Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

2. Critical Rusticity

63 2 Critical Rusticity I’ve been trying to get it together for a move to the country—I’m so tired of the city, of the gay treadmill, recyclable people and city trips, but wondering how to made [sic] contact with other country-oriented faggots. Then—voila—RFD. —Anonymous, 1974 An Aesthetic of Anti-Urbanity At first glance, a rural farmhouse in Grinnell, Iowa (current pop., 9,205) seems an unlikely spot for a sustained campaign against the standardization of white urban gay male identity in the post-Stonewall United States. But consider this recollection of one holiday season in the winter of 1973: For Christmas that year I had bought Julia, one of my housemates, a subscription to Country Women, a rural feminist journal out of Mendocino [a small coastal community in northern California]. Reading and loving Country Women, I wondered why there wasn’t a similar magazine for gay men. I just knew that I couldn’t be the only gay man who liked rural life, though it sure seemed that way. The six other inhabitants of our it’s-not-a-commune-we-just-live-together farmhouse were straight but lovable. The available gay publications were all urban-oriented full of the latest news of cha cha palaces in San Francisco , shows off-off Broadway, trendy fashions from West Hollywood, Gloria Gaynor’s latest album, and how to make a killing in the real estate market. As for rural magazines like Mother Earth News, well, let’s just call these adamantly heterosexual.1 Julia’s subscription to Country Women’s rural lesbian separatism, it turns out, became the inspiration for the RFD (once referred to as “Rural Fairy Digest”) quarterly. RFD was one of the first anti-heteronormative, antiurbanist , and anti-middle-class journals for queers to appear as a challenge 64 Critical Rusticity to and a critique of newly nationalized “cha cha” gay publications like the Los Angeles–based Advocate. It was thus one of the first queer journals to extend the non-normative intersectional politics of the Gay Liberation Front to non-metropolitan U.S. audiences. Nearly two decades later, however, the midwesterners who founded RFD would have been hard-pressed to find critiques of normalizing urban gay culture in the pages of the journal they established. Take a spring 2000 issue, when a different set of RFD editors published “From Hippie to Fairy at Short Mountain Sanctuary,” a historical retrospective that made no mention of the Grinnell farmhouse or of Country Women’s influence. Located near the small town of Liberty, Tennessee, the Short Mountain Sanctuary (current pop., 17) had been a central gathering place for radical —not necessarily rural—faeries since 1979, the year that former Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay published “A Call to Gay Brothers” for a “Spiritual Conference” in RFD. The 2000 RFD essay traced a genealogy of this neo-primitivist gay male collective, a counterculture known to throw weeklong festivals in rural Appalachian mountains, Minnesota north woods, Arizona deserts, and elsewhere across the globe.2 The article glossed Short Mountain Sanctuary and presented a truncated history of its origins: “Hippies knew how to wear flowing clothes, embrace dirt, and worship the goddess. Gay men knew how to have lots of sex, when to wear black, and why to be attractive. They were all familiar with mind-altering substances. Community values and spiritual inspiration married marijuana and sex: the earth mother and pan. The offspring was the radical faeries, a term coined in the 1970s to reflect the need for a counter-cultural queer presence.”3 There is much to question in this succinct history—its glib sketch of a historically complex countercultural movement assumed to “embrace dirt”; its unspoken assumption that all “hippies” are male; its turn toward “earth mother” worship; and its spurious cross-identifications with spiritually inspired cultures that many radical faeries stereotypically located in the Native figure of the two-spirit.4 What is also curious about 2000 RFD’s unreflective equation among “hippy,” “gay,” and “radical faerie” is its unacknowledged reliance on the “values” of a communal “presence” that the journal was originally founded to push against—a sexual group identity that appears exclusively gay, exclusively male, and, ironically enough, exclusively urbanized. With allusions to leisure culture (“marijuana and sex”), style and sophistication (“when to wear black,” “why to be attractive ”), and knowingness (“Gay men knew,” “they were all familiar”), the Critical...