Issue 199 • Fall 2024 • 50 Years • $11.95Issue 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. ✹✹ RFD 199 Fall 2024 1 Reached Fifty—Donchaknowit! Vol 51 No 1 #199 Fall 2024 Between the Lines 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. 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 Collective2RFD 199 Fall 2024 RFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative lifestyles. We foster community building and networking, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, Radical Faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volunteers. We welcome your participation. The business and general production are coordinated by a collective. Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places. RFD (ISSN# 0149- 709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, 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 re- quired by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and associated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material as- sociated 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 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. 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 Steven DiVerde .............................55 Artboydaning ..............................59 Left: Map of RFD readers after just the first issue (RFD #2). Right: Pansy patch ad from RFD #11. RFD 199 Fall 2024 3 CONTENTS Early RFD Memories ......................Dimid Hayes ..........................4 When RFD Came South ...................Franklin Abbott .......................7 One Man’s Life Adventure with Rural Gay Community .................Peter Kendrick ........................9 A Letter from Allen Young .................Allen Young ..........................12 RFD Spring 1976 Issue Changed Life’s Course ..................Dennis Helmus .......................14 White Crane Spreads Wings ...............Toby Johnson ........................16 Serious Flux .............................Bo Young ............................19 On RFD’s 50th Anniversary Issue ...........Eli Andrew Ramer ....................23 Oh Mama Mia: An Appreciation of Sister Mish ..........Sr. Clara Cum Passionata RMG MOPI ..24 Jim Jackson’s Rarely Seen Work ............Jim Jackson ..........................26 Filmmaker Lawrence Brose, De Profundis and Radical Faeries ........Keith Gemerek aka Fussy lo Mein ......29 Doing time with RFD .....................Bambi Gauthier ......................31 RFD Team Muses On Producing This Zine! ..Rosie Delicious. ......................35 RFD as Therapy ..........................Robert D. Mathis-Friedman ............41 Fifty Years! ...............................Gordon Binder .......................42 Richard Vyse ..................................................................43 Printed Pages, Time, and Ages .............That Boy From Kentucky ..............44 RFD Took My Cherry .....................Johnny Townsend ....................45 Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski ..Steven Riel ...........................46 On Seeing One's Self, Years Later, in an Inexpensive Restaurant ............Walta Borawski ......................49 Sequoia .................................Don Shewey .........................50 Excerpt from Divining Desire ..............Sequoia Thom .......................53 In Essaouira .............................Maytag Dishwasher ...................56 Jerry Berbiar— Apr 23, 1955–Aug 5, 2024 ........................................60 Stuart Auld—May 6, 1953-June 26, 2024 .........................................624RFD 199 Fall 2024 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 roll- ing wooded hills of the Arkansas Ozarks. An older cousin had been assigned to Harrison, AK as a VISTA volunteer. A domestic ver- sion of the PEACE Corp, she wel- comed 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 any- thing to them having two female pets. They replied, “We’re lesbi- ans.” 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. Now that I think about it, they’d intuited some- thing 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 bor- rowed 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 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 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, Fayette- ville, AR, Norman, OK, Salt Lake City, UT, Madi- son, WI. The letter writer’s name was Dennis Williams. I wrote to him, he replied and invited me to come vis- it. 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 Early RFD Memories by Dimid Hayes Mulberry House, Summer 1976 Front row: Dimid Hayes, Dennis Melba'son Back row: Michael Oglesby, Charlie Thornton, Jack (Carlotta) Kendrick. RFD 199 Fall 2024 5 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. Fag- gots 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 or- ganizing, 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 Char- lie 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. In the fall of 1976, after the summer bicenten- nial 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 Ken- drick (Carlotta) and Sam Edwards (LaWanda Rose.) Five of us, myself, Dennis, Charlie, Michael and Jack, traveled in an International Harvester Jeep- like thing, loaned to us by the dyke contingent of Mulberry House. They were busy buying and outfit- ting their land named Yellow Hammer, out in rural Madison county. I don't remember a whole lot about that trip to Iowa. We did meet the founders of RFD, Don Eng- strom and his partner, whose name I can’t remem- ber. And several other gay men from across the up- per 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 Ho- mosexuals 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 is- sues 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 Cernun- nos Shawl. Milo Guthrie (Pyne) joined us for producing this issue because he’d been very involved with several recent issues of RFD. LaSIS as a group had traveled from New Orleans to Benson, AZ for the first National Confer- ence 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 spiritual- ist 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 Cover of issue #22.6RFD 199 Fall 2024 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 transcenden- tal 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 Cernun- nos 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. 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 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 histori- cal 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. RFD provided us with a voice, a balm and direc- tion 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 (Wil- liams) and Dimid Hayes have been placed in the Georgia State University Gender and Sexuality Ar- chives along with Franklin Abbot and Cathy Hope’s archival materials.) Drawing by the author made in 1976 based on the photo prior at Mulberry House Garden. RFD 199 Fall 2024 7 When RFD Came South by Franklin Abbott RFD came South with Feygele ben Miriam. Feygele had been part of the Wolf Creek Collec- tive 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 spiritu- ally different. Feygele was one of their most promi- nent and outspoken avatars. I was in my late twenties and still a neophyte when I went to an event in Athens, Georgia spon- sored 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 po- sition, 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 acco- lade “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 edi- tor 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.Next >