Q is for Queer – Pagan Blog Project 2013

Pride kicks off today, so you’re getting “Q is for Queer”.
 
Once upon a time – and there are a number of different times, in the past forty or so years, if not longer, that one could choose from – “dyke” and “witch” were deeply intertwined. Both in the sense of “feminist lesbian separatism” (cue: women’s land, the we’moon collective, all those lesbians wearing Labrys and/or Goddess pendants in order to flag, a distressing degree of biological reductionism, etc) and in the sense of linguistic terminology meant to police women’s sexual/social behaviour (in which case, you can also throw “ho” – and possibly “spinster/frigid”, into the mix).
 
How does my queerness, my bi-dyke-nicity (if you will), play into my paganism? Other than having a goddess who is a dyke, I mean.

Honestly?
Not all that much.
It’s not that it isn’t there – I’m me, I’m doing my thing, my magic/ritual doesn’t rely on a gendered binary-dualism – but it’s not a central focus. A few years ago (Circa 2007, maybe) it might have been. And I’ve definitely done the Ra Ra Menstrual Blood stuff that, I suspect, most of us baby-dyke, c-girl, teen witches did at one point or another[1], though that doesn’t strictly have to do with being queer.
 
It’s funny/weird (or maybe not even slightly so) how being “woman oriented” sexually, being “woman oriented” religiously, and being “woman oriented” politically (as opposed to socially? But maybe in a social way?) got mixed together.
 
I mean, I’ve been “homo-social” pretty-much since I was six and, by the time (ten years later) I was starting to explor Paganism, I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to be dealing with any male deities, having just ditched the one I’d grown up with[2]. But, while I was also sorting out my own sexuality at the time (“bisexual” was a new and appealing concept that I hadn’t heard of before then), my budding (and, yes, kind of confused – but not because of The Bi) sexuality was never really a part of my budding faith or practice.
 
None the less, in my head (and I really can’t tell you why – Willow Rosenberg being still a few years from existence at that point) “witch” and “lesbian” were deeply tied together. Maybe it was the idea of a bunch of women (because all witches are women, amiright) getting together for clandestine, socially-disapproved of, non-patriarchy-serving reasons could have just as easily been a tea dance as a coven.
I don’t know. (I certainly hadn’t heard of a tea dance yet).
Maybe it was Magenta’ and Columbia’s interactions in “Rocky Horror” that helped this idea coalesce in my head, or maybe it was some thing I read… but there it was. And, since most of the witches I met were also bi-chicks… it stuck. 🙂
 
Anyway. So those are my badly-formed thoughts on that one. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden
 
 
[1] Still do, as it happens, just nowhere near as much.
 
[2] Hint: I was sixteen in the mid-1990s. Silver Raven Wolf hadn’t quite started publishing at that point (I don’t think), which is probably a good thing for how I went about learning stuff. I spent a lot of time in the Public Library reading, and rereading Womanspirit Rising, Weaving The Vision, Rebirth of the Goddess, and a number of other books available in the “women and religion” section. This had a fairly profound effect on me, particularly since I didn’t get my hands on Drawing Down the Moon or The Spiral Dance until I was in my twenties.