RFD Issue 21 Fall 1979 by RFD Magazine Gay

Rightfully Feeling Delirious

Next Issue: Winter Solstice

Collective Statement This issue (#21) marks the beginning of RFD's sixth year and the completion of five years of coming together through this journal. We've found cause in this to reflect on the many hours shared in work and play by other collectives, and the many fruitful contacts made through our involvements with these pages. Its been strengthening to work on this issue, spreading root: , taking nourishment, bearing fruit. It’s also been heartening to meet other gays who are living close to this rocky New England soil, and who can share excitement over harvest a;., the full corn moon rides overhead (partially darkened by the clouds of Tropical Storm David). We hope Ceres has blessed your harvests as she has ours. In our case, bringing this issue out of the hills of rural New England this late summer has brought many joys and struggles. We have dif ferent lifestyles, different ways of making a living, varying involvements with the land. Though most of us aren't purist homesteaders, many of us attempt to grow a good part of our yearly food supply in a growing season cut short by occasional June and standard September frosts. So we're right in the middle of cutting and drying lavender, mint, sage; cleaning pea fences; canning and freezing beans, beets and tomatoes; drying corn; cooking blackberry preserves. Many of us also depend on firewood heat and have been laboring at the woodpile, storing hardwood against the long winter. And then there's always work; we are a journalist, some carpenters, healthcare workers, and innkeepers. We're a busy bunch, storing nuts against the long winter. Several weeks ago we were a group from Butterworth farm in the Massachusetts hills who had agreed months before to work on #21, and a well-scattered group of interested men from the hills surrounding the Connecticut river valley watershed between New Hampshire and Vermont. The Butterworth Farm people had worked on a previous issue, while the northern folks have been involved with RFD as readers. Few of us knew each other. Our initial plan evolved through early summer, mostly in telephone talks and letters between Allen in Massachusetts and Ron in New Hampshire. We questioned our process: were we really a "collective", or maybe a looser network of interested RFD readers working with a core of more committed Issue 21 people’ We considered abandoning the idea_ of pulling Vermont-New Hamp shire and Butterworth Farm efforts together, and organizing a later issue around northern energy. Finally, we met in a series of work, sessions in East Barnet, Vermont, and West Royalston, Massachusetts, to bring this late summer Issue together. This experience makes some comment on our indi vidual lives here in New England, which is the focus of issue #21. Though we are transplants from other parts of New England, New York and CONTINUED INSIDE BACK COVER

The Winter Solstice issue of RFD, #22, will be put together in November by the Sissies in Struggle in New Orleans, who are also coordinating an RFD contingent for the Oct. 14 March on Washington. Stacy, writing for "the yet to be formed winter issue collective," sent the following letter for this issue of RFD: "RFD's prize-winning team of crack investigative reporters will be descending on Washington, D.C., to cover the Gay National March on Washington on Oct. 14 from a distinctly faggot perspective. There are openings available on this team for interested faggots. "Further, a faggot march contingent, marching with an RFD banner, and a faggot circle, are being planned. All RFD readers are welcome to march under this banner and to send to us any feelings, analysis, stories, anecdotes, photos, drawings, nasty notes, etc., con cerning the march and the Third World Lesbian/Gay Conference. Those who can't or choose not to attend are also encouraged to send in their ideas, etc. We'd like to devote significant space in the upcoming issue to this event....but as always that depends on what we all send in. "Also for the Winter Solstice issue, we are en couraging folks to write more about ways to increase networking, building faggot culture, survival strate gies for the HARD TIMES AHEAD, growing up queer in the south, relationships with grandparents, etc. "Everything to go in the winter issue must be sent in by November 10, 1979. Mail to RFD, c/o LAS IS, PO Box 51012, New Orleans LA 70151. Our phone number is (504) 943-2081, and you can contact us by mail or phone for more faggot march contingent information or to make plans to come to the Queen City of the Old South to lay out RFD. Thanks."

RFD has learned that a special toll-free number has been established by the Rational March on Washington to provide information about car pools, public transportation, and special events. In the event that an RFD gathemng can be opgarttzed^ and if a specific location for the RFD contingent aan be arranged, information aoout tn.is can be obtained from this toll-free number, which is:

800 - 528- 7382 .

RFD BUTTONS: Color buttons with RFD letters and pansy illustration are available. Large button 2h inches across, with 3 hand-colored pansies and "RFD" for $1.50 each from RFD Button, PO Box 51012, New Orleans LA 70151. Smaller buttons, lh inches across with "RFD" and a single pansy in purple on pink, for 75c for one, postage included; $1 for 3, plus 30c postage, from Milo, Rt. 1, Box 98A, Gassaway TN 37095.

NO. 21 TABLE OF CONTENTS FALL 1979 Special Issue: Gay Life in New England LETTERS TO RFD POETRY CONTACT LETTERS PRISONERS' PAGE

2-4, 46 5, 47, 50 6-8, 18, 37 13

ARTICLES AND INTERVIEWS

RFD is published four times a year by RFD, Rt. 1, Box 92E, Efland NC 27243. Publication dates coincide with the Summer Solstice, the Autumnal Equinox, the Winter Solstice, and the Vernal Equinox. Second Class postage paid at Efland, North Carolina 27243. Copyright (c) RFD 1979. RFD is a non-profit corporation. Donations are tax deductible. MOVING? Send us your old and new addresses, with zips. Otherwise, you will not receive your magazine. The post office doesn't forward 2nd class mail unless specified. BACK ISSUES AVAILABLE: See listing elsewhere in this issue of RFD. ADVERTISING RATES: $10 per column inch. readers can help us by soliciting ads.

Our

WHOLESALE: Bookstores pay $1.20 per copy (40% off), and distributors pay 90c per copy (55% off), with full credit for complete copies returned. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: $6 per year, second class; $9/year, first class; $7/year, Canada and abroad; $10/year, institutions; $15/year, sustaining; free to prisoners. If you want to subscribe, please send your name and address and zip code, and specify the type of sub scription you want, and enclose your check or money order payable to RFD. SPREAD THE WORD: Help RFD grow. Buy a classi fied ad in a local newspaper, especially counter-culture weeklies and monthlies and regional journals. Sample ad: "RFD, a country gay journal of special interest to gay men, send $2 for sample copy postpaid to RFD, Rt. 1, Box 92E, Efland NC 27243, mailed in plain envelope." PAYMENT TO CONTRIBUTORS: RFD is unable to pay money for articles, photos, poems or drawings. Each contributor will receive 2 copies of the magazine in which the contribution appears. Each member of the collective working on an issue will receive a one-year sub, plus 2 copies of the issue worked on. FINAL WORD: RFD is a reader-produced journal. Issues have been produced by groups of gay men in various regions of the U.S. If you would like to organize a collective to produce an issue of RFD, write to Faygele ben Miriam, Rt. 1, Box 92E, Efland NC 27243.

THE JOY OF GAY SWIMMING WOODSTOCK, N.Y. -- A REMINISCENCE CONDOS FOR QUEERS (ROXBURY RUN VILLAGE) OUR HIRED MAN: A SHORT STORY

9 10 14 16

IN SOUTHERN VERMONT

STEAMTOWN STEAM THE ANDREWS INN: AN INTERVIEW RURAL FREE DEVELOPMENT: A REAL FREAK'S DESIRE FORGING COMMUNITY: AN INTERVIEW

20 22

RICHIE AND ELLEN AND...: AN INTERVIEW

RFD SURVEY

VISITORS' REPORT...AND A RESPONSE

ORGANIZING CAMPESIN0S IN SOUTH TEXAS

SNAPSHOTS

28 30

I haven’t written in such a long time and I have been so pleased and thrilled by each issue and as I write the Summer Solstice is happening in the heavens and in my heart. For four years, RFD, meaning many of my brothers, have been helpful, faithful compani ons. "Raised" in Berks County, Pa., travelling all over america in my early twenties and returned to find my life’s lover/friend take a cottage again in Fleetwood. The Pennsylvania Dutch Country is a haven for the earth divas. As straight as the Amish are, they have a deep love and respect for the earth that nurtures a home for the fairies. RFD came alive on our little plot at the base of a hill towering with pines and we began to hear from the little stream the sweet music of the water divas there too. The burbling of the brook is Nature’s laughter; laughter is the catalyst of magic. The seeds that my lover and I planted in that place spawned a spiritual basis that we have been unable to escape even through troubling, rocky seasons. This visit to New York City is in its third year, financial debts about completed, growth be ginning to find room to move unencumbered by "paying of one's dues," new goals and directions taking hold. Besides a couple of parks, New York has little of a country soul. But I have found that the Atlantic Ocean and the glorious sun above it has helped to reveal the Father and Mother in my own nature. With the consistent resource of the faggot/fairy hotline (read RFD) 1 can continue to fulfill and envision my goal of returning to the land to build a credibly self-sustaining lifestyle with other men. Akin, to something a brother wrote this Spring, with every RFD issue I realize how much of a faggot I really am, snuggling into my feminine, tempering but embracing my masculine. About a year ago I began to study Astrology and came to know it as a metaphor for the Universe we/I live in through all Time. The Solar System as a meta phor for the Mind. This expanded towards the Tarot as Self-development of the soul. Isis revealed herself, and, of course, I have never been the same person since (sic). This past Winter Solstice my lover Jerry and I celebrated through our first ritual together. Homage to the earth, praise to the Sun, we read some of "The Four Seasons" by Yeats, annointing of oil, the spirit dancing upon candles, small sacrifices, reflec tion, prayer and love. The experience was new and overpowering, intensely personal and bonding between us. Death and life were ever-present. The emergence of the Winter RFD sissy was a joyous complement. I would like to hear about ocher rituals from people who have made them significant in their lives through the

seasons. As difficult as it may be to explain, I trust I will understand. At the risk of showing a little pride, I thank all of you for being the courageous, Joyous people that you are. I was saddened by the tale of the fire at Wolf Creek. The first issues that I read came out of the collective there, and I felt a certain kinship towards the creative men who live there. I hope the enclosed check can help in some way. Please! Let's not fight amongst ourselves. I think we should realize that the channel for expression which has been sustained here is one of the most honest, energetic media that can be found in america. Our disagreements and rebuttals are fruit for our evolution, but let's remember that if we can't keep feeding each other, no one else may even care that we starve. I would also like to hear more about practical aspects of living in the country: planting, building, obtaining land and living with it. For those of us who have not yet fulfilled all our dreams, we need all the help we can get from those who tried or failed or succeeded. Dave Kline 68 East 1st St. (#4F)

After an issue's absence, we joyfully resubscribe. All the jabber in the Spring issue about what RFD should (not) be of course holds no value if the critics aren't plowing with us. Stay strong friends. What has seemed most wondrous in our history with this charmed rag is the magic which has arisen be cause of the various faces of the reader/writership. Is there such as thing as a Perfect Issue? If so, it may, like perfectly round pots, be "good" rather than whole or real. Let's continue together to turn the problems into mysteries. True and Jim 1866 Graham Ave. St. Paul MN 55116

For the past month, I've been trying to find a way of expressing my displeasure with the contents of RFD #20. As the deadline for issue #21 approached, I calmed down a bit, but the Hot Flash of Inspiration never hit me. It still hasn't. I decided re-reading the past year's issues might help, and what follows is the result. RFD seems to be rapidly losing sight of its reas on for existing: to be a country journal for gay men. The cover of #20 might as well have read "A country journal for gay men, written by and about women, pri soners, anti-nukers, city sissies, and just about any one and anything but gay men living in the country." Who or what is at fault? Well, for one thing, RFD seems to receive a lot of angry letters from readers who submit nothing for pub lication but angry letters. One or two per cent of RFD's 2,000-plus readers seem to do all the work. Re cognition of this fact caused me to reconsider ra^ angry letter; what have Jt ever contributed to the magazine? Not much. Nothing, in fact. Due to a lack of contributions from readers, a lot of space in RFD is being taken up/over by women, prison ers and issues which have little or no direct bearing on the immediate problems of economic and social survi val facing country gay men. Women, for example, have plenty of outlets for their work, whereas there are only two or three journals by and for gay men, as Demian pointed out in #17, p. 10. Anti-nuke articles (#20, pp. 16-17) we can read in The Progressive, The Atlantic Monthly, and half-adozen other places. If issues 'of concern to all people' are to be raised, perhaps RFD should get into birth control/overpopulation, abortion, OPEC, disarma ment, etc., and just forget about country faggots alto gether. The RFD I would like to see is essentially that described by James L. Moore, in #19, p. 4: '...I think top priority should always go to practical information on survival in the country. Second to that should come creative writing with rural emphasis. Only after that, should come politics and philosophy.' It's

that simple. If a return to a policy such as James suggests means reducing the size of the magazine, so be it. If the material readers submit fills only a couple of mimeographed pages, fine. Of course, if things get that bad, it might be tent-folding time. The sissy/butch argument seems to generate more heat than it's worth. Most of us, I suspect, are just plain old faggots, neither sissy nor butch. A bit of each, perhaps, in different proportions, but comfort able with our masculine/physical side as well as our feminine/sensitive side, with no great hangups about our brothers at either end of the (drag?) spectrum. I suspect the heavy emphasis on effeminacy is aliena ting as many of us in the middle as It is those at the butch/raacho end. Having wondered at some length about the direc tion RFD seems to be taking, it's only fair to add that I've enjoyed a lot of where it's been as well. Contact letters are a very Important part of the magazine; I wish there were more. I especially en joyed the articles by Skip Ward and Dave Czyzlnaki in #18, and the mini-story by Aram in #20. Skip's comments on the extended gay family are valuable, and one point he makes is worth repeating: 'un happiness and frustration for the rural gay Is related to the lack of social and personal contacts rather than discrimination.' And with ever-worsen ing inflation making it all but impossible to main tain one-person households, it would seem more im portant than ever that we become more concerned with the establishment of homesteads/households/ communities of two or more persons. As a relatively new subscriber to RFD, 1 hadn't seen issue #7 until a friend in Maine brought it to my attention this spring. 1 consider it the best of the lot. If that sounds like I'm sucking up to the staff of #21, hoping they'll turn out another issue by, for, and about country faggots, damn right! Michael Loris RFD 2 Barre VT 05641

f I haven't beard

from him in two years; if I don't hearfrom him by next,I will write him a letter.

I finally got my first issue after weeks of try ing to locate you. I enjoyed it very much and wish to offer help to all of you and all of your readers. I have been working for three months now as librarian and information coordinator here at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, bet ter known as "Max’s Pot," a non-profit corporation concerned with energy conservation, solar/wind/etc. energy, and most of all Appropriate technology. I am organizing a large amount of documents dealing with all of these topics — things such as how to build with adobe, how to build wood stoves, wind generators, etc. 1 expect to have all this into a public access library by the end of September. I want to offer all RFD people, all gay rural brothers, access to this information. There is a small charge to cover costs of xeroxing and postage, and all orders must be pre-paId (otherwise, I end up paying for it). Anybody with specific questions can write directly to me. Also, we have some publications for sale, and 1 will send a copy to anyone who provides a self-addressed stamped envelope (business size). 1 am also willing to provide bibliographies on specialized topics, recommendations on books to buy, and so on. I can also make referrals to other groups in other areas dealing with Appropriate Technology.

Hello, loves.' Spending a quiet day at home, for the "weakend" (I am tired!), so I thought I'd put to gether a "springy" note your way--The Spring issue was good. Though you seem to be veering off of "theme" issues. No matter. RFD is moving around a lot (Tennessee yet?!!), so that would be hard to accomplish. You're going fine as it is. That's horrible about Wolf Creek! It was so sad. I had stayed there over a year ago on my trip to Cali fornia by car, and have beautiful slides of the farm. Memories now.... I've been very busy with our gay radio show here. We're on a cooperative radio station, CFRO 102.7 FM "on the dial." We just helped raise pots of cash to keep coop on the air through summer and into the fall. Very good feelings. Everyone likes our show, too, which is great! It's called Coming Out (wouldn't you guess?!!), airing every Thursday night at 6:30 p.m. , for one hour. We do news, gay music (live and records), interviews, lots of stuff. Really satisfying doing something different for gay people in our country and city. Apparently we hook up with cable, and reach a larger area in the province (which is great too!) so we hope that we're reaching lots of gay people In the country, as well as the city. David, my lover, and I are planning a 3-week trip to New York (the bad apple) in October. He's planned an additional excursion to Washington, D.C., for the rally Oct. 14th. Should be exciting. I assume he’ll take his trusty tape recorder along and get some good stuff together for putting on the show later. I'm still busy as a letter carrier in town; no sign of that kind of work ceasing to exist. I keep dancing classes, going nights and weekends to keep the rhythm going, though pounding pavement with 3Q lb. bags of mail surely can destroy suppleness! We persevere.... Again, as always, we extend an invitation to all of you there — in Tennessee, in New England, wherever RFD is read and enjoyed — "to come up and see us sometime" (a Mae West— ism!). Write ahead. We have the space. I'm a tour guide at heart. With car too. Take care and keep well. Bill Houghton P.0. Box 2253 Vancouver BC Canada V6B 3W2 (604) 253-1258

Thanks for warning me that my subscription has run out. I want to renew. Have enjoyed issues 19 and 20 very much and will be taking them with me to England to show my friends there. I met the mail man on the steps the day he delivered it20, and he had another copy in his arm for some neighbor on this quiet inner city street. It was like the day TIME comes out and mailmen all over the country are burdened. Hope subscriptions are up. I show my issues off in hopes of increasing your circulation.

Hernando I. Merino Max’s Pot 8604 F.M. Road 969 Aust in TX 78724

George Williams 115 Lincoln St. Hartford CT 06106

In the New England Woods

1. The sky absorbs darkness from the stealing brook. Birches, like whale-bone stays, brace the garment of night. Shadows have the force of boulders, tripping the most cautious walker While a field of ferns trembles like the wing of a wounded bird: Nothing seems itself. Standing at the woods' edge you call to me; your eyes shine like persistant fireflies. Hesitantly, I walk towards you, each footfall translating the earth back to the venacular. A house in the country sounds great a garden with flowers swim in the lake peace... contentment... no lover... what measures we take to fill that pit got to have sex where are those men the ones who want to quench their lust with my body. .. extinguish the fires in my balls... in my guts...

In the New England Woods

It doesn't take much to convince the leaves to fall. Stretched out In this groove of birch they pelt down around us with the rustle of a thousand frantic birds foraging for food before their winter flight. Ocassionally the sun breaks through the steel sky and brews this soft hollow to a rich wintergreen smell. Above us the more tenaciously clinging leaves twist and turn like brilliant flames on a cave wall. I look over to say this all to you only to find you asleep and suddenly I realize that it must be this ancient but forbidden stir of the heart that I feel for you that has caused all this flurry around us.

what measures we take to fill that pit, find those men, quench those fires... in the country.

Butterfly Dream

Like the Mourning Cloak that overwinters in the rock's warm hollow I find my shelter In the crevice of your buttocks and await that inevitable thaw of loneliness.

Jerry Miller Belchertown, Mass.

David Chura 59 Church St. Greenwich, CT 06830

}

I am seeking a friend or lover or helpmate for me and my farm of 25 acres in the Sierra Nevada Moun tains of Central California. The farm is half open meadows and half forests, and there is a creek and a one-acre lake. I am the only gay man in 500 square miles at least, my closest gay neighbor is 30 miles from here. I am raising berries for an income, but would be open to someone else's ideas. It's hot and dry in the summer, rain and snow In the winter. I am 35, have beard and long hair, Aries. Have been here for 2\ years, but need someone to share life and love and work here in this tranquil beautiful part of California. Am also into having visitors any time of the year. Please write. Steve Ginsburg Box 79 Mt. Aukum CA 95656

Contact Letters

I'm a self-employed woodworker who shares an old one—room schoolhouse with three cats, a dog, and se veral tons of machinery and lumber. Visitors have variously described the place as quaint, funky, rustic, and a dump. Interests include Intensive gardening, brambles, music (mostly 'classical,' some contemporary, some rock), long walks in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter, historic preservation, recycling just about anything, homesteading, and motorcycles (sports/touring). My reading habits are what A. Nolder Gay might call indiscriminate: Mysteries (Allingham, Sayers, van de Wetering), architectural history (especially Euro pean churches and cathedrals), crafts, alternate energy sources and shelter design, many periodicals, and gay fiction (Forster, Isherwood, McCullers, Renault.) Am relatively immune to fads and crazes, and am not on any religious trip. Not interested in TM, drugs, or tobacco. Intense dislikes Include liars and escapists, television, AM radio, country and Western 'music,' snowmachlnes, guns, and vinyl siding. Have become active in 'networking' in Vermont and northern New Hampshire, and have been pleasantly surprised at the number of lesbians and gay men tucked away here and there in these beautiful hills. Absence of ageist/sexist attitudes has been encoura ging i Would, like to hear from other gay people, espe cially those living in or contemplating a move to Vermont. Am particularly Interested in learning more about existing and projected communal homesteads, their mistakes and pains as well as their joys and successes. Michael Loris RFL), 2 Barre VT 05641

Strong country cousin seeks partner. Has 5 acres in Wolf Creek, Oregon. 39, 5’10", 135# of pure muscle, into lepidoptera, punk, ritz, gigs, old fuzzes, gurus, oddballs and young balls, poetry, and zig-zags, pachabel and machu picchu, vivaldi and DEVO. I did digging and perfection. I like total recycle and consciousness which takes In all of the nature to the subtle forgiveness of apology. No fanatics please. Here is a chance for you to learn a lot of country practicality and no commitments necessary. Len Box 282 Wolf Creek OR 97497

Howdy. As one of RFD's newest subscribers, I want to commend its staff and contributors for well rounded and well written journal. The Summer Solstice edition was my first exposure to Information concern ing a group of fellers who weren't hung up on heteroimitation’ (to borrow a phrase). I knew that there had to be others like myself, who realized that they had a lot more going for themselves than their sexual prefer ence, but they were few and far between. Having always greatly cherished the sincerity of friendship with straight men and wlmmin, I became very disappointed with the vast majority of gay men. After a year of isolation from the gay subculture, and after a breath of fresh air from RFD, I realized that there are gay men out there who are genuinely sincere and have other interests besides that of orgasm. The origina tors and supporters of RFD should be commended on their efforts to bring this group of realistic peo ple into contact with each other. I am impressed by the variety of information that the RFDers furnish. I am especially glad to see that there are other men who recognize that there is a female side to our spirituality. I’m sure the mother goddess Is glad, too! Vegetarian cooking and farming are also topics that are assets to RFD's potpourri of information. I should like to see more about NORML gay groups, if they exist, and articles that deal with astrology (not daily horoscopes), the Tarot, the I-Ching, and majick. I mention these in hopes that readers take the initiative to share their experiences and/or information with the rest of us. My main interest at present is American Sign Language. I have been studying ASL for two years in hopes of eventually working with people who are af fected by profound deafness. If any of you readers out there share my interest in ASL, or are affected by deafness yourselves, I would enjoy corresponding with you. Being a student of psychology during the school year, I spend my sunnners on my family s fans in rural South Carolina. I enjoy being out here in the swamps, but I also love to visit my favorite city — beauti ful Charleston — which is 80 miles away. I'm a 23year-old Libra with Gemini rising, and an Aquarian moon. I would certainly enjoy correspondence with any of you readers, especially you RFDers in the Carolinas, or in any of the prisons across the coun try. Blessed be and happy trails. Timbo Salkehatchie Swamp < Lodge SC 29082

For several years now I’ve considered seriously — sometimes not so seriously — moving toward a communal scene. I worked with a school district near Albany as a 9th and 11th grade English teacher for a few years, but left after my philosophy and theirs became more and more divergent. For the last two years I've done nothing much more than travel around the country trying to deprogram and read. I did spend two winters in Florida pickin' fruit which was nice — doing something creative and construc tive. I've also been somewhat involved in the anti nuclear movement. I participated at a demonstration in Barnwell, S.C.; the Disarmament Conference at the U.N. and at Seabrook, N.H., last year. This year, so far, I attended a rally at U.S.C. (L.A.) protest ing a proposed new draft, and then later in April at a demonstration at the Lawrence Livermore Labs out side of San Francisco. I guess you might say I'm committed to social and political change — but non-violently. It's something I feel deeply and hope that one day we may all share in a world where folks are concerned about each other and the planet we live on. I strongly favor a non-competetive society, which is also non-sexist, non-exploitative; a place where one may seek out relationships without fear of social pressure or restraint. I'm a gentle soul. I'm not married since I feel myself to be more drawn to single life. Be sides I have strong gay tendencies although I have lived a pretty straight life up until now. I •want, need companionship and a chance to live in a place where I can share my love and fantasies with out being thought weird. We are, after all, brothers and sisters, all trying to go home by our various karmic paths. I have difficulty with women in that I see them first as women and then as people. Since I feel threatened sexually by women my relationships with them have been superfi cial and rare. I really don't feel that will change much. But, if that's the case, then I accept that. Until now, I've been, for the most part, asexual, i.e., not actively seeking out male relationships, but fantasizing about being in a close enough scene with a man so as to allow physical intimacy if it felt good. I'm an outdoor type person, physically fit and emotionally healthy. I've worked out a good number of my hang-ups and want only to share my life with others who feel pretty much as I do. Stephen c/o Saile RD Buskirk NY 12028

I originally grew up in suburban New Jersey, but have been living the past three years in N.Y.C. I am now 22 yrs. old. To put it simply (and easily) the city is not where my head is at presently and I need a change of environment. The noise/confusion is not conducive to the writing I want to do. There is a problem though: that is, I've got emotion al ties to city living (friends, freedom, etc.). So I need help from you and other RFD readers; advice from those of you who have specifically made the transition from city to country life, and correspond ence from individuals and communes in upstate New York, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions about rural life there. All letters received will be answered. Many thanks! Brian O'Dell Box 2, Village Sta. New York NY 10014

Well, we may have been burnt but we are not on our knees. At least not yet! We are facing the end of summer, though, with the hordes of friends, lovers, guests and visitors packing up and heading on. If any of you are planning a trip through Oregon and the West, write us and come for a visit. Or if you are thinking of moving and are considering the country, write us and tell us what your ideas and dreams are. We are open to new people with fresh energy. Our apologies to people who wrote after the fire and didn't hear from us. We tried to write everyone back, but things were pretty upside down here. Write again, and we'll definitely reply. Creekland 4525 Lower Wolf Creek Rd. Wolf Creek OR 97497

America — a dream or a nightmare? That's not my question. But I hope to have many important experiences as I Intend to stay there for six months or more next year. But there*8 more than a general Interest. Here in Germany I'm active member of a mystery called Gay Movement. I would like to see what's on in the U.S. in this area, with my own eyes, not with tf^e eyes of gay journalists or with the eyes of Rosa von Praunheim. I want to correct or to confirm my prejudices independently — more or less. It's not simple for me to find the entrance, especially because I still don't have any personal relation in tht U.S. My "rich uncle from America" is not existent. So I've got your address for you to give me some tips. Maybe it's possible for you to intercede a regular letter-contact for me. We could have a base on the exchange of Information about the fight against our oppression — not excepted the base of personal sympathy, of course. I would be glad if you're able to support my enterprise of discovering the land of unlimited impossibilities, doesn't matter which way. Arnim Schulz Langemarckstr. 141 D-2800 Bremen 1 West Germany

Since I'm not in school any more, and my job is (only) 40 hrs. a week, I'll have lotsa time. Thinking about publishing a (small) mag for Pagan Gays. Or how about just stuff for RFD? Your conment... Peace love joy

Chris Sherbak 588 N. Lucerne Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90004

We have just read your RFD ff20 and take par ticular interest in Steve Ginsburg’s letter to It aeeme to ue that Steve has a valid potnt that your publication cannot serve the homestead er and the political intellectual equally well. Merely being gay is not sufficient catalyst to meld these two diverse lifestyles together. The homesteader is digging in the dirt It _ hours a day and the only publications he has time to read or the inclination to read are those that 'are directly relevant to his survival. The concerned political activist who may re side in a rural environment does not share the same connection with the land and he frequently can afford the luxury of political or intellectu al thought far removed from the soil. We d on’t argue that both of these diverse positions are equally important, intermingled in one publication. Or perhaps we miss the whole point of the publication. « Why can’t you simply change the format of RFD so that there is a completely separate and distinct area for items of interest to homesleaders (people actually surviving on the soil) and another for political and intellectual in terest. While it is true we are all brothers, Ginsburg rings true to many of who anticipate your magazine only to find minimal articles and letters on the homesteading theme. If needs of the "country faggots" aren t met "citu sissies" will be reading RFD all alone — wouldn’t that be incongruous? We will look forward to hearing from any RFD reader who has the inclination to respond.

Steve the

the

Ed Stuart P.O. Box 26482 San Francisco CA 94126

I would H K e to comtunicaie un.cn any guy _ pothers that are now living in rural collectives n the southeast U.S. and would especially like o hear from any gay brothers in the Dayton, 'hio - Miami Valley a r m that would also like to real: free of this city and return to a peaceful nral life of love and happiness in which we tore all meant to live. Jim Caldwell 116 Circle Dr. Fairborn OH 46324

The Joy Of Gay Swimming On a gloriously hot sunny summer day, nothing makes me more happy about living in the country than our nearby lake. The water is clean, warm (sometimes too warm, though cool water lies just below the surface), and well, just a pleasure. As a friend observed about water, it's a whole other medium, and since most of us spend so little time in that medium, it's special when we do. Knowing how to swim, of course, helps, and for tunately, that was one of the few athletic or quasi— athletic skills I managed to pick up when I was young. I was born and raised just a mile from the Neversink River, one of lower New York State's tri butaries to the Delaware River, and it was in the Neversink that my father taught me to swim. Those swimming lessons remain one of the fondest and old est memories of my childhood, and of my father. I learned to swim in the late 1940s, when rivers weren't as polluted as they are now. In fact, I can remember the gradual pollution of the Never sink. Water provides another vital childhood me mory — specifically the waterfalls that gave Glen Wild, my hometown, its name. I frequently went to that falls — alone, with friends, with my dog, with my sisters —— and I suppose I could even say it remains a special cherished place. I made love on the rocks there with my first lover. Two beautiful falls are located here in the Massachusetts town where I now live. They are not far from my house and they have become special pla ces, too. When visitors come, I usually like to take them to one or another of the falls. It's for my own pleasure, and also for theirs — and a little like showing off what the New England woods has to offer I Perhaps it's not unlike a Washingtonian show taking someone to the National Gallery of Art. Our swimming lake, however, is our most frequent ed water spot. State-owned, the lake is designated "for fishing only," but law enforcement is sporadic and swimming is tolerated if not officially permit ted. We found a semi-secluded spot on the less-used side of the lake, started skinny-dipping there, and dubbed it "Butterworth Beach." By now, it's fairly well-known as a nude swimming hole. It seems that the local people accept the idea, and we keep to "our side" of the lake. One time, a state park policeman

caught five people sunning themselves nude, and everryone got an official warning ticket. So Butterworth Beach's status as a "nude beach" is precarious, anil indeed the entire lake may eventually be transformed by the state to a "paid beach" complete with roped-in area and lifeguard. We hope that day never comes, and we may even organize to try to stop it and raaintain the status quo. As this Is written, we are in our sixth summer of enjoying the lake. (Moonlight canoe rides are another way to appreciate the lake, but I don't go as often as I'd like — too busy!) There have been times I've been swimming there alone, with not another soul in sight, with the Sun shining and the water sliding over my body — I feel that I am in paradise. — Allen Young

The Woodstock Music Festival of 1968 did not take place in Woodstock Township, but rather in a big field at Yasgur's Farm in Bethel, N.Y., some 40 miles west. At that time Bob Dylan did have a house in Woodstock, and the town had some reputation as an arts—and—crafts colony, but the Festival made Woodstock known to the whole nation. Crops and cattle remained at Yasgur's Farm, but counter-culture youth was magnetized towards Woodstock. Rilk$ wrote of "unlived life, of which one can die." A lot of us who went to Woodstock had the sense we were dying of unlived life. Woodstock was the mecca of Life. It s weird to recall, but many Americans were shocked when they saw pictures in Life magazine of hippies swimming nude and dancing half-naked. Skinny-dipping down on the farm: what could be more American, other than apple pie? But it was the number of naked bodies and the nature of the gathering that upset some folks. The Festival was an Aquarian celebration, part of the counter-cultural upheaval. (In perspective, it’s clear that the Festival was also part of mainstream capitalism; a pretty safe revolt, and ultimately a subverted subversion.) We all came with our own life-stories. I took a bus to Woodstock in May of '72, and turned 17 on June 17 of that year. Behind me was a mostly happy childhood, happy up to the time I entered Loomis Prep School in Connecti cut. At that point I realized I was destined to be groomed for the ruling class, that 1 wanted to write, and that I was in love with a fellow freshman. I could not write or love as I wanted to within the hermetically sealed atmosphere of Loomis, and the only way out seemed to be to "go crazy." Going crazy was my way of going through changes, and I had spent a month in a mental ward after dropping out of Loomis. Lots of people on the ward were going through changes: doctors call this going crazy, drug you, put you away, I turned 16 on that ward. I was looking for these things in Woodstock: an idyllic setting in which to have a love-affair; a craft to learn and earn my keep by; and a community of radicals and artists. And time to write, of course. To some extent •s I found all these things, but in the process ■» I became less naive about the existing counter| culture. My first glimpse of Woodstock was when the | bus stopped at the Village Green, and the town S seemed an odd mix: a starch-white Dutch Re*■ formed Church; headshops with dayglo signs; little shops and galleries. One gallery was chic and garish, all chrome and glass, full of expensive bibelots from Paris and abstract can vasses from Manhattan; the bookshop next door was funky and down—home, with outsize sections on radical politics, esoteric philosophy md how-to-do-it textbooks. The Cafe Expresso was a place where local freaks and tourists could sit in proximity and observe one another. I was conscious of being a tourist, but determined to become a freak. I strolled down Tinker Street with a knap sack and a suitcase, looking into one craft

"ENCLOSED IS A PHOTO TAKEN WHEN I WAS ABOUT 20; DON'T CARE FOR IT MUCH, BUT THAT'S WHAT WAS AT HAND. (I LOOK STONED, DON’T I?)" shop after another — leathervorks, carpentry, stained glass, the inevitable candle shop — until I finally found a potter who needed an apprentice. He paid me twenty bucks a week, plus whatever pots of my own I could sell at the Craft Guild. I found a cheap place with windows facing the Catskill Mountains. I spent a lot of time in the bookshop, and in time the owner — who was a tall, sturdy guy with wild blond curls — began striking up conversation at the desk. One night he came over to my place and we talked for hours. He didn’t know if I was gay; I thought he was, but didn't know how to make the first move. I think he finally grabbed my crotch, and so we hit the sack. I remember I wanted to fuck him — it was the first time I'd fucked anybody — but there was no lubricant, not even butter, in the house. So I suggested toothpaste. He seemed skeptical but we tried it. A few mo ments after entry, he leapt up and into the shower. Toothpaste ain't a good lubricant. Tends to sting. I can't recall why plain old spit didn't work, or if we tried it. Both he and I were also involved with a woman who said she belonged to a group called Schizophrenics Anonymous, and who wrote very breathless and ethereal poetry (what I some times call "white-on-white poems.") She left

for New York, he left for Provincetown, and I was left in Woodstock. Not feeling abandoned, just lonely for a while. The Woodstock popu lace was very transient. There were a few women's consciousness raising groups, but nothing really ongoing for gay men. I met with some other gay men in

..........A KetAtNbceNce and my friend. We took a walk in the woods, sat by a stream and talked. He confided to me thus: that the commune was terribly far from the opera and a good gay bath; even farther than Woodstock, and that in fact he was thinking of moving to Manhattan. I confided to him that I wondered how much privacy to write one would get in a commune, and that my unruly horniness would make me unhappy there also. It was a lovely place and it was not for us. For weeks at a time in Woodstock I would just throw pots, take walks in the woods, stay home and write and read. Friends would drop by and insist that I break these monastic bouts for sex, a movie, a decent meal, and I was grateful for intrusions. But school had been deadening, and here I had time to spend hours on end delving into Zen, Gestalt psychology, anarchism, feminism, to write poems. I got a mimeograph and printed Snyder's Four Changes for free distribution, plus pamphlets on amnesty for war resisters. I am writing this at night in Stockbrldge, Massachusetts, and the sense of dark woods around me, of moths fluttering at the scrfeen, of craft and solitude: it's very much like those nights years ago when I was 17 and was first discover ing what it meant to stay up all night and put one word after another on the page. At 24 I am both the same and different. Today, or ponight, I feel the same as I did then about a boy I saw swimming in a creek, a boy beautiful in the same way as a boy I'd loved when I was in prep school. I wrote a sonnet in Woodstock to celebrate the boy swimming in the creek and to mourn the unfulfilled love affair. The same bittersweetness I feel even now. (See poem in box.)

small groups a few times, but the group always dissolved. I did have access to various gay manifestoes, papers and pamphlets. The first gay bar I went to was in Woodstock — the only gay bar for miles and miles around. To me it seemed like a place caught in a time-warp. It was very dark and very tacky. Chintzy chandeliers and chintzy scarlet velvet. The most popular juke selection was Sinatra singing "Strangers in the Night." The patrons were almost all over forty and in the closet. They'd call each other "Miss This" and "Miss That." IBM execs, Christian Scientists, a member of the Town Board who was a sober patriarch by day and a mad queen by night. I walked in with a group of hippie queers and the reaction was a mixture of lust and fear. Possibly we were queer-bashers or rowdies, but the place hadn't seen new blood for a while. We got along fine. They sang bits of our Bob Dylan songs; we sang bits of their Judy Garland songs. My brother, five years older than I, was 'living in Manhattan. He was sharing an apart ment on Fifth Avenue with two other rising young executives, all of them working for Mor gan Trust (one of the banks in America which is in the habit of funding fascists abroad). I called him one day and said there was going to be an anti-war demo in Washington, could I drop by his place on my way? Only, he said, if you keep your politics and your sexuality to your self in front of my roommates. Fuck you, said I, good-bye. He has since married; I didn't attend the wedding. We have little to say to each other. I met a charmingly effeminate man who lived in Byrdcliffe. Byrdcliffe had been the site of the original arts-and-crafts colony around the turn of the century. Men and women from England, influenced by the aesthetic and utopian-socialist ideas of Ruskin and Morris, had begun a community there with Americans of like mind. I saw old photos of these dedicated, rather stern Bohemi ans at their easels, of long-passed picnics in woodland meadows. My effeminate friend lived in a big house constructed by the original colonists. The car pentry was solid, the decoration fine: not a board creaked after 70 years, and the cupboards were carved with irises and lilies. We made love in a room with three bay windows. My friend and I heard about a gay commune in Massachusetts and we wrote in advance and got an invitation to visit. It was near Amherst and I recall passing Emily Dickinson's house on our way. The commune consisted of a big house, a garden and a few acres of woods: altogether a charming place, and the commune members were all fine and friendly people. One man seemed to be Che commune's patriarch — a man of about 50 with a grey Whitman beard. On the day we visit ed his daughter was present, a quiet and smiling woman. The meals were vegetarian and very good. There was a pervasive quietism and spirituality about the place and the people. Which was perhaps the problem. For us: me

THE SWIMMER Though idiots upstream dump their trash to drift, people make the beet of things, especially that golden youth: bright xdnge ripple round where he dove, his long limbs flash like fish below the surface. He rises from nowhere, tall at the water's edge, and like a second dawn the boy surprises the shady hollow. All hues, shapes and sizes pass like a river leaping over a ledge till one form comes forth from chaos to lodge in the mind’s eye: where he now stands there will be only garbage and grey slate tomorrow, and already i t ’s late as he turns home with shirt and shoes in his hands.

. 11

I was 17 and had to decide what way would be best to resist registration and the draft. I joined the War Resisters League and found myself in sympathy with the democracy and pacifism of Quakers. This led me from Woodstock to

:ndle Hill, a Quaker community and study center Pennsylvania. After I turned 18 I went to ne local draft board with a bunch of friends id turned In a letter of non-registration. 1 am no longer that person. Today I would at bother with the draft board at all, given ne same situation: no, I would simply consider on-registration a fait accompli and publicize t to my friends instead, and possibly the local apers. Also, I'm no longer a pacifist. Just a there was a Sixties style of militant machismo, 0 there was a Sixties style of sentimental noniolence. I don't think I could ever fight for ny State; but I do feel capable of fighting. 1 now today that I don't want anyone to suffer a leath penalty inflicted by the State, not even )an White, the queer-killer. But I also know I ;ould have smashed windows at City Hall and jumed cop cars had I been with the dykes and ags who rose up in San Francisco and said, ’Enough!" 1 have heard the line that gay men lave a special mission to be pacifists, and to pacify straight men. I think this is the most absolute and dangerous nonsense. The issue is survival. Cay men "into al ternate lifestyles" on communes, or into heavy boogeying in discos, may not yet believe it: but as the economy crumbles the reaction will worsen. Neither gay mysticism nor gay capital ism will save us if the Right gets serious. 1 love fields and streams; I also love dancing till dawn under strobe lights. But I need a politics that will make me and all gay people strong, and I won't get it from communes or discos alone. If a horde of Briggses struck tomorrow, lots of us wouldn't know what had hit us. This Woodstock reminiscence should end with a tribute to Paul Goodman, a man I loved but never met. We corresponded and he invited me to visit him on his farm in New Hampshire, warning me he might seduce me were I cute, but his heart gave out shortly before I was to see him. 1 got news of his death while I was throwing a pot: a potter friend was asking me what poets t admired and I mentioned Goodman. He told me Goodman had died, and my hands sank into the clay. I stood drained as though I had myself died a small death. Goodman was gay, an anarchist, a Utopian. Utopians like Goodman suggest that the city and the country would both profit from a cultivated friendship. I think 1 had expected Eden of Woodstock; 1 was disillusioned, not the same thing as disappointed. I wrote a poem for Goodman. It took months for the one voice I'd first heard to sing through in the lines, for the static to drop away in one draft after another. 1 remember writing late at night, walking to Bearsville and back, flashing my flashlight into the eyes of racoons. The poem is as much a good-bye to Woodstock as it is to Goodman; a good-bye to one time and place in the counter-culture. Did the folks who followed Guru Bawa back then go on to follow Werner Erhard today? Did any of us know then the kind of somersaults the system we were against would make to survive? The kind of somersaults we would make to survive? Scott Tucker

THE ARK for Paul Goodman

His heart skipped a beat, then two, then three, and then that silence endlessly .stretching... buried beside his only son oho fell down Percy Mountain. A month before his death he wrote, "I am not much to emulate, lad, for I have never been happy.” Hawkweed and clover flourish in fallow fields all around clear midnight stars, no sound but crickets — I will gather fistfulls in grief as for a father.

By "paradisen I mean nothing but the world practical — Adam, Paul Goodman. Impractical men rule and ruin the earth, the planet is strewn with carnage and garbage and no child comes of age free of his father's sins. 0 holy light, break in the dark mad night'. dawn and define so we may know ourselves from our shadow. Often at a loss and lonesome, we singers are struck dumb and secretly weep haz'd and long until the cry becomes a song. Imprisoned outside the Garden’s walls, we summon a circle of kindred souls, scheme and bask in their company, homesick to be free. When the Americans grew brutal, dropping bombs, making infernal our one and only earth, he summoned sane souls worth his while, kindred though gone, to lavish his poet ’s praise on. Now that Goodman’s gone I summon his spirit as my companion. I would silence the braying banter, hibernate this winter with your books and letters scattered round and we in hours of sound less dialogue. Tonight I read Adam until light ly I feel a presence where was heavy absence. Many drink and breathe Despair like wine and incense-clouded air, others weave wishes into Hope and hang at length by that rope; wayward among us and rude, still the Angel Fortitude blessed you. Visions of Paradise persist though Eden never was nor will exist. The mind’s preserving ark sails through a stormy dark, olive branch and rainbow greet the living cargo; lost is the body-anchor, yet the ark finds a harbor, each word a warm touchstone though you be clay and bone.

lived yet, why be afraid to die?" Then I said to myself, "Since you're getting right with your self, how about this Gay trip you've hidden all your life?" So I came out; it wasn't easy, but I'm out. A lot of men wouldn't smoke pot at first with me — they don't want to smoke on the same joint as a "cocksucker" — but now they beg me to smoke with them, thinking they can get some sex play. It's very sexist here, and homophobia is everywhere, yet I deal and go where I want — once a person knows me he begins to accept me. So I live free now of sex hangups or guilt trips and the state pays my rent. Please remember the brothers who are locked up in different parts of the system need your paper. I'm a leader in Men Against Sexism, which soon will change names — if anyone has any ideas for a new name, please contact me. If any one wants to write me, please do. Star Carter Box 520 Walla Walla WA 99362 Well, here it is. My first letter to you. Smile! From this point on, we shall exchange letters, I hope. If you know it or not, I've been into RFD for a couple of years now, and our relation ship has been quite meaningful. The many different people who write in to your paper are very beautiful brothers and sisters. I love them all so much, with no strings attached. Well, here's a little info on me. I feel y'all have the right to know, first, I'm black — a Queen, in drag, Sissie Style, fresh out of the closet for three years now, a States-raised youth 26 years of age. There was one reader who wanted to hear from Queens or Gays who are doing all right. Well, I'm here to say that for being locked up in prison, I do all right. Why? Because I am an outspoken Queen who who will deal with anyone. I ain't Bad or Tough; I just can't be pushed no more. I came out three years ago, yet I've been gay damn near all my life. Here it is, the story of Star, being duly sworn: Youth centers, foster homes, boys' school — a prison has been where the biggest part of my life has been spent. Let's see.... At Green Hill for Boys, I was raped. Upon release, I found that the only way to supress this rage was by fighting and being what's called a Street Pimp. I wasn't happy and neither did I enjoy oppressing women. Then on to Monroe, where the rumors caught up with me. "Say, my man, did you know Carter was stuff?' Or, "Man, they tell me that dude had his manhood ripped off." Well, I got right on down with the fighting, hand first. Then I brought all the races together under Inter-racial Inter-action. When the Man saw this, I was on my way to WallaWalla. I told my young brother this: that as long as we were fighting or killing each other, the Man has no worries. I came here in the early part of 1974, where one of my brothers, the eldest, was killed by guards in 1972. Of course, they say it was 'suicide," yet the Black Brothers knew what it was, and they named the Black area after him: Walter Carter Hall. I almost came out of the closet then, yet fear stopped me. I was in to aspects of the "Revolution," so I took hostages in 1975, was given amnesty, was tortured by guards, and released from prison with a lawyer's help. OK, I was out for a short time, then railroaded back in real fast. I was faced with the Walls again. I could have been killed, so I says, "Well, Kid, you have one life to live, and since you haven't

White gay male prisoner seeks correspondence. Will he released cm 3-25-81 and will need a place to stay. Please reply and send stamp so that I can communicate with you. Mark Behring Box 911 South Dakota State Penitentiary Sioux Falls SD 57101 I am presently incarcerated in the Colorado State Penitentiary. I have been gay since the age of 14 and am very recently hack from San Francisco, and have for a long time been a TV, and just recently TS. I am 26 years old and would like to correspond with other TSs and will answer all letters. I am 5 'll", 130 pounds, not really ugly but am taking hormones. I would also like to be a subscriber to your paper. Leslie Wesson #44955 P.0. Box 1010 Canon City CO 81212 Help, lonely WM, 25 years old, brown hair and eyes, 6 ft., 165 tbs., well hung at 8H, and thick, seek honest and sincere friend for cor respondence or possibly more. I am in prison but will be getting out soon, so please write. Will answer all with photo and detailed letter. Terry Key Comp. H4, #41057 Parchman MS 38738

SAN FRANCISCO — GAYCON PRESS NEWSLETTER is sent FREE to prisoners (and students, elderly people and those on welfare). The subscription price for others is $5 per year for 12 issues. The address: 216 Eddy St., 0203, San Francisco CA 94102.

A Critical Look At Roxbury Run Village

Roxbury Run Village ia a group of towr.house con1 dominiuma in the Catskill Mountains near .Woodstock* 1 N.Y. It has been planned by the Lynmark Group and the > Heritage Savings Bank as an all-year resort, where a "diverse and mixed" group of residents can "spend their leisure time in a natural country setting." "Diverse and mixed," in this case, translates as 70 per cent gay, 30 per cent straight, according to Taussig Realty, Roxbury Run's sole agent in Fire Island Pines. Spokesmen for Lynmark deny that these figures exist, but in the meantime they are spending large amounts of money on promotional campaigns aimed directly at New York area gays. With this gesture, they Join others in the business community who realize that this previously invisible group now has enough economic clout to warrant attention. In press releases, prospective buyers are refer red to as "performing arts people," "theater people," and a "narrowly defined group of metropolitan people." Jim Ball, project manager, compares the resort to "special-interest camps for children." In an article in the Catekill Mountain News, included with the press releases, he notes an industry trend to successful vacation-home projects for groups of people who share similar work and interests. No where in his article does Ball mention that 70 per cent of the people he is talking about are supposed to be gay — presumably a tactic to avoid local op position and reticence on the part of straight buyers. The profile of Roxbury Run Village is apparently to be kept as low as possible: no day-trippers, no tourists, no intruders, no way in or out but through the gate. The entrance will be guarded and monitored by closed-circuit TV. It is also clear that Roxbury Run is intended to be an affluent community. The basic price for a three-bedroom home as of October 1978 was $57,900, and the four-bedroom model was priced at $64,900. Lynmark claims that they are offering easy, non-discriminatory terms to facilitate the purchase of a house by more than one person. Theoretically, lovers or groups of three or four friends could enter into a purchase agreement if they can show a clean credit record and a combined annual income of $30,000. At first glance, the prices seem almost reason able — if not in comparison with older, existing properties in the area, at least compared to similar property on Fire Island. But there are significant differences. Even if convenience factors were the same as on Fire Island, which they definitely are not, the prestige of this spot is yet to be established. It is not an "in" place, and has none of the charisma that characteri zes Fire Island. If and when it "arrives," prices of the two could then be compared. Lynmark says many of those who are purchasing houses at Roxbury Run are hoping it never will "ar rive," that it never will become as famous, or infa mous as Fire Island. The company is loath to describe this publicly as a gay resort. Their guides do not bring up the subject of gay percentages to prospective

straight buyers, and the company hopes tnat gays pur chasing homes will be as discreet as possible. Jim Ball says many gays want to escape from Fire Island because of high prices and what he calls "screamers." There are homosexual businessmen, he suggests, who feel threatened by the stigma of hav ing a vacation home in an area known to be gay, and for these businessmen it seems clearly advantageous to purchase into a community that will offer protec tive ambiguity. For those who can afford it, Roxbury Run sounds like a remarkably good offer. There are magnificent views of forested mountains and the Delaware Valley, ski slopes, fireplaces and ice skating on frozen tennis courts in the winter; swimming and other out door sports in the summer; disco, of course, all year long. These facilities already exist, some permanent and some temporary. Roxbury Run is a peaceful place to spend time away from the noise and pressure of the city. But there are problems. There is no direct public transportation from New York City. The Trailways bus that takes you to Margaretville, seven miles from the Village, costs almost $30 round trip, and you still have to pay for a seven-mile taxi ride to and from Roxbury Run. The nearest grocery store is eight miles away. The restaurant, boasting a "famous New York chef," is beyond walking on any but the most temperate days, and the ski slopes are off in the distance. The houses are undistinguished. Models of finished homes shown to the press were poorly laid out and the workmanship appeared shoddy. When questioned, Glen Pederson, press agent for Roxbury Run, stated that the models were finished very rapidly and were in fact incomplete. He also said that while the older houses tended to be noisy, the newer models were made with superior materials and exceed minimum standards set for New York State. No hotels or motels exist or are planned for construction on or near the grounds of the settle ment, but there is a motel four miles from the Village — a tiring trek if you have to do it several times a day on snowshoes. This lack of accommodations makes entertainment possibilities difficult, and effectively eliminates tourists from the roster at Roxbury Run. As far as the "natural setting," it is indeed all around you, everywhere you look — except in74 side the gates of the development. Almost all the

trees that once stood on top of this mountain were cleared by the original developer to lower construc tion costs. Pederson says a landscape architect has been hired to improve the appearance of the new houses but the old ones will remain as they are. The specific rules governing the private commu nity of Roxbury Run Village are stated in the pros pectus, but Lynmark's representatives were unable to make clear just how the system will function. The guide provided by the company could not say whether Roxbury Run will operate as a coop or as a condomi nium. It was, however, explained, that the Village will operate as an association, with each house having one vote. When the 500th house is sold, homeowners will have the right to incorporate Roxbury Run as a municipality, and at that point their rights would be come clear under state and federal law. Partial solutions to some of the problems at Roxbury Run are already in the planning stage; others have yet to be proposed. Public transportation will become more accessible when the Islanders' Club, a catering and transportation company, starts regular bus service from New York City. However, although the bus gets you to your house, you’ll still be faced with cross-country hikes when you want to buy Q-Tips or go skiing. The Lynmark guide suggested buying a car and leaving it up there all the time. Lynmark states there are existing plans for shops (which could be modified, one would suppose, to include a small hotel and cafe) near the gate house, but that might take years. Whether gays as a group will benefit from the establishment of such a cloistered community is doubtful. If things run smoothly, and if the pro ject gets the wide support it needs from members of the homosexual population, money will begin to flow into Roxbury Run. Taussig will get commissions on the property it sells, the Islanders will establish new sunmer and winter routes, and Lynmark and Heri tage will at last be able to make substantial profits on what was, not too long ago, a problem property. All of this is just business as usual. There is nothing particularly predatory about the scheme, and if discrimination exists in the minds of the develop ers, it has taken the usual back seat to profit. If the formula at Roxbury Run seems transparent and op portunistic to some, it is because these promoters are professionals: they have consulted people who know their clients, and know how to make them happy. The project for Roxbury Run Village was origi nally conceived for upper-middle-class straight families. The houses sold poorly after an initial boom, and the property was transferred to Lynmark last year. After extensive marketing research, the new owners concluded that New York area homosexuals had more money and more inclination to buy than other "special-interest" groups. They enlisted the help of Taussig and the Islanders, both of whom have had long experience in dealing with homosexual clients on Fire Island. They hired several gay ad visers and technicians, and they have recently been advertising in the gay press. "If you like the Island, you'll love the Village," is the slogan Lynmark and the Heritage bank are using to promote Roxbury Run in the homosexual community. Given the circumstances, this seems wildly inappropriate. Roxbury Run will not be a permissive new mecca for gay fun in the snow, but a hermetic, private community that you enter by buying your way In. Fire Island happened, but Roxbury Run was con ceived; the two will have practically nothing in common but lots of homosexuals. That should be good enough to guarantee huge pro fits. Behind all the tired vacation cliches and slick

PR copy lurks this message to other contemplating the gay market: build a hunky ex-voto out of some sticks, dress it in work shoes and a bomber jacket and hang it in the window of your shop. God will answer your prayers. Gays have been exploited for a long time, but never with such refinement. There have always been the baths. They're filled with people steaming and dreaming 24 hours a day, and they are gold mines. Once in a while they burn down, but people forget. And backrooms. Pay a dollar at the turnstile and you get to work out all your fertile fantasies. This kind of market has been earning money for a long time, but now there is a new twist: gay fantasy gone legit. Affluent conservative homosexuals have finally publicized their tastes and preferences, enough so that they now constitute a hazily defined but seemingly reliable market. They're eager to re ward those astute enough to understand their need to be classified as gay but OK, and there are folks around willing to sell them what they choose to per ceive as legitimacy. Out of the bars and into the mountains, by ex press bus. No risks, no confrontations, no growth. Even closets are relative, and compared t> a sleazy bar in a crummy neighborhood, a serene mountaintap must seem like paradise. Of course it's still a closet and, worse, this time you're going in because you want to. You even tip someone for turning the key. Roxbury Run's success can only shore up the weakening barrier of incomprehension that surrounds homosexuals. The essence of what unites many of them — marginality, fear and insecurity — makes them into an ideal market. They are easy to reach because they group and Isolate themselves. Their needs are predictable. They have the means to buy, and are grateful for the opportunity to grab up any thing proffered to them as long as they are convinced that other gays will want it too. Options are few, but offers are increasing every day. Until recently, gay people resolved things their own way; out of defense they created their ghettos and built their walls. Things have taken a curious turn, and a dangerous precedent has been set. Far from representing progress toward further liberation, Roxbury Run is the transfer of ghetto planning into new hands. — David William Linger (Note: Thie article originally appeared in the Soho Weekly News, New York City.)

New Film

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FRANKLIN LAKES, N.J. -- "Between Men" is a new documentary film about "a masculine contest under a military condition," about "the consequences of male socialization. For information on rentals, contact United Documentary Films, PO Box 315, Franklin Lakes NJ 07417, phone (201) 891-8240.

‘Btxjnies’ PARADISE, NOVA SCOTIA — A new paper for rural gays, entitled Boonies, Is being published here with funding from the Gay Alliance for Equality of Halifax. Subscriptions are free; write to Boonies, RR 1, Paradise, Anna. Co., N.S., Canada.

Our Hired Man I was 13, and it was my job to drive the horses when we loaded. They had seen many more seasons of haying than I had and hardly needed driving. They followed the windrows, stepping solidly to either side of the matted hay, straining against the har ness as the load rose above the wagon, and stood panting when Da called a rest. Da and the hired man stood on the hay in the pitching wagon and distributed the load as it came cascading down from the hayloader. Da always stood next to the hayloader, filling a round in the back half of the wagon first, then passing the hay forward in great forkfuls to the hired man, who built his round in front. As Da built his next round, the hired hand stomped around the wagon to settle the load. I sat on the lip of the wagon in front of the low sideboards which held the bottom of the load in place. When the load had grown some, so that I was hidden from Da's view, and the windrow in front stretched out long and straight, I let the horses guide themselves and turned to watch the hired man pitching the hay above me. When he stood in the center, I could see only his head and shoul ders over the hay, and sometimes even they dis appeared, but when he made his rounds, bouncing at each step in the springy pile, I could see where his glistening back narrowed and dropped into the loose-fitting black trousers. Every step was a feat of balance as he paced the edge of the load, feeling for the limits of safety around the edges. He was only 17, a farm boy from the other side of the county, the son of a friend of Da's. His family was large, and he could be spared at home, so he had come to work for us that summer. Da had had many hired men before, some older and some not so old. Some of them had been kind to me, making me whistles or toys, letting me ride on the wagon with them. Others had ignored me, too busy to notice a boy. But none had fascinated me as this one did. He was built, not stocky, but full, deep-chested, still growing but already in a man's form. He was bow-legged and had a funny little roll when he walked, like you would expect from a sailor, though I'm sure he'd never seen the sea. His hair was a dark wave, which he had to push back from his eyes or shake away with a jerk of his head. He laughed at me when I jumped down from the mow into the cushion of the loaded wagon for the fun of it, and teased me about who my girlfriends were. He would play at wrestling with me, though he could pin me anytime he chose, and sometimes he would torture me with tickling till I cried uncle. Sometimes he took me fishing with him, when Da gave us a rainy day off, only chores to do. He could tell me what it was like at home for him with all his brothers and sisters, how strict his father was, and how his ma was like mine. He talked about my sister a lot. She was 15 and sometimes they went for walks in the evening. He liked my family and our farm, but he seemed to like her best of all. I always liked to watch him. His whole body seemed alive in some way that other people's weren't. It all moved together, smoothly, like a cat's does, and under that smoothness he looked to have all the strength in the world. I watched him every chance I got, especially when we were loading hay. Once in a while Da would catch me not paying attention

to the team and scold me, and one time the nigh horse stepped in a groundhog hole and almost broke his lef, and I caught hell for that, but I still watched him when I could, only being more careful to look up ahead every once in a while. When the wagon was full, we all three sat on the lip and Da drove back to the barn and unhitched the wagon in the drive-through. Then Ma and my sister would come out from whatever they were doing. My sister set the hayforks, driving them deep into the carefully built mound on the wagon. Ma hitched the team to the hayfork rope and drove them out, slowly lifting the woodshed-sized bundles of hay up to the peak of the roof, as the pulleys creaked and the haydust swirled, glowing in the shafts of light that pierced the siding. Just before the bundles reached the peak, there was always a hesitation, and I would wonder if this load would be too heavy for the team, but every time the mechanism would click, and the great bundle would go swinging down the length of the mow, trailing wisps of hay, like some gigantic mop wielded in the heavens. Then came my job. I had to pull the trip rope, which released the forks and let the hay drop with a muffled thud into the mow, while the forks flopped in the air like a duck shot in flight and clanged against each other. I pulled the same rope to reset the forks. I never understood how the one rope could release the forks one instant and reset them the next. Somebody must have done a mess of think ing to figure that one out. When they were reset I pulled them back to the center of the barn and let them drop down to my sister in the wagon again. Meanwhile, Da and the hired man pitched the hay in the mow, throwing it into the corners, settling it for the winter. At first my place was in the empty mow on one side of the drive-through while the hay piled higher and higher in the other, and Da and the hired man went out of sight. But when the first mow was full, I stood on top of it, in the very peak of the barn where the rail hung and swung that the hayforks ran on. From there I could look down at the other mow and watch them spread ing out each pile that the forks left. The hired man strained to keep up with Da, and the muscles in his back stood out in the half-light of the mow. The sweat formed little rivulets down his back, leaving lighter streaks in the dust and dirt which settled on it. They bent and heaved until each

mound the forks had dropped was leveled, then wait ed to one side for the next. Sometimes they spoke quietly or joked, sometimes they just rested, easy in their fatigue. One might choose a grass stem from the pile and chew at the end of it, or Da might pull his pipe from a pocket and suck on that, though he never lit it in the bam . When the last load of the day was in the barn and mowed away, Da would lead the team off, to water and feed them, and Ma would return to the house to get dinner ready. When I was forgotten, I would scramble back into the mow and lay there for a bit. It was my special place, all closed in under the gently sloping roofs of the b a m peak, cushioned by 40 feet of hay below. I lay and felt the sweat slowly dry on my arms and smelled its sharp odor mixed with the sweet of alfalfa and timothy grass. Then I would chew on a grass them and think all sorts of thoughts before the chores had to be done. There was a little open window in the peak of the gable, which faced the house and yard. From it I could watch all the goings on of the farm and look across the hayfields, golden-green in the valley, to the rocky pasture hillside and the wooded ridge be yond, with its deeper green of pine and hemlock, which marked the boundary of our land. I knew it all as only a child can, unburdened by acreage and fenc ing, sawlogs or sugarbush. I knew the special places, the hide-out ringed by juniper and the spring in the hillside which dried up in the summer. I knew where the owl nested and how deep each part of the swimming hole was. I could watch it all from my post in the mow, I could keep track of it all. Especially, I watched before dinner when the hired man took his bath in the horse trough. First I would hear the creak of the pump and the splash of the water. He always filled it, though he splashed as much water out again when he bathed. I would bounce across the hay to my window and stand on a brace to get up for a better view. When he had the trough full, he loosed his belt and dropped the black trousers, bending to slip them ov«r his feet. The whiteness of his skin where they ha4 keen always startled me. He folded them over the pump handle, then swung up over the trough and lowered himself feet first into the water. His head would go under for a second, and then the dark hair would reappear, and he would toss his head so the hair flew back away from his face and the water streamed out of it and rolled down the curve of his spine. I could see where his knees rose near the surface of the murky water. He would scrub for a few minutes before lifting himself out again. He never used a towel, but swept the water off his body with his hands, put his pants back on, and set to combing his hair. He always faced away from the barn, and I only got glimpses of what I wanted to see, but I longed for those glimpses. One day he was late; he'd been helping Da with the team, and I was already at the window waiting, thinking of nothing, when I felt a hand on my shoul ders. I spun around and there he was, grinning at me, rocking on his heels in the hay. He laughed at my surprise, then crowded in at the window with his arm over my shoulder and gazed out at the farm. "It'8 a fine place your father has, Davey. I hope I'll have one like it." Something in his voice made us equals then, and I slipped my arm around his waist, settling it there, where his trousers lay on the ridge of his hip. His arm on my shoulder pulled me tighter to him. We were late for dinner that evening, even though I skimped on chores and he never had his bath, and often afterwards that summer we found each other in the mow or the woods or out fishing. And sometimes we came in late, and Ma and Da would exchange a glance

and tell me to "hurry your chores, boy, your dinner will be cold." I only see him occasionally now. He farms his folks place while 1 farm here with my sister and her husband. He's married and has a crew of children. His oldest is 13, and when I see the boy sitting on a tractor two sizes too big for him, pulling a wagon while his dad bucks the bales up to their hired man, he reminds me of something in myself at that age and of the summer his dad was our hired man* -i- Bruce Penrose

‘Magic Changes* SCHAUMBURG, ILL. — A new literary magazine, "Magic Changes," is coming, and has hopes of establish ing and maintaining "strong communication ties with all those involved in this new age of Art." For more information about how to subscribe or submit, manuscripts, write to Magic Changes, 1923 Finchley Ct., Schaumburg IL 60194.

Chutzpah CHICAGO — The radical Jewish newspaper Chutzpah announces the formation of a national organization with the same name. For more information about this group, which has supported gay rights and included gay and lesbian writers in their paper, write to Chutzpah, PO Box 60142, Chicago II. 60660.

New Gay-Owned Bar in Vermont BURLINGTON, VT. — Vermont now has a second gay bar I Charly B. Good is located at 15 Center St., in downtown Burlington. Gay owned and operated, the new watering hole welcomes both men and women. A few blocks away is Bookstacks, at 118 Pine St., with the best selection of gay and women's books and periodi cals in the state. (Vermont's first gay bar, the Andrews Inn in Bellows Falls, is mentioned elsewhere j j in this issue of RFD.)

into the forest — a wild river blows through, high ridges, a solid insulated cabin!! But if it doesn’t, we're going to stay here on this land. I thought the last 3 issues of RFD were excellent — everything!.'.' I loved the longhair article and en vironmental issues brought up. I am very happy to see the production changing hands. Ideas stay fresh. I realize the deadline was the 31st of July, but if possible could you put these following words in: Rural Gays in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Western Ontario, Eastern Manitoba, North Dakota. Why don't we contact each other to see about putting to gether a future issue of RFD!? A VOICE FROM THE NORTHERN WILDERNESS. (Glacial Cliff Survival Coop -GCSC — is also still seeking others to join us.) Kim Brettingen / GCSC Star Rt. 1, Box 3257 Ely MN 55731

We just returned a week ago from a very long 3 months 300 miles south of here in Minneapolis. Working for the "green god" again. We put the land up for sale in May because we cannot get financing (to build) anywhere because we're not married heteros and we're self-employed. Thanks to Carter there is no more low-income home-building loans or grants. The economy keeps getting worse and the media is finally starting to say "Depression" (It can't happen here!!). The era of this Insane consumption has only about 2 winters left. This is what those great Medicine Men said at the Black Hills gathering. We believe every word said there, as we have felt this for some years. When down in the city, we got heavily involved with the Black Hills Alliance, Northern Sun Alliance and a lot of gay struggles within the city — the No More Assault Task Force. Lots of murders (gay) in the city this spring — queer bashers — and apathe tic police departments. At one point a group of us stormed the office of the mayor of Minneapolis and sat there screaming our demands. Eight of us were arrested and about 15 stayed behind to hold a news conference with the media and the mayor — who was very red in the face! Also the chief of the Minne apolis Oink Squad was stuttering about our demands. We've also been volunteering our services to the anti-nuke alliances, powering the sound systems with the wind generator mounted on the back of a flatbed truck. At the Black Hills, there were only about 7 gay men I knew. We were pretty paranoid about coming out as a group. Although when the 20-mile march from Rapid City to the gathering started, we saw a group of Lesbians Against Nukes, about AO of them, with a large banner. We kicked ourselves for not making a banner. There were about 10,000 people at the gathering — very little media cover age. At the gathering, we started coming out to people who were likely suspects. Next spring — in July 1980 — there Is going to be a larger gathering called the "Survival Fair" in the Black Hills. The Indian tribes in this area are going to need all the support people can give. The Monster Corporations / Our Government have declared war on these people again (eventually us too, if not al ready). A hundred years ago it was gold, now uranium and coal are in their greedy eyes. We con tinue our support of these groups. If our land sells within the next month, we are still hoping to buy A0 acres 25 miles deeper

After having enjoyed RFD from the first issue, I must apologize for not renewing our subscription. A friend loaned us the past two issues; glad you've reinstated "country" in our journal. We're country boys, Peter and I, raising rasp berries — 2,000 canes planted this spring, and starting to look really good. I feel I've gotten to know each plant. We're organic farmers and so we do a lot of hand weed pulling. Last spring we planted 300 grapes, 6 different wine varieties, currently building the trellis for them. We also have milking goats, a mare in foal and chickens, geese and one lamb. It's becoming quite a barnyard. This is quite a new experience for us, both coming from suburbia and city life. I'm 30 and Peter is 26. I was sunbathing and fell asleep, awoke and found Peter laying beside me; we've been together 2 years. We've laughed, cried, worked/ played hard, and continue to fall in love. This is the best life I’ve lived. Must return to my original intentions for the day — cleaning out the goat barn and starting a new compost. We're open for visits from our brothers. En closed is a one-year subscription and a small do nation. We've missed you, RFD. Wishing you love and happiness. David Vanderlind Rt. 1, Box 121 Northport MI A9670

The Octagon House at Butterworth Farm welcomes visitors who are interested in exploring rural life styles for gay people. We like visitors to join us in work and play. We use an outhouse and have no electricity, but even in the dead of winter, our home is comfortable and the food is always plentiful and good. Please write ahead to plan your visit, and tell us something about yourself. Allen, Buddy, Denis Octagon House Butterworth Farm RFD 2 Orange MA 0136A

The following cluster of articles focuses on some of the many hues of gay realityin a particular region of rural New England.

Steamtown Steam

Tensions have begun to cool in Bellows Falls (Vermont) after two highly publicized anti-gay demonstrations, some nighttime vandalism and some obnoxious verbal attacks hurled at gays outside the Andrews Inn (a gay bar and hotel) by a generally high school age group of rowdies. The incidents surrounding the controversy received substantial press coverage. It was front page news in Vermont’s largest daily newspapers for 4 days. Gay Community News (GCN) in Boston carried a front page story on May 19. Boston Globe reporter Kay Longcope spent two days in the area researching a story that the Boston Globe ran, complete with photographs. The week of incidents began after news appeared in the Brattleboro Reformer that a con ference of gays from Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine planned to meet at the Andrews Inn in Bellows Falls to make plans to participate in the Oct. 14 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. A large group of Bellows Falls residents met at the American Legion Hall and planned a protest demonstration to coincide with the gay conference. At the meeting to organize the anti gay march, it became evident that the organizers were upset at more than just the weekend gay con ference. Anti-gay fires had already been fueled by an Inaccurate and shallow article which had appeared in Blueboy a few weeks earlier describing Bellows Falls as a potential Provincetown and urging gays to invest. Throughout the meeting that Blueboy article remained a rallying point; copies of the Blueboy article had been circulated, and an anti-gay cartoon, based on the article, had appeared in a local weekly. The Andrews Inn had been functioning as a gay bar for several years, but apparently some area people felt that the Blueboy article and the proposed conference were evidence that the gays pe.re "taking over," or attempting such a takeover. Throughout the week's anti-gay organizing, ♦local business leaders remained very non-ccwnmital. ^The reason generally given was that they feared any statement would threaten business from either the gay community or those opposing the gays. Kay rplemer, executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, said she was opposed to any demonstration. •The town selectmen supported the rights of both *sides but were clearly disturbed about the possible ^violence at the march and about the publicity the 'whole controversy was bringing the town. In the long run, that publicity has probably •helped the area's gay community. Members of the •Southern Vermont Lesbian/Gay Men's Coalition seem ♦to agree. The increased publicity has focused *attention on the area's gay community, allowing some members a platform from which to carry on a ,constructive dialogue. The increased publicity 'also resulted in the Coalition receiving letters ‘ from area gays who previously had not been in ♦touch with the organization. The "aftermath" of 'the Bellows Falls controversy leaves us with the ^opportunity for some constructive discussion. An interesting sidelight of the controversy £ concerns the Brattleboro Reformer. Its coverage tot the Bellows Falls situation was generally favorable to the gays. However, a few weeks later, John Carroll, a local gay man who has contributed a movie review column to the Reformer for two

years, devoted his column to the movie "Word Is Out," which had been shown in a local counter culture theatre. In his review, Carroll commented on the isolation that gays experience when growing up and he expressed concern about gay adolescents currently enrolled in local high schools, and about gay teachers in the same schools who cannot honest ly communicate with those young people. The Reformer's editor refused to run Carroll's column, the first time he has ever done so. A few weeks later, the entire column and a summary of the controversy was published in the widely-circulated Valley Advocate (Amherst, Mass.). The following is a basic chronology of the events surrounding the "Bellows Falls Gay Controversy": ***April 28: Announcement of Northern New England Conference to plan for area participation in the Oct. 14 March on Washington appears in the Brattleboro Reformer. ***May 1: Brattleboro Reformer carries announcement of meeting of "concerned citizens" to be held at the American Legion hall to discuss the scheduled "Gay Convention" to be held in Bellows Falls and "what should be done about it." ***May 1: Organizers for the regional conference on the March on Washington make decision to switch planning conference from the Andrews Inn to a private home — the switch was made primarily because of a lower than expected turnout of participants. ***May 2: More than 200 people attend an emotional meeting at the Bellows Falls American Legion Hall and map plans for an anti-gay march through the

Village aquare on Saturday. The assembly and Saturday march are coordinated by Terry Griffin, former American Legion Commander and D. Thomas Burns, County Chair of the Democratic Party. The meeting is attended by police chief Sigmund Ostrovski, vho cautioned the group to stay within the law, and vowed his force would not hassle any segment of the population but would protect all rights, including those of gays. Town Attorney George Norstrand, however, maintained there were lavs, though hard to enforce, that could help curb the growth of the gay community. ***May 3: Tensions run high in Bellows Falls, as the town becomes embroiled in the gay controversy. Late night vandals break several plate glass windows in the Andrews Inn complex of shops. ***May 4: Saying "We thought there was a Bill of Rights and Constitution in this country," and asking "Has that changed," the Moisis family, owners of the Andrews Inn, call a press confer ence to tell "their side of the story." They are joined by several local clergy and members of the Southern Vermont Lesbian/Gay Men's Coalition in denouncing the anger and hostility exhibited by the anti-gay "concerned citizens." ***May 5: A smaller than expected group of anti-gay protesters carrying placards marched through the Village Square in a peaceful and orderly fashion. Later in the evening a riled group of youths (mostly of high school age) gather in the Square and are dispersed by police. Several arrests were made. ***May 5: The northern New England conference for the Oct. 14 march is held as scheduled. The meeting is conducted in a relaxed and productive atmosphere and delegates are selected to attend the next National Steering Committee Meeting. ***May 5: The Moisis family, owners of the Andrews Inn, receive a letter from Edward Costello, Commander of the local American Legion, express ing his concern for the vandalism at the Inn and saying "neither I nor the American Legion condone what has happened in the past few days." ***May 8: About 100 religious fundamentalists, mostly from Claremont, N.H., arrive in Bellows Falls, Vt., to stage an anti-gay protest in front of the Andrews Inn. ***June 5: Vandalism to the plate glass at the Andrews Inn continues almost weekly. Windham Coun ty Democratic Committee meets in Bellows Falls. County Chair Tom Burns comes under sharp attack for his role in organizing anti-gay activities. Malvine Cole of Stratton expresses dismay at the "shocking spectacle of the chairman of our party demonstrating against homosexuals." Bernard Scholz of Townshend compares the recent anti gay activities to what happened in Germany in 1935 when "the element of narrow-mindedness that started with the defaming of a peaceful minority that had broken no laws, became the be ginning of what we now call the Holocaust. Ron Squires, who had proceeded Burns as County Chair, spoke at length about his concern over the bigot ry and closed-mindedness of the current Chair and placed the blame for the vandalism and hostility on the shoulders of the anti-gay organi zers.

Country Cold Hazy pumpkin sun Barely heating the skin Poplars do not sing now But merely stand clean In smokey air Days of blue banter And violet exchanges And staying close to you in our wooden bed, Warming your cold feet Against my back.

David Sunseri PO Box 186 Wolf Creek, Ore. 97497

(Note: The preceding article is reprinted from "The Open Closet, n the newsletter of the Southern Vermont Gay community, with a few additions and changes by RFD.)

The Andrews Inn ^ Tom:

INTRODUCTION: This interview was done for RFD by Robert Redwing, who works as a carpenter and lives in New Hampshire. Tom Herman and Jeremy Youst are lovers of several years, and recently purchased the Andrews Inn. In the context of recent events which uncovered anti-gay sentiments rarely made public in this region it has seemed important to examine what has occurred there. This interview, which took place at the Inn one hot august evening, offers some perspective on gay struggles for acceptance in a sexist culture inherited from the Puritans who first came here. Though not officially owners until after the first anti-gay rally May 5, Tom and Jeremy had been involved in buy-sell negotiations for sev eral months. Tom, Jeremy, and Robert have been close friends for several years.

RFD:

Perhaps we can start out by your talking about the history of the Inn. Too: My understanding is that Andy and "Fanny" Philomena Moises purchased the Inn about seven years ago, and until that time they had run the Miss Bellows Falls Diner, for 15 or 20 years. When they bought the Inn, it was closed down. I assume the former owners went bankrupt. They opened it up and tried to run it for two years as a straight hotel, the coffee house, the rooms, what's now the disco was a formal dining room, and a bar downstairs. And after two years they were in real serious trouble. Their son John, who was a haircutter by trade in town at John's House of Beauty, dropped his work there and came and started to operate the hotel as a gay resort; started with private parties, and by word of mouth. And so about five years ago he began build ing it into what it is today, until we took it over May 8, 1979. RFD: Do you know if prior to the Moises' family's purchase of the Inn; that this was a straight hotel? Tom: Oh for sure...always has been. This was a railroad hotel. The railroad goes right under the building in a tunnel and stops in Bellows Falls; it's the Amtrak. And before that it was obviously built because of its proximity to the railroad; half the rooms have bathrooms and half of them just have sinks for people who were waiting between trains. RFD: I suppose that's good news these days of gas oline shortages and high gasoline prices. Do people come to the Inn on the train? Tom: No. The Amtrak passenger train doesn't cater to people in this part of the country. They arrive at quarter to five in the morning; so it is discouraging. I think a day train would have a whole different effect. We're glad that the Amtrak wasn't discontinued and that it's here, but it isn't something we can count on because of the time of arrival. RFD: Tell me a little about Bellows Falls.

I'm really not the best person to give you the facts and figures. My understanding is that there are approximately 3500 people. But there is a little bit of fogginess in my mind regarding what's the town of Rockingham, what's Bellows Falls, and what's various and sundry other little communities. Most of the eleven weeks I've been here, I've spent right inside this building. There may be someone else who could give you better facts. RFD: How many people live at the Inn as full-time residents? Tom: Well now we have five older gentlemen who live here, who have been here, some of them for 15 and 18 years, and they are of course full-time resi dents. You're probably referring to my staff. I have about a dozen staff members who actually live here in the hotel, and I have another dozen who are commuting people who I employ in the restaurant. RFD: What are relations like between the elderly men and the gays who live here? Tom: They seem fine. They don't seem bothered by any of it, and they've been living with it as long as it's been here. They've watched the whole transition. As I say some of them have been in the same rooms for 15 or 18 years. RFD: You, Jeremy, and your staff moved in on the 7th of May at the height of... Tom: ...the protest march was happening on a Satur day. On the following Monday we closed; we signed all the papers In Brattleboro at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, on the 7th. We drove up in our cars from the closing with whatever clothes we could threw in the car. We didn't know until two hours before that It was going to happen, because the insurance companies backed out due to the broken glass, and we drove to the Inn from Brattleboro as owners, moved in, and we've been here since. RFD: Can you briefly recount the events that led to the protest rally held here on the 5th, the Saturday before you came? Tom: Sure. In April an article came out in Blueboy magazine, which incidentally was written the summer before and was unsolicited by us and according to John Moises was unsolicited by them. The article, written by a freelance writer out of Boston, billed

Bellows Falls as the gay experiment. It could easi ly be taken as an entire community opening its arms to gay people. The next incident was that Sarah Vanarsdale from the Lesbian/Gay Hen Coalition of Southeastern Vermont asked me if she could hold a meeting here at the Inn, inviting representatives from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont to talk about the March on Washington. She asked me because she assumed I was going to be the owner of the Inn at that point. When it turned out that I wasn’t, I re ferred her to John, and he gave his permission for that meeting to be held. She placed an ad in the Brattleboro Reformer, a small ad indicating that that meeting was happening. Whether or not it's accurate, I've been told that some local people understood that there was going to be a march of 10,000 gay people on Bellows Falls, instead of a meeting to talk about the March on Washington. My understanding is that with the two things, the Blueboy article and the little ad in the Reformer, a meeting was held at the American Legion Hall where a small group of angry citizens decided that they were going to have a protest march. Two or three people in the community were basically responsible for it. RFD: Of the few people who were organizing the march, wasn't at least one of those people the local American Legion leader? Tom: That's correct. RFD: I heard today that the national American Legion organization denounced the local organizer of the rally for his use of the American Legion name. I'm sure it was very difficult moving yourselves into this town as owner-operators of a large gay inn with this vocal group feeling so threatened. And then you had a second protest group come down from Clare mont, N.H. a week later. How did it feel passing papers or making a decision on purchasing the Inn in that climate? Tom: To be very honest with you, I had been involved in trying to purchase the Inn for over six months, and I had done a lot of research about the climate of the town. Although it was scary to move in, and it proved to be scary living here, I spent six months of a roller coaster ride trying to get here and was fairly well determined that if it was going to happen and I was going to be able to purchase it, I was going to do it. And so although I was scared and had never lived in a situation such as this, I felt strongly that we would be able to cope with it. RFD: What kind of research did you do in the town? Tom: I sent some people up to talk with the local conmunity members; to interview them. One of the women talked with local business people, talked with some of the police In town, and talked with the Chamber of Commerce. She said that some of her friends were thinking of buying the Andrews Inn and she was wondering what the community felt about it. RFD: Was she out front about some of her friends being gay friends? Tom: Well, when people asked whether they planned to run the Inn as it has been run, she would say yes. / RFD: ...But she wasn't letting people know that the prospective buyers were gay? Tom: No. . RFD: It was suggested to me that the timing of the protest rallies might have been arranged to dis courage you from buying the Inn, because organizers of the rally were aware that you were the first gay owners of the Inn. How do you react to any of those suggestions? Tbm: It's hard for me to knew if* that’s accurate or not because I'm a stranger to the community. Some of the people in the town indicate to me that

this is part of what was going on: that some people were not supportive of the Moises family making a pro fit on the sale, and also we were an unknown quantity of gay people who would be owning the Inn for the first time and that this was very threatening to them. Although I didn’t mention this before, the Inn had been run for five years as a gay resort, but it was not gay owned. It was gay operated: John Moises' son is gay, but he did not own it. So 1 would say that this probably was an additional* part of what made the whole thing, the protest march, etc.... I think we were being discouraged. RFD: You think that might have contributed to. the urgency of the planning of the protest? Tom: Perhaps. The immediate urgency seemed to have been the conference that was being held, be cause it was planned to coincide with the date that the conference was happening. You know, it was just a combination of emotional reactions to us owning it, the Blueboy article; to the convention being held... RFD: Well, the convention didn't happen here. The protest rallies happened. Some vandalism occurred. There were some broken windows. Is there any ongoing protest or vandalism? Tom: None whatsoever. RFD: I'm interested in hearing what kind of support you people as residents and workers at the Inn have received. Would you talk to me- a little bit about what kind of support you've had from outside the Inn during this past eleven weeks? Tom: The things that come to mind immediately are just meeting people one at a time in the coffee shop. People wfyo come up and welcome you and apolo gize for what a few people in town did. People would even go to great lengths to tell me that some of the people who participated in the "protest” are sorry that they did. People have gone out of their way. For example, the second night we were hete, the religous people came from Claremont to sing, to save our souls. (It was incidentally the first night that Jeremy's mother had ever been here). So we were in the coffee house, and in the coffee house you can look outside on the street artd watch what's going on and they can't see in. And several people from the community came to join us and sat with us and had ice cream while this was all going on. We felt less like a bunch of little mice in this huge fortress. It felt like even then, the second night, that there were some people who were going to say, "Look, we don't like this going on any more than you do." I also feel like the people coming from Clare mont helped us. I think there were a lot of resi dents in Bellows Falls who could understand the right of people within the community saying what they needed

to say about what they felt was going on, but they didn't like people from another community coming and making a statement about this community. So as in all of these events my posture, my staff's posture is total non-reaction. We give no credence to anything being hurled at us. It was nice, to get back to your question, that there are people who are aware of what's going on. Kay Flemer, the woman from the local Chamber of Com merce, came over to welcome me a half-hour before everybody knew that the singing group from Claremont was going to appear. And she was very visible walking across from her office to the Inn, because it was well broadcast all over town that this was about to happen. I feel very strongly that there is a strength and a beauty of the native Vermonter that's not going to stick up for me to be doing my trip specifically, but is going to stick up for the right of people to live the way they want to live as long as they don't hurt other people. And that’s the beauty of what I've learned in the years that I've lived in this area, and I feel that one by one people are being supportive of us in whatever way they can and that it really takes a very small group of people to make an environment feel alien. RFD: To what extent do you think efforts to support you by local clergy, elected officials, and Cham ber of Commerce people were motivated by recognition of the Lnn's large contribution to the local economy? Tom: This is certainly one of several factors, I'd agree... Acceptance In small New England towns for anyone comes hard, and I don't think you can pur chase it. The Inn's contribution to the local economy is not new, the Inn has been around for awhile. Most local people have been silent, and my interpretation of this is Chat these folks believe in individuals' rights to conduct their own personal and business af fairs without interference. What little support there was from these people was I'm sure, sincere. RFD: What about the gay community in this southeastern Vermont, southwestern New Hampshire, northwestern area? How supportive has the gay community been? Tom: First of all I'd have to go back to the six months of my process of getting here to say that when I was having a great deal of difficulty raising money and finding support from people to get the place so that it wouldn't be turned into a housing project or whatever, I went to the Coalition in Brattleboro and they were wonderful to me. They gave me a place to talk; they gave me support; and they gave me recommend ations for where to go and what to do. Some of the members even pulled through with financial support to get us here. So I feel it was an incredible process of connecting us to other gay people in the area. I felt the geography of the area separates us, or has separated us all along, and we all have maintained our trips in our own little boxes and it's hard to find the vehicles to connect. And I feel that the Inn is it for a lot of people. We're sitting here tonight having the Interview while the coffee house is meeting downstairs for the first time. We're donating the space; the Coalition is running the coffee house. I feel like it's the beginning of an alternative to the bar scene, and another way this place will function for gay people to support one another. In answer to your question, it was the beginning of any support for me other than sporadic support from friends. RFD: Where else from the gay community In the area do you receive support? Tom: You know my first reaction when you say that is that it's one of the trade-offs, one of the good parts of being owners of the Inn- There's all the negative stuff, because w e ’re out moie publicly out than most people in the area. There’s a lot of nega tive stuff that goes with it, but one of the positive things is that we receive support. That we can contact

people in Boston, and people from Boston contact us, and from Hartford, and from New Haven, and from Springfield, Mass., and from Montreal. We've received calls from a lot of people gay and straight saying that they're with us and that they are watching what's hap pening and are concerned about what's happening. At the same time the protest march was happening there was a group of Quakers from Putney who came and stood in front of the door of the Inn with a sign say ing "We're not gay; we're human beings and people have a right to be who they are." It's like those kinds of things aren't usually covered. I mean you get the pro test coverage, but you don't hear about the people around who are concerned about our rights. RFD: I wasn't aware of that support; I had been fol lowing most of this in the press. Tom: Well I'm saying the whole process, not just the trouble, the whole process of getting here, seek ing support on all different levels has brought us into contact with a lot of gay people. RFD: What was the role of local governing officials? For example, the Selectmen in town and the police, what has been their role? Tom: It's very hard for me to answer that. In the sense that the only contact that I have had is that I appeared in front of the Selectmen for my liqour license, which I received. I talked with the town manager when I first got here to introduce myself. And I've been in contact with the police. The police stance publicly as quoted in the newspapers, I believe is accurate, which is that they are not interested in giving any preferential treatment to anyone; they want to protect every citizen in the town. I think basical ly that as far as the trouble was concerned, people just wanted life to go back as normal and for the past five years part of normal in Bellows Falls has been the Andrews Inn functioning as a gay resort. RFD: What about formal protections of gay rights; are there local ordinances that protect gays against discrimination? Tom: Not that I'm aware of, other than the Bill of Rights. RFD: What about the business community? Tom: Well, I found them supportive. We're a member of the Chamber of Commerce. We're a member of the Merchants' Association. We of course are landlords for four businesses in the town. We have the local Rexall drugstore, the jewelry store, the department store, and we have one store rented to three designers from New York City. And the other businesses have all come over and welcomed us, with a few exceptions. There are some businesses in town that are known not to be particularly happy with what's going on at the Inn. But it is a small group. I'd say one or two that I

advertising vehicles that we have used that contain perhaps some of the things people might he concerned about, have drawn larger crowds than any other. And we're searching for alternatives to that, but at the same time we're using it to try and stay afloat. I'm a non-drinker and a vegetarian running a greasy spoon and a bar. I feel like what we're doing is important because we're here, and we're available to people, and that we're learning about alternative ways of attracting people. But for now we have to deal with what we have. RFD: Before you came to the Inn, you lived on a land trust in a very rural part of southern New Hampshire. Eleven weeks ago you moved into the Inn, and as you say you've been pretty much cloistered here since then. What kind of personal changes has that meant for you? Tom: Outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. I have to carry with me approximately twenty-five keys in order to be able to get in and around this building. I lived in the middle of the woods with a mainly glass house and never locked anyghing including my car. I woke up to no sound or the sound of the birds in the trees; smelled clean air. Here we get the diesel smells from the trains and the trucks, and it's dirty and ugly and noisy. We don't have kitchen facilities where we live; we have to use the facilities that are down in the restaurant, and it's all totally different and crazy and wonderful. It's been a great disruption. The transition has been amazingly hard. RFD: But you seem to have lived with it well. You certainly have retained your healthy glow in the course of all this. Tom: Well, it's been awfully scary, and it's been awfully exciting. And as I say I feel very vital. The days are very full. My home is still there in Richmond. Jeremy goes two nights a week. I've been back once, but I intend to go more. I lived there for five years. People have asked me why I did this. My response has been: I had a beautiful home on the land trust and led a very lovely life with a wonderful supportive group of friends and lovely animals and a beautiful garden, yet I was bored to tears. And that's not a problem I have right now. RFD: I would like to hear something of your plans for building or continuing to build relations, good solid relations with local officials, the business community, and residents of the Bellows Falls area. Tom: Let me answer that by saying I moved into Bellows Falls in the same way that I moved into the other towns I've moved into. And that is that the only way for me to survive here is to have a support system. The support that I was given was nothing incredibly amazing. I was not welcomed with open arms. I went and met everybody, introduced myself, explained who I was and that I was available if they needed to discuss anything with me and began to build a working relationship with the people who are important as far as the way the town functions, and that's what I've done in other places too. I'll give you an example. A month ago I fell down an elevator shaft and dislo cated my shoulder. Although that was an horrendous experience and I won't go into it right now, through that I met a lot of people in the medical community. I met the doctors, the anesthetists, the nurses, and the physical therapists. The physical therapy lady and I decided that when we we're going to build the swimming pool, she's going to help be build it in such a way that during the week when we don't have very many customers in the Inn, it can be used for physical therapy patients in the area, because there is no indoor swimming pool in Bellows Falls. So that's exciting for me: when I can think about the growth of this business, include people from the community in the planning, and have It provide a service and also pro vide income for the Inn. It's like ...verv exciting. 25

Then there is the story about our friend from across the street as a small town phenomenon. We had a young gentleman about 20, when we first came here, come back Into town I guess from the Services, drive into town on a motorcycle with a jacket that said on the back of it, "I hate queers." It was the start of some very scary times for us. He was a very big guy, about 6'4" and 220 lbs., and he was like a leader: all of the little kids that hang out on small town New England street comers In the summer would do whatever he wanted. If he saw some of our staff members walk ing across the street to the laundermat and he wanted to go over and harass them, he would lead these kids and they wouldn't say no. He became the focal point of a lot of our difficulties. In the five years that John Moises had run the place, the name-calling from across the street had happened periodically, "faggot" or "queer," you could hear it from time to time, but people had never come across the street, had never entered the Inn,...never came into the lobby. And this particular guy did. He made life-threatening re marks and came right into the building. Tt was very scary. Last Thursday he came into the restaurant and asked to speak to the owner. When I identified myself, he said it had taken him two hours to get up the cour age to come in and that he wanted to talk to me. He apologized for having been an asshole and wondered if there was any employment that I had; that he was need ing a job. The whole thing has come full circle. He's now going across the street and saying, "Look, these people aren’t just my employers right now; now that I'm inside and see what's going on they're nice peo ple. I want you to leave them alone." It's an amazing flip-flop in a very short period of time. I mean it's incredible. Two months ago my entire staff was petrified of this guy. They would not go out of

know. We after all, the coffee house, function as a restaurant for the business community, seven days a week. RFD: I'm curious about the role of the local press. Tom: It’s hard for me to respond because most of the local press coverage happened before I got here. The Reformer from Brattleboro and the local reporter want to do an Interview with me. I'm going to set up one to do with him later this week. They were all very understanding when I said, "Look, I want to wait until this has blcwn over for awhile." And new that things have quieted down, I will have an interview with her. I felt most of the stuff that I read with the exception of the one cartoon that was a little bit sarcastic, gave an accurate accounting of what happened. I mean, it wasn’t hysterical press. I haven't seen anything recently. RFD: Nothing since May? Tom: Right. RFD: I'm wondering what role women have at the Inn? Tom: We have a woman who is on the board of direc tors. We also have a woman who was very helpful in loaning us money to get here. We have three women bartenders. And we have about a 40/60 break right now. As far as I'm concerned it's part of the unique way this place functions in that we do have both men and women sharing, intermingling in the same space. There are a number of women, and I'm very sensitive or I try to be, (interruption) l am sensitive to the fact that there are some women who have spoken with me and have verbalized a need to have space for themselves because of the particular oppression of women. And it would be my hope in the future to have a space that could function In that way. RFD: Such as a women's bar? Tom: Exactly.

RFD:

I'd like to know what kind of promotional effort you’re making to attract rural gays. It seems to me, that a lot of your promotion is directed at ur ban gays from the megalopolis who might like to spend a quiet weekend in the country. And although you are here smack in the middle of Bellows Falls, I mean if you were to look out the window you'd think that you were in the middle of a city, but just a half mile out side of town you're in open woods and farm country. What kinds of efforts are you making to promote use of the Inn by rural gays? Tom: We have no advertising vehicle for them. All we can do Is use word of mouth, use our mailing list, and count an awful lot on the fact that we're here doing what w e ’re doing in the middle of rural New England. We're fairly well known now. We have a lot of people who call us and come and use this as a re source. And those are rural gays. The advertising for the weekend, and the people who come and stay are exactly as you made them out to be, but we find that we have a constant flow of rural people through the door and on the phone just by virtue of the fact that we are known in this area. RFD: Well that leads me nicely Into mv next question, which is how would you answer someone who is con cerned that promoting the use of the Inn in the urban gay media encourages gay stereotypes by attracting urban and higher income gays. How would you answer someone who was concerned about your encouraging these stereotypes? Tom: My only response would be that I'm concerned too. And furthermore it's an important issue, but it's a tricky one. This is a very large operation and we have a very large overhead. I have put one of my staff in charge of marketing. I'm very pleased with the job he's done, although we have great debates about the objectification of sex, etc., etc. Nevertheless, the

the building alone because of this one individual. He is now our doorman and bouncer. The only other thing I would say about it is that I ’m looking for other ways to keep the place open other than the bar, such as the coffee house. People travel great distances to be here. It's nothing for people to drive two hours from St. Johnsbury just to be here on a Saturday night. That’s how I see this place as a real commentary on rural gay life, because until we develop alternative ways of meeting and supporting one another within our own communities, we try and get to whatever the bar is in the area. This is the bar in the area, and people come from all over. I feel that I ’m in a very lucky position to be able to have con tact with a lot of very interesting gay people from all over the region. RFD: It's refreshing to hear you talk about your sense of responsibility toward your rural gay community. Tom: It may sound egotistical, but Jeremy and I are interested in improving the quality of our lives here at the Inn. And our hope is that that would have some effect on people who come through the door.

Last Minute Conference News

Dear Readers As usual, it's time to ask for money. We have not raised the subscription price, and we are trying our best not to do so. Postal rates have again in creased. Any extra money is most appreciated (and tax deductible); or, you can give gift subscriptions and help increase our readership base. Also, we can always use good material for publi cation. Since we are now producing issues all over the country, there is additional chance for material to get lost, so it would help immensely if you could make a copy of written material to keep for yourself, just in case....Graphics, including photos, are always needed. We used to have a large graphics file to pore through for each issue, but .that has dwindled significantly. Small drawings, even tiny ones, to use as fillers, are useful, as well as fullsize drawings. Photos must be high contrast to re produce well. Photos should also be black and white, and preferably on glossy paper — color photos present various technical problems. We also need articles on how-to, whether how to build something, cook some thing, or how to survive as a gay man in a rural set ting... How do you support yourself financially? What support systems have you tied in with? Don't worry about the style of writing; what you have to say is more important than that. Or, if you wish, you can ask us to polish it up for you (we prefer not to). If you don't want your address listed, let us know that, too. Ask your local bookstore if they will carry RFD. Many of our accounts were started simply by someone walking into a bookstore with an extra copy of RFD. Gaily, Faygele ben Miriam

1. Third World Lesbian/Gay Conference, Washington, D.C., October 12-15.. For infor mation: call 212-924-2970 or 301-596-5865. 2. Land Trust Conference, York, PA., October 19-21. For information, write to School,of Living, P.0. Box 3233, York, PA. 17422, or call 717-755-1561. 3. Sixth National Conference on Men and Masculinity, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 24-28. For information, write Scott Weikart of Jack Weyrauch, 403 S. Poplar, Urbana, IL. 61801, phone 217-384-1724 (Scott and Jack at home), 217-352-6220 (Terry Cosgrove at work, weekdays), or 217-333-6573 (Scott at work, late evenings).

We welcome submissions, but don't forget to send a self-addressed stamped envelope so that we may return material to you. Note: Please don't forget to send a selfaddressed stam^sed envelope so that submisi Note: Please don't forget to send a selfaddressed stamped envelope so that submissions may be returned to you. The people who worked on this issue of RFD need feedback from you, the readers. Reader re sponse to any issue will, of course, also help cfj determine the general direction that RFD takes.

with my major battles being anti-sexist and anti-ageist. But by my activities and appear ance (long hair, late 60's drag, sometimes bearded), I can easily pass for straight. I don't let my politics limit me by forcing me to be constantly on the offensive/defensive line, which can be a real trap. A major value to living in a town with some 400 people is feeling integrated with the community. I spent much of my growing up here, but also spent about 10 years away, going to school, going to California, traveling, and fi nally returning here to establish my life. My personal needs are to prove myself a capable and effective per son in the community with a valid artistic vision. My sexual preferences are not an issue; I let my gayness shine to those who can see it, then they learn my po litics from someone whose judgment they trust. When I need them, they are there. When sexual politics is an issue, I'll be there, my views known. Vermont has a tradition of being accepting to individuals, however odd they may be, so long as they don't push it on others, and therefore a tradition of eccentrics and other strong individuals. But it doesn't pay to advertise. There are many people in town I would disagiee with strongly, but that would not improve our ability to live and work together. So we leave it alone unless there is a specific case to deal with. The value is in a community of persons, rather than roles. No New Orleans Police vs. Faggot Commune (as reported in RFD #20). The danger and limitation of confrontation politics is that the energy is given to the confrontation, often obscuring the real issue. I read with amazement Bruce's tree-climbing encounter with the Atlanta police in RFD #19. I could not un derstand the dynamic at all. Then I realized: he was probably in sissie garb. The tree was irrelevant, but they used it to crucify him on without having to deal with the real issue: his effeminism. This type of activity is very necessary in the city. I was out—

d esires

My name is Burr; I live in a rural town in southeastern Vermont. Three years ago I bought five acres from my father and built a small post and beam house with much help from many friends and lovers. (The dome in the drawing printed below will be a greenhouse.) It is without electricity, on top of a hill, H-mile up a side road from my parents' house. I value a close relationship with them and my (biological) sisters and brother, es pecially as ray mother becomes more open and inter ested in my emotional life. Economically, 1 am a printmaker doing photosilkscreen, primarily images of plant form and landscapes. My studio is down on the state high way about 3 miles away from the house. I have progressively moved my business up here from Con necticut where I had established it. Besides framed prints, I produce T-shirts and stationery items. 1 am constantly traveling to the cities to sell my work, although I am developing an in creasing amount of business by mail. I seem to be getting by, but only because I can live with almost no money (impossible in the city). I cut firewood rather than buying heating oil, grow vegetables, make wine, etc. When I drove a school bus this spring, it was my first outside job in 2 years. Politically, I must admit to being somewhat bored with seeing so much energy spent in previ ous issues of RFD on the alleged "sissie/butch controversy." I value RFD as a forum where so many of us can open up and share our lives, values, insights and experiences with a nationwide rural gay community. I enjoy the fresh voices and ideas, but wonder if some old axes aren't getting ground past their usefulness. Myself, I find I often fall in the middle — twice un acceptable. My viewpoint • is radical ef feminist,

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rageous in the city. In the country it is counter productive -- people here, not roles. There do exist both positive and negative small town stereotypes in Vermont. I do have friends in other towns who feel animosity, as if their activi ties are being watched and fed into the rumor mill. There are places where the social structure is used to isolate people and force them into acceptable roles. And there are always people stronger than those imposed limits. Here in town, the Town Clerk is an elected po sition, filled by a capable, openly gay man. Two years ago there was a "tragic accident" involving one of his friends/lovers, for which he was eventu ally acquitted of the major charges. The town, the people in the town, gave him their full support. Personally, from those who knew him personally, and publicly, by a vote of confidence at his next elec tion. (He has hjLs enemies, too.) Competence and community were more important than sexual prefer ence. As one crusty old native said, For all you

to the widely differing segments of a widespread and diffuse gay community. Southern Vermont does have a large and ac tive gay male and lesbian community which pro vides a lot of real support. It is very impor tant to me that the men's and women's groups meet together frequently in a combined group and are able to share a lot across a border line which so often seems a battle line. I also have strong bonds with the other people in the larger artist-crafts community in the area, with many of the straight hippies building cabins in the woods, and with an extended biological family. Thanksgivings are now held at my house with about a dozen relatives. L am, on the other hand, living mostly by myself. 1 value the soli tude, and wonder what it would be like living with a full-time lover. 1 lived with one for a year while first building the house, but that fell apart in part over a clash of values: California (urban?-) vs. Vermont. I have a good close family of friends and lovers around New England, many in the cities, and we see a lot of each other, offering each other some of the strengths of the different en vironments, and of our different lives. — Burr

know, I may do some pretty kinky things in the bed room myself." Not so in Brattleboro, the next large town, where the newspaper played up the sensa tion and printed defamatory and probably libelous stories about the case. The ability to see people as individuals be cause there are not so overwhelmingly many of them also affects the bar scene in Bellows Falls. The lights are higher and the music less oppressive than in the city bars. You can see, meet, and talk to people rather than being dependent on re acting to projected images of often cookie-butter monotony. There is a continuing discussion among the bar's owners and the community on the role of the bar, the different needs of the women and men who go there, and ways to make it of more service

Forging Community An RFD Interview The following interview is mostly with Andrew Kopkind, a gay man who is a widely-known magazine journalist. His writings for such periodicals as the Real Paper, Hew Times, and the Village Voice offer commentary on politics and culture from a left perspective and with a gay sensibility. When not in New York and elsewhere, he lives in an old colonial house in rural southern Vermont with John Scagliotti, who also participated in this in terview. In the early 1970s, John and Andy co produced the Lavender Hour, a popular gay radio show on WBCN-FM in Boston. Both were involved in news and public affairs programming at WBCN for several years. John recently completed a film do cumentary, "The Stuff of Dreams, " about a local community theatre production of "The Tempest," and this film i8 scheduled for broadcast soon on public television. Also present for the interview was Kevin, an active member of the Southern Vermont Gay Men. Doing the interview for RFD was Allen Young, who lives about 26 miles to the southeast of Andy and John'e house. On the day of the interview, Andy and John were hosting a concert sponsored by a local musical organization which owns an organ that is stored in their barn. RFD: Could you say something about the evolution of the gay community in this area. ANDY: I came to this part of southern Vermont about 10 years ago, and had not yet come out, and started to live in a commune with what I believed to be all straight people — and I was not out to them. It turned out that a couple of the people who were living there — both men and women — were in fact gay. But we never came out to each other that first summer. There were four other large communes in this area, and several people in each of them, including some of the people who founded almost all of them, turned out to be gay, although for the first year or so, no one was out to any of the others. I felt quite isolated. I came out during that year to the other members of the commune that I was in, and by extension to the other people in the area. A few of the other people in this neck of the woods did the same thing, but there was no sense of commu nity among ourselves; we never got to each other. As a matter of fact, quite the opposite happened: the few people who were out were pitted against each other, and pitted themselves against one ano ther. As an example of that, which is instructive, I think (without mentioning names), I was having a great deal of difficulty relating to the other men in the commune I was in (who were straight). They were more or less well-intentioned, and wanted to help resolve these problems, but nobody knew how to do it in those days. They knew that one of the men in one of the other communes in the area was gay, and, without telling me, they went to him one day, and said, "Why is Andy so freaked out, and why does he feel so isolated, and why does he feel so estranged, and why can't he find fulfillment and hap piness as a member of a heterosexual community?" This other gay person, who was desperate to find happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment as a mem ber of his heterosexual commune, said, "I don't

know. He must be crazy; I'm having a marvelous time here!" Meanwhile, he was freaking out, ter ribly neurotic, becoming an alcoholic, and every thing else. And I was extremely angry at him for not supporting me in any way In my struggle to de velop a separate identity, but he was quite afraid of this process — as we all were. As it turns out, shortly after that, I real ized that I couldn't find support, I couldn't find community, I couldn't find attachments, I couldn't find emotional support or anything in this area — and I went to the city. I decided to leave. This was a long and hard process, because in fact I really liked it here, and I had founded this commune, as it were, and had gotten other people to livethere, and had put it together, and it was my only home — and I had to leave. And then it turned out that there were at least 15 or 20 gay people here, who I knew, and all of whom were having the same problem. Well, several years later, I came back, with a lover, and in a different capacity, in a house that we owned, and own, and the first problem we faced was, what kind of a house would it be? Would it be a house of straight and gay people? What kind of

in Southern Vermont sensibility would reign here? And these things are very difficult to pin down. How do you establish a gay sensibility, and is this necessary? And what does that mean? And there was a straight couple in the house, and we tried that for two weeks...(laugh ter) . And it came to hysterical scream-outs. They had a child; we didn't know what to do... It's hard enough for people to live together, but we had a dif ferent view of what kind of place this was going to be. As it turned out, it was going to be either us or them, and after a series of negotiations, it turned out to be us. Again, more or less by evolu tion and not by conscious decision or plan or stra tegy, it began to turn into a center of gay "culture" in this area, and other gay people sort of gravitated to it. A series of things happened. We were still li ving part of the time here in Vermont — weekends, in the summer — whenever we could get away — and then we had an apartment in Boston. And we had lots of gay friends in Boston, too, and obviously a gay social infra-structure was developing in the cities, and we were part of that, and we had lots of friends in that social world, and they came up here a lot, and they mixed with the local straight people and the local gay people. For a while, there was a point where there seemed to be a perfect kind of balance, and nobody seemed to threaten anybody else. And I remember one year the scales tipped in some way. The Halloween parties were the crucial test, the bellwether events. We all felt some kind of mild... it wasn't exactly tension, but separation...that had n't been felt before. The parties (around this area) were interesting, on the whole, but they were always very straight, and the gay people always had to exist as part of a heterosexual social scene, and, you know, men danced with each other and women danced with each other — but it wasn't only that, there was something that's very hard to explain, that sensibility, but whatever it is: that sensibility was heterosexual. And these Halloween parties, for the first time, started to be identifiably homosexual parties. And then, homosexual culture started to pull away from heterosexual culture in the mid- to late'70s. One of the keys to that, of course, was the kind of music people listened to. We started listen ing to disco music, while the people up here were playing early '70s and late '60s rock and roll. There was a lot of tension around the kind of music that was being played. The straight post-hippies wanted to hear hard rock and dance to hard rock, and we wanted to hear Gloria Gaynor singing "Never Can Say Bood-bye." KEVIN: I remember being here one time and you said, "This is my house and I'm going to play what I want on my record player."' ANDY: That was a crucial point. We were going to have these parties, and as usual the gay people would stay up real late, and the straight people would go home relatively early — it was late for them but it was relatively early for us, and there were carry ings-on, and there was the usual sort of campy banter, and so forth and so on, and this more or less turned the straight people off. And this house became known, for just this little area, as a kind of center of gay social life. It was also interpreted as a late '70s atmosphere rather than a late '60s, early '70s hippie atmosphere. That was a change in culture. It was somehow more urbanized, somehow more sophisticated,

it was somehow more deliberate than the hippieness. There was a clear break. That was one theme of development. At the same time, some of the gay people in the various houses around here — communes, houses, living arrangements, whatever they had gotten to be — were also begin ning to feel the pressures of a separate homosexual cultural development spreading out from the urban centers. And they had found that they had not real ly dealt with their own separate identities over the years in the way that their urban brothers and sis ters had. There was one person in one of the com munes who everyone knew was gay, was out for all in tents and purposes, but still was afraid to bring anyone home that he met in a bar — this was two years ago, after seven or eight years of being out — for fear that he would be looked on as something less than kosher. And relationships between the gay men and the straight women were very hard to deal with. They just hadn't had the contacts, the conversations, the strengthening advantage of living in a gay si tuation that gay urban people, or gay rural people who'd lived in an all-gay commune, had ever had. They felt that they could get away with it, and they could have gotten away with ft il in fact

there hadn't been this development of a gay cul ture. And this was pulling them out of the closets that in fact they were still in, even though to a certain extent they felt they were out by just saying they were gay, and sneaking away to the bar in Bellows Falls or off to the baths in Boston every once in a while. People started to talk, actually started to talk a couple of summers ago, in our kitchen, and these discussions went on every so often. They were really more or less gay consciousnessraising discussions of the kind that happened everywhere else in the early 1970s, but they just never happened around here. It was amazing to me, having lived in the big city on and off for all these years, how little of what we thought was common consciousness about gay identity had pene trated around here. There was one interesting event. A straight couple, a man and a woman who'd been living to gether for a while, decided to get married. For reasons whicl^no one will ever understand, they decided to have quite a conventional wedding, in 1977 or 1978r of the kind you read about in the Sunday New York Times — but it was here in the post-hippie heaven, complete with showers and bachelor parties and churches and ministers and receptions and organs and music and families flown in from near and far and honeymoons and rice, and so forth and so on. There were a lot of in teresting attitudes, and one was that people had lived together in various ways — straight couples and gay couples and non-couples, in what were con sidered alternative lifestyles here — and no one had ever celebrated them or given very many parties in their honor, and all of a sudden... (As a matter of fact, one of the things that this community, in this area, was founded on wa9 the theory that people ought to be able to find legitimate ways of relating other than the conventions of our parents and grand parents.) All of a sudden this couple decided to have this most conventional wedding, and the commu nity went out of its way to celebrate, as if this were the most legitimate of all possible ways of living. Not only ^feit, but all the gay men in this area found themselves in various sharaus roles. They put everything on. They were the facilitators of all of this process. For instance, one of the gay men was the caterer of all of the food, one of the gay men supplied all of the music, one of the gay men presided as the Justice of the Peace (laughter). We came home one day and found that our house had been used for the bridal shower. All of the women in the neighborhood came to the faggots' house be cause we had all the cute little tahatchkea> the bud vases and the tea servers, and a nicely-appoin ted house, rather than some sort of straight hippie pad, and they played nice music on our stereo and had tea and everything, whereas up the road some straight men had the stag party — to which we were not invited -- where they showed dirty movies and said risque jock things! But people were afraid to even say anything about, it, ana a lot of people, to themselves, harbored second thoughts about their roles, and when we started talking about it, a lot of anger came out. Discussions happened about why married couples and straight couples had more power and more legi timacy, even in what was presumed to be a liberal, tolerant, even radical kind of community. Of course, that's what made it even more difficult here, that it was presumed to be oriented toward a radical lifestyle, Con-III, not only tolerant, but loving, accepting, brdtherly, peacefully, sisterly,

great deal of homophobia lurking in the peace-love ideology, and it has to be dealt with. Out of that event and others similar to it, discussions started, and we would have just regular old consciousnessraising sessions and they would last until 3 or 4 in the morning. Well, people heard about this from areas other than this very small neighborhood that we live in, and asked to be included, and a few more people came. Then some larger political events happened, or seemed to happen, both here and elsewhere. There was the Anita Bryant crusade in Florida, and the referenda in various states that were trying to re peal anti-discrimination ordinances. The politics of homosexual acceptance were much in the news. In our own area, a disco had opened downtown. One or two nights a week there were gay people in somewhat larger numbers than ordinarily, and more visible than at the very beginning, and there were reports — I don't really know if they were confirmed — that gay people were beaten up after the disco was over, by local toughs. At least they were harass ed inside. There began to be a visible gay scene in town, but it was still atomized. The post '60s population was getting bigger and bigger and big ger all the time, thousands and thousands of people had moved in, in the last 8 or 10 years. There were many gay people among them, plus per manent residents, and part-time residents and permanent visitors, and whatever. Out of that came the formation of what has be come a gay organization. And the nucleus of it was the group that met around our kitchen table here the previous summer. We just called a meet ing one day, on our own volition, of the Southern Vermont Gay Men, and had everyone let it be known, and put out some posters, and a press release, and anyone could come to the Common Ground Res taurant in Brattleboro and talk about the forma tion of a group. The appointed day came and we went up to the restaurant and there were 15-20 people there.... KEVIN: Did the people who met in your kitchen have any relation to the Andrews Inn? Did people go up there? JOHN: Once or twice, but really not. We were sort of our own little consciousness-raising group. RFD: But the people who were in that group were people who frequented the Andrews Inn at least sometimes, right? ANDY: Or infrequented, semi-frequented. Sure. We went there. But it was not a social circuit. We had all gone tl\pre, many times, but it was not the center of our social lives. I don’t want to go into the chronology of

that group, but the night of that first meeting, there were 7 or 8 pickup trucks and cars with what we later heard were vigilantes, or at least observers, who were sitting in their green workshirts watching the faggots go up to the restaur ant. We had heard that there were seme in a red neck bar in town, that some people there were talking about going and getting the faggots. As far as I know, nothing ever happened except obser vation and taunts and things. But it was not with out some tension. RFD: When you said that at the Halloween parties, some of the straight people were getting uptight, how did you perceive that? JOHN: I see it more as just an automatic breaking down...or a separation that automatically happens. I remember that in the old days about 6 gay people would go to a party, and we would say, "This is a nice room, wanna see all the straight people leave?" And we would get together and start camp ing it up, not really flaunting it, but, you know, a little ULss, a little dance together, and within 10 minutes the room would be empty, and all the straight people would move to another room. And the gay people would have that room. Gay people are gay in bed, but not only in bed, and as soon as they get out of the bed and start being gay in their lifestyles, one thing is that other gay people get uptight, and straight people get uptight, too. What's happening as gay culture gets stronger and stronger, and gay commu nities get bigger, is that gay people can be gay in more social situations. So when we would have our parties we would make sure that we would invite gay people so that there was a good crowd, and straight people who couldn't understand it, who couldn't get out of their heterosexual culture (the way they see things), felt uncomfortable. They would move, they would create distance, and the gay people felt very comfortable, and would continue doing things their way. You could tell there was tension. See, before the first Halloween parties, the straight people stayed much later and really danced and really so cialized and it was a very straight party, and as the parties got a little gayer and as the numbers grew, and as more men danced with each other and hugged and kissed each other and flirted with each other, and straight men didn't know who was who, and stuff like that, you started seeing the straight people leaving earlier and saying, "Oh, we've got a few other par ties to go to," and there were interesting dynamics that indicated to me that the dominant culture was no longer heterosexual, but that the gay culture was contending with that. RFD: Were there exceptions? Were there certain straight people who seemed to do really well? JOHN: Oh, yeah, there are certain straight people who hang out with gay people, and understand that culture and can sort of slip into it, and not feel like they have to run, or whatever. I really think when you put 7 gay people or 5 gay people in any room, you have created a different climate, you have created a different sensibility. And that sensibility really fills the room, and it's no longer heterosexual, and it really changes the atmosphere, and no matter where you are — for example, here at this concert the gay people would congregate, they would come together, and you could tell that these people were gay, and as more and more gay people start realizing that, that there'8 a sort of species orientation, you just know that this is where you belong, in some sort of strange way. One of the problems here in the community is that a lot of the gay people who live in this commu nity are used to being in a heterosexual culture, and find it difficult being in a gay culture. It's not an

easy thing for them to get into. There's a lot of self-hate. You say "gay culture" and they say "queen" or "campy" — and that's part of it, too. But that's the part that a lot of gay people can attack real quick as not being themselves because they want to be seen as masculine, or they don't want to be seen as gay, so therefore the queen thing or the effeminate thing is a very frightening thing for a lot of gay people in the rural areas, because it's a real quick stereotyping identifying way for others to find out that you're gay, and if you participate in that, you are being seen as gay. So a lot of the gay people are afraid of that, and when they're exposed to that, while in their hearts they may enjoy it, they’re still very nervous about it. I think what happens is that as you create a larger gay community, or you feel less freaked out about that, you go behond that. It's not just a question of saying that is the only thing that identifies a gay culture or a gay sensi bility, or just a preference for disco music, or any of these things, but I think that's part of it, part of a whole group of things that's going on. Let's face it, the gay culture is not something that's al ready there; we're creating it ourselves from an op-

Litfgk*.14 .Sibil*A i

** I#4t* i

pressed past, so therefore w e ’re taking in some of those elements that are oppressive to ourselves and oppressive to women, oppressive to a lot of other people. But we can’t just cut it off. It's all part of a thing that's creating a new culture. We don't know just what the new culture is, but the only way it's going to happen is when more and more gay people start getting together. We're starting to see some things from that, and I think you're starting to see a real need for gays to be separate. There's a need for that separation to create that culture, to understand ourselves in the first place, so that we can go on and create a culture, and then be able to mingle and be able to share that culture with heterosexuals. But I think the idea of separatism, even in rural areas, is very important, that there be spaces and places for gay people to get together in rural areas, so that they can create their own styles and their own forms of life. You know, around here the only examples (of forms of life) we have besides the local examples that were al ready here in the country, are the hippies who came, and I don't think that they’re necessarily the examples we want to follow because they're very homophobic examples. So we have to create our own examples. It's a process that’s going to take a long time. ANDY: There's another change since the early ’70s. Ten years ago, the median age of the new people was 24, or 23; the material of their lives, their oo expectations, their conversations, were quite

different than they are now. There was much less permanent coupling, less stability, there weren't children to think about, no houses and mortgages, and 10 years later, people are 33 or 35, and even though they may be, in certain ways, more casual in their styles and more tolerant in their atti tudes, they are replicating many of the things of their parents, whereas the gay people by necessi-* ty are further apart from that, and they're doing what gay people do — they aren't talking about marriage and families and so on. The roles of men and women, when they were 23 in the height of the radical hippie days, were quite different (i.e., unconventional). Now, while they aren't as completely conventional as the previous generation's, they are in fact much more conventional than they were a decade ago — the edge of radicalism has been dulled, as we all know, and women, despite a certain liberation ethic, still fulfill roles which are more tradition al, and men hold attitudes which are more tradition al, masculine attitudes, male macho attitudes, and that creates that heterosexual culture — all the things they talk about. If you go to a social evening that's predominantly straight, you usual ly find that the men get together and talk about things quite like one used to hear at your pa rents' house — you know, cars and sports and fixing things up and girls and this and that and the other thing. And women get together and talk about children and cooking and things like that. The gay peoples' concerns are quite different. The other interesting thing is a lot of the gay men go back and forth, either on a regular basis or a random basis, between big city and the country. Some people do it on a weekly basis; some do it whenever they can get away. Many gay men, es pecially those who aren't in the first throes of a love affair or a couple relationship, find the need for the social life of a big city — especially now when it s quite exciting and developing a sense of gay culture. And when they go to the city they assimilate the attitudes and the styles and even the appearance of that urban gay culture. I remember the first time that I came back here with my hair cut very short; it was considered bizarre. And in fact I had crisis of identity: was I an urban faggot or a rural hippie? People asked me, "Why is your hair short? Why do you look like this?" There’s a whole new look. It has to do not only with obvious things like the cut of hair, but also with clothes, w !th the way you hold yourself, your manner, your facial expressions, a whole lot of things that you're not aware of any more. And how does that sit when you come back to your rural home? Is there a dis tinguishing gay look? RFD: Is there something parallel that happens in the city? Do you go to the city and feel that rural things are somehow lacking when you are there? ANDY: Less. It's much easier in the city because there's a huge gay culture that doesn't feel uptight about strangers, as much, at least in the big cities. It's unusual to see a long-haired hippie at the Ramrod, but it's not unknown, and it's an acceptable thing, though it's a bit unusual look, whereas here it's rather strange to see the Christopher Street, cropped, meticulous look walking down Elliot Street in Brattleboro, although maybe that's changing, too, and it may become the style up here too. RFD: Among your friends, do you notice a larger number of people trying to develop both rural and urban residences, a way of living their lives in both places? ANDY: It's certainly happening a lot, whether people want it to or not. We find a lot of people going down to New York or Boston, back and forth.

Steven McCarty of North Orange, Mass., is shewn in the hack of his colonial house, which he has been restoring with the help of friends.

RFD: Staying at friends'? Maintaining second homes? ANDY: Staying at friends’ places. Maybe not main taining a separate home. That's hard to do for economic reasons, unless you have the kind of jobs that we do, that we can try to take with us, back and forth. But the lifestyle of the gay culture of large cities is quite compelling for a lot of gay men. JOHN: Well, all over the country, not so much in this community, but all over the country, gays who grew up in isolated ways, especially in the last 1015 years, find themselves going to their local sort of urban center, then to the next larger one, and then finally either to New York or San Francisco. Thousands of gays have moved to San Francisco in the past few years. And if you were to do a poll in a local New York gay bar and find out where everybody was born, you would find very few New Yorkers. A lot of them come from smaller cities in the north east, or the south. ANDY: Yeah. And there's this really interesting thing that’s never been accurately described. Only in an impressionistic way do I know about it. From Houlton, Maine, or Worcester, Mass*, people move to a regional center like Boston, and then when economics and age and friends and contacts warrant it, they move on to New York. RFD: The first time a Bostonian goes to New York, it's probably with a New York trick that he’s met in a bar in Boston. ANDY: Or to visit a friend from Boston who's moved to New York. Or to go to an event like a Christopher Street march or a party at some big disco. And some of them say, "I wouldn't live here, but I like to visit," and others say, "Boy, as soon as I can get

a job here, I'm moving," and it's the same with San Francisco. It's beginning to be the tourist season now in New York, and I’ve met people from Dallas and Houston and Long Beach, California, and so forth, and other areas tjiat are in fact regional gay cen ters, but when these people come to New York, their minds are blown. They don’t know how awful it is, too, but they see that this is the gayest city in the world, and they say, although not all of them do, that as soon as they can find some thing to do, they’re going to move. JOHN: New York is rapidly changing because of this, too. What I think will happen is that as urban cen ters create this very strong gay culture — and I think it's going to be a very strong gay society, gay community — there will be gay doctors, gay lawyers, gay accountants, gay stores, gay restaur ants, a very separatist gay community, too, not just the bars, but it would encompass your whole life, your work. There will be more jobs; gay people will start getting into positions of being able to hire other gay people, and you’re really going to create these gay centers. I think that will have a tremen dous effect on the rural areas, because what will happen is this: what will happen is, you get a little older or something like that, you're going to want to retreat from the city life, and more and more gays, as the climate changes, more and more gays are going to find themselves moving into ru ral areas. So you might find somebody going from Maine to all these centers, ending up in New York, and finally going back to Maine — or different people going to these rural areas. ANDY: It's happening in interesting ways in cer tain communities. Entrepreneurs and developers are starting gay communities in upstate New York, say, like Roxbury Run.* I saw a display ad and a booth set up at the Christopher Street fair. They had a slide show. Condominiums! It's a riot! JOHN: Obviously this is going to affect the rural gays. A lot of the leadership roles or the sense of community will be defined and developed in an urban setting and then sort of rearranged and re mixed for a rural setting. RFD: Don’t you think that one of the things that will happen is a kind of resentment against all of these city people moving out into the country? JOHN: Resentment by whom? RFD: By the native people, whether they're gay or straight. ANDY: Well, there might be, but that's always hap pened . JOHN: I think the resentment in the gay case will probably come out in homophobia. But gays will de velop their skills. Let's face it, the gays in the city are going to be petit bourgeois. They re going to be storekeepers and stuff like that. They re going to go back to the rural areas and open up their little stores and stuff like that, and they re going to bring to the rural areas an economic sort of growth. RFD: Not only business, but also crafts. Things like carpentry, especially restoration. JOHN: You're going to find more and more little cen ters, and, for example, I think this area will be come one of those little gay centers, whether Bellows Falls likes it or not.** The Southern

*See article on Roxbury Run elsewhere in this issue. **See articles on Bellows Falls elsewhere in this issue.

Vermont area is going to become in the next 5 or 10 years a little oasis where urban gays are going to start relating more and more. Some are going to move here. Some are just going to have summer homes here, but others are going to start opening their little businesses and creating their little stores or little hobbies and start to develop here. RFD: Are you saying it will be a new gay "mecca"? Do you think it will be similar to, or different from Provincetown, Key West, Fire Island? JOHN: I think it will have some of those elements, but it will be different only because, as I said earlier, the gay culture is changing, and you don't know what's going to happen. It's always in a tran sitional period, I think. It's only been 10 years since Stonewall, where things started happening. ANDY: It probably won't be as complicated here, be cause it's not a tourist center, it doesn't beck and call. KEVIN: I think the area itself is not confined by geographies. RFD: Yeah, it’s not at the tip of something. ANDY: Not at the tip of a peninsula. RFD: The tip of the penis. ANDY: The glans of a sand strip. KEVIN: Maybe that's a good place to stop. JOHN (to Kevin): You should say a few things, or are you going to write your own article? KEVIN: I have confusing ideas about a lot of this stuff. My experience is sort of the opposite. I grew up in New York, and then I moved up here. I was never really a part of the gay scene in New York, mostly because of what I consider a lot of class stuff — things like, you know, it's petit bourgeois, or upper class, at least trying to have that kind of appearance. That's not my lifestyle at all, and I find I have a hard time relating to it. I've been thinking for the last 6 months I want to write this all down in a real understandable way and I haven't gotten around to it, and I'm really confused about it. JOHN: It is a confusing thing because the styles are being created, obviously, by some people who have money, and you feel attracted to the styles because they are gay, but yet there is that part of you that says that the commercialism of it all, the exploita tion, the silliness of it all... KEVIN: Also, it creates the impression that gay culture, whatever it is, you know, is an upper class thing, that gay people are upper class people... JOHN: That's what I think is in a transitional period. As the gay community gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you're going to find the quality spreading out, the style spreading out, and new styles will be formed that will contend with each other. It’s not going to be just all a single way. And there fore that contention that you're bringing up will affect the totality of the thing. It's a question of time and evolution.

Green Revolution YORK, PA. — RFD readers who would like to have a free sample copy of Green Revolution, the periodical of the School of Living, should send a note requesting one (donations appreciated). Green Revolution has been committed to alternative rural lifestyles for many decades. The address is: P0 Box 3233, York 35 PA 17402.

Howdy! Really enjoyed Jeff Wetmore's letter in if20. Feel much as he does. Sure would be fine to hear about country men doing country things who are also gay. We're (2 of us) into all sorts of activities, gardening, carpentry, ceramics, beekeeping, alternative energy systems, livestock. Doing some, working on more and have so much to learn. A contact section would be really fine as RFD is a good way to come together even though we're miles apart. Over all we enjoy the journal despite its often nellie bias. The attempt is there and THAT is very important. //20 the best yet. Gary & Rich Box 782 Drain OR 97435

I live in community as a gay male in a household of 10 persons — 4 adults and 6 child ren. Our household is one of many in the Miccosukee Land Cooperative, an alternative com munity in the country about 15 miles east of Tallahassee, Fla. Recently, someone passed on a couple of old issues of RFD. Great!! Start my subscription. I'm open to household adults and neighbors but still closed to the world at large. I came out to my wife a couple of years ago, and we're still working through the "trauma." A common binding force of our household has been the building of a couple of geodesic domes from scraps for the past 5-6 years. In our area, we experience something known as "The Miccosukee Factor." So we're still working on the kitchen dome. Slow but beautiful common experience for family and friends. I look forward to contact with RFD producers and readers. Gerry Brudenell Rt. 7, Box MLC Tallahassee FL 32308 (904) 877-3634

I have been in the States since last September at school, and learning a lot besides. Discovering RFD has been one of the most exciting things in the whole year. It has been so full of ideas and in spiring for me. Most of all I like what I have been reading about people who move from city to country and the other way about, and people trying to bridge the macho-sissie chasm. There are times in my life when I have lived in both places and at different times I know I will need different things. I can never settle down. Now I am moving countries again, back to England where I have lived for most of my life and I would like a subscription to RFD to keep me in reach of the U.S. community. It would be great to get in touch with any British readers of RFD. Lotsa love. Rob in 55 Dirchling Rise Brighton Sussex, England

I am writing to you for some gay contacts. I was told to write to you all. I am 25 years old and live in Jonesville, Va. I would like it if you could help me out. Curtis Price

Future homesteader with some assets would like to hear from others about their homesteading experiences and ambitions. Am seeking partner(s) for renovating or building rural dwelling. Also Interested in existing settlements or rural communes. Erik Bergstrttm RFD If2 Lincolnville ME 04849

(Mfckerndlo&nand An RFD Interview

INTRODUCTION: Richie and Ellen are a married couple with two children who are friends of RFD readers living at Cherry Hill. Richie and Ellen live in a small town (pop. 11,000), where they own and operate their own business. Over the past few years, the men at Cherry Hill have developed a friendship with both Richie and Ellen, and Richie has pursued a gay lifestyle with the assent of his wife. They have also become involved sexu ally with another couple, Grant and Susie. The following is the transcript of a tape made espe cially for RFD by one of the men at Cherry Hill. Because Richie and Ellen want to protect their anonymity, the names in the interview are fic titious. Anyone wishing to communicate >with Richie and Ellen can write to them in care of RFD, RFD: Why don't you start by telling me how you met? ELLEN: I met him at a party when I was about 13 years old, at his house. RFD: Did the relationship get romantic right away? ELLEN: No, because at that age, I really didn't like boys very much. It was just a fun thing to do. I didn't really start liking boys till 16 or 17. By then I was going up and seeing Richie all the time. RFD: How did you think about Ellen then? RICHIE: Just as a friend -- for years. RFD: Did you think at that time you might be gay, deep down? RICHIE: Oh, deep down, yes, that started when I was 13 or 14. RFD: In what sense? Did you actually have sex with other boys? RICHIE: Oh, yes, when I was probably about 14, I started. ELLEN: I never realized! Way back then! RICHIE: I'm 36 now, and it's been 22 years! RFD: How did you decide to get married? When did your relationship get more "serious"? RICHIE: When I was about 21? ELLEN: Yeah, I was about 20. We dated off and on for years. RICHIE: I dated all kinds of neighborhood girls, all those years. ELLEN: And I moved away a dozen times, but I kept in touch with him over the years. RICHIE: And she dated other guys that were my friends, all those years. ELLEN: One thing I liked about Richie though: he wasn t aggressive. My father was an aggressive man, and I didn't relate to having sex with an aggressive man. So I kept going back to Richie because he was n ’t pushy about sex. RFD: Did you two have any sex at all? ELLEN: We used to make out heavily in the car, and stuff, but he would only go as far as I let him. RICHIE: We went to bed, though, six months before we were married. We had sex then on a regular basis. RFD: And at that time, were you still having sex with men? RICHIE: No. There was a year before we were married, when I was going with her, that I didn’t have any sex with any men. It was a year after we were mar ried that I started -- with one person. ELLEN: For 10 years.

RICHIE: For 10 years. That relationship lasted for 10 years. ELLEN: I guess you can call it a relationship, even though there wasn't any love. RICHIE: It was sexual. ELLEN: It was a need you had to fulfill. RICHIE: Yeah. RFD: Were you afraid that Ellen would find out? RICHIE: I don't know. I don't think I ever really thought of it. ELLEN: You knew me well enough. You knew it wouldn't end everything. You must have, or you wouldn't have taken the chance. RFD: But you didn’t feel free to be open with her about it? RICHIE: No. RFD: What made that change. ELLEN: Dumping my mother! RICHIE: No, it was back around Christmas, a year ago. ELLEN: It was probably the influence of Cherry Hill. RICHIE: Oh, Cherry Hill, yeah. I finally realized that that relationship wasn't what I wanted. It was just a sexual relationship, and I didn't want that any more. And I decided there was more to a relationship than that. And I didn’t know just what, but I decided, hey, it's not my bag, I just can't handle something like that. It was just about that time — it's close to two years now — that Ellen starting saying, "Why don't you go out and try it with a guy?" RFD (to Ellen): Why did you say that? What made you even bring up the subject? ELLEN: Well, he started... he always bought Playgirl magazine, and stuff. I know he enjoyed looking at them. RFD: Who made the first move to buy Playgirl? ELLEN: Probably me, out of the two of us. RFD: Why did you do that? To look at the men? ELLEN: Yeah, I guess, and Richie would make remarks: "Oh that one's not too bad." RICHIE: No, it started when Hank gave us all the books. He said, "Oh, you ought to read some of my good books." ELLEN: I should have suspected you swung a little the _ other way when you'd be looking at cashmere sweaters wo on girls and you'd bring them up to me and say, "Gee,

ifricml andAlibi# look at this, that's nice," and I'd say, "Oh, you're looking at boobs," and you’d say, "No, not at the boobs — the sweater." RICHIE: I like high-class well-dressed women. They don't turn me on sexually because I never think of them as sexual, just that that's the type of women that would turn me on if I were to think of them sexually. It's the same with guys. For a sexual turn-on, they have to be well groomed, probably not the average guy, you'd have to be one step above... you know, a little more class. RFD: How do you think living in a small town influ ences your day—to—day life as far as being gay. RICHIE: You have to be completely closety for living in town, so that there'd be no outsiders, other than our own friends or acquaintances that I meet, who would know. ELLEN: You have to consider the business. You know, we never made friends for years. Neither one of us knew what was wrong. We just avoided saying to each other why we didn't make friends easily, until we met a couple from Cherry Hill, and we just kind of got friendly with everybody up there. You're the only friends we've got around here...close friends. RFD: Except for you-know-who... (laughter) RICHIE AND ELLEN: Grant and Susie! RFD: How did you meet Grant and Susie. How did you develop this relationship with Grant and Susie? RICHIE: Well, we've known Grant as a casual friend for 5 years or so. ELLEN: Real casual. RICHIE: You know, to talk to, stuff like that. ELLEN: I approached him, I guess, because I was sort

of upset because Richie had gone to a gay bar and met somebody that he really got emotionally involved with. And it was right after he told me that he was gay and that he'd had a relationship for 10 years — and I was just scared. Everything hit me all at once RICHIE: There was a 6-month period of time in between. ELLEN: There were 2 or 3 weeks when everything happened real fast for me. I'm over it now, but at the time, the fact that you got so involved kind of upset me, and I just didn't want any part of it, so I made him get rid of him. I felt bad after, so... it was just a spur of the moment thing with Grant. RICHIE: I knew you were upset. You were just trying to find an alternative for me. ELLEN: I wasn't out looking for an alternative. Grant was just there. I saw him in a store. RICHIE: And he started talking about another friend of ours. ELLEN: Oh yeah. He asked where this particular guy was, and I said, "He's living in Boston now." And he said, "Oh!" And I said, "Don't you know why he’s living in Boston?" And he said, "No., with those big wide eyes. And 1 said, "He's gay," and he looked shocked, and he said, "Oh, I didn't know that And I said, "Oh, I thought you did. You guys were friends for years; I thought j[ou were gay!" And he said, "Oh, really?" And 1 said, "Oh, yeah." Grant's the type, you know, who wouldn’t say any thing, so I told him that Richie was... RICHIE: That I was bi... ELLEN: Yeah, that you were bi. And he was surprised.

VV-.

...

andScantand(Richie

And he hinted, he said, "Yah, I always wanted... I was always curious, and always wanted to, but never did, never had the nerve to." And I don't know why I said it, but I said, "Would you like to try?" (laughter) And he says, "With Richie?" And I said, "Yup." And his face got all red, and he said, "Yeah," and I said, "You can talk to him first. If you're scared and stuff you don't have to." RICHIK: We talked for a long time. When I started talking to him, I decided that where I was having a good relationship then with Frank, the guy I'd met in the bar, this would be a side... ELLEN: Like dessert... RICHIE: Like dessert. But I was going to let him know that. He's married the same as I am. And Jl wanted him to know what the problems were going to be... I wanted him to know damn sure what he was getting into before we went into bed. ELLEN: He told me after -- and I don't believe him, I think he was scared — I asked him a long time after, "When were you ready?" — and he said, "Oh, the first night I talked with Richie." RED: How did it all come together? Who took the initiative? RICHIE: Ellen talked to him a couple of times, then invited him over. Then one day he called up and he says, "I'm coming over for a cup of coffee." So he Just came over, and Ellen left and went over to the store, and we just sat here for about an hour and talked, and then I saw him probably 10 more times. We went for coffee downtown and things like that. We talked here at night, but he knew every thing. ELLEN: Grant likes adventure and stuff; he has strong tendencies for being gay. RICHIE: He's a very strong sexual person. ELLEN: He's not afraid of trying anything new. He doesn't think it a threat on his mind. RICHIE: But then one night he called up and said, "How about going out for the night?" He called up at a quarter to seven and said, "How about going out for a few beers, a few drinks. I've got the whole night oft — l don't need to come back tonight." So I says, "Sure." He says, "I'll be over in 15 mi nutes." 1 had to move I I had to shower, shave, get dressed. 1 was dead that day! We had just come home, about 5 minutes before. I'd just sat down and Ellen was getting supper. So he came over, and we went out. ELLEN: (.rant said to you, "Ellen really wants you do go out with me, doesn't she?" Did you tell him I was really upset about Frank? RICHIE: Oh yes, he knew. He knew from the beginning that you were upset with Frank. You made that very clear to him. ELLEN: I never lied or left anything out. I told him everything so that nothing popped up later that was a surprise. RICHIE: We started off as a relationship wrong. ELLEN: Like an experiment? RICHIE: Well, it was a practice type thing on his part, where I was having a relationship, and a good one all along, at that time. He knew what was in volved in a relationship. He knew my intimate type things, and he knew about the relationship I was having. ELLEN: You know one thing he is sorry for is that I broke it up with Frank. He wanted you to break it

up. He was never sure after that. RICHIE: He never will be sure. He's jealous of me. ELLEN: I'm not jealous. RICHIE: That got over the first time he went to the bar and met Frank. He got over that. ELLEN: He found that Frank is very sweet. RICHIE: Once he got to know him... It bothered him at first that Frank was very outgoing. He's 100% gay, he is not trying to hide it, he came on kind of heavy for Grant. He got over that. The first time we went out, he was really nervous. It didn't bother him that we were going to have sex. Sex wasn't what bothered him. He was afraid of the caressing and the making out, the lip contact, that's what he was scared of. He didn't know how to handle that. That was the first thing we ended up doing. ELLEN: But he did say — this is what you told me — he did say, "Do you mind if I think of my wife?" RICHIE: Oh, yeah. He was so afraid, he wasn't sure he could concentrate on me. The erection was no problem! Everything was just so natural to him. He just couldn't get over it. RFD (to Ellen): Some people would think that you have the raw deal in a situation like this. ELLEN: You think so? No, because I know if I wanted to, I could end it. If it makes Richie a whole person and makes him happy, that's very little to give up, that's the way I look at it. I know probably a lot of other women would have problems, but they probably have a lot of problems with themselves — this is just my guess, that they feel insecure or jealous for some reason. I know Richie loves me as much as somebody like Richie can love a woman. It isn't all sexual with Richie and I to begin with. RFD: Do you feel free to pursue other sexual rela tionships? ELLEN: Oh yeah, he doesn't mind, I mean I've tried it 3 times. Failure. I guess there's just one par ticular type I like. RICHIE: She can't stand a macho man, that's the whole thing, anyone that's aggressive, and you're not going to find a man who is straight that will allow a woman... ELLEN: I'd rather have my few gay friends, with no sex. RFD: In your business you serve the public, and is that something that's on your mind a whole lot when you figure out how to deal with this sexual stuff? ELLEN: Oh, I'm sure people in town have suspected, long before Grant came along. RICHIE: They would normally assume that, in the type of business that I'm in, that a majority of the guys are gay to start with... ELLEN: Anything artistic, you know... Dbesn't George call you a pansy? (He's a burly 300-pounder.) RICHIE: Yeah... RFD: You don't feel threatened by townspeople? RICHIE: I never even think of it. What can I say? Either they're going to come to me, or they don't. ELLEN: I'd rather the kids didn't hear about it from outsiders. RICHIE: I just don't want it made public. With the type of friends we have, I'm not hiding it from them. And our friends have enough brains, they wouldn't be loose-mouthed, it’s a private thing and if they know and they're involved in it, it's just not going to go any further. I don't think the type of friends that we have would utterly broadcast something like that which is, more or less... They have the feelings, fj) they have their own personal rights...

andtdm

RFD: Do you think the community is tolerant? ELLEN AND RICHIE: No. RICHIE: I don't think they are at all. ELLEN: I think this is the type of community, even if they know, as long as you don't get involved with their kids, do what you want. RICHIE: If you were having a lot of relationships... Especially like me; if I had a lot of guys that were coming in, or if I was having a lot of social activity with a lot of guys, then they would kind of say that, well, he's just going out to see what he can get... ELLEN: I think you're fairly discreet. RICHIE: But where I have no social involvements with anyone, no local type friends or acquaintances that I would be spending time away from the house with... ELLEN: We double date with Grant and Susie... RICHIE: They could think... but there's no way that they could put two and two together that I am having a homosexual relationship with this one or that one. It'll always be that way. They'll never know who... They may think that someone who comes over... RFD (to Ellen): You say you've been very accepting of these developments, but Susie hasn't been? ELLEN: No, I don't really know what her problem is. I think her weight has a lot to do with it. She says it's her mother and stuff. I think she's real ly just possessive of Grant, but it has nothing to do with him and Richie, not really, because she says that doesn't bother her. That's why I thought it would be a good idea if maybe for a while we didn't double date and stuff, if the problem is she can't stand to have anyone touch Grant. I can live with out it. Richie and Grant can still be together. RFD: For a while, were all three of you having sex ual relations with Grant? ELLEN: Oh yeah. RFD: Is that still happening? ELLEN: Grant, Richie and I used to have threesomes. RICHIE: But Susie didn't know about the threesomes. ELLEN: She knows Grant comes over here to have sex, and one day she said to Grant, "How come Richie never comes over here to have sex, like you do over at his house?" Grant, I think, didn't give her an answer, but I can answer that, because I know Susie well enough. She's the type that rather than leave them alone, or just be curious in a loving way, she'd say, "Does he give you a better blow job than me? Do you like kissing him better than me?" She puts him through hell. RICHIE: They have no control over those kids, and you never know when the kids are going to come into the bedroom. ELLEN: I think it would be a shock for the kids to see their father in bed with his best friend. RICHIE: You don't have as much privacy even though their house is three times the size of this. ELLEN: Susie indirectly I guess isn't tolerant of the whole thing. RFD: What about her relationship with you? What's that like? ELLEN: At different times, she really likes me, feels close to me. It depends on how I react to Grant when we're out. She feels free to make out with Richie and stuff, but I like to be real careful about what I do with Grant in front of her. We just end up hugging. When I kiss him in front of her, I feel inhibited. But I understand, she feels jealous. We're friendly, but...

RFD: You've had some sexual contact with Susie... ELLEN: Yeah, one-sided. Got to keep her happy. There's something wrong, I don't get what it is. She's inhibited for some reason. Grant tries what he thinks she wants. She'll give him a lot of sex, and then he'll do it vaginally and rectally to her, and he says, by then, if she isn't turned on by all that, he says, "I give up." He's dead after coming three times. Then she expects him to turn around after all this and do stuff to her. I asked her once, "Don't you get excited giving him a blow job?" And she said, "Not really." So that's where the problem lies. RICHIE: She gets horny. But it's a level thing. RFD (to Ellen): But you bring her off? ELLEN: Yeah. RICHIE: She's afraid of that. She's afraid of her own feelings. It's only in the last 2 or 3 months that she's capable, now, of masturbation on her part. She can masturbate herself, just like that.' And come just like that.' But Grant can give her oral sex, and have intercourse 3 or A times, and finger her, and do anything for 2 or 3 hours, and she don't even get close to coming. ELLEN: But you know when I give it to her with my hand, I just lay beside her and Just talk to her softly, and I say, "Just pretend you're not even gonna have a climax, don't even think about it, and if it doesn't happen, don't worry about it." And then she said something, she says, "l always feel rushed with Grant." You know, I wouldn't put Richie through the torment of doing oral sex on me for A5 minutes or anything. If I know I'm close, we Just go in a 69 position and do it like that. RFD: Do you feel you have a long-term commitment to being here, in this place, with each other, and the kids, and the business? ELLEN AND RICHIE: Oh, yeah. RICHIE: Definitely. We have no intentions of chang ing. If this doesn't work out with Grant and Susie, I have no idea what will be going on sexually after that, with someone new. I do know that I would never go out with a married man again. ELLEN: He told that to Grant, too. RICHIE: I don't want that hassle of worrying about what his wife thinks about it... ELLEN: Now you know what Frank went through.' RICHIE: So I would go for a gay guy, and whether Ellen can handle that is a whole other problem. ELLEN: That's a whole other ball game for me, then. I'll eventually adjust. How do I know the next gay person he meets isn't going to say, "Don't kid yourself, Richie, you’re more gay than straight?" Richie and I know that, and he's adjusted to being with me, but I don't know how long another gay person... they'd want Richie all to themselves. But I know Richie well enough. He isn't going to give up his family, kids and the business. That means more to him. He's not a highly sexual person. See, now, Grant is, and I don't know if it breaks up what Grant would do. I'm just guessing, but if this broke up, the impression I get from Grant is he would probably never go back to Richie, but he would lay down the law that Susie's not going to be pos sessive — man or woman or what — but he would lay down the law. RICHIE: I really don't think that he'd stay married to her. The relationship could end with me, but I don't think that he'd stay married. He may stay

with her, but if he does, she's going to live in hell, because he's going to sulk the rest of his life. ELLEN: He'd be very indifferent. RICHIE: You can live with someone and be very polite and get along, but be very indifferent. RFD: Let's talk a little more about your marriage. To what extent do you feel that your marriage is traditional, or not traditional, aside from the sex? RICHIE: It's not traditional at all. ELLEN: I think we're doing everything backwards, according to everybody else. But it's working for us. RICHIE: See, I'm passive and she's aggressive, both sexually and otherwise. Even when it comes to col lecting bills. ELLEN: Yeah, I have to be the aggressive one. I don't mind. I am father and mother to the kids. RICHIE: Yeah, because I don't want any responsibili ty. I have so much responsibility... ELLEN: He does, though... RICHIE: I've got the business, totally, from begin ning to end. I have the house, responsibility for maintaining the house — the cleaning, the food, the bills, everything... ELLEN: What food? RICHIE: Well, you do the shopping now, only in the last year, but up until then I've always done all the food shopping... ELLEN: I don't like to socialize in the stores... I'm not crazy about women... RICHIE: ... and clothing, I've bought most of my own clothing. And child-raising — I took care of the kids before they went to school. I spent most of Che time. ELLEN: I'm probably better equipped to raise the boys than you are because I was raised as a little boy. Every time my mother looked at me she said, "God I wish I had a boy!" So she dressed me in boys' clothes and had a boys' haircut. I didn't mind. RFD: But you never thought you might be a lesbian? ELLEN: No. I don't think I have any desires. Maybe it's because of Susie. Maybe with the right one. But I like men. I really do. RFD: Let me ask you something again about the town. You've been living in this town how long? RICHIE: Twelve years. RFD: Do you feel like you're outsiders here? ELLEN AND RICHIE: Oh yeah. RFD: Just because you weren't bora here? ELLEN: The people make you feel that way. They’re real cliquey. RFD: Don't you think that people like us, who are sort of like hippies, are more outsiders than you are? RICHIE: You may be considered more outsiders, but to us... ELLEN: It's the modern generation that we'd like to be... You know I've seen a lot of people my age that are like 50 years old, you know, it's... RICHIE: People 35, 36, are old, they're old people, they've settled down into a groove, they don't have any life, they get fat, they're content to be sitting home having a few beers... ELLEN: They don't go disco dancing... RICHIE: They have no goals in life, they've lost their goals. RFD: But you're active in the community... ELLEN: In the Conservation Commission... RICHIE: But other than that, I don’t want to get

involved...because to get involved means I have to give up work time and all the hours that I would have for myself. ELLEN: I'm not tolerant of people, I guess that's my big problem. I'm not perfect, but I think that other people shouldn't be openly two-faced, and I went to join one of the clubs and I found a lot of the women -^ to be like that. I don't know if it's just the women. The men tend to be that way, too. I like real people. RICHIE: Once you get involved socially, everything has to be done for the social aspect. In fact, the only way you're going to get business is socially, once you start to go into it, your whole life is run, is changed, you have to run your life, your personal life and everything, to go along with the business and how you're going to survive businesswise. RFD: In other words, much of the business community, without it being obvious, bands together on the basis of a heterosexual lifestyle. If you ran your business in a more normal fashion, then you’d have to run your marriage in a more normal fashion. RICHIE: Oh yes, it would change our complete life. ELLEN: And everyone would know our business. Every one would know who we were going out with, and they'd question it. RFD: What about people like your more openly gay friends? Have you ever had any apprehension that people would associate you with them? ELLEN: I don't think about it. RICHIE: I never think about it and really don't care. Our personal friends are our business. If you don't like who our friends are, that's your tough shit. I have a right to have my own friends, whether they're straight, gay, or anything. ELLEN: Our neighbor across the street always speaks highly of all the Cherry Hill people. RICHIE: Oh yeah, she knows you're all gay. RFD: How does she know that? RICHIE: She knows Bill, Sam, Ralph. ELLEN: She asked me. She says, about Sam, "He acts a little gay to me. He acts like he might be homosexual." That was a long time ago. I won't give the information, but I won't deny it if some body says something. I don't think of it as some thing to be ashamed of. RFD: This is just hypothetical: let's say Willie and I started a gay organization in this area, with re gular meetings and so on. Do you think there'd be any hostility? ELLEN: I really think so. RICHIE: I think this area is so tight... ELLEN: Even though my psychiatrist at the mental health center said there's a lot of gays in this area, he assumed that they're all closety. RICHIE: You would have to do it as a friendship type of thing. RFD: You could do, for example, a Mt. Wilson Area Gay Organization? With meetings announced in the local newspaper? RICHIE: No, you couldn't get away with that. ELLEN: There'd be a lot of hard feelings. RICHIE: I think a lot of people would be afraid. RFD: You think it'd be the wrong thing to do? ELLEN AND RICHIE: Yeah. RICHIE: I think you'd have to do it with a social group. Just from word of mouth. 42, ELLEN: I get the feeling that people are uptight.

widdMiieandibuhu Look at our friend in Smithville, Richie; we were going to Mapletown one night and he saw "Gay Rights" written on the overpass, and he says, "Look at that!" and I said, "Yeah, they shouldn't deface public property," or something. I just let it pass. And he's our age. He's younger than us. And I thought, "Gee, I always think everybody accepts everybody." That's from his parents, and his parents are... RICHIE: Very straight. RFD: But the local state rep voted for the gay rights bill, and I never heard anybody criticize him for that. RICHIE: No, I don't think they would, but I think they would figure that he would have his own personal reasons for it, figuring that it wouldn t affect us up in this area. ELLEN: I think someone like our rep would want it started somewhere else, let somebody else get it going, and I'm for it...but not here yet... RFD: Do you think a lot of people here are tolerant of homosexuals as long as they're in Boston and New York, but they don't want them around here... RICHIE: I think they know that they're around, but it's something that's unsaid. If I don't openly say that they’re around here, even though I know this one's gay, or that one's gay... if I just kind of forget it, it's not going to go any fur ther. It’s either going to disappear or it's just something that won't ever be talked about. RFD: Do either of you have second guesses about your marriage and the choices you've made? ELLEN: If I had it to do over again, I'd either not get married, or I'd marry somebody like Richie. If it happened that he was gay, that's what I want, I guess. RICHIE: If I had a choice, I would have to go back all the way to 14. If I knew what I know now at 14... ELLEN: You might not have gotten married. RICHIE: I might not have gotten married; I might have lived a completely different lifestyle. ELLEN: Remember, that means giving up kids. RICHIE: Oh yeah. ELLEN: Your mother! Your mother! RICHIE: Oh, yes, but I would have moved away and everything, but it's something I would have had to decide back when I was 14, and if I'd made no commitments and was young enough, I could have possibly...if that’s what I wanted. But I would have changed my whole life. RFD: One of the things that concerns me is the kids in the towns around here who are 14 and who have no real information about sexuality, especially gay sexuality. And I wonder, what can I as a gay person do in this community to reach those people? And I sometimes feel like I'm not doing enough, like I'm too cowardly. ELLEN: I think it would cause a lot of hard feel ings. It's going to be a nationwide thing that's going to have to happen gradually. RICHIE: I think the regular news media and the books around, and the openness of the kids now... either they'll try it on their own, a lot of them will remain in the closet, and a lot of them will figure... ELLEN: Maybe I'm just prejudiced, but I really think it's going to be the influence of married gays, successfully married ga^ys, where the other partner allows the gay person to go out, within

reason, that influence on the kids being brought up. They can go either way. Now, my 13-year-old says, "I'm going to be straight. I like little girls." I said, "Why? Is gay bad?" and he says, "No, I guess I just like little girls." RFD: He feels like he has the choice. RICHIE: He knows he has a choice; he knows there's different lifestyles. RFD: That's something that you wanted him to know. ELLEN AND RICHIE: Oh yes. RICHIE: Definitely. As the gays organize them selves nationally, like in Boston, and it's in the newspapers, and the government itself is fighting for gay rights, the kids themselves will decide on their own. In the cities, you can get away... RFD: So you think any organized effort wouldn't work in this area. RICHIE: Not in this area. It's too small. ELLEN: I think it would hurt the gays that are already here. I really do. That's my opinion. RICHIE: If it was out in the public, you'd get into trouble. The people that would go to the group meetings, or something like that... everybody would be eyeing and looking, and saying, "He's gay, 1 wouldn't trust him..." ELLEN: My impression is that people accept you the way you are, and if, say, I know you're gay, and I'm a straight person and I'm uptight and stuff, I think as long as you didn't broadcast to the whole world and make hard feelings and stuff, I think they wouldn't mind knowing that you are, but if there were organizations... RFD: How has your own personal sex life changed since Richie has been more out? ELLEN: A lot! RICHIE: Oh it's definitely changed in the last year. Privately, we have more sex together now chan we had for 12 years. We enjoy sex with one another. We’re beginning to open our feelings more, because we talk about our own relationships with other people, sexually and everything, what our preferences are. ELLEN: We talk to each other. RICHIE: It brings back that we’re not a normal husband and wife, it's almost a reverse role-play ing, so we're reversed on everything. ELLEN: You enjoy sex more now? RICHIE: Oh yes. ELLEN: Because with everybody else, it's missionary position, fondle the breasts, and all that stuff, and the man kisses the woman — and we did that for 10 years and neither of us really enjoyed sex un til I found out, through trial and error, what he likes. I don't like to be touched as much as he does, but he likes to be completely passive. RICHIE: Smoking grass makes a difference. That's when we first started changing our life — we'd get stoned and we'd sit in bed and we'd talk for 3 hours. ELLEN: One joint between us! We started out to have sex, and we... RFD: Were we the first people to give you grass? RICHIE: Oh yes. RFD: We didn't say anything about sex when we turned you on? RICHIE: Oh no. We discovered sex after we tried grass. We tried grass and we ended up really enjoy ing ourselves, and we started talking, and we went into these books... Our private life after work was

always in bed. We did our reading, our talking, our resting, everything was done in bed with the TV at the bottom of the bed. ELLEN: It made sex very easy, very accessible. RICHIE: After working 12 to 15 hours, that was the easiest place. The house was too small. We en joyed smoking grass, we got wrecked, then sex came into it. ELLEN: You're a lot less inhibited... RICHIE: ... now, than I ever was. ELLEN: With or without the grass. RICHIE: Well, it took me 22 years to decide... ELLEN: Do you think that had anything to do with your telling me. It isn't a dark secret that's always in the back of your mind... RICHIE: No. Now that I've decided that I'm basical ly gay myseif, and you know about it, if I decide that I find somebody sexually attractive, it's not that I want to go to bed with them, but I can go, even if you get upset that it's not the person you like, I can at least have the freedom to do it at least one time. RFD (to Ellen): You don't get sexually frustrated in this relationship? Do you still get satisfied? ELLEN: I get so excited, almost to the point of climax, just doing everything to him without any physical stimulation to me, so at the end, I just flip him over and do 69 or just say one little key thing... RICHIE: And then we have intercourse, and it goes along. Still, basically, I'm not that aggressive. RED: Any final word for the people out there? RICHIE: Smoke grass... ELLEN: Don't let your mind work overtime on the things you do. RICHIE: Don't try to analyze what you're doing. If you analyze you screw up yourself.

Centra! Vermont Group Formed MONTPELIER, VT. — A new gay group has been formed and is meeting weekly in Central Vermont. The goals of the group are to serve as a support group for gay persons in the area, and to become political ly active in the area of gay rights. Membership is open to all lesbians and gay men. For additional information, write to Washington County Gays, P.0. Box 1264, Montpelier VT 05602.

DIRTY TALK' MALEBOX NEWS! Each month Malebox News brings its 50,000 single copy purchasers the hottest selection of noncoded personal ads, exclusive entertainment features, and explicit fiction. A 40-word personal ad is S5. Dirty talk is encouraged; direct addresses only. Run your phone and photo for $1 more. Send us your ad, or send $2 for the current 32-page issue, mailed first class in a plain brown wrapper. Do it! Malebox News, 4741 N. Magnolia Ave., Chicago IL 60640

Back Issues

You can help RFD and improve your library by ordering back issues. Cost: $1.50 each, except for current calender year, which cost $2 each, postpaid. All orders must be pre-paid. The following issues are available (with a brief summary of contents): #2 — Tarot, children, NW men's conference, Iowa, fruit orchard, songs, dance, Elwha #3 — New Sodom, slab art, stories, poems, recipes and a "morality play" #5 — sexual tension, NW faggots gathering, dome, shit, yurt, poems, Henry Hay on consciousness #6 — collective kitchen, kids, commune odyssey, fable, poems (last issue produced in Iowa) #7 — Butterworth Farm, gardening with astrology and divas, recipe for a small cabin If8 — Wolf Creek tape, buying land, RFD survey If9 — recipes, bulb forcing, high school reunion, saving forestland (struggle with Bureau of Land Management), Brender a Brandis engravings If10 — goat dairy, factory work, plant nursery, prisoners, Mother Earth News "11 — machines, cars, cooking, "The Sled," Wolf Creek journal. #13 — aging, shiatsu, Robert Francis the poet #14 — photography, visual issue, Men Against Sexism , calendar #15 — small town issue, the baths, lots of poetry, looking for Wolf Creek #16 — issue about women #17 — southern celebrations, Allan's journal on Hayesville, N.C. and other places, Twin Oaks #18 — Tsusiat Point, Sissie statements, Witchcraft and the Counter Culture, lunar calendar, herbs #19 — replies to sissies If20 — Native Americans, nuclear realities, RFD poster, black lesbian prisoner, long hair, antique dealing Note: In back issues of RFD, there is an ad from some folks putting out RFD patches and T-shirts. Unfortunately, they are out of business, so don't place any orders.

K FB

SURVEY The survey of rural gay men that follows was compiled mostly to find answers to a simple question: How do rural gay men survive, economically and socially, in the country? Being a reader of RFD since its inception, I have come to the conclusion that there are generally 3 types of RFD readers. First, there are the city people thinking about or fantasizing about living in the country. Second, there are rural gay men, like myself, who are out there atone, or with a lover or a friend. Third, there are rural gay men who are in a commune or in a small town where there are a number of gays (tike Wolf Creek, Oregon), and also those rural gays who are into a heavy political trip, such as butch vs. sissieism. Over the years, and especially of late, RFD has concerned itself with the political/sissie types. Most of the articles in the magazine have not been relevant to those of us out there realty struggling. So that's why the survey happened. I did it all myself. The survey was sent to 108 gay men whose names were in RFD between June 1976 and Summer 1978. They were sent only to people in the boonies or in small towns under 10,000 population (an atlas was checked). Only 8 came back with address unknown. That left 100. Of the 100, 57 came back with responses, which is a damned high figure.

5 have a three-way lover situation, or have a lover and an additional gay friend 2 live in a mixed commune (and are the only gays there) 2 live with a female wife 6 live in a situation that war, so confusing 1 could not categorize or understand it

Geographical distribution and percentage returned: 7 returned of 27 sent in California 8 returned of 14 sent to Ore.-Wash. 9 returned of 13 sent to other West 7 returned of 12 sent to Central 13 returned of 18 sent to Northeast 12 returned of 17 sent to Southern

— — — — — —

33% 57% 69% 58% 72% 71%

The people were also asked how many gay male neighbors they have within a distance of 10 miles, and these were the responses:

The two major questions were about economic and social survival. These compilations are based on 50 responses, since some of those replying moved back to the city. The following breakdown concerns economic survival and self-sufficiency.

23 have no gay male neighbors within 10 miles 14 have a few (1-4) gay male neighbors 8 have 5-10 gay male neighbors 8 have a dozen or more gay male neighbors

15 people work a 40-hour week non-agricultural job. They derive no income from either crops or animals.

For many people, closeness to a city is a factor, and a question was asked determining distance from a city.

10 people have odd jobs to support themselves, and they also derive no income from farming.

18 live within an hour's drive of a big city 14 live within 1-2 hour's drive of a city 10 said it would take 2-4 hours to get to a city 3 live more than 200 miles from a gay bar or city

12 people are struggling to become self-sufficient. They do odd jobs and derive some income from crops or animals.

Commenting on their social situation, those who live alone offered some poignant comments:

13 people are self-sufficient for the most part. They derive their income from the land, from crops or animals or by-products, such as crafts.

"mostly do without, which is difficult sometimes.” "talk to self, talk to birds and animals" "it's depressing being all alone" "I've had no social life since moving here" "I'm primarily celibate" "have few gay contacts, not into city games "I'm not surviving real well" "I'm losing my grip on sanity being alone"

As for social survival and gay male support systems, here is the breakdown of the 50 men: 20 are completely alone on their land 9 are alone but have straights living on their land or in their household 8 live with a lover, but have no other gay support

My comment: somehow those of us out there alone, or with just one other person, do manage

to survive. But it ain't easy. None of the people who responded live in a Wolf Creek situation, with a large gay community. Another question concerned openness about being gay. The question of wearing a dress in town did not seem to be relevant: 14 people are upfront to most people in their area 18 people only tell a few people that they are gay (usually counter-culture people, "hippies") 15 people say no one knows, that they would tell no one 3 people had no comment It was also of great interest to me a year ago whether people had electricity or not. At that time, I lived without electricity, though now I do have power.

While visiting friends at their Wisconsin farm, I pored over the past issues of RFD with mounting wonder. The love, talent, and pain expressed in your pages has been wondrous. I am excited by you, often angered by you, many times challenged by you, always drawn to you. Thanks. I'd like to correspond with some realistic per sons currently engaged in rural commune / communitybuilding, or seriously contemplating such activity. I've experience with making clothing (sewing), em broidery, organic gardening, herbcrafting, and cook ery. I'd also like to swap recipes for using herbs f°r fragrance, flavor, and cosmetics; I'm a published writer and planning an herbal. Rand Lee 6261 Clemens Ave., #3E University City MO 63130 (314) 721-7732

40 have electricity 2 use a generator 2 use a battery for partial power 5 have no electricity at all For $10, mostly xeroxing costs, I will send complete copies of all the replies. —

Steve Ginsburg

out there I know there must he some guy who would like to get it together with me in order to establish a good home for both of us in the country. Objective is to claim independence by governing our food, and energy supplies as well as establishing a loving, lasting^ relationship. I am a white man in his 40's who would like to contact anyone over 30 who sincerely would like to establish a country home. Pursuits are writing and painting. Am published in the juvenile and textoook j i e l d s . Hobbies are sailing and gardening. Have had some experience with rural living as well as urban living and really cop out on the urban scene. I promise you nothing except sincerity and security. You can reciprocate with honesty and xntelligence. Love and Peace, John Pettibone PO Box 253 Portage OH 43451 I am a semi-rural faggot who lives in the city, gardens in the country — and practically the only political gay man on this island in the Pacific (Vancouver Island). I was raised in Andover, Mass., until age 6, and remember many a fine Cape Cod sunnier, with puffer fish between my toes and stings from jelly fish but I have changed coasts for the needs I have now. Autumn back East is a treasured sensation, brooks filling with leaves, sky of mackerel scales — how lucky you are.' Hoping the smell and taste come through the issue you present.

John Tomlinson 3024 Carroll St. Victoria, BC, Canada

HARVEST by Thomas H. Gough

JULY 4, 19 79

"Nothing will grow there!" the old woman told you. "It's a waste of seed! No good can come ot it!"

love

the

way

the

and

the

lightning

sneaks

You fled before the weight of those white hairs; that voice, quavering, but no less certain than Moses'; that wrinkled jaw as set as oak rooted in stone.

right

and

Gary

Thomas H. Gough 125 Abbeyville Rd., Apt. C-6 Pittsburgh, PA 15228

The Cleaning Man

The man I'm in love with new Cleans for a living.

back

the

booms

hell

He goes

To the lake each morning With his brushes, scrubbing The turtle plates til you can read Their ages, and the whorly snailshells, so small Are the voices they talk in As he polishes, careful To be polite.

R. Drake PO Box 41 Berea, OH 44017

always

sometimes

Gilman

over

never

leave

chase

around,

Thunderstorms They

I coaxed. We stole into the field one moonless night; you entrusted your seeds to me. I cherished, sunned and greened them, and we proved that old woman wrong. Love has grown here: whole bouquets and bushels of it! Crop enough to nourish us still when we grew white and fallow.

thunderstorms.

far

zaps

the

last

love the

ahead

the

across

the

storm

thunder

mountains.

long.

you with

rainbow.

crackles

the

eaves

dripping

sky,

VISITORS’ REPORT We live in the city but for a long time have wanted to move to the country. Until last year, however, we did not believe that, as gays, we could even do it. Then we saw an ad in a gay publication invi ting gays to visit a farm in Massachusetts. The very fact that gays were living in the country showed that living there was at least a possibi lity for us, too. So we went for a one-week visit in 1978. While we knew in advance there would be no electri city, it was another thing to actually live without it. Also, getting used to the outhouse was not easy — in fact, one of us had to visit a neigh bor to use the "facilities." There were, of course, many compensations — knowing that it is possible to live quite adequately and happilv without being hooked up to the electric company. A number of things impressed us. First of all that it was possible to live a simpler, less consumer-oriented life (although some gays in the area, originally correct "back-to-the-landers" have proved since then that one can get as caught up in the countryside as in the city on material acquisition and possession). We also found that gays could and did live in the country without being isolated from either other gays or liberal (or open-minded) non-gays. In fact, Allen, Buddy and Denis have many more friends than we do in the city.' Unique perhaps to Butterworth Farm is that we found gays were living together in one space and, after a great deal of struggle, were sharing a rural life together, and caring f°r each other —— a real family. (For us, and we are sure for so many other gays, our "blood" relations do not play a relevant role in our lives.) We would not be amiss in calling Butterworth Farm a truly revolutionary experiment, where work is often play, where real progress is being made to avoid power relationships, where one can do what one feels like doing to help the farm grow. Lest all readers of RFD break down the door at Butterworth Farm, we should point out that it took us almost the entire week to adjust to the much slower pace (we are from New York City.'). Also, perhaps, Butterworth Farm is not for us, as a permanent home, because of the lack of structure to which we might never be able to adjust. We also feel we lack now the selfdiscipline necessary for the (at times) hard work of homesteading (i.e., especially if you have to start from scratch). But we came back in 1979 for another visit, both because we got to love the brothers at Butterworth Farm, and to get a booster shot of the "good life" — again we felt like Fresh Air Kids in the country. (However, the kitchen was still very dirty and the bugs were really vicious.) While we cannot leave the city at this time, it is important that Butterworth Farm is a reality and that it exists as an inspiration to us. Meanwhile, we tend our backyard city garden and are busy fighting the squash bugs and other pests. Israel and Carl

ISRAEL AND CARL

...AND A RESPONSE Booing visitors is one of the pleasures of country living. It's a way of sharing, and a way of countering some of the isolation and loneliness —— matter how busy we may be with our many local friends. We ask our visitors to help, and Carl and Israel, for example, did various tasks from weeding strawberries to carrying fire wood. As for our kitchen being dirty, let me just say that it's a matter of opinion. Carl and Israel's concept of hygiene and order is not for mel (Concepts of cleanliness can, of course. really divide people, but we didn't argue.) 1 'm bothered by the myth-making that is implied in the letter. I d o n ’t feel anyone can know what is or is not n.revolutionary." Else where in this issue of RFD, there are references to 9ay communes. I'm not sure there are any communes left, and if there are, they are very few in number. Butterworth Farm started out as a ccmrnme or a community, but I don't think that label applies any more. There are four houses at Butterworth Farm. One house is vacant; its owner plans to use it as a second home. The Peak House is lived in by Bob and Jerry, who work as self-employed carpenters. The big house is lived in by Art and John, who work in their real estate business. The octagon is home for three of us — me, Buddy and Denis — and though we try to function cooperatively, it isn 't really a corrmune. Each house at Butterworth Farm is owned by a single individual. There is a 44-acre parcel that is owned jointly by the four people, but that parcel is just woods (and a brook). We do not have communal gardens or any communal projects. We are friends and neighbors; our re lationships vary in intensity and closeness. At this point, I feel that Butterworth Farm is a place, but I don't feel that it is a thing or a concept any longer. RFD readers who read

CRAIG

about Butterworth Farm in issue #7 will see that this evolution makes sense. I, for one, experienced some disappointment, but I have adjusted. On the other hand, it feels good to read Carl and Israel ’s supportive comments about our efforts at the Octagon House. It helps for us to be reminded of the fact that our efforts mag in the end be something special. On a day-to-day "basis, however, we are mostly aware of the mundane things and not the principles that may in fact guide us. At some point in our evolution, we discovered that we had in corrmon only this: that we are gay men who want to live in the country. That alone is the basis of our unity — it may be a lot, it may be a little, but it is true in any case. —

Celibate woodcutter — stop the woodstove's flue, the pump, the garden's rows of fingerlings and come to town with me! Abandon cabbages and apples cellared for the winter that's ahead of you. Strip shirt and shirt beneath that flannel shirt quick; out of jeans and longjohns; into shower to soap and frolic in that dreamy water's steaming; into bed of flowered city sheets where there's no thorn but mine to prick. It's not my mouth on yours you fear but yours on mine; you flinch at touch of hand of love. Well— stay there, black.fly-bitten, sweating; prove yourself in woods, in shop, in garden's furrows. Prime your pump alone in that mean, rural kitchen.

Allen Young

—

Bob Ames

' OCTAGON HOUSE

WomanMade Products WEST HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — WomanMade Products began in the summer of as a lesbian/feminist owned and operated silk screening business. For a catalog showing their big selection of T-shirts, bumper stickers, etc., send a business-size self-addressed stamped envelope to them at Woodfield Road, West Hempstead

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374

Faggots Are Fantastic

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SAN FRANCISCO — We can’t tell if this card is meant to be purchased by outrageous faggots or by yahoo tourists to send home for yuk-yuks. But it's worth checking out; for a sample copy of the "Faggots are Fantastic" color postcard, send and a self-addressed stamped envelope to the publish er, Daniel Nicoletta, Ashbury St., San Fran cisco CA Cards are priced at each plus postage.

SASKATOON, SASK. — A "truly collective experience" is planned to take place here Oct. 6-8. The event is M E T A M O R P H O S I S '79, a celebration of lesbians and gay men. "We invite brothers and sisters from all over the continent--- If you sing, dance,

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Cornin' home from the Fair for Jim Eaby

cornin' home from the fair today by way of Greyhound I had a beer in the Coachroom that bar next door to the bus depot where you had a couple last summer waiting for me to drive in to get you I thought of your cowboy ways the fierce loyalty to your own truth of our love making always spontaneous natural and satisfying: for 6 years - once or twice a year one time a two year period didn't see us together refusing to define yourself as faggot or even gay insisting on bisexual the time in the City when we fucked on the living room floor while my lover was at work (he knew without being told) you spent most of that night in the S.F. bus depot miserable and cold last summer 1 hurt you don't know what to say no hard feelings honey none of us loved the best we all tried

For My Nuclear Family

Will Ballard Box 104 Guernewood Pk., Ca. 95446 Mama, 1 could have been Just as happy to have a family As you and Daddy Were proud to have me. I miss the flower of his manhood growing gently at my side,

And I think to myself When I see my sister's son â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

the tendrils weaving round me slowly, slowly, like the tide.

He could've been mine: Were I not this black sheep running.

I miss the tangle of his foliage; his nectar with the dew.

As it is, when 1 see his Daddy, I think how he could have been mine too. So Mama, just let me be

How sweet t'would be to be with him before this night is through.

The kind of man I am: What else is there to do?

Bruce Penrose Rte. #2 Potsdam, N.Y. 13676

Michael Mason 19 MAY 79

SN A PSH O TS

Organizing Campesinos

An Interview With Julio Coreno

The brush and fields along the highway change from nearly green to green as you drive south from Austin to the Rio Grande Valley in April. The mesquite becomes thicker. The houses change, too, from plain symmetry and neatness in the north to richer florid schanes, less modest color, and a kind of hitnan prevalence in the south. And poverty reveals itself in poorer sides of towns as unadorned human prevalence over neatness of lawns and rigid archi tectural geometry. The valley, by one measure, is not poor. Hi dalgo County, whose southern limit is the Mexican border, is the richest agricultural county in Tex as, the second richest in the nation. In its fertile soil grow orange trees, grapefruit, and countless types of vegetables, enough to feed millions and enough to make men richer. For it's by the measure of rieh men that Hidalgo is rich. Like corporate feudal lords, they gather fortunes while seated in plush ahairs at polislied desks, far removed from the soil, the sun, and the growing plants. But fortunes in carrots and onions need more than clever business deals, a warm climate, and great holdings of fertile land. What's needed too are abundant human hands to cultivate and pick and to do so cheaply. By the measure of the 70,000 agricultural workers who live there, Hidalgo is one of the poorest counties in the nation. There are efforts to build a union. With few resources behind their own determination, a group °f farmworkers has been trying to change the legacy of centuries by organizing strikes and marches. The Texas Farmworkers Union, La Union de Campesinos de Texas, recently organized a strike in the onion fields, where workers previously earned less than a dollar an hour at 35$ per sack of onions. In 1977 they marched 1,500 miles from their headquarters in San Juan, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to speak to • Jimmy Carter. Carter's refusal to listen was no major blow to people who had been run over, shot, and jailed for their efforts. An openly gay man is in the thick of the union's struggle. Small and dark, with Indian features and a recent permanent, Julio Coreno 's effeminacy is one with his strength and determina tion. Being a campesino, a farmworker, is more his life than his occupation, as it was the life of his parents and his grandparents. Born in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, he has never been to school and speaks no Englxsh. He is articulate and sensitive on the subject of his life as a campesino and his union, which was the subject of the interview Enrique Ixwpez and I held with him at his home in Mercedes, Texas, on the eastern edge of Hidalgo County. Although deeply political, Julio's community has not yet politicized the subject of homosexuality. One measure of gay oppression in that community is that Julio himself has not politicized his homosexu ality. He has not taken the first step toward his liberation as a gay men, that of recognizing his own oppression. He was thus reluctant to discuss his homosexuality in a political interview. 52

Julio 's openness about being gay is of course at cost. In contrast to masculine and bisexual men xn his culture, whose social and sexual masculinity preclude their being considered gay, he has accept ed the traditional role of the joto, the effeminate gay man, a role Similar to that of women in its limits and degradation but without the near deifica tion that accompanies the limits and degradation of women. Like strong and active women in the union, Julio is respected for his efforts. But he is re spected because his inferior status has moved him to make a greater effort. He is respected in spite of being gay, not because of it. . ^ e realm of ideology, there is diversity within the Texas Fccprrtwovhevs Union and some ppotrti— nent union organizers represent political organi zations whose position on the gay question is quite reactionary. By the purely orthodox and obviously false reasoning of those organizations, Julio's homosexuality would be ascribed to "bourgeois decadence." Thus lesbians and gay men wishing to support the cause of the farmworkers in Texas are faced with a serious dilemma that has re curred often in the history of the gay struggle. And thus the difficulty of Julio Corefio's position is compounded. — David Morris DAVID MORRIS: How much money do farmworkers make here in the valley? JULIO CORENO: You can't make money here, the sala ries are very low. We never work 40 hours a week, much less overtime, because they don't want to pay time and a half. DM: In other jobs it's only the father that works, but here in the harvests isn't it true that the whole family works, usually? JC: Everyone always works, the father, the mother, the children, everyone. They have to take them to work because you can't earn enough pay to be able to say, well, I'll be the only one to work. DM: So the children don't go to school, or they go only when they can? JC: The way we were raised, our parents didn't send us to school because there weren't any schools on the ranches, there was nothing, and even when the government started putting schools on the ranches, parents didn't send their children. Who could send their children to school? It was better to have them driving the oxen or with the team, work ing the soil, bringing firewood, bringing hay for the donkeys, taking care of the goats or the pigs, or this or that. They would say that the schools were a thing of the devil. Now when there are classes, when the schools are open, the children don't go to work. But when they get out of school, and they get out at 3 or 4 o'clock, from there their parents take them in their pickups, they take them to gather this or gather that, to work at this or work at that. That's why during school hours there are no children at work. Nevertheless, there are a few because the pa rents lie to the teachers, they tell them they are sick. They also take them to work on Saturdays and Sundays if there is work to be done in the fields, and when there are no classes, since classes are over in May; then all the children go to work, little kids and big ones, I4-, 15-, 16-, 18-yearolds, 10-year-olds. And babies, the mothers take their babies, too, because, well, they have to take

in South Texas them along because they don’t make enough money. Who would take care of them? So they're there with their bottles, in the sun, in the wind, exposed to poisons from the work, to insecticides. All that's very dan gerous. DM: So, if the kids don't learn anything else, they are going to spend their lives working in the fields, in the harvests? JC; Well, at most they finish high school, but most stay to work in the fields, mainly because there has to be a oampesino work force. It can't end. If all the food is produced by the oampesinos, everything that the lower classes eat and the upper classes, and all the communities, everyone, educated and not educated, everything that all those people eat, all of it is produced by the campesinos. So oampesinos have to exist anyway, because if we're all going to be educated, and the government wants us all to go to school, then what are all those educated people going to do? Where are you going to put them? DM: But all of this about technology. They say all of the work is going to be done by machines in the future. So what's going to happen to the oampesinosl JC: Well, yes, exactly. But it's the oampesinos who run the machines. DM: Yes, but not as many workers will be needed. JC: Yes, I know not as many workers will be needed. DM: So, are most of the farmworkers going to be un employed? JC: Yes, naturally. Unemployed. One machine does what it takes hundreds of workers to do. But many people have told us that: they've said to us, since the government has so many programs why don t we go to school instead of going around — what they mean is going around like troublemakers or like agitators. So, why are we struggling? I tell them, if that were enough to end all the exploitation, if there wouldn't be any more exploited oampesinos , well, I d go to school, so that all the exploitation would end and so the boss would respect our opinions. But if I go to school and nevertheless there is still ex ploitation for hundreds and hundreds who are out in the fields, then what good does it do for me to go to school? Because exploitation isn't going to end just because you go to school. They won't give you the right to... They won't respect your opinion. Only what they say goes. And that's it, isn't it? Because I can't say I don't like this work, or that'8 not the way the work is, or that's not the right way you’re doing it, or the way you ordered it isn't right, can I? Just the way they say, that's the way it is. For example, in many states they've done away with the short hoe. ENRIQUE LOPEZ: And in Texas? Can they use the short hoe? JC: They've got us bowed down, and really bowed down, because if the boss comes to the field and we're not bent over we're fired. EL: Why do they use the short-handled hoe? JC: Well, ideas that the bosses have. Because they think the work is done better. There weren't any short hoes before, but the work was done well any way with long hoes. But it's the bosses' ideas. That's why a lot of times they ask why the people don't defend themselves, why the people don’t say... I tell them, well, it's easier said than done. If that's the way it was we could defend ourselves without having to make those walks to Washington, D.C., and to Austin, and all that. But then it's not like that. I tell them. Because if I say, if

I tell the boss or the contractor, I'm not going to work with a short hoe, I'm going to work with a long hoe, and if I take the long hoe from home, the con tractors have a saw there and they cut it off. But I've heard that in some states the short hoe is against the law, isn't it? DM: I think so. JC: I don't know in which states it's been fought for but the fight was also won to get rid of the short hoe and have them give the people long hoes. And up in the northern states people say they don't give^ them short hoes. But I tell them, don't think it s because the boss loves you so much. The boss has never loved us, all he loves is his big sack of money that's all he wants. People don't matter to him. They want to have people in stock, to have a lot of people, of every type, of every age, of every size, every kind of peo ple. Like a basketful of apples, and from it the buyer, the boss, whoever is going to buy that mer chandise, he's picking out and picking out, all num ber one, all number one -- and all the number twos and number threes he leaves there or he throws away, because they're no good, according to him, because he's going to choose the best. That's the way he

JULIO CORF.ffo

wants us, the people, the ccmpesinos. No, he doesn’t Mint to have us that way, he has us that way, do you see? Because they pick the best and the strongest, the ones that can do a lot of work, not the weaker ones. They want to have a lot of people so when a bunch die, or one dies, they put In ten more. One dies, they put In ten more. They want to have ex tra people like extra machines. They don't want to lose time. They’re not going to lose, for example, ten trailers of whatever is waiting there without ice and without being crated, so it moves, it has to be moved. So the packers...don't think they have just one machine. They have extras. Because if one machine breaks down, the flow of getting things in boxes doesn’t stop. They have another and another and another, they have extra machines. That's how they have us workers, not that they just want to have us but they do have us. Extras, they want extras so when a hundred die, they've got a hundred more. DM: Is there a law protecting the w o r k e r s f r o m in secticides, from poisons used in the f i e l d s ? JC: The workers have none. That's why we make these marches, and make these protests, and make strikes, because the oampeaino8 aren't protected. DM: So for example, if a group of workers is in a field and a plane passes by spraying insecticides, what happens? ■1C: No, not "for example," they do pass by and they do spray us. DM: They don't pay any attention to the workers? JC: No, they don't pay any attention to us, be cause we don't have any laws to back us up. People have even been killed in the fields by the planes because they fly so low that even if the people lie on the ground they have been hit. DM: How many years have you been doing this? JC: Well, as for being a ootmpeaino, my whole life because I don't know how to do anything else, just farmwork. EL: From what age? JC: From the age of 8, which is a child's age, isn't it? I worked because we have always been very poor, my parents have always been very poor. I never went to school, I've never seen a school from the inside, just from the outside, from the sidewalk. EL: Were you raised here in Texas or in Mexico? JC: I came here at the age of 15, very young; I'm 48 now, do you realize? I’m from Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, where don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the liberator of Mexico, was born. DM: How long did you live there? JC: Until I was 10. EL: Then you came here with your parents? JC: Yes, but I've always worked in the field. At that age of 10 you go around gathering onions, picking to matoes. In Mexico, things are cultivated with don keys, with animals. There are no tractors, only animals. So there's a govdevo, what's called a gordevo, and an aguadov. You carry water on a donkey to the people who are working, and you carry lunch, which is called almierzo there, la ccmtida. Just as trucks carry water here, over there you carry water on a donkey, because that't the way it's done. And that's what I worked at. I never had any schooling, none at all. In those times the government did nothing for the peo ple, or the people didn't like those benefits, be cause the government gives nothing on its own. It's like a locked chest. If nobody opens the chest to take out what's locked up inside, it'll stay locked up there, no one gets it out. The people are the key to that chest, which is the government. As long as the people don't push for benefits for themselves, for the communities, for the poor people,

the government gives nothing. They just want to keep things coming in, coming in. DM: The government belongs to the rich. JC: Yes, they're the ones. The government and the capitalists are the same, they're like a needle and thread, just like that. DM: When and how did you get involved with the union? EL: Were you with Chavez's union, the United Farm Workers? JC: Yes, yes. EL: Is that where you first met Orendain? JC: Well, I've known Orendain since he was with Cha vez, because we were chavistaSy all the Texas Farm workers Union, La Union de Campeainoa. EL: What year was it that Chavez came here to organ ize? JC: Well, Antonio came here as his representative. EL: He was Chavez's first lieutenant. He put him in charge here. JC: He came here to organize, yes. But I don't know, I don't remember, that would be in '64 or '66. In '66 was the march from Rio Grande to Austin. EL: And that's when Connally, the governor, told them to leave. Do you remember? JC: Yes. EL: Governor Connally came to New Braunfels and told them to go home because he wasn't going to help them. That was the first march. DM: And were you in that march, in the first one? JC: I wasn't in the first one, the one from Rio Grande.

EM: Some people say you worked harder than anyone else during the march to Washington. JC: Well, I can't say I was the hardest worker, be cause who knows? For me it wasn't work at all. Al though I would work here and there and then I'd cook for all the strikers and I'd distribute the newspaper, I d distribute leaflets and I'd go around to the houses to talk to the people, to distribute newspa pers, and to cars in the street, on and off the bus every few minutes, on and off the bus, grabbing papers, giving out papers... EL: Some would be marching and there would go Julio and some others distributing papers, or they'd have to run forward, the marchers would pass by and they d run again. And the rest would be just march ing and marching. It's hard. JC: For me it wasn't work, since I'm used to it. I'd even go barefoot. And I never got a blister. I'm used to walking around like that. Look. I think I have enough callouses. EL: And a lot of people in the union would make fun of you because you're gay, wouldn't they? JC: Oh, yes. Well, no. They just... They liked to play with me. EL: And you loved it! JC: Oh, I did, yes. EL: But they accepted you anyway. JC: Oh, yes, they had no reason not to accept me. It's not against the law. (Pause) DM: What were you telling us about the onion pickers? JC: What's needed is a collective contract between the union and the boss, because without that collec tive contract, the boss will lower the wages, he'll bring them down to 20c or 30c whenever he feels like it, whenever he wants. EL: And for a week there that was the Seal Produce Company, right? JC: Yes, for a week. It's the first time that there have been empty fields, with no people at all. It looks that way now, but regardless, some people re spond, some don't. EL: Well, they have to work to eat, don't they? JC: Well, yes, but there are other ways to work, there are other jobs. But until the fight is won

in one kind of harvest, the people could stop. It s just that many people don't know the meaning of the word "strike." EL: When they were out on strike, how much money were they getting a day? Was the union giving them money? JC: Yes, just for necessities. EL: To eat, and all that. How much was it? How much were you offering them? JC: Just spending money, about three dollars a day. EL: And did they have canned food? Did other people help with the food. JC: Oh, yes, a lot of support. Here in Mercedes we had a lot of support for this thing. A lot of people helped with food, in the colonias, with prepared food for the strikers. DM: How much were they making before they went out on strike? JC: Before the strike, they'd pay thirty, forty cents a bushel at most. And that's a very old rate; they've been paying that for many years. DM: And now? JC: With the strike it’s gone up, they're paying a dollar. But nevertheless there are problems be cause, as I told you, as long as there's no union contract, they can break that wage whenever they want, they can lower it again. Like in '75 when we had the cantaloupe strike, we went to talk to all the people who come across from Mexico, who cross the border every day to work. We stopped all the people. We stopped more than 3,000 cantaloupe workers. EL: But it got rough because the damn Miller shot them with his shot gun. How many was it? Nine, eleven campesinos? JC: Well, when the boss at the El Tejano Ranch opened fire on the campesinos... EL: Were you there? JC: Yes, yes.

EL: And they didn't do anything to him, did they? Did the union file charges. JC: Yes, he was charged. EL: But nothing happened in court, did it? JC: No. EL: And now I hear senor Pantaleon Lopez was in jured. JC: Oh, the strikebreakers, the anti-unionists go too far, don't they? So senor Pantaleon was on the picket line and the scab hit him with his truck. EL: I heard he was in the hospital, he was under ob servation in the hospital. JC: Yes, but he got out right away. He's all right now. EL: But also the Mercedes police arrested two or three campesinos, didn't they? JC: Yes, there were arrests also. The Mercedes po lice made arrests in this strike, in the onion strike. EL: A lot of people have been asking why Orendain supported the farmers’ strike. JC: Well, the idea is just to support them, just sup port their strike. Just as you support a lot of or ganizations, a lot of unions from all over the country, they just came to support the Farmworkers Union. They don't have to agree with your ideas, they just come to give their support. So we of the Farmworkers Union just went to support the farmers' strike. EL: But in the end they're fighting the same people, the big ranches, the agribusinesses. DM: Yes, they aren't the ones who hire the campesinos, are they? They're independent fanners who work their own land, right? JC: Well, the farmers who are on strike are small farmers, not the great big ones, the small ones. DM: The great big ones are the enemies of both. JC: Anyone who's great big is everyone's enemy. The big capitalists are everyone's enemy, not just the

little guy's. DM: Yes, I agree. EL: So It was a good idea for Orendain to support them? JC: Oh, yes, I think it was a good idea. Why not? That's just support that's given. EL: On the march to Washington, many people say that since you didn't get to talk to President Carter... Do you think it was a good idea and that something was gotten from the march? JC: Well, I think it was a good idea even if he didn’t talk to us, because for us, for me, for the union, we weren't going because we were so anxious to see him, because after all we weren't going there to kiss him. What mattered was talking to the people, to the poor people, to every class of people, poor and not poor, to anyone who would support us. That was our idea. *

JC: I think the campesino’s life is beautiful, very sad, very hard, but very beautiful. Very bitter, but very beautiful. Because it's experience that speaks and it's experience that matters, not education. Education is good. I'm not against education, I'm against the exploitation that comes about because of the education people have. Those who get an education then exploit the ones below them. DM: That's certainly true. JC: And it shouldn't be that way. You've got to study agriculture, to sow, to plant crops. But if you don’t have experience, then reading and study ing are worth nothing to you. There are certain plants and certain seeds that need a certain amount of soil. One kind of seed needs a certain amount of to sprout, another needs another amount and another needs to have the soil pressed over it in or der to sprout. Do you see? And they need different ways of planting. Not all seeds are sown alike. Each kind of seed has its own way and its own amount — onions, carrots, beets, corn. Each one needs a certain amount of soil to sprout. Also, to keep plants alive that are already up, for example, because plants are like us, they are bora and they grow and they are nourished. They need to be fed like us as well. If those plants are not fed, they die, just like us, do you see? You should water them at their own time. Because if you water when the plant won't use it, doesn't need it, then just like us it'll get sick, do you see? One single watering when the plant doesn't need it,^ that's enough for the farmer to lose his crop, fijate. Por eso te digo.

DAVID MORRIS AND JULIO

CORENO

(Note: This interview was previously published i-n River City Rising, an Austin quarterly_, and in Gay Austin, a monthly. The introduction was revised especially for RFD by David Morris.)

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