When I posted my most recent thoughts on being a queer running in the heavily Wiccanized regions of the neoPagan community, I had been struggling to articulate myself for several weeks and finally decided to just post what I had. As such, a couple major issues eem to have gotten lost while I was frothing at the mouth. Jack Faust was kind enough to point some of them out to me on G+:
Hm. I don’t own Sheba’s version of the BoS (it is only part of the BoS she was given by Michael Howard, and includes her own ideas in many places – which have no part in Trad. wicca), so I can’t comment, there. However, I have not seen your reference point from it in other sources – which makes me dubious about it.
That said, there is at least one Trad offshoot (Alexandria-Cthonica, I think) that is now doing a massive level of same sex work that you might want to look into. I won’t take my time discussing the gender essentialist doctrines some covens have (remember: all trad. Covens are autonomous, meaning what goes on changes based on coven, line, and trad) and my issues with them. I think they are… Iffy, most of the time. Not quite what I’ve been taught, at all. But I’m mostly bound to silence there, alas.
I am not an initiate to any tradition of Wicca. As such, I am precluded from the details of coven-by-coven variance, and have only the Outer Court materials (many of them from the 60’s) and my personal experiences with Wiccans (Traditional and Eclectic) to judge by. In the parts of the Midwest where I have lived, Traditional covens are hard to come by, and the one time such a coven showed interest in me, I was unable to reciprocate due to the direction in which my life was going.
I can only speak to what I’ve read and seen, and I should have made that more clear.