333

Out of the Closets, into the Woods: "RFD", "Country Women", and the Post-Stonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-Urbanism

Author(s): Scott Herring

Source: American Quarterly , Jun., 2007, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 341-372

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40068466

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods: RFD, Country Women, and the Post-Stonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-urbanism

Scott Herring;

Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 341

first glance, a rural farmhouse in Grinnell, Iowa, seems like an unlikely spot for a sustained campaign against the normalization of white urban gay male identity in the post-Stonewall United States.

But consider this recollection of one winter in 1973:

For Christmas that year I had bought Julia, one of my housemates, a subscription to Coun-

try Women, a rural feminist journal out of Mendocino [a small coastal town 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

Julias subscription to Country Women's rural lesbian-separatism, it turns out, became the inspiration for the RFD (or "Rural Fairy Digest") quarterly. RFD was one of the first anti-heteronormative, anti-urban, and anti-middle-class

journals for queers to appear as a challenge to and a critique of newly national- ized "cha cha" gay publications such as the Los Angeles- based glossy Advocate. It was thus one of the first queer journals to extend the non-normative inter-

sectional politics of the Gay Liberation Front (or GLF) to nonmetropolitan U.S. audiences. As of this writing, it remains so.

Nearly two decades later, however, the rural 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 of RFD that made no mention

of the 1 973 Grinnell farmhouse or of Country Women s influence. Located near

©2007 The American Studies Association

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342 I American Quarterly

the small town of Liberty, Tennessee, the Short Mountain Sanctuary had been

a gathering place for radical - not necessarily rural-identified - faeries since the summer of 1 979, 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 neoprimitivist gay male collective, a counterculture known for its festivals in rural Appalachian mountains, Min- nesota north woods, Arizona deserts, and elsewhere.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 1 970s 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; and its spurious cross- identifications with indigenous cultures that many radical faeries stereotypi- cally located in the figure of the berdache.4 What is also curious about 2000 RFDs unreflective equation between "hippy," "gay," and "radical faerie" is its unacknowledged reliance on the "values" of a communal "presence" that the journal was originally founded to fight 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 knowing- ness ("Gay men knew," "they were all familiar"), the history that late nineties

RFD offers here seems more the offspring of metro-oriented, racially norma- tive gay male cosmopolitanism than the issue of a radical, regionalized, and intersectional queer counterculture.

"From Hippy to Fairy at Short Mountain Sanctuary" thus confirms eth- nographer Scott Morgensens recent claim that many present-day U.S. radical faerie gatherings have erased their political history, "outpaced" "rural men's participation," and now consist primarily of middle-class "urban gay men, who

[frequent] gatherings as temporary rural retreats for the cultivation of a new cultural identity and spiritual insight for transport back to urban life."5 When

seen in this light, the amnesiac histories that late 1990s faeries tell themselves about their mid- to late- 1970s origins promote the mainstream "community

values" that they like to think they dance, sing, worship, and write against. And

though recent RFD articles have imagined male readers who are "not interested

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 343

in being 'bar clones', but who . . . explore their uniqueness and spirituality," the current publication may be closer to an urbanized version of U.S. gay male "bar clone" identity than it likes to presume (fig. I).6 In a telling moment, one disgruntled RFD reader lamented in 2000 that the journal is "quite a contrast from the early issues of RFD that came out in the mid-70s." He demanded: "Please cancel my subscription immediately! I thought your magazine was 'a country journal for gay men everywhere' but it's not! The 'RFD connotation used to stand for those living a rural lifestyle, country affairs, small town life,

etc. but not any more! Apparently your mag is now completely (90%+) a Radical Faery Digest."7

The following pages revisit RFDs early to mid-1970s "rural lifestyle" to argue that the quarterly did not initially stand in or stand for a radical faerie

digest that leisurely cosmopolites enjoyed as an armchair rural retreat (fig. 2). Rather, several working-class white males who politically affiliated with the Gay

Liberation Front founded the journal in 1974, and they imagined themselves as the antithesis of what many metropolitan-based radical faeries now consider

themselves to be. Quoting a sexological glossary titled "The Language of Ho- mosexuality," historian Jonathan Ned Katz notes in his Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary that "R.FD" initially connoted the transcontinental sweep of the U.S. Postal Service, or "/ftiral Free Delivery."8 In the late 1940s

and 1950s, white middle-class urban gay U.S. males appropriated this postal term to disparage what Katz describes as the "R.F.D. queen - a homosexual who lives in the country or in a small town, and who has homosexual impulses

and desires, but who does not understand the argot and ways, or know the habits and places of congregation of the homosexual fraternity in cities and metropolitan centers."9 In the 1970s, however, these so-called R.F.D. queens reappropriated this regional slur to express dissatisfaction with the "argot and ways" - the cosmopolitan styles - of an emergent white gay male "ghetto" cul- ture felt to be inherently normalizing rather than inherently oppositional. Far

removed from the sophistication and knowingness that marks the late-nineties

RFD (and many late-nineties post-Stonewall urban U.S. cultures), early seven-

ties RFD begins as a riposte to these "habits and places of congregation" - one that critiques via the unsophisticated, the anti-urban, the anti-urbane, and the

anti-cosmopolitan, and one keen to distance itself geographically, materially,

and aesthetically from a big-city "homosexual fraternity" through unexpected print alignments with small-town rural lesbians.10 Through such critiques, RFD

enabled the queer subjects in its pages and elsewhere to imagine and inaugurate critical horizons that engaged with those bodies and consciousnesses - such as working-class men, women, and queers of color - that were often excluded

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344 I American Quarterly

Figure 1.

RFD logo, RFD issue 122 (vol. 31, no. 4; Spring 2005): 44. Courtesy of Soami for the RFD Collective.

from the matrix of urbane metropolitan schemas even as the journal's non-normative engagements were sometimes incompletely realized.

RFD, that is to say, was one of the first prints to offer a ruralized counter to what Judith Halberstam

has termed U.S. -based metronormativity. By metronormativity, Halberstam

references a dominant "story of migration from 'country' to 'town'," "a spatial narrative within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring

life in a place of suspicion, persecution, and secrecy" and embraces a flight to

the city that imagines the metropolis as the only sustainable space for queers.11

To this compulsory narrative of rural-to-urban lesbian and gay migration, I add that racial, socioeconomic, and aesthetic norms inform metronormativity,

including what Jose Esteban Munoz terms the "normative ideal" of whiteness,

"an image of ideality and normativity that structures gay male [and lesbian] desires and communities" and "is reproduced transnationally through print advertising."12 To the racial and corporeal norms of such privileged whiteness, we could add the socioeconomic norms of the middle classes and the aesthetic

norms of urbanity, sophistication, and cosmopolitanism, or what is often referred to as "trendy fashion," "chic," "style," or "lifestyle." Together these four interlocking aspects of metronormativity - the narratological, the racial, the socioeconomic, and the aesthetic - reproduce the imaginary geographic ideals of post-Stonewall urbanism for men and women, an urbanism that facilitates the ongoing commodification and depoliticization of U.S. -based

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 345

Figure 2.

RFD logo, RFD issue 1 (Autumnal Equinox 1974): 1. Courtesy of Soami for the RFD Collective.

queer cultures. Taken as story, style, or both, metronormativity thus buttresses the narratives,

customs, and presumptions of many modern U.S.

urban gays and lesbians while it simultaneously enables these gays and lesbians to govern the aesthetic, erotic, material, and affective imaginaries of many modern queers, irrespective of "country," "town," or somewhere in between.

That said, I stress that the cosmopolitan middle-class styles of U.S. metro- normativity have always been countered by stylistic metro-subversions within

and without the U.S. metropolis. The radical sexual politics of the Gay Lib- eration Front, to take but one example, were integral rejoinders to the racial, gendered, and class-based codes of homonormativity that emerged in the early 1970s, even as the GLF oftentimes promoted one aspect of metronormativ- ity - rural-to-urban migration - in its emphasis on an urban-based politics of

"coming out" in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and other major cities.13 Homonormativity, that is to say, may facilitate metronormativity, but

the two are not always coterminous. Likewise, outside the U.S. metropolis, a complementary form that metro-subversions have taken is a deliberately queer anti-urbanism that marks journals such as RFD and Country Women. Though anti-urbanism historically refers to a conservative, urbanoid, and heteronormative "white flight" from the city that marked post- World War II

middle-class Anglo-American migrations to the suburbs, I here redeploy the term to describe a mode of queer critique that counters the normative ideals

(the "argot and ways") of homonormative ^Wmetronormative post-Stonewall urban gay lifestyles.14

This essay, then, extends recent historical scholarship on 1970s lesbian and gay U.S. print cultures to analyze the anti-urban politics of RFLfs early

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346 I American Quarterly

stylistics. It offers an aesthetic archeology of what one initial contributor, Donald Engstrom, later termed RFLfs "separatist fag community,"15 and what one historian of regional U.S. cultures, James T. Sears, sees as the quarterly's

"anarcho-effeminism."16 Extending their findings, the essay explores how gay male urbanity reprinted itself as a normalizing print style in 1970s glossy maga-

zines, and how RFD, alongside Country Women, responded to this historical

packaging with oppositional stylistics of its own. Hence it examines the visual culture and stylistic productions of rural-based queer print culture that speak volumes about the calcification of U.S. metronormativity over the course of

the 1 970s. Interrogating these paratextual layouts will enable critics to witness

how stylistics function as points of political and cultural contestation for gay urbanites and their detractors in several post-Stonewall U.S. literary public spheres. The layouts will also show how a rustic 1974 RFD logo tried to slow

the historical march of what would gradually become the urban sprawl of RFDs 2005 logoscape.

To accomplish these tasks, I return to a pivotal moment in U.S. sexual history that saw the fraught convergence of nationalizing glossies such as the "cha cha ' Advocate, regionalizing radical-lesbian mimeographs such as Coun- try Women, and anti-urban counterparts such as the Iowa-based RFD. I start in Los Angeles with an explosion of metropolitan lifestyle publications that crystallized aesthetic standards of gay urbanity in the post-Stonewall United States. I next explore rural California critiques launched against these stylistic ideals by lesbian separatists disenchanted with male "ghetto" publications. I finally return to where this essay began - a Grinnell, Iowa, farmhouse - to chart how RFD bounces on Advocate and. builds on Country Women s stylistics to advance what I theorize as critical rusticity. By critical rusticity, I mean an

intersectional opportunity to geographically, corporeally, and aesthetically inhabit non-normative sexuality that offers new possibilities for the sexually

marginalized outside the metropolis as well as inside it. Both of these jour- nals, we will see, exhibited complicated, sometimes flawed, gender and racial politics as they critiqued the Advocates metronormativity. Acknowledging their respective complexities, I show how a working-class "country journal for gay men everywhere" tried to present alternative aesthetic opportunities

to dominant U.S. gay lifestyles via rural U.S. women's alternative lifestyles. These alterative aesthetics were resistant to the "trendy fashions from West

Hollywood," but they were nevertheless indebted to the antifashion cultural

politics of Country Women.

* * * * *

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 347

RFD emerged at a pivotal moment in post-World War II U.S. lesbian and gay print cultures, one marked by a rising tide of consumer-oriented urban prints such as Advocate-, an increasing emphasis on world cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as the final destinations of internal U.S.

lesbian and gay migrations;17 and an increasing bifurcation of queer print culture into distinct lesbian and gay literary public spheres.18 1 overview some

aspects of U.S. lesbian-separatist print culture in the next section of this essay.

First I explore the inchoate literary fields that RFD and its counterpart, Country

Women, worked through and against. Recounting the publishing climate that led to RFLfs first issue in 1 974, Stuart

Scofield, a founder of the journal alongside Donald Engstrom, recalled that

at the same time that RFD was being born, the third generation of gay magazines began to appear: the heavily-capitalized "slicks" such as Blueboy, Honcho, and the new Goodstein

version of the Advocate. Giving Gay Lib, at best lip service, they have grown and prospered

since 1 974 by avoiding political controversy, selling sex and catering to the so-called afflu-

ent "gay lifestyle". Unlike all the preceding publications, these new ones are money-making

ventures - from Gay Liberation to a Gay Lifestyle, from attempts to define and establish a

separate gay culture and identity to the selling of advertisers' products in just five years.19

In his mention of "preceding publications" and other "generations," Scofield references major 1950s and 1960s homophile publications such as the Los Angeles-based ONE: The Homosexual Magazine and. the San Francisco-based Mattachine Review and The Ladder: A Lesbian Review. Each of these journals

tried to politicize a "national gay and lesbian community," although none fully achieved this goal.20

Scofield then notes that "earlier prints" like ONE and The Ladder were supplanted by locally based newspapers and journals such as "Gay Sunshine (San Francisco), Gay (NYC), Gay Alternative (Philadelphia), the pre-Goodstein

Advocate (Los Angeles), and Gay Community News and Fag Rag (Boston)."21 As I mentioned earlier, many of these metropolitan-based prints were committed

to intersectional Gay Liberation Front politics that engaged with concurrent critiques of racial, imperial, and capitalist norms, or what one GLF member (and subsequent founder of RFD) praised in the San Francisco Free Press as the interconnections of "women's liberation," "black [or Third World] liberation,"

Chicano liberation, and "white radical and ideologues" working against global capital and "Amerikan" imperialism.22 Likewise, part of the multifront political

aims of these queer prints was to critique the homonormative white gay male ghettos that were developing in Los Angeles and San Francisco. As one GLF manifesto noted, "ghetto institutions are still part of our lives . . . The prices

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348 I American Quarterly

are notoriously high, and the practices are often racist, sexist, and anti-work- ing-class. This materially oppresses female, black, and poor homosexuals and also reinforces the false consciousness (racism, sexism, class-chauvinism) which

divides us as a group and, in the end, oppresses us all."23 Advocate, however, dismissed the intersectional ideals of these Gay Liberation

prints and affirmed what Scofield sees as a homonormative and metronormative

"Gay Lifestyle." Indeed, by the early 1970s journals such as the Mattachine Review were either financially destitute or out of print, and anti-homonorma-

tive prints such as Bostons Fag Rag were nationally (if not locally) eclipsed by the Los Angeles-based Advocate.24 Emerging at the historical upswing of gay "ghetto"-ization, Advocate paradoxically began as an offshoot of U.S. homophile

monthlies and as a complement to urban-oriented gay liberation prints such

as Gay Community News and Gay Sunshine. By the mid-1970s, it surpassed both of these constituencies and "made a killing" as a "gay lifestyles magazine"

that promoted "trendy fashions."25 Historians have often charted Advocates devolution into an "affluent" lifestyle weekly as a refusal to maintain previous

allegiances to post-Stonewall intersectional politics.26 Yet even before Wall Street investment banker David Goodstein purchased the publication in 1974,

overhauled it into a slick glossy, and added the subtitle " Touching Your Lifestyle"

Advocate confirmed a white middle-class cosmopolitanism that marked norms

of cultural and economic capital for many gay men and lesbians, metropolitan

or not, and that RFD and Country Women would later try to counteract. To do so, Advocate imagined its gay readers as "heavily capitalized" con-

sumers and interpellated them into a normalized racial and class identity via an aesthetics of chic and fashionability. Scanning the layout of early 1970s Advocate, one is struck by the relentless promotion of this cosmo-urban style,

an endless sea of glittery ads for Persian rugs in Melrose, or skimpy swimwear,

or Art World, or swank nightclubs, or Eye Mystic jewelry, or David s Divine Dining Nightly in Melrose, or Glendons fine crystal, or Dresden kennels for your beagle, or advice for buying the perfect boat, or hat stores, or New Look

loungewear, or glass tabletops. There are also weekly columns with titles such as "BODY Buddy," "Fashionation," and "The Fine Art of Dining Out." To be more theoretical, there are ample opportunities for what Munoz, in his overview of mainstream New York City gay nightlife, terms "the dominant

imprint," "a blueprint of gay male desire and desirability that is unmarked and thus universally white" or what I see as the inchoate cultivation of U.S.

metronormativity grounded in an AdvocateLA. "ghetto" yet extending beyond this print-metropolis to encompass a globalizing U.S. nation-state.27 As one March 1970 "Exclusive To The Homophile Society From Coast To Coast"

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 349

advertisement for "specially designed" Eye Mystic 10K white-gold blue sap- phire rings promises: "We predict that the Eye Mystic will become the symbol of the Homosexual Society the world over."28

If not yet "the world over," then certainly the transcontinental United States

as the stylish print that fast became Advocate: Touching Your Lifestyle matched

the commodified bodies offered between its pages. Witness the following 1970 gray-balance subscription advertisement that records a shift from Gay Liberation to "Gay Lifestyle" (fig. 3). In its obsession with the duplication of

leisure-oriented white gay male "ghetto" bodies, this ad erases lesbians and queers of color. Six clustered scenes reproduce approximately thirty-eight per- sons, all white and none recognizable as female. Potential subscribers instead view exact replications of stylish men who dress the same, share similar chiseled

features, and look at the same copy of Advocate newsprint, whose front page reads "Groovy Guy Gala Goes Ga-Ga" and whose back page reads "What do 70,000 gay people have in common? The Advocate, that's what!"

In this advertising subscription, a developing apolitical urban clone culture becomes a uniform print culture, and unlike earlier publications such as Mat-

tachine and ONE or later prints such as RFD or Country Women, lesbians are nowhere in sight. Thus the slim body of a white male, hair coiffed, jean cuffs hemmed, calf muscles bulging, occupies a good third of the ad's frame. The epitome of "trendy fashion," this clean-cut reader presents himself as a sophis-

ticated cosmopolite for interested subscribers, and if his tight-fitting T-shirt and deliberately placed locks don't alert you to this, a quick semiotics of his sidekick poodle - another eager Advocate reader - certainly will.

This poodle, in fact, is key to decoding how Advocates visual culture stylizes

U.S. gay metro-norms to record a shift in male-centered U.S. metronormativity.

While most of the ad appears sleek, modern, and bulging - from the skyscrapers

to the Advocate reader s crotch - the poodle appears somewhat removed from this

glossy beefiness. With a bow on its head, it appears diminutive and effeminized.

Yet the fact that the subscription aligns the marginalized poodle with the Advocate

reader is noteworthy, since the dog functions as a representative carry-over from

pre-Stonewall metropolitan stylistics, one in which a classed version of white gay

male identity was registered through "fancy frills, froufrou, bric-a-brac, and au

courant kitsch."29 And that the poodle is also an avid Advocate reader (note its

wagging cotton-ball tail) is just as significant, given that this pre-Stonewall dog reads a post-Stonewall lifestyle magazine rather than politicized prints such as the contemporaneous Gay Liberation Front journal Fag Rag.

What the Advocates visual culture accomplishes here and throughout its pages is impressive. Its images translate the gendered, racial, and class biases

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350 I American Quarterly

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 351

of one pre-Stonewall generation of closeted middle-class white urban gay U.S. men - what a male GLF proponent criticized as a "bygone era of their fantasy world of poodle dogs and Wedgwood tea cups and chandeliers and all the fancy clothes and home furnishings that any queen could ever desire" - into the hy- permasculine norms of "ghetto" visibility.30 This historical move is condensed

into the spectacle of an apolitical Advocate reader and his dog, and together these

two come to epitomize a certain legend of homosexuality in the post-Stonewall U.S. city, a guiding mode of sophistication too often presumed to be intrinsic to

Western gay men. Notes queer theorist Joseph Litvak: "We have learned from

gay, lesbian, and queer theorists that gay people - especially gay men - have

traditionally functioned as objects of such distinguished epistemological and rhetorical aggressions as urbanity and knowingness. But, in the Western imaginaire, gay people also function as subjects of sophistication."31 To extend

Litvak, "Western" gay men - especially "West-

ern" lesbians and queers of color - within and

without the city are "traditionally" subjected to sophistication as an aggressive communal standard not only from outside queer group identity, but also from inside it. The 1970 Ad-

vocate image bears this out as it turns the "rhetorical aggressions" of an earlier

U.S. cosmo-stylishness into an aestheticized norm that ideologically imagines itself to be Americas Homophile Community.

To confirm its claim to represent this "gay community," Advocate nationalizes

metronormativity by condensing an imaginary Homosexual Society into three global cities. Indeed, this Advocate ad is one of the first of its historical kind

to illustrate another normalizing impulse that early RFD and Country Women work against: bicoastality.32 By bicoastality, I refer to an idealizing metropolitan

scenario akin to "the flight to the city" that constructs intranational, national,

and transcontinental lesbian and gay identities by imagining the evacuation of the regional and the rural into global cities such as New York, Los Asles,

and San Francisco. The Advocate ad thus translates localized imagines of urban cosmopolitanism into a bicoastal national readership that it ames applies universally to all queers irrespective of their geographic particul. To

do so, it subjects readers to an imagined Homophile Community boolded by geographic stereotypes of New York City, San Francisco, and Los ^eles with nothing in between. Left of the anonymous reader and his can are five scenes. One depicts Advocate subscription space. Another depicts lerdjz~v Advocate readers outside an unnamed bookstore. The remaining scenes - me- tonymies of a phantasmatic gay U.S. literary public sphere - figure specific

Figure 3.

Artist unknown. Advocate subscription advertisement, February 1 970. Courtesy of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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352 I American Quarterly

geographic locales. The Golden Gate Bridge, hillside Victorians, and a trolley overflowing with clones signify "San Francisco" and its growing Castro district. The arches of Washington Square, several raised water towers, and the Empire

State Building register "New York City" or, perhaps, Greenwich Village. And a day at the beach symbolizes "Los Angeles."

All told, we view leisurely San Francisco readers, leisurely New York City

readers, and leisurely Los Angeles readers, all joined through the Advocate subscription as a collective "America." In anticipation of later U.S. lifestyle slicks such as Out and MetroSource, these metropolitan localities confirm an Advocate imaginary that figures the urban white gay male ghetto as the locus of a nationalizing and nationalized queer U.S. identity. This Advocate ?A thus

represents the "urban" as a geographic and homogenized space of leisure, wealth, and consumption, which works to replace the notion - and the politics - of the U.S. city as a place of racially, corporeally, and socioecomoni-

cally diverse queers as well as the urban as a space

of political contestation, uprising, and revolution

that marked numerous metropoles in the late 1 960s and early 1 970s.33 This exemplary image is also one among the hundreds

of such images published in metropolitan gay lifestyle glossies in the decades after Stonewall, and its bicoastal focus on "trendy" contexts produced forms of

exclusion that RFD and Country Women pushed against (fig. 4).

• • • * *

If Advocates "70,000 gay people" subscription erased women in general and lesbians in particular, however, there were numerous rejoinders to this oversight

from white lesbian organizations, and they were blistering. Most notably, Del (Dorothy) Martin, a former editor of the Ladder, revoked her membership in the early 1970s homophile community and denounced white urban gay male publications in a manifesto titled "If That's All There Is." First published

by Advocate under the tongue-in-cheek title "Female Gay Blasts Men, Leaves Movement" in 1970 and later reprinted in the 1971 racially diverse and in- terclass collection Lesbians Speak Out, by the Oakland-based Women's Press Collective, Martins article bids "goodbye to all the 'representative' homophile publications that look more like magazines for male nudist colonies" and "goodbye to the gay bars that discriminate against women."34 In their place, she contends, "it is a revelation to find acceptance, equality, love, and friend-

ship - everything we sought in the homophile community - not there, but in the women's movement."35

Figure 4.

Artist unknown. Advocate subscription advertisement, January 31, 1973. Courtesy of the Kinsey Institute for the Study of Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 353

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354 I American Quarterly

With this farewell to Advocate, Martin joined a rising number of women's movement coalitions such as the National Organization of Women to launch critiques against misogyny, male-oriented capitalism, male-oriented aesthetics, and gay-male-oriented "ghetto" print cultures.36 In fact, Martin became a mem-

ber of NOW s board after breaking with nationalized homophile publications such as Advocate and, soon after, she emerged as a key spokeswoman for radical

lesbian separatism, a "lodestar of [largely white] Lesbian America in the 1 970s"

that encouraged political and cultural breaks from straight-male-identified (and

gay-male-identified) cultures to promote women-centric lifestyles.37 While there were numerous critiques launched against the racial norms of

lesbian separatism by queer of color/Third World feminists such as the Boston-

based Combahee River Collective, Cherrie Moraga, Rosario Moralas, Audre Lorde, Chrystos, and Gloria Anzaldiia, I want to explore the visual culture and paratextual print culture of lesbian separatism to see how it stylized its racial norms even as it critiqued homonormative ideals. Manifestos such as "Leaving the Gay Men Behind," by New York City's Radicalesbians, launched intersectional attacks on economic inequality, gender bias, and sophisticated stylistics - in brief, U.S. homonormativity - "as a form of oppression" that these critics sensed many white urban gay male middle-class publics typified.38

As self-identified lesbian separatist Karla Jay writes in her influential essay "No Man's Land":

I talk of women/lesbian culture and not gay male culture. I believe that culture is one area

in which lesbians have greatly diverged from gay men, perhaps because, as I have pointed

out, gay men have somewhat different roots, and, after all, they are men. . . . This is true, as

I've said, in part because gay men, being men, with greater stake in the ruling culture, have

relied heavily on already established institutions and forms for their "new" culture. Lesbians,

twice removed and thoroughly alienated, have started from scratch.39

As many white lesbian separatists produced this "women/lesbian culture and not

gay male culture," some (not all) lesbian separatists launched negative critiques via a politicized anti-aesthetic, a calculated stylization of the "not gay male"

that "greatly diverged" from a gay male metronormativity symbolized by the Advocate. In fact, there was a significant strain of metropolitan-based 1970s lesbian separatism that promoted "antifashion" aesthetics for those "who were striking out against the Hollywood-Madison Avenue-Playboy ideal" as well as for those, like Martin, who were striking out against dominant publications

felt to be more like "magazines for male nudist colonies."40 Or, as historian Robert Streitmatter explains, "lesbians did not write so colorfully about their

culture" as white gay "ghetto" males did, primarily, he assumes, because urban

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 355

U.S. gay men were thought to place more "value on physical beauty."41 I have no desire to assess the truth-value of this last claim. Nor am I invested

in defining radical lesbians of any color or class solely as antisophisticates. Nor am I eager to reproduce stereotypes of 1970s lesbian separatism as "unsophis-

ticated."42 A quick glimpse into the historical complexities of any pre- or post-

Stonewall U.S. lesbian cultures immediately proves otherwise. And a materialist

critique that attends to white gay men's access to capital and publishing centers

also informs my understanding of these anti-aesthetic discourses. But when a prominent lesbian separatist such as Jay cautions that "we do not become the

women of gay men," I am nevertheless intrigued by how a particular strain

of white lesbian separatism, implicitly or explicitly, challenges the norms of Americas Homophile Community with its own aesthetic critiques, and how such

critiques functioned as both anti-Madison Avenue and anti-Advocate.43 Likewise, I am interested in how stylistics of the nonurban often informed

these politics, and how these cultivations facilitated RFLts anti-urban queer cri-

tique. One critically neglected anti-middle-class journal of white-based lesbian

separatism - Country Women - did just this as it aestheticized Jay s "No Mans

Land" into a unique form of cultural criticism that signified on the Advocates bicoastal ideals. In her negative vision, Jay makes mention of "the proliferation

of lesbian media after the Stonewall uprising."44 Among the numerous journals

that she catalogs {Lesbian Tide, Big Mama Rag, Lesbian Connection, and herself, among others) she highlights Country Women s dedication to "rural living" and

its critique of gay male "ruling culture."45 Within this growing schism of radical

lesbian separatism and gay male "ghetto"-ization - a schism that AIDS activ- ism of the 1980s and 1990s would later bridge - Country Women introduced geographic separatism as a possible strategy against middle-class "male culture" as well as the gendered bias of bicoastal aesthetic norms. It "developed a critical

view of urbanity," argues historian Martin Meeker, as it "struggled] to build

. . . outside of/and or independent of Americas largest cities where gay [male] ghettoes were located."46

First published in the rural community of Albion, California, Country Wom-

en situated itself 147 miles north of San Francisco's developing gay "ghetto." Printing the journal from 1973 to 1979, with an Anchor Press/Doubleday compilation released in 1976, Country Women s collective was composed of working-class and lower-middle-class women who sometimes addressed the sexual politics of opposite-sex rural communal living as they also invoked a back-to-the-land ideology, a countercultural ideology that often emphasized organic farming, communal activity, and eco-activism.47 More often than not,

members of the collective concerned themselves with publishing the principles

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356 I American Quarterly

of radical white lesbian separatism, "which whilst not exclusively anti-urban,

could perhaps best be enacted away from man-made cities."48 Country Women readers and writers thus imagined themselves as an antidote to male-oriented

urban print cultures in general and gay-male-oriented urban print cultures such

as the Advocate represented in particular. Much of the journal was separatist - or

"woman-identified" - in its back-to-the-land politics.49

While this rural lesbian separatism was often dependent upon strategic es- sentialism, Utopian impulses critiqued by queer of color/Third World feminists,

and an unquestioned reliance on racial normativity, it is clear that the Country Women journal tried to advance "alternative (non-urban, non-industrial, non-

consumerist) lifestyles" at levels of both content and form.50 The journal was

founded by white blue-collar and lower-middle-class feminists in low-wage occupations - one was a secretary, another a waitress - who were quick to re-

spond to the socioeconomic difficulties of rural living and who were eager to instruct other separatist-minded feminists in the complexities of everyday land

cultivation. "Unless you have inherited money," readers are informed, "buying land means saving money - either one or two people saving a lot of money (several thousand dollars anyway) or a group of people saving smaller amounts."51 Though it explicitly recognized that rural communal living was not an affordable option for a majority of feminists, Country Women earnestly cultivated a

nonurban reading public that it felt offered a "living alternative" to dominant middle-class lifestyles that would influence RFD. And if its working-class readers could not finance a move away from cities (or if they questioned the political value of a "back-to-the-land" movement), some could afford a Country

Women subscription that enabled them to imagine themselves as members of a nonurbanist collective.

As we see from the front cover of a special issue dedicated to "Living Alter-

natives," Country Women figured itself as a counter to supposedly "man-made cities" and the aesthetic, socioeconomic, and narrative trappings that these environments were ideologically thought to entail for women, lesbian or not (fig. 5). Fighting what it saw as the aesthetic and socioeconomic norms of met- ropolitan leisure classes, this front page sketches an alternative to these ideals with idealizations of its own. What is most obvious about this front cover is

its separatist erasure of men. Four clustered scenes reproduce approximately

four persons, none recognizable as male. Moving clockwise, we see one female harvesting hay. Another reads in front of a wood-burning stove. Another picks

apples. And another sows a field. Though each female is singular, these women

Figure 5.

Carmen Goodyear. Front page of Country Women,]\ine 1973. Courtesy of the artist.

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 357

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358 I American Quarterly

are braided together through an illustrated border of grape and pumpkin vines.

None of these females has a recognizable face since they are blank, though each is unmarked as white. None is wearing particularly "trendy" fashions. None

participate in a capitalist economy. And none, to my knowledge, is beholden to ideals of "physical beauty" that stereotypically marked 1 970s gay male cul- tures and that some strains of lesbian-separatist critique fought against. They are instead opposed to - and geographically distanced from - a stylistics of cosmo-urbanism that marks dominant homosocial publications such as Play- boy, and dominant homophile publications such as Advocate. This Utopian scene presents potential subscribers with an alternative collective, a rusticity

that "naturally" separates from the "man-made" "institutions" of urban gay

print cultures by cloning white female anticlones. The print styles of Country

Women, original founders Sherry Thomas and Jeanne Tetrault noted, "were simple and funky and plain crude."52

To rephrase these last claims: Country Women s simple, funky, and plain crude stylistics works against the bicoastal male sophistications of "Holly- wood-Madison Avenue" and Advocate with a strategic aesthetic of womanly ruralism. Though the journal did promote an unquestioned emphasis on the white female body, the front cover also shows two-dimensional pumpkins figuratively overwriting slick "Gay Lifestyle" designs. This is the textual re- production of Jays "woman/lesbian culture" as "not gay male culture," and it occurs throughout Country Womens paratextual "No Man's Land" during the mid to late 1970s. As we see with the front page to "Living Alternatives," covers of the quarterly were always hand drawn. Captions to articles were often scribbled or written in bubble letters. And its nonindustrial, nonconsumer-

ist politics refused capitalist advertisements. Through such stripped-down imaginaries, the journal naturalizes its critiques of cosmopolitanism through a woman-identified ecopolitics of coastal separatism.

Country Women also flouts these female-dominated stylistics with invoca- tions of graphic design that were anything but graphically designed, that were

more akin to a handwritten do-it-yourself (DIY) print for those who could not

afford typewriters or mimeographs (fig. 6). As opposed to the leisurely "fash- ionation" that saturated mainstream and middle-class "ghetto" print culture, the journal offers a space where metronormative stylistics - or a particular body type, if not a particular body's gender or racial identity - really doesn't

matter. In keeping with these principles and its anticapitalist critiques, the quarterly published creative writings such as "A Fat Women's Journal," as well as how-to guides for collecting shellfish, sowing fields, raising sheep, chopping

wood, bartering, understanding welfare rights, building hot beds, and raising

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 359

Figure 6.

Contents page of Country Women, October 1974. Courtesy of Carmen Goodyear and Sherry Thomas for the Country Women Collective.

calves. In the journal's first statement of purpose we

are told: "Each issue will be regular columns plus articles about a central theme. Regular columns will include gardening, raising animals, how to use tools, building, food, country skills, alternatives (life styles), women's health, and reviews of women's

literature." In brief, Country Women ruralized a strain of anti-middle-class white lesbian separatist critique into a distinctive version of radicality. And

though it may have reinforced racial norms in its neglect of metropolitan or nonmetropolitan Third World/queer feminists, its visual culture nonetheless

dismissed burgeoning gay male metro print norms. In lieu of Advocates nationalizing boutiques, then, Country Women offered

readers a critical rusticity that encouraged a "lack of cultural sophistication

and a preference for practical know-how."53 By stating critical rusticity, I follow

anthropologist Gerald W. Creed and cultural critic Barbara Ching, who em- phasize "the possibility of a culturally valuable rusticity" and note that "identi-

ties" stereotypically "based in the country can be considered rustic while those

associated with the city are urbane, or, more vernacularly, sophisticated"^ And

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360 I American Quarterly

by this term, I refer not only to an actual geographic space removed from the

metropolitan such as Albion, California. I also refer to an antagonistic mode of queer critique and a novel structure of feeling, a rhetorical and affective engagement with U.S.-based metronormativity that critiques any representa- tion of the rural as a pastoral space removed from conditions of conflict and

inequality, as it also supports the representational politics of those (such as the rural working-classes) often typed as "rustic."

By accomplishing these tasks, such critical rusticity, notes one Country Women contributor in a self- reflexive "Retrospective" about an unnamed "rural

commune in the northern Midwest," would be an anarchic queer "state" that is adamantly not a commodifying urban gay nation-state. "This allows us to live together in a state of what I'd call loving anarchy, and what a friend rephrased as 'responsible anarchy/" she tells readers. "We need neither structure nor rules to live together. We find ourselves sharing work freely."55 It is precisely

this "responsible anarchy" that so intrigued RFD founder Stuart Scofield, who was unimpressed by the "cha cha palaces" and "trendy fashions" of the Advocates metronormativity, and who, "reading and loving Country Women' in the winter of 1973, was inspired to print a complementary quarterly for "country men everywhere."56

*****

First published in August 1974 with a print run of seven hundred copies, RFD, in its inaugural issue, made clear that the journal extended the rural stylistics of Country Women, that the working-class editors imagined themselves

as non-normative alternatives to bicoastal U.S. gay lifestyle. The journal was published by the lesbian-run Iowa City Women's Press and strove to include

lesbians of any color - separatist or not - in its pages. In the quarterly's first issue, the collective published an introduction titled "Rustic Fairy Dreams," which confessed that "No women have contributed material for this first is-

sue, but we hope it is not so male-oriented/dominated to prevent Lesbians from using this magazine for communication with each other. And perhaps, with the Earth as our common ground, we can begin a much needed dialogue between gay women and men."57

This intersectional emphasis on cross-gender alliance was complemented by RFDs critique of U.S.-based capitalism and its attention to racial representa- tion. Much like Country Women, RFD too advocated a critical rusticity as it offered readers an anti-cosmopolitanism that undid Advocate ideals of middle-

class culture and corporeality. Using language that strikingly mirrors Country

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 361

Women editorials, the first issue included a tongue-in-cheek advertisement for

the Hop Brook Commune in rural Massachusetts:

We share most of the values that you would expect from an alternative society - steering clear

of consumerism, commercialism, T.V., A.M., affection, competition, intellectualized bullshit,

egoism, role-playing, meritocracy and the rest of that bourgeois. We are multi-uni-racial. WE RECOGNIZE NOT LESS THAN ONE SEX AMONG HUMAN BEINGS.

Rules. We have no rules. If we were to draw up a rule, it would be that no one here will objectify another (which is also to be objectified). We don't want this commune to be a crash pad - a homosexual motel - a place to bring the individual and collective falseness of

"self-hate and of "self "-love of either the major cultures or of the gay subcultures. But we have no fixed structures or systems for ourselves.58

With rhetoric that echoes Country Women's claim that one "needs neither structure nor rules to live together," RFD situates itself outside the "rules" of

heteronormative ("major") culture and an increasingly homonormative gay male subculture. Refusing to become the print equivalent of a bourgeois "ho- mosexual motel" or an armchair urban gay rural retreat that would characterize

later radical faerie gatherings, the journal distances itself from the consumerism

and the commercialism thought to characterize mid-1970s urban gay lifestyle publications as it, like Country Women, merges countercultural and back-to- the-land ideologies. Though initially founded by white men, it also refuses "gay-ghetto" aesthetic norms with what one contributor called "its agony under

the tinsel, dealing out death to the spirit but surfaced with glamour,"59 and it tries to reach readers less settled into the "collective falseness" of capitalist

homonormativity and less indebted to what was becoming a slick mainstream subculture.60 In this focus on "multi-uni-racial," gender, and capitalist oppres- sion, RFD extends the political aims of metropolitan-based Gay Liberation Fronts as it also critiques a dominant U.S. "Gay Lifestyle." Recounting the journal s economic critiques of ghetto prints, one initial editor recalled that "we were poor and knew that many readers were poor, and 75 <£ seemed the

upper limit of what we personally could afford to spend for a magazine and it seemed what our collective political consciousness would allow."61

Thus the working-class editors of RFD - a journal under perpetual financial strain - imagined themselves as an extension of anti-homonormative urban-

produced gay liberation magazines such as Bostons Fag Rag. "RFD was the last Gay Liberation magazine to begin, in many ways quite fittingly. Just as some of the counter culture people were choosing the quiet organic life, gay people began to see rural life as a real option to the urban ghettos."62 But I also

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362 I American Quarterly

highlight that RFD was adamantly not urban oriented, nor did it participate in the rural-to-urban metronormativity that marked even the most politically radical queer prints of the 1970s. Like its predecessor Country Women, RFD instead offered what one issue termed a "reader-participatory adventure" for

nonbourgeois readers that details forging for edible wild violets, paper cut- ting, goat dairying, water dowsing, basket making, and cooking with bark.63 It also functioned as a "de-isolating connection" for queer readers who could not afford a move to a city, or who could not participate in the imaginary metropolitan "flight" that I detailed earlier.64 Such an anti-metronormative and

anti-homonormative agenda builds from rural lesbian separatism in particular, but it also refuses to separate itself from lesbians in general, as the first issue of

RFD stressed. Explained one self-identified RFD queen: "I felt very alienated

from the faggot scene and found myself constantly surrounded by Lesbians I was close to. I hardly used the city at all for things I had in the past."65

I emphasize that these anti-urban dismissals do not fall under the rubric of a conventional and racist "white flight" from the city since they are liter- ally a "flight" from racially normative metropolitan gay culture. Like Country Women, RFD was more interested in defining itself against these metro-norms,

as both the journals rhetoric and print aesthetics suggest (fig. 7). Compare the following 1974 subscription ad to the 1970 Advocate subscription previously shown. What is noteworthy is how the RFD composition lays itself out as a nonbourgeois "faggot separatist" offshoot of rural lesbian separatist print cul- ture and gay liberation, how it reprints itself below a subscription to Country Women by grafting itself onto Country Women. What also stands out is how these subscriptions are scrawled in chicken scratch type rather than set in a "Groovy Ga Ga" metro type. Unlike the Advocates imposing and crisp logo font, shown in the bottom left hand of figure 3, here we have the aesthetic

negation of such cosmo-stylization. In the RFD subscription, the typography slants. The initials are wobbly. Bold-typed abbreviations appear to tumble off their lines. There is no uniform typeset. The ad jerks from lowercase cursive

to uppercase print. And the spacing is skewed. That this double ad is not, in /£FZ)-speak, "surfaced in glamour" cuts to the chase of the quarterly's anarchic

attempt to undermine U.S. metronormativity. It is not glossy. It is not full of

flair. It is not beholden to male physical beauty. It is not a sophisticated style. It is not fashionable. It is instead critically rustic, a textual repetition of Country

Womens hyperfeminized, anti-middle-class rusticity. And this alternative liter-

ary public sphere functions as both a negative and a positive counter to the Advocates mass-produced counterpublic. It is "the rural feminist experience,"

the subscription suggests, which is also the radical rural experience of reading,

writing, and participating in early RFD.

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 363

Figure 7.

RFD/Country Women subscription advertisement, RFD issue 1 (Autumnal Equinox 1974): 11. Courtesy of Soami for the RFD Collective.

Indebted to Country Women, these stylistics also

owe an unacknowledged debt to the working-class white rural cultures that refused to assimilate into

the middle-class metronormativity of the mid- 1970s (and that did not participate in dominant

"white flight" narratives or styles of straights, lesbians, or gays). Given that the journal's editors were economically impoverished, rural based, and resis- tant to self-identifications as urbanites, some came to embrace not only the

subcultural slur of the "R.F.D. queen" but also the regional slur of the work- ing-class "hillbilly." As one RFD contributor from rural Massachusetts noted about Bostons metronormative climate in 1976: "Every time I go to the city, there s less and less there that I can relate to at all, even meeting people who are there. ... I don't know what I'd relate to them about. It's really hard."66 And his partner: "I just feel funny going into a bar in Boston and walking up

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364 I American Quarterly

to someone and saying, 'How's your bean plants, baby?' I don't have much to talk with people there, it seems. We've become such lovely hillbillies. When we go into town, we get dressed up, but it's not getting dressed up like people in

Boston do. Like we put on a pretty flannel shirt."67 Though the term hillbilly historically refers to the rural, impoverished white populations of Appalachia,

this comment suggests that many RFD readers, writers, and artists in nonur- ban areas embraced (or, perhaps, reappropriated) a "hillbilly" working-class style as a way to affirm the possibility of a culturally valuable - and culturally

critical - rusticity that questioned the normative ideals that were crystallizing in the post-Stonewall United States.68

Though this "hillbilly" representation may be racially normative, RFD nev- ertheless deploys the stereotypically white working-class aesthetic to imagine

something other than the masculinist "bar clone" style that saturates Advocate and other nationalizing gay male slicks. The handwritten ad presents mirror- image calligraphy for both Albion's Country Women and Grinnell s RFD, which

amounts to a duplication of the former's nonurban, nonconsumerist aesthetics that extends into a unique form of anti-urbanism.

Deploying the translocalities of Albion and Grinnell

against the bicoastal U.S. metropolis, RFD resists incorporation - inscription - into the stylized aes-

thetics that is Advocates nationalizing ghetto culture

as it imagines itself to be what cultural historian Beth

Bailey elsewhere terms "the antithesis of bicoastal sophistication."69

In so doing, disparaged "R.F.D. queens" transform into bumpkin-fied RFD faeries; Scofield, Engstrom, and other RFD editors conjure an alternative print culture for reading publics removed from "the latest news of cha cha palaces in San Francisco, shows off-off Broadway, trendy fashions from West Hol-

lywood, and Gloria Gaynor's latest album"; and RFD quarterly becomes an aesthetic reprint of Country Women quarterly as well as a political reprint of "country women" the separatist rural collective. As it seeks independence from

the national norms of America's Homophile Community, what RFD imagines

here is nothing less than a Gay Liberation Front - an aesthetic dislocation, so to speak - that unhinges itself from the domineering stylistics of normative

urban gay male U.S. print culture. And much like Advocates pervasive bicoastal cosmopolitanism, this strategy of critical rusticity recurs through the entirety

ofearly/?FD(fig. 8).

*****

Figure 8.

Richard Phillips. RFD Statement of Purpose, RFD issue 2 (Winter Solstice 1974): 1. Courtesy of Soami for the RFD Collective.

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 365

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366 I American Quarterly

As I noted in my introduction, RFLfs early efforts were soon complicated

by a neoprimitivism that gradually overtook the journal once it was dominated by the radical faerie movement in the early 1980s, but its initial issues can be

historically recuperated. The first instances of RFLfs critical rusticity let us

imagine alternative possibilities for belonging within the sexual boundaries of the geographic U.S. nation-state, as well as for imaginatively extracting ones self from metronormativity at the moment of its historical inception in

post-Stonewall queer cultures. And though predominantly anti-middle-class white men dissatisfied with the homonorms of the bicoastal metropolis first

deployed its strategies, the journals tactics today reverberate for many queers of

any color and class regardless of where they might be geographically situated, metropolitan areas or not. As RFD moved its publication base from rural Iowa to the rural Northwest to rural North Carolina in the half decade following its

first 1 974 issue, we see how self-identified working-class "country men" aligned

themselves with self-identified anti-middle-class "countrywomen" to replace an

Advocate-inspired "gay nationality" with a small-town queer regionality, how RFD undercut the urbanity of gay U.S. print culture with a mimeographed insistence on the intranational (fig. 9).70

As this hand-drawn 1974 image of transcontinental U.S. RFD readership suggests, the journal not only advanced Country Women s aesthetics to counter

Advocates bicoastal cosmopolitanism. At times it also signified on Advocates nationalist impulses to offer readers a regionalized queer country. Like much of the typescript and many of the images featured in early RFD, this drawing

too is somewhat poorly drawn and crude. Missing the sleekness that defined

concurrent metro-oriented gay lifestyle magazines, we instead have a map of the United States on which many of the state lines appear scribbled or blurred, and it looks as if the artist has traced the outline of the continental U.S. border

from a standardized map and then loosely delineated the states. Printed over these boilerplate states are 149 dots, each signifying an RFD reader or subscriber,

with question marks around states where readership cannot be verified. This map could be critiqued for its unexamined national emphasis (Mexico

and other hemispheric nation-states in North and South America are notably absent). Likewise, compared to Advocates "70,000" readers in 1970, these scattered RFD dots may seem insignificant for political mass mobilization, and they certainly did not stop the onslaught of cosmo-urbanisms that confirmed

metronormativity. But reading this "RFD Country" map in an alternative light, we might follow Lisa Lowe's and David Lloyd s advice that "resistances are more and more articulated through linkings of localities that take place

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 367

Figure 9.

"RFD Country," RFDissue 2 (Winter Solstice 1974): 3. Courtesy of Soami for the RFD Collective.

across and below the level of the nation-state,

and not by way of a politics that moves at the level of the national or modern institutions."71

If such is the case, then these hand-drawn mim-

eographed dots might best be seen as tiny DIY pinpricks in the nationalizing U.S. imaginary that was Advocate urban visual print culture, as micropolitical

interventions in the massive public literary sphere that the Los Angeles-based magazine came to exemplify.

Though RFD only had seven hundred or so subscribers by 1979, we might best read these dots as micro-interventions that reestablish the regional, the rural, and the nonmetropolitan in order to blast open the bicoastal ideals of a normalizing U.S. gay print culture for anti-metronormative and anti-homonor-

mative audiences of any color or class. As Advocate obliterated other possible U.S. geographies with its emphasis on the bicoastal, the white, the male, the

fashionable, and the middle class, "RFD Country" insists on reintroducing the very local and regional and often working-class styles and states that are ren- dered inconsequential. The caption below this cartography of "RFD Country" reads: "At this moment, RFD is being read in Vida, Nampa, Monona, Louisa; Philo, Solon, Malmo, Garnavillo; in River Rouge, Rogue River; Fall Creek,

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368 I American Quarterly

Clear Creek, and Cross Creek . . . Camp Verde, Junction City, Liberty and Independence; Honeydew and Orange; Alpine, Bunceton, Caspar, Dearing and right where you're sittin'."72

These localities are, I note in closing, the supposedly unsophisticated or rustic regions forgotten, dismissed, and disavowed in the forging of 1970s U.S. gay "ghetto" culture. They are also the geographic and imaginary spaces where a collective and critical lesbian and gay anti-urbanism emerged even as national urban prints championed a bicoastal "flight to the city." As RFD readers reworked U.S. metronormativity with a consideration of queer spaces "right where you're sittin," the initial issues of the quarterly fought subscription

with subscription, and the journal separated from the cosmopolitan typing and the ideological geographies of metronormativity with a typography that resisted urbane stylistics.

Through these counter-subcultural strategies, early RFD presented readers

with the visual challenge of a regionalized alternative literary public sphere that connected rural queers outside homonormative "ghettoes" in New York

City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It wrote over Advocates national ideals with rural lesbian separatist "living alternatives" inspired by Country Women. It

circulated a novel imaginary of U.S. sexual citizenship and national belonging, one that might have been complicit in advancing a national and Westernized identity, but one that nevertheless thinks itself a regionalized alternative to the

stylized homophilia found in imaginary white urban geographies. And while later RFD and early Country Women may have both instantiated racial norms, the journal's early collectives nevertheless intended to be comprehensive, inter-

sectional, and politically anti-assimilationist as they advocated a GLF-inspired

capitalist critique for ruralized queers. With help from Country Women, RFD fantasized that it was a Rural Free Delivery from the stylistics of a metronorma-

tive U.S. identity that, in countless regions, many refused to purchase, since

the price of ghetto institutions was notoriously high. The aftershocks of such metronormativity, it bears repeating, continue to try and to tax queer cultures

and queer studies, no matter where they might be geographically "sittin'," to this present day.

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were prepared for the 2006 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, as well as for audiences at SUNY-Albany and the University at Buffalo. I thank Sherry

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 369

Thomas, Carmen Goodyear, Sister Soami, and Donald Engstrom for their generous permissions and recollections; Linda Garber, Marjorie Pryse, and Ann Pellegrini for their knowledge base of radical U.S. feminisms; and John Howard, Ed Comentale, Shane Vogel, and Karen Tongson for encourag- ing drafts. Several librarians also offered archival assistance: Bill Brockman at the Penn State Paterno Library; Glen Martin at the University of Illinois History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library; and Shawn Wilson at the Kinsey Institute. I especially thank Curtis Marez and the members of the AQ advisory board for their incisive comments and suggestions for improvement.

1 . Stuart Scofield, "RFD History," RFD 9.3 (1983): 9. 2. For detailed accounts of the rise of the radical faeries, see Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in

the Words of Its Founder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1990); and Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).

3. Olmo Eric Ganther and Frank S. Grant, "From Hippy to Fairy at Short Mountain Sanctuary," RFD 26.3 (Spring 2000): 24.

4. Mitch Walker ( Visionary Love: A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology [San Francisco: Treeroots Press, 1 980]) and the collected essays in Gay Spirit: My th and Meaning, ed. Mark Thompson (New York: St. Martins Press, 1987), present suspect analogies between gay male faeries and the Native American berdache.

5. Scott Morgensen, "Rooting for Queers: A Politics of Performativity," Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15.1 (2005): 257.

6. B., "Ooo-h-h-h It's One of Those! Reflections and Projections of Faerie Past, Present and Future," RFD 303 (Spring 2004): 20.

7. Anonymous, "Letter," RFD 26.2 (Spring 2000): 4. 8. Gershon Legman, "The Language of Homosexuality, in Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns,

With Selections Contributed by Specialists in Particular Fields, ed. George B. Henry (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1948). Reprinted in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 582.

9. Ibid.

10. I here invoke and extend Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman's readings of normative and non-nor- mative queer print cultures in their essay "Queer Nationality" (Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997], 169).

1 1 . Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 36-37.

12. Jose Esteban Mufioz, Dead White: Notes on the Whiteness of the New Queer Cinema, GLQ 4.1 (1998): 129, 131.

1 3. See Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 50 and 65, for an outline of U.S. -based homonormativity's relation to global consumption, corporate capitalism, and neoliberal ideals of privitization.

1 4. For detailed analyses of white night, see Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); William H. Frey, "Central City White Flight: Racial and Non-Racial Causes," American Sociological Review 44.3 (1979): 425-48; and Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

15. Donald L. Engstrom, telephone interview by the author, January 12, 2006. 16. James T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruits, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New

Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 306. Framing my argument in this manner, I join Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 377-401; Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Berlant and Freeman, "Queer Nationality"; Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s- 1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Richard Meyer, "Gay Power Circa 1970," GLQ 12.3 (2006): 441-64; and Margo Hobbs Thompson, "'Dear Sisters': The Visible Lesbian Presence in Community Arts Journals," GLQ 12.3 (2006): 405-23. Each has written on the complex interconnections between collective U.S. lesbian and gay identity and modern print culture.

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370 I American Quarterly

17. Halberstam, Queer Time, 35. 1 8. Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Boston: Faber and

Faber, 1995), 154-55. 19. Scofield, "#F£> History," 13. 20. Streitmatter, Unspeakable, 50. 21. Scofield, "/2/-D History," 13. 22. Carl Wittman, A Gay Manifesto, in Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and

Allen Young (1972; New York: New York University Press, 1992), 340-41. 23. Chicago Gay Liberation, "Working Paper for the Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention,"

in Out of the Closets, ed. Jay and Young, 349. 24. Streitmatter, Unspeakable, 150. 25. Ibid., 87. Allan Be'rube' ( Coming Out Under Fire: A History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two

[New York: Free Press, 1990]) and John D'Emilio {Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940- 1970 '[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983]) provide the most detailed account to date on the rise of white lesbian and gay "ghettoes" in major post-WWII U.S. cities. Martin P. Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 31-43, provides a concise sociology of middle-class white male urban clone cultures in the 1 970s. For contemporary critiques of this ideal by non-normative urban gay men, see Charles P. Thorp, "I.D., Leadership and Violence," in Out of the Closets, ed. Jay and Young, 352-63. For a complementary twenty-first-century critique, see Charles I. Nero, "Why Are the Gay Ghettoes White?" in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 228-45.

26. One exception, however, is Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 144-59, who viewed Advocate as a consumable sex object geared toward middle-class gay white men.

27. For critiques of globalizing lesbian and gay "lifestyle" in commodity capitalism, see Jose Esteban Munoz, "The Future in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia," in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 101; Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000); Sharon Zukin, "Urban Lifestyles: Diversity and Standardisation in Spaces of Consumption," Urban Studies 35.5-6 (1998): 825-40; and Ann Pellegrini, "Consuming Lifestyle: Commodity Capitalism and Transformations in Gay Identity," in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 134-45.

28. Anon., Advocate, February 1970, 40. My critical overview of Advocate confirms Streitmatter s claim that "style and flair . . . has always been synonymous with the community" (103), and that "many gay men" "possess the high level of taste and style" (23). However he assumes these "high" levels to be an essentialized component of gay "community" and (white) gay male print culture in the United States, rather than a historicized and compulsory urban norm.

29. Quoted in Levine, Macho, p. 56. 30. Craig Alfred Hanson, "The Fairy Princess Exposed," Gay Sunshine, January 10, 1972, 10. Reprinted

in Out of the Closets, ed. Jay and Young, 266-69. 3 1 . Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer-

sity Press, 1997), 4. Queer theorizations of cosmopolitanism, urbanity, style, and sophistication are ample and often disagree as to the value of these ideals. See D. A. Miller, "Sontag's Urbanity," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 212-20; and Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'," Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966), 275-92, or what she sees as "a variant of sophistication" that is "something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques" (275) or a "a vision of the world in terms of style" (279). For recent critiques of such gay cosmopolitanism, see Dereka Rushbrook, "Cities, Queer Space, and the Cosmopolitan Tourist," GLQ 8.1-2 (2002): 183-206; Hiram Perez, "You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!" Social Text 84-85 (2005): 171-91; and Karen Tongson, "Metronormativity and Gay Globalization," in Querdurchdie Geisteswis- senschaften: Perspecktiven der Queer Theory (Berlin: Querverlag, 2005), 40-52.

32. William J. Spurlin, "Remapping Same-Sex Desire: Queer Writing and Cultures in the American Heartland," in De-Centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis, ed. Richard

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Out of the Closets, Into the Woods I 371

Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton (London: Routledge, 2000), 183-92; Michael Moon, "Whose History? The Case of Oklahoma," in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 24-34; and, especially, John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), offer trenchant critiques of what Howard terms the "bicoastal bias" (12).

33. Two exemplary works that tackle the political complexities of the U.S. metropolis in the 1960s and 1970s include Cynthia A. Youngs Soul Power Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), and Laura Pulido's Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

34. Del Martin, "If That's All There Is," Advocate, October 28-November 10, 1970, 74. 35. Ibid., 75. 36. See Saralyn Chesnut and Amanda C. Gable, "'Women Ran It': Charis Books and More and Atlanta's

Lesbian-Feminist Community, 1971-1981," in Carryin On in the Lesbian and Gay South, ed. John Howard (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 241-84; Karla Jay, "No Man's Land," in Lavender Culture, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young ( 1 978; New York: New York University Press, 1 994), 63; Stephanie Foote, "Deviant Classics: Pulps and the Making of Lesbian Print Culture," Signs 31 .1 (2005): 169-90; and Streitmatter, Unspeakable, 155-58, for catalogs of lesbian print published during the 1 970s and earlier.

37. Streitmatter, Unspeakable, 167. 38. Ibid., 161. 39. Jay, "No Man's Land," 53. See also Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1973); Charlotte Bunch, "Learning from Lesbian Separatism," in Lavender Culture, ed. Jay and Young, 433-44; Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, 227-54; Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 989); Anna Lee, "For the Love of Separatism," in Lesbian Philosophies and Cultures, ed. Jeffner Allen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 143-55; Radicalesbians, "Leaving the Gay Men Behind," in Out of the Closets, ed. Jay and Young, 290-93; Berlant and Freeman, "Queer Nationality," on the "separatist withdrawal into safe territory" (168); Streitmatter, Unspeakable, 1 54-82; Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1982); Ann Snitow, "A Gender Diary," in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (London: Routledge, 1990), 9-43; Linda Garber, Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Cherrie Moraga, "Preface," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Chern'e Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981), xiii-xix, for personal accounts and critical histories of U.S. radical- lesbian feminisms in the 1970s.

40. See http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/exhfashion.htm (accessed February 14, 2006). See also Streitmatter, Unspeakable, 161-63; and Katherine Sender, "Gay Readers, Consumers, and a Dominant Gay Habitus: 25 Years of the Advocate Magazine," Journal of Communication 51.1 (March 2001): 73-99, as well as Sender's Business, Not Politics: The Making of a Gay Market (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

41. Streitmatter, Unspeakable, 105, 192. 42. For discussions of this stereotype, see Garber and Sender, "Gay Readers," 85. 43. Jay, "No Man's Land," 53. 44. Ibid., 63. 45. Ibid. 46. Meeker, Contacts Desired, 232. 47. For more on the cultural politics of the radical back-to-the-land movement as well as the countercul-

tural strains that influenced Country Women, see Bennett M. Berger, The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life Among Rural Communards (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 98 1 ); Jeffrey C. Jacob, "The North American Back-to-the-Land Movement," Community Development Journal 31.3 (1996): 241-49; Alice Echols, Shaky Ground: The '60s and Its Aftershocks (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); and Avital H. Bloch and Lauri Umansky, eds., Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

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372 I American Quarterly

48. David Bell and Gill Valentine, "Queer Country: Rural Lesbian and Gay Lives," Journal of Rural Studies 11.2(1995): 118.

49. See Angela R. Wilson, "Getting Your Kicks on Route 66!: Stories of Gay and Lesbian Life in Rural America, c. 1950-1970," in De-Centring Sexualities, ed. Phillips, Watt, and Shuttleton, 199-216; Gill Valentine, "Introduction: From Nowhere to Everywhere: Lesbian Geographies," From Nowhere to Everywhere: Lesbian Geographies, ed. Gill Valentine (Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park, 2000), 1-9; Gill Valentine, "Making Space: Lesbian Separatist Communities in the United States," in Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalization, and Rurality, ed. Paul Cloke and Jo Little (London: Routledge, 1997), 109-22; and Sherry Thomas, We Didn't Have Much, But We Sure Had Plenty: Stories of Rural Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1981), 149-63, for more on the emancipatory politics as well as the idealogical problematics of rural feminist/lesbian separatism.

50. Bell and Valentine, "Queer Country," 1 19. 5 1 . Sherry Thomas and Jeanne Tetrault, "Introduction," Country Women: A Handbook for the New Farmer

(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1976), 13. 52. Ibid., xiii. 53. Gerald W. Creed and Barbara Ching, "Introduction: Recognizing Rusticity: Identity and the Power

of Place," in Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, ed. Barbara Ching and Gerald W. Creed (New York: Routledge, 1997), 10.

54. Ibid., 4. 55. Barbara, "Retrospective: Feminism and the Unconscious Collective," Country Women 6 (1973), 34. 56. Scofield, "RFD History," 9. 57. RFD Collective, "Rustic Fairy Dreams," RFD 1 (1974 Autumnal Equinox issue): 3. 58. Anon., "Hop Brook Commune," RFD 1 (1974 Autumnal Equinox issue): 11. 59. Lee Mintz, "The Gays- Who Are We? Where Do We Come From? What Are We For?" RFD 5

(Autumn 1975): 41. 60. I borrow the phrase "mainstream subculture" from Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby, "In-

troduction," in Goth: Undead Subculture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), who use the term to describe contemporary goth group identities.

6 1 . Scofield, URFD History," 1 1 . 62. Ibid., 13. 63. RFD Collective, "Rustic Fairy Dreams," RFD 1 (1974 Autumnal Equinox issue): 3. 64. Scofield, "RFD History," 9. 65. Lee Mintz, "City/Country," RFD 3 (1975 Spring Equinox issue): 9. 66. Anon., "As the Butter Churns," RFD 7 (1976 Vernal Equinox issue): 16. 67. Ibid.

68. Critical analyses of "hillybilly" or working-class white representations can be found in Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries ofWhiteness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Constance Penley, "Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn," in White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1 997) ,89-112; Wendell Ricketts, "Passing Notes in Class: Some Thoughts on Writing and Culture in the Ga(y)ted Community," in Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life, ed. Wendell Ricketts (San Francisco: Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005), 216-42; J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and John Hartigan Jr., Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).

69. Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4. 70. Meeker, Contacts Desired, 214. 71 . Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, Introduction, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa

Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 25. 72. Anon., RFD 2 (1974 Winter Solstice issue): 3.

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