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What if casting your vote could be an act of love? And what if the same collective power that fueled the Gay Liberation movement could help us transform our world today?
In this episode of Queerly Beloved, host Wil Fisher welcomes Murray Edelman, a pioneering gay liberation activist, Radical Faerie elder, election polling expert, and founder of Circle Voting, for a fascinating conversation about the intersection of politics, spirituality, love, and community.
Murray has spent more than five decades witnessing and participating in extraordinary social change. He helped launch the Gay Liberation movement in Chicago in 1969, played an important role in the early Radical Faerie movement, and spent much of his professional career analyzing elections and helping major news networks project their results.
Now, through his initiative Circle Voting, Murray is inviting us to reimagine our relationship with democracy. Rather than seeing voting as an isolated act driven by fear, anger, or frustration, what if we approached it as an expression of love for our communities, our planet, and future generations? What if casting a ballot could also mean casting an intention—or even a spell—for the world we want to create?
Wil and Murray explore how conversations within our social circles can help us reclaim our collective power and why bringing politics out of the shadows and into community might be more transformative than we realize.
The conversation also takes us on a remarkable journey through queer history. Murray shares firsthand stories of the early days of Gay Liberation, the creation of intentional queer spiritual communities, and the groundbreaking rituals he helped facilitate in San Francisco bathhouses during the 1970s. These experiences helped inspire the early Radical Faerie gatherings, where sexuality, spirituality, and authentic connection could be explored in revolutionary new ways.
Together, they explore:
How voting can become an act of love rather than fear.
The inspiration behind Circle Voting and the power of our social connections.
Bringing sacred ritual, intention, and even a little magic into political participation.
Murray's firsthand experiences at the birth of Gay Liberation in Chicago.
The early Radical Faerie movement and the integration of sexuality and spirituality.
The importance of community in a culture increasingly defined by isolation.
The wisdom of queer elders who have witnessed and helped create extraordinary social change.
Why the political, personal, and spiritual aspects of our lives are inseparable.
At its heart, this conversation is a powerful reminder that transformation doesn't happen in isolation. It happens when we come together, open our hearts, and remember the power we have to create something new.
Connect with Murray and explore Circle Voting:
Circle Voting: https://circlevoting.com/
Murray's interview about Gay Liberation, Radical Faeries, and Circle Voting: https://circlevoting.com/blog/an-interview-with-murray-edelman-faerie-elder
Murray's LGBTQ oral history: https://www.lgbtqhp.org/post/murray-edelman
Connect with Wil and Queerly Beloved:
Coaching, retreats, and more: https://www.wil-fullyliving.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wilfish99/
More episodes: https://queerlybelovedpodcast.buzzsprout.com/
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Originally released in October 2022, this re-released episode is a conversation with Clyde M. Hall which remains one of Wil's all-time favorite interviews on Queerly Beloved. Four years later, he's bringing it back to share the wisdom of a man he deeply admires and whose perspective on Indigenous traditions, Two-Spirit identity, and the spiritual gifts of queer people feels as meaningful as ever.
Clyde M. Hall is an enrolled member of the Shoshone-Métis tribe, an esteemed authority on Native American culture, tribal arts, and traditional ceremonies, and a pioneering figure in the contemporary Two-Spirit movement. He was recognized by OUT Magazine as one of its OUT 100 and later as one of the 1,000 most influential gay individuals of the 20th century. Through his lifelong dedication to preserving Indigenous knowledge and ceremonies, Clyde has helped carry forward traditions and perspectives that colonialism sought to erase.
In this fascinating, heartfelt, and sometimes hilarious conversation, Clyde shares stories from his extraordinary life, including his involvement in the early Gay American Indians movement, the emergence of the term Two-Spirit, and his adventures bringing together gay Native Americans and gay cowboys at a rodeo. (Yes, really!)
Together, Wil and Clyde explore how Indigenous understandings of gender, sexuality, and spirituality challenge many of the limiting beliefs inherited from Western culture and organized religion.
In this episode, they explore:
🌈 The origins of the Two-Spirit movement: Clyde's firsthand experiences helping build a movement that celebrates the identities, traditions, and spiritual contributions of LGBTQ+ Indigenous people.
🪶 Honoring each person's spiritual vision: The importance of respecting the unique ways individuals experience and express their connection to Spirit.
💗 The sacred roles of gender-diverse people: How different Indigenous cultures have recognized people whose identities and gifts extend beyond conventional gender categories.
🔥 Colonialism, Christianity, and shame: How the introduction of Christian concepts of sin influenced Indigenous attitudes toward sexuality and spirituality.
🤠 Gay Indians meet gay cowboys: A delightful story about bringing seemingly different communities together through connection, celebration, and a gay rodeo.
✨ Awakening our spiritual potential: Clyde's inspiring belief that queer people are like sleeping spiritual giants, possessing extraordinary gifts and capacities waiting to be awakened.
Perhaps the most moving invitation from this conversation is to imagine what might become possible if queer people fully recognized and embraced their spiritual gifts. What wisdom, creativity, healing, and transformation might we bring into the world?
Whether you're hearing this conversation for the first time or revisiting it four years later, may it inspire you to honor your own spiritual vision and recognize the sacred gifts you carry.
Learn more about Clyde Hall:
Clyde Hall — LGBTQ Religious Archives Network
Connect with Wil and Queerly Beloved:
🌐 Website: https://www.wil-fullyliving.com/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wilfish99/
🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@willfullyliving4357
If this conversation moves you, please share it with someone who might benefit from hearing Clyde's wisdom. And don't forget to follow Queerly Beloved and leave a review to help more people discover the podcast.
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What happens when you intentionally ask life for “warrior training”… and life responds by putting a 50-pound backpack on you and sending you straight up a mountain?
In this solo episode, Wil shares the story of an eight-day, 32+ mile backpacking journey through Sequoia National Park that became one of the most physically demanding experiences of his life.
Going into the trip, Wil set an intention to discover more deeply what he was capable of. That intention was tested almost immediately: steep climbs, intense knee pain, blazing sun, thousands of feet of elevation gain, exhaustion, and one particularly brutal 13-hour day that ended with him slowly descending a mountain alone in the dark.
And yet, somewhere inside the experience of having absolutely nothing left, Wil discovered that somehow… he could still take another step.
But the warrior training wasn’t only about individual strength. It also became a lesson in receiving help, generosity, vulnerability, brotherhood, and the extraordinary intimacy that can emerge when people move through something difficult together.
In this episode, Wil explores:
The fears he carried into the wilderness
A sacred (and somewhat silly!) dream involving “mall angels”
What a grueling day in the mountains taught him about perseverance
Discovering strength beyond the mind’s declaration of “I can’t do this anymore”
How shared hardship created profound brotherhood among the nine men
Finding joy in skinny-dipping, mud, ramen, creek water, stars, and simple acts of service
Improving his relationship with meditation and stillness
How eight days almost entirely without a phone changed his experience of presence
Encountering Shiva through the themes of dissolution, transformation, endings, and renewal
Holding grief and heartbreak alongside the possibility that endings can also contain mystery, sacredness, and meaning
Ultimately, Wil returned home with a deeper knowing: I can do hard shit.
And that knowing isn’t just about hiking mountains.
Most of us have some metaphorical mountain waiting in our lives- something uncertain, uncomfortable, or frightening that asks us to become bigger than the version of ourselves we currently know.
Maybe you don’t have to know that you can make it all the way to the top.
Maybe you only need enough courage to take one step.
And then another.
And another.
Sometimes we have to climb the mountain to remember who we truly are.
Connect with Wil:
wil-fullyliving.com
Instagram: @wilfullyliving
Check out Inirly (the group that organized the trip):
https://www.inirly.com/
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In this episode of Queerly Beloved, Wil speaks with Emily Greenway, a former clinical researcher who now works as a burnout and stress coach, energetic reader, and teacher of ritual and energetic mastery. Through Rise to Her and the ROOTED community, Emily blends her research background with archetypal wisdom to help spiritually conscious entrepreneurs and leaders question inherited systems and build lives rooted in their own power.
Emily shares her journey from growing up in a working-class Southern Baptist family in rural South Carolina to gradually dismantling the religious, patriarchal, and cultural expectations that shaped her understanding of who she was supposed to be. Through education, travel, spiritual exploration, and embracing her queerness, she learned to recognize when an old structure no longer reflected her truth, it was time to find the courage to let it fall.
Together, Wil and Emily explore how desire can become a compass when it’s separated from shame, morality, and the pressure to prove our worth. They discuss Emily’s concept of the “soul code”: the deeper themes, values, joys, and patterns that continually guide us back toward who we are beneath our conditioning.
The conversation also turns toward joy as a form of rebellion. Emily explains that joy doesn’t require bypassing pain or ignoring injustice. Instead, being willing to experience grief, pleasure, desire, and the full range of human sensation can help us stay connected to our creativity and power within systems that profit from our disconnection.
Together, they explore:
 Distinguishing authentic desires from desires shaped by capitalism and patriarchy 
 Releasing shame and rigid ideas of right and wrong 
 Understanding the difference between core human needs and a personal soul code 
 Breaking structures that no longer support our truth 
 Emily’s journey through religious deconstruction and queer self-discovery 
 Why joy and grief belong on the same emotional spectrum 
 Reclaiming the senses as sources of wisdom and discernment 
 Working with the Wheel of the Year and nature’s cycles 
 Disentangling our energy from grind culture, urgency, and endless productivity 
This episode is an invitation to remember that we aren’t merely caretakers of the Earth—we are the Earth—and that our joy can help make us burn-proof in a culture determined to burn us out.
Connect with Emily
Visit Rise to Her
Explore the ROOTED Community

Connect with Queerly Beloved
Wil's Upcoming retreat in Costa Rica- 
https://www.wil-fullyliving.com/awakened-hearts-nye
Willfully Living
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What if the thing you reach for dozens or hundreds of times a day isn’t simply a tool?
In this episode of Queerly Beloved, Wil sits down with psychotherapist, author, and teacher Shannon Algeo (he/him), MA, AMFT, APCC, author of Trust Your Truth and the new book The Power in Your Hands: Liberate Yourself from Attachment to Technology.
Shannon’s work offers a fascinating lens on our increasingly intimate relationship with technology: the connection of compulsive smartphone use with insecure attachment patterns. Our phones can become something like surrogate attachment figures- reliable places to seek stimulation, soothing, connection, validation, or escape when being present with ourselves or another human feels harder. 
Wil brings his own recent exploration into the conversation, sharing discoveries about the ways his social-media algorithm seems to hook different “parts” of him- parts afraid of missing out, being manipulated, or not being enough. Together, Wil and Shannon explore a deliciously provocative question: What might your algorithm reveal about you? And if the things that repeatedly capture your attention are pointing toward unmet needs, fears, desires, or wounds, could noticing those hooks actually become part of a healing practice? 
They also explore how social media can interfere with the very capacities human beings need for deep relationship: sustained attention, spaciousness, solitude, emotional presence, and the willingness to tolerate the glorious inefficiency of another human being.
Together, they explore:
 How attachment theory can help explain compulsive smartphone use 
 Why intermittent rewards keep us checking apps over and over 
 The difference between having a desire and having an algorithm manufacture one 
 What our personalized feeds reveal about our fears, fantasies, wounds, and needs 
 How phones can become an escape from uncomfortable emotions 
 Why real human relationships require friction, inconvenience, and vulnerability 
 The importance of reclaiming solitude, creativity, wonder, and unstructured time 
 Practical tools like one sec, app blocking, digital sabbaths, and simpler phones 
 The possibility of joining a growing renaissance of rehumanization
Near the end of the conversation, Shannon offers perhaps the most hopeful reminder of all: this way of living is remarkably new. We are not permanently wired for endless scrolling. Our relationship with technology can change.
When we reclaim our attention, we also reclaim room for what matters: creativity, intimacy, embodiment, purpose, play, and the messy, inconvenient, miraculous people right in front of us. 
Connect with Shannon
Shannon Algeo: shannonalgeo.com
The Power in Your Hands: https://www.shannonalgeo.com/book
Trust Your Truth: http://www.trustyourtruthbook.com/
Resources Mentioned
one sec: one-sec.app
The Light Phone: thelightphone.com
Brick: Get Brick
Strother School of Radical Attention: School of Radical Attention
The Offline Club: The Offline Club
Johann Hari / Stolen Focus: Johann Hari
Stay Connected with Queerly Beloved
Website: https://www.wil-fullyliving.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wilfish99/
If this conversation moved you, please subscribe to Queerly Beloved, leave a review, and share the episode with someone who might be ready to reclaim a little more of their attention—and their life.
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