When “Men Are the Problem” Enters the Coven: Queer Men, Witchcraft, and the Gender Divide Holding Magic Back

Modern witchcraft has become one of the most visible spiritual homes for people who have been rejected by traditional religion. Women escaping patriarchal churches have found power there. LGBTQIA2S+ people have found language for identities mainstream faiths once condemned. Trans people have created rituals around transformation and becoming. Survivors have reclaimed their bodies, outsiders have found community, and people pushed to the margins have discovered spiritual systems where being different can be treated as sacred rather than sinful. Yet somewhere between feminist resistance, social media, online identity politics and the rise of WitchTok, another message has increasingly found its way into some occult spaces: men are the problem, masculinity is toxic, male energy is dangerous and witchcraft fundamentally belongs to women. For heterosexual men who have spent much of their lives being centered by society, being decentered in one spiritual space may appear relatively insignificant. For gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming and other queer men, however, the experience can be very different. Many queer men did not arrive at witchcraft carrying the social experience associated with heterosexual patriarchal masculinity. Some arrived precisely because the dominant culture had spent their entire lives telling them they were not masculine enough. After escaping one world that told them their masculinity was defective, they can find themselves entering another spiritual environment that seems to tell them masculinity itself is the defect.

There is nothing unreasonable about feminism having a major influence on modern witchcraft. Women have legitimate historical and contemporary reasons to create women-centered spiritual spaces. Patriarchal religious systems have controlled women's bodies, denied women positions of leadership, condemned female sexuality, restricted reproductive autonomy and frequently portrayed independent female spirituality as dangerous. Women creating spiritual spaces centered around women is not inherently an attack on men. The problem begins when criticism of patriarchy becomes criticism of maleness itself. Patriarchy is a system of domination and social power. Masculinity is not. Being male does not automatically make someone patriarchal any more than being female automatically makes someone feminist, and nowhere is that distinction more obvious than among LGBTQIA2S+ men. Gay boys have historically been bullied for being considered insufficiently masculine. Bisexual men are frequently told their sexuality somehow diminishes their manhood. Transgender men may spend years fighting to have a manhood recognized that other people continually deny, while feminine gay and queer men are punished socially because they fail to perform the narrow version of masculinity society expects from them. Queer men are certainly capable of sexism, prejudice and harmful behavior like anyone else, but pretending their relationship with masculinity is identical to the stereotype of heterosexual patriarchal masculinity erases a significant part of queer experience.

Perhaps nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the experiences of some transgender men who enter heavily gendered spiritual spaces. A trans man may discover witchcraft before transitioning. He may have found refuge in feminist spirituality, goddess traditions, women's circles or magical communities during a period when the world perceived him as female. Those spaces may have provided safety, friendship and spiritual meaning. Then he transitions. His voice changes. His appearance changes. Other people begin recognizing him as a man. Suddenly a spiritual community that once told him he belonged may begin treating him with suspicion precisely because his manhood is now visible. There is an uncomfortable contradiction in telling a transgender man that his identity as a man is completely valid while simultaneously treating him as spiritually suspect because he is a man.

That tension becomes even greater in spiritual systems that treat menstruation, wombs, pregnancy or reproductive anatomy as the foundation of femininity or female spirituality. There is nothing inherently wrong with finding sacred meaning in menstruation, childbirth or the womb. Those experiences can hold enormous spiritual significance for people who experience them. The difficulty begins when those experiences become the definition of womanhood itself or when anatomy becomes the deciding factor in determining which spiritual mysteries someone is permitted to approach. That form of gender essentialism can exclude transgender women while simultaneously putting transgender men in the strange position of being told that anatomy they may have spent years trying not to have define them spiritually binds them to womanhood. A tradition has the right to maintain particular mysteries and practices, but modern practitioners should at least recognize the complexity of what happens when biological sex becomes a spiritual gatekeeper.

The idea that witchcraft is fundamentally women's spirituality with men appearing only as occasional guests also does not accurately describe the development of modern Paganism. Queer men have been creating, practicing and reshaping magical traditions for decades. One of the clearest examples is the Minoan Brotherhood, founded in New York during the 1970s by Edmund “Eddie” Buczynski. The tradition emerged in part from the problem of heterosexual polarity within forms of Traditional Witchcraft where ritual power was commonly presented through an assumed male-female pairing: priest and priestess, God and Goddess, masculine and feminine. Gay practitioners were confronted with an obvious question. Where did the sacred love between men fit into a magical structure that often assumed spiritual polarity must also be heterosexual? The response was not to abandon witchcraft. It was to create a magical structure in which male same-sex love and queer male spiritual experience could themselves be sacred. Nearly fifty years before today's arguments about gender, masculinity and WitchTok, queer men were already wrestling with how a magical tradition could move beyond the assumption that heterosexual gender roles represented the only legitimate form of sacred polarity.

The Radical Faeries would soon push the conversation even further. Emerging in the late 1970s, the movement asked what queer male spirituality might become if gay men stopped defining themselves according to heterosexual expectations altogether. Ritual, nature, intimacy, sexuality, community and alternative forms of masculinity became part of a broader effort to understand queer identity as something more than simply a minority tolerated by mainstream society. The Radical Faeries were not merely a Wiccan denomination, but their contribution to queer spirituality remains important because they represented gay men asserting that queer sexuality did not need to be granted spiritual legitimacy by someone else's religious system. Queer experience itself could become a source of spiritual knowledge.

The Feri tradition represents another challenge to rigid heterosexual magical structures. Associated with Victor and Cora Anderson, Feri developed as an ecstatic form of American witchcraft whose approach to sexuality and spiritual identity did not depend entirely upon conventional heterosexual gender polarity. Traditions such as these demonstrate that queer involvement in witchcraft is not a recent internet development. Queer people have helped shape modern magical spirituality for generations, often precisely by questioning the rigid assumptions surrounding sexuality, gender and spiritual power.

The issue, however, reaches deeper than simply whether queer men are welcome inside witchcraft. It raises a much larger question about the way magical practitioners understand masculine and feminine energy in the first place. Rev. Dr. Gabriel Silent created a tradition based on the understanding that masculine and feminine are not opposing spiritual substances permanently assigned to men and women. Instead, both exist within every human being. Within that understanding, every practitioner carries both currents and should be capable of learning how to recognize, hold and work with them during ritual. A man does not become less of a man because he works within a feminine current. A woman does not become less of a woman because she stands within masculine energy. Transgender and nonbinary practitioners do not need to force themselves into magical positions determined by anatomy or conventional gender expectations. The ritual role should be determined by the energy required for the work and by the practitioner's ability to carry that energy, not by the sex written on someone's birth certificate.

In that spiritual sense, humanity itself can be understood as fundamentally nonbinary. This does not mean that every person's gender identity must be nonbinary. A person may completely and comfortably identify as a man or a woman while still understanding that they possess both masculine and feminine spiritual qualities. The idea simply recognizes that human beings are far more complex than the social categories built around them. Every person can nurture and protect, receive and project, create and destroy, soften and stand firm, heal and fight. Those characteristics are routinely assigned genders by society, but magic does not necessarily need to obey those assignments.

This is where modern witchcraft may have to confront one of its own contradictions. If witchcraft presents itself as a path of transformation, liberation and expanded consciousness, why should practitioners continue rebuilding the same rigid gender roles around the altar that many of them are attempting to escape in the outside world? If every human being contains both masculine and feminine currents, then any adequately trained practitioner should eventually be capable of working through either. The person standing in a masculine ritual position does not necessarily need to be biologically male, and the person carrying a feminine current does not necessarily need to be biologically female. What should matter is whether the practitioner understands the energy, has developed a relationship with it, can hold it properly and can direct it responsibly.

This does not erase masculine or feminine energy. It actually takes both more seriously. Instead of reducing masculinity to men and femininity to women, practitioners are required to understand the energies themselves. Masculine and feminine cease being costumes assigned according to gender and become spiritual forces a practitioner must actually learn to recognize. A practitioner who can only work comfortably with one current may ultimately be limiting their own magical vocabulary. Someone who develops the ability to move consciously between different spiritual currents becomes more adaptable, more balanced and potentially more effective in ritual. The goal is not to make masculine and feminine meaningless. The goal is to stop imprisoning them inside gender roles.

For queer men in particular, this creates an entirely different way of understanding masculinity. Many gay, bisexual and queer men come to witchcraft looking for something society never gave them: a form of masculinity that is neither domination nor emotional suppression. Traditional masculinity frequently gives boys an incredibly narrow script. Be hard. Do not cry. Dominate. Compete. Desire women. Do not appear feminine. Do not be vulnerable. Do not be weak. For queer boys, failing that test can become one of the defining experiences of childhood. Then Paganism and magical spirituality offer images of masculinity that can look completely different. The Horned God, the Green Man, Dionysian ecstasy, Apollo and beauty, Hermes crossing boundaries, Pan's wildness, the magician, the healer, the poet and the protector who does not need to dominate all offer possibilities beyond the version of masculinity imposed by mainstream society. Masculinity can become mysterious, nurturing, sensual, artistic, wild, protective, gentle and magical.

Imagine, then, the queer man who spent his childhood being told he was the wrong kind of man entering a spiritual community only to encounter another message telling him that men ruin everything, male energy is dangerous or masculinity itself is inherently toxic. What may be intended as anger toward misogyny or patriarchal systems can land very differently on someone whose masculinity has already been questioned, mocked or denied for most of his life. The answer is not to tell women they are forbidden from expressing anger about sexism. The answer is simply to become more precise about what we mean. Patriarchal domination is harmful. Misogyny is harmful. Abuse is harmful. Entitlement is harmful. Homophobia is harmful. Transphobia is harmful. None of those things requires us to declare masculinity itself spiritually corrupt.

The same care is necessary when discussing Indigenous Two-Spirit traditions. Two-Spirit should never simply be used as another word for queer, nonbinary or magical. It is a modern intertribal term used by some Indigenous people, while individual nations have their own identities, histories, ceremonial traditions and understandings of gender. Those traditions should not be collapsed into a single simplified story or appropriated by non-Indigenous practitioners. What they do remind us of, however, is that human societies have never possessed only one universal way of understanding gender, sexuality and spiritual responsibility. The strict binary assumptions familiar to contemporary Western culture are not the only ways humanity has organized its spiritual world.

Nor should this conversation become a battle between queer men and queer women. Gay men, lesbians, bisexual people, transgender people and other queer communities have survived enormous amounts of religious and social oppression together. They have built movements together, protected each other, created art together, protested together and practiced spirituality together. Feminism is not the enemy of queer male spirituality, and queer masculinity does not threaten women's spiritual liberation. The danger is essentialism: the idea that someone's biology or gender automatically determines their spiritual capacity, morality or place within magical practice.

At the end of the day, perhaps one of the greatest things holding modern magic back is our inability to move beyond gender itself. As long as we insist that particular powers, energies, roles or ritual positions must belong to men while others must belong to women, we limit the practitioner before the ritual even begins. Magic asks us to transform, expand, cross boundaries and understand forces larger than the identities society has assigned us. If we cannot move beyond rigid gender constructs at the altar, then we are carrying the limitations of the outside world directly into the circle.

Real magical growth may require something much more demanding than simply swapping which gender holds power. It may require us to stop using gender as the foundation of spiritual authority altogether. The stronger practitioner is not the person who perfectly performs a masculine or feminine role assigned to them by society. The stronger practitioner is the one who knows themselves deeply enough to recognize every current within them, disciplined enough to develop those energies and skilled enough to call upon whichever force the work requires. During ritual, anyone capable of understanding and properly holding the necessary energy should be able to stand in that place.

Patriarchy does not own masculinity. Women do not own femininity. Men do not own masculine energy, and women do not own feminine energy. They are currents available to human beings. The healer can carry masculine power. The warrior can carry feminine power. The gay man can be both strong and tender. The transgender man can call upon feminine mysteries without surrendering his manhood. The woman can stand within tremendous masculine force without sacrificing her womanhood. The nonbinary practitioner can move between currents without needing to justify their existence to anyone.

If witchcraft truly teaches transformation, then its practitioners must eventually be willing to transform their understanding of gender as well. We cannot claim to be breaking the chains placed upon us by conventional religion, society and patriarchy while rebuilding those chains around our own altars. Magic cannot grow if we insist on squeezing limitless spiritual forces into narrow human categories. Neither can the practitioner.

Perhaps the next evolution of the Craft begins when we finally understand that masculine and feminine were never prisons we were supposed to live inside. They were energies we were supposed to learn how to use.