RFD 175 Fall 2018

Number 175 Fall 2018 • $11.95

QUEER

AND

MEDIA

YOU

RFD 175 Fall 2018 1

Issue 176 / Winter 2018

IMAGES OF OURSELVES Submission Deadline: October 21, 2018 www.rfdmag.org/upload

This issue we’re hoping you will dust off your old photo album or flip through your Instagram and find us images which reflect who you are and what brings meaning to your life. You can also share a story about a fixed memory, a written image that you’d like to share. A poem as image— think of the early Imagist poets like H.D.—where your poem reflect a visual moment.

We’re hoping to use this image to reflect our diversity and how varied our community is— so please reach out to everyone you know to show the world a queer community with reflects the rainbow. We especially welcome sharing images and reflections of images which reflect us at various parts of lives—young and old but also windows into unique communities or moments and how our community has also reflected

2 RFD 175 Fall 2018 Harry Hay photo-mosaic built out of radical faeries and queer activists by John O’Leary

movements, actions and deeds which deepen our pride, resilience and fierceness.

In some ways we’d like to think the issue will be a visual chronology of how the community has grown, expanded and reshaped itself while also honoring and valuing our past with pride.

So close your eyes and think of the images that most encourage you and share them with all of us! Please share this widely!

Raddish Fagrag Draghead Vol 45 No 1 #175

Fall 2018

Between the Lines

In this issue we asked our readers to reflect upon being queer, how queer media exists or existed and how we are reformulating ourselves and the media around us in shaping queer space to reach out, reflect ourselves, and be a beacon in some way to our existence.

We’re thrilled to reflect a panoply of different approaches to this theme.

From founders of gay periodicals, to readers of gay porn, to writers, to people being shaped by the queer media they experience, to readers reflecting upon the landscape of what queer media has been, to shaping new forms of outreach online.

You’ll also find poetry and art work as well as images of gay periodicals in the collections of the authors or from the Queer Archive Project. Please see the blurb about the Queer Archive Project on our ad pages.

In the coming issues RFD will have spent nearly a decade here in New England and the collective would like to extend hearty thanks to the brave souls who helped us on that journey—Mountaine Jonas, Sister Soami, Michel Dubois, Bambi Gauthier and Matt Bucy and our many former and current Board members. And much thanks to generous RFD readers who have donated money to help keep this project alive.

In the constant flow of media overload with Trump tweets and the harangue of injustices so many people face, it is refreshing to return to our simple task here at RFD, to reflect our readers ideas and visions. Please consider ways of reflecting that vision by sending in your theme ideas for upcoming issues. Otherwise we make stuff up!

In the warm summer breezes of the Upper Valley we send you blessed greetings and a prayer that you enjoy the Queer Media you help sustain by being an RFD reader. Please share RFD widely. You can always direct people to our website—www.rfdmag.org.

From the crew who managed gin and tonics (it was a hot summer night and we were at a birthday party) and margaritas (it’s a tradition when we wrap an issue) all in one weekend and proofed this zine!

—The RFD Collective

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Submission Deadlines Winter–October 21, 2018 Spring–January 21, 2019 See inside covers for themes and specifics.

On the Covers

Front : “Faces” by Richard Vyse, Back: One cover, courtesy Queer Archive Project

Production

For advertising, subscriptions, back issues and other information visit www.rfdmag.org RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative lifestyles. We foster community building and networking, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, Radical Faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volunteers. We welcome your participation.

The business and general production are coordinated by a collective.

Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places.

RFD (ISSN# 0149-709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302.

Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA

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01035-0302. Non-profit tax exempt #62-1723644, a function of RFD Press with office of registration at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190.

RFD Cover Price: $9.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive it four times a year. First class mailed issues will be forwarded.

Others will not. Send address changes to submissions@rfdmag.org or to our Hadley, MA address. Copyright © RFD Press. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and associated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material associated therewith on which this label appears) are kept by the custodian of records at the following location: RFD Press, 85 N Main St, Ste 200, White River Junction, VT 05001.

Managing Editor: Bambi Gauthier Art Director: Matt Bucy

Visual Contributors Matt Bucy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Richard Vyse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover, 11, 57 Timonanda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Drawing by Matt Bucy

CONTENTS Submitting to Porn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natty Soltesz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 A Love Letter to the Queer Press. . . . . . . . . . . Nikita Shepard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Reflections on a Gay Literary Era. . . . . . . . . . . Phil Wilkie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 The Cock and the Carpenter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e.c. patrick. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 White Crane Spreads Wings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toby Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Paper Revery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew Ramer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Lost Art of Communication. . . . . . . . . . . . c. huilo c.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 FaeNet: Making Faerie Space In the Clouds —A social network for Radical Faeries . . . Bulbul of the FaeNet Stewards . . . . . . . . . . 19 Queering The Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lucas LaRochelle/Lawn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Two Poems for Nick. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bambi Gauthier. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Allen Young Interview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RFD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 A Return to Gay Sunshine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leo Racicot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Queer Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Don Shewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Christopher Street and Its Kind . . . . . . . . . . . . Jon Weatherman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 My Blue Neighbourhood: Coming Out of the Closet With Troye Sivan. . . . . . . . . . Michael Nied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Poison Ivory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simon Maddrell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Imperfection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Malik Shakur. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tolth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Banks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 The Garden of Arden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jessica Dickinson Goodman . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 The Mountains We Avoid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jessica Dickinson Goodman . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Inventory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jason Roush. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 A Place for the Sun And the Moon. . . . . . . . . . Fadrian Bartley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 The Secret China Gathering 2018 . . . . . . . . . . Mata Hari . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 A Love Letter to Faerie Camp Destiny from Rock River. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moon Morgan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Omnivore by Nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fran-Claire Kenney. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Gone Political. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Raymond Luczak. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Story Telling meets Community: The Story of Queer Tell Our Visions (Santa Cruz). . . Kwai Lam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

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Submitting to Porn

by Natty Soltesz

T

he internet came of age as I did—“came” being the operative word, because it was my main source for jack-off material as a teenager.

But my first exposure to gay porn was from two issues of First Hand, which were digest-sized story-and-illustration magazines. My older brother found them in a dumpster and brought them back to his college apartment where I was visiting. He’s straight, as I was assumed to be, but he thought they were “funny.” Funny is how they made me feel, but I wasn’t laughing when I got unfettered alone time with them after he went to bed. Somehow the apartment wasn’t submerged in cum by sunrise.

Around then I began accessing the internet and discovered The Nifty Erotic Stories Archive. If those magazines were a revelation here was one anew: a seemingly endless array of queer fantasies, loosely categorized in all their permutations. Also anybody could send something in and, barring lenient guidelines, expect to have their story visible to the world. I used my father’s dotmatrix printer to keep a ream of my favorites in a locked trunk in my room—the better to enjoy “Saved by the Bell” fuck fiction without worrying about getting caught.

When I moved out of my parents’ house I began to buy porn magazines. I found an issue of Handjobs in a Phoenix porno store—boy did that blow my mind. (In the back, a homespunlooking ad for a gay “country journal” called 6

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RFD). When I moved to Pittsburgh I would buy issues of Men and Freshmen from Jay’s Bookstall, an independent, gay-owned bookstore. (Once when I brought my spank rags to the counter Jay smirked and asked if I’d had a good Valentine’s Day. I blushed.)

But more than ever I was on the internet, sifting through the muck to find the pearls.

The internet offered a sense of DIY possibility before I even thought of myself as a writer. I’d already found (via AOL cybersex) that writing out my fantasies gave me a thrill akin to reading fiction, with the added satisfaction of having created something. The Nifty Archive was full of terrible stories, why not add my own?

Porn magazines weren’t as inspiring in that way. Print media felt like the old guard; less accessible to amateurs, rife with the possibility of rejection.

I sent my first erotic story to the Nifty Archive on September 16, 2001 (strange week, that was), a fan-fiction take on two characters from the NBC soap opera Passions.1 It was such a satisfying experience—presenting finished work the world, getting emails of praise from strangers—that I continued to write and 1

In 2006 the porn director Joe Gage plagiarized dialogue from this story for his Titan Media movie “Lifeguard! The Men of Deep Water Beach”: the old guard pilfering the new, before I’d even realized my stuff was worth stealing.

post more.

My confidence grew and in 2005 I submitted for the first time to a print publication: First Hand, aka the first gay porn magazine I’d ever read. They accepted it and the circle was complete: the masturbator had become the masturbatrix (or something like that). Even better, I got a check. Handjobs was next, and while they didn’t pay (they gave you a year’s subscription), I had such admiration for that magazine that it was enough to see my work in its pages.

I was in college and waiting tables at a Syrian restaurant. One of my regulars, an avid reader named Dwayne, liked to offer advice on my nascent writing career.

I told him it was my dream to get into a magazine like Freshmen, which paid $300 a story but seemed attainably glossy.

“You should submit to them,” he said.

“You might be good enough.” He was right, and over the next three years I had seventeen stories published in the glossy porno mags. The Unzipped Media ones like Men and Freshmen paid the best, but the $150 checks I got from Torso and Mandate weren’t bad either.

T

hose were my salad days, and they were already wilting.

By 2009 the magazine publishers started to disappear: first Mavety Media (First Hand), then Unzipped Media (Freshmen) then—most tragically in my eyes—Avenue Services stopped print publication of Handjobs. Losing those outlets— not to mention those checks—sucked, but I’d leveled up writing-wise to where I was getting published in print anthologies like Cleis Press’s Best Gay Erotica series. These didn’t pay much but you got the prestige of seeing your story in an actual book. By 2011 there were significantly less

of those, too, as publishers folded or moved to ebooks.

And so the internet had subsumed print, or at least the part of it I’d been cashing in on. I wrote my first book of stories and published it through an independent press, then delved into selfpublishing. My 2011 Amazon-published ebook Str8 but Curious brought in so much cash that I dreamed of quitting my day job, but it turned out to be an anomaly, the crest of a Fifty Shades-era boom set off by the popularity of ebook readers and the ease of consuming porn on them.

Today I still self-publish ebooks and the money I get from them seems comparable to what I used to get from the magazines. But now it feels like if I want to get paid for my work— including my books published through independent presses— I’m forced to hack my way through the Amazon. Amongst the negatives of being beholden to a corporate behemoth are Amazon’s restrictive and mysterious content policies, which I encountered when they rejected my collection of incest-themed stories without a whiff of explanation.

I still publish stories on the Nifty Archive and in other weird corners of the internet that are free from corporate oversight (or as free as they can be).

Who knows what will happen with the repeal of net neutrality, but I have to believe that whether online, in print, or handed from person to person, independent channels will exist so long as there are people to create them. And money, for me, has always been beside the point. The only tangible reward from writing is the process of it, and the idea that somewhere, some reader—maybe a teenager, getting their first taste of porn—is getting off.

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A Love Letter to the Queer Press

By Nikita Shepard

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ummer 2001. Nestled into a comfy, threadbare armchair rescued from a college dormitory dumpster, I’m posted up in the back of the little alternative book store and community center the next town over from where I go to high school. The anarchists and graffiti artists who staff the space as volunteers don’t mind me taking as long as I like to leaf through used books and magazines, reading the hours away while the scorching Carolina afternoon heat gives way to the relative relief of early evening. Plenty of stickers and posters proclaim this as a queer-friendly space; indeed, I first found out about it from my first lover, who sat on its board of directors as a precocious high school junior. Yet nonetheless I feel a quiver of anxiety as I flip through the pages of this publication, perched against my knees so as to block its cover from view: XY Magazine. It’s a glossy, upbeat, feisty magazine by and for queer boys, with articles on health and dealing with parents or classmates and stories from lives not so dissimilar from my own. The quiver I feel in my stomach glimpsing the pictures—sent in, presumably, by readers of themselves—leaves me a little giddy and a bit embarrassed. Another customer walks by, and I shuffle another book on top of it with awkward abruptness.

The volunteer behind the counter raises an eye at the noise, then indifferently returns to her 8

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book. She’s got my number, and it doesn’t matter a bit to her; I’m not the first nervous teenager who’s come in here for a clandestine peak at the queer literature. I relax a bit. Then tentatively, with a furtive glance to make sure no one’s watching too closely, I flip back to XY. I’m not quite seventeen years old, newly out of the closet to a gradually growing list of friends and acquaintances, and not fully sure of myself. My internet access at home is limited, and both school and the public library block most websites with queer content. In the city where I live, I don’t know where to find contemporary reading materials that speaks to the experiences of other queer kids, and would probably feel too vulnerable to read it there even if I did. So this expedition to a nearby town for the day contains a secret thrill that goes beyond the concert I’m ostensibly in town to see—my alibi for borrowing the car. I’m also here to cocoon myself in the cozy arms of a radical book store to see if I can find myself in the pages of the magazines and books they’ve got here. For me as a nervous teenager, the queer press is a lifeline.

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or my whole life I’ve always been a reader.

Whenever I had a problem to solve, yearned to Courtesy Queer Archive Project

understand something mysterious, or wanted to escape to a different reality, the printed word provided the pathway for me. Since my adolescence the gay press in particular has held a unique place in my heart: conveyor of forbidden knowledge, window into alluring alternate worlds, map to the secret terrain I share with fellow travelers, my accidental kin among those who answer affirmatively that innocuous southern question: “Are you family?”

The summer between high school and college found me interning at an LGBT political organization in the state capital. One afternoon my boss and I, on an errand to the local gay bookstore, walked through to the crowded back room where the The Front Page, the state’s gay newspaper, was published. The editor, a dedicated (but, I’d been warned, notoriously cranky) activist, paced around between stacks of papers, griping about whatever antagonists had ticked him off that morning. Though he intimidated me, I admired his encyclopedic knowledge of statewide gay organizations and people, and the razor-sharp edge of his opinionated diatribes. I became a regular reader of the weekly newspaper, which fleshed out my understanding of local and state politics, while exposing me to the diversity of southern queer culture.

As I emerged into punk and anarchist subcultures in my late teens and early twenties, I caught the tail end of the vibrant zine culture that had exploded in the 80s and 90s. If you had something to say, a typewriter and a glue stick, and could figure out how to reprogram a Kinko’s photocopier to your advantage, you could put out your own zine and release your own experience and opinions to a far-flung network of fellow zinesters and readers.

Queer zines were particularly special to me, offering personal stories I could relate to written in a DIY format, with topics and aesthetics all over the map.

I put out my own first zine at nineteen and contributed articles to others, and collected ones I picked up off merchandise tables at concerts or from rotating metal racks in alternative bookstores. Titles like Anonymous Boy, Black Maps, Fag School, You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania, and dozens more whose names I’ve long forgotten lined my shelves, and the ones I liked best I re-copied and distributed myself.

Like the title of an anthology of early English gay writing, these zines truly were “pages passed from hand to hand” for my alternative queer generation.

I stumbled upon my first Radical Faerie gathering at Short Mountain in 2005. After the profound sense of connection I experienced there, I hungered for more—so one of the first things I did was to

subscribe to RFD. Each time a new issue arrived was a cause for celebration, prompting me to sequester myself in my room to read it cover to cover.

Through the stories, poems, and articles I encountered there, I did my best to rekindle the feeling of intimacy and freedom I’d felt frolicking amidst the faeries.

At twenty-two I moved north for the first time in my young adult life, to soak in the relative anonymity and freedom of Washington, DC. A substantial and well-heeled gay community sustained two free gay weeklies, The Washington Blade (a more traditional newsprint offering) and Metro Weekly (a glossier, entertainment-focused magazine). I read them with some skeptical distance; my radical politics often left me impatient with the city council debates on marriage regulations, and my relative introversion shied away from the pictures of gaudy evenings from the city’s fabulous nightlife. Yet despite my critiques, I read both of them each week on the subway to work, keeping up with news developments and getting acquainted with the cast of local politicos, columnists, and drag queen emcees. Even if I rarely set foot in the bars they depicted or the meetings they announced, the experience of holding the physical paper in my hand and reading it week after week seemed to solidify me as a member of the secret club of same-sex desire, hidden in plain sight.

The gay press made tangible the imagined community I shared with the legions of other miscellaneous queers sprinkled throughout the city, from the elderly couple who lived next door to the waiter I cruised on a lunch break to the faceless throngs I took in, wide-eyed, at my first big city Pride festival.

Moving back to the South after my urban sojourn, I took a job managing the little alternative book store where I’d huddled with XY as a teenager.

One of my favorite chores was opening the box of each month’s new magazines, lining the shelves with Out, Curve, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Transgender Tapestry, The Advocate, Lesbian Connection, Instinct, and of course good old RFD. (I took particular joy in recommending the latter to customers looking for something queer off the beaten path.)

Once I’d set out the new issues, I stripped the covers off of the unsold copies to return to the distributor for credit—and loaded the cover-less back issues into my backpack to take home and read. Over the years that I worked there, I made a point to try out any LGBTQ-themed publications I could get, through distributors if I could or on consignment from locals, and read most of them. Even living in a smaller town, I felt connected to a broader RFD 175 Fall 2018 9

universe of queer community and culture through the printed word. And through the bookstore, I made it my task to get those words into the hands of people who also needed that connection—especially younger folks who found, like I had not so long before, a queer-positive refuge in that space.

I began to take increasing interest in queer history and the generations of gay men and lesbians who’d preceded me. Much as I appreciated the new magazines that arrived each month to the bookstore, none of them reflected the edgy, critical radical politics I hungered for from a queer publication. The books and articles I read describing the Gay Liberation Front, the Radicalesbians, the emergence of the Radical Faeries, and so forth frequently left me gnashing my teeth in frustration that I’d been born into such relatively boring and assimilationist queer generation. Where was the passion, the vitality, the creativity, the unapologetic defiance of those early years of the liberation struggle? This hunger for more radical queer visions led me back to the archives, where I began to read the publications that had emerged from the movement decades ago.

Roger Streitmatter’s wonderfully readable reference, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (1995, Faber & Faber), gave me a helpful bird’s-eye view of how the terrain of queer publishing developed and evolved over time. During one summer research trip, I spent days speed-reading the canon of the pre-Stonewall “homophile” publications, including ONE, The Ladder, and The Mattachine Review, observing how dramatically some of the discourses and assumptions have changed in the decades since then while smiling in recognition at perennial concerns that plague gay and lesbian culture to this day. I laughed at Lige Clark and Jack Nichols’s hilarious gay-themed column in Screw, a heterosexual countercultural paper, which brought a gay-affirmative print voice to a wider readership than ever before in US history. In the post-Stonewall ferment of gay liberation, I cheered at the ebullient energy and confidence of publications like Come Out, Gay Sunshine, and above all Fag Rag, whose provocative politics, powerful art and poetry, and utter fearlessness in challenging every taboo remain in my opinion unmatched to this day. I read the letters sections in Gay Community News and Bay Area Reporter, observing the debates and controversies that preoccupied queers at different times. I marveled at the sophisticated politics and nuanced discussions of Out/Look. These and other examples served as models for the radical queer magazine I’ve long fantasized about founding and editing myself (though 10 RFD 175 Fall 2018

I never have). Together, these publications offered glimpses of the remarkable diversity and fecundity of queer life and culture over the past seventy years.

S

ummer 2018. My ramblings in the archives of the queer press have provided far more than enjoyable afternoons reflecting on the evolution of our print culture. As I write this article, I’m completing a summer research fellowship looking at intersections of homosexuality and anarchism in the twentieth century United States and getting ready to begin a PhD program in history at Columbia University, where I’ll continue exploring the LGBTQ past for years to come. Eventually I hope to write books and teach about the lessons I think we can learn by sifting through the literature of previous queer generations. In a delightfully queer twist of irony, my obsession with the past has opened up an entirely new future for me.

Yet as I sit in the archives, hunched over this or that old publication, I can still feel hints of my teenage self, tucked into the old armchair at the alternative book store and looking over my shoulder to make sure no one’s paying too close attention to what I’m reading. Today, everyone knows I’m queer.

Yet when I’m flipping through an issue of Fag Rag that declares, “Cocksucking is an act of revolution,” or taking a picture of a sexy illustration of sodomitical punks from a queer zine in the 80s, or requesting a NAMBLA Bulletin whose contents push into what still remains perhaps the strongest taboo in our culture—here in the stuffy university library, I still feel that little shiver of anxiety or embarrassment. What is that filth you’re looking at? You think you can get away with that?

But then I stop and smile. If there’s one thing the queer press has taught me, it’s that we shouldn’t feel ashamed of who we are and who and how we love.

It’s always going to be controversial and contentious; we’re always going to offend and disgust, infuriate our enemies and embarrass our friends. But there is power in speaking our truth and putting it down in print. It has allowed us to find and to speak to each other; to experiment and then criticize and refine our ideas; to feel connected to something larger than ourselves. The courage of earlier queer generations in doing so has allowed me to revisit their lives today.

And decades or centuries from now, someone might stumble upon this issue of RFD in an archive or a dusty attic. And they’ll know that all those years ago, there were queer folks who were living and loving, exploring and asking questions, trying our best to craft beautiful lives and to transform our society.

Reflections on a Gay Literary Era

by Phil Wilkie

I

n 1983, I was one of a trio that founded The James White Review, a gay mens’ literary quarterly. The idea grew from a gay mens’ writers workshop that I founded a year earlier at Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. I had been in writers’ groups with Natalie Goldberg who later became famous as the author of best seller Writing Down The Bones. The bones workshops were mostly women. We threw writing ideas into a hat, then drew them. I once suggested first sexual experience. There were many different perspectives.

We sat in a circle reading our just completed work, never critiquing. Listening to each other was the key.

Then we had instant recall best lines of each person’s work. It was an instant combustion of creative energy.

We never created that energy among the gay men, least not from my perspective. The men were competitive, drawn to critiquing and criticism.

James White was a gay poet who died in 1981 of heart failure at age of forty-five. His collection the Salt Ectasies was published in 1982 by the prominent Graywolf Press. Jim White had a large following in the larger literary scene, naming the publication for him gave us instant credibility.

I favored publishing on a newspaper web press.

We printed several thousand, given free all over the

Courtesy Queer Archive Project

Twin Cities in gay bars and cafes. Fellow co-founder Greg Baysans typeset and laid out the Review, often moon lighting at a professional press. In weary middle of the night we tried to proof read. Errors were like cock roaches, if you had one you had many.

I handled promotion, based ideas on self-supporting community publications like Boston’s left wing weekly Gay Community News. We built a base of hundreds of sustainers. Greg and I were perfect partners for first eight years until he voluntarily left.

From the beginning James White Review sold at gay bookshops A Brother’s Place in Minneapolis, Oscar Wilde in New York, Glad Day in Boston, Lambda Rising in Washington DC, Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, A Different Light in LA, Walt Whitman in San Francisco and the Unabridged in Chicago, the only gay book store of these still in business.

Earlier gay literary publications Mouth of the Dragon, Fag Rag and Gay Sunshine Review ceased publishing just before our birth. Gay Sun Sunshine continued publishing books. The monthly Christopher Street was still going but they were very New York centric.

Mark Thompson at that time was cultural editor of Advocate published in LA, gave great coverage to literary coverage. We immediately filled a void and this created a conflict pulling the Review from being a

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nual Out Write Writers Conferences began in San local rag into a national following.

Francisco in 1990 and ended a decade later in Boston.

For me saw great opportunity to help writers. The Hundreds of gay and lesbian writers attended and seventh issue in spring of 1985 was printed on a fiftypound heavy white paper and sold everywhere ending heard many well published gay writers.

Our 10th anniversary issue in fall 1993 featured an free local distribution. There was some fall out locally interview with the poet Jonathan Williams. He pubas we published writers from all over the country. lished books under the Jargon Society label and wrote In winter of 1986 we began annual readings in a memoir teaching at the radical Black Mountain New York City attracted many writers we published College near Asheville, NC. That issue also featured there: Richard Hall, David Fienberg, Carl Morse, Asphotographs of many of our writers by Robert Giard. soto Saint, Felice Picano, Donald Vining (an old man Later, Robert’s Particular Voices, Portraits of Gay & who had journaled daily his entire life).

Lesbian Authors, was published by MIT Press. Bob We had readings in San Francisco attracting was a dear friend. He died suddenly on a GreyHarold Norse, James Broughton, Sam Stewart, Steve hound bus traveling for photographing gay writers Abbott and others. We attracted well known writers, in Midwest. many just emerging, like David Feinberg’s hilarious The Gay Nineties, edited by Willkie & Baysans, was book Eighty Sixed, a comic novel as person with living a collection of our short stories published by Crossing with AIDS. It became a best seller.

Press in 1991. Both books are Five editors read and available via Amazon. responded to all submissions.

Some rejections were I leaned on many people, There were tensions among but two writers gave me the editors over controversial memorable...one endless support: the late subjects. “Oh Shit Yes” was called “My brother Richard Hall and Bob Peters, a reflection on a father and The Noun” about how with whom both exchanged uncle grunting and grinding a brother changed dozens of letters. Richard may their bowels in outhouses. have been first to review gay The author reflected that genders and then books in the New York Times. their pleasure belonged in the became a noun.

The New York Times was not bedroom. Some rejections friendly to anything gay in were memorable, one called the 1970s. Richard authored “My Brother the Noun” about Family Fictions (Vikings Press), a novel/memoir of how a brother changed genders and then became a his family, once Jews who become Episcopalians, and noun. Carl Morse responded to the Vatican’s attack moved to Westchester. Robert Peters wrote memoir on homosexuality with a poem ending “Sucking the Crunching Gravel about growing up in dire poverty Virgin Mary’s Cunt.” Another take on Catholicism during Great Depression (University of Wisconsin was John Gilgun’s “Boppin” about two boys could not Press). He may have been most prolific published gay have sex after the Saturday confession and before the poet and critic. Richard and Bob were dear friends, Sunday Communion. always supportive and encouraging.

James Barr Fugate, author of Quatrefoil, one of In 1998 the Lambda Literary Foundation of Washfirst gay novels published in 1950, reflected on suckington DC acquired the Review. They also published ing off older gay men for Cherry Cokes during the the monthly Lambda Book Report. Patrick Merla, a Great Depression. That was published in same issue former editor of Christopher Street, became the edias Essex Hemphill’s tales as a teenager working in tor. They ceased publishing 2004. a butcher shop, fucking the white butcher behind In the internet age it would be hard to publish the meat counter. We also published a lot of gay art, The James White Review, though the Gay & Lesbian photographs and line sketches.

Review Worldwide continues. I call them the gay New We rented mailing lists in 1988, including a quarYorker without fiction. It’s a pity that gay culture has terly, Out/Look, a gay/lesbian perspectives magazine, nearly evaporated, literary presses, gay book stores in and built our subscription base to 1700 in 49 states and several foreign countries. Several distributors cir- many cities in USA and Canada, writing and academic conferences, gay community theaters and great culated to independent book stores and chains. Our press run was usually 5,000. The income allowed us to local newspapers with real news and dialogue. We now have slick commercial glossy rags that are the give modest honorariums to our writers. gay versions of in-flight airline magazines.

Out/Look magazine launched the nearly an12 RFD 175 Fall 2018

The Cock and the Carpenter by e.c. patrick

I

can’t say that print media of a homosexual persuasion was either very accessible to me as a boy or even much of a blip on my radar. I can’t say that I even knew such things existed. My first decade of life was the Eighties, and I missed so much of what I imagined was the height of gay awakening in the United States. Rainbows were certainly pretty, but they were confined in my imagination to Rainbow Brite’s apparel and the off-brand crayon set I used to adorn the blank pages of my youth. Any further depth was lost on me. What I can say, however, is that print media of a homosexual persuasion somehow found its way to me whether I wanted it to or not, maybe by fate, perhaps just accidentally.

I had been playing tennis with my father and several other neighborhood boys on a lazy summer Sunday afternoon. There were more of us than there were rackets to play with, so we took turns on the bleachers nearby when not otherwise engaged in whacking the ball across the court. During one of these breaks, I happened to spot the glossy pages of a magazine underneath the lowest bleacher and wondered at its contents. While the others were distracted, I reached down and pulled back the pages enough to see what it was about. In an instant, my eyes were filled with images of naked men in full erect glory, some of them alone and some of them interacting in a way I had never seen before. As if the pages were electrified, I snapped my hand back and returned to the match at hand, silenced by both fright and sudden excitement. I dared not, at that moment, investigate further.

Once our band of athletes had tired of tennis and returned home, my mind returned to the underside of those bleachers. I had to see those pages again, examine them up close. There were a few of us lingering

“Red Trunks,” painting by Richard Vyse

around the neighbor’s basketball goal half-heartedly tossing the ball around. Either someone mentioned Playboy for the millionth time or made an ignorant gay joke of the kind that was common in my youth.

With all the courage I could muster, I took the opportunity to mention the mysterious magazine. In a flash, we were on our bikes riding down the block to see what there was to see.

As the ignorant boys we were, we did nothing more than laugh and gawk and pretend to be disgusted by page after page of men on full display, penetrating, touching, holding, and pleasuring. This was something to be ridiculed by the other boys. For me, it was something else entirely, regardless of what I said or did that day. This was a glimpse of something inside of me that I had yet to define or understand in any real way. This was confirmation that there was someone else out there that might be just like me. Was he in that house? Maybe the blue one?

What did he look like and where did he get the magazine? Were there others?

The one image I will never forget involved a fullpage image of a carpenter holding up in his hands a giant wooden cock that he had perhaps just finished and could not help but admire for its craftsmanship, its beauty, its raw essence of man. That was the image I went back to over and over as we boys tore and ripped the pages apart and spread them all over the adjacent field for the wind to blow as it wished and for all to see. Fools we were, laughing and jumping among those strewn pages. I sometimes wish I had kept that image, that carpenter with his wooden cock. It carved out a new place in my mind, one that would fill with desires and fantasies for years to come. Even though I hadn’t sought it out, somehow, homosexually inclined print media had found me and ignited my imagination.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 13

White Crane Spreads Wings

by Toby Johnson

“W

hite crane spreads wings” is the name of a move in T’ai Chi Ch’uan. My partner, Kip, and I have been practicing T’ai Chi for years. Central to this Taoist meditation-in-movement is the notion that all things unfold naturally in their time, like a flower opens its petals in spring or a great bird spreads its wings in expectation of flight. The task of practitioners of the wisdom is to participate joyfully and intentionally in the unfolding.

In the summer of 1996, as I was preparing a talk I was to give at the Joseph Campbell Library in Santa Barbara, I got a call from gay mytho-historian Randy Conner, author of the remarkable Blossom of Bone: Reclaiming the Connections Between Homoeroticism and the Sacred. Randy said he had learned that Bob Barzan was planning to retire and that White Crane, the zine of gay men’s spirituality Bob had started seven years before, was likely to disappear unless a new editor came forward. Randy said I should take on that role.

The zine had started as a newsletter for a support group/salon Barzan hosted in his apartment in San Francisco for ex-priests, like himself, and other gay men who still felt “religious,” but rejected from the Church and religion. White Crane Newsletter published announcements, articles, and book reviews by members of the group or about topics discussed in the meetings. It developed into a substantial magazine during the hey-day of the zines in the early 90s. The seven years of Robert Barzan’s editorship resulted in the anthology book Sex and Spirit: Exploring Gay Men’s Spirituality.

Kip and I were running the lesbian/gay community bookstore in Austin then. We sporadically stocked White Crane Newsletter on our magazine rack when we got them from our distributor (who was Bert Hermann, publishing industry activist and himself a writer about affirmative gay consciousness and the spiritual qualities of intense sexual experience).

I’d been a gay therapist, a gay social science researcher, a gay community organizer, a gay health educator, a gay bookstore owner, a gay spiritual writer and novelist—and at the time we’d just sold the bookstore and Kip and I were looking into developing a gay country guesthouse in the Rocky Mountains. Here was another gay community service venture.

14 RFD 175 Fall 2018

I had just been writing that Joseph Campbell, my friend and mentor and “the wise old man” of my spiritual journey, had urged “follow your bliss.” Well, spreading the news that gay identity confers a sort of spiritual vocation has been my “bliss” through all those jobs I’ve had.

Say “YES” to life was Joe’s sage advice and “doors will open where you never even knew there were going to be doors.” In fact, I’d just typed that sentence when the phone rang with Randy’s call.

Right after I got off the phone, I did a Tarot reading, using Anna-Marie Ferguson’s Arthurian Tarot which I’d just been given as a gift and was sitting unopened on myt desk. I broke open the deck and drew three cards. The first was The Sun: it means “yes” (I’m a Leo, born in early August when the Sun is in its native house.) The second was the Five of Cups: in the Arthurian Tarot the card shows the handsome but ever-elusive Lancelot, bare-chested, gazing over the castle battlements toward Camelot. It’s the only “homoerotic” illustration in the deck. So far, so good. The third card was the clencher.

It was the blank you’re supposed to have taken out and reserved to use in case you lose a card.

Well, the blank is meaningful in itself as the reminder that the future is open and we can make of it what we will. But there was more: the illustration borrows a background motif from the deck: a basilisk, with wings extended, holding out the sword Excalibur, the sign of Arthur’s vocation. How much closer could the Arthurian Tarot get to “White crane spreads wings” than this card?

A sign of “karmic destiny?” Perhaps. A synchronicity, certainly. So I said yes. I think this is what it means to live spiritually: to understand that the Basilisk from the Arthurian Tarot, courtesy author.

events of our lives resonate with—and reveal—otherwise unseen, “mystical” patterns that can only be understood from the higher perspective we call “spirit,” and then to make decisions with faith in these patterns, especially as they appear in coincidence and synchronicity, weaving—out of the chaos and chance of life—patterns of beauty and coherence.

No doubt life is unfolding as it should. The great bird spreads its wings. The Tao manifests itself.

Doors are opening.

I had read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces for a college class while I was still in Catholic seminary. That was also right at the time I was struggling to understand my feelings of affection and desire and joy simply at gazing upon certain others of my fellow seminarians.

This was in 1966; I didn’t really understand what homosexuality was. But I did know that Catholic doctrine didn’t have a place for what I was experiencing, and what could I be but confused and conflicted?

Campbell’s comparative religions approach to the nature of myth and doctrine seemed to cut right through all that.

From learning about other religions, I’d seen through my own, and seen there is a higher gnosis, a “spirituality,” that comes from transcending traditional faith, that solves those doctrinal conflicts. They are all just metaphors.

A couple of years later, out of seminary and living in San Francisco, I signed up as a work-scholar for a weekend lecture program Campbell taught. I made friends with him personally and joined the crew that would work his appearances in Northern California for most of the 70s.

Joseph Campbell wasn’t gay himself, though he and his wife—dancer and Broadway choreographer Jean Erdman— lived like a gay couple, not having biological children, but making their creative projects their “spirit children.” And they lived in a high-rise apartment at the corner of Waverly and Gay in Greenwich Village, overlooking Sheridan Square and Christopher Street. But it wasn’t so much Joe Campbell the person, it was the perspective from over and above that he demonstrated that I found so helpful. All those tangled moral questions that homosexuals had to struggle with were solved with one insight— like queer predecessor Alexander cutting through the Gordian Knot with one blow.

White Crane issue cover, courtesy Queer Archives Project

I was introduced to the idea of gay spirituality in the lecture series Arthur Evans did at BAGL in San Francisco in 1976 that became the book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. And from working with Toby Marotta a few years later on his history of the homosexual rights movement, I learned of Harry Hay. I recognized in Hay’s thinking that outsider, post-religious perspective. Gay consciousness accords spiritual insight and aptitude.

Then during the early 80s, back in my home-

town San Antonio, I subscribed to The Loving Brotherhood Newsletter, a pen-pal network run by Ralph Walker and Robert Kazmayer; the newsletter that came with the pen-pal list always included New Age Spirituality articles mostly by Walker (who looked like Walt Whitman). Kazmayer maintained the mailing list for TLB and also later published Touching Body and Spirit Newsletter, more specifically focused on bodywork and gay tantra, which continued after Walker’s retirement at age 80 or so. Kazmayer is now Sunfire, the gay spirit wizard at Easton Mountain. I experienced RFD 175 Fall 2018 15

personally how these newsletters created connections and shared identifies. They acknowledged otherwise unspoken of gay spiritual interests and experiences.

White Crane Journal focused on gay men’s spiritual experiences and perspectives. During

“From early childhood we learn to observe the world from a perspective, knowing we know a secret other people don’t know. That perspective from outside and over and above is the contemporary way to understand myth, religion, and spirituality. We queer gay people are naturals at attaining such a perspective.”

16 RFD 175 Fall 2018

the years I managed it, there was a regular feature with a quote from Campbell’s writings relevant to the topic of each issue to highlight the “transcendent” comparative religions approach. I joked that I’d become Joseph Campbell’s apostle to the gay community. The high-flying white crane, looking down from far above, was a perfect symbol for how our gay outsider consciousness could naturally lead us to just such a transcendent vision. From early childhood we learn to observe the world from a perspective, knowing we know a secret other people don’t know. That perspective from outside and over and above is the contemporary way to understand myth, religion, and spirituality. We queer gay people are naturals at attaining such a perspective. And, of course, in examples like the Radical Faeries, RFD, the Body Electric, gay Tantra, Easton Mountain, Wildwood, and gay Neo-pagans, et al, you see exactly this vision, arbitrarily and joyfully intermixing myth and satire and deep devotion with abandon. This is what I think “gay spirituality” is, and it is one of the ways we spearhead and contribute to the evolution of consciousness. This is what everybody’s religiousness is evolving toward.

I edited White Crane Journal for seven years, often with the advice and assistance of Bob Barzan’s friend Bo Young. After seven years, like Barzan, I retired from the job and handed it over to Bo and Dan Vera. They continued to publish the ’zine as a hardcopy magazine for another seven years, while they also established White Crane Institute, helped sponsor the Gay Spirituality Summit event at Garrison, adopted the name Gay Wisdom, and published a number of books in the field of gay spirituality, consciousness, and culture, then converted to the digital email blast of dates in LGBTQ history that the White Crane Newsletter has transformed into—flying instantaneously through cyberspace.

Out of my work with White Crane I was invited

by Scott Brassart, editor at Alyson Books, to write about what I’d learned about the gay men’s spirituality movement. That resulted in two books. And what I really learned from all that was how important the gay press—and especially our grassroots, self-produced zines and newsletters, however amateurish they might have been—has been in the creation of a community of like-minded men.

Where else could articles about gay men’s spiritual experiences and insights into the deeper nature of spirit have been published? Gay Wisdom and White Crane Institute continue to keep such books and articles alive.

Paper Revery

by Andrew Ramer

N

ewly out of high school, June 1969, Anaheim, California. Spending the summer with my father and his wife in New York. The morning after the Stonewall Uprising a neighbor called to tell my stepmother—“The fags rioted last night on Christopher Street.” After breakfast we walked over. There was rubble in the streets, scared cops on horseback, and we passed my favorite candy store, one wall lined with racks of magazines, hundreds of them.

Afternoons I would wander over to casually flip through one after another till I’d worked my way to After Dark, which covered the theatre, film, dance, and art scene. Unlike the athletes in Sports Illustrated, there were pages of men, often shirtless, never touching each other, and—sexy! Standing there with men all around me, only men, I would memorize images for that night’s in-the-shower masturbation adventure—too afraid to ever look at any of the men around me, usually older, and too afraid to ever buy a single issue.

A senior in Berkeley. 1973. I remember wandering into Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue and seeing in the New Releases section, face out, a book with a circular rainbow on the cover—The Gay Liberation Book by Len Richmond and Gary Noguera, unlike anything that I’d ever seen. For about a week I went in every day to look at it, letting my fingers quickly stroke the cover, too afraid to take it off the shelf. Then one day it was gone and I wandered through every section of the store till I found it upstairs, in a corner, in the Sociology section, I think. Standing in that corner with my back to the aisle, I read the entire book, too afraid to buy it, not to mention too poor—that book an essential part of my coming out process.

I was twenty-four before I ever saw a picture of two men kissing—on a flyer for a gay dance that was stapled to a lamppost. By then I was living in New York again, in another part of Manhattan, with my father and a different stepmother. A year out of college and having broken up with my first boyfriend, you might have expected that I’d eventually move into my first apartment in the Village. But I was a boy who (my parents delighted in embarrassing by telling his few friends) was sent home from the hospital wrapped in a yellow blanket, not a blue one or even a pink one. So yes, I had boyfriends, loved

to visit the Oscar Wilde Bookshop on Christopher Street, where I looked through and sometimes even bought gay magazines, newspapers, and books— where I spent as much time on the lesbian side as on the gay side.

In those days, because I didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs, loved to dance but hated loud music, I never went to gay bars or clubs, and only went to the baths twice. I continued to read gay publications like Fag Rag and Christopher Street, and it was Gay Community News, from Boston that shaped my political opinions—but I also read Amazon Quarterly from cover to cover, along with Lilith, Off Our Backs, and other feminist and lesbian magazines, and found myself having far more in common culturally with the lesbians I met than with the gay men I met and dated. So when it was time to go out on my own, instead of finding a place in the gay Village, I moved across the river to lesbian Park Slope in Brooklyn, where I lived for nineteen years in the same two room apartment one building in from Prospect Park.

For six of those years I worked in the Community Bookstore, two blocks away and around the corner from my apartment, and while I met several of my boyfriends in that time, my social circle was almost entirely composed of lesbians, several of whom I still count among my dearest friends. Among that circle of friends and acquaintances were the founders of the feminist press Out & Out Books, Joan Larkin, Elly Bulkin, Jan Klausen, and Irena Klepfisz, all of whose books I devoured. I remember evenings, often the only man, sitting in Joan’s living room with Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich, listening to them talk about writing, politics, and also about their spiritual lives—something that none of the gay men I knew would talk about till the coming of AIDS. And one night in her kitchen, Joan tapped me on my shoulders with a thick wooden spoon whose handle was almost a yard long—and dubbed me an honorary lesbian, which to this day I rank as one of the great honors of my life.

I devoured the journals, poetry, and fiction of lesbian author May Sarton, who became a pen pal, along with the works of Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, and other women writers, including Alice Walker, who lived for a time RFD 175 Fall 2018 17

in the neighborhood and sometimes came into the store. I helped my boss, a straight woman, set up the store’s Womens’ Section and helped her maintain a flourishing shelf of local and regional woman authors, many of them self-published, all of them essential to me.

Not into drag or drag shows, I dressed and moved in the world like my lesbian friends. My identity makes more sense to me today than it did back then, when the world was more binary. And now, in a time when porn is everywhere, when you can find sex on your phone in an instant, when there are fewer and fewer gay bookstores left, in fact fewer and fewer bookstores at all, I remember with joy and gratitude the 1970s, when gay and lesbian presses were thriving, when there were magazines and newspapers that talked about us and our lives in ways that we had never seen before. And when I think about my own work as a writer, it is that time

18 RFD 175 Fall 2018

and those women’s books and periodicals that made me possible—a gay (not queer, although I sometimes use the word) man in his late sixties who’s a Goddess worshipper and an honorary lesbian, who spent the last eight months slowly reading out loud before he got in bed each night the collected poems of Emily Dickinson, all 1789 of them. His favorite is 1775: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery.

The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

(He is now reading out loud a new verse translation of the Bhagavad Gita.)

The end

Visionary cover courtesy Queer Archive Project

The Lost Art of Communication by c. huilo c.

H

ow is news exchanged? Locally? Queerly? The new realm of social communication in the gay world lacks charm and wit. The world has changed.

No doubt, when we communicate in bytes, tweets, and various chat formats our sense of being becomes more insensitive.

I used to write for the long gone, CreamPuff magazine. As the art commentator, aka Artvark, for a hip San Francisco based gay rag; I was delighted to be part of a generation writing for cutting edge media. Like the Warhol inspired Interview magazine, the format of CreamPuff was interesting, eyecatching and much more than just a tourist guide to bars—it covered the underground gay scene as it slowly emerged out of the AIDS epidemic.

The magazine was inspired by Kevin Afuso, chief editor and also curator of the infamous club night, Sugar, at SF’s Stud Bar in the 1990’s. The artistry that went into the covers and the range of articles was to say the least, savvy. Unfortunately, this magazine suffered its demise from unpaid debt by its advertisers.

Today, I long for a place to turn to interesting queer media and ways to connect to our stories.

Sure, there’s Zuckerburg’s big brother format that is nothing more that a forum for self-feeding loops of egomania. Over and over we regurgitate destructive propaganda and self-centered praises. We live in a micro media world where “its all about me”.

Now? POZ magazine comes forward on sensitive and tough issues around HIV+ life, although it receives most of its backing from treacherous big-pharma companies. Ok, so there’s LogoTV, NewNowNext, etc., but where is the local coverage of our theatre, our arts, or even our politics? Often, I ponder the love affairs brought forth by personals from the back pages of SF Bay Times. I think about pre-Grindr, when bar-time bon-vivants danced before jumping in the sack. Is there any level of courtship these days? I think the media did help lovers to connect their invitations to woo each other through a paragraph and a phone call. Now our courtship is a dick pic and an Uber ride to a fifteen minute sex act. Not that our actions were up to good in the past…but the point is, with all this media available to communicate are we becoming more—or less— intimate?

The social memes that seduce the perspective

Creampuff covers courtesy author.

of queer beings toss us deeper into a cauldron of deception—cheating us of human interaction. The media of the 70s, 80s 90s, while heavy on paper/tree cutting…had ways to bring us together, share our stories. Now we see ourselves, with the supposed “queering of the media,” yet, are these images creating an in-depth exploration of who we are as a full spectrum, integral part of society?

What inspires modern gay media? Is it really catching the barometric pulse for who we are and what is important? In the late 70s I remember waiting for a mysterious, brown envelope arriving at my door hiding the alluring After Dark magazine. It was my subtle entrance to the gay scene before the bars.

Now, I apprehensively scan AOL’s Huffpost’s Queer

RFD 175 Fall 2018 19

Voices for any sensible reporting on our evolving gay world—but rarely find any report of local news— who’s in what theatre production or who has an intriguing art show?

Perhaps there’s room for both online media and print media? Maybe we can do better, all of us…at communicating? We can ask better questions, see each other, court each other, and reveal our magic

20 RFD 175 Fall 2018

a bit more compassionately than just an egotistical sound-byte on social media. While advertisers compete for our five-second attention span, our heart and soul gets lost in the saturation of media platforms. Let’s call forward the media to see us more clearly, and also invite each other to see each other more empathically as well.

Creampuff cover courtesy author.

FaeNet: Making faerie space, in the clouds—

A social network for Radical Faeries

By Bulbul of the FaeNet Stewards

What is FaeNet? FaeNet is a social networking website for Radical Faeries. You can create a profile (with your Faerie name!) and connect with friends, lovers, and sisters.

You can create a group, events, or a page, share pictures, videos and documents, write a blog, and much more!

Why is there a need for FaeNet? Facebook is not an ideal place for us Faeries. The massive, for-profit corporation has profiled us every which way, then sold our data to some unscrupulous third parties. They ban users for uploading seminude pictures, or even shut down whole groups for that or other petty “violations”. In general, it just does not feel like a safe space anymore. With FaeNet, we are the owners of our own data and we make sure it is not misused. We run FaeNet as a community Faerie project, according to our own values.

What are the benefits of FaeNet? FaeNet allows you to connect with other Faeries.

Are you traveling to Rome and want to see if there any Faeries there? Want to see which Faerie events are happening in Europe on a certain date? Looking to connect with other Faeries who are interested in crystals? Looking for a Faerie graphic designer?

With FaeNet’s Faerie Directory, it’s easy to get connected!

FaeNet also offers easy registration for events, including the option to donate in advance to the event. It offers an easy way to share pictures, documents, blog posts, or meeting minutes among Faeries who attended an event or are part of a certain community.

Who runs FaeNet? The FaeNet community is served by a few software developers and a FaeNet Stewards circle of about ten Faeries from various Faerie communities around the world.

FaeNet demographics As of today, FaeNet has 780 users from twenty different countries. FaeNet has hosted 136 events, 46 groups, and 1,425 photos albums. An average of

five Faeries joins the network every day.

What’s next for FaeNet? The team is working on adding more functionality, building mobile apps, and improving overall performance.

I’m in! How do I sign up?

Great! Just go to www.faenet.org and follow the instructions to create a new account.

How can I support or get involved in FaeNet? We are currently raising funds for FaeNet. We would like to move FaeNet to faster server and there are additional costs for the development of the mobile apps. If you are interested in donating to FaeNet, please go to www.faenet.org/donate We at FaeNet are expanding our support circle, so we are looking for graphic designers, programmers, and technical support Faeries. If you are interested in joining the core FaeNet community, please write us at info@faenet.org.

How did FaeNet start?

In the Canaan Great Circle of 2017, I volunteered to build the community a new website. There were two main requirements that seemed important to the community: (1) To allow Faeries to log in to the website, so they can see content that is shared only to Faeries in the community. We had many minutes, budgets, documents, etc., that we wanted to share, but didn’t want to share them with anyone who visited the website. (2) An upgraded registration system for events. We used google forms, but the form was a bit long. We wanted something where Faeries could save some of their information and not have to fill in the same info over and over again (like food allergies and so on). Also, we wanted to allow online donations, in order to reduce the cash that we gathered for gatherings and to make the financial situation for each gathering a bit more predictable.

I started building a website, and posted a beta version to play around with. In October 2017, I had the pleasure of participating in the Albion Communication Circle at Featherstone Castle as part of the Samahin gathering. I found out that they actually RFD 175 Fall 2018 21

needed a very similar website. I told the participants there about my work and offered to collaborate on it. If we have already developed the code, why not having both communities enjoying it? Plus, I was working on the project by myself, so I was very happy that Running Water—an Albion Faerie who is a web developer—joined me as part of the collaboration.

We formed a small circle of people who are interested in the project: Miqi Mixture, Running Water, Swallow, Buzzy, and myself. We discussed the different requirements for the websites and bounced around various solutions. We realized that we wanted to allow Canaan Faeries to register for events in Albion, and vice versa. Then we thought, why stop there? This tool can be used by any other community that wants to adopt it. From there, it was a very short road to understanding that we were actually building a social network application. There was also a strong sense that we needed an alternative to Facebook: I witnessed a few Faeries getting banned from Facebook because they uploaded sexual content into private groups. Facebook has switched from removing content based on user reports to an algorithm that detects nudity. Facebook removed event pictures with non-frontal nudity or even just a glimpse of pubic hair, but the real threat was that Facebook would just shut down whole groups based on sexual content.

Running Water and myself spent a few months researching different ways we could set it up and testing a few frameworks. Since we saw FaeNet as community project, we felt it was important to widen the forums for decision making about FaeNet. We formed a circle (later named the “FaeNet Stewards Circle”) and invited Faeries from different communities: Shokti, Miqi, Swallow, and Running Water from Albion, Lucifer (aka Liminal Baby) from Berlin, Mata Hari from Austria, Foxie Deux Milles from France (Folleterre), and later Buzzy (Albion) and Stardust (San Francisco). The circle meets every month and we discuss topics such as the moderation of FaeNet, privacy settings, legal structure, and what should be developed next.

Around Februaryt 2018, we started announcing FaeNet to the Faerie universe. Our goal was for FaeNet to handle registration successfully for the “Spring Love Awakening” gathering at Paddington Farm, Glastonbury, UK. We announced FaeNet and the gathering registration on Albion’s communication channels. We wanted to make sure that FaeNet was stable before we were ready for a larger crowd.

Slowly Faeries started joining and giving us feed22 RFD 175 Fall 2018

back. Then, we announced FaeNet to other Faerie groups in Europe and around the world. We wanted to do it gradually, since it was important to see that there were not real technical issues and to ensure that things were running smoothly. We focused on allowing gathering facilitators to use FaeNet as a registration platform. We added registration to the “Sounds of Faeries” gathering in Austria, and to “Beltane” at Folleterre. We add the ability to process credit cards to Albion, Austria, and Canaan Bank accounts. However the real pleasure was to see the plethora of groups that were forming on FaeNet. Faeries open lots of groups, regional groups, and special interests groups as well, such as: sex workers (“World of Whore Craft”), gardening, astrology, reading club, politics, various stewards circles, and more and more.

After we launched, we had a few people join us.

Buzzy (Cynl) joined the development team for about six months. Stardust joined FaeNet circle and later offered to move FaeNet under the legal umbrella of the Online Policy Group / QueerNet, a non-profit organization with the motto “One Internet With Equal Access for All”. This allowed us accept donations and to have more legal protection than a loose project of a few individuals. Most recently, Basic, Baby Goro, and Blackcap have joined the development team. We want to get a lot done—we’d like to improve the performance of the network. Basic has already started optimizing the network and was able to cut the load time of a page by about 30%. Ideally, we want to move to a private virtual server. From tests that we’ve run with Blue Star, we’ve found that we can triple the speed of the network. Blackcap is now working on an adult content plugin that allows user to tag pictures if they content sexual content.

This will enable users to choose to avoid sexual content images in their stream or, even better perhaps, to have a feed that contains only sexual content!

Stardust brought up the need for such a tagging plugin, in order to make it possible for younger Faeries to participate in FaeNet without violating any applicable laws. Our next major development project is to create mobile apps for the network. Mobile apps will allow us to send users mobile notifications and will let users converse on FaeNet much more smoothly.

To cover the costs of maintaining and developing FaeNet, we are starting an online campaign. We have secured funds from Albion, Austria, Canaan, and the EuroFaeries Fund. This will leave us with about an additional US$1,000 to raise to meet our funding target. We hope that the community will support FaeNet. If you are interested in donating to

FaeNet, please go to www.faenet.org/donate. We are also expanding our support circle, so we are looking for graphic designers, programmers, bloggers, and technical support Faeries. If you are interested in joining the core FaeNet community, please write us at info@faenet.org.

I’m extremely proud of the work we have achieved. An average of five new Faeries join FaeNet every day. I have met a few Faeries that have left Facebook completely and are now using FaeNet exclusively for their Faerie social networking. For me, the most magical moments working on FaeNet have been the moments when the community has

The Rad Dish cover courtesy Queer Archive Project.

come up with new ways to communicate online that are unique to us Faeries. Baby V requested to add a “sssss” emoji, so Buzzy create a snake icon with “sss”. KingFisher asked us to have a “Yoo-hoo” sound as the mobile application sound for a notification, and we immediately said yes. Or an online heart circle group where Faeries can just share from the heart without getting comments, just other Faeries acknowledging their shares. Building an alternative to the mainstream media was our goal and I feel that FaeNet is creating a radical means of communication for our beautiful worldwide Faerie communities.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 23

Queering The Map

by Lucas LaRochelle/Lawn

T

he notion of ‘queering space’ does not seek to embed a given environment with a visible orientation of non-normative sexuality or gender, but rather to disrupt and critique a reality in which cis-heteronormativity is rendered the norm.1 To ‘queer’ space is to point to the limits of current realities that do not adequately consider the comfort and safety of queer bodies, and in doing so, points to other possibilities. Queer space is ephemeral, it is produced through the actions of queer bodies resisting or even simply existing in the face of dominant power structures that would rather we not exist.2 Despite their ephemeral nature, these actions of resistance do not simply disappear into the ether once they have been performed, but rather hold the possibility to act as catalysts for a reimaging of a queerer, more radically open world.3 Queering The Map is a community generated digital counter-mapping project that aims to archive these fleeting moments of queer existence and resistance in relation to physical space. Participants of the project anonymously share stories of queer significance and locate them on the map with a drop-pin.

As queer life becomes less and less centered around specific neighbourhoods and the buildings within them, Queering the Map seeks to make visible the sheer diversity of queer spaces, from park benches to parking garages — to mark moments of queerness wherever they occur.

T

he project intends to leave ‘queerness’ open to endless interpretation. From direct action activism to a conversation expressing gender pronouns, from feelings of isolation to moments of rapturous love, Queering the Map functions as a living archive of queer experience. The mapping of queer histories is at the core of the project and elders of the queer community are particularly encouraged to add moments and places of historical significance to the map in order to preserve our collective history—one that is always at risk of erasure. As one fan of the project commented on Facebook, “We don’t inherit our stories. This is a lovely way of passing them on.”4 Through mapping these ephemeral moments, Queering the Map aims to create a web of queerness that shows the ways in which we as a community are intimately connected.

24 RFD 175 Fall 2018

1 Oswin, N. “Critical Geographies and the Uses of Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer Space.” Progress in Human Geography 32.1 (2008). Web. 90 2 Reed, Christopher. “Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment” Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 4, 1996, 64.

3 Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

New York, NY: New York U Press, 2009. Print. 113.

4 “Queering The Map.” Facebook ,www.facebook.com/pg/queeringthemap/reviews/

Two Poems for Nick

by Bambi Gauthier

Sat 10 Aug 18

While listening to Reynaldo Hahn’s Chant d’Amour It’s been ten days since we made love Vast oceans have calmed into a tide Your arms are the distance of seas from me & I hunger to swim into them Smiling as some crag of ledge for me Clinging, expectant and warm from the climb Seeing the sun, feeling the blue fire Your eyes glinting as some Fresnel lens guiding me Back to the inlets that dot the shore Fingers for me to lick and tug at with vigor The soft seaweed on granite shifting with each wave My hand brushing over your belly fur The laughing gull swirling overhead As your giggles rise as you partake of another kiss There is this ocean, filled and ever wanting to be filled Your body riding along my shoreline, splashing against my defensive barriers Til I too am part of some cosmic ocean And your hair is damp like a mariner Salty smelling as I kiss it to reach your mouth It is misty evening and the sea is blank, vast Only the small of your back is known to me as we spoon The only safe harbor in this darkness Are your kisses as we drift into the oblivious ocean of sleep It has been ten days since we made love And I am walking the shore seeking the current, that is you Fri 24 Aug 18

Smoke Poem Lying in bed smoking my pipe Smoke carpets the cool air Forms into angels, small particles Circle above my head, my eyes dart Seeing visions as though watching an old television And with each wisp of smoke I feel insecure in this body The variables endlessly floating Small rabbits of grey dancing through the open window Into the larger atmosphere, accumulating In my sleep, in the morning dream Into your lungs, aspiring to create fire With your breath as we kiss

RFD 175 Fall 2018 25

Allen Young Interview

by RFD

RFD: Allen, thanks for taking the opportunity to meet me for lunch a few weeks back. I’ve been enjoying reading your newest book, Left, Gay & Green. Can you tell me what inspired you to consider writing an autobiography at this point in your life?

Allen: I had a few essays on various topics which I’d worked on over the years which were never published and their existence prompted me to consider a book of autobiography essays. One of these was about being a “red diaper baby.” I wrote that when Michael Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and a friend of mine going back to the 1950s, invited me speak about that topic at a conference in Danbury CT in the 1990s. I also wrote a piece about my Jewish identity, explaining that even as a secular Jew, I identify strongly with my Jewish heritage. I wrote about my maternal grandfather, who was Orthodox, and about growing up in a distinctly Jewish cultural region—the Borscht Belt of New York’s Catskill Mountains. Another unpublished essay I’d worked on was about my enjoyment of marijuana and my 1980 arrest for growing it.

Also, I had published some books of local interest with Haley’s of Athol, Mass., near my home, and the publisher there suggested I write a book about my life as a writer, with excerpts of early work. I retired in my late fifties and had enough savings to live on, so I started to think about a full-length book.

Writing comes easily to me, plus I felt it was the right time. Even though I have had a great enthusiasm for other activities, for instance, in gardening, writing is the number one activity for me.

I wanted to tell the story of my life not just that period of intense activism from the 60s to the 70s – which was perhaps the most “marketable” topic 26 RFD 175 Fall 2018

-- but I wanted to include my rural life as a child on a chicken farm in Upstate New York, my three years in South America, and my life at Butterworth Farm (the gay-centered community started in 1973, where I still live). I didn’t want to limit myself to a memoir, a small chapter of my life, and the result is an autobiography which covers my whole life.

RFD: Much of your book chronicles you navigating personal, political and professional experiences that mostly deal with our life as a journalist.

How do you see your life as a gay man influencing the work you took on?

Allen: When I was closeted and secretive about my sexuality, I obviously didn’t consider cocksucking and my sexual feelings as something to write about! I saw being gay as a form of sexual gratification, not a cultural or political force. Early on, when I was in early adolescence with raging hormones, I masturbated frequently with gay imagery in my head, and somewhat obsessively drew doodles that featured penises and ejacuation. I can’t emphasize enough how vital it was for people like me to keep our sexual feelings – I use the word “feelings” rather than the more contemporary “identity”—secret in the 1950s.

I wrote about other things for many years, but my work as a writer changed significantly soon after I joined New York GLF (Gay Liberation Front) in January of 1970. Gay men and lesbians needed to be affirmed about our place in society. And as a group, we needed to communicate our reality to society – and overcome the rampant misinformation and homophobia. All GLFers were committed to coming out as the way to make people aware that things needed to change. I took on the challenge of using my skills as a writer to educate gay and straight

people about these issues. There was a huge amount of misinformation and ignorance – and there is a difference between these two things. Much of the misinformation came from psychologists and psychiatrists who had pronounced us as being mentally ill. They blamed bad parenting, and said we could be cured through psychoanalysis. There were other horrible cruel treatments, including electroshock therapy. Many people thought we wanted to have sex with small children. Books were written saying we couldn’t be happy. As for ignorance, one of the most important items to bring into the light was how great our numbers are and how homosexuality is nothing new. Our sexual acts were called “crimes against nature,” but we fought against this by pointing out that homosexual behavior was widely found in the natural world and in human civilization from its outset. Many of us suffered in isolation, thinking we were the only one, but post-Stonewall, we were starting to learn how there were millions of us worldwide.

co-worker about my book with Karla Jay, The Gay Report, published in 1979, just as I started that job.

The editor was entirely surprised but said nothing.

I was a great resource for them and it was source of income for me.

The hardest part of working for the Athol Daily News was dealing with the editor. He was an alcoholic and an ex-Marine, and liked to prove that he was the boss. I had developed survival skills in life to deal with difficult people.

The transition to Athol Daily News was also fine because I had a commute of only fifteen minutes and had plenty of time to enjoy my connection with nature. I was able to continue political activism by joining local environmental movement groups and being part of the “no nukes” movement.

During that time I was also writing and editing more gay books and writing for a number of gay periodicals, especially The Advocate, also San Francisco’s Gay Sunshine, and Fag Rag and the Gay Community News in Boston.

You were involved in some interesting places in leftist politics from Liberation News Service and Gay Liberation Front yet you chose to relocate to a small Massachusetts town to live closer to nature. You took up work at a local paper. How was that transition?

I wasn’t thinking about my career at the time I decided to move to the country. My goal was to experience full-time rural living, building a house, and enjoying the great outdoors. We were running a small map business that we five original Butterworth Farm members owned and later sold when each member moved in his own direction. I took the job of reporter at the Athol Daily News to support myself. I was openly gay, not closeted, but on the other hand, I had stopped wearing gay buttons and I didn’t announce my homosexuality. I approached the editor of the paper with a good resume and was hired. The editor found out within a year that I was gay but it never became an issue. I’d told a

Did you know Mark Thompson at The Advocate? What were your impressions of his take on gay spirituality?

Yes, I knew Mark, as I often was writing book reviews for The Advocate at the time he was cultural editor. Friends here at Butterworth Farm were involved more spiritually than I was. For example, Bob Gravley believed in tree spirits, and he told me he said something to the devi of a tree before he cut it with a chain saw (for firewood or land clearing).

John Burton used astrology to aid him in planting his garden, but I was devoted to science and considered myself an atheist. I learned about paganism via Arthur Evans’ book, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. I had met Don Kilhefner and knew of his interest in gay spirituality and I was aware of the birth of the Faerie movement in the 1970s when Harry Hay organized a gathering in New Mexico. I was interested, but too busy building my house at that time and did not attend. I often stated that my

Images courtesy Allen Young

RFD 175 Fall 2018 27

love of nature was my spirituality.

You seem to have shifted from identity politics (left, gay) to dealing with nature while still retaining your ideas coming out of your experiences. Obviously all of this is fluid but do you see one influencing the others and how.

Well, my book has four main words in its title and subtitle – left, gay, green and writer. I still feel connected to all of those things and in the “afterword” in my book, I summed up my current views or definitions. I think “identity politics” refers to things like my being gay and Jewish, and I define each of those in my own way – I don’t abandon them. Being a leftist, environmentalist and a writer are all part of who I am. I don’t let identity politics overwhelm me one way or another.

Some left-wing parts of the gay movement resist gay assimilation but I don’t have the same reaction to assimilation. I am comfortable around straight people, but I am still the same gay person.

As an analogy, consider many people you might know -- non-observant Jews who do not follow dietary and other Jewish laws.

That person can still have a Jewish identity, without being marginalized and totally separate as are many Orthodox Jews with their strict adherence to Jewish laws including specific kinds of clothing they wear in public. I make a point in my book that I do not wish to be marginalized, but that does not mean that I am assimilated in a way that totally takes away my differences (as a gay man, or as a Jew).

You’ve worked in the past with Karla Jay on books which many consider seminal early texts for coming out. Does that work still resonate with you? Have you heard from others about the impact it has had on them?

Karla and I worked together on four books, all published in the 1970s. The first, still in print in a 20th anniversary edition, is Out of the Closets: Voices 28 RFD 175 Fall 2018

of Gay Liberation.” These essays and manifestos are extremely relevant to this day, even if some of the ideas come across as dogmatic and unrealistic.

People still tell Karla and me about how important this book and others were to their personal liberation and experience. I’m proud of what we did and pleased to report that as a gay man and lesbian team, we strived to have a successful collaboration and a friendship that endures to this day. Our last collaborative work, The Gay Report,” published in 1979, is an important document about gay men and lesbians before the onset of HIV-AIDS. Given the shrinking media in general, do you have any thoughts about how to keep a vibrant queer media in the age of the blog and instant news sites?

There’s a reason the word media is plural. For communication, aside from songs and story-telling and music and maybe art, there was once only one medium – the printed word. Now we have movies, TV, social media in many forms – and all have a place in modern society.

None of them is about to go away. I see value in having us participate alongside straight people in various media, as well as maintaining and promoting our own media. Individuals may feel more comfortable in different situations, and that’s OK. A constant theme in my book is my own gradual revulsion toward dogmatic approaches to issues, and my rejection of zealotry that can be self-satisfying but often is a turn-off and thus counter-productive.

Do you have any advice for other queer writers on honing their craft in today’s saturated media environment? You decided to self publish this work, can you speak to why you made that choice and what has been your experience with self publishing versus working with a publishing house?

Self-publication is closely associated with relatively new technology, linked to computers and the internet, called “printing on demand.” A book can

Allen Young and Karla Jay as the gay and lesbian American Gothic. Courtesy author.

be created, as mine was, with minimal expense and without a specific press run. With self-publishing, the author has complete control. I am all in favor of collaboration, and a commercial press, even a small press, can help some writers create a better product.

I decided to obtain total control over my book once I figured out that other people wanted to alter it in ways that frustrated or annoyed me! That may sound egotistical, but to be honest, it is not that so much as it is related to my years of experience (having previously written or edited fourteen books) and being an “old man” (76 when my book was published, now 77).

Allen, it’s been wonderful catching up with you for our readers. In closing, any last ideas or themes people should think about from reading your book?

I think readers of RFD are in many ways an ideal audience for my book, and that’s true for those who are close to me in age, or those who are much younger.

There are some very positive customer reviews on the Amazon.com page for my book. (Yes, this is raw promotion!) I feel that my life has been joyful as well as a life of struggle, with the pain of repression before gay liberation emerged, the sorrow of the AIDS crisis, and the failure of my generation to bring about the utopian liberationist socialism we envisioned. Focusing on love, kindness, mutual respect, joy, cooperation, community, and progress, even In the threatening age of President Donald Trump, is something I try to do, and hope others have a similar vision. I appreciate the interest of RFD in my book, partly because it is a sweet link to the fact that I had immediately been aware of the launching of RFD in Iowa in 1974 and, together with the other residents of Butterworth Farm, participated in the production of several early issues.

Bambi Gauthier, I want to say to you and others who work on RFD today, nearly a half-century later, that you should be proud of continuing this periodical long after others have gone.

Octagon House at Butterworth Farm, photos courtesy author.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 29

A Return to Gay Sunshine

by Leo Racicot

O

ur friend, Brian Dean, got very sick, very fast.

The best-looking of our gang of cut-ups and clowns. Picture a rougher copy of Paul McCartney, not as jejune as Paul, a hippie knight out of Ivanhoe, witty as shit, flamboyant but not ostentatious.

Brian was so good-looking, so “together” with confidence, such a cool cat, a panther, he literally could not make it from his apartment to the corner store without getting his cock sucked.

He possessed the sexual prowess of a thousand rabbits. We envied him. We adored him. He was just Brian, immortal.

In a breath, it seemed, he began to run out of breath, became uncharacteristically weak.

He lost too much weight. Ugly sores appeared on his collar area and arms. Doctors were baffled and Brian became lost for a long time in a wilderness of medical tests and pills and bad-tasting syrups. By the time we did finally puzzle out what was happening to Brian, Brian was dead.

It took weeks and months to assimilate the reality of AIDS, this mystery illness that was making us sick, killing us, this “gay cancer”.

Brian’s demise hit me like a kick in the stomach. And as I do, and have done since the age of ten, whenever loss tosses a look my way, I wrote about Brian and the tragedy that had taken him, to try to bring some sense to it, to try to expel the panic of it. I called my essay-memoir “Lines for Brian.”

I tried placing it with mainstream magazines but they wouldn’t touch it. No less a literary personage than E.B. White petitioned The New Yorker to print it but they laughed at him. On a visit to Jearld Moldenhauer’s and John Mitzel’s Glad Day Book Shop in Boston, my eye caught a 30 RFD 175 Fall 2018

title that took me by surprise—Gay Sunshine. On the cover, two men were locked in tender embrace. Inside were pictures of two boys kissing and of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky tonguing one another. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—the audacity, the mere joy of it, the idea that a gay hippie sensibility was infusing a newspaper

and a splendid newspaper at that I decided after looking through its provocatively delightful pages.

I scribbled down the submissions information—a San Francisco P.O. box and sent “Lines for Brian” off to Gay Sunshine the very next day.

Wasn’t I over-the-moon when a long letter arrived from publisher, Winston Leyland telling

me he wanted “Lines for Brian” not only for his journal but for its special tenth-anniversary issue.

He loved my writing style and said that as far as he, his staff, his friends and the San Francisco gay community could gauge, “Lines for Brian” was the first chronicle of a death from AIDS Related Complex (ARC). This claim was later documented as bona fide and to this day, no one has challenged the fact that “Lines for Brian” and Gay Sunshine broke new ground when they exposed the desperation, the pathos, the devastation of AIDS, the undeniable power it had to snuff out a young life so instantly. Brian’s story put a face to the burgeoning epidemic. The tenth-anniversary issue remains the biggest-selling issue in Gay Sunshine’s history. I was so pleased, for my own efforts but most of all for Brian whose story was being seen by so many. Pleasing, too, was seeing my work published in the same issue alongside prominent gay writers of the time: Robin Maugham, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Dennis Cooper, Charles Shively (who sadly journeyed on just this year), James Broughton, Jean Genet! It was a great year in my life—mostly, too, due to the epistolary friendship that blossomed between Winston and myself—we exchanged dozens of long letters, gayrelated, politics-related but also personal epistles—we shared similar backgrounds; we had both come from too-strict Catholic upbringings, had both entered seminaries to become priests, had both run like hell from the hypocrisy, the delusion we found there. We both discovered comfort and redemption in Buddhist teachings (Winston is still a practicing Buddhist). A recent winter rummage through some attic boxes unearthed amazing numbers of letters from Winston. How delightful his letters were and are.

My history with Gay Sunshine and Lines for Brian did not end there. In 1997 I was living a lost existence in Las Vegas. I had disrupted my life here in New England, left my friends including many gay friends, my gay milieu to journey out to Nevada to lend a helping hand to an elderly aunt, Helen, and her daughter, my cousin, Cookie. I adored Cookie and though Helen could be fun, by nature she was manipulative, scheming, destructive. She undid me. And taking care of Cookie was exhausting. I had no time to myself, no support system of any kind. I had no time to write. I hear the Vegas gay scene thrives today but when I was there, there was no such community, no vast numbers of gay men, no gay clubs (A trick and I once walked miles, on The Strip and off, for a gay water

ing hole we could quench our thirst in and found not a one). To say I was depressed—stuck in a city that struck me as ridiculously hetero, lacking any kind of cultural life—no museums, no musical concerts (other than rock and heavy metal), nothing but one-armed bandits and showgirls—well, I couldn’t get away and suicide some days seemed the only escape.

I was browsing the WOW store on West Sahara, sort of a mega-depository for the thencoming trend of techie devices, when on a shelf, a book called to me—Gay Roots. I grabbed it.

It was an anthology, subtitled The Best of Gay Sunshine Journal. It was wonderful to see but what stopped my heart in my chest was—in the table of contents, there was the title Lines for Brian along with my name! I cannot tell you the hope seeing that book gave me, lovely, miraculous, the reminder that my work had been rewarded in this tribute way. My work was in a book!! On that day Gay Sunshine gave me back some of myself. I came back to myself. That book rallied me. Over the next six months, I cranked out dozens upon dozens of poems, poems that would later become my award-winning collection, Alone in the Yard: Poems Buddhist, Beat and Otherwise. Eventually, I found a way out of Vegas and returned home to my beloved New England. Hallelujah, Gay Sunshine!

Winston Leyland is still living, thriving, keeping the work and memory of Gay Sunshine Press relevant through its archives. Nothing I can say here can possibly describe or pay proper tribute to the importance of Gay Sunshine and early publications like it that came along when they did—a time in our history when visibility was needed, when we needed to say, as we did say, “We’re Queer. We’re Here and We’re Not Going Away!”

Being visible was scary. These were times when to be out at all, much less out and proud was to go looking for trouble, even death. Many in the Movement went under. Many Brians died before the government would help And yet, I think now of the utter joy gave illustrating our lives, our activities, our agenda, our sexual release and habits as we were living and enjoying them, making us public, making us brave.

Invaluable is the word I feel for Gay Sunshine, for Winston Leyland, As a writer, as a gay man, I heard the Cosmos telling me to celebrate them, to celebrate ourselves. I hope with this remembrance I have.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 31

32 RFD 175 Fall 2018

Covers courtesy Queer Archive Project

RFD 175 Fall 2018 33

Queer Media

By Don Shewey

I

love subscribing to a podcast called “Nancy,” officially sponsored by WNYC-FM with superqueer co-hosts Kathy Tu and Jason Low. It thrills me to no end that the major New York Times podcast, “Still Processing,” is hosted by Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, two brainy queers (who are also, like Kathy and Jason, people of color). RuPaul’s Drag Race is not my TV of choice but it tickles me that all of America gets to see gay culture in action on that show, and Queer Eye, and Project Runway, and Modern Family, and…the list goes on.

Needless to say, it wasn’t always that way. When I was a young critter craving some reflection of my little queer self in the wider culture, sometimes the only thing available was the card catalog at the public library (see: Homosexuality). The primary function of culture is to show us how to live and what to be -- and we were all brought up to be heterosexual.

Some of us, however, are not heterosexual, and maybe the essential strangeness of being gay is being something other than what you were brought up to be.

So how do you learn to be gay? In the past, homosexual society was characterized by isolation and subterfuge; underground living produces a subculture.

But with the Stonewall rebellion and the advent of gay liberation, a gay culture was born. I’m fortunate to have been spared the isolation-and-subterfuge era and to have benefitted directly from this newborn gay culture. I’m sure the signals I picked up were faint and casual ones—offhanded remarks Allen Ginsberg would make in a candid interview; the liner notes for the Broadway cast album of Hair; an

34 RFD 175 Fall 2018

excerpt from The Homosexual Handbook (by the pseudonymous Angelo D’Arcangelo) printed in the hippie-slick magazine Rags; definitely Jill Johnston’s stream-of-consciousness column in the Village Voice, which covered lesbian communes, Gertrude Stein, and the New York bohemian art scene all in the same breath. Small things, but they passed down

the word to me that there was a way of living gay.

The impact this budding gay culture had on my actual life often seems small—until I compare my experience with that of older gays. My first two lovers were both a dozen years older than I am and so were socialized at a time when there was no open gay culture. The man I lived with for four years in Boston—activist lawyer and in many ways an incredibly brave soul—still suffered from his Irish Catholic upbringing and his years with a homophobic Primal therapist; his guilt and shame would erupt in spasms of self-hatred and post-coital disgust with me. The man I moved to New York to be with came from a more genteel background in Covers courtesy author.

which it was acceptable to be gay but only if you were utterly discreet (his shrink had him dating girls); when we were together, he was too nervous even to hold hands in public.

Of course, having grown up in a strict household (redneck father, Catholic mother) on Air Force bases around the country, I got the same negative messages from society that they did—that being gay wasn’t popular, that it would be something I’d have to hide, that it probably wouldn’t make my parents happy. But unlike the previous generation, I was also getting positive messages to counteract the gloomy ones. By the time I was forming an adult identity, being gay meant coming out—a political act that was applauded and approved as such, at least in

the robustly activist environment that was Boston/ Cambridge in the mid-1970s. It was relatively easy for me to follow the path that others had carved out of a wilderness. I had their fortitude as a model, whereas they had mostly silence. I started writing for a gay newspaper, Gay Community News, and became part of the culture.

Thank the goddess for GCN! Nobody got paid, and it sometimes felt like the high school newspaper in its frantic casual flying-by-the-seatof-the-pants lowbudget handmade quality, but there was terrific community spirit, and any number of excellent dedicated writers and reporters got their start there: Neil Miller, Michael Bronski, Amy Hoffman. My editor Lyn Rosen, bless her heart, let me write about anything I wanted, whether it was celebrating early Patti Smith and Lily Tomlin or applying crude gay analysis to Sondheim musicals or dumb Broadway shows trying out in Boston. My friend Joe Martin worked for WCAS-FM, which had a weekly show called Closet Space, which broadcast gay news you wouldn’t hear anywhere else on the radio. Across town, the Fort Hill Faggots churned out issues of Fag Rag featuring Charlie Shively’s provocative essays (“Cocksucking as an Act of Revolution”). Emanating from the West Coast, The Advocate was still a biweekly on cheap newsprint, with the pull-out pink pages of dense personal ads, along with Vito Russo’s interviews with gay icons and Mark Thompson’s reports on the early days of the radical faerie movement, while RFD carved out its own niche as a journal for rural queers, in those days focusing on farming tips and recipes as much as anything else.

And then there were the skin mags. The obscenity laws prohibiting frontal male nudity changed in 1968, which paved the way for periodicals featuring naked men starting in 1973 with Playgirl, which supposedly catered to newly liberated, sexually empowered women (ha!). The spreads of shirtless Broadway chorus boys in the closety show-biz monthly After Dark gave way to openly gay magazines like In Touch (launched in 1974), Blueboy RFD 175 Fall 2018 35

(1976), Mandate (1977), Playguy, and Honcho (both 1978).

As my career progressed, I took my gay identity with me, writing for the Boston Phoenix about theater, music, and anything gay that came down the pike. When I moved to New York, I found myself living in the West Village—smack in the middle of the most visible gay culture on the East Coast. Still, as I went off to meet this editor or that one, friends would advise, “Don’t let her know you’re gay.” In New York City! Disturbing but true: it takes as much courage to be openly gay in New York as it does almost anywhere else.

Again and again, I’ve gotten that courage from our culture. There was a time when the only “gay culture” was pornography Mae West movies, Streisand records, and the opera. I’m grateful to have had the plays of Harvey Fierstein and Robert Patrick, the essays of Karla Jay and Allen Young, the cranky-defiant journalism of Arthur Bell and John Mitzel, all of which informed my budding gay sensibility. In New York, the “alternative weeklies”—the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News—had lots of gay staffers and regular contributors (among them C. Carr, Gary Indiana, and Hilton Als) who covered gay politics and queer culture extensively. Christopher Street unabashedly positioned itself as a gay version of The New Yorker, introducing and promoting the explosion of excel-

36 RFD 175 Fall 2018

lent gay novelists emerging in the 1970s (Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Robert Ferro, George Whitmore, etc.). Publisher Charles Ortleb also created a weekly newspaper, the New York Native, which produced some of the best re-

porting on AIDS in the early years of the epidemic.

It wasn’t the first or the last gay weekly—in the late 1970s there was Gaysweek, and in the mid-’80s Outweek hit the scene with strong political and cultural coverage, including the provocative journalism of Michelangelo Signorile. The current gay newspaper in New York, Gay City News, was the evolutionary product of a ’90s weekly called LGNY, for which I co-wrote a she-said-he-said theater-review column with the peerless novelist Sarah Schulman, which migrated to New York Press for about a year.

Indefatigable activist and committed scribe that she is, Sarah compiled a compendium of her journalism called My American History, collecting articles written for Womanews, Off Our Backs, Seattle Gay News, Outlook, QW, and Lambda Book Report as well as mainstream publications such as The Nation and The Guardian. First published in 1994, it’s being reissued this fall, and it’s still the most succinct volume about “Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan and Bush Years.”

Along with newsweeklies, almost every big American city has some version of a bar rag—Michael’s Thing was the first one I encountered in New York, and for a while in the ‘90s and early aughts HX and NEXT were everywhere. Before the internet, these slick giveaways aimed at gay men provided listings of places to go and things to do and all the pictures you could want of local drag queens and muscle boys at parties. The 80s and 90s saw a proliferation of handmade arty/political zines, some crudely Xeroxed, others modeled on poetry chapbooks or Boyd McDonald’s cheeky Straight to Hell: The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts. My Comrade is one that persisted for a few years; during the height of the plague, Diseased Pariah News offered expressive truthtelling in the form of bleak, welcome humor. I treasure my collections of Steam (“a quarterly journal for men” published in Wisconsin by the late sparky porn star Scott O’Hara) and Gay Sex & Spirit (an Australian quarterly newsletter) the way comic-book collectors cling to early or obscure Marvel titles.

The World Wide Web made it easier for anyone with a computer to get their hands on free porn.

AOL chat rooms paved the way for the myriad platforms on which we cruise for sex. The transition wasn’t instant or seamless—print publications and zines have hung around, with increasing scarcity—but there is a robust online gay culture that anyone can tune into.

The internet is a boon to folks who are too young, too isolated, too scared, or too closeted to congregate in gay places or be seen picking up gay publications. But online culture is also immense, chaotic, and segmented. We don’t all consume the gay culture. Still, if you’re a gay Peruvian, the online magazine La Revista Diversa is probably a bit of a lifeline, and Gayletter and Edge still deliver something to their readers that you don’t get looking at Time Out or Facebook.

What makes queer publications important to us?

The dumb obvious answer is representation. That’s why I feel grateful for every manifestation of queer

media, from literary journals and investigative reporting to pornography and bar rags. It means a lot to see yourself reflected in culture. Otherwise, you feel invisible and therefore without value. For decades, fashion magazines featured only skinny white models, which had the impact of making plus-sized (i.e., regular) gals and women of color feel defective and worthless. The world has changed for the better for all of us. Any butch dyke can remember the first time she spied someone who looked like her in the world (her “Ring of Keys” moment, as fans of the musical Fun Home now call it); likewise, any trans person can probably recall the exact moment they saw a trans person in the media as something other than a crime victim. The gay press gave me the opportunity to develop my voice as a critic (I had the audacity to write about Sweeney Todd as an expression of Stephen Sondheim’s “gay rage”) and reporter (I got to ask Madonna, “Why is the music business so homophobic?” as well as “How big is Warren Beatty’s dick?”). And the gay press has taught me plenty in return.

The courage to be who you are—we all need that.

Questions of identity (who you know yourself to be versus who you allow yourself to be with others), of the importance of sex (who and when you fuck and/ or love)—these are obsessive themes of gay culture, in the art sense and in the life sense.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 37

Christopher Street and Its Kind

by Jon Weatherman

T

he gay press of the middle Seventies led me to the man who has been my husband for nearly forty-one years. Thank you, Detroit’s Metro Gay Times. Coming out, a continuum that remains ongoing for many of us as long as the social default is an assumption of straightness, I encountered the nascent word of gay media well before I could engage most of it. During high school, through furtive visits to downtown Columbus, Ohio bookstores and Ohio State University area head shops on the occasional flight from my suburban family home, I found several books (The Gay Insider, The Gay Liberation Book) that described a flourishing world of gay periodicals (Fag Rag, RFD). Not until adult life a few years later, living in Detroit, was I able to access a regular gay organ other than Blueboy, Honcho, Mandate, and its ilk or, as a queeny male proprietor who noticed my browsing interests and my Advocate purchase at his newsstand called them, “the After Dark and the In Touch.” Once found, Detroit’s Metro Gay Times became my roadmap to living the gay “lifestyle” in Motown. Through its pages I learned about a non-credit course in gay history being offered at Wayne County Community College. Not being the sort of guy who felt at ease in bars but being the sort of guy who fancied himself an autodidact, I signed up. I met a core of men who would become dear fiends and an early lover. They suggested I might like the weekly Gay Liberation Front rap meetings at Wayne State University. It was only a few weeks into joining the raps that a gender fluid member named Jezebel asked me about a tattoo on my left wrist. This drew the attention of that man who has been my companion for close to forty-one years and for seven legal years my husband. Together we became active in the community.

In the course of integrating my life with my “lifestyle” in Detroit I discovered WDET’s public radio broadcast of Gaily Speaking. Among the Motor City’s network of activists that I came to know were both the creator and the voice of Gaily Speaking, John Evola, and also the gay twin brother of David Krumroy, the gay editor of the Metro Gay Times. My day job then and for years to come was as a bookstore manager. While I could exercise some power to create and maintain a gay and lesbian interest section in my chain store posts (We had Black Stud-

38 RFD 175 Fall 2018

ies, Women’s Studies: I added Gay Studies.) I could not work LGBTQetc periodicals into my magazine section. That was the control of a corporate buyer and a local jobber. So I would shop the indies for my other reading, finding and subscribing to Christopher Street, for example. As our careers progressed, his took him to Pittsburgh, mine took me to a life in New York City. Long had been my ambition to live in the City, and hard work and good fortune brought me there Labor Day weekend, 1983. I was a store manager for B. Dalton Bookseller. My posting was in the Greenwich Village store at Sixth Ave and Eighth Street. To be in the city where Christopher Street was produced, as well as Charles Ortleb’s New York Native, was quite exciting. As a bookseller in the Village I found myself working in the writerly precinct that was home to homos and the land of those pinnacles of queer bookselling, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop and A Different Light.

A few months after moving into my floor-through in a Park Slope Brooklyn brownstone I was invited by my downstairs neighbor to join him when some guests would be visiting. I remember understanding that his guests would include Andrew Holleran and another writer well known for his contemporary gay themed fiction, I said I’d love to join them but of course I did not. I was shy, embarrassed by my fandom and my lack of a college degree and general overall feelings of provinciality. These were the men whom I’d been reading in Christopher Street. I sold their books. How could I be worthy to sit with them as if I were in the Stein-Toklas salon on the Rue de Fleurus? After my “partner” (in period parlance) joined me in New York, now in Washington Heights, it would be still a few years before I would set foot on Fire Island, that storied (quite literally) place of gay liberation, AKA hedonism. And when I did, and on subsequent visits, I am always reminded of its depiction in the pages of Holleran, and Edmund White. For sure, certain vistas evoke Bill Sherwood’s tender Parting Glances. Nonetheless, it is the descriptions of the men and their experience of the Grove, the Pines, and everything in between that the Christopher Street generation instilled.

I burrowed further into New York’s community, much as I had in Detroit. It was my half decade of volunteering with Heritage of Pride (the people who

bring you NYC’s Pride events) that coincided with the apogee of the the activist gay press, the Native, a well as Marc Berkeley’s entertainment guide Homo Extra (HX), and its rival, Next. As in Detroit, activism and the media were my fellow travelers. Of course, as time passes, things and people pass. New York’s community is today served by one newspaper.

Nightlife weeklies have all but evaporated. A glossy monthly primarily serves the male community as it aspires to a national profile. The Advocate has become the shiny happy Rolling Stone of LGBTQ? Fanorama cover courtesy Queer Archive Project.

media. I am older, naturally, and as I’ve settled into married life, my husband and I remain committed to gay print media. We subscribe to Out and The Advocate. We pick up the Gay City News, MetroSource, and Get Out. At the close of the Aughts I achieved my BA in creative writing from NYU. I’ve published books. I’ve written for RFD. And I find myself writing for RFD once again. Thank you for still publishing and affording me the opportunity to share my gay life with today’s readers.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 39

My Blue Neighbourhood: Coming Out of The Closet With Troye Sivan

by Michael Nied

I

painted my nails yesterday. As I sit in my car (at a red light, I swear) typing away on my phone, I’m looking down at the rich color. It is too dark to qualify as emerald. Not blue enough to be a true teal.

What really matters is that it is shiny.

And it feels good to be this fabulous. It is a relatively new feeling. Three years ago, this Midwestern twenty-seven-year-old would have missed out. Hell, three months ago I would have seriously overthought things. Because that bright spot of color is a bit of a calling card. It doesn’t exactly scream “I’m gay” to the world. It is literally just paint. On my fingernails.

Or so you would think.

It raises questions, though. My mom, a typically non-confrontational angel, grimaced after she saw me rocking an icy blue color recently. When we went to a family holiday party she asked if I could take it off. Because what would my uncle think.

He epitomizes “manliness,” after all.

Hopefully, he’d appreciate my fine motor skills and excellent concepts of color theory. “Oh, Mikey!

That ultramarine with those jeans and that tattered, vintage sweater you insist on wearing every time I see you? Simply brilliant, man,” he could gush between servings of pasta at my grandma’s table. Or it really could be an end-of-days situation. So, best to avoid at all costs. Sadly, I acquiesced to the request. The decision hit me with instant regret.

I can be my own worst enemy like that. I internalize problems the same way I internalized my sexuality until I was twenty-five years old. Unfortunately, they don’t give out Olympic medals for those truly impressive repressive abilities. So this is a habit I deeply desire to shake.

And I am.

Because I am on a journey to love myself more.

I’m struggling to embrace the inner, very fantastic, very gay me. In the process, I’m rewriting years of self-doubt and hoping to emerge from this transformative chrysalis newly minted. Hopefully, there are medals for this hard work as I transform myself from awkward, pre-godly Hercules into my fully evolved form: the still very awkward but much more adorable Hunk-ules.

Granted, I never would have been able to com-

40 RFD 175 Fall 2018

plete this metamorphosis alone. Obviously, I’d like to thank my friends, family and God(ney) Jean Spears while accepting my medal in a lengthy speech at the imaginary awards banquet I am hosting. But I also owe a lot to Troye Sivan.

Well, not just to Troye, the doe-eyed choir boy who grew up in Perth, Australia but was born in South Africa. There were others who came before him to lay the groundwork (I’m looking at you on the very slim chance you’re reading, Britney Spears). But, frankly, I owe a lot to his debut LP, Blue Neighbourhood.

The album dropped in 2015, mere months after I accidentally (more on that later) came out to my family. Although technically Troye is years younger than me (I mean, I’m basically a grandpa in some sectors of the gay community), the album resonated.

It was the first time I had heard a collection of music that so wholeheartedly celebrated an artist’s homosexuality. As a “baby gay” new to displaying my homosexuality to the world, I found a flicker of hope that things would get better after listening. I began to realize just how broad my future could be. Now is probably a good time to mention Troye paints his nails, too. Basically, we’re twins!

Since its release, Blue Neighbourhood became my unofficial soundtrack. Listening to it, I began to lay the groundwork to move into the future. It inspired me to face a new set of challenges and to live more authentically. The sweet synths and drilling bass showed me a new way of looking at the world.

Listening hurts a bit, though. It is a story of a young gay coming out. And while I may be newer to the LGBTQ community, I’m surely not new to the world at large. Remember, I technically qualify as a grandpa in the gay world. So, the album also reminds me of things I have missed out on. It balances the heartache of missed experiences with hope for the future.

Growing up, I learned to see the world in shades of gray. I learned that nothing is ever as easy as it seems and there aren’t always clear-cut answers.

Listening to the album, I started seeing my world in shades of blue. I may not have mentioned this yet, but blue is my favorite color.

It should come as no surprise, considering my Like Troye, I’m about to give you a chance to see intense, friendly love affair with the Pink Ranger, that my life in shades of blue. What follows is my coming I wanted to be her. Recently, I learned just how deout story set to songs off the album. Unfortunately, I manding I was when a friend revealed I always forced was not blessed with the voice of a baby angel. But I love to write, and I want to tell my story. So here goes her to play the Red Ranger during our dramatic reenactments of the latest episodes. nothing.

That requires a commendable amount of grit as “My youth is yours.” far as I’m concerned. Basically, I was the original https://youtu.be/XYAghEq5Lfw go-getter.

“When did you first know?”

I’d like to think I was wild when I was younger. I This is one of several dreaded questions that emerge in a young gay’s life. I can’t tell you how many was a pink-loving, Ariel-T-shirt-wearing, Jasmineaction-figure-toting spitfire. times I’ve been asked the exact moment I realized Looking back, I envy who I was.

I was gay. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d assume it Those carefree vibes burned brightly through comes up approximately once every time I’ve had my earliest years, but they gradually lost their luster. to come out to someone new. So, probably a billion I dulled some of my more feminine instincts in an times by now. effort to fit in. At my parents urging (later their However, I can’t give you a direct answer. Can you insistence), I signed up for various sports teams and imagine if you could pinpoint an exact moment in your life and say, “this is the cause of one very specific became a reluctant and highly uncoordinated student athlete. part of me?”

After years of bouncing But, I have a few guesses. from soccer (which required Let’s start with the Pink far too much running in Power Ranger, my first role It should come as no muddy fields) to baseball model. surprise, considering (where I learned to fear balls Oh, Kimberly Hart. How being thrown at my body) I loved (and still love) you. my intense, friendly and basketball (where the If only my burning passions love affair with the Pink balls were bigger, and I was had been of the youthRanger, that I wanted rewarded for my sole basket ful heterosexual variety to be her. Recently, with an ice cream sundae), like they were for so many I decided it was time for a other boys of the ‘90s. Why I learned just how change. I wanted to learn couldn’t I wake up to dreams demanding I was when a how to dance. There were of kissing you? Instead, I enfriend revealed I always far fewer balls involved, and vied your brilliant costume forced her to play the I wanted to float across a (which came complete with stage. a skirt, because you were Red Ranger during our What I didn’t mention the “girly” Ranger) and your dramatic reenactments when eighth-grade me asked graceful moves. Don’t even of the latest episodes. my mom if I could take get me started on your sass. classes is that I wanted to And your adorable boybe more like Britney Spears friend; can we share? (relatable, am I right?). She had recently replaced I mean, by now we all know I dreamt of kissing the Pink Ranger as my idol. Hello, early signs of my Tommy, the beautiful and wildly masculine Green burgeoning homosexuality. Could they have been any (future Gold) Ranger. louder?

I owned at least two of your action figures (and Luckily, she agreed. an oversized, stuffed version complete with a plastic Cue my graceless happy dance followed by imhead, which I wielded as a weapon if my brother measurable stress before my first class. I would be came too close). When one of them got run over by the only boy there. Thankfully, I managed to keep up. a lawn mower, I insisted on a burial. I wouldn’t be I trained my body to move. Excitedly, I donned my overly surprised if I contracted the local harpist to costume (oversized white pants and a tragic cowboy perform while I placed the single shovelful of dirt hat) to deliver excellent bell kicks during my first over the mangled corpse. I was extra like that even recital. back then.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 41

For the first time ever, I was a star. I left the stage preparing to accept offers for roles on Broadway. It was only after I got offstage that my mom told me people in the audience were saying I was gay.

Here was my first reminder that society expected me to be something. And while I wanted to be myself, I began to realize I may have to fight for that right.

“You were wild here once, don’t let them tame you.”

Isadora Duncan said that. She was a pioneer of modern dance, but I like to think of her as one of the most amazingly Bohemian bad bitches in history.

Here is another idol, and her words have become a creed of sorts.

Young me perfectly embodied it. Year after year, I insisted on getting back on stage despite (or in spite of) what people were saying. I refused to let them get between me and what I loved. I felt unstoppable.

Except for one little problem. Eventually, it all caught up to me.

And then I tamed myself.

I’m just a lost boy, not ready to be found.

“When are you going to come out already?”

I’ll never forget the first time I heard that. I was a freshman in high school and already embroiled in an inner battle over who I was. Like any young Catholic schoolboy (masters of guilt), I was handling my budding interests in the male form the only way I knew how: hard denial. Or, you know, just trying not to get hard in the locker room after gym class.

Unlike Troye, who came out at fifteen, I fought being gay. I crushed on boys and convinced myself it was merely a distraction before I eventually married a girl. Being straight was all I knew, and I wasn’t ready to accept anything else.

Which means I certainly wasn’t ready to be accosted by strangers about lusting after Zac Efron (do not speak to me if you don’t recognize his endless beauty).

Unfortunately, that was about to happen. At my school, we had regular mass services. However, our chapel was not big enough for the whole student body, so those of us with lesser religious inclinations (also known as me) spent the hour in a silent study hall. Obviously, we spent that time piously reflecting on upcoming tests and unfinished assignments that may be due next period.

What godly individuals we were becoming.

During one of those blessed breaks, a girl sitting in front of me turned around. I knew her in the way you know a stranger in a class of 200. Not well. In fact, we’d never spoken. Was I, the quiet freshman, about 42 RFD 175 Fall 2018

to make a new friend?

Sitting at my miniature desk, studiously bowed over a book, I remember thinking she was going to ask to borrow a highlighter. I don’t know why, but I was sure that was the logical explanation for what was about to go down. Instead, she dropped the question.

“When are you going to come out already?”

My response, being fourteen, shy and traumatized, entailed gaping at her like Britney stared at the camera during her disastrous performance at the 2007 VMAs. Full disclosure: I didn’t even know what coming out meant at the time. But, I knew, in this context, with this relative stranger asking me in a silent study hall, that it was not a good thing. I felt a sense of shame permeate my body and undoubtedly blushed.

Not the best denial, but also not a wholehearted announcement of my gay-ness.

By the next time someone asked about my sexuality or pulled out the equally dreaded questions about potential relationships, I had come up with a handful of excuses. I was dating school. Dance, drama, or choir kept me busy enough. I was waiting until I got accepted into the French Honors Society (desperate times call for desperate measures).

I wasn’t even ready to come out to myself. And part of that was because, in my school, no one was gay. People came out after we graduated, but I faced these struggles alone.

Thank god for the internet.

I was trying to be like you. I was trying to be cool. youtu.be/nld-m7mPRXQ Although I’d never had any issues finding porn online (sorry, Mom); it took me years to find anything resembling a true community of gays interested in anything other than a quick release.

Once I got to college, I turned to YouTube. There, I found endless cat videos and an adorable video of a baby stuck in a watermelon. But I also found coming out videos. Chiefly, I found Troye’s. And I was obsessed.

Here was a boy who came out at fifteen. At the same age, I was hiding behind my admission to the French Honors Society to avoid even talking about relationships. Meanwhile, he was opening up to millions of followers.

Inspired, I came out to myself. I looked in a mirror and owned my truth.

“I’m gay. Like, really gay.”

And it felt good.

Thanks to alcohol (a story for another time), I managed to start coming out to my friends. And they

from danger. I shake dramatically as though the were supportive. In my cozy home away from home, ground directly underneath me has been hit by an I began to shed some of the wards I’d erected around earthquake. It is not a pretty sight. Obviously, I am myself. Yes, this is a good time to use the word doing all of the above now. erected.

A half hour earlier, I dragged my feet up the steps However, I wasn’t out to my family. And I wouldn’t of our third-floor walk-up. For the first time, I wished be until I was twenty-five and living in Chicago with there were more steps. The prospect of exercise has my brother. never been more welcome.

Now seems like a good time for this story, so here Thankfully, my brother is waiting for me. He delivgoes. ers words of support and tells me it is time to stop Counting to 15 (or 25). running. I hope he is right. https://youtu.be/8VNV__mV38s Anxiously, I dial my mom’s phone. The words “Is this your way of coming out to me?” came out on a gasp.

Well, fuck. I guess it is now.

“Mommy, I am gay.”

The ground dropped out from underneath me as Finally.

I realized exactly what just happened. It is way too If I’m losing a piece of me maybe I don’t want early in the morning on October 6, 2014. I’m getting heaven. ready for my hour-long commute to work when I see the email.

I love my mom more Apparently, I’m going to than words. be coming out to my family When I’m nervous, There are so many times today. adrenaline takes over.

I was so close to telling her.

Shit.

Blood rushes to my The words would dance The night before I sent inside my mind as we rode my mom a message asking face, which burns hot side-by-side in the car. I her to check a blog post I’d enough to melt the sun. knew she wouldn’t be able to written. While grabbing dinMy knees lock, making escape, and, if I was driving, ner in the city, my brother it impossible to run the shock may not cause us and I were approached by to veer off road. a woman who had escaped from danger. I shake But, the moment never a life of domestic abuse. dramatically as though seemed right. And time is While my brother ordered the ground directly up now. My brilliant plans her something to eat, we underneath me has been (of having a boyfriend, spoke. She had been on the having been kissed, havstreets for seventeen days. hit by an earthquake. It ing stability in my life) fade My heart broke. is not a pretty sight. to black as I face my new When we returned to reality. our warm apartment I We both cry. I wish wanted to write something. we were together so we could hug. But her voice is But I was worried it would seem preachy. Cue sending an email asking my mom to proof-read. However, enough.

As I aimlessly wander around my apartment, I see I forgot my plans to write a week’s worth of content a future. We’ll move beyond this and be stronger. centered around National Coming Out Day as an It is clear that this is new. This is scary. “advocate.” Those posts started this morning.

We’ll get through the new and the scary. Together.

Take a wild guess which my mom read first.

Trying to keep faith and picture his face staring up Understandably, she had some questions. Inconat me. veniently, they were going to have to wait until we both finished work for the day.

“Do you want me to tell your dad,” she asks.

Suddenly, I was willing to stay late.

Well, now that you mention it, kind of. But it The truth runs wild like a tear down my face. should come from me. Instead, I ask you to pass the phone. And here is proof that a heart of gold overWhen I’m nervous, adrenaline takes over. Blood comes religious bigotry every single time. rushes to my face, which burns hot enough to melt “Can you put Rachie on the phone,” I request. the sun. My knees lock, making it impossible to run

RFD 175 Fall 2018 43

Nothing quite like coming out to your entire family. One after the other. Over your cell phone.

Only seeing myself when I’m looking up at you. https://youtu.be/UVMK5c8oJb8 For some reason, I am most afraid of being honest with my sister.

She has been my baby as much as my parents. Six years separate us, and it’s an ocean of time.

As the oldest, it is my job to protect my younger siblings. But sometimes I need them.

“So? That just means we get to talk about boys now,” she assures me.

Fierce warrior; never leave my side.

Just like that, a burst of laughter cut through the fresh tears springing to my eyes. I let her words begin to numb my pain. Maybe coming out won’t be that bad after all.

There’s a glimmer of hope like an exhale of smoke in the sky.” https://youtu.be/9ZxHBKojLSs Coming out is a never-ending experience. I haven’t gotten the hang of it yet. How do you work it into a conversation. Do you even need to? To quote Love, Simon (seriously, see this movie), why is straight the default? Sometimes I think it will never get easier.

44 RFD 175 Fall 2018

But coming out later in life is even harder. I’ll never get those years I lost in the closet back. I won’t get to be one of the adorable gay couples posting prom pics to Twitter. I won’t have my first love story in high school. I’m pretty sure a good love story is the only thing that makes high school manageable.

I realized all this before, but I doubly realized it the first time I saw Troye live. I was back in Chicago for a weekend getaway with my friend in 2016. She had agreed to come to the show with me. What she didn’t realize was that (after classily sipping a 4-Loko because nostalgia) I’d break into tears at the sight of Troye onstage.

My heart ached in my chest for all the years I had lost. But it also ached with joy to see the example being set in front of me.

Troye was gay. He was proud. He was radiant. He was everything I ever wanted to be.

He was everything I still can be.

Leaving the theater, I wiped the tears from my face. It was too good of a show to drown in sorrow.

And I left with a new mission. Because I saw a future beyond the years of self-doubt.

Now, I am approaching ease.

“Smoking Gun” by Timonanda

Poison Ivory

Simon Maddrell, Queer Manx Poet

My love’s purity is tarnished forever. No longer can I have hot sex freely. In cold fear of being blighting black sheep: Three-lettered branding iron that burns soul deep.

Poisoned ardour is all I have left to give. Seed of my loins now ivory tainted. My blood flowing with cells the same, once white. Elephant slain for being just where she might.

Unjust, life feels both poached and reproached,once majestic, now shot down in her prime.

Fearing my toxic sperm: ivory hemlock drink;even my lifeblood stained: hellish crimson ink. My shamanic guide she sees, she knows,in ghostly graveyards of bones she wanders,showing me, now stood still, proud with HIV: It was, it is, will be—all down to me.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 45

Imperfection

by Malik Shakur

46 RFD 175 Fall 2018

I trust I will die and have no cause to blush in my grave Though you laugh on the wrong side of your face Kissing the table After dragging our bleeding feet Famished, we fell into it…

—Tolth

Evil underwear Pinching my scrotum How could you?

Impeding my erection What’s your problem?

—Greg Banks

RFD 175 Fall 2018 47

The Garden of Arden After the Orlando Pulse shooting

I spent the last couple of days feeling like cannon fodder. I have never sought out strangers wearing clothes and hair and wants like mine in the heat-sweat of a gay club.

But I knew the men he killed; dancers laid out on the tacky ground; women’s hair spread out like blankets over blood; their phones crying out families’ texts. His ‘hunting rifle’ sights-up my nape, my dyke-y hair. He scopes my combat boots, my Pride flare hid in my closet. When our bi-bard’s Orlando fled his brothers’ rage he got a found family, a happy marriage to his fated sex.

But his brothers didn’t pack Sigs MCX.

— Jessica Dickinson Goodman

The Mountains We Avoid The mountains we avoid Monarch butterflies hang a left over the Great Lakes because a brief millennium ago there was a mountain there.

I won’t sleep on trains or leave my drink unattended or leave a cave after dark: survivors refuse to die the same way twice.

The mountains we avoid in our minds as they were given to us by our mothers make sense to our souls’ kaleidoscope of butterflies.

48 RFD 175 Fall 2018

— Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Inventory I wonder how many men I’ve slept with are dead.

How many have moved to other cities or countries.

How many still live here but rarely leave the house.

I wonder how many men I slept with are straight.

How many of them are still married to women.

How many of them are now married to men.

I wonder how many of them still just sleep around.

How many hate marriage and will never marry.

How many hate being single and how many love it.

I wonder how many lost their looks or stayed hot.

How many are the same type now or changed types.

How many still like the same type or had them all.

I wonder how many of them got really religious.

How many think they’re going to heaven or hell.

How many hate religion and don’t believe in God. I wonder how many of them got rich or got poor.

How many of them bought a house or still rent.

How many have kids now or will never have kids.

I wonder how many fell in love and stayed in love.

I wonder how many of them remember me at all.

How many thought to get in touch but then didn’t.

—Jason Roush

RFD 175 Fall 2018 49

A Place for the Sun And the Moon

by Fadrian Bartley

To a place of fire and ice Liberation celebrated in naked form, X-rated desire, Pubes of no pride, Uncovered scenery, A brush of hair in admiration, Above necks and navel bed, Dream is now free, in this open field, Buttocks know their needs, To accommodate pain, Teleporting the sensation into pleasure, Here into the open field, A playground of two muses, body of evidence laid together, The touch of both hands, healing the same gender, A piece of land uncovered by many, Where masculine fever induces their wild spirits, Group into few on withered grass, Below the element of the harsh humid, Playing the fiddle, making way to be fondle, Rise to their occasion, the monkey food draws attention, Displaying grandeur on blossom field, Species of charm, charismatic indulgence, One can never let go, when fingers grip their chances, An open space to enter, breathe without fear, Relax into what felt like an astroplane, or ritual ground of acceptance, The atmospheric pleasantry, Sigh of relief, into an open field of beliefs,

One will refuse to leave, Resting heads on chiseled platform, over pounding heart, Four eyes eclipse, To know what’s real, humane and liberated, Transforming intentions, and choices into masculine desire, Communicating effectively, Touching skin below the clouds, Other acknowledged, and participate the same, Demonstrating upon the field of fairie camp 50 RFD 175 Fall 2018

The Secret China Gathering 2018

by Mata Hari

—I am with you!

I

n early April 2018 after a short visit to the exotic, wonderful Faerieland Sanctuary in Australia and a very easy-going Fools n’ Faeries Easter Gathering in New Zealand, I flew directly—for the first time—on a mysterious journey to the ‘Land of the Red Dragon’ for the third China Faerie Gathering near Beijing.

In truth, I had never wanted to go there because I had heard only negative things about this country.

How it exploits its people and monitors them, that personal and political freedom is suppressed, that homosexuality is illegal and gays are persecuted.

The environment slips from one disaster to the next and is mercilessly sacrificed to economic progress.

However a year earlier at the Global Gathering 2017 in UK I met Francis, a charismatic Faerie.

Francis is an incredibly nice personality who brought the Radical Faerie Movement to China. He became a true friend to me and he convinced me to visit the 2018 Chinese gathering. The challenge was so strong. I accepted it.

When I landed in Shanghai and then in Beijing, I saw nothing of this huge country. Everything was a white mist around me and light yellow smog clouds. Just a week ago, there was a sandstorm

Photographs courtesy author

from the Mongolian desert that caused 2000-fold air pollution in Beijing. The weather was crazy. It was winter in China. We landed in the snow and it was so cold. I had to meet Pablo who was my contact at the airport, otherwise I would have been lost in this huge and unknown country. For the privacy and security of those Chinese Faeries who were attending the gathering I had not been told where the Gathering was to take place or who else should pick me up. My only thoughts were would we actually make contact? Will Pablo be there?

After some initial panic, some Chinese Faeries arrived at the airport and took me through a snowy landscape resort outside of Beijing, where the four day gathering was to take place. I will not announce the location for safety reasons. But I safely arrived at my final destination.

At the entrance of this place stood two golden lion statues, who bring happiness and prosperity to the newcomer. I was greeted by about twenty four Chinese young Faeries. We three non-Chinese, Western Faeries, Pablo, Chas Nol and I were by far the oldest in this gathering. But that did not matter.

Right after the welcome we did a workshop ‘Face to Face,’ and we got to know and love each other for the first time. All these wonderful, loving young Faeries I was allowed to hug. Every single one I found RFD 175 Fall 2018 51

beautiful in their own way. Is there anything more beautiful than the smile of a Chinese Faerie who is pleased to see each other’s eyes? They showed me their ‘true self, ‘ their true ‘Faerie Being.’ Wonderful and compassionate beings that are unique to the faeries and that should not be hidden. Yes, I saw so many beautiful faces—or rather, the souls behind the faces. Young faces, with an incredible smiles that were heart warming and lovely.

The next morning Chas Nol asked me to facilitate the Heart Circle. The sharings and the stories I heard made this event one of the most emotional Heart Circles I’ve ever participated in. Some sharing of young Faeries here almost broke my heart.

The speciality of this gathering was that nearly two-thirds of all participants were young, students between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four. They all told things as they might have been in Europe in the 1960s, where homosexuality was almost still illegal in all countries.

In China, family ties are much stronger than in Europe, and if you come out here as a gay in front of your parents, this can mostly lead to exclusion from your family, because it is the biggest disgrace.

Not only will you be cast out, you will lose all rights in your society. It may also be that you are

52 RFD 175 Fall 2018

being persecuted by your own family, or that your own father wants to kill your boyfriend. So it was not surprising that nearly every second person in the group spoke of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, both by himself or his friends. What came out of the mouths and hearts of the young Chinese people was so real and so heartfelt and so intelligent that I was totally entranced. It showed a different reality that we can no longer imagine in our Western liberal world. Most of them had never felt the true love of a man and they longed for it.

So many here believed in love. How beautiful the world can still be in young hearts, and how much the grown-up world denigrates and above all, does not appreciate, it and even tramples it in every way.

I believe in these Chinese teenagers; and we three “old-fashioned“ Western Faeries began to love them more and more.

For relaxation we went to a nearby restaurant where food was served extensively on a round table and the over-filled plates were shared.

On the way back to our home it snowed again.

In the evening there was the ‘No-Talent Show’ and an auction at the same time. The Chinese are very good at trading, so the auction was a big deal and was extensively prepared. But also for the show

there were some wonderful Chinese music and literature acts. Everything was prepared via WeChat platforms as Facebook and other social media platforms of the West are blocked in China. I hosted the show together with Chiffon, the very talented second youngest Faerie here.

Every morning there was Heart Circle. It was the centre of our gathering and that made the Chinese Gathering very intense and exhausting for me as well. You almost could not relax your head.

Therefore, it was also very necessary for me (after receiving a professional Thai massage from Xisi) to take at least a short hike to the ‘Spring of Happiness’. However I did not find this source of joy in the mountains, but in the hearts of the Faeries here, in their yearnings and dreams. And I noticed how body contact and tender touch among the young Chinese Faeries increased during the gathering. The true smile that we give ourselves here is the greatest gift that people can give themselves.

It ascends hope, affection, openness, beauty—everything that people can give—even sex. It radiates your innermost self:—your Being as Radical Faerie. Do not hide it—it’s what we can give the world—the best you have—because when you hide it behind a cold wall, you break with your humanity. Do not use your power for wars, negativity Photographs courtesy author

and cynicism, but for love. This is also part of the ‘legacy of Kung Fu’ and is also a legacy of the Radical Faeries.

At the end of our last full day, we formed a circle where we should reveal our Emperor and our angel—slowly, gently, yet persistently. And I was surprised. Even I had an angel here, it was my last translator. With more than amazement, yes, admiration, I went to bed exhausted.

On the last day the sun suddenly shone friendly over the valley. Colourful children’s windmills turned wildly in the wind and wherever I looked I saw a pink bloom. How nice it was here all at once.

Now my soul finally found satisfaction and relief.

We all left as friends and enriched ourselves with the message that we should all be our Faerieselves, and that no one can take that from us. Chas and I loved these wonderful intelligent Faeries here in China who were able to organize such an intense gathering. I was so impressed and wanted to carry this message around the world. The golden lion has really made his positive side resonate in us and brought us to enlightenment.

Despite being relieved to leave the emotional intensity of the gathering, I also left with new wisdoms as I went back to the juggernaut of Beijing and into the Forbidden City.

RFD 175 Fall 2018 53

54 RFD 175 Fall 2018

A Love Letter to Faerie Camp Destiny from Rock River

by Moon Morgan

T

he Faeries were one of the reasons I chose Brattleboro, Vermont, when I moved from Walnut Hill in southeast New Hampshire in 1997. Rock River was the other.

Gay men had been gathering at Rock River for some twenty-five years before the Faeries came to town to look for sanctuary. But it was the Faeries of Camp Destiny who showed the gay men of Rock River the way to secure their own sanctuary. This summer those men raised $90,000 to purchase the gay beaches and trails at the far, far end of the path.

Without the experience of Faerie Camp Destiny, Inc., and some of the Faeries who worked on that project, the historic gay gathering places at Rock River might not have been saved—for those who came before us and are no longer here, for those who are still finding their way to Rock River and for those who will come along in the years ahead.

Louis Bazzano showed me the way into Rock River in 1995 or 1996. I followed him in on Newfane’s Town Trail No. 11, which was easily mistaken for an old railroad bed, with significant washouts to navigate along the way.

He led me to the “fifth beach,” as far as you could go on the rugged trail. That’s where local gay men in the early 1970s had created an isolated and safe place to gather, be naked together and enjoy each other’s company as friends, community members, tricks, lovers. Unlike most bath houses and anonymous sex venues, the men at Rock River talked to each other. It was a welcoming community, and, like a village, it had its share of characters.

Among the most prominent characters in those years were Armand, London and Lawrence. Some people referred to Armand as the mayor and London and Lawrence as the king and queen. It was long before the first lawn chair appeared. People

Photographs courtesy author.

spread their towels on the sand and stones of the most popular beach, but everyone knew the two most prime spots were always reserved for London and Lawrence, who drew people in, serving trays of hors d’oeuvres and cocktails and entertaining with their raucous humor.

London organized Sunday late-afternoon volley ball games at the local gay bar, the Rainbow Cattle Company. Come five o’clock on those Sundays an exodus from the river drove through the Dummerston covered bridge and over the East-West hill to the bar to play volley ball and eat grilled burgers and hotdogs offered by bar owner Lynn and his boyfriend Kelly. The volley ball games weren’t just London’s attempt to get his bar tab discounted, they were community building, and they became the deciding factor in making Brattleboro my home.

Meanwhile, the community building efforts of the Northeast Faeries were inspiring local curiosity and participation.

Louis, London and many others were part of the significant overlap between the gays of Rock River and the emerging Faerie circle that was to become Faerie Camp Destiny. Louis’s name can be found on several of the early Destiny gathering lists, and London opened his home on a back road near the Dummerston-Putney town line for a Thanksgiving Faerie gathering in 1995, when Destiny’s search for sanctuary was in its infancy.

The following summer, in 1996, I joined Endora, Gabriel, Bambi and a rotating roster of other Northeast Faeries on multiple searches for land on which we would create Faerie sanctuary. This was well before cell phones and GPS; we used paper maps and newspapers to find land listed for sale on the back roads of southeast Vermont, eventually landing at the steep hillsides in Grafton that became RFD 175 Fall 2018 55

Faerie Camp Destiny. On that first visit, Gabriel was the one who ran from the river, at the bottom, to the upper reaches and reported back with cautious optimism that not all the land was at a 45-degree angle and this place might work. Those who waited at the bottom hoped the flat area along the river, near the entry, was part of the land. It wasn’t. At least not then.

For the purchase of the land on which they eventually settled, the Faeries of Destiny created a fundraising plan that inspired Rock River’s eventual organizing efforts. To reduce the amount FCD needed to raise initially, Jay Warren (Jaybird) and Jim Jackson agreed to co-sign a loan. That meant FCD had to raise only enough for the down payment to start.

A few years after the initial purchase, Destiny had the opportunity to buy a second parcel—that flat area by the river near the entry off Route 103 in Chester where some of us had waited for Gabriel to come back down the hill on our first look-see.

For the second purchase, Bambi and I managed the negotiations, lined up the co-signers—Jay Schuster and Dan Berns (Dandelion)—and threaded the bureaucracies while the FCD Money Planet collected another round of donations.

A few years after that, over at Rock River in late 2003, Em Richards, Watershed Director of the Windham County Conservation District, tried to conduct a survey of Rock River users over Labor Day weekend. I was one of her first (and last) responders as she tried to stop guys at the Depot Road entry to the town path to find out where they were from and how they planned to spend their day.

I told her she was standing in poison ivy, what she was doing was crazy, that no one was likely to talk to her and that her motives could not be trusted. Still, I gave her my name and number, and a year later she called to ask If the users of the river would be interested in buying land along the path into the beaches.

Because Destiny had shown the way—twice—I was able to say yes without missing a beat.

The Connecticut River Conservancy owned four and a half acres along the path, which included the first and most popular beach (called Indian Love Call, where the rope swing was; straight; swim suits) and the so-called third hole (at a bend in the river; nude; quiet; mostly gay). The conservancy was divesting itself of many small parcels it owned along the length of the Connecticut River watershed because it couldn’t perform regular stewardship on the land.

Within weeks of Em’s phone call, Mike Duffy, the 56 RFD 175 Fall 2018

Brattleboro botanist who created Destiny Geographic, A Study of the Natural History of the Faerie Camp Destiny Inc. Property in Grafton, Vermont, joined me in meeting with the conservancy’s executive director, who defined “regular stewardship” as visiting the land annually. We both laughed. Someone in the community was at Rock River every day for six months of the year.

Other concerns shared by the conservancy, the county conservation district and the Vermont Land Trust were conserving and maintaining the land while keeping it both pristine and open to public access. Again we laughed. Guaranteeing access and protecting the land was exactly what river users wanted, too. (Ironically, the conservancy had tried years earlier to close the town path leading into Rock River because of concern about gay activity there. Rock River “Mayor” Armand, was instrumental in killing that hateful effort.)

Over the winter of 2004-2005, local river users gathered in the basement meeting room of a Brattleboro bank, created the nonprofit corporation Rock River Preservation Inc., and made an offer on the land. The offer was accepted, and $16,000 was raised from the diverse river community, working without the enabling structure of gatherings and circles that the Destiny Faeries had had. The robust response of the gay men at Rock River meant no loan or cosigners were necessary.

The creation of Rock River Preservation Inc. and the initial purchase protected our access. Owning the third beach provided a fallback if the owner of the most popular gay beaches and trails upriver ever posted the property and barred us from returning.

That was one of the mysteries of Rock River: Who owned that land, and how is it that they’ve let us come back year after year? We never knew from one year to the next whether this Brigadoon would emerge unchanged from the next spring’s snow melt and welcome us back.

Alex Swartz was part of the answer to that mystery. Alex’s father, Dr. Robert Swartz, bought the land in 1977, some five years after gay men had established their beachhead at the base of the property, having moved up river from the mixed nude beaches where they had not felt welcome.

In the mid to late 1990s Alex occasionally could be seen coming down the back hill at Rock River, wandering along the beach and circling back up through the woods. I didn’t get to know him by name, but a few others did. Someone told me “that’s the gay son.” He and I never talked beyond the briefest hello, but others recall positive, gentle, kind and

sometimes erotic engagement with him.

As Alex became known among river users over the years, some reasoned that, as “one of us” and the son of the land owner, he might somehow help protect this amazing gay sanctuary. In fact, the name Alex, means defender of men. But that wasn’t a role Alex took on overtly. Nevertheless, he was a quiet and reassuring presence.

Alex died in 2004, but he remained an important part of the Rock River experience for the Swartz family, who welcomed the idea of people using the beautiful beaches and grew to hope they could preserve the area for future generations. At the same time, however, they would occasionally encounter debris or damage that marred the landscape for everyone. It was in that context that in 2014, Alex’s father and sister, Jennifer, began talking to board members of Rock River Preservation Inc. about stewardship—the care and preservation of the areas close to the popular beaches on the Swartz land.

The conversation eventually resulted in a formal agreement, signed in October 2017, designating Rock River Preservation Inc. as the steward of the lower section of the Swartz property on behalf of the Swartz family.

The lengthy negotiations that resulted in the stewardship agreement established a strong bond between Rock River Preservation and Jennifer, who had been empowered to speak on her father’s behalf. Jennifer said she had been approached by neighbors who complained about gays gathering on the Swartz land. She called the complaints “antiGLBT rhetoric,” and she said she had no interest in supporting such sentiments.

“It’s just people,” she said during a 2015 meeting.

“We don’t want to tell anyone ‘you can’t swim here.’

I don’t mind people using the property; it’s beautiful down there.”

She shrugged off the nudity and sex as natural and an expected part of being a daring human, but she was insistent that while on the Swartz property the river users show respect in their engagement with each other and exercise discretion.

Some of Jennifer’s language survived the long negotiation process and made it onto signs that were posted at the beaches early this spring to announce RRP’s stewardship authority on behalf of the family.

But one of the new signs, on the main beach, wasn’t subject to the negotiation and was a surprise to Jennifer. The Rock River Preservation board of directors voted to name the beach for Alex and created a sign that reads, “Alex’s Beach. Swartz Family son who loved this place.”

While the signs were still on order in the early months of this year, seemingly out of the blue, Jennifer asked the RRP board of directors if they would be interested in purchasing a large chunk of the Swartz land. The idea of such an offer wouldn’t have seemed farfetched five or ten years down the road, but it was totally unexpected at that moment.

RRP board members looked at their modest annual budget and didn’t think they could swing a major land buy. I’m not a member of the board, but when I heard about the opportunity I offered to form a volunteer fundraising committee to make it happen, using the two Destiny purchases and the initial Rock River purchase for inspiration and guidance.

The committee of volunteers represented various “neighborhoods” of the Rock River village.

There was Gary Taylor: He and his late partner Bob Camara had inherited London and Lawrence’s place at the most social section, hosting Wednesday cocktail parties and cookouts on the beach; …there was Dave King: He and his partner Scott Heller established Frog Meadow on the hill high above Rock River, which has become much more than just a bed and breakfast, offering workshops, retreats, community potlucks and fundraisers year-round and attracting gay men from around the world; …there was Jay Warren (Jaybird), who drew on his Faerie Camp Destiny experience and connections and used his loving engagement skills to work “the suburbs,” as he called the areas outside the most social beach; …there was Stephen Goldberg, a development consultant who had joined his husband Steve Randoy in keeping the New York Jacks going; …there was Hugh Russell: If he were a Faerie his name might be Forrest because, Gump-like, he’s been within view of Faeries for years; he introduced Scott Garvin (G!sn) and Carey Johnson (Tabitha) to each other and he was business partner with Bruce Scott, who built large paper constructions at an early Destiny fire circle, filling them with hot air and releasing them to float up into the darkness above the drumming and dancing. Hugh’s been active in Body Electric and a frequent participant in the Walnut Hill sweats, which still take place in the sweat lodge built by the Northeast Faeries in the early 1990s. Hugh was board chair at Easton Mountain for a number of years; as treasurer of the Rock River Preservation board he provided board oversight to the volunteer fundraisers and handled the money they raised; …and there was me, too, obviously drawing on RFD 175 Fall 2018 57

skills learned through the Destiny experience.

The current Rock River Preservation board of directors has Faerie links as well. Secretary Jim Russell served on Destiny’s Money Planet around the time of FCD’s second land purchase. Others on the board besides Jim and Hugh are Bob McCandless, owner of Fieldstone Lodge Bed and Breakfast in Newfane (with his husband and former RRP board member Gary Delius) and Thom Chiofalo, who attended an early Destiny gathering in Northfield, Vermont, where he met Tom Cargill, his partner for four years. Thom also participated in two Blue Heron gatherings.

Thom joined the RRP board in 2009 and has served as its chair since 2010. He’s been chief trail fixer and neighbor relater through a period that included Tropical Storm Irene and stormy times with locals around parking, water quality (it’s fabulous, as certified by regular water testing, which Thom initiated) and other issues. He’ll be stepping down sometime after the October closing on the land purchase, so the Rock River Preservation board and community face a challenge familiar to those involved in the governance of Destiny: Who else is out there who shares the vision of making and maintaining daring, welcoming, sacred, safe, risky, silly, sexy sanctuary? The links between Rock River and the Faeries go deep, and welcoming embraces await those who might want to strengthen the connection by becoming involved in the governance of this sanctuary neighbor.

The neighborly friendship, curiosity and support between Rock River Preservation Inc. and Faerie Camp Destiny Inc. have been shared since the Faeries first showed up at the river. Like fraternal twins, we have much in common and we’re different. And we have our moments of rivalry. Early in our infancies, the Samara Foundation put out a call for proposals from organizations that were trying to build LGBTQ community in Vermont. Both Faerie Camp Destiny Inc. and Rock River Preservation Inc. applied. FCD got the money; RRP didn’t. A Rock River organizer who knew some of the Samara reviewers was told that they had not wanted to get involved with Rock River because of its reputation as a sex venue. While their decision was disappointing at the time, and appears homophobic by current standards, I was delighted to be involved in something that was recognized—officially—as more radical than the Radical Faeries.

Regardless of how others judge Rock River, it’s been a welcoming safe place with plenty of Faerie magic for those open to seeing it.

58 RFD 175 Fall 2018

“In talking with a newcomer to Rock River recently,” Jaybird Warren said, “it struck me how both Destiny and the river provide sanctuary for people, albeit in somewhat different ways. But I often see the same reaction: wide-eyed expressions of marvel that such places exist.”

The Statistics Total funds raised as of August 18: $94,350 in donations and pledges from 175 individuals and couples in at least fifteen states and Canada. Largest single donation: $20,000. After that, there was one of $7,500 and four of $5,000 each. Those six individuals or couples represented half the amount raised. The public phase of the campaign started Friday, June 29, after a two-week quiet phase in which $50,000 in pledges had been secured from targeted potential donors. The first week of the public phase of the campaign resulted in $15,000 more in donations and pledges. The goal of $90,000 was reached within 35 days of the launch of the public campaign. The average donation during the targeted quiet phase was $3,500, and the median (just as many donations above and below) was $1,500.

During the public phase, the average donation was $275, and the median was $100. The locations of 77 donors are unknown because GoFundMe does not share that information and a few other donors using other platforms chose not to reveal where they live. Of those whose locations are known, residents of Massachusetts represented the largest single block of donors (43). Most of the Massachusetts donors were from eastern Massachusetts (29), predominately the Boston area.

Western Massachusetts accounted for 14 donations. Residents of Vermont accounted for 17 donations. Of that total, 9 are local to Rock River. Those 9 individuals or couples accounted for 25 percent of total donations. New Hampshire residents were responsible for 11 donations; Connecticut and New York each had 6; New Jersey had 3; Rhode Island and Maine each had 2; and one each came from California, Canada, District of Columbia, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.

Photograph courtesy author

“Man Heat” by Richard Vyse

RFD 175 Fall 2018 59

Omnivore by Nature

An Anthology of Moments Leading Up to Near Veganism by Fran-Claire Kenney

1. Edie Heckendorf: a gracefully petite sprite of a senior at a time when I’m a powerless, lanky freshman who looks older. Her hair is streaked blue and her moonlike face bears a consistent smirk, and though she recently lost a great deal of weight, she rocks her activist attitude beyond her twiggy form’s capacity. Fairly unprompted, she tells our ensemble cast of the school play of how she first only ate local animal products, and now she’s a vegan who refuses industrial food. She requests that her psych box* be filled with organic dried produce and stickers. I think she’s crazy, and I think I love her.

2. “So, like, um, that’s like, um, what happens in factory farms...I see that you’re all upset, right?” says our health class guest speaker. It is November 9th, 2016. She’s wearing a rose-pink tee and sweatpants, not exactly the ideal attire for telling a group of high schoolers the truth about where food comes from. Field hockey jock Mira Knudsen, her face now a puffy red tomato, stands weakly from her desk and pads to the box of tissues across the room. Everyone else gawks blankly at the projection board, burning the tail end of what the crusader in pajamas has just thrust at us.

a group sitting atop part of the set.

5. I peck at and soon gulp down a vegan protein bar as my mom drives us down the freeway and towards a dreaded therapy appointment. We’ve just had an argument, but maybe if I eat in big enough chunks I’ll forget how shitty I feel. Yesterday she bought these for me, knowing I’ve been flirting with the idea of non-dairy eating; that was thoughtful. It’s good and surprisingly filling and I feel a bit warmer.

6. Meeting the parents: it’s summer and my partner invites me to their house for dinner and a sci-fi binge. The table bears pasta, tomato sauce, parmesan cheese, and a plastic box of salad. I’m already digging my heels into the floor and my nails into my thighs when I start to blubber about being vegan--I’m only trying to be, but I’m met with hardcore vegan support. Drew’s brother, a frizzy-haired cynic in a Schrute Farms shirt, is the hardcore vegan. Everything at the table is vegan, even the pasta. Oreos, it turns out, are vegan, and so is the almond milk ice cream that I have for dessert.

3. That afternoon, I open the lunch that I made for myself in the morning (pre-traumatic health presentation) to find that it’s completely vegan: an apple swaddled in a paper towel, a PB & J sandwich, and a reusable packet of peppers. My mind is sizzling, new ideas evaporating into my consciousness, with thoughts of how I could totally go vegan if I try hard enough--I never even liked meat that much! The lunch before me makes it a little easier to stomach the overwhelming information that fishing is bad for the environment and milk is not meant to be digested by adult humans.

7. I sit back from a meal at camp, contemplating what I can eat out of the spread of packaged, quasi-prepared food that we drove to the coming week’s site with. “It’s a good effort, but you probably want to hold off on going vegan until you get home,” says my former counselor, Rachel.

It’s more of an experiment at this point; the word “vegan” just sort of fell out of my mouth as a descriptor. In spite of the smugness of alreadyvegan Willow (she wasn’t like that last year) and her personal carton of rice milk that she came prepared with, Rachel was right. Days later, I receive a strong package from my family stuffed with tissues and nutty trail mixes and quinoa cubes and Oreos.

4. Yvette Emery piles greasy cheese aside on her paper plate, speaking with Edie, who eats a single organic banana; everyone else on the cast and crew, knowing we’ll be here for another three hours, scarfs down large quantities of pizza slices.

I splatter fizzy corn syrup on mine as I try to join

8. On the long drive back from camp more days later, I eat an egg sandwich with feta for dinner around nine-fifteen PM. It’s way better than camp eggs, and the Starbucks said that they use cagefree eggs only, so I feel pretty good about it, and very full.

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9. That night, I dream of a sunnyside-up egg, but not in a pleasant manner. A girl in my German class stabs the golden yolk with a fork, and blood oozes out in a globby fashion and she just eats it and I turn the other way. I wake up, and my sister has made a welcome-home breakfast for me: sunnyside-up eggs on toast.

10. I get ice cream in Philadelphia with my mom and my sister, and after slogging through the consistency as I eye the dancing cows painted on the walls and know that’s not how it works, I silently swear that this shall be my last dose of ice cream.

11. My sister begins referring to my settling dietary restrictions as “Frannie’s weird vegan thing” while getting more attached to the coconut mock ice cream that I’ve been getting hooked on; my dad muses that he’s been eating less red meat since I started the weird vegan thing.

12. I receive two hefty vegan cookbooks for my sixteenth birthday. I pose for social media, cradling the books with an upturned chin. Flipping through the books, everything looks so appetizing--I also realize that it lacks gelatin and honey.

Huh. 13. The spread of desserts at a Christmas party wafts chocolate and peppermint and yuletide cheer, but I awkwardly swerve away from their residence on the washer-dryer as I try to find the veggie chili, if there is any.

14. Willow is at the CITs’ tryout weekend; it’s chilly and we’re both overzealous in our interviews.

Congratulatory snack is soft pretzels and mozzarella sticks. Searching for an ally, I see that Willow is eating a pretzel. I ask if she thinks they’re vegan. She says that they probably have egg wash, but no dairy; the whole vegan thing didn’t really work out for her, she’s not on that jag anymore.

I’m not really hungry.

15. But I’m not in the mood for a salad, I complain to myself as I resign to eating at a three-star pizza joint for date night.

16. I’m brushing my teeth when I overhear my mom stressing to my sister’s friend’s mom how difficult it is to make non-dairy scones: they came out all droopy and there’s no satisfying glint or flake to them. Paul and Mary would not be pleased. “You must be the most patient mother in the world,” says the confidante. I stare critically in the mirror for a minute.

17. My mom takes me with her to get salmon for a welcome dinner for my lactose intolerant grandmother as she’s moving to town. The blank, gelatinous eyes of the dead fish combined with the utter redness of the fish chunks fazes me just a little, but I remind myself how marvelous fish is.

18. Shelly, a counselor when I’m a CIT, narrows her eyes as I tell her that technically, I’m a dairy-free pescetarian. She’s an aspiring vegan, and I’m going nowhere, and content with that; I’ve made it pretty far already, I think.

19. My campers are appalled when all of my dining hall meals consist of either sunbutter and jelly sandwiches or side dishes flayed by sriracha sauce. I tell them that this is all because I’m a vegan. They want to know why I did it, but I don’t really know how to explain it to a group of kids without terrifying them. Frankly, I just want them to eat.

20. It’s dinnertime during a university’s summer program for young writers. I circle the dining complex and grab a small glass of green smoothie, checking the ingredients list for milk because the presence of honey makes the smoothie nonvegan; it does feature avocado, a true asset in my eating habits. After downing the smoothie shot and eating a hearty mixture of carbs and sauteed vegetables, I snag a plate of California roll. The edges of the crab meat are pink, but not bright red, and the rice clumps and feels almost prickly to chew. I finish off the plate and feel comfortably full.

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Gone Political

by Raymond Luczak

The first time I picked up a copy of The Body Politic, all smudgy with newsprint, I wasn’t anyone political, even though I was living in Washington, D.C. At eighteen years old, my closest to a remotely political thought was the belief that Ronald Reagan—gasps!— was a great President, but I hadn’t realized how political my life as a homosexual truly was. Granted, I knew that kissing another man was taboo, but political?

I couldn’t understand that. It was a strange concept.

After all I’d grown up in a small town seemingly apolitical— or maybe my hearing aids hadn’t picked up the full timbre of debate drifting around me—so politically speaking, I was a virgin. I’d heard of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, but Reagan seemed to project something beyond political.

Never mind the fact that I couldn’t lipread him on television.

In D.C., I’d heard of men dying of AIDS but it wasn’t a political issue, or was it? I knew that I didn’t want to get it, so being wracked with the fear of infection wasn’t political, right? I wanted to know which hot man on the street was safe. I didn’t know that to survive, I’d have to get political.

I’d already witnessed how the issue of a new gay student organization demanding recognition on my campus had become political, but I hadn’t—strangely enough—made the connection between my campus and the world out there. Political?

It was something that the hearing world dabbled in, right?

But when I read about Jimmy Somerville getting political because he’d been arrested in a public restroom in The Body Politic, I felt confused. How? Why should a singer get political?

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I’d fallen in love with his Bronski Beat song “Smalltown Boy” without hearing it because the lyrics—poignant and political— had been printed on the back of the 45 r.p.m. record envelope.

In Musicland, I stood gaping at each word, a political bombshell exploding inside the cavern of my brain. Then in a gay bar I saw him, the lonely boy, in the song’s video, but was it political?

No! I thought politics had to be about marching on the streets and waiting in line to vote. Glancing through The Body Politic, all I wondered was what it felt like to be gay in Canada. I bought a copy and read it cover to cover. It dawned on me that I was already political: if I was out as a gay man, I was simply pushing for a greater understanding of my people. Any rebuke to homophobic remarks was political, just like how hearing educators had tried to suppress sign language.

Even our government not helping with the AIDS crisis was being political and homophobic. I began to read the The Body Politic, witnessing for the first time how our communities had to become political.

People were dying. People were getting fired all the time.

People went back into the closet. They couldn’t afford to be political.

Where did that leave me, a young Deaf gay man who was lonesome for a little connection? Did I really want to get political when all I wanted was love? Yet the reports in the Body Politic soon stripped away my patina of naïveté. I now saw my life as political and necessary. I would no longer be a wallflower, not that young boy who’d been picked on to the point of becoming apolitical.

Oh, no. I would be Jimmy Somerville, singing, “Can you tell me why?”

If no one wants you as you are, every move you make is political.

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Photographs courtesy author.

Story Telling meets Community: the Story of Queer Tell Our Visions (Santa Cruz)

by Kwai Lam

S

haring stories, reflecting back and building queer community have been life long passions for me. Way back in 1994—before YouTube—I took some of my recordings to the local cable company to see about getting them onto cable. The reception was cordial…but they said that the material was “too controversial”. Read “too gay”. Little did I know that this would lead to helping start and run our local Public Educational and Government Access organization, training of numerous volunteers and the production of almost 200 hours of programming over the next decade. Let’s hear it for homophobia.

If you can’t get your stories into media, become the media.

Our first show covered Santa Cruz Lesbian and Gay Pride in 1995. There we had a table and recruited people to work on the show. Interestingly then, and through QTV’s journey most of the other folks involved in the production were lesbians.

The first year’s topics included drag shows (benefits for the local AIDS project), interviews with queer authors and artists, the Dyke March, surfing and other events.

We also started a little sitcom, called ‘Hellen’ riffing on Ellen but where Ellen was out.

We interviewed Harry Hay in 1996, as part of his biographical book tour with Stuart Timmons.

We had segments on transgendered photographer Loren Cameron, Lesbian and Gay Chorus, queer youth, and the youngest drag queen in Santa Cruz.

We did some animated shorts called Barbie Goes Butch and a number of pieces on PFLAG. AIDS was addressed in various ways: from plays (How To Catch A Virus Without Even Trying, to panels, World AIDS day observances, benefits and youth produced items (Teen’s & AIDS, Every 15 Minutes).

We covered and became part of the community. One of my favorites was the annual event the Queer Youth Leadership Awards. Every year I had the honor of interviewing all of the nominees:

these interviews were then edited down and played back, Academy Awards style, at the event. Shooting before and editing down allowed us to get the best tidbits from the youth, some of whom weren’t the best public speakers. These interviews were then used for outreach in the schools. And we covered the event as well. A Gay Evening in May—Santa Cruz’s big annual show and fundraiser, we also covered.

A number of QTVers became deeply involved in Community TV of Santa Cruz, the organization which provided equipment and access to the cable channels. I served on the board of directors for well over a decade, much of it as Chair. Hillary Hamm and Cece Pinheiro also had long stints on the board. This was probably the most involved that any of us had gotten to date in non-queer organizations. (Some kind words on my participation here were written by Geoffrey Dunn and published in the Santa Cruz issue of RFD). We were very committed to diversity and free speech in their various forms: and our perspectives as queers/outsiders was often recognized by the Community TV community.

(OUTsiders sitting on the Board, what a hoot).

Over the course of ten years we did about 200 shows, our little part in creating Queer Media for the Santa Cruz community. We told a number of stories, facilitated lots of conversations and helped numerous community groups get their words out.

Along the way we received a number of awards, one of our volunteers became a professional video editor, and we helped guide Community TV overall.

Of course with the advent of YouTube and online distribution the cable model has faded…raising interesting question for ‘what is media’…and how targeted audiences such as our queer communities overlap (or don’t) with geographically-based communities.

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Issue 177 / Spring 2019

I’M MIGRATION

Submission Deadline: January 21, 2019 www.rfdmag.org/upload

Migration is the heartbreak story of life itself. The spring 2019 RFD edition invites reflections at the crossroads of queer and immigrant realities. Our intention, similar to a heart-circle, is to mutually hold open spaces exploring migratory patterns of loss, seeking and finding; to sensitively present biological, geographical, intimately personal and radically political; culturally and historically infused ritual, art, poetry and stories of fleeing harm in search of healing.

In times of crisis people and communities adapt. What are the risks taken, the skills and strategies discovered to migrate from places and situations of oppression into regenerative spaces of connection through inclusion? During torrential change let’s tie our destinies together by telling life-anddeath stories of riding out storms.

Between wish and action, the decision to commit. Women, immigrants, people of color, trans, queer and otherly-abled people are at increased risk of backlash.

As we seek relocation we remember to ask ourselves, our youth and elders, “Where are you and your people from? How did you do it? What is now needed and what do we have to offer one another?”

This edition called, I’m Migration reaches out to our intersecting networks to consider personal and collective stories of migration. We must also ask in the face of desired and/or enforced change, “What are the risks of doing something—and what are the risks of not doing something? What vital parts of our experiences and identities are sacrificed in an attempt to survive, assimilate and/or make radical change to thrive? Mycelium-like, how are some popup communities doing the necessary work of sanctuary making? What safer containers are needed for magical inspirations and revolutionary actions to foment? And finally, what does the near future require of us today to navigate these, our own best and worst of times? Please share some of your heart-smart ideas and examples of what is possible.

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a reader created gay quarterly celebrating queer diversity