Queer Traces—Belief in Fairies

Page Sonnet Sullivan
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HONORABLE MENTION: While this essay centers around the personal, it ultimately connects to broader, collective themes. The text weaves together historical research and personal anecdotes, placing the author’s work and identity into a meaningful context. The author’s warm, engaging, and considerate voice makes it a true pleasure to read.—Meredith Barrett

_{All images from the author’s series “After Cottingley Fairies,” 2024, photographs.}

What was the first sign? It could have been the day I taught myself how to swing my leg over the railing of my crib onto the wooden rocking chair arm, find my balance and walk into my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night. Or the day I spent the entire afternoon talking to the caterpillar I named Carmela on the picnic blanket in the sun. Maybe it was because my mother taught me how to build a fire. Or because my dad let me climb on the roof. Or because I walked on my tiptoes as a kid. I suspect heightened sensitivity has something to do with it, and the self- assuredness to climb and trust my balance.

Thinking about it, it’s probably more logical to blame all my mom’s high school friends because they all happened to have baby boys while my mom had me. Or to blame the boys themselves because they treated me just like them, until they didn’t. From then on, I was a girl who was a tomboy instead of just Page. Maybe it stems back to when I was four and our neighbors had a party. I danced with Bobby in my white Cinderella wedding dress on our porch until my neighbors noticed and invited me over. Maybe it’s their fault for inviting me over—that was probably it. Or when the wedding reception was for two brides, and my only question was why weren’t they wearing white. My mom answered that they were wearing their favorite colors.

Someone else who could have contributed was my friend Ava’s older brother. He showed us the music video for “Firework” by Katy Perry. In the part of the chorus when the boy gets the courage to kiss the other boy, he pointed at it and said “That’s me. I want to do that.” He then showed us “California Gurls” and Katy Perry wrapped in just pink clouds. All of us in that room are queer now.

Ava had a Jonas Brothers alarm clock that I hated. I hated boy bands. I hated the One Direction life-size stickers in Lauren’s room and all her posters with all their eyes that watched us. I hated the Harry Styles cardboard cutout in the corner of Lilly’s room. I hated the color pink all through middle school. Maybe it was because I loved media by gay men. Maybe I loved media by gay men because there was a lack of media by gay women. I watched Tyler Oakley and Connor Franta on Youtube and my first concert was Troye Sivan’s Blue Neighbourhood tour. My friend who went with me is also queer. We have the same birthday, only 27 minutes apart, so it could be an astrological reason instead: the stars were positioned queerly. The stars could also be to blame for why my stomach dropped in church when a man I respected told me homosexuality was a sin. Why did it feel so wrong then? Maybe the queerness seeped into the hole in my heart that they told me I was supposed to feel and would be filled by Jesus, but wasn’t. Or it could have been the feeling I got when I heard gay marriage became legal. Why was I so happy?

Where was the first sign of this magic? The rainbow plaid shorts I’d wear. The insistence on black high-top Chuck Taylors. The playing with worms. Maybe the worms gave it to me. Thinking back, there could have been a spell on the rusted, broken compact mirror that I pulled out of the ground when digging for treasure in my backyard. There could have been some sort of enchantment in the photos my childhood friends and I printed out to hang in our hideaway. Photos of the missing Mauna Loa ship, maps of the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, and other mysteries we swore we could solve. It was my fault for welcoming the unknown, and feeling electrified by it.

Where was the point of no return? Maybe it was when my friend Amy invited me to plant sea grass at the beach with her and her Girl Scout troop. It was for their volunteer hours or something, but I wasn’t a Girl Scout. We took a break and sat in the back of her mom’s minivan. She told me how funny it was that a boy in her class didn’t know what masturbation was. She could tell I’d never heard that word before. She saw me blush and she told me not to be embarrassed. She explained to me what it was, how girls do it too, not to let boys tell me otherwise. She learned from the internet and told me to always wash my hands and I still didn’t fully know what she was talking about.

When was the first spark? Likely the openly bisexual pink-haired girl who would change across from me in the middle school locker room. Or around the same time Hayley Kiyoko’s music videos came out and I would watch and rewatch them. Around the same time Kacey and I kissed in the pool as a joke. She later set me up with her neighbor. I dated her for a year and a half. Maybe the shooting star that we saw right before our first kiss was an omen from God that the world was about to end. Our strap-on got lost when her basement flooded and that felt biblical. Or maybe Freud was right with the dad stuff. He is an alcoholic and hasn’t known me since I was 13. Maybe I hate him and maybe that’s why.

I’ve been thinking of my queerness in terms of looking for fairies and becoming a fairy. My connection to nature is a queer thing. The sensibility to walk quietly through the woods is queer. The urge to collect little things like a crow is queer. Disregarding dominant culture’s push for sleek design, clean white walls, and consumerism, my insistence on collecting, creating, upcycling, and constructing my own taste feels political. There is something dangerous too about believing in fairies instead of God—small creatures with their own desires and lives instead of one omnipresent, surveillant man. You find them in the garden instead of inside the walls in the church.

Fairy is usually defined as “a small imaginary being of human form that has magical powers, especially a female one,” “a man who is seen as masculine, timid, or affected,” “a mythic being of folklore and romance,” or “a gay person (used as a term of abuse and disparagement).” The etymology traces from the Proto-Indo-European root *bha “to speak, tell, say.” It has the same root as the words abandon, aphasia, banish, blasphemy, cacophony, confess, fable, fame, fatal, infamy, infant, profess, Polyphemus, prophecy, and symphony. Then comes the Latin fatum for fate. There’s also Fata the goddess of fate. The three Fates in Greek mythology were three women who unwound, measured, and cut the strings of life.

Faerie in the year 1330 meant “enchanted magic” or “magical land.” It was a collective noun before it was used to describe a singular person. It meant the whole realm of magic, the land that held it, and all those who practiced it. Later, this magic was personified into individuals. In the 1300s, fairies were written as powerful and human sized, fairy knight-like figures, and in the 1700s, they became minute; invisibility turned into fragility.¹

I always have loved the How to Find Flower Fairies pop-up book I had, with all its moments of individual investigation. It makes me happy that fairies do not reveal themselves to you unless you believe and reminds me of the history of photography and its subjects. People who were forced to sit for a photo, remove their veils, remove their clothes, sit in front of a bright light, to be captured to be studied hundreds of years later. Invisibility is not fragility. There is ignorance and violence in forcing something to be visible and highly perceived, without consent, to be considered real. It is a method of survival to choose not to be seen by those who do not respect you.

I can’t help but think of my camera as a hagstone, as a tool to see the unaltered magic in natural moments. The way I photograph is queer no matter the subject. In 1947, Tolkein said it became “fashionable … to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves.”² This idea has stuck with me as I think about how dominant Western culture values individualism and the narrative of the fairy has been molded to that, thus its power has lessened. I find the spirit of fairies inspirational, to hide and make a private life uninfluenced by larger society, to play small tricks, to laugh at people for not understanding.

1896 is the earliest record of “fairy” in regards to a gay man. It is not clear why this association was made. More feminine men were often cast as the role of fairies in plays and dressed in drag. There’s also a theory that because fairies are sexualized but there is an assumed “absence of progeny,” an association was made with male gay sex. Another theory claims that it originally was used as a code word by the queer community in order to refer to each other, but then was taken by heteronormative people who used it as a derogatory term.³

I am queer, another reclaimed label. It means an embrace of vulnerability and intimacy. I practice a greater questioning of myself, my attractions, my motivations, the way I am seen by particular individuals, my family, politicians, and strangers on the internet. It means an understanding of the difference of gender identity, attraction, and expression. It means loving my friends deeply. It means defining my own spiritual practice because I don’t feel a fit with organized religions. It means using the word “queer” because when I used the word “bisexual,” I would fluctuate between thinking I was just straight or just gay and both could not be true at once. The word felt binary and I always analyzed the percentages of my attraction to each gender. When straight men ask me my sexuality, “bisexual” means to them that they will get to watch me kiss girls and that girls kissing is hot. When I say queer, they don’t know what it means and it is an additional shield that usually deflects their attention. I am not as easily accessible or understandable. They imagine me kissing girls in the real way, the gay way, the way that doesn’t include them.

The purpose of fairies in art has evolved over time but mainly serves as a place for taboo or less accepted subjects to be discussed. In cave paintings, fairies and other-worldly beings are thought to be explanations for natural phenomena that provide a sense of comfort in portraying the human-like forces that controlled things. In Victorian times, fairies were associated with Paganism and were seen as anti-Christian, thus demonic. In this time of purity, politeness, and strict moral rules, portraying fairies in paintings became a way to draw naked women. The painters put their sins on the fairies.⁴

Richard Sugg claims that in the early 19th century, fairies were seen as the most “embarrassing” to believe in, “worse than witches, ghosts, or aliens.”⁵ Fairies are typically morally ambiguous. They can be sexualized entirely or crafted with childlike innocence. In children’s books at the time, including fairies became a way for women authors to subvert the norm and to write strong, mischievous, defiant female characters. Fairies and fantasy worlds become more popular in times of uncertainty such as war in which people want to find an escape and turn to other beings in which to believe. Cicely Mary Barker’s illustrations of flower fairies in 1923 popularized the idea of fairies as whimsical spirits of nature. Later, in 1978, Brian Froud wrote about fairies as a reminder that “we were all connected to the earth itself and could acknowledge its spiritual manifestations.”⁶

I Googled “photographs of fairies” for the first time recently. I was surprised I hadn’t thought to look this up sooner considering my childhood fascination. I expected to see photoshopped images that went viral or maybe some strange blurs. Instead, I found the same five black-and-white film photos of young girls and storybook fairy illustrations. They are the Cottingley Fairies from 1917 in England, made by nine-year-old Frances and sixteen-year-old Elsie. They made these images with Elsie’s father’s camera and darkroom because they would get in trouble for getting wet by the river and they claimed they were with the fairies.

Edward Gardener got permission to use these images to illustrate his book. He was a Theosophist who believed humans were “undergoing a process of transformation that would eventually lead toward the perfection of the species.”⁷ He sent the photographs to Kodak to be verified as real and gave the girls cameras and plates to take more images. They wouldn’t let him watch because the girls claimed the fairies would not come out if anyone else was there. Gardener believed the photos were factual.

After the publication, newspapers had mixed reviews. Some claimed they were fakes and the girls intentionally tricked them, while others claimed the girls’ faces looked too truthful. One said that the explanation was not “occult” but required a “knowledge of children.” Some thought it was a gift that these children believed in fairies and others said it was dangerous to play into their fantasy and would cause mental disorders later in life. Elsie, years later, called the photographs from her childhood “photographs of figments of our imagination.” In 1983, the women said they had faked the photos, but that they really had seen fairies. The original intention of the photos was fun, not being fraudulent, and said they “can’t understand why they were taken in—they wanted to be taken in.”⁸ The photos took on a life of their own, beyond the intentions of the photographers in the hands of wider society.

I’ve been thinking more about ways to use the camera as an instrument of wonder rather than of strict representation and the violence associated with it. When I was younger, I wanted to be a scientist and now I am an artist. I think they both contain similar ventures into the unknown and a contribution to the shared body of knowledge and articulated experience. I have heard the argument that the scientific knowledge of something can take the beauty and joy out of it. I have never felt that to be the case—a sunset still takes my breath away after learning more about how light moves through the atmosphere and such. A garden is still beautiful without a belief in fairies living at the bottom of it. Frances wrote that even when she was sixteen she started to hate her fairy photos because Mr. Gardener made her sit on the stage with him during a Theosophical meeting holding a bunch of flowers. She said “I realized what I was in for if I did not keep myself hidden.”⁹ I think she was feeling what the fairies would have felt if they were actually photographed. She was feeling what many young women feel in the eyes of men. She was feeling what many unconsenting subjects of photos feel when they are captured by a camera. She was feeling the power of invisibility and the violence of vision.

I have created my own version of the Cottingley Fairy photographs. It felt like an appropriate exercise that combined my personal story with queerness, the history of photography, and the etymology of the word fairy, ultimately subverting its derogatory meaning for a community-building one. I used self-portraiture as a way to be both the subject and the photographer, the being and the labeler, the fairy and the observer. I traced images from my How to Find Flower Fairies book that I loved when I was younger and have kept since. It was important to me to use analogue processes similar to the girls, so the camera really was taking an image of what was in front of it, rather than digitally editing the fairies into the frame. Exploring my belief in fairies and writing through the way I think about my queerness has validated things I have always felt but not exactly had the words for. Looking back, there could have been signs all along, but those hints of fairy dust are traces of how I exist and am inseparable to the core of myself.

NOTES

On definitions and etymology of “fairy,” see: Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fairy; “Gay Fairies: When and Why” https://www.strangehistory.net/2018/03/14/gay-fairies-when-and-why/; “Away with fairies” https://www.oed.com/discover/away-with-the-fairies?tl=true; Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/fairy; Valerie Voigt, herisson, and Subhas K.’s posts on Stack Exchange for “etymology of fairy,” https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/391776/etymology-of-fairy.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” accessed online.
Megan Crutchely, “A Need for Belief: The Victorian and Fairies” in Retrospect Journal and Francesca Bihet, “Late-Victorian Folklore: Constructing the Science of Fairies” in Revenant Journal.
On the history of “fairy” denoting a gay man, see “Gay Fairies: When and Why” (n. 1).
See Richard Sugg, Fairies: A Dangerous History (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).
See Brain Froud and Alan Lee, Faeries, as cited in Neil Rushton, “The Art of Fairies,” https://deadbutdreaming.wordpress.com/2017/06/22/the-art-of-faerie/.
As quoted in Miriam Bibby, “The Cottingley Fairies,” https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Fairies-of-Cottingley/.
On the aftermath of Gardner’s photographs, see Wikipedia entry on “Cottingley Fairies,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies.
Ibid.

Page Sullivan is a collector of keys, rocks, and four-leaf clovers.