No 147 Fall 2011 $9.95In celebration of its over 30 years in existence, RFD will dedicate the Winter 2011 issue to Short Mountain, and seeks words and images to reflect this community’s experience and all it has done for the extended Radical Faerie collective worldwide. Called “Witch Mountain” - “Hippy Holler” - “The Mound” - “Hickory Knoll” - “The Mountain” - “The Sanctuary” - “SMS” - and “home” to a cast of characters known as sanctuarians over its three- decade-long existence...a place of myth and legend that has physically, psychically and spiritually fed thousands who have alighted down its steep drive for Spring and Fall Gatherings. Known by some as the “Mother Ship,” Short Mountain Sanctuary has spawned an extensive “feyborhood” of radical queers wishing to create sustainable homesteads in the middle of rural Ten- nessee. Rising above the surrounding countryside, Short Mountain is a temperate rainforest on a unique geological formation with watersheds that feed river systems on three sides, and has its own species of freshwater crayfish. It was also the home of RFD for over two decades. Its history includes Cherokees, the Underground Railroad, radical free land Hippies and yes, you! Please send us your reminiscences, reflections, as well as hopes & dreams for this very special land and community as it enters the next phase of its ongoing story. Submissions for this issue are due no later than November 1, 2011 . Submissions can be sent electronically to submissions@rfdmag.org—please send them as attachments preferably in plain text files. We love to see our readers images and art- work, it can also be sent to the same email. Please send image files with at least 300 dpi resolution (2100x3000 pixels for a full page). Small files intended for the internet do not reproduce well especially now that we have switched to color. Issue 148 • Call for Submissions SHORT MOUNTAIN SANCTUARY RFD 147 Fall 2011 1 Rebellious Fervent Daddies Vol 38 No 1 #147 Fall 2011 RFD has a proud history of evoking the voices of queer poets in it’s pages (and thus the voices of the larger gay community). In this issue we focus on Walt Whitman, one of America’s best known poets along with one of his early disci- ples and one of the English speaking world’s first gay rights activists. Both writers were working within the confines of a Victorian era of homophobia and sex phobia in general. So it’s with pride that we laud them and see how their words, deeds and lives have impacted our own. Although some of the pieces are “long” we hope you’ll read them through as many of the authors insights into Whitman or Carpenter struck a cord with us and we hope they resonate with you our readers as well. We encourage interested readers to check the following websites which focus on the life and work of these two pioneers of gay life: Walt Whitman: www.whitmanarchive.org. Edward Carpenter: www. edwardcarpenterforum.org and www.edwardcar- penter.net. We’re pleased as always to hear from our readers and whenever we hear “you should cover this” please understand our mantra in response is “sounds great send it in!” RFD is a reader created experience. It documents what you as readers want to see. Sometimes it may seems biased or skewed but that is because other “readers” chose not to send something which represents their views, lives, or experiences. So please, please consider that when you see the deadline for the next issue... We’ve been on a steady course for the last several issues and we appreciate your support in keeping our pages flowing! Speaking of support, we feel the need to send out a few words of healing and encouragement to Sister Soami (Sister Mish to many folks). He was a con- stant spirit in bringing RFD to you for many years while the magazine was produced in Tennessee and news of his resent illness and recovery is on our minds. We wish him well and take this opportunity to thank him again for his years of service to RFD. With that we also want to reach out to other former RFD contributors through the years and thank you as well. In this issue we hear from one of the early collective member from the days when RFD was produced in Oregon. It’s wonderful to hear from folks. Please write in! Our next issue will focus on the thrity year his- tory of Short Mountain Sanctuary, please send in your recollections, photos and stories from “the Mountain.” The Spring issue will deal entirely with all things FASHION. Gussy up and send us your photos and stories! For folks who have put in requests for back issues - please bear with us. We installed new shelving and we’ve been slowing setting things back up. It’s a one person affair and it often sadly falls by the wayside as we face another issue deadline looming. With autumnal hugs from the land of Fall foliage —The RFD Collective Whitman & Carpenter Between the Lines2 RFD 147 Fall 2011 Artists in this Issue Adrian Chesser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 artboydancing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2, 12, 43, 50, 51 Bear Das . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Bob Burnside . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52, 53 Frank Serafino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16, 17 J Elliott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 Joey Cain & Ann Carrol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Marmot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54 Miles J . Santiago-Serano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 Mitchell Santine Gould . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4, 14, 19, 40 Scribble aka Paul Festa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36, 37 Sheffield Libraries Archives and Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22, 23, 27, 29 Stuart Norman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 Thomas Eakins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7, 44 Dot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32, 34 Wally Telford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Walt Whitman Archive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 Links Links to artists and organizations who want to share their website with you and whose work appears in this issue. RFD Archives ..................www.rfdmag.org Adrian Chesser ..........www.adrainchesser.com artboydancing ..........www.artboydancing.com Mitchell Santine Gould. . . . .www.leavesofgrass.org Sheffield Libraries Archives and Information .... www.sheffield.gov.uk/libraries/archives-and- local-studies Walt Whitman Archive ..www.whitmanarchive.org RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative lifestyles. We foster community building and network- ing, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, radical faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volunteers. We welcome your participation. The business and general production are coordinated by a collective. Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places. RFD (ISSN# 0149-709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302. Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302 Non-profit tax exempt #62- 1723644, a function of RFD Press with office of registra- tion at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190. RFD Cover Price: $9.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive it four times a year. Copyright © 2011 RFD Press. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and associated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material associated therewith on which this label appears) are kept by the custodian of records at the following location: RFD Press, 85 N Main St, Ste 200, White River Junction, VT 05001. Mail for our Brothers Behind Bars project should be sent to P.O. Box 68, Liberty TN 37095. On the Covers Front : Kyle photographed by Dot Inside Front Cover : Cathy Hope and Dimid Hayes at Short Mountain; Photo by Joshua Smith Inside Back Cover : Ophelia by Matt Bucy Production Bambi Gauthier, Editor in Chief Matt Bucy, Design & Typography Eric Linton, Editor Paul Wirhun, Editor Jason Schneider, Editor Myrlin, Prison Pages Editor Ian Waisler, Proofer Don Perryman (Dawn), Proofer Submission Deadlines Winter–November 1, 2011 Spring–January 25, 2012 See inside covers for themes. Photograph by artboydancing RFD 147 Fall 2011 3 Letters & Announcements ....................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Stories & Articles Sleeping With Walt Whitman ...........Talorgan Elliott ..........................7 In Paths Untrodden: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems, Gay Consciousness and the Radical Faeries ..............Joey Cain ...............................8 Worshiping Whitman at Destiny ........Endora .................................13 Stranger, If You Passing Meet Me ........Jory M. Mickelson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Carpenter and Whitman: The Subjective and the Objective .....David B. Wright (Street Candy) ...........19 The Case for Reading Carpenter: Am I—or You—the Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter? ...............Toby Johnson ...........................21 PLQs, Meet Walt Whitman...Animated ..Mitchell Santine Gould ..................40 Centerfolds ...........................Raymond Luczak ........................44 My Days and Dreams: The Worlds of Edward Carpenter, Gay Freedom Pioneer ...............Joey Cain ..............................45 Faerie Elders: What and Where Are We? ..........Stuart Norman .........................48 Momma’s Boy .........................Stephen Washington ....................50 Attending Gay Men’s Gatherings in Scotland with the Edward Carpenter Community .......Bob Burnside ...........................52 It Can Be Like This...Always: The First B.C. Radical Faerie Camp ...Marmot ................................54 Brothers Behind Bars ..................Myrlin .................................59 Poetry & Art Whitman Poems and Found Photos. . . . . . Frank Serafino ..........................16 The Other Moses ......................Raymond Luczak ........................18 Kyle ..................................Portraits by Dot .........................32 Two Poems ...........................Ampersand Charmpop ..................34 moss on petrified wood ................J. Elliot .................................35 The Walt Whitman Service Area ........Photo essay by Scribble, a.k.a. Paul Festa ...36 Poems ................................Jim Wise ...............................38 O Living Always .......................Jimmi Kocher-Hillmer ...................39 Standing with Apple ...................artboydancing ..........................43 A Proposition to the Good Gray Poet ....Don Perryman (Dawn). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Remembrances J.P Hartsong ..........................Ampersand Charmpop ..................57 CONTENTS4 RFD 147 Fall 2011 LETTERS & ANNOUNCEMENTS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR A former RFD collective member shares memories and a poem Hello. I once was a contributor & member of the RFD collective back when it & I were living at Magdalen in Wolf Creek. I worked on issues #10-16, as typist, proofreader, lay-out, paste-up, etc., as well as contributing poetix, articles, photographs & graphics to most of the issues at the time. Although I no longer live in the country, I still have a wonder- ful memory of my time in the Wolf Creek area (I lived at Magdalen, Woodford Creek & Golden!) & still feel a huge attachment to the land & the spirit of the place. I moved from the country to Portland many years ago & have felt comfortable & energized enough here to stay...lately I have met a few folks connected to what is now the Sanctuary at Wolf Creek & have posted a few items there on the Wolf Creek Sanctuary page. I have also posted some of my photographs from my time on the farm on my Facebook page. When I lived on the farm & worked with RFD I went by Jai Elliott, now I am known as J Elliott (tho my FB page is under XJ Elliott because of FB rules, go figure). You will also see there my pics of the Walt Whitman Brigade, which was a group of Eugene poets & artists I was a part of who produced a one-time cultural journal called Hundred Flowers, around the same time I was doing RFD. We were going to use the photos in the second issue but I moved to Magdalen & it never appeared. Anyway, I am happy to see that RFD has survived & hopefully flourished, throughout all these years! I hope you love working on it as much as I did for the time I was involved with it. All good things. —J Elliott Where is the GLBT Community Support? As an inmate at Oskosh Correctional Institution, I must ask myself this all the time. Being in prison is hard enough, but if you are gay it is even harder. I see many support groups but no support groups for GLBT inmates – especially Wisconsin inmates, or the support groups don’t exist any more. As a GLBT community we must stick together for one another no matter what. Yes, I’ve made a big mistake to get into prison. But I still think we need to stick to- gether for one another. We all make mistakes, some bigger than others. But does that mean the GLBT Community should ignore the GLBT people who are in prison? We don’t want you to buy us things; we ask only for a few letters of encouragement, maybe even a visit. But what it all comes down to is a simple friend. Is this too much to ask from our own community? I don’t think so. As an inmate, I don’t want to come back to prison; but to succeed on this mission, it always helps that I have support from my own people. Please support GLBT inmates. —James J. Hinkle 253820, OSCI, PO Box 3310, Oshkosh, WI 54903-3310 CORRECTIONS We neglected to credit Rink for his photo on page 7 of issue 146. Many apologies. Walt Whitman Brigade, Eugene, Oregon. September 19, 1977. Left to Right: J. Elliot, Incas Wickham (Luke Berlin), Roan Simone Vaughn (ponoi mon dada), Gary Morgret, unknown, unknown. Photo by J. Elliot. Partial frame from Mitchell Gould’s animated Walt Whitman film, To the Soul. RFD 147 Fall 2011 5 Amber Fox McDonald’s Corners, Ontario, Canada akaamberfox.blogspot.com Breitenbush (Cascadia Radical Faerie Resource) www.radfae.org/breitenbush Edward Carpenter Community BM ECC London WC1N 3XX United Kingdom contactecc@edwardcarpentercommunity.org.uk www.edwardcarpentercommunity.org Faerie Camp Destiny P.O. Box 517 Chester, VT 04143-0517 802-376-5772 info@faeriecampdestiny.org www.faeriecampdestiny.org Faeryland P O Box 495 Nimbin, N.S.W. 2480 02 6689 7070 ozfaeries@yahoo.com www.ozfaeries.com Folleterre Ternuay-Melay-et-Saint-Hilaire France info@folleterre.org www.folleterre.org Gay Spirit Visions P.O. Box 339 Decatur, GA 30031-0339 info@gayspiritvisions.org www.gayspiritvisions.org IDA 904 Vickers Hollow Rd Dowelltown, TN 37059 615-597-4409 idapalooza@gmail.com www.planetida.com Kawashaway Sanctuary c/o Scott Schroeder (Scooter) 3007 Oakland Ave S Minneapolis, MN 55407 www.kawashaway.org Midwest Men’s Festival http://www.midwestmensfestival.com Nomenus (Wolf Creek Sancturary) Wolf Creek Sanctuary P.O. Box 312 Wolf Creek, OR 97497 541-866-2678 nomenus@hughes.net www.nomenus.org Santa Cruz Radical Faeries www.santacruzradicalfaeries.com Short Mountain Sanctuary 247 Sanctuary Lane Liberty, TN 37095 615-563-4397 Messages only Starland Yucca Valley CA www.starlandcommunity.org Zuni Mountain Sanctuary P.O. Box 636 Ramah, NM 87321 505-783-4002 zunimtn@wildblue.net www.zms.org Corrections? Send them to submissions@rfdmag.org with “corrections” in the subject. Announcements can be sent to the same address. Please be sure to list “an- nouncement” in the subject line! Gatherings and Such.... Fall Gathering Short Mountain Sanctuary, TN Sep 23-Oct 2, 2011 Fall Foliage Gathering Faerie Camp Destiny, VT Oct 6-10, 2011 Great Circle Wolf Creek OR Oct 8-10 , 2011 Lumberjane’s Gathering Folleterre, France Oct 14-22, 2011 Samhain Gathering Wolf Creek OR Oct 27-Nov 2, 2011 Samhain Zuni Mountain Sanctuary, NM Oct 28-31, 2011 Asian Faerie Gathering Thailand Feb 2-12, 2012 Breitenbush Gathering Breitenbush OR Feb 16-20, 2012 Sanctuaries and Faerie Friendly Organizations RFD 147 Fall 2011 7 I n my small rural high school, where my graduating class was only thirty-six students, Walt Whitman’s work was not included in the English curriculum. In college I took English Literature, not American Literature, and so missed out again on experienc- ing Whitman. To be honest, I really did not come to know Walt Whitman’s work until much later in life. Certainly, I knew his name and perhaps a famous quote or two, like those of Dickinson, Longfellow or Emerson. But, I had never read or comprehended an entire piece or even a passage of his written work. It was just a little over year ago, when I began having a series of dreams in which I was sleeping next to a different man every night. Although quite intimate, they were not sexual in nature. On the first night this happened, I found myself lying in bed next to a fair-haired man who was in his thirties. As I lay beside him—spooned into him—I wrapped my arms tightly around him. As I began caress- ing his chest, I became him. I entered his mind and body; I entered his dreams. The experi- ence that followed was one in which I began to sense the man’s life through this dreaming connection. His work day, his fantasies, his reality and of course, his actual dreams all became known to me. This continued on each night for four nights and each night I experienced the dreams of a different man. There was the blond teacher, followed by the brown-haired businessman, the teen sleeping on the streets and the soldier in the desert. These were that type of dreams that when you wake up, they linger with you and are never erased from your mind; the type of dreams that feel so very real. So real in fact, that you question if they were dreams at all. Perhaps they really were more than ordi- nary dreams. Perhaps they were some sort of ethereal experiences. In our ordinary world, the ability to retain the memory of a dream within a dream seems improb- able, especially when one considers that the second dream is a dream of another man. But in the extraordi- nary world, all things are possible. Shortly after having these experiences, I was searching the internet for quotes to be used for a blog post, when, as only synchronicity would have it, I discovered this: I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn, I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, And I become the other dreamers. –Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers,” Leaves of Grass It was there, glaring at me from my computer screen, where I was properly introduced to the works of Walt Whitman. This stanza so succinctly described my experience and resonated within me the understanding of both the power and compas- sion associated in the deep connection with these other men. This connection is not just in this world, but also in another realm where the consciousness of all beings is equally accessible and equally valuable. So personal, so intimate, and also in its own way, so erotic was this act of dream- ing the dreams of other dreamers. Since finding The Sleepers, I have explored more of Whitman’s poems and his writings on nature. I also continue, from time to time, to experience the dreams of other men. And each time this happens, I am humbled at the deep connection that the universe provides. However, it will always be these first experiences and the first reading of that particular stanza in The Sleepers that will remain foremost in my heart and memories. Yet even so, perhaps tonight, if we both think of Whitman as we lay down to sleep, you and I may dream…and in our dreams, we may dream each other’s dream. w Sleeping with by Talorgan Elliott Bill Duckett in Rooms of the Philadelphia Art Students League by Thomas Eakins Collection of Metropolitan Museum of ArtNext >