The Southeastern Conference of Lesbians and Gay Men served as a catalyst for the emergence of the Radical Faerie movement and later, Gay Spirit Visions.
From 1979, regular Faerie gatherings took place at Running Water Farm in North Carolina, as well as the Short Mountain Sanctuary in Liberty, Tennessee. The gatherings “nurtured a warm sharing among gay men in a beautiful setting [and] provided a vehicle for the discussion and exploration of alternative gay male identities.”
“One of the guys [at the Southeastern Conference of Lesbians and Gay Men] was Mikel Wilson, who owned Running Water. He looked like an Old Testament prophet. He had long hair and a bushy beard. The men were sitting there. We’d never intentionally sat down just to be a group of gay men together. We had a really beautiful, moving conversation, and at the end we all said we’d like to cotinue this. It had just never ocurred to us, I think, because of privilege, that a group of men needed a space too. Mikel invited us in June, around the solstice, to come up to Running Water. So the 1978 conference is kind of a catalyst for the Running Water Farm gathering.”
Franklin Abbott, December 14, 2015