At Quinta , a queer-run permaculture farm in rural Portugal, karaoke nights follow compost mornings. At a Radical Faerie house in Portland, Oregon, sex, spirit and politics swirl through residents’ daily rituals. These aren’t retreats from society — they’re blueprints for how to live differently within it.
“We’re not recreating an alternative system,” says Stephan Dahl, 41, a co-founder of Quinta. It isn’t some sealed-off queer biosphere with its own infrastructure. It’s a world of its own, yet still deeply embedded in the rural community around it.
These queer utopias, some rural and others urban, share a quiet rebellion. Joy-centered and anti-normative, they’re scrappy, spiritual and slyly political. They’re about care, not performance. Structure, not hierarchy. So yes, they’re utopias — but you don’t have to leave the world (or even the city) behind to be part of them.
“You can stick your toe in,” says Terry Cavanagh, 68, co-founder of the Portland Faerie house. “You don’t have to move to the woods.”
Still, there’s something about the land — the dirt under your nails, the fire circle, the garden that needs tending — that calls to queer folks building something new. Quinta, a 5.5-hectare organic wine farm nestled in Portugal’s São Mamede Natural Park, folds queerness into ecology, ritual and daily life. “We are part of nature, and we’re going forward with nature,” he says.
And then there are the Radical Faeries. In case you don’t know about the legendary fae, the movement began in 1979 as a queer spiritual rebellion rooted in anti-assimilation, Earth-based ritual, and fierce fabulousness. Their houses and sanctuaries now pepper the rural U.S. and beyond. Imagine them as queer zones of ecospiritual practice, co-living and campfire drag.
For the Faeries, nature is sacred but never separate. “The radical faerie is this kind of merging of your heart energy with your sexual energy with your spiritual energy,” Cavanagh explains. “There’s a whole history... where queer people actually are at the essence of spiritual practice.”
Cavanagh is referring to the roles that queer and gender-nonconforming people often play in Indigenous cultures, but these aren’t appropriative back-to-the-land fantasies. As scholar Scott Herring writes in “Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism,” contemporary queer utopias offer “a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to [the] myopic mindset” of metro-centric queer theory.
And that new map doesn’t include rainbow capitalism, hetero imitation or corporate wellness retreats. These communities don’t just step outside the mainstream — they compost it.
Visitors volunteer, share meals, tend the land. It’s a gift economy rooted in human connection, not transaction, Dahl tells me. The Quinta Project is financed in part by Dahl (who owns the land) and in part by the wine project and bar — which allows the running of the farm, day-to-day.
Faerie sanctuaries work similarly. “It’s a completely horizontal structure,” says Cavanagh. “There’s no president, there’s no chief, there’s no steering committee.”
Their politics don’t mirror the mainstream, either. “This is a group who is not interested in gay marriage or serving in the military,” Cavanagh says. “That’s not the vision of the radical fairies.”
Instead, it’s about queerness as a practice — expansive, messy and defiantly off-script. These utopias are communal projects where the daily work of living together becomes the real experiment.
At Quinta, theory meets praxis. The farm regularly hosts gatherings on ecosexuality, queer theory, activism and permaculture. “It turns out that everyday life continues to happen in utopia,” says Dahl. That means equal parts dancing and dishes, karaoke and conflict resolution.
Faerie life is also immersive. Days unfold through shared meals, heart circles, drumming and nude rituals. “It is possible to live in very deep collective community,” said Cavanagh. “It takes skills to do this.” He’s not talking about fairy dust. “It takes skill and time to build these intergenerational connections. It takes normative conversations.”
In other words, living together means learning together. And learning requires the experience of elders: people who’ve already done the dishes and cried in the circles, and who know what it means to stay when communal life is challenging.
I don’t know about you, but I’m starving for that kind of guidance. If we’re going to imagine new ways of living, we need proof that queer aging is possible — that choosing a different life won’t mean growing old alone.
And we do have proof, in kitchen tables full of chosen kin. “It’s not unusual at my table for there to be somebody that’s 38, 45, 62 and 82,” Cavanagh says. At the Portland Faerie house, daily life unfolds across generations, with queer elders sharing not just stories, but also skills, care and continuity.
That legacy runs deep. “I’m a survivor of the AIDS epidemic. I lost about 300 people,” Cavanagh says. “So the idea of being with people, having them be healthy and vibrant, is extremely important to me.”
Quinta, though newer, is built with this in mind. Dahl and his collaborators have intentionally created a space that welcomes a wide range of ages — not as guests, but as co-stewards. It’s not simply about reverence. It’s about remembering how to live together.
These queer sanctuaries aren’t open-door communes, but they’re not gated utopias either. You don’t need a secret password or a trust fund. What you need is resonance. At Quinta, community forms through shared labor, loose invitations and deep listening.
“Some people have moved nearby to be closer to Quinta, which builds more of a community,” Dahl says. So Quinta is not about screening people out; it’s about cultivating what grows when care comes first.
Faerie culture runs on similar principles: inclusive in spirit, but attuned to the alchemy of group dynamics. “They bend over backwards to do the best they can to meet people’s access needs,” said Cavanagh.
As Scott Herring writes, rural queer community isn’t effortless. It’s “hard-won” — a patchwork of shared meals, shared resources and shared risk.
And still — they throw parties.
In the nearby village, Quinta runs a wine bar that’s become a local favorite. “It’s the only bar where people dance and have fun,” Dahl says. “We’re fully embedded in this village... and they love us. I think it’s because we brought joy.” That joy is a form of resistance.
The Radical Faeries know this magic, too. “When we throw a solstice gathering,” says Cavanagh, “it’s a wild-ass celebration — bonfires, music, moon rituals, food, dancing. People from nearby towns show up too.”
These aren’t sealed-off sanctuaries. They’re porous queer ecologies. They grow by teaching each other, yes, but also by staying in conversation with the world around them. They seed possibility not by retreating, but by rooting.
In a time when queer futures feel both urgent and under threat, places like Quinta and the Faerie houses don’t just offer refuge. They’re a dress rehearsal for a possible future, a chance to practice what liberation might actually look like, one compost pile, one solstice party, one collective meal at a time.