Diggers, Free Land and Diablo Canyon: A Story of Faeries and Reclaiming

by Covelo

In 1975, a group of us from our commune at 529 Castro Street*, on the same block as Harvey Milk’s camera shop and the Hula Palace arts commune, joined Arthur Evans’ faery circle and attended his lecture and slide shows at Bay Area Gay Liberation at 33 Grove Street. There he introduced his groundbreaking book, “Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture.” Inspired by what we saw was the special place of queerness in the pagan world, we decided we would like to know more about witchcraft and were told that there was a neo-pagan witch on Cole Street who could teach us the fundamentals.

I was in the process of leaving the city and moving to a Free Land commune in Mendocino County, twelve miles above a remote town called Covelo, where I would reside without electricity and running water for the next six years, so I attended only one meeting with the woman who would later become Starhawk. A small core of us who continued to study with Starhawk later became part of Magdalene Farm, which became the Nomenus/Wolf Creek Radical Faerie Sanctuary.

There were many tributaries that became the Radical Faeries and Reclaiming, but there is no question in my mind that those meetings with Arthur and Starhawk in San Francisco in 1975 and 1976 were important wellsprings of the San Francisco Faerie movement and our connection to neo-paganism. But neither Arthur’s nor Starhawk’s work and our openness to receive them existed in a vacuum. They both were fed and nurtured in a rich cultural movement that arose in San Francisco in the 1960s and came into full bloom in the 1970s.

The Diggers were renegades in the Haight-Ashbury who grew out of the activist theater of R.G. Davis and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. According to Eric Noble in the Digger Archives, www.diggers.org, the Diggers “took their name from the original English Diggers (1649-50), who had promulgated a vision of society free from private property and all forms of buying and selling.” The San Francisco Diggers evolved out of two radical traditions that thrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1960s: the the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. The Diggers practiced “garbage yoga,” in which they distributed unwanted appliances, particularly stoves and refrigerators, to those in need. They distributed free bread that was baked at the Free Bakery in one- and two-pound coffee cans, they introduced tie-dyed clothing and held communal celebrations at solstices and equinoxes. “Do your own thing” and “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” are phrases coined by the Diggers that became touchstones of the counterculture and found their way into the mainstream. beat bohemians with their underground art and theater scene and the New Left’s civil rights and peace movements.

The San Francisco Diggers began to think of themselves as the Free City Collective. Using the tactics of street theater, anarchist direct action and art happenings, they conducted daily rallies at City Hall demanding that city-owned, empty buildings be given to the people to rehabilitate and live in freely, that surplus food be distributed freely and that trucks be provided to distribute free newspapers. Although the demands were not met, there became a proliferation of the idea of “free,” and there arose a grassroots movement of free stores, the distribution of free food in the park every day, a free film series, the Medical Opera and the Free Medical Clinic, which inspired the founding of

Irving Rosenthal’s Kaliflower Commune brought the Digger philosophy to a community that was much more polymorphously perverse than the largely heterosexual Diggers. Rosenthal moved to San Francisco in 1967 and began creating Kaliflower. I first visited the group at their Scott Street commune, where I encountered men, women and children, gay, straight and in between. It was awe-inspiring. Kaliflower helped initiate the Free Food Conspiracy, whose member communes pooled their members’ food stamps to buy food in bulk, which was then distributed to communes according to need. It was through the distribution of food to the communes that Kaliflower members Hibiscus (George Harris III) and Ralif (Ralph Sauer), who called themselves the Kitchen Sluts after characters in “Man of La Mancha,” entertained the communes and gathered about them a group of would-be performers who became the Cockettes and the Angels of Light theater companies.

Rosenthal’s writings back then speak to us today and offer valuable insight into how we may best direct our energies as the international economy collapses and a dramatic paradigm shift looms on the horizon. He wrote in Deep Tried Frees, Kaliflower, N.S. 3, April 30, 1978, “Buddhists, particularly local ones, make a great fuss about right livelihood. But what does right livelihood mean in a capitalist-corporate multinational nexus of greed? Every aspect of our lives is tainted by excessive profitmaking, real-estate speculation, stockmarket manipulation, price-fixing, armament-making, hard sell advertising, conspicuous consumption, unfair labor practices, automobile proliferation, urban “redevelopment,” chemical pollution of food, air, and water, deforestation, strip mining, chicken farming, genus-cide of mammals for their skins, tusks, fur or meat-- the list of et ceteras would fill a book.”

Another important thread that influenced the proto-Faerie and Reclaiming communities, again chronicled in the Digger Archives, was the Free Land Movement and two important communes in Sonoma County -- Morning Star Ranch and Wheeler’s Ranch. Morning Star Ranch was founded in 1962 by Lou Gottlieb of the folk group The Limeliters. Lou bought some land in Sonoma County shown to him by the husband of Malvina Reynolds, the Berkeley folk singer who wrote “Little Boxes,” now the theme song to Showtime’s popular series “Weeds.” In 1969, as the ranch grew and legal hassles afflicted the renegade community, Lou deeded Morning Star Ranch to God, finding precedent under Muslim law, which for centuries had allowed for donations of property to Allah. Some months later, a judge ruled that “Whatever the nature of the deity, God is neither a natural or artificial person capable of taking title under existing California law.” He argued that God could not own land because He couldn’t sign His name to the deed. But the idea that individuals did not have the right to own land, that land was “un-ownable,” took root.

After a visit to Morning Star Ranch, an artist and architect from the blue-blood lineage of Kent School and Yale named Bill Wheeler and his wife, Gwyn, moved to Sonoma County in the summer of 1962 and subsequently bought a 320acre ranch about eight miles from Morning Star which became Wheeler’s Ranch. For a fascinating history of the two communes, and the involvement by the likes of The Rockefeller Foundation, Nina Simone, Bill Graham, Stuart Brand,

Church, whose name came from Gandhi’s term for non-violence.

Central to the Articles of Incorporation of the Ahimsa Church was the idea that “Among the primary functions of the corporation is the maintenance of the premises of the church as Open Land” and that the land could never be sold, exploited for profit, rented, borrowed or closed.

And so, the confluence of these tributaries — street theater, a commitment to civil rights, environmentalism and peace, and the philosophy of Free, Open Land and Ahimsa set the stage for the rest of us living in the Bay Area. Herb Caen kept us informed through his column in the San Francisco Chronicle, and the busts at Wheeler’s were fodder for daily news stories.

In 1972, influenced by this mix — and I haven’t even mentioned marijuana — Randy West in Berkeley and Lucky Mollin and I in Palo Alto organized a gay/straight consciousness raising retreat on Joan Baez’s ranch on Page Mill Road in the foothills above Palo Alto that had all the markings of a faerie gathering -- heart circles, mysticism, nudity, vegetarianism, neo-paganism. The phrase we used to describe the unique praxis of what we were doing was Gay Consciousness. Gay Consciousness was in the air when we encountered Arthur Evans and Starhawk.

Timothy Leary, Peter Coyote, the Hog Farm, Steven Gaskin, Owsley, LSD and the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, read “Home Free Home: A History of Two Open-Door California Communes” on the Digger Archives website.

From these two communes came the Open Land Manifesto and the Ahimsa

In 1980, I again encountered Starhawk in San Luis Obispo, where we were part of a mass movement to keep Pacific Gas and Electric from opening the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on an earthquake fault on the Central California Coast. I had moved from Castro Street to a commune called The Land twelve miles northwest of a small, remote town in Northern California called Covelo. The Land, one of the great Free Land communes whose roots were in Wheeler’s and Morning Star, had Photos: Courtesy of Covelo been given to a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt educational corporation in San Francisco called Hearthshire School by Diggers Claude and H’lene to keep it out of the hands of private ownership. Hearthshire was one of many members of the San Francisco intercommunal network that decided that the drugs were getting too nasty and the scene too commercial and diluted. Back to the Land was our way of creating a new order.

A number of us were activists with a group from Mendocino and Humboldt counties called Downwind Alliance. The alliance had been working to decommission the Humboldt nuclear reactor. I was less active than others but wrote a small agitprop play, “Helen’s Revenge or Kiss My Ash,” about the Trojan nuclear power plant that was near the base of Mount St. Helens, the volcano in Washington that had recently erupted. We performed it at the Humboldt Country Fair on the grounds of the Benbow Inn on one of the forks of the Eel River.

I had left the commune in 1980 to attend Sonoma State University, where I joined up with a group of radical/political/ spiritual freaks who created an affinity group to go to the Diablo Canyon Blockade and Encampment. We called our group the Wild and Tackys. After seven years of legal challenges to Diablo Canyon had run its course without success, the Abalone Alliance sent out a call for non-violent direct action. They created an excellent guide to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, be it weapons or power plants, and to the theory and practice of non-violent protest titled “The Diablo Canyon Blockade and Encampment Handbook.”

Affinity groups from all over the state converged and we were given a fallow field to set up an encampment for several thousand people. Except for the privileged few who slept in tents, we all slept in sleeping bags open to the air. Following the dictate of Martin

Worman’s tongue-in-cheek comment, “I don’t kiss and tell, I fuck and publish,” I must reveal that for some reason Starhawk and I “spooned” every night we were not in jail. By chance we had happened to lay our sleeping bags next to each other, but as the nights grew cold, we snuggled to keep warm. It was safe and comforting, so we sought each other each night. She was fearless. As waves of us were arrested through the two weeks of the encampment, I was “caught and released,” i.e. arrested, once. I think she went three or four rounds.

The Wild and Tackys thought of ourselves as naughty and relished being politically incorrect because we would leave the campsite to have our strategy meetings in the luxury of the coffee shop of the Madonna Inn, a fabulously campy icon on Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo that was built in 1958 and has more than 100 rooms, each decorated differently with themes like the Daisy Mae, Fox and Hound, Cuernavaca, Antique Cars and Matterhorn. The Madonna Inn features giant rocks and waterfall showers, leaded and etched glass, a hand-carved marble balustrade, incredible hand-crafted woods and copper and a Gold Rush dining room that came from Hearst Castle. It was the perfect spot for a group of radical pagan environmentalists with a sense of irony.

Throughout the week, groups would slip out of the encampment and start the two-day trek through the 100,000acre King Ranch to the reactor, situated precipitously on a promontory over the Pacific Ocean. The Abalone Alliance had spent years developing trails with ropes to help us through the more dangerous passages. There were hidden campsites to hide for the night with names like Seven-Up. We weren’t the only ironists. When the Wild and Tackys reached the reactor, we were true to the Digger roots of agitprop theater. We had created a cow costume with white sheets and black spots. We gathered under the sheet and became one giant, many-legged mutant cow. When we reached the gates of the reactor we chanted, “The radiation gets into the air, the clouds form in the sky, the rain falls on the grass, the cows eat the grass, the babies drink the milk, the babies die.” And then we tried to block engineers from entering the plant. Word was that the plant was to go online that day. Needless to say we were arrested, handcuffed and led to buses, where hundreds of us were transported to a makeshift jail at San Luis Obispo Community College. The men were brought to the gymnasium, where we were greeted with thunderous cheers and were surrounded by Quakers and Unitarians who made sure we were served organic peanut butter and apples. I was given the cot which had just been vacated by the singer Jackson Browne, who recently sued the GOP and McCain campaign for using his song “Running on Empty” without his permission. Some of us never give up. Thank the Goddess.

We were not successful in our attempt to shut down Diablo Canyon, but the day after we witches and pagans did our magic at the reactor, the news broke that the contractor had built it in the mirror image of the blueprints and the entire plant would have to be retrofitted. Seemed like magick to us.

Diablo Canyon was finally completed, the fuel rods were loaded into the reactor core and it went online. But no other reactor has been built in America since.

I like to believe that “Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture” had something to do with it all.

*Among those who lived with us were Tede Matthews, Frank Femia/Assunta, Shaundel (now Loki), Jamal, Soula, Michael Bumblebee, Jesse Cox, Marc Huestis, Jada Joyous, Mountain Bear and legions of others who entered our open door, with its poster of Ho Chi Minh on the door and its Vietnamese National Liberation Front flag hanging from a second-story window over Castro Street.