You can have friends, sex, parties, romantic prospects, a successful career, and an Instagram feed that suggests you’re having the time of your life, and still feel lonely. It might seem like a paradox, but none of these things are the same as having people you can count on—a family or tribe.
Perhaps as an effect of the haphazard public display of my own midlife crisis (or maybe it’s just the zeitgeist), I’ve lately run into men who seem to have mastered the art of independence, but who still search for something harder to find: a sense of belonging, a dependable circle of people, a place to call home.
A few weeks ago, during my ongoing city break from sailing, I stumbled across a possible answer in an unexpected place: a retreat in Northern Catalonia that convinced me that the future is already here, and it is queer.
Welcome to the gay castle.
The Radical Fairies
Do you know what a radical fairy is? Neither did I.
I briefly came across this queer subculture during my early student years. Peter Hennen, an American anthropologist, has written a spicy ethnographic book called Faires, Bears, and Leathermen, and my internalised homophobia made me skip the part with the cross-dressing goofballs and focus on the manly men.
Luckily, I’ve changed, and life has given me a second chance at exploring the joys of being a silly fag.
The Radical Faeries emerged as a countercultural queer movement in the late 1970s. They are a bunch of queer hippies who play, spend time in nature, and challenge conventional gender norms. They’ve embraced spirituality, ritual, and magic crystals, and experiment with forms of community outside mainstream society.
So, basically, queer eco-anarchists. Just like me.
Why hadn’t I discovered them before? Maybe I’ve just been too busy trying to squeeze myself into the soul-crushing corset of status, productivity, and convention.
The Castle
I knew none of this just a few weeks ago, as I was getting ready for my stay at Terra Rosa, a queer retreat center and intentional community on Costa Brava, just north of Barcelona.
Founded in 2025, Terra Rosa is not exactly a Faerie sanctuary, and the place isn’t formally Fae. Even anarchists have rules, and to become a faerie sanctuary, certain criteria have to be met. But the community at Terra Rosa shares some of the same values: a willingness to question convention, make room for difference, and create spaces where queer people can come as they are.
This is a space organised around life in community and time for reflection—morning circles, shared meals, communal work, and daily workshops. It is a place where queer folks from around the world can come as they are and be part of an intentional community.
And I’m convinced this is exactly what our tribe needs.
The Queer
Cause we are still, unfortunately, a challenged bunch.
The mental health disparities between queer and straight people in adolescence are well known (and include a 3X larger suicide rate among young queer folks), but even if these disparities dip as we age, living outside the social conventions of the nuclear family has its own challenges.
Our replacement for the family—the gay community—sometimes feels less like a community and more like a loose social network structured around hookups, workouts at the gym, and drug consumption at the nightclub.
Even if we don’t lack social contact, being desired is not being known, and having the freedom to do what you want is not the same as belonging. And people need both in order to live happy, fulfilling lives: freedom and belonging.
Right now, most gay men have a whole lot of freedom, but are starved for belonging.
This disconnection has been brought on by a society where time in nature has been swapped for time behind screens, where we no longer strike up random conversations because we’re all chatting with ChatGPT, and where we eat our meals alone.
Raise your hand if you recognise yourself in any of these scenarios.
Experiments in different ways of life
True. These challenges are not exclusive to queer folks. But they are the effects of a society organised around the heteronormative family, compounded by a hellish touchscreen culture that has us all hostage.
An iPhone with an even bigger screen is not the solution. More places like Terra Rosa might just be.
Intentional communities in different shapes and forms offer a model for the future that breaks with hyperindividualism, tear down the walls that isolate us, and offer us spaces for real-life, face-to-face interaction, where we can rediscover our tribal nature.
Whether straight or queer, these places remind us that we can sleep in the same room, eat the same food at the same table, and do without a private toilet—even in our forties and fifties (and beyond)—and still be okay. Perhaps even thrive.
And I think that’s pretty damn cool.
Damn. I was just thinking/journaling similar thoughts as I realized October 2025 was when my old life was ending, one death at a time through December.
It's time for Me 2.0 to come out, literally and figuratively, to take positive steps rather than staying comfortable in the regimen of daily life.
Thanks for the thought kick, amigo.
I’ve found gay men (myself very much included) to be aloof when it comes to meaningful relationships. Letting people know you beyond the superficial can feel dangerous because that is what childhood can be when letting people in. So it’s extra hard (imho) to build the connections and much easier to be free. It takes active thought and reflection to understand that letting people in to know you deeply is not a danger to your life. Great article!