RFD 199 Fall 2024

Issue 200 / Winter 2024

FUTURE RFD

Submission Deadline: November 15, 2024

www.rfdmag.org/upload

In the last issue we asked you to reflect on fifty years of RFD for our Fall issue. Now we want you to enter the dreamscape and tell us what you’re dreaming about for the future. How should we be passing into the future? What are your hopes as we cross another threshold in the queer community. In these times of shifting ideas of community and safe space how we do we claim our queerness? How do we reconnect in such fragmentary times.

There is a phrase, “above all else, audacity,” that reflect’s Harry Hay’s sentiment and philosophy. How can we find space to envision audacity in becoming ourselves, knowing who we are and creating space to share our splendid dreams together?

So tell us what you are dreaming up for yourself, for the people around you and show us some of your dreams enacted.

As RFD turns the wheel on fifty years of sharing our visions and ideas of ourselves, delve into your heart and mind to share your audacity.

Issue 201 / Spring 2025

Reached Fifty—Donchaknowit!

COLORS OF SPRING

Submission Deadline: February 15, 2025 www.rfdmag.org/upload

Between the Lines

Spring is more than just a season; it’s a vibrant celebration of life, renewal, and self-expression. As nature bursts into a riot of colors, we, too, are invited to shed the layers of winter and step boldly into our authentic selves. In the LGBTQ+ community, spring represents an opportunity to embrace the

spectrum of our identities with pride and confidence.

As we welcome the warmer days, consider how the colors around you inspire your personal journey. How do the shades of spring reflect your inner world? Are there new colors you’re ready to explore, both in your wardrobe and in

Counting the years together has been such a bittersweet trip down memory lane. We so appreciate the folks who have contributed to this issue and for the memories they shared about others who helped shape RFD over five decades.

your life? Whether it’s the pink of a budding rose that reminds you of a tender romance or the purple of a lilac that resonates with the strength of your identity, tell us about the colors of spring in your life that remind you that we are all part of something beautiful and ever-changing.

RFD is always a magical experience of dreading not getting enough material and then the reverse, getting a bounty of submissions. That was the case with this issue, we were not able to share all of your memories but we tried to select submissions that spanned the entire run of the magazine.

Many of you wrote, contributed art or otherwise helped shape RFD and we celebrate you and everyone else who through the years helped bring RFD’s pages to our dear readers.

Obviously, pouring over the many submissions, looking for the back issues to tie-in to the articles, looking for images has been a tiring journey for our production crew, so we’re happily tired and sleepy.

We hope we haven’t missed something along the way as there was a flurry of revisions and additional memories being shared and recollected.

We hope our readers will enjoy our revery and we welcome you sharing your hopes and dreams for RFD’s future by contributing to our future issues and sharing your theme ideas with us.

From a verdant August evening in Vermont —The RFD Collective

Submission Deadlines

Winter–November 15, 2024 Spring–February 15,

2025

See inside covers for themes and specifics.

For advertising, subscriptions, back issues and other information visit www.rfdmag.org. To read online visit www.issuu.com/rfmag.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# 0149709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, PMB 329, 351 Pleasant St., Ste B, Northampton, MA 01060-3998. Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD Press, PMB 329, 351

Pleasant St., Ste B, Northampton, MA 01060-3998. Non-profit tax exempt #62-1723644, a function of RFD Press, Inc., with office of registration at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190. RFD Cover Price: $11.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive RFD four times a year. First class mailed issues will be forwarded. Others will not. Send address changes to submissions@rfdmag.org or to our Northampton, MA address. Copyright © RFD Press, Inc. 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.

Production

Managing Editor: Bambi Gauthier

Production Editor: Matt Bucy

Visual Contributors Inside This Issue

Artwork not directly associated with an article.

Front Cover

Matt Bucy

Back Cover

"David at Lammas" by Richard Bump.

Back Inside Cover

"Sunflowers" by Javier Trelis Sempere

Richard Bump ..................... Back Cover

Javier Trelis Sempere Inside Back Cover

Early RFD Memories

by Dimid Hayes

It was a cool, crisp fall Farmer’s Market morning in late 1975.

Over the previous three years I’d dropped out of college, dropped out of vocational training school and fled my home state of Minnesota for the rolling wooded hills of the Arkansas Ozarks. An older cousin had been assigned to Harrison, AK as a VISTA volunteer. A domestic version of the PEACE Corp, she welcomed me into her one bedroom rural home where I set up camp in the corner of the tiny living room.

On that fateful Saturday I met an older woman with two young women. They were about my age. We hit it off. They were friendly and also recent transplants to NW Arkansas,. The two women and I agreed to meet for dinner later that week.

We chose Pizza Hut, which back in the day, was known as a fine dining place. I got there first and when Laura and Cindy slid into the booth, they placed a manila folder on the table. We chatted—the usual questions one asks new acquaintances. They mentioned their dog and cat, both of whom were female. I gathered the courage to ask if there was anything to them having two female pets. They replied, “We’re lesbians.” They were the first lesbians I’d ever knowingly met. Did I intuit their answer? At this point I’d not even considered myself gay.

they’d found me.

In one of those very first issues there was a letter from Hank Schusser in Minneapolis. I wrote Hank, hoping to meet him the next time I was back in Minnesota. He wrote back and gave me the name and address of a fella in Fayetteville, AR who’d also written him in response to his letter. Fayetteville

Now that I think about it, they’d intuited something about me. What was in that manila folder was about to dramatically change my life. Here we are in the rural heartland of America, at a Pizza Hut and they placed before me three copies of a magazine called RFD. They’d guessed my being gay before I’d even consciously explored it. They were the first people to ever know me as a gay man.

At this point, RFD was barely a year old. I borrowed the issues and devoured each and every page. I’m a country boy by heart—a gardener, fermenter, grower of community—I’d found my people and

is only an hour away from Harrison and is one of those towns in conservative America (many states have them) where, if you find yourself in that state, that’s the town to live in. Think Austin, TX, Fayetteville, AR, Norman, OK, Salt Lake City, UT, Madison, WI.

The letter writer’s name was Dennis Williams. I wrote to him, he replied and invited me to come visit. I hitched a ride with an acquaintance in Harrison who was also going to Fayetteville for the weekend. I didn’t tell him when he dropped me off, that I was visiting people I’d never even met and I was gay. Harrison is in Boone county, a dry county and only much later after leaving Harrison did I learn it was a

Mulberry House, Summer 1976 Front row: Dimid Hayes, Dennis Melba'son Back row: Michael Oglesby, Charlie Thornton, Jack (Carlotta) Kendrick.

hotbed of KKK organizing.

It took me all of two months to realize my new path. I moved from Harrison to Fayetteville over the Christmas holidays, 1975.

Dennis was twenty years older than me by three days. He was the charismatic center of a place called Mulberry House. On about two wooded acres, smack dab in the heart of Fayetteville, it was for several years the safe space for radical queers. Faggots and dykes (we used those terms) were coming from across the United States to create rural safe spaces, all in preparation for the imminent collapse of capitalist America. This was the time of Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, Watergate, Civil Rights organizing, inflation and the hangovers from the ‘60s. Yuppies and gay assimilation were in ascendance.

The core members of the men’s collective were Dennis, myself, Michael Oglesby and Charlie Thornton. Michael and Charlie, lovers, were white working class fellas from Monroe, LA. We did everything together. All income was shared and we did deep dives into our privilege and status as white men. Class differences meant we often did not share similar life experiences. It sometimes got very heated and painful.

Every three months as the solstice or equinox approached there were rising expectations of when the next issue of RFD would arrive. Would it be “on time?” What would the cover look like and what would that issue’s subtitles be? Raspberry Flavored Desserts? Rambling Free Dervishes? Often there was an article, another letter or some kind of submission from one of us, which added to the anticipation.

Iowa. We did meet the founders of RFD, Don Engstrom and his partner, whose name I can’t remember. And several other gay men from across the upper Midwest. There were several men who’d come down from Ann Arbor, MI. John Mifsud (Stella) and Rita Rose come to mind. I think Rita Rose visited us later in Arkansas and John and I have stayed in touch over the years. He was at the house in New Orleans in 1979 when ABC News came and filmed the LaSIS collective for a documentary named Homosexuals in America.

A couple of years later Dennis, I and two other newer members of the collective, Robert Raich (Stacy Brotherlover) and David House Speakman (Aurora Corona) relocated to New Orleans. We founded LaSIS—Louisiana Sissies in Struggle and continued to do the political organizing we’d begun in Fayetteville. This group of men produced two issues of RFD over the next couple of years. Of special note, the winter issue of 1978 was produced in New Orleans. The majority of the material in this issue was from the first National Conference of Radical Fairies held outside of Benson, Arizona that September. The cover is of Dennis wrapped in the recently crocheted Cernunnos Shawl. Milo Guthrie (Pyne) joined us for producing this issue because he’d been very involved with several recent issues of RFD.

In the fall of 1976, after the summer bicentennial celebrations of the founding of the US of A, the Mulberry House collective traveled to Iowa City, Iowa for a statewide Gay and Lesbian conference. By this time the collective had been joined by Jack Kendrick (Carlotta) and Sam Edwards (LaWanda Rose.)

Five of us, myself, Dennis, Charlie, Michael and Jack, traveled in an International Harvester Jeeplike thing, loaned to us by the dyke contingent of Mulberry House. They were busy buying and outfitting their land named Yellow Hammer, out in rural Madison county.

I don't remember a whole lot about that trip to

LaSIS as a group had traveled from New Orleans to Benson, AZ for the first National Conference of Radical Fairies. The call for the gathering, as they came to be known by, was issued by Harry Hay, John Burnside, Mitch Walker and Don Kilhefner, all from the Los Angeles area. Riding out we stopped in Odessa, TX and picked up Duane Riddle, a later addition to the Mulberry House collective. The conference took place outside of Benson at a desert oasis owned by some spiritualist gay man. This is where we all first met Harry and John.

Harry’s melodious voice caressing the desert air as night fell, introduced the 150 men gathered from across the United States with his concepts of Subject-Subject Consciousness and shedding the protection of our “frog skins” to reveal the fey spirit within. It was this weekend that birthed the now famous “mud ritual.” Actually it was more like mud

and grit that bathed us. Hauling buckets of water to a nearby arroyo to make the mud, Henry Jonz, of Santa Fe, NM became the sacrificial, animated one whose splattered and encrusted body and long hair was held aloft by the assemblage. After the climax of liberated exhalation, all made anonymous by the mud, Henry was released and we came back to the reality that we’d all just experienced a transcendental experience we’d never forget. As the celebrants returned to the compound we were sprayed clean by those who’d not participated in the joyful play.

While the collective was at the conference we received word of the sexual assault of a daughter of a lesbian ally back in New Orleans. We brought this news to a talking circle the next morning and again a spontaneous outpouring of grief, rage and anguish fused the dozens of men into one transcendent vortex of passion.

Lives forever changed and the birth of the Radical Faerie movement came out of that weekend. Also, Dennis Melba’son left with the vision of the Cernunnos Shawl in his mind. Being a prolific fabric artist (quilting and crocheting) he created the shawl within the next couple of months and presented it to the opening circle at the second National Gathering of Radical Faeries outside of Denver, CO in 1979. I believe I’ve heard the shawl has now disappeared after its many years of being shipped from gathering to gathering as a powerful symbol of this movement. I also heard the shawl was almost burned at one gathering by those who didn’t understand its history or importance to the community. They thought it’d become too much of an object of worship. And now it’s been lost. A dear shame.

is of Dennis wearing the shawl. (Note to editor: Maybe a photo of the cover could be included in the article?)

During the fall and early winter, as the collective put the Winter issue together, two major historical events shook the nation. The Jonestown mass murder occurred in Guyana, South America. Nine hundred and eighteen people died. One third were children. Most members of the cult around Jim Jones were working class people of color from the Bay Area. Jones said he was attempting to create a utopian paradise in the tropical setting.

The second event was the assassination of Harvey Milk, a San Francisco Board of Supervisors member and George Moscone, the city’s mayor, by Dan White, a recently removed Supervisor. White admitted to the murders but was only charged with manslaughter. He served five years of a seven year sentence and committed suicide two years later. With these two events only nine days apart (I remember the headlines in the Times Picayune paper in downtown New Orleans on November 19th of the Jonestown Massacre) the world seemed to have gone crazy. The previous year, Anita Bryant had brought her homophobic campaign “Save the Children” to New Orleans. We’d mounted a counter protest and later that summer created the first “PrideFest” event in New Orleans history. As out gay/faerie men we felt very much under threat.

While we were still at the gathering in Arizona we requested attendees to send in stories, poems and visual expressions of the conference for the Winter Issue. We were preparing to produce that issue in the fall. Harry Hay had a long piece on Subject-Subject Consciousness, and those of us in the collective contributed several pieces of prose and poetry. Being conscious of expenses we had that issue printed on newsprint. Not a very good idea for archiving. The cover was a photograph, taken by Milo Guthrie in Washington Square on Elysian Fields, just outside of the French Quarter. The photo

RFD provided us with a voice, a balm and direction to focus all this fear and worry. Balancing these horrors with the Benson gathering and all the articles streaming in, gave us hope. I’m sure RFD has been a place for many of us of hope and finding one is not alone. This certainly is a major part of its success and legacy.

RFD was there at the beginning of my queer journey. It humbles me and fills me with pride to know it is still flourishing. Because of what it has offered to all of us these fifty years, I’m hopeful for its continued longevity.

(The archives of LaSIS, Dennis Melba’son (Williams) and Dimid Hayes have been placed in the Georgia State University Gender and Sexuality Archives along with Franklin Abbot and Cathy Hope’s archival materials.)

When RFD Came South

by Franklin Abbott

RFD came South with Feygele ben Miriam. Feygele had been part of the Wolf Creek Collective in Oregon which published RFD after it left it’s creators in Iowa. It was slowly being transformed from a journal that served and connected rural gays to a journal that articulated a radical position on

queerness. RFD was founded on the homophobia of Mother Earth News, a publication that helped back to the land (hippies) connect and share tips on rural living. Back before the Internet it provided a way for alternative folk to meet each other through personal ads. Mother Earth News refused to publish ads for queer folk. RFD was created to provide an alternative. After a few years the founders in Iowa ceded the editorial and publishing responsibilities to members of the Wolf Creek Collective who used radical words to describe themselves. They took back the words of insult like faggot, faerie, sissy and insisted that queer folk were culturally and spiritually different. Feygele was one of their most prominent and outspoken avatars.

I was in my late twenties and still a neophyte when I went to an event in Athens, Georgia sponsored by the LGBTQ organization of the University

of Georgia. I had just began my studies in the MSW program of the School of Social Work. Feygele gave his talk in a black cocktail dress. I cannot remember what he said. I remember being discombobulated. A man in a dress speaking in public, all of my buttons were pushed. It was 1977.

Feygele, aka John Singer, was a “red diaper baby.” His parents were progressive socialists, aka Commie Pinko Sympathizers. Feygele who as John Singer worked for the Federal Government in a clerical position, made a statement about new dress codes that allowed women to wear pant suits and went to work wearing a dress. He was dismissed and he sued. It took years but ultimately he was vindicated. By that time he had left Wolf Creek and moved back home to North Carolina to live with his mother Miriam. Just like Grendel who was fierce but not as fierce as their Mother, Feygele was fierce by nature. Miriam, even as an older woman, remained a radical. Feygele changed his name. No longer John Singer, he was Feygele ben Miriam. Feygele is Yiddish for little bird (queer). Ben Miriam was from the Jewish tradition acknowledging one’s parent. Feygele acknowledged his maternal parent, a break in tradition. He was the little bird (queer/faggot) son of his mother, Miriam. Is there a gender neutral term for the Yiddish accolade “mensch”? If so, Feygele was worthy of the title. In addition to bringing RFD to the South, Feygele brought knitting and baking. He made many a shawl and blanket and his specialty, rugalach, was a much anticipated treat at gatherings. Feygele was a regular at the early Running Water gatherings. He was almost always naked and proud of his rather large uncircumcised dick. He was always ready to party. And he was a serious radical. He was RFD’s Faerie godparent and held it close until a new editor could be found. RFD wandered around in the Southeast for several years. Collectives in Atlanta, New Orleans, Asheville and Norfolk put together issues. These classics were composed by hand. We had no computers, it was all cut and paste so not only did the collectives generate content but we put it all together as artfully as we could. I think those issues are some of the best of early RFD with covers by Raven Wolfdancer and Michael Mason. Good, potent, raw and a howl against heteronormativity and for Faerie eminence.

Ron Lambe, a fey saint if ever there was one,

Mother Earth parody from RFD #1.

stepped in to shepherd RFD from his perch at Running Water Sanctuary on Roan Mountain north of Asheville, North Carolina. Ron was just as queer as Feygele but from a radically different angle. Ron had searched for a queer affirming spirituality for years. His quest had led him to some esoteric Christian groups with long traditions going back to early Christian days. He was the end of the line for one of these traditions and found a new career as a spiritual guide in the Radical Faerie movement. He was an original partner in the Running Water Collective and managed to survive many a cold winter in the crude log cabin with no electricity (no solar panels back then) on the high slopes of Roan Mountain. Running Water Farm was charming in the summer with it’s cherry and apple trees but bleak in the winter with a wood burning stove and an unheated outhouse. Ron, perpetually cheerful, indexed the early RFD’s, wrote music to poems therein (including mine) for cello and voice and held space for those who wandered in and out of the sanctuary. As the gatherings gained popularity it became apparent that Running Water did not have sufficient infrastructure or space. The early gatherings of 30+ and doubled and tripled and could not contain both the growing enthusiasm and the growing hedonism. By that time Short Mountain Sanctuary had become another space for Faerie gatherings. With much a milder climate it became the place where larger gatherings were possible. Milo Guthrie, an original member of the hippie collective that took over the old homestead, invited the Faeries to come and congregate. Our first gathering was in 1980 and Short Mountain continues to hold space for queer folk and host gatherings to this day. One of the original members was Sister Soami, a founding member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. They took over the editori-

al duties of RFD and the archive made its way from Roan Mountain to Short Mountain as did the stones from the Memorial Grove. Many of these stones were carved by the poet and stone mason Michael Mason. As the AIDS epidemic took many Faeries with it, including Michael, the importance of legacy and remembrance grew stronger. Sister Soami kept RFD going for many years. The bulk of the RFD archive is at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. It not only gave RFD an injection of money but has provided a safe place (the barn at Short Mountain had no climate control or deterrent to bugs and other pests). Inside this still unsorted archive are letters and artwork and history.

Post Iowa origins, between Wolf Creek and Destiny in New England, is an important interlude for RFD in the most unlikely of places, the American South. It is an amazing trajectory. RFD and the lesbian perennial Sinister Wisdom are both now at fifty and the oldest continuously publishing queer magazines in the world. RFD is still here because of Feygele ben Miriam, Ron Lambe, Sister Soami and dozens of others who cut and pasted, who wrote articles, poems, contributed art and letters. Now in good hands in New England, it is my hope that RFD will persist and exist fifty years from now. My first poems were published in RFD and as poetry editor for a decade I was delighted to publish new poets for the first time or introduce poets like Assotto Saint, Essex Hemphill, Gustavo Hernandez, Steven Finch and Jericho Brown. RFD is always a little miracle. Reader written, blessed with editors who give their time and creativity like Bambi Gauthier and Matt Bucy who continue to make it radical, thoughtful, gorgeous, it is an anomaly. How does it keep on keeping on? Let’s revisit this question fifty years into the future.

One Man’s Life Adventure with Rural Gay Community

By Peter Kendrick

Many gay men harbor a desire to explore and experience their connection to nature. RFD , which once used the subtitle: A Country Journal for Gay Men Everywhere , speaks to this yearning. One romantic ideal the magazine offered was a shared satisfying rural lifestyle that maintained a connection to our community.

My dream was a cabin in the woods with a devoted loving partner. When I began my quest to satisfy this urge in the mid 70’s, I was not aware of RFD , but I had come across The Mother Earth News . I submitted a classified ad to this magazine, looking for a partner to explore my “ RFD dream” within me. The ad was successful. I teemed up with Rocco Patt, an avid hiker, with a serene demeanor. He was most at home in the woods and introduced me to hiking and camping.

Together we left my suburban Long Island home and embarked upon a Hero’s Journey. The arc of the drama that ensued might be viewed as a play in three Acts:

Act 1: Running Water

Rocco and I explored the country to discover our place on the planet. It turned out to be the mountains of Western North Carolina. Through friends we discovered that Running Water, a very

rustic homestead with a gay history was for sale. We formed a collective with two others, Ron Lambe and John Jones, pooled our resources, and bought the place. We continued the gatherings that the previous owner, Mikel Wilson, had started in 1978. We completed the property sale transaction on the day of the next gathering in Fall 1979. Despite the hardships of the poverty-stricken life there, this period of my life was full of magical connections with nature, other gay men, and my own inner resolve.

The central ritual at the Running Water gatherings was the heart circle. Men sat in a circle and passed a talking stick honoring their brotherhood. The only rule was to speak from your heart. I was attracted and amazed by this radical self-empowering approach to spiritual fellowship.

RFD came into our lives in the first years at Running Water. Faygela Ben Miriam was publishing the magazine from Efland, NC, with the help of his mother Miriam. He felt that our collective should take it over. The decision to take this on was debated, and in the end accepted. A trip across North Carolina delivered the disheveled magazine records in a bunch of cardboard boxes. Ron Lambe proved to be a genius at organizing these records. He had unbounded energy and

Top: Cover of RFD #24. Bottom: Running Water gathering call, courtesy Faerie Queer Archive Project, gift of Michael Glover.

enthusiasm for RFD .

The first issue of RFD , published from Running Water, had an illustration of Running Water as its own world on the cover. This was created by the Atlanta artist, King Thackston, who visited the homestead. The RFD initials were designated to stand for Rhododendron Fire District in this issue, as this is what road signs declared as one got near Running Water in the Roan Mountain area.

I felt that RFD was crucial to our community because it supported connections between gay men who desired a rural life. Mother Earth News , which provided my link to this world of gay men, was no longer accepting gay ads.

The actual residents at Running Water went through many transformations with the one consistent person being Ron Lambe. He provided an attractive fairy energy that made a visit to the homestead a warm and welcome entry to another way of being. It would be a sojourn filled with humorous lively conversation imbedded in an authentic, slow-paced, simple life in the woods. Ron Lambe also became active in the environ -

mental movement and was offered a leadership role in the Western Carolina Alliance. RFD was passed on to Short Mountain and Ron moved to Asheville to take on this new role.

The last gathering at Running Water took place in the Fall of 1989. I personally had not lived at Running Water for many years for economic reasons, but I was sad to see this era end. I spoke my regret to my friend Severin Saint Severin. He said “Don’t look at it that way; you had your Camelot.”

Act 2: Gay Spirit Visions

After the 1989 gathering, Raven Wolfdancer, who was an initial attendee of the Running Water gatherings, visited with Ron and Rocco and I and issued a challenge. He suggested that we continue the gatherings in a more organized fashion to explore our gay identity and gifts. He proposed that we have keynote speakers in order to hear from our elders and that we have organized workshops on specific topics. The challenge was taken up. Ron and I toured Western NC looking for a

A photo of the group before leaving for the first GSV conference from Peter and Rocco’s. Standing left to right: Rocco Patt, Harry Hay, 3 friends, Peter Kendrick, and John Burnside with our dog Kiva.

suitable campground that would provide enough facilities to shift the major focus of the gathering from the camping aspect of taking care of our basic needs to an actual program. The home for this conference was found in The Mountain, a Unitarian Universalist Retreat Center in Highlands, NC.

Raven had met Harry Hay in his travels and he suggested that Harry should be our first keynote. Harry lived on the West Coast so getting him to NC would be expensive. As I was working at UNCA, a plan was devised to bring Harry to campus for a student activities talk. A grant was submitted and it worked. We scheduled the conference a week after the UNCA talk. Harry Hay, and John Burnside , his partner, stayed with Rocco and me at our home outside of Mars Hill, NC.

The Gay Spirit Visions conference was a success and has been repeated with a long list of notable keynotes. The Fall conference this September will mark GSV being thirty-five years old.

The group of friends organizing the GSV conferences also explored other modalities of spirituality. Rocco was drawn to the Indian Sweat Lodge, which was introduced to us by Peter Bear Walks, a Comanche friend of Raven. Peter Bear Walks gifted Rocco the ability to conduct this ceremony in a brother lodge on our property. Rocco did subsequently lead sweat lodges here.

Act 3: Green Man Forest

Rocco and I bought our nine and a half acres with a small house and two barns in 1985. Since then we have added neighboring parcels and now have close to 14 acres. One of the barns collapsed and was removed. At first the property was difficult to love. Much of it was overgrown pasture over run with the invasive thorny plant, Multiflora Rose. After many years of work, the property has become attractive with woodland trails and some cleared mowed areas. Being on this property is now is a centering sacred experience.

nosed with cancer that had metastasized. He died in August 24, 2014. Devastated, I mourned for a year. Rocco an I had been together for thirty-eight years.

Despite this personal set back, I have decided to pursue the goal that Rocco and I had. In February of this year, 2024, I came across a serendipitous deal for Cabin Kits. I bought five cabin kits and had them delivered to the clearing at the

hilltop on the property.

I held a heart circle of close friends in March to announce my project. I decided to call the venture Green Man Forest Retreat . My vision is to provide a space for GSV and RFD oriented men to connect with nature and each other.

A dream Rocco and I shared was to have cabins on the property to host visitors and provide some income. As energy and finances needed to be focused on the land and improving the small house, this goal was deferred.

Unexpectedly in July 24, 2014, Rocco was diag -

The local community was incredibly supportive in helping me get the project underway. Men provided hours of labor on work weekends to launch the effort. This is admittedly an enormous undertaking for a seventy-six year old, but amazingly the stars seem aligned to make it happen. If you are interested in this venture please contact me peterwkendrick@msn.com .

A Letter from Allen Young

by Allen Young

I heard about RFD from its very beginning—when it was published in Iowa—because I was immersed in the gay liberation movement as a writer and activist, and because I had begun (with other gay men) the rural community we call Butterworth Farm. We were eight gay men living on mostly forested land in Royalston (80 miles NW of Boston) in North Central Massachusetts, dealing with house-building, gardens, the back-to-the-land scene, and very successful relationships with traditional straight-dominated working class small towns and rural villages. I tell the story in great detail in my autobiography, Left, Gay & Green: A Writer’s Life, which was covered in RFD not long ago. That book remains available on Amazon, where it has received many positive reviews. It includes the full text of a short article I wrote for RFD about the joy of swimming in our local pond in a nearby state forest. The place where we swam became known as Butterworth Beach, and of course it featured skinnydipping by a bunch of hippies, male and female, gay and straight.

We produced two issues of RFD at Butterworth Farm with a variety of articles, photographs, and drawings. One of the men who came to live with me and helped me build my octagon house, Dennis Helmus, responded from his home in the Midwest to a letter in the RFD contact section—and he has many stories he could tell about his life-changing experience.

In one early issue of RFD, there was a beautiful wood cut of a large barn in Canada, created by artist Gerard Brender a Brandis of Ontario, and upon admiring his artwork, I contacted him. We became enduring friends and collaborated on a book entitled More than Sand and Sea: Images of Cape Cod.

There was an ad in an early issue of RFD from two gay men in Madison, WI, who owned a body products business called The Soap Opera. Those men, Chuck Beckwith and Chuck Bauer, both talented artists, also became friends as I became a customer of their business and visited them once in Wisconsin.

After a while, I lost interest in RFD and no longer subscribed, though I was always aware of its continued existence. I submitted some articles in recent years— sadly, those articles were about friends who had died.

I want to express thanks to Bambi, my fellow citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for all he has done to keep RFD going in recent years.

Top: Allen Young, in front Octagon House, with a copy of his book Left, Gay and Green. Middle: The Soap Opera ad in RFD #13. Bottom: The book by Allen and Gerard Brender à Brandis.

Top: The Butterworth Collective in the fall of 1973 during house construction, as a memorial to Marcos who just died of Alzheimer’s Disease. Photo by Allen's Brazilian friend, Marcos Carvalho Silva. Bottom: Wood block print by Gerard Brender à Brandis from RFD #14.

RFD Spring 1976 Issue Changed Life’s Course

by Dennis Helmus

I lived in Iowa City in 1974-75 finding RFD from the very beginning. I had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago but always loved nature and as my aunt told me once—I knew you were gay since you were two years old. But of course, I didn’t and growing up in a very religious Dutch Calvinist household in the 1950’s and 60’s there were no role models, nor was it ever discussed—

they even avoided the regular Bible verses that are often used against same sex relationships being squeamish about sexuality of any kind— other than God’s plan was to have children.

In Issue #7, Spring of 1976, an ad appeared from Steve at Butterworth Farm in Royalston, Massachusetts (who produced that issue) inviting those interested in learning through firsthand work experience what country life was about to visit on a temporary basis. Reading “As the Butter Churns” and “Recipe for a Small Cabin” I was intrigued. Being in graduate school at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale thinking about what I should do for the summer, decided if not now, when, try it and see. In exchange for working four to five hours a day they offered a small private sleeping cabin, friendship, lots of good food, as well as enjoying the nearby lake and woods and for being with friends and neighbors. All of this turned out to be true (well the workdays were more than four or five hours, but I was OK with that).

I spent the summer at the Peak House learning timber frame construction, organic gardening, cooking on a wood stove, eating good vegetarian

food (but occasionally us meat eaters would sneak to the Idlenot Restaurant at the mini-mall and get a cheeseburger and fries), meeting other back to the land gay men on the farm and visitors, along with straight hippie friends who were also back to the land folks in Wendell, Warwick and Jolly Road Farm in Royalston. In many respects it was an idyllic time where I came into my own as a gay man from a repressive background in the heyday of gay liberation in the country swimming naked at the pond and sometimes gardening in the nude just for the novelty of it (but the reality not so good as there are bugs that bite so clothing was not optional!).

I stayed past summer as I was invited by Steve and Bob but unfortunately their relationship was falling apart, and it became clear to me that it would not be good for me to stay as I was sort of in the middle. So, I left back to the Midwest. But in the Spring of 1977 (as I was still in communication with Al -

len and Buddy from the Octagon House) they invited me back to share in this lifestyle and to continue to learn by building the second floor to the Octagon. In exchange for room and board Allen would buy my $50 a month in food stamps for my spending money and I would work on the house and the gardens. We grew our own vegetables and canned a variety of foods for the winter. As electricity had not yet come up the road we cooked on a wood stove (but had a propane gas one as well) and read by candlelight, kerosene lamps and a couple of propane lamps set in the wall. It is not something one can do today I think because back then one didn’t need much money or a car given the life I was living was fulfilling despite hard physical work.

After several years I moved to the cabin owned by a straight couple (who were getting a divorce) that was modeled on the Fern Cabin described in the Spring 1976 issue. So what was to be a summer experiment has turned into I have been in Massachusetts now for forty-seven happy years.

Although I now live in Northampton, MA for a variety of reasons, the farm and my country friends are only fifty minutes away so I can still jump in the pond (although no longer possible to be nude) but sometimes take my suit off in the water and put it back on before I get out as it is much more utilized and known as the state has promoted visiting for outdoor fun in that area and the North Quabbin region in general.

RFD magazine was integral to my blossoming as a young gay man being with and learning from back to the land openly gay men in a rural country setting. New Englanders appreciated hard work and although gay hippies in a town of 900 there was very little openly hostile behaviors or actions against us. Butterworth Farm put together another issue #21 in the Fall of 1979. I worked on that issue and we had articles like “The Joy of Gay Swimming” and “The Andrews Inn” a hotel in Bellows Falls, VT that became a gay disco for dancing on Saturday nights. I still have some of the original photographs from that issue and a drawing I did for the back cover based on the album cover of Billy Joel's Piano Man 1973.

In the ebb and flow of RFD and its changing focus to Faerie experience, I stopped subscribing only because that wasn’t my interest but always appreciated that nature was still prominent still being a tree hugging hippie at heart. I am

Top: Cover of RFD 21, by the author. Bottom: Back cover of RFD #21, by the author.

grateful you are still publishing and finding an audience for GLBTQI folks in an ever changing liberation world for sexual orientations, sexual expression and gender diversity for those who love the wildness of nature and the human spirit.

White Crane Spreads Wings

By Toby Johnson

RFD was a model for me when I took on the task of editing and publishing White Crane Journal. RFD, a reader-written journal, was publishing stories and articles about gay men’s spiritual and blissful, ecstatic experiences. Men were submitting articles telling of their personal experiences of gay life that went beyond the superficial public face of the gay world—“spreading their wings,” as it were. Telling our own truth was how I believed the gay liberation movement worked.

My own experience of “liberation” came from attending a weekend marathon encounter group in San Francisco lead by the psychologist Don Clark (author of the wonderful Loving Someone Gay). From that group process event with some twenty other gay men, with Clark’s guidance, I had my whole idea of what it meant to be gay changed. I was shown the deeper, interior layers of gay consciousness. And that was liberating at the level of spirit. I came to understand one of the central insights: the way for homosexuals to change what the world thought about homosexuality was for us to change what we thought. The job wasn’t to get the straight world to accept us and give us rights, but for us to discover our sexuality, not as a curse, but as something more like a religious vocation—and then to create our own alternative future.

magazine called Alternative Vocations; it ran classified ads and stories about progressive, countercultural jobs and careers. I had thought my disinterest in marrying and having a family was a sign of religious vocation to a life of service; I discovered it was actually homosexuality—and that that too was a kind of vocation to a progressive, countercultural life of service.

In 1970, age twenty-five, fresh out of Catholic religious life, I attended a new age fair at the Mission Inn in Riverside, CA. The historic hotel had gone fallow and become a rundown apartment house and crash pad for artists, craftspeople, and hippies. I was invited up to “see the penthouse.” I don’t know whether the guy was actually living in that room or just knew how to get in, but I had one of my first sexual adventures in the same room that Pat and Richard Nixon spent their wedding night (there’s an historical plaque to that effect in the lobby). Also at that fair, I picked up a

My first gay activism was with Gay Rap and the San Francisco Gay Counseling hotline. This was gay lib aimed at enhancing gay people’s psychological functioning and happiness. I worked in psychiatric emergency and community mental health while I studied for a PhD in counseling and interned in a clinic with a specific gay and lesbian outreach. I’d helped with organizing a couple of “gay/straight consciousness raising” weekends that proved to be proto-Faerie gatherings. Bob Croonquist, “Covelo,” one of the organizers, wrote about the second of these in “Diggers, Free Land and Diablo Canyon: A story of Faeries and Reclaiming” in RFD, Spring 2009 #137. I met my first lover Guy Mannheimer at the first of these in 1972, in

Picture of John Sokoloff from RFD #14, by Marshall Rheiner. "I'm dealing with the sexual signposts of our society. I'm satirizing stereotyped roles and imbuing them with something new, something beyond."

a building in San Francisco’s Western Addition called “Alternative Futures,” a neighborhood center where Gay Rap met—another “Alternative.” Later Guy and I were in BAGL (Bay Area Gay Liberation) and friends with Arthur Evans, whose lectures on Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture opened my eyes to the long history of sex-variance as just that religious vocation.

Guy and I had broken up by the mid-70s and split our friendship circles. He stayed with BAGL and attended the first Radical Faerie Gathering in 1979. I’d moved my activism into gay mental health—with its no-sex, no-drugs professional ethics. And wasn’t at that life-changing event in the Arizona desert.

I first encountered RFD in 1977. I was dating John Sokoloff (now John Berryhill); he was in the cast of the ground-breaking ensemble show “Crimes Against Nature: a play by faggots about survival.” He’d visited Wolf Creek and photos of him and of other cast members appear in issue #14. (There are lots of photos in that issue online.)

I liked the homemade look of the magazine. That Alternative Vocations magazine had looked like that—an alternative to the mainstream American culture. I liked the idea that gay men were creating our own culture, and creating with a certain whimsy, gender-bending, and embrace of being simple, honest, and amateur. That would stick with me the rest of my life.

I moved back to San Antonio to be the gay therapist in 1981, and met my partner Kip Dollar. By the late 80s, Kip and I had moved to Austin to run Liberty Books, the gay and lesbian community bookstore. We regularly stocked both RFD and White Crane. White Crane was started by Robert Barzan, a former priest living in San Francisco who was organizing salons with other former priests to talk about how to transcend their religious upbringing by finding spiritual meaning in being gay. Both magazines were wholesaled to the trade by Bert Herrman, a writer about New Age spirituality himself who was doing gay and lesbian book distribution out of his apartment in San Francisco—also at the DIY/amateur level. Liberty Books carried all we could find about spirituality and consciousness studies. We sponsored and participated in Shamans’ Circle, a gay spin-off from the Men’s Movement “Wild Man Weekends,” led by a local charismatic gay psychologist. We danced around a fire in the moonlight and led rites of passage; I usually gave an oration on the spiritual qualities of gay-consciousness.

By the mid-90s, the bookstore business was changing. Big box superstores were opening—and having large gay sections. Mail order was replacing the local pop-and-pop stores as the only way to find gay books. Porn video rental was moving from XXX stores to the gay and lesbian bookstores and altering the character of these businesses. In Texas two competing chains in Dallas and Houston were moving into Austin. The DIY community-service quality of the store was changing into real business operations with competition and high finance. We sold Liberty Books to one of the chains and got out of the business.

My interest in New Age thought and understanding of religion and myth was greatly affected by the philosopher of religion Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth). I was on staff for five summers at a Jungianoriented retreat center in northern California called The Mann Ranch Seminars. Campbell was a regular seminar leader and I got to know him personally. He wasn’t gay himself, but he wasn’t anti-gay in any way. His wife, Jean Erdman, was a Broadway choreographer. They had lots of gay men in their lives; they lived in an apartment building on Waverly Place, overlooking Sheridan Square. The comparative religions approach of looking at religion from over and above was so liberating—from religion. I understood the gay ability to look at the world from outside and over and above paralleled this enlightened, Buddhistic, demythologized/ remythologized perspective that Campbell was teaching. I joked that I wanted to be Joe Campbell’s apostle to the gay community cause we needed that kind of enlightenment and liberation from traditional religion.

Summer of 1996, still in Austin, as I was preparing a speech to give at the Joseph Campbell Library in Santa Barbara, I got a call from my former-Austinite friend, gay mytho-historian Randy Conner (author of the remarkable Blossom of Bone). Randy said he had learned Bob Barzan was planning to retire and that White Crane was likely to disappear unless a new editor came forward. Randy suggested I take over that role.

My initial reaction was to say: “No, I don’t want a new responsibility.” We were just out of the bookstore business. Kip and I were looking into moving to Colorado and running a gay country B&B. I was reluctant to commit to yet another venture. But I had just been typing that Joseph Campbell, “the wise old man” of my spiritual journey, had instructed: “Follow your bliss.”

Say “YES” to life was Joe’s sage advice and “doors will open where you never even knew there were going to be doors.” Well, spreading the news that gay identity confers a sort of spiritual vocation has been my “bliss” through all the roles I’ve played as gay activist.

Kip and I practice Tai Chi. One of the moves is called “White crane spreads wings.” So already the image of the high-flying, magical bird had meaning.

So after I hung up with Randy, I did a Tarot reading, then I called Bob. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will. Yes.”

Indeed doors did open. We published the readerwritten ’zine of gay men’s spirituality from our log lodge gay B&B in the Rockies for three years and then back in Texas another four. Bob had been editor for seven years; I held the job for seven years. Bo Young had been an informal assistant to Bob and continued with me; then he and Dan Vera took over after my term. Bo and Dan, with me now as informal assistant, published the ’zine for another seven years, then shifted to email distribution of events in LGBTQ history. A few years into my term, I was invited by an editor at The Advocate when they were publishing books to write about what I’d learned from doing White Crane. That resulted in my couple of books on gay spirituality. And in the wake of that I was invited to speak at the Atlanta-based Gay Spirit Visions Conference.

There is an interesting parallel between RFD and White Crane Journal and the Radical Faeries and GSV. When I took over editing and publishing White Crane, I followed Bob’s established style. He had been using clip art line drawings and embellishments. In those days RFD had a similar sort of look with line drawings and clip art, but RFD’s was audaciously sexual (though not sleazy) and homoerotic. That distinguished the magazines too. White Crane was more scholarly and prim; remember, I’d gone the professional mental health route. I used classical images and religious icons. The Faeries and Gay Spirit Visions both came out of the gay hippie counterculture, psycho-spiritual growth movement of the 1970s that Harry Hay was the philosopher and spokesperson for. The Faerie Gatherings were ecstatic, sexual, and psychedelic. GSV chose the psychological encounter weekend style, like that of Don Clark, and so were sober and fairly non-sexual.

mystical layers of consciousness that it is our birthright to discover. Both in RFD and WCJ, gay men have had opportunity to tell about their interior lives, both the candidly sexual and the high mystical. And it has helped us and the readers to reenvision what it means to be homosexual and queer.

Before calling Bob Barzan to volunteer to take on the job, I did a Tarot reading (using Anna-Marie Ferguson’s Arthurian Tarot deck; somebody had just given me a brand new copy). I 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: the card shows Lancelot, bare-chested, gazing over the castle battlements toward Camelot. It’s the only “homoerotic” illustration in the deck. Hmmm!

The third card was the clencher. It was the blank you’re supposed to take out 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. 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 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. Our sexuality is such a pattern. This is why we’re gay and queer. These magazines have revealed these patterns. By our sharing our stories, we are creating alternative futures for ourselves and for the world.

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

There’s been a magical quality to all this all along. It’s what the extra "e" in Faerie is about. Back in BAGL Arthur Evans called his vision “magical socialism.” There is something in gay experience that runs through the sexual and erotic and into the deeper and

Interesting coincidence: In an article by Murray Edelman on “The Origins of the Faerie Movement,” in RFD summer 2024 #198, the advertising flyer appears for Arthur Evans’ lecture series. The illustration is a basilisk, very much like the one in that Arthurian Tarot.

Serious Flux

by Bo Young

My life in New York City was in serious flux. In addition to ending an eight-year relationship, I was stepping down from responsibilities as a member of Manhattan Community Board 7 (where, as an aside, I had zoning and development dealings with the Trump Organization), and I had recently left my non-profit job as a development director. In the interests of a segue into food writing, I had spent the previous summer cooking in a two-star restaurant in the Hamptons. I had owned a catering business in Palm Springs ten years before, and I didn’t think anyone would be interested in my commentary about food with little or no credentials, so the Hamptons was something I did to “build my resume.”

This is when I first visited Short Mountain. I was visiting to see where my dear, old friend —really the first gay man who I had ever become true friends with, years before, after moving to San Francisco—Tim Kelleher (aka Ha!) had landed after his own cross country hejira. He had also left a high-power job on the West Coast, sold his house, bought a VW camper and drove across country for months, ending up, picking me up along the way to a small men’s gathering in Maine, where we spent a beautiful week with a group of gay men on the Maine coast.

This is also where he told me about his plans to go to Tennessee. After we left Maine, he dropped me off at my new apartment in the East Village and went off to see about these “Radical Faeries” and a place called Short Mountain.

I arrived and stayed three full weeks. It was the last of December, 1993. Back in the city, I had also just completed my first Naraya at the Synod House of St. John the Divine. I left the Synod Hall on a Monday morning, went back to the apartment I would not be returning to, grabbed my pack and drove to Tennessee that same day.

It’s no surprise to say that Tennessee is radically different from the wilds of Manhattan. And I fell in love with the place, the people and the setting. Tim had decided that this was where he was going to settle. He and a few others had found another house, nearby the Mountain, and were busy building yet another queer community in satellite to Short Mountain, ”Idyll Dandy Acres” aka IDA. And it was here that I discovered RFD. RFD was

published out of Short Mountain then. It’s second or third home if I recall. I subscribed right then and there, and spent a good deal of the there’s-notmuch-to-do time at SMS pouring over old issues.

My mind was blown that this publication even existed. It was the first time I’d seen people who I resonated with represented in print. My first living experience when I moved to San Francisco from the Midwest, was a communal house, with a collection of men, women, and babies. It was where I first came into my gayness and came out to someone else ever. The first-person narratives of so many ideas and things that I was interested in, or discovered I had an interest for were seductive and exciting.

So to discover Short Mountain, and on top of that a publication that spoke to, and documented this kind of living, intentional, rural community? And all of it with gay men? This was nothing short of a revelation to me. I’d been out for twenty years, and I finally felt like I’d found “my people” in the larger gay community. It wasn’t “coming out” anymore. It was coming into my own. I couldn’t wait to learn more.

At the time I had just become aware of White Crane, for which I had submitted a piece and I would go on to publish and edit, along with my Sex Magick friend and brother, Dan Vera. It was a more philosophical publication in my eyes. I saw RFD as a more pragmatic journal of rural living (which I think it was at the time, but has now shed). And yet the two of them played well together.

In the long run, White Crane was probably a better fit for me. RFD, as its name so clearly announced (no matter how many other interpretations are applied: “Roughing it For Divinity”, “Redeemers Foster Devotees,” “Rad Faes DC,” “Roaming Frontiers of Death,” “Raddish Fagrag Draghead” to name but a few), was about rural queer life. I had been a city dweller for most of my life, more than twenty years at that point; but I felt at home in the cabin at Short Mountain, and I wanted to be a part of it as much as I could.

Both publications have experienced growing pains as part of their continuing survival. White Crane stopped using “spirituality” in its mission statement and title, and made a lateral move into “Gay Wisdom and Culture.” I always liked that the title letters of White Crane (WC) were reflected in

Wisdom & Culture.

RFD began to absorb the urban lives of its readership, and among other innovations, invited different cities around the globe to produce individual issues reflecting their particular people and places. Both were moves for the good, I think.

RFD also presented me with an opportunity and much needed discipline to do some regular writing. In a stroke of luck, the very first piece I had ever written about food, and submitted to a magazine (Fine Cooking), was, much to my dismay, published! I was thinking “here I go” and approached Mish, suggesting that I would like to write about food for RFD; he thought it was a good idea. I committed to writing four columns a year. My struggle with recovery from Roman Catholicism was apparent in

my choice of titles: Communions.

I must admit I never quite found my culinary niche at RFD (nor elsewhere for that matter). Most Faeries were interested in vegetarian foods, and I was decidedly an omnivore and more of a “fine dining” writer (not that I haven’t eaten some of the best meals of my life at Faerie Gatherings!) But my style of cooking with which I was most accustomed, wasn’t really Faerie fare. Nevertheless, in the three weeks I was there, I mostly hung out in the kitchen, which I found fascinating. Large and accommodating to several people at a time, it was a dream country kitchen to me.

After a couple of years – I think it was two? –Mish approached me about the need for a poetry editor for the magazine. In retrospect, again, I now

can say that I wasn’t a good fit for this role. For whatever reason, poetry and I have a tenuous relationship at best. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t have an affinity for it, nor the patience for its language. I say this even as I write poetry myself. It’s the same for fiction and me. I’m a nonfiction, biography, and history reader. But I had accepted the assignment, and I felt that I had an obligation to fulfill it, at least for a while. I can’t say if I did it well, or not.

Nevertheless, I always thought of RFD and White Crane as being “sister” publications. The “body and spirit” of the Radical Faeries, respectively. Both were reader-written, a form that I feel a great deal of pride about. Irrespective of either publication, that they exist to give voice to their readership is the Talking Circle in print form, and that is foundational to the Faeries. RFD seemed both literally and figuratively more “down to earth”, while White Crane was more “idea-centric.” I suppose that could be called academic. But I don’t think it was. While there are real ecological considerations to printing things on paper, even recycled paper, it was always important to me that we were creating tangible documents, and tangible documents that were being collected and conserved by institutions of learning, public libraries and university libraries, even internationally. We are a people that are perpetually coming out of erasure, and having tangible documents of our lives is important to future generations. And that both publications are collected in respected public libraries all over the world is more than a matter of pride for me. It is a matter of survival.

I can’t speak to RFD, but while White Crane’s circulation was small by any standard, two to three thousand at the peak; I believed its success couldn’t be accurately measured by the quantity of its readership. It was the quality of the circulation and readership—twenty-two countries, multiple wellknown universities, e.g. Yale, Harvard, University of Chicago, Manchester University, UK. etc., and most major city libraries, from San Francisco, to Boston. I always got a kick out of the fact that Arthur C. Clarke was a White Crane subscriber. RFD archives are proudly maintained at Emory University.

With the advent of the internet (yes, some of us are that old) publishing went through a drastic adjustment about fifteen to twenty years ago. It happened to coincide with my own big change, leaving city life, and buying a house in Upstate New York. It was all too much to keep the magazine functioning and everything else I had to do.

This was also one of the things that separated

WC from RFD: RFD had a devoted group of volunteers (I’m bowing deeply in the direction of Mish, Bambi, Matt and Rosie, and many others) who could take up the slack. With White Crane, if Dan left, and he eventually did, it was just me on the masthead. Even with sufficient funding, it was always more than a one-person effort from the get-go. Bob Barzan had help. I helped Toby Johnson. Dan Vera worked with me.

And though it never touched me, so long as I got my piece in by deadline (a concept loosely interpreted by RFD), the advantage of a crew of volunteers, also meant friction, disagreement, disputes and delays. I had Dan; Dan had me. And we were preternaturally in synch with one another’s taste and decisions were usually quick and easy.

Both RFD and White Crane invited contributing writers using assigned topics. Each of our quarterly issues were themed, Sanctuary, Community, Lovers, Health, etc. RFD worked similarly. I’m told that White Crane was perceived as more “academic”. Why? I cannot say. Certainly we were not as academic as the [Harvard] Gay and Lesbian Review, the only other publication that I saw as being on a par with RFD and White Crane (Malcolm Boyd once scoffed when he heard me say this, saying their stuffy mag couldn’t touch either of the Faerie publications. I liked that.)

Though I have been a supporter, I am no longer in touch with the issue-to-issue economics of RFD. But when I took over publishing White Crane, it cost about $1,000 to produce each issue, mostly printing and postage costs. Neither Dan nor I (nor anyone else who had ever had any connection to the journal) were ever paid a cent in salary or stipend; another common bond with RFD. But by the time I was faced with the decision to publish or to move to the internet, a single issue was running about $6,000-$7,000 to produce. The cover price had risen from $3 to $12, and had I decided to go forward, it would have no doubt have risen to $15 to $20, cover price. This bothered me and led to my final decision to shut production of the hard copy down and continue on line and with books.

RFD has weathered this, not without some near collapses, reaching this golden achievement of fifty years. For this we have all the readers and the Faerie community to thank. We value these publications, and as a reader-written magazine, it values us.

It Is axiomatic that the ability to see yourself represented in media is community-building, to say nothing of being important support of our individual mental health. I still firmly believe it is critical

to create tangible history, actual documents that can outlive us the way a floppy disc has already proven it can’t. I still believe that paper will outlast electricity and binary code. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that through these documents, our stories will live, at least as much as anyone can hope for. RFD needs to live another fifty years.

Oddly-- or maybe by unconscious design from a community that is accustomed to the drawn shades and shadows —these dogged efforts at representing ideas, culture and history, are not widely known. Certainly not as widely as they might be. And not even within the LGBTQ community. Some of the very people you might think would be aware of us, apparently are not. The late Larry Kramer no less, speaking of the above-referenced Harvard G&LR opined that it was, “our intellectual journal, for better or for worse. If you want to deal with scholarly intelligent arguments, there’s really no place else we can publish.”

We beg to differ. And I don’t want to add fuel to the anti-intellectualism that plagues us these days, but there is room for both “scholarly” writing and idiosyncratic personal reporting.

I am seventy-four years old. I am one of those people that Mark Twain was talking about when he said, “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never work a day in your life.” I find purpose and fulfillment every day by maintaining White Crane through the Gay Wisdom Facebook page, and the subscription email of the same name. I suspect, if you asked them, the RFD collective feels much the same.

RFD keeps chugging along, and as an institution it faces the same challenge that we do as a people: erasure from generation to generation. Every day I ask myself “Who will take up the task?” “Who will value these histories, this culture, this work enough to make sure it survives and continues?” I hope we are all asking the same question and seeing to it that someone—some many-- take it all on. I’d like to be around to assure that.

The relationship between elder LGBTQI people and the next generation is often just as fraught for us as it is for straight culture. The young queers still think they’ve invented something new, never before seen; the proverbial reinvented wheel. While we elders are shocked, or frustrated, or puzzled by the new technologies, values, and seismic cultural swings. T’was ever thus. Both operate with deficits. We, the young and the elders, both need one another, and need to value our future as much as our past. I think one of the best ways to bridge that gap

is in the continuation of projects like White Crane and RFD. At a time I was trying to decide how to proceed with White Crane after it all became too much for me—money, time, and the work—I gained solace from knowing that if the venerable Newsweek was struggling, and migrating to the web. If Newsweek was having a hard time, who was I to think the same wave wouldn’t hit White Crane? RFD remained afloat; RFD kept on keeping on by any means necessary. But this should never be taken for granted.

I returned very recently from a trip to the Midwest for my family’s annual gathering. I was in Minneapolis briefly, and was fortunate to be able to take in the Keith Haring show currently at the Walker Art Museum. I talk to strangers. And I overheard a young couple, a man and a woman, next to me, commenting on some photographs of Haring working with children. I kibbitzed that I thought it would be hard to take a bad picture of Haring doing anything in his career.

I mentioned that I do a Facebook “almanac” page that is devoted to LGBTQI+ history, and that when I have tried to use a photo of Keith Haring, naked, in a room he has painted in his style, as is his body and [gasp!] penis, Facebook has censored me – “against community standards”. And the woman, who was many years my junior, I’d guess late 20s, early 30s at the most, stopped me and asked, “Are you Bo Young?!” I averred as much, and she proceeded to go fan-girl over Gay Wisdom. I proceeded to explain that Gay Wisdom had grown out of the work of the magazine I had published, and she asked what magazine? I told her White Crane, and she got very excited. I mentioned RFD, and she practically swooned! Her companion hadn’t heard of either publication, and she insisted that he had to learn about them.

And then she asked me if I was considering where to place papers and any archive that might exist. This happens to be exactly what I’m considering at the moment. As it happened, she was affiliated with the University of Minnesota’s LGBTQI+ archives! Contact info was exchanged. It was a very gratifying moment.

I relate this not for any personal pride, but because it reaffirmed for me on a very personal level that this work was, is, and will be reaching into the heartlands, and into a new generation of readers.

It’s all in serious flux, too. And even so, we abide. And we are all thankful and the better for it.

Happy 50th Anniversary RFD!

On RFD’s 50th Anniversary Issue

by Eli Andrew Ramer

You. Married to all of us for half a century. Is this a kind of poly celebration? You and all of us together. Our golden anniversary.

I remember the first time we met. Not long out of college. Berkeley. Religious Studies major. That where I came out. Now living with my family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Newly broken up with my first boyfriend. Too shy to go to bars. Don’t drink either. Too mono-inclined to go to the baths. Dancing? Don’t like loud music. So what do I do? Spend hours in the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, down in the Village, flipping through books and magazines, waiting for one to call out to me to take it home. And one day, one is staring back at me. RFD. Face-out on a shelf on the left, or maybe on the back wall. And I’m in the city, and the Ruralcall grabs me, comes home with me.

How many issues have I read over the years? No idea. How many issues have I been published in? Several. But what calls out to me, RFD, on y/our 50th anniversary, is how much you and all of the voices that you’ve cuddled on your pages down through the years have shaped, colored, fed, informed, energized, enlightened, and grounded this old man’s idea of, not queer community, but of that which I married you in, our little gay tribe, which you have blessed and healed again and again, almost 200 times now.

Thank you. Mazel tov! Congratulations. Kisses and hugs to you! From me.

Oh Mama Mia: An Appreciation of Sister Mish

Sr. Clara Cum Passionata RMG MOPI

So build yourself as beautiful as you want your world to be. Wrap yourself in light then give yourself away with your heart, your brush, your march, your art, your poetry, your play.

And for every day you paint the war, take a week and paint the beauty, the color, the shape of the landscape you`re marching towards. Everyone knows what you’re against, show them what you`re for.

—Andrea Gibson

When I was asked to pen a few words about my Dearest friend, Sister, Mother and Mentor for RFD’s 50th year tribute issue it gave me pause. Where to start? How does one encapsulate in a few words a tribute to a Queer Cultural Worker of such magnitude and founding Sister of Perpetual Indulgence without it sounding like a eulogy?

Sr. Missionary Position—Missionary P. Delight—Iamosama Delight The Sodimite of the Most Holy Dove and Glorious Rumi Sufi Heart. Now –SOAMI—Mish. The evolution of their name.

Through the pages of RFD over thirty-two years ago I was drawn to Short Mountain Sanctuary where we met in real time.

In those days before the building of Three Sisters Lodge she was living in “The Tree House” an Aframe house on stilts it seemed. When one entered, it was like entering an ancient magical medicine wagon. The walls lined with art, potions and survival gear... enough to tend the needs of any who might wander down the path to SMS.

It was also a sanctuary—a sanctuary within a sanctuary for those in need. Sick—hungry—too many shrooms? Mama Mish could tend your needs.

My life partner Tom had known of RFD and the collective since its inception being a “Hippie Iowa Farm Guy”. When we moved to Iowa from Chicago in the Fall of 1982, obtaining a subscription to RFD was paramount on my partner Tom`s mind. He knew it would be the connection for us that fit our lifestyle best. And so it was.

When RFD moved from Running Water to SMS, the lives of those in the collective there became more familiar with each issue. Mish’s artistic editing tended the zine well.

At the first dinner of my first Fae gathering in 1992 I spotted her at a table with friends, “cackling” in conversation with a deep belly laugh that cannot be mistaken. She was draped in a vintage Deco dress and shawl. Iconic before the word was used en mass and clearly—loved.

And so from those days and throughout her time in the amazing Three Sisters Lodge, not only did I witness this love and commitment toward community but I was blessed by it firsthand. Nestled in her loving arms throughout some of the most difficult times in my life and our communities’ ongoing challenges, her home became my home.

An amazing cook with such a sophisticated palate, it was such magic to see her churn out dish after dish of delectable morsels for all that might visit on the spur of the moment during gathering. Cooking on a vintage Coleman camping stove mind you. Kitchen Witchery at its finest.

What a blessing it has been for me to have been exposed the evolution of her work as an Queer activist for over fifty years with a deep commitment toward honoring this land we are blessed to stand upon.

When she handed over the Stewardship of Three Sisters Lodge two years ago, I was amazed by the depth of her queer archives as I helped to move these treasures.

If you are unaware of whom I am writing about and are curious to learn more, seek out the film Joy! Portrait of a Nun, it was filmed over seven years by the amazing filmmaker Joe Balass.

Thank you, RFD, for being the catalyst for my Queer Home coming, discovering my Tribe and my life’s work.

Here's to another fifty years.

Blessed be.

Photograph by Toma Iczkovits.

RFD

RFD Managing Editors, March 1991, photographed at Short Mountain Sanctuary by Robert Giard. Copyright Estate of Robert Giard. From left to right: Jim, Kulaya, David, Sr. Missionary P. Delight, Vera, Martin, and Stevie.

Jim Jackson’s Rarely Seen Work

by Jim Jackson

One day I arrived at an unexpected point in my efforts as an artist. I discovered gay and queer characters appearing in my spontaneous approach. I would just start doodling away with ink dots on the paper and start looking for interesting images. Before I knew it I had created hundreds of drawings this way. Then I began to consider getting them into print. In my teens I had learned just how important it was to keep the lines and dots crisp and clean so that the cheapest form of line cut photo lithography could be used. A publisher was more likely to use your work if it was a simple ink drawing.

Back in the 80’s, Sister Mish and Dwight Delight, editor and art editor, encouraged me to send in some of my drawings to RFD. I felt honored to have a publication finally run some of my fanciful gay work. There were limitations. During the early years RFD was restricted by their printers who often refused to print art and photos that were erotically explicit. Also, the printing, except for the cover, was only in black and white.

The #69 cover shown here contained one of my drawings done with pen and ink stipple technique. The coloring, layout and design were by Wayne Sizemore and Sr. Mish similar to the coloring of ink drawings in comic publications. The logo graphic was by Stephen Noonan.

What I would like to feature now are drawings I did for other projects. RFD could not have printed most of these back then.

Safe Company

Below are four drawings done for Safe Company, an AIDS Action Committee offshoot organized by Abe Rybeck (He is the founder of Theater Offensive in Boston, MA for whom I also did costume design.) Abe presented me with rough sketches of the art included within a packet of condoms. The packet also included a sample of lube and a whistle. It was distributed at the Fenway Park cruising area during the peak of the epidemic in the early 90’s.

Abe wanted the drawings to illustrate sexual pleasure and safer sex. He wanted a very explicit drawing of a condom getting lubricated just before rectal insertion. The brutal scene of the beating being called out by a guy blowing a whistle and the “lookout” stationed to help protect active lovers was important to make us all aware of possible violence in the area. I really hope this effort helped save some lives.

Condom Drawings At The Ramrod Gay Bar Show

One other project for the AIDS organization included about six charcoal drawings of condom use

that were shown in the back room of the Ramrod, a Boston gay bar, as a fundraiser.

Here are two samples:

This hottie is preparing a condom to go on the erection approaching him in the shadow.

This clever guy is preparing to put a condom on his partner with his mouth—at least he is getting it started in a very hot manner.

I think you get the idea. Let’s make condoms erotic, fun, creative, and more pleasurable. Some of you may think that in these days of PREP the message is outdated. It’s not. It’s possible to think this if you were around back when condom use was first being promoted among gays in the 1980s to slow the spread of HIV. And younger folks who weren’t around then may agree. However, condoms are just as relevant for all sexually active people these four decades later because they slow the spread of other STDs, which are very much on the rise in the gay community. Just goes to show: Art endures.

Hippie Dick

In the late 80’s and 90’s, copy machines were prolific and user friendly… sometimes. Some folks got the idea of turning out their own publications with affordable copies, again mostly in black and white. The price drop and accessibility helped create the “Zine” movement. What could be printed and/or censored was up to the person doing the publishing. The audience was not large and was mostly friends and friends of friends of the person making creative use of a copy machine. By featuring some of my work, RFD had made me known among the Faeries and their friends. I actually got requests for submissions.

One of those was from Gene Barnes, who had begun to make a name for himself in the San Fran-

cisco gay mecca for his work in erotic media. He began publishing Hippie Dick around 1991. He had experience with the local Faeries and RFD and sent me a very interesting conceptual idea. He knew Karl Van Uhl, a pianist and composer who was interested in doing some short etude works inspired by a gay artist’s drawings. Since Gene was mostly interested in erotic art, I jumped at the chance. Here are two of the four pieces. These reprints are direct scans from Hippie Dick #3 1992.

The art came first, and then Karl wrote the words and music. I hadn’t had the pleasure of experiencing them together until long-time Faerie, John Collis, at a ’93 Walnut Hill Gathering opened the old upright piano and played them for me. Not often does a visual artist get to hear a musical piece inspired by their work.

The lyrics to the music are worth printing here so they can be more easily read:

FINAL

What lush harmonies you have, sir — All the better to fuck your ass with, mister— so soon?

Damn, I need to get my dick wet.

—Karl von Uhl, 5 July ’92, Loan Star Saloon

I was very pleased some of my phantasmagoric sexy art was the inspiration to these etudes, and that Gene shepherded the art to print. Alas, we lost another very talented gay artist to AIDS when Gene passed in 1995. Some of his work is held with the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles.

Draghead

A Canadian Faerie publication was put together by Jules Chamberlain and others from the Amber Fox gathering community also in the 90’s. He encouraged me to send in some submissions. So I piled it on and he used a number of pieces. Here are two of my favorites along with one with color that can now be printed in RFD:

By the late 90’s I also began using black paint washes with pen and ink. The technological ad-

vances in printing made it cheaper and easier for various tones to be printed.

Harbinger Dreams

RFD editor, Bambi Gauthier, and Matt Bucy, art editor, were kind enough to work with me on finally publishing my therapy dream drawings in a book format. The art for Harbinger Dreams was never published in RFD magazine because I was holding them for a possible book publishing deal which never came to be. The drawings were not especially erotic, in fact they were sometimes kind of scary. This was because they were inspired by nightmares about the AIDS epidemic. I was able to use these drawings in very emotional meetings with a therapist who helped me understand the full range of feelings the nightmares represented. I was blessed with a whole new peace of mind after the sessions. I hope the book can help others who are suffering from anxiety about serious health threats and issues.

Harbinger Dreams, by Jim Jackson is available at Amazon books for $12.95. The direct url for the book is: https://a.co/d/98FBO26.

Filmmaker Lawrence Brose, De Profundis and Radical Faeries

By Keith Gemerek aka Fussy lo Mein

Filmmaker Lawrence Brose premiered his magnum opus De Profundis at the Public Theater in New York in 1997. Not a narrative, the film is a dazzling meditation on Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde’s prison letter, De Profundis. Wilde is considered a gay martyr by some. He broke Victorian rules of decorum and defiantly wrote, sometimes in code, but always with humor and brilliance, about the life that we contemporary queers take for granted in our time and place. In the 1990’s Lawrence began to see the homogenization of a once daring and subversive gay subculture, by efforts to make it palatable to mainstream (straight) society.

Lawrence’s hardscrabble life in 1950’s South Buffalo resulted in blindness in one eye. After high school, he was trained as a piano tuner, a profession he could continue with should he lose his good eye. He became a master piano tuner and eventually started a business restoring pianos and specialized in restoring Steinway’s, the ultimate instrument. His business was so successful that Steinway bought him out as he was their main competitor. That released him to pursue his artistic mission to make films. While working on pianos, doors opened to a rarified world of contemporary composers and performers, mostly gay! He began a series of independent films called Films for Music for Film, working closely with important musical artists like John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Yvar Mikhashoff, Paul Schmidt, Conlon Nancarrow and others.

Oscar Wilde’s transgressive aesthetics, his unwillingness to stifle his art to suite the classridden, heteronormative society at the time, spoke to Lawrence as a survivor of working-class Buffalo and the Catholic Church which had a stranglehold over everything in his life. At times he suffered the consequences of his rebellion.

Lawrence created art with his camera that functioned as more than just a lens and film. It was perhaps with only one good eye he possessed a unique perspective in his work, much as it did in his day-to-day life. Realizing what you see is not always what you get, he began creating unique imagery focusing through glass jars and vases to manipulate what a lens could see. Then he began to rework his actual film by rephotographing the negative or positive film and hand processing the film to create spectacular images. His palette was his own creation as was his subject matter. In the cinematic context of this hand-crafted film with contemporary music, vintage gay porn and found old family films filled out this exploration into the elements for this film. Those elements being suffering, survival, contemplation, sex, masculinity, the spectrum of sexuality, and self-liberation.

Radical Faeries are all over this film.

Fannie Mae Be Free (aka Ken Cooper) opened the film with his personal story of public sex in a Greenwich Village theater.

Important to note, Lawrence is credited as having made the first independent film about the AIDS crisis. Titled An Individual Desires Solution, standing in for AIDS. It was about his lover at the time, a pianist from England, and his struggles and failures to get healthcare for AIDS in this country. He eventually left for home and passed away.

Aleksandra (Mark Miller) took on multiple roles. He enacted being tortured in prison, caged and abused. He also enacted a naked gay male witch engaged in ritual, performing with a mask at times, a repeated theme in Wilde’s work.

Agnes de Garron performed brilliantly as the cross-dressing sex worker on the Promenade overlooking lower Manhattan. He also brought his

Lawrence Brose filming for De Profundis at Short Mountain Sanctuary by Keith Gemerek.

signature dance performance to the camera. And he engaged in intergenerational sex play with a much younger man (Leon Ko). But his most riveting performance was as the Repressed Everyman (as I interpreted his character) in hat and trench coat walking through the urban wasteland. Lawrence calls him his William Burroughs character.

Agnes was also a spoken word artist, reading Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms that were written before his incarceration. Composer Douglas Cohen took Agnes’ recordings and treated them like lines of music, reworking the aphorisms, layering and echoing the visual kaleidoscope of the hand worked imagery on film.

Keisha Lorraine (aka Fussy lo Mein, or Keith Gemerek) provided his Gowanus loft as the studio space and managed the studio lighting for filming. Keith (the writer of this piece) has known Lawrence Brose since they met as twelveyear-old boys in South Buffalo and have been close comrades throughout their life.

Central to the film is an audio recording of Frederick Rzewski, one of America’s most important pianistcomposers, performing with piano and voice using Wilde’s De Profundis as the text. It became another layer upon which Brose could place his footage. East Coast Faeries will recognize the Beltane Maypole ritual at Short Mountain Sanctuary, and Faeries chiseling rocks to memorialize their dearly departed loved ones.

This film works to subvert any simple romantic resolution of torture and isolation. Wilde’s prison poem was bitter, but it developed into a revelation that self-liberation was possible. The layering of visuals of Fadical Faeries at play or in ritual, illustrate a gay culture steeped in self-liberation that is a subversive alternative to mainstream normalizing queer culture. With De Profundis Brose does not provide solutions; he sets up the existential conflict of a life outside of the dominant culture by questioning normative frameworks of masculinity and gender expression. Wilde could never imagine this discussion or Radical Faeries for that matter.

major museums and film festivals all over the world to great acclaim.

As a footnote, in 2006 Lawrence was singled out by the Department of Homeland Security, looking for a person allegedly downloading kiddy porn from the Internet. When he was arrested, the FBI agents expressed that they had no certainty who was downloading the obscene images but Lawrence being a gay artist they were “pretty sure” they had their guy. Subsequently, no illicit images were found on his computer, but the Feds needed to cover their ass and forced him to take a plea deal, or they would come back with many more charges, because they knew what he has on his computer. This film is what they were referring to. After six years of fighting for his innocence and many thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees, Lawrence was forced to accept a felony charge for “one obscene” image in his computer, a legal fiction that was never presented as evidence to dispute. He lost his job and his reputation and suffered through two years of probation at the cruel whims of a Christian probation officer who was convinced that Lawrence was a pedophile and treated him accordingly. But his community stood by with support, and he was able to get his job back as Director of CEPA Gallery and continue as ground-breaking curator and champion of the independent artist. Lawrence returned to making art. Lawrence is about to have a major exhibition of his film work inspired by his association with composer John Cage, at the esteemed Burchfield

Penny Art Center in Buffalo. This exhibition had been scheduled around the time of his arrest. It was pulled, but the extended arts community watched Lawrence through his legal woes and almost universally admired his dignified response to these false allegations and welcomed him back. Much could be written about how people supported him through the difficulties of a false accusation, including RFD magazine.

Lawrence is currently battling cancer and is hoping to see his show at the Burchfield in April.

De Profundis has been shown to audiences in

For more on Lawrence Brose and his film work go to www.lawrencebrose.com

Agnes at the Brooklyn Promenade in the film De Profundis, by Lawrence Brose.

Doing time with RFD

by Bambi Gauthier

In the autumn of 2008 folks from the RFD Board contacted a number of folks from Faerie Camp Destiny, a Radical Faerie sanctuary in Southern Vermont, to see if there was interest in taking over RFD from Short Mt. in Tennessee. The Destiny community itself was busy with its own projects and so wasn’t interested in taking on RFD as a side project. But several members felt strongly that RFD should carry on, so they stayed in touch and after tele-conferences a small group of us decided to work on moving RFD to New England.

I have to thank Mountaine Jonas, a RFD Board member at the time, for his enthusiasm in helping us pick up the pieces and make the shift. We also had a lot of support from Sister Soami aka Sister Mish as we looked at next steps.

Michael DuBois and I flew down to Nashville and were picked up by Sister Mish. We picked up a U-Haul truck to cart all of the RFD back issues with us back to New England. We settled in to Kokoe’s apartment & began our days of packing the U-Haul which Michel deftly got down the Mountain’s notorious driveway to the Bee Complex where we hauled boxes of RFD magazines out of the attic space. It was an adventure as each box could be filled with either mud daubers, dead lady bugs, brown recluse spiders or the box was grown through with vines that had crept into the wall of the Bee Complex.

passed along the database of RFD’s subscribers.

We had supper at SMS that evening and caught up with some old time familiar faces before returning to our borrowed apartment for the evening. The next morning, we took more winding roads to visit Tom Foolery in his house before heading to Keith and Sylvain’s place where there was a small tiny house office for RFD in the front yard.

From there we traveled over bouncy country roads to Gabby Haze’s house and got more boxes of RFD from a specially built shed porch, boxes of financial records and had a nice lunch with Gabby, who was our acting treasurer. He also went over our various bookstore accounts and

Sister Mish greeted us like a hobbit from the Shire as he opened the small door to the space which was crammed with more boxes of RFD, filing cabinets, boxes of the two books RFD produced by poets, Franklin Abbott and Winthrop Smith, more ladybugs! He also gave us boxes of computer files—old 3.5inch floppy disks, Zip drives, and portable hard drives filled with old files of prior RFD layouts. It was a bittersweet day, our last day of boxing up the U-Haul and clearing the office of most of its possessions. All the trappings to make RFD happen. Hand stamps, renewal cards, brochures, etc.

Yet it was also clear a lineage was being passed on—Sister Mish sat showing us old indexes to RFD, printing information from Running Water days, old surveys that RFD did over the years. It was obvious we needed to hit the road to make progress to head north but we kept finding ourselves pouring over the old files, looking at old photos. Tucked up on a shelf was an old Tennessee license plate that read “RFD HQ”. I gently took it down and put it into one of the boxes. Sister was obviously sad that I was claiming it, but the legacy was shifting.

So much like the times before when RFD could often travel across the country in a few boxes, to

Top: Bambi and Mish at the Tennessee RFD office. Bottom: Michel DuBois and Bambi packing up RFD for the trip to New England. Photographs courtesy Michel DuBois.

it’s time of relative calm at Wolf Creek, Oregon to it’s move cross country the South as traveling show guided by Faygele ben Miriam, to Running Water in North Carolina, into the steadfast hands of Ron Lambe who care took RFD along with editing it until it’s move to Tennessee where it held a long sojourn before it’s flight up north, Sister Mish and the many hands who shepherded it from it’s early beginnings until now, have much to celebrate.

My fifteen year journey stewarding RFD in New England, cluttering up my living room and part of my kitchen with the “RFD office” along with a large storage unit off the interstate has been an interesting ride for me. I was forty when RFD came north and now I am fifty-six. I used to be very involved in

the Destiny community but have become emeritus except for attending gatherings. So this side project has become a primary focus as I work with a small crew of folks who make RFD materialize four times a year.

I feel like many prior editors celebrating milestones that I have people to appreciate and thank for their help in making RFD’s journey in my hands

easier. Being part of a cooperative and collaborative small group has been a dream in terms of working collectively to find solutions and making things happen.

Folks who directly helped me along this journey worth remembrance and praise: Michel DuBois who help cart RFD north, help set up our new bank account, set up our database and helped me navigate spreadsheets even from his perch in Mexico City. Franklin Abbott often helped me seeing literary legacies of RFD and we’ve often talked about the archive of RFD materials currently owned by Emory University. He was ever generous with his time whenever I emailed him asking him to interview an author or poet for RFD’s pages. Someday, when fate allows I’ll make it down to Atlanta to visit the archives and make my pilgrimage to see Franklin. Franklin was once RFD’s poetry editor and his fellow poetry emeriti, Steven Riel has also been a sweet force in my time as RFD’s editor, mostly recently with his donation of a number of RFD back issues and other gay literary magazines.

Jason Schneider, a former Board member, helped early on in helping edit and proof RFD along with Eric Linton (Waterfall). Several folks helped with counting the back issues, shaking out the ladybugs, mud dauber dirt and the occasional alive recluse spider as we tried to tackle how many magazines came north with us, it was close to seventeen thousand individual magazines. Those folks from memory were Chris Moes, Greg Hyde, Michel DuBois, my partner at time, Rob Goodale, and countless other folks who helped shift boxes. I remember fondly, a local friend, Danny Flynn came over and shifted the entire contents of the storage unit to the other side of the storage building to a larger space. I was pretty much audience. We ate heartily that evening.

I want to honor spiritual guides along my road

with RFD. First off, Mark Thompson in far off California was a guiding hand who often supported RFD with his eye towards it’s “future”. He helped RFD along with White Crane to get the Monette-Horwitz Prize in 2010. That small bit of money helped us digitize RFD. I had the pleasure of being on panel with Mark at the Harry Hay Conference in NYC. Meanwhile, another angel is Bo Young, from White Crane and a former food and poetry editor at RFD. He often helped me in the transition from the South to New England. White Crane was also generous with a donation which has helped RFD sustain itself. Happy memories of my stops off to see Bo in Granville NY with my boyfriend Rob. Along a trip there I found a beautiful Solomon Simeon print in a jumble shop in Glens Falls.

In terms of producing RFD, obviously many hands over time helped guest edit RFD but the primary person I’ve worked with for these fifteen years is Matt Bucy. I journey the hundred miles four times a year, driving up the Connecticut River Valley along I-91 to White River Junction, Vermont where we ensconce ourselves in Matt’s office in the Tip Top Building on Main Street until the magazine is done. We also usually work on other RFD business—the website, fixing the database, coordinating the digitization of the RFD back issues, setting up an online presence of each magazine, and planning for the future. Thankfully, being a foodie, we make time to eat in the Upper Valley, chiefly at Gusanoz Mexican restaurant where we sip margaritas and nosh on chips and salsa. But we’ve found ourselves over time eating in most of the eateries around. Then settling in to watch cinema at Matt Bucy's home, "The Mill," after a long evening.

To say that it’s been easy to caretake RFD is in some ways reflective of what working collectively looks like, some major easy climbs and at times hard slogs. Sadly, the COVID pandemic took a toll on all our ability to come together as easily. Unforuantely frailty seems to have made itself known to me—I’ve always been a petit flower as Judy Tenuta used to say in her comedy act. For that last three years I’ve been dealing with neck pain and it’s slowed me down as I often get migraine from the pain. I’ve had to re-do how I do RFD, printing out each submission and hand correcting it in red pen. Thankfully, I have supportive people who take into consideration my new ability levels. So I feel confident to continue.

I also want to specifically thank current RFD Board member, Rosie Delicious (Paul Wirhun) for his time, seemingly mostly making time for my

bitchy phone calls but also his wonderful work helping promote RFD at the Rainbow Book Fair each year as well as helping shape and keep the vision of RFD alive. Many an RFD theme comes out of us having a gabfest. I also wanted to thank Kwai Lam for his help on the Board over the years from the

move to New England to his help with the storage unit on his rare visits to the Northeast. I couldn’t close out my praise for folks without thanking Rosette Royal (Timothy Burton) for his precise, witty and calm advice during our quarterly Board meetings. My only regret being on the Board with him is that we’re not able to share a table, a meal together since a continent divides us. My dreams for a RFD Board retreat linger as a result.

Bambi,

RFD Team Muses On Producing This Zine!

Interview with Bambi Gauthier and Matt Bucy, by Rosie Delicious.

Recently, I had an interview with the principals of this magazine, Bambi Gauthier (managing editor) and Matt Bucy (art director), about their experiences producing RFD. As you may know, RFD has had a history of being housed in several different communities and places, and now it’s within what we call the New England collective. Before that, it had been at Short Mountain, with the Running Water collective. Earlier, it had been produced out of Wolf Creek, while it had originated in Iowa.

My first question is, what was the impetus for you taking on these roles in the context of your experience with the magazine at the time that you did it? What caused you to step forward to take on these roles at that time in the magazine's history?

Bambi: Well, I was approached by Montaine, who was on the RFD Board at the time, asking for help as he saw a lot of energy coming from the New England Faerie community. Montaine was curious if Faerie Camp Destiny would be interested in taking on RFD’s production, similar to how Short Mountain and Running Water had done. Jason Schneider and Michel DuBois were the main people I asked. We brought it to them at a meeting, and they didn't want the magazine. They were too busy with building things, so we were in a position of, well, do we just do it, or do we hand it back and say, no, thank you? And me, being kind of a very queer archivist-type person, didn’t want the magazine to just fade away. I thought, well, at the least, we can foster it until brighter horizons appear.

Rosie: And Matt, would you like to...?

Matt: I don't remember much about the beginning at all. I just remember Bambi cornering me because I was in charge of the building at Destiny. So it was like, another task, okay, great. And then I remember a few people being concerned that I was not going to finish the building or something. But I knew that doing RFD wasn’t going to take nearly as much time as the construction.

Rosie: Has that held true?

Matt: Yeah, the building got finished. And so, you know, my only connection to the Faerie community

now is RFD.

Rosie: I want to bring out one comment you just made, Bambi: “about not wanting to see the magazine fade away as part of the impetus.” What is the value of the magazine as you see it, such that you would commit such time and effort to continue? Because it's a big personal commitment for any of us who are involved with it, and both of you are, you know, the principals that really carry this thing forward in a way. What is it about this magazine that causes us to give this commitment?

Bambi: I think the thing that always struck me, even though it was always a small magazine (it wasn't a big, huge national thing in terms of circulation), is that it had a purpose in giving voices to people who weren't being heard at all. That was always something that struck me while reading RFD. I happened to be down at the Mountain and got a number of back issues for the Faerie Camp Destiny archive, and I had a chance to really look through the ones that I was given. I was just struck by the continuity of voices that you wouldn’t necessarily hear—rural folks, people who are into alternative living, who are exploring their gay spirituality, and who are at the fringe of the gay mainstream. So what always struck me about the magazine is the way it gives a voice to people who wouldn’t necessarily be heard and tries to do it without editorializing. With few exceptions, the magazine doesn’t tend to say, “Oh, dude! That was a bummer. Don't write that anymore.” It may be reflected in what we don’t publish, but with few exceptions, I generally look at it just in terms of, is this interesting? Is this person’s voice fitting our theme? If it fits our theme, then we use it. And I just thought that was a really elemental thing in an age when everything is so ephemeral. We have our blogs and Facebook, and whatever other media we're on, but it vanishes. And so, our stories kind of vanish with that in a very ephemeral way. And some of that’s fine—that’s what life is.

But then, the other aspect of it is that certain things have a continuity of story. One thing with putting together this anniversary issue of the magazine that really struck me is there's a kind of lineage of who touched your hand, who introduced you to whom, and all these overlapping things across the whole

country, and spreading to other places, other countries. That is the impact of the magazine, and just that word of mouth, that “I saw this article,” or “I spoke to this person,” influences where people go, how they live their lives, and, in some ways, touches them to respond to something. And that always struck me. You don’t get that reading other gay magazines. They might be interesting, but they’re not doing that.

Rosie: Matt, do you want to weigh in?

Matt: I guess for me it's multifaceted—it’s just fun working with Bambi on the magazine. I like doing graphic arts as I’ve studied typography and graphic design my whole life. This is an opportunity to play around with that in the community that I was participating in, and so, from just a purely fun point of view, I enjoy our layout sessions. It’s a lot of banter, and we’re very silly about it all, and it tends to go quickly. We have a celebratory margarita afterward, so there’s a sort of ritual. It’s the only Faerie ritual I still do: layout for RFD.

Rosie: Interesting way to talk about it.

Matt: But it does feel like a ritual, as it has this whole cycle to it. Bambi and I start to talk about the new issue, and then he comes up to White River Junction, where we do the layout. Most of the time, it’s usually a two or three-day process, and we never know what the magazine’s going to look like. It’s always kind of fun to watch it unfold. And it feels like a way I can contribute to the community. And, like Bambi said, it’s sort of like the fringe of the fringe, which is always interesting. As I’m laying out the text, I’m reading the articles for the first time, and I watch the magazine blossom in front of me. It’s a little bit like dj-ing Faerie culture because we’re moving the articles around, trying to get the mix right, the flow, matching images with articles, so that whole process for me is really fun. The reason I commit to it is really just because I enjoy doing it. There’s not much more to it than that. And I feel like I’m making a contribution to keeping the whole thing rolling. I agree, given all this virtual news and publication going on, I find it really fun to just do something on paper.

Rosie: When was it again that you took on the magazine?

Bambi: We moved the magazine from Tennessee to New England in 2008. We worked on our first issue in Spring 2009.

Rosie: What have you seen along the way—any changes within the community that you’ve witnessed in the magazine since you’ve been putting it together, or what changes in general have you witnessed in this process, in terms of maybe the content or themes, or participation?

Bambi: We were very ecumenical in who was in the community and who we wanted to reflect. I’ve been usually pretty vigilant about not always saying Radical Faerie or not saying just gay. I'll say queer; I'll say LGBTQ—I make a point of not, and also trying to reduce the gendering of the contributors. That’s been really refreshing from my perspective. It started off as a magazine for country gay men, and some people drifted away from the magazine when it kind of fell into the Faerie perspectives and the gay spirituality perspectives. One thing that’s interesting is that some of those old-time readers have found us and have become re-engaged because it is more diffuse. It’s not just Radical Faerie-focused; it’s not just gay spirituality-focused. We try to come up with something variable, and so it’s been really refreshing to be part of that.

Bambi: And the other thing that always amuses me is that many contributors in RFD often use pseudonyms for their bylines, and so you don’t really know who they are. I know who they are because I have to send them their magazine, but nobody else knows who they are. So I’m always fascinated by conversations I overhear. “Oh, RFD, such a boy’s club!” And I laugh because I know these power dykes just wrote the poetry here, but because it wasn’t gendered, you didn’t catch it. So you (the reader) gendered the story or the poetry. You forced the paradigm on yourself. And it’s always fascinating to me to see that and be part of that, and also similarly regarding people from other countries, people who are not necessarily Caucasian. That’s the other thing—there are these assumptions about who gets to be in print. People’s assumptions are that it’s white and male. I’m just so fascinated by the people we attract to the magazine, who, in some cases, have nothing to do with anything other than seeing us on Instagram or Facebook. I just love that. And I wish we had a bigger PR team to promote those things, to extend those tendrils because then some of those people end up being long-time contributors.

Rosie: What I would also ask is, what direct change has happened regarding the formatting of the magazine?

Matt: RFD used to be a black-and-white magazine. It started out as 7 x 10 inches, then became 8.5 x 11 inches and some other odd sizes now and then. I’ve always found letter sized magazines to be awkward; then we found out we could get 7 by 10 inch paper, and we also found out that it really wasn’t much more expensive to print in color versus black and white. Most of the submissions we received—photographs, art, etc.—were in color, and we lost a lot going to black and white. So we decided to make the jump to color and a 7 by 10 inch format. We got a lot of feedback that people liked the different size. It sat on the toilet better. One of the problems with the 8.5 x 11 inch format was that often the articles were too small to fill up a page, or ended with a lot of space, so pages got cluttered with sidebars and things which were cute, but also distracting. Having looked back at some of the more chaotic issues of RFD, which were visually dramatic, it seemed to me that writers might be unhappy with the way their work was being treated because it was difficult to read. So we redesigned the layout to be more text-oriented, to honor the text, and to make the text legible and readable, rather than trying to make each page its own special piece of art. That was probably the biggest shift. We went with a more traditional layout, but I think it honors the word better than what was happening before. That may also be a reflection of the fact that we sometimes don’t get a lot of graphic material. I think the old magazines before were much more visually focused than they are today. We get photographs and drawings, but not nearly as many, I think, as there used to be, and that’s perhaps a reflection of the fact that you can now get porn online.

Rosie: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. I’m curious if you wanted to comment on how technologies and social media have affected what people are writing about and printing? The magazine’s now fifty years old, so it’s gone through a sea change in terms of the intention behind the magazine. And what kind of service does the magazine provide to the community that reads it? As you know, in the beginning, there used to be contact pages where people wanted to meet up for sex or friendship, and now that’s not part of the magazine at all.

Matt: Yeah, the social aspect of the magazine is completely gone. And even the advertising aspect of it has faded dramatically. There used to be a lot more people who wanted to connect their products or whatever they were selling to the community. That’s all easier done online now. So really, it’s forced us to become

just a purely gay subculture magazine. But I think staying in print was smart. At the time when we took it over, a lot of people were telling us to forget print, go online. Print’s going to be dead soon. But I’m glad we stuck with it because, personally, I just like reading the page a lot. I can focus on the page; you can read the whole issue. There’s a defined order—it’s not all random. What we do is choreograph each issue so that it has a flow to it, and that’s part of the experience, which you don’t get online at all. Online, you get something which is supposedly personalized to your taste. I think that’s what’s valuable in print—that you end up having to scan through things you might not read, and then you catch something that piques your interest, and you go back and read it.

Rosie: Especially when the magazine is kept by the toilet, which I have done a lot in my own life. I remember when I lived in Brooklyn, there used to be a stack of New Yorkers and RFDs by the toilet, and I would just pick up a random issue and turn to some article to read.

Matt: We actually published a picture of RFD on the back of toilet in one issue because when I visit people who have RFD, that’s usually where I find it. We should make a little special RFD toilet bookend.

Rosie: What I love about our culture is that we're laughing about it, but we’re laughing about it in a way that we’re not disparaging the magazine for being toilet reading. We’re actually honoring it in that role in a particular way.

Bambi: To me, it just shows that the magazine might be two years old, and it’s still around. Some people don’t throw them away at all.

Matt: It’s not very newsy—the topics. It’s something that you can go back and read ten years later, and it’s still interesting.

Bambi: So that’s what I find interesting—putting it in a place like a toilet or putting it on a coffee table so that at any point you can just pick it up. It has a certain audience that people want to see, and they don’t mind picking it up again. That’s the other interesting thing—I find that people don’t forget the little story they read, or the person who told some story. They’ll remember it! It’s been fascinating going through the submissions for this issue because there have been people writing about something that happened back in the early seventies. Whether it was this one contact

order or a story about rural farming, or whatever, what has amazed me is how one could remember that level of detail! For the reader, they’ll remember exactly what was on the cover, etc. I’ve been amazed.

Rosie: Well, that speaks to this conversation we’ve been having all along about why the magazine exists. What I’m hearing is the answer to that is that these are very personal stories that have an impact on the reader, as the format of the magazine is so personal. Some people have likened it to being like a written heart circle where people are pouring out their soul to those who are listening. And in this way, this is what the magazine does—provide a format and a reason why we still do it.

Bambi: Right, and the impetus was gay men were trying to write into Mother Earth News, but they wouldn’t run gay ads there. Then there was a conference that happened in Iowa, and people who came were all discussing this. It was totally a word-ofmouth conversation at a Gay and Lesbian conference in Iowa, helping them realize that they were not the only person who got their ad rejected. In response to the isolation that they were trying to combat, they started RFD.

What I find really fascinating, though, is that there were the contact letters—looking for a fellow farmer, boyfriend, husband—but also they were creating communities, even if it was on their own personal farms or in their own towns. They were trying to get more people to where they were living. A lot of the letters and a lot of the contact letters had that intent, and then they started writing stories about what life was like for them in this state, doing this work and trying to network. I find it fascinating because people read that and it influenced them on the other side of the country. They communicated with that person, and then they would meet over time. Some people even moved because of reading something in the magazine, and then they got in touch with these people and moved there. Or they took those ideas and started a community where they were, as that networking had a really strong impact. This activity bled into the Faeries and was consequential because some of these people were the same people. People who were doing the back-to-the-land gay movement stuff were also interested in having a spiritual life, and all those things kind of interwove together.

Rosie: Oh!

Bambi: Also, city folk wanted to make their own tempeh, to learn skills, to be in nature as well. It was also interesting to see how there was a reaction by some of the early readers—a kind of reurbanizing after their experience of being a bit of a fantasy. We went off into the woods and made a farm and made our place. Yet half the people who did that left those rural places and came back to New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, or Atlanta and realized, “I need a job. I can’t live here.” They took all those ideas and put them in place in those cities. And then, you see the creation of men’s movement work in those cities and the beginnings of urban Faerie circles in those cities. You see people reacting to political issues like anti-nuclear protests, the wars in Central America, etc. I think that’s the other thing that the magazine was critical for at the time—allowing people to do that kind of networking as well. So from the late seventies through the mid-eighties, there was a lot of not necessarily gay stuff being published in RFD—it was much in reaction to the Reagan-Bush time period. Anti-war, anti-nukes, anti-imperialism, which then tied in with the Brothers Behind Bars focus as people saw that a lot of people were incarcerated because of poverty and discrimination.

Rosie: I’m curious whether or not this whole phenomenology of RFD is particularly an American DIY moment throughout its whole existence. Is this something that’s a particular part of an American ethos, or was this phenomenon happening here only because of the rise in the number of queer folks, gays, and lesbians who were coming out in the sixties and seventies, and being empowered enough to do this kind of work with each other and to seek each other out?

Bambi: RFD was part of a whole movement. The gay press in the late sixties and early seventies was a burgeoning movement as people felt that our voices haven’t been written down. Our stories haven’t been told. We don’t see the things we want to see. And so there was a huge creation of media in response. What was interesting about RFD in relation to that was that it did not have a mainstream focus. It wasn’t uninterested in what happened in the cities, but it wasn’t focused on it, and it wasn’t focused on some of the typical stereotypical things that were in some of the gay press at the time. Like *After Dark* always had a ballet dancer on the cover and an interview with Barbra Streisand. Which is all great, but to RFD—we can’t eat Barbra Streisand. We need vegetables to survive. Subsistence was a big part of RFD's idea because they were aware of what isolation would do to starve

you emotionally and psychically. One of the interesting things is that most gay media is there to distract you and titillate you. RFD is often asking questions and sometimes exposing ugly things—what your life was like or what you had to do to get to where you are. And those things are jarring, but they’re everybody else’s story who’s picking up the magazine. So it’s not glossy and pretty, and in a strange way, without being openly political, in certain ways it was very radical in the most radical sense of politics by making it so personal—and yet so universal. What always strikes me when I see an art piece is that by not labeling it (as gay, trans, etc.), I’m able to give people more ability to see it from a human perspective. I think that’s the thing the magazine’s done fairly well throughout—it is asking people to speak from themselves, to tell their own truths, and to share where things work for them. DIY—that’s kind of been the thing all along.

And they were in great shape, you know? So just imagine. The only reason this isn't the 200th issue of the magazine, versus the 199th, is they missed just one magazine in fifty years.

That blows my mind. In all that time, someone always came in to fill the gap and put out the magazine. They had what little money was in a bank account and a mailing list, which was literally a paper list back then. I'm amazed by that. It wasn’t easy for us, even with digital formats. I mean, imagine they used to get a folder with typed mailing addresses, photos, and then reproduced the labels. That’s how they did it. Replace the sticker with another sticker and print it again, you know?

Rosie: Yeah. One of the things I’m realizing, as I listen to you, Bambi, is how RFD captures culture from the ground because it's all reader-contributed stories. Unlike other gay press that used to exist, a lot of which has died away, we’re surviving. It’s interesting because we’re not asking people to submit articles; they come from life experiences, reflecting what we ask for each issue. It’s not filtered through an editor’s pen. Our editing is light—mostly just grammatical corrections. That’s what makes the magazine powerful; it’s almost unfiltered truth.

Bambi: Right.

Matt: We've had requests from academics who say RFD is years ahead of the mainstream because of that approach. We capture the on-the-ground sensibility because we aren't over-editing.

Rosie: Why has RFD survived while other gay press hasn’t? In the digital age of print media, it’s because of our business model—an all-volunteer phenomenon. Our expenses are basically printing and mailing costs. Do you want to speak to our survivability?

Matt: A big factor is that a lot of our readers donate money to the magazine, which keeps it afloat. Our subscription fees cover just the printing and mailing costs; everything else is covered by donations. Also, technology has changed. It's a lot less work to put out the magazine now. I don’t know if we’d still be going if it was as difficult as thirty years ago, but because of layout software and digital printing, we can focus just on putting the magazine together.

Bambi: Yeah. That’s reflected in the early issues, which were all done by hand.

Matt: It used to take a month or so just to do one issue. That was a huge commitment compared to now.

Bambi: There was calligraphy, drawings to fill gaps in the text...

Matt: I love the handmade look of those early issues. I wish we could get some of that back.

Bambi: What struck me was how they took it to a press to be lithographically reproduced.

Matt: It was hard to find people to do that kind of printing. You know, gay material—shops wouldn’t print it.

Bambi: Right? The early issues were often printed by a women’s press in Iowa. They didn’t care.

Rosie: That’s a bunch...

Bambi: But it was all cut and paste. Someone literally pasted the photograph onto the boards to produce that set of pages. Now, none of that’s done. It’s fascinating because the magazine used to loop around with sections out of order because they realized they had more letters to lay in. Now, digitally, everything stays in one section.

Rosie: Right.

Bambi: In the eighties, there was a big zine phenomenon in the gay and punk movements, which influ-

enced our layout. But while it was creative, it wasn’t always readable. Some old-time readers appreciated that we made the magazine more readable. We love the zine approach, but we also want to honor the text. We don’t feel the need to add a picture to a poem unless the poet sends one.

Matt: Zines are usually one person’s point of view, but RFD is a collection of different viewpoints. It felt almost graphically violent to impose a single graphic idea onto all those different ideas.

Rosie: Looking into the future, how do you foresee RFD’s future?

Matt: That’s for the next editors to figure out. We have our routine, and I don’t see us transforming much. It’d be great to have new people come in and work on it, but I don’t know if they’re around. I have faith they are, because I see younger people getting involved in other cultural projects.

Bambi: I’d love to see more theme input. I often ask people if they want to guest-edit an issue, but few want to do that. We’ve standardized how we produce things, which would make it easy to involve others. When we first brought the magazine to New England, we had more proofreaders, and we ranked submissions based on multiple voices. I still do that, even though it’s often just me. It would be great to get additional voices in the mix.

Rosie: I’m curious about how we ended up going online and the response we got.

Bambi: A lot of people who didn’t think we existed anymore found us again. And new people found us through platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Seeing the back issues online has democratized the magazine in a way because it’s free—there’s no paywall. We didn’t have the staffing to deal with two subscription models, so we decided to just give the online content away. We felt the legacy of the magazine was never about money. People supported printing it, so we made it accessible online.

Matt: When we first put the new website up, we got a lot of subscriptions from people wanting RFD TV magazine, a conservative rural magazine. We could tell from the names that they probably didn’t want RFD, the gay magazine. So, I put a drawing of a naked guy with a big dick on the contact page, and that stopped the mistaken inquiries pretty quickly.

Rosie: But there was also an uptick in donations while people were reading free content online, right?

Matt: Yes. We only charge for print to cover production costs. Reading it online doesn’t cost us much, just a few hundred bucks a year, and donations cover that. I’d say half the people reading it are online. We put up the PDF of the issue so they can page through it like a printed version.

Rosie: The fact that people support the magazine even though they’re reading it online for free speaks to the experience of RFD being different from other gay media.

Bambi: We share an anniversary with Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian publication that also has a steady readership and tries to make their magazine affordable and accessible. We get a lot of back issue sales from people who read online and then want a physical copy.

Rosie: Interesting.

Bambi: In the last five years, because the content is online, the research and scholarship into the movement around RFD has expanded. We get a lot of people writing papers and using us as a resource for discussions on gay life in rural areas or other topics. It's fascinating because even though we’re a small magazine, people need us to tie things together with other sources. And we print poetry from many voices, not just looking for the top echelon, but for people’s voices.

Rosie: I’ve run out of questions, but is there anything else you’d like to add?

Bambi: I wanted to say that the collegiality between Matt and me is something I appreciate. Even those who submit work often send nice cards, showing they appreciate being in the magazine with others. There’s a kind of genealogy of queerness, a lineage, a connection that ties people together through this magazine. People meet partners, friends, and move to communes because of connections made through RFD. That’s something worth pointing out. Even when the magazine traveled all over, the people who produced it stayed in touch and cared about each other. It’s an aspect of listening and regarding others that makes it work.

Rosie: Beautifully spoken, both of you.

RFD as Therapy

By Robert D. Mathis-Friedman

For many who read, or contribute to, RFD, the publication serves as a method of exchange for those who belong to a special community; for others, it’s an opportunity to express art, thought, or vision in a safe spot that would, elsewhere, be invisible.

For me, it is medicine. Allow me to explain.

I am an anthropologist, with training in Folklore and Emancipatory Research (using one’s skill-set as an ethnographer to engage in Social Justice-related work); my specialty is on the social and political intersections between the Queer and Neopagan Communities. I quickly learned that my take on the subject was unique, and that there were those both within the respective communities and among my peers in Academia who showed great interest in what I was doing. I was working on a dissertation and, later, a book, on this subject.

Bear in mind that I also counted myself as a member of all three groups, as a Gay anthropologist who identifies as a Pantheist.

Cut to December of 2013: I had just submitted a partial draft to my publisher for an opinion, when I had undergone something quite unexpected.

Marfan Syndrome is a congenital condition wherein small, pinprick-sized tears, like microsized distressed marks in denim, exist with sections of one’s heart (usually, as in my case, the aorta) but the condition had gone undiagnosed. Usually, the microtears open, causing a heart attack or stroke, by one’s forties. Fortunately, my lifestyle choices, according to my cardiologist, strengthened my heart to the degree that the nearinevitable was postponed for over a decade (forty for me was 2001). Unfortunately, the near-inevitable became inevitable while I was waiting for a response from said publisher.

When the stroke hit, I found myself on the floor, my left limbs suddenly useless, for several hours. Finally, a neighbor came to my apartment door, and, yelling from the other side, I convinced him to call an ambulance. After extensive surgery and subsequent hospitalization for four months, I found myself damaged, mentally, and physically; the left side of my body partially immobilized, my window of opportunity for completing my book gone, and recovery still years away, if ever.

I struggled with uncertainty over the stroke’s effects on my cognitive skill and emotional strength, battled forms of depression the depths of which only now, as of this writing, I’m willing to admit to much less come to grips with. It all collided with the simple fact that, as an ethnographer, I’ve spent my life training to deal with the nowincreasing injustices of this country, this world, in a manner that my current condition renders all but impossible. My skill-set (specifically designed for in-person interaction, not online activity) has become obsolete.

On top of that, I’ve had to deal with the increasing number of deaths of people that I’ve known and cared about, two of them just this year. In my sixty-plus years of existence, I had never felt more helpless. For a decade, I spent most nights crying, and most days struggling not to.

Some people close to me began to encourage me to work on a piece that I’d been toying with... a section of my dissertation that could be excised from the main body... as a method of trying to find my voice and test my abilities. I chose a section called How To Build Your Own Gay God. One of them suggested that I find the proper venue for it. I took a look at RFD Magazine, and as luck/Fate/ the gods would have it, the upcoming issue at the time was based on the theme, Do It Yourself.

Now, there’s some freaking serendipity if I ever experienced it.

I finally saw the article in its published form, with the editor’s brilliant imagery curated throughout. Beautiful, in so many ways.

The article was an exercise that helped bring my sense of self back in focus. I had a lot of help with it, and I’m grateful to them for it, and also for giving me the push to set aside my spiral long enough to do it in the first place. Most importantly, I’m grateful that RFD exists as a venue to express something that I not only feel to be important for the Community, but as a means of therapy for my ongoing recovery. In fact, so is the article that you’re reading, right now.

Thank you.

Fifty Years!

by Gordon Binder

For several years now, I’ve contributed to RFD some of my drawings and paintings along with a statement pegged to the upcoming theme. And they’ve made it in, including the cover of the Queer Icon edition! For this I am incredibly grateful.

In my drawings and paintings I’ve been capturing gay men out and about in bars, parks, on the street, and more, especially in Washington DC’s Dupont Circle neighborhood, where my husband and I have lived for more than fifty years.

Sharing these images with RFD means a lot to me as they help to record our ongoing presence and

our joy in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, even while the backlash in places around the country, indeed the world, raises red flags. More power to RFD for presenting the upside, the progress, the challenges in queer life, as well as sharing intimate stories we can appreciate and learn from.

Here’s to at least another fifty years! I confess, I probably won’t be around to celebrate the 100th but here’s to it!

Keeping with my usual practice, I’ve attached an artwork, a self-portrait that appeared in an earlier edition as a reminder of how much I value RFD.

Richard Vyse

Hello Bambi and Team. Congratulations for fifty years of giving a safe place to the LGBT community of writers and artist that challenge a society that still sensors and marginalizes. It is amazing how you manage to come up with a different themes for each issue. Kudos to your graphic team that create a great look for RFD! Thank you so much featuring my art in recent years. I feel so honored to be part of your wonderful publication.

Top: Richard Vyse at work, photograph by Lee Bivins (also the cover of RFD #176). Bottom: Covers of RFD over the years by Richard Vyse.

Printed Pages, Time, and Ages

by That Boy From Kentucky

RFD is older than me in more than one sense. Five years older than my first earthly breath. Twenty-four more than my first taste of penis. RFD was circulating through the queer community thirty-two years before I admitted to anyone that I was gay outside the few men I’d slept with. Forty-two before I knew the journal existed.

Still, it was out there, this publication aiming to speak directly for and from its community. Pages full of color, form, and naked bodies alongside poems and pointed prose refusing to flinch at the thought of it.

I spent most of my youth equally frightened and fascinated by queer, as much as I wasn’t yet ready to embrace it as part of me. Devouring every bit of every book or page I could find in my hometown Midwestern libraries. Tiny pictures from Tom of Finland (the cleaner ones) tucked away in the back of history books in small sections on gay art and literature. A military son’s autobiography with photos of him and his lover playing on the beach in the center of it. A medical text on human sexuality that explained, more directly than I’d ever seen, that when two men are fully engaged in the act, there is rarely any other form of sex more intense or satisfying. (I wondered why it wasn’t, then, widely accepted).

When Barnes and Noble opened in my hometown, I’d stroll down the massive wall of magazines eyeing the men’s interest section for anything interesting, though rarely gathering enough nerve to pull one out and look past the cover. Once, though, I found The Joy of Gay Sex on a shelf upstairs when no one was watching. Snuck it off to a quiet corner to devour its elaborately drawn illustrations in as much privacy as I could muster.

Yet, somehow, RFD eluded me. Missing from an education I pieced together from bits and scraps floating in a sea of hetero-normal media. Barnes and Noble wasn’t part of its distribution. It didn’t pop out and grab my eye from racks of glossy pages. But maybe I wasn’t ready for it, then. Having failed to pass some threshold of queer understanding and self-acceptance. Though RFD is something meant for openness and visibility, I don’t know that I could have appreciated it, fully, until much more recently. Some things we find when we need them, perhaps. The older, wiser, RFD quietly chronicling queer history while I slowly started to accept that,

maybe, that history was also part of my story. I graduated from physical library scrounging to internet searches, eventually. Looking up the logistics of sex between men, printing off pictures for later perusing, talking up new friends in specific chat rooms. And after some years of fumbling through life, generally, I stumbled upon RFD in a call for submissions.

I can’t say I immediately picked up pen and paper. This was asking me to contribute, to officially voice some thought or opinion. Was I ready for that? I’d come out by then, to most people close to me. Loved. Lost. Loved again. But how much did I know about a larger scheme, living mostly quietly in the middle of Kentucky? In most ways, I was still fumbling. Would they care what I said? These people who seemed wiser, more cultured, more tapped into some essential essence of queer?

But then I looked deeper. I stayed, I read more. RFD felt different than so many other things I’d seen. Celebratory more than anything. Strange, sometimes mythic. Stories that hit from places outside of urban queer centers. People beyond celebrity circles who seemed wonderfully everyday. Like I was. Like I am. Yet, also, simultaneously extraordinary.

Yes, RFD is older than me, as is the history that embodies all queer in its many diversities. A history we all come to, if we’re lucky enough to accept ourselves within it. Something we can only do because of those who came before, chronicling life as they went with pen and camera, in prose and images, in every place that we exist, including fifty years of RFD in print. Reflecting us. Connecting us. When we’re ready. When our time comes.

The first time I saw it in palpable form, out in public, sitting on a rack in the front room of a crowded Seattle bookstore, amidst all the other magazine editions, like it belonged there, like it was one just as worthy and important if not more so, I paused but did not hesitate. I pulled it out and quickly shifted through every one of its crisp pages. Issue Number 170, Summer 2017. In it--a poem. One that I wrote. And suddenly, it was real. It was right there in front of me. I was definitively part of our queer history. Even if I came to it a little bit late. Even if it was just one solitary page.

RFD Took My Cherry

by Johnny Townsend

Do you remember your first time having sex? Of course you do. Even after sex with 400+ men, even after working as an escort, even after nearly two decades with my husband, I still remember my first time, at the age of twenty-five.

I also remember my first fiction publication. RFD published my first two short stories in the Summer 1991 issue (#66). I’d already earned an MFA in fiction writing by then but was still a publishing virgin. RFD took my virginity—twice—in one day and left me wanting more.

One of those stories, “P-Day Man,” recounted the first sexual experience of a gay Mormon missionary in Italy. With the confidence good publication (or good sex) can give a guy, I kept writing, with more stories appearing in RFD, Christopher Street, Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly, Queer Fish, and even in Mormon journals such as Sunstone and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

I’ve published essays in Newsday, Army Times, Bay Area Reporter, Orlando Sentinel, and the Seattle Times, with multiple op-eds in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Several of my books were named to Best of the Year lists with Kirkus Reviews. I’ve won the Rainbow Awards for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction.

trum. It’s wonderful to be part of that legacy and to know the work RFD does isn’t only legacy, that it’s still ongoing.

My grandparents worked a dairy farm, and I spent many happy holidays and summers there. Recently, after I needed to usher a rowdy crowd out of the lobby at my workplace, a coworker asked with a tone of incredulous wonder, “How did you learn to do that?”

“I used to herd cows,” I told him.

I love nature and sometimes collect acorns, pecans, and other seeds to grow trees in pots, donating them to folks reforesting their land.

Still connected to my country roots, I taught myself to make patchwork quilts, but as a gay, sexpositive man, I also made my quilts into celebrations of gay life—rainbow flags, leather pride flags, grooms on a wedding cake, men sucking and fucking, and more. RFD celebrated that, too, with another publication (“Not Your Grandma’s Quilt”).

Blah, blah, blah. No one really gives a damn about any of that. And while those details may be personally gratifying, I consider my publication with RFD one of the most important of my career, and not only because it was first. RFD has also stood the test of time, while more “prominent” publications like Christopher Street faded away.

RFD has always supported the marginalized of the gay community, rural folks, men in prison, guys were didn’t fit the “traditional” concepts of masculinity or male beauty. Of course, it also celebrates mainstream beauty, too. I loved every nude image in issue #66! There’s no shame for being anywhere on the spec-

While the far right has made life in the country more precarious for us, I love that RFD still promotes rural life for gay men as a viable option. Too many are afraid to venture outside city limits.

After I read the latest issue I receive every few months in the mail, I then pack it with other materials and donate it to LGBTQ archives in other countries so folks there will have access to this content as well.

The attacks against the LGBTQ community are real and for now, unfortunately, growing. Our active, unhidden presence is a form of resistance as well as of celebration. Keeping RFD strong requires support, in the form of submissions, volunteer hours, participation at events and, naturally, finances. We aren’t always able to contribute in every one of these ways, but let’s do what we can so that the work of RFD can continue for at least another fifty years.

The end of "P-Day Man" in RFD #66, by the author.

Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, edited

by Philip Clark & Michael Bronski.

Reviewed by Steven Riel

When I moved to the Boston area as a twentythree-year-old aspiring gay poet, I immediately contacted Walta Borawski, who lived in Cambridge. Earlier, during my college years, when I’d sought out poems with gay content, I’d discovered Walta’s poems in Mouth of the Dragon and consequently wanted to meet him. I started working at Harvard University, where he also had a job, so after our initial meet-up, we occasionally arranged to take lunch hours together or bumped into each other on campus. Eventually, I reviewed his first book, Sexually Dangerous Poet, for Gay Community News, and his second book, Lingering in a Silk Shirt, for Bay Windows. Walta died of complications from AIDS in 1994.

Decades later, the writer, editor, and researcher, Philip Clark, and Walta’s lover, Michael Bronski (an influential author, journalist, and academic) have brought out a volume of Borawski’s collected poems. In addition to all the poems found in his two books, it contains twenty-five uncollected poems plus Walta’s last poem, which was written despite his physical limitations just months before he died. (This volume inaugurates a new imprint of Rebel Satori Press that is “dedicated to preserving and promoting works of gay literature, with a focus on the AIDS crisis.”)

Walta’s poems are compelling and memorable enough to have continued to be braided into my consciousness. I frequently go back to my favorites, including “Role Model,” “My Mother Was a Seamstress,” “My Perfect Poetry Reading,” and “Priapus Past & Present,” to enjoy and contemplate them. With this new collection, we have an opportunity to step back and consider his oeuvre as a whole.

In retrospect, Walta’s poems—especially those in his first book—are profoundly aligned with the surge of liberation that coursed through American poetry during the second half of the 20th century. The explosion generated by the publication of Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl” in 1956 freed a whole generation to dare to tell a wider range of life’s truths in their poems. With preferences for open forms and free

verse confidently and eloquently endorsed by such award-winning and established figures as Denise Levertov1 (for whom Borawski worked for a time as personal secretary), younger poets like Walta could experiment exuberantly. In addition to the loosening of traditional standards regarding poetic forms, prohibitions regarding what content was deemed appropriate for poetry were also being breeched, with writers such as Ginsberg and Anne Sexton broaching topics like anal intercourse and abortion. New journals such as Manroot, Gay Sunshine, Fag Rag, RFD, and Mouth of the Dragon provided platforms to gay poets who dared to write openly about queer experience. Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, who wrote in what I call a “gay chat” style

or voice—with the two of them exponents of a witty and urbane version of it—paved the way for other directions a “gay chat” voice might take. For example, in his virtuosic masterpiece The Changing Light of Sandover, James Merrill took it in the direction of upper-crust refinement.

In contrast to Merrill, one of Walta’s unique contributions is that he pioneered taking gay chat in the opposite direction:

I do my act for them my college educated working-class paid-for mouth I get paid enormously for these displays of ego…

(“My Perfect Poetry Reading”)

This provides an excellent example of the sassiness and bounce of Borawski’s poems that express a working-class consciousness. I can’t help but to compare this “mouthiness” with the salty nosethumbing that Alta contributed to feminist poetry during this same period:

& we celebrate our love for one another & we stand tall in our second hand clothes & up yr ass with a silver dollar, savage welfare. we’ll get what you owe us we’ll get it all!

(“the day mrs. savage cut off my welfare we had a party”)2

Several of Borawski’s poems about Harvard University highlight the class issues he perceived in its culture, whether he was lusting after students (“their bodies show centuries of breeding, / like horses”) or hanging a personal photo in his office on campus:

My mother doesn’t do snapshots—there has to be a pose, stiff-smiled, as much a mask in 1939 as in 1990. Once my camera caught her squinting in the glare of the sun on the Great South Bay and she never forgave me. “How could you do that?” she demanded. “Tear up that awful picture.” Instead I bought a plastic frame, hung it on a nail on my Harvard office wall, so that anyone curious in academia could see

where I’m from.

(“There are no snapshots of my mother.—Max-

ine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior”)

Rather than hide where he hailed from, Walta advertised it.

Another characteristic and hugely signficant (and—at least for the young poet I was—instructive) feature of Borawski’s poems is the non-oppressive, pro-feminist way he expressed his identification with women. In “I am not Billie Holiday but I look good in my dress & my running shoes,” Walta links

Walta

porch,

this affinity not only to his vocation as a poet (“all these songs”) but to his very survival as a gay man:

I find it increasingly hard, not being Billie Holiday. No-voiced, I don’t know what to do with all these songs.

At other times I am Barbra Streisand. It is an integral part of my survival, why & how I am still here, being now & then, Barbra Streisand.

In “My Mother Was a Seamstress,” we witness a boy speaker escape from his parents’ arguments by imagining, among other things, he is a woman (in this case a socialite during the French Revolution):

If you draw me make me purple & red put me in a kaftan reclined on a bed Madame Recamier…

Assuming the identity of a beloved diva takes on an added dimension in his persona poem spoken in the voice of the pop singer Gogi Grant, because in Walta’s poem, Gogi (fictitiously) has AIDS, too. Hilarity mixed with sadness ensues as the poet seems to grapple with what will be lost with his own demise:

My husband said the other day, Well Gogi, I hope you don’t get this CMV retinitis, because I’d hate to see you lose your eyesight. There are so few, so few left who can distinguish 19 shades of chartreuse.

(“For Mitzel”)

I feel deep sadness wondering about the many fabulous perceptions (in addition to those about chartreuse) Walta would have shared with us in the poems he never had the opportunity to write.

I cannot fail to mention that one of Borawski’s most brilliant skills as a poet was his superb sense of dramatic timing. I find myself returning again and again to this passage in “Role Model,” in which the speaker fantasizes about being Elizabeth Taylor:

…I imagine

myself in violet dresses with violet contact lenses & the largest diamonds outside the

Tower of London, jewelry box to that other, lesser, Liz. I too would toss 39 carats

like a stereotypical cheerleader her steady’s

class ring: loosely, on a vulgar chain: tick

tock: expensive pendulum as I pass by, ogled: heavily insured. They would say I’m too fat.

I’d say: So what’s Twiggy’s last name?

The poet suggests a great deal via the line break between “tick” and “tock”: the swinging of substantial, attractive breasts and the suspense generated by seductive behavior. Likewise, the line break between “ogled” and “heavily insured” serves the poem, in that it creates a pause that implies cause

and effect: the speaker’s diamond (and, presumably, her person) needs to be heavily insured because it is so desired. In another example of dramatic timing, the end-stopped line that that concludes “I’m too fat” allows the full effect of the insult to sink into the reader’s consciousness while the speaker winds up to deliver a tart, drag-queen-like reply.

The previously uncollected poems in this volume enhance our understanding of Walta’s experiences, as well as our appreciation of his poetic gifts. Several of the poems describe with honesty and vulnerability awkward and odd moments that occur while cruising. In “Dead Languages,” the speaker uses academic diction to transform his disappointment (when a sex partner who is writing a dissertation on “long-dead tongues” doesn’t remember his name) into an assessment of that trick’s limitations:

He could muster only dusty words, a prospectus on the day, its

Michael Bronski and Walta Borawski, September 1987. Photograph by Robert Giard. Copyright Estate of Robert Giard.

matriculated absence of me.

In “Didn’t That Bother You,” another speaker out cruising in the middle of the night describes the (ironic) distain that another man participating in the very same scene has for him: …You do this often, you say: You’re into anonymous sex. You say these last words like I would say nuclear waste.

The decision of the editors to include Borawski’s final poem is a wise one. In the facsimile of Walta’s handwritten version of the poem, we come face to face with the dogged need of this writer who is also a PWA to express himself—in this particular poem, to communicate his longing for his lover Michael and his fear and loneliness during a nighttime winter storm. Borawski’s handwriting provides heartbreaking evidence of the physical difficulties he was experiencing: the letters are crabbed, and the lines are crooked. In some cases, Walta seems not to have been able to move his pen to an empty part of the sheet of paper but instead wrote over words he had already written. For me personally, since I’m familiar with the quirks of his handwriting because of letters he sent me when he was healthy, seeing this facsimile underscores my sadness about how this gifted man for whom writing was so central struggled to continue composing poems during the later stages of his illness.

I can’t help but wonder what sorts of poems Borawski would have created if he had lived longer. Walta and Michael Bronski were plugged into the LGBTQIA communities’ most politically and culturally aware circles, so I would expect that Borawski would have responded in his poetry in complex and interesting ways to changes in aesthetics and culture over the decades. But we only have the poems that Walta actually wrote, and this book now gathers them between two covers, helping to ensure that his oeuvre will be remembered and esteemed as some of the most vivid, forthright, and spunky gay poetry written in the last half of the 20th century.

1See her essay "On the Function of the Line" in her prose collection Light Up the Cave (New York: New Directions, 1981).

2Alta, i am not a practicing angel (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1975), p. 9.

On Seeing One's Self, Years Later, in an Inexpensive Restaurant

You study! You pass! You show them you can do it!

Your father talks like my father, so I change my seat at the Friendly Eatery I want to watch you. He

is wearing, your father, one of those jackets that says his name is Tony & has a map of Japan on the back. I suspect your mother's been keeping it clean & pressed since World War II. She

wears a worn grey sweater I can't see her skirt. Sometimes women of the educated classes dress like your mother to be comfortable. Sometimes men of the educated classes dress like your father for sportswatching or fishing trips. But they do not

wear these clothes for pregraduation dinners nor do they slap each other's tired fabric. Even so, you yourself, longhaired & high schooley in your tired, unfashionable clothes, do not look happy. You look out the window when there is silence at your table, just like other people. Your mother has long dark wavy hair, she shakes it & looks out too I wish I could see her face maybe she is my mother & maybe your father, bringing the pizza back to the counter to demand more oil is my father, though he never took us out even for pizza, & he served in Germany.

Don't study! Don't pass! Don't show them! I want to say, it will take you years before or maybe you will never again enjoy pizza with your folks if you do.

—Walta Borawski

Sequoia

By Don Shewey

Sequoia Thom Lundy has spent his eight decades on earth as an intrepid adventurer: a seeker of wisdom and experience, of spiritual satisfaction and sexual self-acceptance. His entertaining memoir Divining Desire chronicles his pilgrim’s progress from post-World War II Brooklyn to present-day Vancouver, from US Air Force pilot working hard to maintain a façade of butch realness to radical faerie building community around the pleasures of yoga, massage, and erotic playfulness. Along the way he was blessed to encounter a string of high-powered meditation teachers who nurtured his soul – Baba Muktananda (then head of the Siddha Yoga lineage), Ram Dass, Rudy Ballentine, Patricia Albere, Eckhart Tolle. He also formed strong bonds with kindred spirits on the Gay Soul journey who became colleagues and sometimes collaborators, including Harry Hay, James Broughton, and Joseph Kramer (founder of the Body Electric School). Meanwhile, his romantic nature led him to an abundance of lovers who educated and fed his heart.

The journey has never been especially smooth or linear. Sequoia writes honestly about the obstacles he’s had to navigate, internally and externally, as a gay man. Yet he has accumulated many tips and tools for creating a good life, and he shares them with a generosity and grace that radiates off the page.

itation practices. I spent a few years investigating Siddha Yoga, under the leadership of Muktananda’s successor Gurumayi, and the two of us also gravitated toward Buddhist teachings.

He invited me to attend a yoga retreat he conducted on beautiful rustic Gambier Island in British Columbia, and I got my first taste of his cozy home temple in Vancouver. We kept in touch, and years later when I returned to Vancouver for a high-dose psychedelic adventure, he kept me company afterwards, which was when I met his partner Ziji, a magical soul born on the same day as Sequoia forty-one years later. What began as an apprenticeship became a true collaboration, and eventually Ziji would take over the mantle of “Men in Touch.”

I met Sequoia in 1992 at the First International Gay Vision Conference in Toronto, where he was one of the featured presenters. He offered his workshop “Men in Touch,” exploring intimacy through yoga and breathwork, and we bonded while standing in a naked circle at some ceremonial event. We would continue to cross paths under similar circumstances – Sacred Intimate Training with the Body Electric School at Wildwood Retreat Center in California, for instance – and we discovered that we both had cultivated serious med-

For the last two years, Sequoia and I have assisted Steve Schwartzberg at the Body Electric School’s meditation-and-massage retreat “Touching the Heart of Stillness (or as I like to call it, “Touching the Tuchus of Stillness”) at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in New Mexico. It’s a venue we both love, having taught workshops there ourselves, though Sequoia has a much longer history; he and the late great massage teacher Doug Fraser facilitated many “Men in Touch” retreats there. Just before “Heart of Stillness” last year, Sequoia was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, for which the prognosis is never good. It was touch and go as to whether he’d make it to the retreat, but not only did he surf the rapids last year, he survived to return to Jemez Springs again this year.

As an instructor of touch, Sequoia prizes and models exquisite presence, balancing sensuality with heart-centered contact. His intimacy exercises incorporate soulful eye-gazing, the kind that could easily veer into corny, simplistic New Age platitudes. But he’s a genius at getting male-bodied people to cultivate tenderness and openness in a

quest for connection. Hanging out with him in New Mexico was an opportunity to witness decades of teaching being transmitted with grace and twinklyeyed humor.

The gravity of Sequoia’s health challenges in the last two years lit a fire under his desire to capture his life story in a memoir. We crossed paths again in Oaxaca this past February, where he worked furiously on the final stages of the book. Somewhat inspired by Ram Dass’s legendary first book Be Here Now, Sequoia envisioned a memoir strewn with graphics, illustrations, and photographs. If you’re inclined to buy a copy, I encourage you to pay the extra ten bucks for the hardcover edition. It’s a beautiful object. He’s also a big fan of hyperlinks to further reading and additional resources, but those are only available with the digital version of the book.

This summer Sequoia participated in the fifth annual Ignite Festival in Vancouver, which Ziji put together as an outgrowth of the “Men in Touch” events that the two of them created over the years. With twenty-seven miniworkshops led by fifteen facilitators from all over North America, it was an opportunity for male-identified folks to explore ways of being more vulnerable and authentically intimate with one another. As Sequoia shared in a newsletter circulated to friends, “At Sunday evening’s closing, I thanked each man/person who came for their courage in showing up for such a vulnerable and authentic weekend. I asked how many had experienced their heart opening: almost every hand went up. Then I invited and challenged them to walk back into the outer world and practice keeping their heart open, using any/all of the techniques they experienced over the weekend.

year’s Ignite, I did not expect to be alive for this one, and that I greatly doubt I’ll be here next year, so this is my final Ignite. Then I told them of my upcoming 80th and said being with all of them has been my best imaginable celebration. Now there is a sweet sense of completion of my journey…and a greater sense of leave-taking and farewells. It continues to feel like I’m in a slow, final decline. Emotionally there is a sense of rightness and gratitude to be granted the time and energy for all these goodbyes.”

On his 80th birthday, August 7, Sequoia was in good spirits, and we had this email exchange:

You have had an extraordinary life, which you describe in generous detail with tremendous honesty. What was it like for you to approach this task of reviewing your life in the form of a

memoir?

“I told them how inspired I was 50+ years ago reading Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, by his guru’s simple, yet unfathomable instruction to ‘Love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God.’ I said those words have guided my life ever since, and I invited them to contemplate their profound wisdom. I shared about my cancer and how at last

It was surprisingly easy, having been a journalkeeper for decades. During the pandemic I simply started a longer journal about reviewing my life, with no intention of publishing. It was only after realizing how many incredible teachers and teachings I’ve been graced with that I began to consider that others may find my “journal” of value. Several friends who read the early draft eagerly agreed!

The running themes of your book have to do with sexuality and spiritual, the erotic and the divine. How do you understand the connection between those two powerful forces?

The short answer is they are two ends of a spec-

Sequoia fooling around with Don at a Body Electric workshop in 1994. Courtesy author.

trum, depicted in yoga and Tantra as the chakras. It’s all one energy at different frequencies or colors. The longer answer requires reading Divining Desire. ;-)

You had a pretty traditional American upbringing and yet you have spent a good part of your adult life living in Canada. How did that happen?

I fell in love with Canada as a kid when my family spent some summer holidays there. My love deepened when experiencing the Vancouver Expo in 1986. I was smitten with summers here, and still am! Winters are less wonderful.

You received a serious cancer diagnosis last year. How did that affect the writing and completion of the book?

It heightened my motivation. By then I had begun to view Divining Desire as my final teaching vehicle, my legacy project. Knowing I had a “deadline” really quickened my motivation.

You describe your encounters with a string of

legendary teachers. You yourself have a long history of teaching. And you make it a point to offer the book not just as your life story but also as a compendium of teachings that you’ve found meaningful. How did you develop your capacity as a teacher? And what can you say about the role of teachers in life?

I first discovered that I had a gift for teaching as an Air Force and later civilian flight instructor. As I began discovering the incredible value I was receiving from practicing yoga and meditation, I felt a strong impetus to share those gifts with gay brothers. It gradually and organically unfolded from there to teaching sensual massage, then Tantric massage. The role of teachers seems essential to spread skills and wisdom from one culture and generation to another.

Divining Desire is available from most online retailers. For more information, see https:// sequoia.wordpress.com/publishing/

Left: Sister Sari Sequoia in 2006. Upper Right: Ziji and Sequoia against the Vancouver skyline in 2018. Lower Right: Sequoia enjoying a "chocolate bomb" in Oaxaca, 2024. Photographs courtesy author.

Excerpt from Divining Desire by Sequoia Thom

CHAPTER 9 (1979)—Finding “the faeries”

In the summer of 1979, on a bulletin board in San Francisco, I was thrilled to read “The Call” put out by Harry Hay, John Burnside, and Don Kilhefner to gather as a tribe of loving men in the desert of Arizona for a weekend celebrating our queer love. Here is that eloquent invitation: [see center photo]. I drove from Berkeley to Arizona with my housemate Hal and my dear friend Eric in my 1965 VW van which had a sliding canvas roof and “eyebrow windows”: the perfect chariot for a legendary quest. Hal dubbed it “Percy,” short for Percival, the knight who went on endless quests.

About 200 of us spanning 3 generations of gay men traveled from all over North America and found our way to a desert sanctuary near Benson, in eastern Arizona, on a hot Labor Day weekend for a 3-day and night encampment. Under that blazing sun, we sought refuge from the scorching sand in the wondrously cooling swimming pool: what an oasis! Imagine dozens of naked men being silly, frolicking like boys, evoking the erotic in a playful way like diving under water to blow bubbles on one another’s magic wands. At other times, we smeared mud all over our naked bodies, revealed our wounds in “heart circles,” raised our voices in

traditional pagan or indigenous chants, shared sacred ceremonies, danced under the moonlight, and were passionate in full-bodied ways that invited our hearts and souls to dance together.

Under Harry’s fatherly guidance, we were encouraged to move beyond the objectification that was the norm in the new urban gay landscape, and instead, embrace “subject-subject consciousness” to discover the inner beauty underneath even the homely or wrinkled among us.

That event was a lifechanging experience. The energy was so much more uplifting than the bars and baths of San Francisco. At “the tubs” the guys took sex very seriously: there was a job to do (or get). Men sized each other up to see who had the biggest qualifications.

A month earlier, I marked my 35th birthday at a yoga retreat with Baba Hari Das at Mount Madonna near San Jose, California. Both he and Baba Muktananda would give people who requested one a “spiritual name.” In both ashrams, many had taken Hindu names to signify their commitment to the path of yoga. I felt like I was becoming a different person, my real and authentic self, and Thom seemed old and tired. One afternoon, while meditating in a beautiful grove of stately redwoods, Sequoia came to me clearly. It sounded beautiful, having all the vowels

and ending in “a” making it androgynous. For me, the sequoias convey timeless serenity. But the idea of taking their name as my own seemed completely audacious. I dismissed it immediately and continued my meditation. Still, the idea intrigued me.

Harry’s eloquent call was a clear invitation to step into a new version of me. I was excited arriving at the Sanctuary with my 2 dear friends. Among the first to arrive, we were greeted at the gate by Harry and John, who registered us, and invited us to sign our name on a key-ring “earring.” I followed the sudden impulse to write “Sequoia.” It was a momentous choice. The whole weekend people met me as Sequoia. It was clear that I was beginning a new life. After that Gathering, a tradition developed among the Faeries of taking a “faerie name” in a ritual way. I like to think I was the first one to do so.

Ever since, whenever I meet someone, invariably they are struck by the name, and often ask me to explain its origin. It gives me the perfect opening to speak about my deepest values. For example, I later learned that in Cherokee, the name means “peacemaker.” That became my guiding inspiration in teaching yoga and meditation beginning a few months later. Claiming my true spirit with a new name proved to be surprisingly empowering. Even all these decades later I still look upon claiming my “true name” as one of the most momentous choices I’ve ever made.

Eric offered a class in “Loving Kindness Meditation” or Metta, from the Buddhist tradition he was studying. I loved it immediately; it quickly became a regular part of my devotional practices along with meditation. Catholicism has a long tradition of praying “to God” for loved ones or even strangers. Buddhism drops the God part: one simply sends good wishes in a meditative way: first to oneself, then to specific people, then perhaps to “all sentient beings.”

I continued attending and sometimes organizing and/or helping facilitate Faerie Gatherings quite regularly for a few years, but became less regular in the ensuing decades. While I have enjoyed the playfulness and open affection of the faeries, my soul is more satisfied by more grounded and structured containers like workshops, many of which I have taken and offered over those same decades. Who are The Radical Faeries? I’ve sometimes called us “the queerest of the queer.” Each one is unique. We share an appreciation of genderfluidity, ritual, making music and dancing, being in nature, nudity whenever possible, playful eroticism, and offering a heartfelt “welcome home” to each one-of-a-kind rare gem who chooses to show up.

People usually find my name memorable, which can be awkward for me since I have a poor memory for names. It can be amusing if they can’t quite remember. I’ve been called Sierra and Sonoma when in California, as well as Segovia, and even Saguaro when visiting Arizona.

Some of the new faeries offered small classes in their particularly favorite practices. My dear friend

Before finding the Faeries, I had observed a striking uniformity in the physical appearance of young gay guys in the Bay Area, which became satirized as the “Castro Clone.” The uniform included a stache, tight, button-fly torn jeans (preferably Levi’s 501s), and a semi-opened shirt (preferably plaid) revealing toned pecs.

The Faeries were all ones that either could not or would not fit that mold. Being with the Faeries gave me even more permission to be my own unique creation. In the ensuing decades, I became ever more one-of-a-kind.

In Essaouira

by Maytag Dishwasher

In Essaouira, we fall in love with a dog. I name her Fatima, and all afternoon we run up and down the beach calling “Fatima! Fatima!” as she bounds after us, black ears flying, until we collapse in the sand, laughing and panting, as though we have always been this happy.

My friend grows mystical. “I dreamt,” she says, “I dreamt I’d meet a dog in Morocco.” She is from a dogless place called England. Cold and rainy, too. Not to mention expensive. You do meet gloomy Brits when you’re abroad.

My friend is not gloomy. She had spent some years caring for a mother who suffered from mental illness. Madness, as the Brits call it. But she did not mind it, she loved her mother, and cared for her until she died. She could not share the grief with her sister, who stopped speaking to her over something significant or insignificant. She’s tried to end her life, seriously and on more than one occasion. She told me this in a cafe in Marrakesh. We had only met an hour before.

With friends you have known for years, their stories become familiar and tiresome, the way our own stories become wearying to even ourselves. But when you make friends traveling, their past, whatever they disclose, is a gift, and you will not be together long enough to grow tired of them.

Now, in Essaouira, she rides horses on the beach. She laughs easily and often. She even farts, and will announce she has done so in case anyone missed it. If I will not do something she proposes, she says, “When will you be here again?”

We guess Fatima is not even a year old. She has a puppy’s habit of nipping at the hem of our pants. She doesn’t like being still. She rests her head on her paws and looks listlessly at the sun dipping into the ocean.

The ocean. The Atlantic. It is early spring, and a light rain is falling off the coast. The waves pick up--Essaouira is famous for its wind. Kitesurfers zip across the final waves. The camels that carried tourists up and down the beach all day are nested in the sand, vacantly chewing nothing. The sky is red, horses stand against it. Rain dusts the sea. You see it only in the sheets of light, the last light, falling through the clouds. A shocking shimmer of pink suspends above our heads, turning itself inside out,

over and over again, like a jellyfish.

“Maybe we should name her something else,” my friend says. “Everyone looks when we yell Fatima.”

“It must be a popular name here,” I say.

“Why don’t we name her Rosie?”

“That’s a nice name,” I say, though I know she will always be Fatima in my heart.

But Fatima is not ours. “She belongs to Essaouira,” I pronounce. And so she does. She follows us toward the medina, but then something has caught her attention. A very small puppy wobbling beneath a shabby bush. She gives it a sniff and nuzzles its nose. But the puppy is too young to play. Too weak from the heat, maybe, or lack of milk, or both. How can it survive, without its mother, so small and soft? It will have to learn--to eat trash, to drink fetid water. To beg. We hope it will. We never see it again.

Fatima loses interest in us, she trots off into the dark. We go home. Our $6 hostel. I am tired. I have done nothing all day but play on the beach and eat street food, but I am tired. Crepes filled with cheese and fried fish sandwiches and a peasant soup of beans and vegetables called harira. Despite our exhaustion, we clamber up the ladder to the roof, which is filled with travelers. Essaouira attracts a romantic crowd. Or they become so when they arrive here. Loose clusters of young people recline on carpets, playing guitar, smoking hash, smoking cigarettes. My friend is trying to quit smoking, she won’t buy an entire pack. We buy handfuls of loose ciggies that she carries in her coin purse, doling them out one at a time until they are all gone. The medina is silent. We go to bed, happy. In our dorm, which sleeps eighteen, the lot of us stay up and keep chatting. There is so much to talk about among travelers. Cities we’ve been. Cities we should see. Some are going home. We regard them with pity and fondness and say goodbye. There are so many goodbyes when you are traveling. But also hellos. For every heartbreak, every last hug and wish for a safe journey, there is a hello.

My friend and I had met in Marrakesh. I had traveled alone to Marrakesh from Fez, where I left two dear friends. We got tired of the crowds and the traffic. On the beach, I meet her as she dismounts her horse.

“The sun was setting on one side, and the moon

was rising over the other,” she tells me.

She hands me an apple to feed the horse. Thick lips mop my hand. It is much smaller than I remember, but I haven’t seen a horse since I was a child. Is the world smaller when you grow up? Yet here we are, in Morocco. “Are we really here?” we keep asking. No, we are not. This is not our real life. We have escaped our real life. The tedium and the boredom and the desperation. We have that luxury. Not the locals. If you talk to a Moroccan long enough, you hear how difficult life is here. And yet they are happy. They are quick with emotions.

I buy pants. I have never been so happy buying pants. The crotch falls to my knees, as though I have melons for testicles. The man in the little shop wants way too much for them. We bargain. No deal, I say, several times. It seems to excite the man. I buy the pants.

And so the days unfold in Essaouira. We wake late, have some coffee and crepes and buy loose cigarettes which we smoke while we take turns swimming in the ocean. The water is still bracingly cold that time of year. And often, Fatima would appear. She would see us and run to us. Our hearts swelled.

I stand wet on the sand and pull my giant scarf high over my head, letting it fill with wind. I lean into it, letting it hold me, like some lady on a tampon box. But if what tampons are selling is freedom, I feel free.

In the morning, my friend says, “I wonder if we’ll see Fatima today.”

And I say, “Oh honey. You don’t think that dog survived the night, do you?”

Her face collapses.

Half the time, we’ll see the dog. When we don’t, and my friend wonders aloud where she is, I say again, “Oh honey. You don’t think she survived the night, do you?”

Her face collapses every time.

Someone says, “Have you ever noticed the cats here, how they walk? They walk like people. Right down the middle of the street. Like they’ve got somewhere to go.”

And it’s true. I half expect the cats to nod and touch the brim of a hat as they pass me.

One night we see a kitten, seemingly days old, scrambling among the foot traffic. We try to catch it, but it bares its needle teeth at us and tumbles crookedly away. No one else seems to notice. But my friend and I keep after it, cooing, bent at the waist, down the street. At last we give up. What could we do, even if we catch it? Its mother has abandoned it.

We can’t take it to the hostel.

It breaks your heart, the puppies and kittens that fend for themselves in the streets of Morocco. Puppies and kittens and very old men and women, some holding very young babies. When I ask about why these mothers have ended up on the streets, a friend who grew up in Morocco says, “It is because their husbands are in jail. Or dead. Or they had babies and they are not married. Without a husband, what else can they do?”

“I think it’s a scam,” says another Moroccan. “They sit with babies all day begging rather than work.”

“There’s easier ways to make money,” I say.

“And harder,” the man says.

We go to our friend’s shop and sit for mint tea as the street streams past us, all those feet and carts, probably trampling the poor kitten to death as we sipped our tea in the cool night air. I have brought a gift: oranges. The young guys who run the shop bring out drums. I always feel a bit inadequate when people start playing drums in my presence. They put one in front of me. Go ahead, they say. It may as well be a Rubic’s cube.

*****

The currency in Morocco is the dirham, but I keep saying shekle. Shekle just seems the perfect word for money. You see the hardness of it, the glint and the crassness of it. I have no idea what Moroccans think about Jews. Probably not much. Most of the Moroccans I meet are Berbers, semi-nomads who live half the year in the mountains, and they like to correct you when you call them Arabs. “We are not Arabs,” they say. “We were conquered by Arabs. God is something we were forced to adopt.”

What did they worship before they were conquered?

“The sun, the trees, the mountains.”

In Chefchaouen, the famous Blue City, a man told me that his town was famous for four things: “Wool, air, relax, and cold water.” Relax may be a codeword for hashish. And what four things is Essaouira known for? Sea and wind are two. Kitesurfers come from around the world for the wind, which whip the coastline into waves.

*****

I decide that I am leaving Essaouira. I go to the bus station to buy a ticket, and on my way back to the medina the wind kicks up and I cover my head in a scarf and run along the city walls. A man runs alongside me. He takes my elbow and says, Come with me. Where are we going? I ask. To my house, he says. Why? I say. To meet my mother and father,

he says. I let him take me. We enter a doorway, and up a dark staircase. He unlocks a door, and suddenly I am out of the sun and the wind, I am standing in a small filthy room with a bare mattress and piles of clothing on the floor. He locks the door. Let me out, I say. He leans in and kisses me. I look at him finally. He is extraordinarily handsome, with a shaved head and a fine skull. I can also smell the alcohol. This is no easy feat. Alcohol is not easy, or cheap, to find in Morocco. Let me out, I say again. He starts to take off my jacket. No, I say. He kisses me. Yes, he says. Let me out, I say. He starts to pull at my shirt. He is kissing my cheek, my mouth. You first, I say. You take off your clothes first. OK, he says. He starts to undress. His body is beautiful. How old is he? Maybe forty. He stands before me naked. He goes to a dresser and slaps some cologne into his palms and rubs it into his cock and balls. He lies on the mattress and holds out his arms. Come, come, he says. I cannot imagine what lives on that mattress. But I undress. He watches me tenderly. When I am naked, I sit hunched on the edge of the mattress and fit my small body against his. He has not washed. There is a strong smell of urine, and a coating of dirt, but it does not offend me. He holds me. I let him. Then I turn to his face and we kiss. We kiss and I am on top of him.

*****

I am off my medication. My therapist and my doctor, not to mention the nice Chinese ladies at the pharmacy, jumped through no small number of bureaucratic hoops to secure a two month supply of anti-depressants for my trip, which I arranged because I was scared I might run out of meds and go psychotic in a foreign land, amongst the camels. I was afraid I’d go psychotic anyway. The meds in question are questionable. I felt as though I had bees in my head, each bee bearing some variation of the same message: that I was a loser, and wouldn’t it be better to just jump in front of a bus? *****

It is late. The boys in the shop are getting restless. They want something to happen. They want to sleep with my friend, but they also think that I am her boyfriend. One of them suggests we go for a swim.

“A night swim,” he says slowly.

“I don’t have my swimsuit,” my friend laughs.

“Pfft,” the boy says. “We swim naked. So what? We are free.”

And so we are. We close the shop--it is after midnight--and saunter down the empty streets through the city gates and hop the low balustrade that divides the street from the beach where we

walk along the surf carrying our shoes in our hands as the waves wash soft as hair over our feet. And that is all. There is no naked swimming under the stars. We walk. I can feel, too, the boys’ curiosity about my friend, circling her, occasionally bumping into her shoulders. It is alright, I think. They are just boys and she is enjoying herself. I fall behind. I am walking utterly free, in a kind of haze, thinking about the moon and the sea and the churning dark, and how far away really I am from home, how far away I am really from my life. I want to sleep. I start to say goodbye, but then I think it is better to slip away. “Wait,” my friend says, running after me. And it seems best to leave the night as it is, where nothing has been wrecked. We say goodbye to the boys. The long walk through the city, over the old stone streets. When we step on a sewer cover, a million cockroaches, peering at the moon through the keyhole, startle and scatter into the depths, clicking.

I start smoking again and I remember how beautiful it is to smoke, even if you have to pay the price later. I don’t care. I don’t care. Let it come, let it all come crashing down on me, old age and illness and financial ruin. Let me die a wreck. Someday, another day. I don’t care.

The boys in the shop are sitting with friends. One of them points to another boy and says, “My friend likes you.” I say, “Then we should get married,” and laugh. Everyone laughs. Later, one of the boys, in a low voice, tells me, “You can joke with us, it is alright. But do not make this joke in front of strangers. They are Muslims, and they will kill you for this joke. They will go to jail forever, but they will not care.” I keep smiling, because I don’t care. I don’t care.

*****

As I wait for the bus, I see the man who kidnapped me into his filthy room, who made love to me on that sour mattress. He is very sad, and puts his head on my chest. I hold him. I don’t care who sees, and neither does he.

“Goodbye, friend,” I say.

*****

Years later, my friend has returned to Morocco. It rained everyday, she told me. I think of Fatima. Has someone taken her in? Does someone look for her everyday, and feed her fish, as my friend did? Not likely. There are too many dogs in the streets of Essaouira.

There is too much life.

Jerry Berbiar

April 23, 1955–August 5, 2024

Jerry Berbiar, affectionately known as “Jerry the Faerie,” a beloved figure in San Francisco’s LGBTQ community, passed away on August 5, 2024, at the age of sixty-nine. Jerry’s vibrant spirit and commitment to the causes he believed in made him a cherished member of groups such as the Radical Faeries, the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, and the Bound Together Bookstore. His sudden passing has left a void in the hearts of those who knew him.

Born on April 23, 1955, in Chicago, Jerry faced significant challenges from an early age. His parents separated during his childhood, and he moved to Los Angeles with his mother, who sadly passed away when he was still young. After spending a few years in Madison, Wisconsin, Jerry moved to San Francisco in 1977, seeking a place where he could live openly as a gay man and embrace the city’s thriving counterculture.

In San Francisco, Jerry found a community where he could be his authentic self. He became deeply involved with the Radical Faeries, a spiritual and cultural movement for gay men, and was a familiar face at their gatherings, including those at the Wolf Creek Sanctuary in Oregon. Jerry was a founding member of Nomenus and was a significant participant in creating and maintaining the Nomenus Radical Faerie Sanctuary in Wolf Creek, Oregon. Jerry also contributed significantly to the Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore, a co-operative in the Haight, where he volunteered for many years. His presence was described as “bigger than life,” and he was known for his generosity and willingness to help those in need, particularly members of the LGBTQ community and people experiencing homelessness.

liberation, noting his commitment to ensuring that future generations could thrive.

Throughout his life, Jerry was known for his kindness and his commitment to helping others. He was part of The Circle of Loving Companions, a group that cared for gay rights pioneers Harry Hay

Jerry’s involvement extended to the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, where he worked on issues of importance to the community. He was remembered by his friends as having a “big heart” and a “fighting spirit.” Tom Ammiano, a longtime political leader, highlighted Jerry’s dedication to gay

and John Burnside in their later years, moving them to San Francisco to ensure they received the support they needed. His compassion extended to his everyday interactions, where he was often a positive and uplifting presence.

Jerry faced health challenges of his own, having contracted HIV in the early 1990s, which led him to transition to Social Security Disability Insurance.

Top: Jerry at Lower Falls, Rochester NY. Bottom: Jerry, Frederick Douglas and Susan B. Anthony Having Tea. Susan B. Anthony Square Park, Rochester NY, April, 2024. Photographs by Joey Cain.

Despite these challenges, he continued to be active and engaged in his community. Earlier this year, Jerry traveled to Buffalo and Rochester, New York, with his friend Joey Cain to view a solar eclipse, and attended a Radical Faerie Gathering in Oregon.

In his final days, Jerry experienced chest pain and underwent an angioplasty and stent insertion at CPMC Hospital in San Francisco. Despite initial signs of recovery, he suffered a massive heart attack and passed away shortly thereafter. His passing has been deeply felt by his friends and the broader community.

Jerry is survived by the close-knit circle of friends who were his chosen family. Plans for a memorial service at the San Francisco Columbarium are being arranged, with details to be announced in the coming weeks. Jerry’s life and spirit will be celebrated by those who loved him, and his legacy of kindness and advocacy will continue to inspire the community he cherished.

In the words of his friend Larry-bob Roberts, “They aren’t making characters like Jerry anymore, and with his loss goes an irreplaceable part of San Francisco.” Jerry Berbiar will be deeply missed by all who knew him.

Top: Jerry at Wolf Creek, photograph by Daniel Nicoletta. Bottom: Jerry Jim and Rula, ca 1990s. Photo by John Keating.

Stuart Auld May

6, 1953–June 26,

Stuart Auld (Zenya) died June 26, 2024 8:20 AM Central Time. He spent his final weeks the way he spent his best, and on his terms—at home, surrounded by the people he loves and who love him; with conversations, laughter, ideas, art, music, shared food, visits from babies and dogs—and without fear or pain. He was seventy-one.

Born in Galion, Ohio, Stuart was the third son of Marjorie (Dill), who taught him to sew, bake, and to see the world as large and full of possibility; and Richard Auld, who introduced him to carpentry and three-dimensional thinking.

He graduated from Galion High School at its academic and fine arts peak, benefiting from teachers and programs that would enrich his world immeasurably. He remained close with the many friends he made there throughout his life.

Stuart entered the theatre department at Ohio University in 1971 but left in his second year and worked at Yellowstone National Park and later in Jackson, Wyoming. He returned to Ohio to complete a degree in graphic design. After graduation, he moved back to Jackson, where he found a joyful niche, throwing costume parties and teaching disco dancing in addition to working as a painter and illustrator. Yellowstone National Park continued to fill his need for balance and quiet contemplation. After Jackson, Stuart spent a year in Salt Lake City working in publishing.

2024

innate hospitality were honed during this period. Stuart later joined Jazz Fest’s art department, painting both “ancestors” and sets, including the Easteregg-filled juke joint backdrop of the Blues Tent.

He dragged a whole bunch of wisteria vines from his display job at D.H. Holmes to his house with his partner, Danny, on St. Claude Ave and threw the

He moved to New Orleans in the late 1970s, immersing himself in art, music, and theatre in a bustling apartment owned by the family who opened Preservation Hall. Creating elaborate window displays at the famed DH Holmes department store further integrated him into the breadth of creative talent that imbues this city with its magic.

Stuart met his partner Danny Toups in New Orleans, and the two operated a po-boy concession at Jazz Fest for years and then the Sweet Olive Bed and Breakfast in the Marigny. Both his cooking skill and

first Purple Party in 1991. The Purple Party moved in 1999 when they opened their guest house, Sweet Olive. Stuart hosted the Purple Party until Hurricane Katrina when it was taken up by Tim Wolff and has since been taken up my others. It was not originally a Radical Faerie party but it was always attended by fey folk but it had a strong Faerie feel especially after Stuart left New Orleans.

As a set builder/scenic painter for the film, TV and music industry from the early 1990s until his retirement, Stuart split time between New Orleans

Stuart at his Purple Party, photograph by Valerie Skinkus.

and New York, his two favorite cities outside Venice and Barcelona, before returning permanently to New Orleans.

In recent years, he was best known as a key creative and organizational force behind the Ste. Anne parade, an opulent, dramatic, historic, organic and glittering Creole-style Mardi Gras day walking Krewe. His fortieth year with Ste. Anne was the Krewe’s fiftieth anniversary, and he designed and oversaw the creation of a lavish and visually stunning solid gold parade.

Stuart survived crushing losses, which reinforced the value and fragility of life, and the importance of living it well. He is predeceased by his partner, Danny, and his son Taylor, as well as his parents and his brother, Edd. He learned the transience of treasured possessions twice—his place in Gulfport in Hurricane Katrina and then a serious fire in Brooklyn. Stuart loved to dance to house music. In New York City he frequented Body & Soul, 718 Sessions, and numerous other events with his many loving dance partners.

While in the Northeast, Stuart began attending gatherings at Faerie Camp Destiny, where he came to know a large circle of Faeries outside of the Mardi Gras crowd. He helped the Destiny community with timber framing a kitchen, mudding straw bale walls and keeping everyone in stitches with his humor. And his idea of dressing for dinner put many of us on notice to up our game.

Stuart is survived by his brother Tom, nephews Evan, Christopher and Andrew, and nieces Caitlin and Molly; the dear friends he made at every place he called home; and his best boy Chapi. He will be remembered through the body of work he leaves behind, including the joy and creativity of the Secret Société of Ste. Anne, who will carry him home on Mardi Gras morning 2025.

A celebration of life will be held November 18th, 7:30-9:30 at Vaughan's Lounge in New Orleans, featuring the Storyville Stompers.

In lieu of flowers, wear more purple, hold your people close, and as always, help pay the band. More information will follow about Ste. Anne Parade. Folks associated with Ste. Anne say the purple and gold will be the color theme and we hope everyone comes out to represent.

Top: Stuart at the St. Brigid Ball, New Orleans. Photograph by George Long. Bottom: Stuart as a younger man with a watercolor palette. Photographer unknown.

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Issue 201 / Spring 2025

COLORS OF SPRING

Submission Deadline: February 15, 2025 www.rfdmag.org/upload

Spring is more than just a season; it’s a vibrant celebration of life, renewal, and self-expression. As nature bursts into a riot of colors, we, too, are invited to shed the layers of winter and step boldly into our authentic selves. In the LGBTQ+ community, spring represents an opportunity to embrace the

spectrum of our identities with pride and confidence.

As we welcome the warmer days, consider how the colors around you inspire your personal journey. How do the shades of spring reflect your inner world? Are there new colors you’re ready to explore, both in your wardrobe and in

your life? Whether it’s the pink of a budding rose that reminds you of a tender romance or the purple of a lilac that resonates with the strength of your identity, tell us about the colors of spring in your life that remind you that we are all part of something beautiful and ever-changing.

Javier Trelis Sempere

a reader-created gay quarterly celebrating queer diversity