FOR A SPELL
Sissie Collectivism and Radical Witchery in the Southeast
by Jason Ezell
Univ. of North Carolina Press. 278 pages, $29.95
IN HIS deeply researched chronicle For a Spell, author Jason Ezell focuses on a subculture of self-proclaimed gay “sissies” who lived in the American South (particularly Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina) between 1976 and 1981. The sissies made up a small network of leftist gay men who lived in collective houses—an idea they borrowed from lesbian feminists—and practiced a modern, politically informed style of witchcraft. The sixteen men that Ezell focuses on also participated in left-wing small-press publications and were active in various liberation movements.
“Sissy” is not a term often used by gay men to describe themselves in the 21st century, and Ezell provides an enlightening background showing how these men came to embrace that word. In the early 1970s, members of the New York Gay Liberation Front (GLF) wanted to reclaim the word “faggot” as a source of power. Members of a GLF group claimed that “faggot” originated as a slur for gay men because they were used as fuel for the fires that burned female witches in the Middle Ages. This etymology is false, but the more radical members of the GLF accepted it, in part because they felt it demonstrated that gay men were natural allies of feminist women.
Other, even more radical members of the GLF went further and claimed that male homosexuality was “an early but woefully incomplete step in the dismantling of the patriarchy.” Calling themselves “effeminists” or “flaming faggots,” they wanted to destroy all traditional male roles in society, including those in gay culture. They were opposed to gay bars, bathhouses, the leather and BDSM scenes, and pornography featuring “beefcake.” They also disapproved of drag, which they considered a parody of women’s suffering, and instead opted for a more androgynous, nonbinary way of dressing termed “genderfuck.” The effeminists and flaming faggots believed that women should lead the revolution, and men (including gay ones) should be followers.
In September 1976, five self-proclaimed “angry faggots” who lived together in a collective called Mulberry House in Fayetteville, Arkansas, traveled to Oregon for the leftist Faggots in Class Struggle Conference. They found it eye-opening in both positive and negative ways, and afterward they decided to refer to themselves as sissies in reaction to the faggot image presented at the conference, which they felt was too Eurocentric, white, and masculine. As in the present day, descriptive terminology for members of the queer community was quite fluid, and the five sissies sometimes also called themselves fairies.
The Mulberry House sissies, along with others they met and inspired, went on to form several other collectives: the Louisiana Sissies in Struggle in New Orleans; Running Water Farm in Bakersville, North Carolina; and Short Mountain Sanctuary in Liberty, Tennessee. Short Mountain, which was founded in 1981, still exists today as an important Radical Faerie sanctuary.
As the book’s title indicates, many Southern sissies practiced a progressive, feminist-influenced form of witchcraft. Their magical work was influenced primarily by the Feri tradition of witchcraft, developed in the Bay Area in the 1960s by Victor and Cora Anderson, and by Reclaiming, the politically focused witchcraft tradition started by Starhawk, a student of the Andersons who authored the well-known book The Spiral Dance. Similar to the GLF’s effort to reclaim the word “faggot,” Starhawk and the Andersons reclaimed the concept of witchcraft as something self-empowering, gender-inclusive, and aligned with politically oppressed people.
For a Spell is filled with rich details. Although much of the book concerns political theories of the time, it also contains many interesting stories. A Mulberry House sissy attempts suicide but changes his mind when he sees a vision of King Tutankhamun’s funeral mask and relocates to New Orleans, where a museum is exhibiting the Boy King’s treasures. Anita Bryant and her New Right allies attempt to sow terror among the queer people of the Southeast. Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture author Arthur Evans moves to Washington state, where he founds a small and short-lived rural collective named New Sodom. Sissies and their allies try and fail to take over a food co-op from anti-gay hippies.
For a Spell is a work of serious scholarship, yet also very readable and entertaining. The events it covers occurred fifty years ago, but they still hold lessons for people considering how to be authentically queer in a predominantly straight world.
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Peter Muise is the author of Legends and Lore of the North Shore (2014) and Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts (2021).
