GLR July-August 2022

Natives and spirituality would lead to his collaboration with the GAI History Project. Roscoe and Randy Burns collected oral histories, short stories, and poems, which were published as Living the Spirit: A Gay American In dian Anthology (1988). It was a moving coming out an thology similar to others of the time with intersectional identities as sexual and ethnic minorities. Its Native writers were still using the term “berdache” in reference to gay Indians, yet were creatively generating a positive history of LGBT in Indigenous America—bringing us full circle to the 1990 birth of “Two-Spirit.” Smithers sometimes lapses into romanticizing Na tives as he criticizes Hay and other non-Native spiritu alists and scholars, including 19th-century anthro pologists engaged in “ethnographic salvage” work of Indian culture. For example, he claims that under tra ditional matrilineal education, “all Cherokee children received love, care, and guidance.” All? Yet he does passingly acknowledge that Native tribes fought each other, engaged in slavery of women and children, and in some documented cases ridiculed and persecuted gender non conforming members. As a non-Native writer, he has to be extra cautious. Nevertheless, he presents a carefully documented work in tune with the tremendous resilience, creativity, and community-building of LGBT Native Americans in overcoming centuries of European persecution, misinterpretation, and ap propriation of Indigeous cultures in general and Native sexual and gender diversity in particular.

Faeries, an eclectic hybrid of the 1960s sexual revolution, left ist counterculturalism, and neo-pagan spirituality. Smithers care fully traces Hay’s romanticized appropriation of Native culture and spirituality in creating Faerie “origin” mythologies and rit uals. For Hay, the berdaches were just one branch of an ancient tree of gender-crossing shaman healer-priests who were being reinvented through the Radical Faeries. Will Roscoe attended the first Faerie meeting in 1979, and his enduring interest in gay Sonnet for This Queer Body Hail the double-take of white men when I walk past, head bald and big-earringed, smear of incandescent pomegranate over my pout. Praise the mom-pouch poking over the faux leather painted on my legs, the “Ohs!” grandmas emit when I make way for them in the supermarket. Compliments to the claws painted black and pink, gold-ringed hands that write poems to a world always extending itself beyond reach. Pay tribute to the tattooed arms like pirate flags, the radical nose springing forth like alien bloom. Salute these sagging tits and coiffed cunt, these misty eyes cursing those who can’t see such fucking divinity. M ARINA C ARREIRA

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July–August 2022

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