I’m not a hippy, and definitely not a radical faerie, but I did go to a very un-selective small liberal arts in Arkansas that had some hippy-fruity-fairy vibes—long afternoons of smoking pot in the woods, putting flowers in our hair, wearing ugly colorful genderfuck, having groupsex with patchouli-scented people, and planning trips to protest the School of the Americas or visit The Farm.
My involvement with these activities was, except for the pot, peripheral, but for a moment sophomore year I got genuinely into Harry Hay and his trajectory of homo-communism to homo-hippie-ism (with an unfortunate but not so surprising detour through NAMBLA). The Radical Faeries hold out the promise that we could be gay without living in cities, as butch gym clones or assimilated consumers, that we could combine unmasculine flamboyance with a return to nature and a pre/post-Christian paganism. Now I’d never actually lived anything like a stereotypical gay city life, and was only just out of the closet, so I’m not sure quite what I found exciting about this, except perhaps that it was, on the one hand, so weird, and on the other, made gays—and especially effeminate ones—out to be so important, a revolutionary vanguard more of gender-spiritual than sexual-material liberation.
Thankfully I lost interest in Hay and the RFs pretty quickly—I am not built for rural life; I can’t even drive!—but my then-boyfriend and his best female friend (named after a distant male ancestor who’d been a Confederate general) caught my passing enthusiasm and carried it further, taking a road trip that summer to visit surviving Radical Faerie communes across the country (he since has normalled up; she’s a rural doula in a polycule—it’s sort of Will and Grace meets “Jenny and the S Dog”).
The closest I’ve gotten since to enacting hippie/RF values is not giving out grades or assignments in my last years of teaching at Chicago (at a certain point, the crunchy democratic spirit is indistinguishable from laziness)—although teaching the Great Books without grades was also a way of becoming the Baptist youth ministers I’d hated in my adolescence (what is Marx saying to us today, y’all?). Anyway, although I loathe their bad smells, clumpy hair, ill-fitting clothes and stupid earnestness—and although much of their preaching sounds, taken word-for-word, like the slogans of woke “be kind!” bullies—I did and do have a certain distanced affection for the gentle people and their goofy-corny ways.
Which is why I got a few issues of RFD, a magazine for rural gays that became heavily inflected by Radical Faerie-ism, and present some choice bits here. They’re all from the period 79-82 (RFD seems to have not yet been aware of AIDS in that last year).
The art has a certain crude whimsy:
Importantly these stupid cock-bongs were made by incarcerated sissies; the magazine, like Fag Rag (which had a similar left-pagan-silly politics, but was based in Boston, not a country commune), put a lot of emphasis on reaching out to gay men in prison—featuring letters and articles from and about them (a topic what mainstream or even tediously woke gay/queer magazine now would devote a monthly feature to?).
(PS: I hope this letter doesn’t blow your liberal minds)
There’s some regular Whole Earth Catalog products-and-advice shit, like these features on kooky yurts and an apparently neglected nut:
But needless to say, this shit is a skim for me. I’m sure the cashew was forgotten for a reason. It has been weird, incidentally, to see how this sort of ‘Mongolian Cloud House’ and non-peanut nut butter thing off has gone from the post-Marxist stinky left to J Peterman-Goop yuppies to right-wing trad-wives.
RFD also featured a lot of bad, earnest poetry. I’m actually headed in a few weeks to the University of Wisconsin to do some research in their gay poetry archive on this kind of bad poetry from the 70s—beyond the formally perfect poems of like, real poets like Thom Gunn, or the experimental post-avant-garde work of Ashbery, there was a huge amount of rightfully forgotten political/personal poetry in magazines like RFD, Fag Rag, and Mouth of the Dragon. But as with shit like Rupi Kaur or Yung Pueblo today (the only Instagram poets I know), I’m curious about where bad poetry comes from—what function is it imagined to serve, and why does it look the way that it does? how do people learn how to write the kind of bad poems they do? Anyway, here’s some:
There’s music too! The 70s were also an era of terrible gay folk music, inspired I guess by the terrible feminist folk music, inspired by the terrible straight male folk music revivalists who were inspired by early American people too poor to make anything better. Tradition!
I do have a soft spot for the song from the era ‘Gay Spirit,’ which was played a number of times on the gay radio shows of the era that have been archived well enough for me to have heard them, Fruit Punch and Gay Life (maybe something to write about in a future episode) but otherwise this cannot compete with disco (a musical style that many of both the rural hippies and urban lefties denounced it—not so differently from the homophobes who finally killed it—as a decadent cynical capitalist corporate culture-substitute).
The real fun of any gay magazine, however, comes from the letters and personals:
Leave straight people alone!
Every gay, even every gay today posting on r/askgaybros, asks “Am I the only gay who…”—if gays before Stonewall, as Ed White says somewhere, all had the common experience of growing up worrying that they were ‘the only one’, all gays after Stonewall seem to have taken up the n+1 of that worry (or wish)…
It gets lonely on the neo-shamanic homestead, so the personals are full, sometimes even of people who aren’t particularly rural/radical-faerish:
What happened to these two? A Manais Clements graduated from high school in Oklahoma in the late 70s—and then? Hopefully she found her sugar daddy. As for Rand Lee, well, the Southern Garden Historical Society bulletin a few years back reports: “The North American Cottage Garden Society and the North American Dianthus Society have combined to produce a quarterly journal, Small Honesties, edited by Rand B. Lee, president and founder of the two organizations. Rand Lee is a renowned Dianthus authority and lectures often on the topic.” I can only hope it’s her, and that she finished her novel!