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At 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 Country 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-wejust- 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 (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 nationalized "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 intersectional 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 1973 Grinnell farmhouse or of Country Women's influence. Located near 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 1979, the year that former Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay...