We Are Pagans of Color

Imagine being a black, gay drag queen in the 1800s after being born into enslavement AND having the style and cachè to throw soirées that the girls had to come to! That’s why I don’t want to hear this “we’re not our ancestors stuff.” You’re right!

From The Very Black Project Page- William Dorsey Swann was a gay liberation activist. Born into slavery in 1858, he was the first person in the United States to lead a queer resistance group and the first known person to self-identify as a “queen of drag”. Imagine the queenery of this icon.

He was a slave in Hancock, Maryland and was freed by Union soldiers after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. During the 1880s and 1890s, he organized a series of balls in Washington, D.C. He called himself the “queen of drag”. Most of the attendees his gatherings were men who were former slaves, and were gathering to dance in their satin and silk dresses. William was arrested in police raids numerous times,including in the first documented case of arrests for female impersonation in the United States, on April 12, 1888. In 1896, he was falsely convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail for “keeping a disorderly house” (running a brothel). After his sentencing, he requested a pardon from President Grover Cleveland. This request was denied, but but he was the first American on record who pursued legal and political action to defend the LGBTQ community’s right to gather.

He was known to have been close with Pierce Lafayette and Felix Hall, two men who had also both been slaves and who formed the first known male same-sex relationship between enslaved Americans.

When William stopped organizing and participating in drag events, his brother continued to make costumes for the drag community. Two of his brothers had also been active participants in his drag balls.

Imagine how intelligent and ambitious this man had to be to come up with drag balls in the 1800s! Imagine how many terrible concepts he had to unlearn by himself to be a confident gay black man who does drag in the 1800s! Imagine how courageous he had to be to fight for lgbt people as a former slave in America in the 1800s!

Meet Alice Smeets:

As far as I’m aware she doesn’t share any of the profits from the tarot deck with those artists who helped create it, she just mentions them and credits them briefly on her website…

Meet Alice Smeets:

As far as I’m aware she doesn’t share any of the profits from the tarot deck with those artists who helped create it, she just mentions them and credits them briefly on her website…

I’ll be making 떡국 (rice cake soup) for my gods, I got three different kinds of fruit for offerings, soju, and new toys and candy for the children gods.

Hi, thanks for the question. I (mod Han) have been a bit busy so I haven’t been on as I would like, which explains the radio silence.

Now that’s a tricky question. Firstly, I am Chinese and I grew up in a family that did maintain the practices of Chinese folk religion, so I do have lived experience regarding it.

Okay so I went to ask my mom for a second opinion on this just so we have a diversity of opinions on this. 

Chinese folk religion is both closed and open, I’ll explain. We don’t have a central authority that regulates the religion, it is very populist and of the people. Now there are outsiders who partake in the religion, I have come across white people who have been initiated in my google searches. When it comes to ceremonies and rituals, they are open to outsiders. The exception is ancestor worship, a major part of the Chinese folk religion. You have to have familial (blood or adoption) connection to the ancestors in order to partake in the ancestor worship. Praying to the wrong ancestor is considered a major offense. There are 2 possible ways for non-Chinese to be apart of ancestor worship. First, a non-Chinese woman marries a Chinese man and she’s considered part of the family. The non-Chinese has to be a woman because our ancestry is passed down through the male lineage. You can’t be a non-Chinese male marrying a Chinese woman, the Chinese woman would be able to pray to her ancestors but her foreign husband could not as those are not his ancestors. That’s one way as an outsider to participate in ancestor worship. The second way is if you’re adopted into a Chinese family. In Malaysia, we do have Chinese families who adopt Indian babies and they are considered to be as Chinese as a full-blooded Chinese. Those are the only ways for outsiders to be able to participate in the ancestor worship at temples.

Now with all of that said, I will now be putting down my personal opinions on outsiders wanting to partake in Chinese folk religion. Keep in mind that other Chinese people may disagree with my views, because we are not a monolith. These are just my views on the matter.

I personally feel uncomfortable with white people in particular wanting to have a piece of my culture, mostly due to centuries of colonialism, imperialism and anti-Chinese racism that has affected my people greatly. If you’re a white person interested in participating in Chinese folk religion, I would suggest that you take a moment to reflect on why exactly you would want to participate. Reasons like “it looks cool”, “it’s so exotic”, “aesthetics”, etc. are not good enough reasons. If you really want to participate, take the time to read up on the issues that plague the Chinese community. Read up on colonialism and imperialism, and how they have affected the Chinese. Read on how the West has harbored anti-Chinese sentiment and how that has affected us. That’s especially important as many Chinese living in the West have had to give up Chinese folk religion in order to assimilate. I was lucky I was born in Southeast Asia as we were able to preserve our practices. Read up on how exotification and fetishization affects us. I suggest to look into those things because I feel that if outsiders wish to participate in our culture, they must first care about the people that originated it in the first place. You can’t separate the culture from the people. If people want me to go into any further detail on the above, send me an ask on my personal tumblr (hanwitchx), I don’t mind expanding a bit more on what I’ve wrote.

If you want to go over something similar, I suggest certain sects of Buddhist and Taoist “deities” to go over. Jinja Shinto is open as well, so you could go over Kami?