Items

• My first satyrnalia
  One of two Michael Rumaker (1932-2019) books seized, this novel follows a narrator through a night in New York, on the streets, in the bookshops and in “make-out booths”. The narrator’s ultimate destination is an apartment where a Fairy (Faerie) Circle is gathering for the Saturnalia of the book’s title, an “orgiastic celebration” of the Winter Solstice. The Fairy Circle refers to a meeting of the Radical Faeries, a countercultural movement founded in 1979. The novel is scattered with references to non-fictional locations, books and music, including the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Christopher Street, Donna Summer and Arthur Evans’s book ‘Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture’ (also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). The novel, therefore, provides a sense of gay culture in Greenwich Village as it was forty years ago.
• Witchcraft and the gay counterculture : a radical view of Western civilization and some of the people it has tried to destroy
  This book by Arthur Evans (1942-2011) is a rebuttal to the homophobic bias of “professional historians” and academics. Merging myth and history, the text is a self-proclaimed radical and subjective vision of a pre-Christian world of nature societies, which touches on many themes including Druids, Gnosticism, witchcraft, matriarchy, class politics and magic as a collective endeavour. Published by the Boston-based Fag Rag collective, it was edited by two of its members, Michael Bronski and Charles Shively, and chapters were initially published in the journals ‘Out’ and ‘Fag Rag’. Active in gay liberation movements, Evans was a co-founder of the Gay Activists Alliance and of the San Francisco Faerie Circle. This text is still in print in pirated editions and remains popular with Radical Faeries.