Michael Eisenbrey—Response 1

QUESTION

Why do the groups in Hennen's study, particularly the Radical Faeries and Bears, gather in the woods? What are the sociopolitical implications of their (similar) nostalgic pastoral mythologies?

ABSTRACT

Radical Faeries and Bears have built nostalgic mythologies rooted in English and American traditions about a pastoral past in which people had access to essential values no longer accessible in the modern world. These mythologies exclude non-white people and obscure the hostility of English and American history to gay men themselves.

BODY

It's striking that all three of the groups Peter Hennen studies in Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen gather in rural, woodland spaces. Although the leathermen make some gestures towards a less urban, less civilized past (e.g. the adoption of cowboy apparel and imagery), the Radical Faeries and Bears make the connection explicit. The Faeries' stories "operate as nostalgia narratives, hearkening back to fundamental struggles over culture and civilization" (76), while the Bears' narrow their focus to the struggle over masculinity.

Hennen circumspectly links the woodland fantasy of the Faeries to the fact that the community is overwhelmingly white; he notes that the Bears, too, are almost exclusively white, although he doesn't connect this fact to that group's pastoralism. He does, however, note an element of continuity between the imagery and mythology of the Faeries and that of the Bears, noting that Ron Suresha "credits the Radical Faeries, identifying them as the 'foremost cultural influence' on the Bears" (106). He also identifies a potentially reactionary element in Bear mythology: "the pastoral fantasy encoded in Bear semiotics can be linked with earlier movements aimed at revitalizing an 'essential' masculinity under assault from the feminizing effects of civilization by retreating to the wilderness" (98).

Pastoral fantasy, historically, has been about more than rehabilitating "essential masculinity." English fairytales, in the most literal sense (i.e. tales about fairies), are a product of the idea of "Merry England," the idyllic Victorian-era vision of a happy, wholesome pre-industrial England free of modern fears and worries. The trope has been deployed on both the left and the right—either capitalism wrecked Merry England, or the breakdown of the proper class system did, or perhaps both. Each side has been likely to throw some blame the way of multiculturalism, too (unsurprisingly, that aspect, and really the idea of Merry England in general, has gone out of fashion on the left, though it's alive and well on the right).

Critics have made the case (see, e.g. Michael Moorcook's essay "Epic Pooh") that J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books present a deeply reactionary worldview: the Shire (where the hobbits live—bear with me while things get a little nerdy) is happy, safe Merry Old England, where everyone knows his place and nothing ever changes. It is threatened from without by dark-skinned, evil barbarians and from within by new economic currents and the advent of "the age of man," when a racial hierarchy of elves, dwarves, hobbits, and so forth will disappear. In this view, the magical creatures of the land (whether elves or fairies) represent archaic virtues to which the modern world no longer has access; those virtues are also tightly linked to race and class essentialism.

Some within the Bear community recognize that the rural past they've constructed is a fantasy—Michael Bronski calls it "nostalgia for something that never was" (101)—but neither they, nor the Faeries, nor Hennen really teases out the full implications of this nostalgia. Valorizing an idealized past means ignoring all of the ugliness of that past's reality: not only is there little safe place in the Anglo-American past for non-white people, there's little safe place for gay men either (the narrative of "Faerie diaspora" includes such a space, but not an historically identifiable one). Radical Faeries and Bears are trying to carve out a space for themselves in the fantasy of a white, straight past—to write themselves into the idealized history of the hegemonic culture in which they live.

DMU Timestamp: March 15, 2012 22:35