Republicans’ increasing attacks on transgender people have compelled many trans people and their families to move to Portland, Oregon, a trans-friendly city in a state with lots of trans legal protections. To help these newcomers, 65-year-old Stella Maris — who identifies as a “bi, poly, switch, fat, femme, dyke witch” — coordinated with the co-organizers of her Oregon non-profit, Queer Magic, to make welcome bags with useful items, like knitted hats, transit cards, a bike map, a book of city resources, discount coupons, and small gifts made by local queer artists.
“We’re meeting our own community’s spiritual needs from a mutual aid ethos,” Maris tells LGBTQ Nation. “It’s about recognizing that people in a community have a variety of needs, and that we can turn to each other to meet those needs.”
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The help flows in different directions, she says: “It disrupts the whole idea that there are people who only give and people who only receive…. Everybody has something to give, everybody has something to contribute.”
But, she adds, “I think what’s scary to me about mutual aid is: there’s just so much need.”
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On the patio ceiling of Maris’ South Portland home, a silvery dragon appears in a starry cosmos, its long tail encircling the moon. Maris is running late for Queer Magic’s Tuesday planning meeting. She opens her front door: on the front of her house is a large mural of Portlandia, a giant woman in Grecian robes, kneeling amid green foothills and a red-and-orange sunset, her hand touching the Willamette River as a small dragon boat paddles by.
Queer Magic, which Maris and her co-organizers have run since 2007, holds events at least twice a month — including gatherings, rituals, heart circles, workshops, and other sacred play events — with the goal of nurturing connection, healing, and liberation through radically inclusive queer and pangender gatherings.
We’re saying, “Yeah, [gender] doesn’t matter. It’s all a made-up story, and we’re retelling that story in a way that is liberating all of us — it will liberate you too, if you let it.”
Leo Sunshine, radical faerie and co-coordinator of Queer Magic
All of the events are NOTAFLOF (No One Turned Away for Lack of Funds) and GAYABAGS (Give As You Are Able And Always Give Something). They’ve included urban outings to drag shows and queer music showcases; day trips to nearby farms (where people make flower crowns, enjoy vegan potluck meals, and weave ribbons around a maypole while a DJ spins); pop-up art markets; pool party fundraisers; and, one of their most popular, the “Medicine Show,” a three-hour spiritual open mic and pancake breakfast in a small, gay-owned black box theatre.
There, Maris and her co-organizers set up an ancestor altar; a small merch table with local art; and a buffet table with flapjacks, toppings, fruit salad, and sausage. Several dozen people sit and eat while laughing and catching up.
Onstage, performers sing, dance, tell stories, recite poems, offer prayers and sermons, and even lead sing-a-longs, meditations, and spells. Once, a person performed a spoken-word piece to the sound of two differently-pitched vibrators. Another time, a performer asked audience members to imagine their tongues escaping their mouths and tasting everything in the auditorium. Yet another time, a scholar put on a literal medieval puppet show.
Queer Magic calls the Medicine Show “a space for radical authenticity, holy mischief, and heartfelt expression.” The medicine, Maris says, refers to a “queer spiritual essentialism” that is mysterious, healing, and powerful. This spirit “recurs in generation after generation,” she says, and “is necessary to the well-being of the species.” And the medicine isn’t just whimsical or social; it also involves discomfort, friction, and tension. Ultimately, Queer Magic’s events are about recognizing and celebrating difference, “escaping the gender binary,” and liberating people from “the ugly green frogskins of heteronormativity,” she adds.
“People single [queers] out and identify us as children, not because of our sexual orientation, but because of our gender nonconformity, which is why the trans issue is so huge and so threatening,” explains Leo Sunshine, a 59-year-old Queer Magic co-organizer. “It’s because we’re saying, ‘Yeah, [gender] doesn’t matter. It’s all a made-up story, and we’re retelling that story in a way that is liberating all of us — it will liberate you too, if you let it.’”
Maris, Sunshine, and their co-organizers are just a few members of Portland’s large and loosely affiliated community of radical faeries, queer witches, neo-pagans, and magic practitioners. The community’s mutual aid and spiritual efforts have resurged amid the rise of Christian nationalism and the re-election of the current U.S. president (whose name many are loath to utter); a presidency that has slashed social health and safety net programs while also targeting trans, nonbinary, and other marginalized queer people.
Radical fearies have been an influential (though somewhat hidden) part of Portland’s spiritual culture since the early 1980s. The group originated in 1970s San Francisco, with gay activists like Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, Don Kilhefner, and John Burnside urging gay people to liberate themselves through an unapologetic queer spirituality that refuses imitations of mainstream, capitalist heterosexuality.
The faeries held their first gathering on Labor Day 1979, but they’ve since expanded into a loosely affiliated worldwide group with rural sanctuaries and spiritual gatherings held internationally.
Though the group defies easy categorization, they generally believe in a nature- and pagan-based spirituality; therapeutic, anti-authoritarian self-actualization; deliberate, sustainable, and ecologically-conscious community-building; flamboyantly gender-fluid self-expression; open-hearted communication; and subject-subject consciousness (the refusal to dehumanize others as simply objects to be used, but rather seeing people as equally valuable humans worthy of empathy and respect).
During a February 2025 gathering of about 80 radical faeries at the Breitenbush Hot Springs (about 113 miles southeast of Portland), a faerie named Hammer noticed other faeries “very, very freaked out” about the president’s re-inauguration. In a heart circle — a faerie ritual where individual speakers share their deep emotions while others listen supportively and non-judgmentally — he heard a lot of fear, anger, frustration, terror, rage, and feelings of powerlessness.
“I was freaked out like everybody else, and … [had] lots of feelings of … ‘What needs to be done? How can we respond? I want to do something, but I don’t know what to do,’” he says. As a 69-year-old with a Master’s in social work and over 40 years of community organizing and faerie experience, he invited people to talk with him independently.
If I’m going to put my energy and my magical ability towards something that is useful and helpful, then I should do something to help my community. It’s going to be more effective than hexing the president.
Arcadia, a gay witch living on the Oregon coast
He subsequently coordinated an online meeting of about 35 individuals who had been at the gathering — men from cities across North America. Together, they discussed the things weighing heavily on their hearts and minds and recalled the faeries’ history of radical activism and political engagement.
Some attendees shared actions they were taking, like signing petitions, registering voters, writing Congress members, meeting with state and local officials, or fundraising for resistance organizations. Overall, they left feeling less isolated and more encouraged — many agreed to start meeting regularly.
That meeting has since evolved into a weekly online video call for a group called “Faeries of Conscience.” It has met every Monday for over a year now, but only for one hour, to prevent things from feeling too overwhelming.
Together, they check in emotionally, discuss recent political developments, brainstorm ways to stay engaged, encourage self-care, and inspire one another to keep taking steps to counter the authoritarian regime rather than just feeling paralyzed or completely disconnected. Hammer reminds participants that they don’t need to solve the world’s problems; they can stay focused on practical, home-based, “bite-sized” actions to honor their feelings and intentions for today.
Gradually, Hammer has seen evidence of “change and transition and transformation” among the group. His fellow faeries feel less isolated, more affirmed that what’s happening is not okay, and more empowered to take steps towards personal healing and political engagement.
“One of the fundamental things that many times, the group camp came down to, is that a lot of what was happening was a crisis of ethics, and that Donald Trump and that whole regime … were a symptom of a society that’s broken,” Hammer says. “So we actually all needed to go forward into the future in creating a society that doesn’t exist yet, and that we need to transform into.”
As frightening and scary as that can be, he adds, it also provides the opportunity to reinvent society as we want it to be. “We left room for the visionaries and the dreamers,” he says, emphasizing the need for “acts of creation,” like “art, writing, expression, and discourse.”
“These conversations of consciousness raising were in fact very empowering and very important … [for] our sense of spirituality and our community and our organizing capacity and our ritual capacity towards a sense of creating and forming and building a new community,” he adds.
The current administration doesn’t care about rising grocery prices, the ever-emerging climate catastrophe, or people’s general well-being, says Arcadia, a 55-year-old witch who lives on the Oregon coast. He doesn’t expect an election to solve the nation’s problems because Democrats have fostered the status quo that led to this current crisis.
One of our organizing principles is that it should be fun and feel good, at least, comparably fun to the thing you’re organizing. Like, it shouldn’t just be a trial.
Stella Maris, a bi, poly, switch, fat, femme, dyke witch with Queer Magic
France, he says, has systems for people to protest for days or weeks while still receiving food and medical care. He notes, “In America, we don’t have the system in place to have any kind of mass, long-term resistance movement because we have no way to take care of each other.”
“So, if I’m going to put my energy and my magical ability towards something that is useful and helpful, then I should do something to help my community. It’s going to be more effective than hexing the president.”
Arcadia is researching how to create support networks that provide food and housing outside of governmental and capitalist systems. These independent systems require decentralized communication and flexibility, he adds, so if a single person becomes unable or restrained by the government, the system can reorganize and still thrive.
He has also started stockpiling water, dried goods, and canned food so he can feed loved ones even if a famine or rising fuel costs cause food supply chains to break down.
“Practical matters and spiritual matters go hand-in-hand,” he says. “Christianity has outsourced practical everyday matters to capitalist endeavors and said, ‘Okay, the spiritual realm is ours.’ But… you can’t have a functioning spiritual practice if you don’t have the ability to take care of yourself day-to-day.”
After a faerie gathering last summer, he and 15 others agreed that the Christian nationalists in power want to erase queer people. So they started meeting during celestial equinoxes and solstices to conduct rituals for peace, protection, renewal, and healing — and also to face their fears of death.
The group is non-hierarchical. Each member leads a different ritual when they meet. The rituals are experimental. Some involve music, movement, plant medicine (cannabis), or connecting with queer ancestral power. The participants draw inspiration from the creativity and resilience of Stonewall veterans, ACT-UP organizers during the AIDS epidemic, and queer activists who lived boldly even when homosexuality and cross-dressing were illegal.
“It just reminds us that we aren’t the first ones to go through this kind of political trauma. This is just a new cycle of what we’ve gone through in the past,” Arcadia says.
Maris, Sunshine, and Bio, a 66-year-old nonbinary “late bloomer,” admit there’s much further to go to keep aiding the local community.
Leo wants to offer more spiritual discussions about harm reduction when self-medicating with decriminalized “soft drugs” (especially since mental healthcare remains financially inaccessible to so many people). Queer Magic is also exploring mutual aid networks between older and younger queers who may need emotional, monetary, or domestic support.
Maris, Leo, and Bio note that Hawks, the local bathhouse, has expressed interest in exploring more ways to be even more gender-inclusive and to unite queers through art. Several months back, the bathhouse hosted a cabaret where its “resident artist, a wheelchair-using faerie named Curiosity, led a karaoke sing-a-long to tunes exploring the complicated and funny feelings that come up when horny people cruise a bathhouse.
“One of our organizing principles is that it should be fun and feel good, at least, comparably fun to the thing you’re organizing. Like, it shouldn’t just be a trial,” Maris says.
She admits, “I don’t think of [what we do] necessarily as having a lot of relevance or importance for the wider world… [but] I realized that we’re actually on the cutting edge of culture — we always have been, and we always will be.”
“Our experiments in emergent ritual and non-hierarchical [organizing] and subject-subject consciousness, and all of that, like it might feel petty or trivial, or whatever, but… I think it ripples out in ways that we don’t even know. I do believe that.”
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