Leo Martello | |
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 Martello in 1970 | |
| Born | September 26, 1930 Dudley, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | June 29, 2000 (aged 69) |
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Leo Martello (September 26, 1930 – June 29, 2000) was an American Wiccan priest, gay rights activist, and author. He was a founding member of the Strega Tradition, a form of the modern Pagan new religious movement of Wicca which drew upon his own Italian heritage. During his lifetime he published a number of books on such esoteric subjects as Wicca, astrology, and tarot reading.
Born to a working-class Italian American family in Dudley, Massachusetts, he was raised Roman Catholic although became interested in esotericism as a teenager. He later claimed that when he was 21, relatives initiated him into a tradition of witchcraft inherited from their Sicilian ancestors; this conflicts with other statements that he made, and there is no independent evidence to corroborate his claim. During the 1950s, he was based in New York City, where he worked as a graphologist and hypnotist. After beginning to publish books on paranormal topics in the early 1960s, he publicly began identifying as Wiccan in 1969, and stated that he was involved in a New York coven.
After the Stonewall riots of 1969, Martello – himself a gay man – involved himself in gay rights activism, becoming a member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Leaving the GLF following an internal schism, he became a founding member of the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) and authored a regular column, "The Gay Witch", for its newspaper. In 1970 he founded the Witches International Craft Associates (WICA) as a networking organization for Wiccans, and under its auspices organized a "Witch In" that took place in Central Park at Halloween 1970, despite opposition from the New York City Parks Department. To campaign for the civil rights of Wiccans, he founded the Witches Anti-Defamation League, which was later renamed the Alternative Religions Education Network. In 1973, he visited England, there being initiated into Gardnerian Wicca by the Gardnerian High Priestess Patricia Crowther. He continued practicing Wicca into the 1990s, when he retreated from public life, eventually succumbing to cancer in 2000.