I’m in a Recently Published Book

Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-Land? by Valerie Padilla Carroll came out in December 2022 from the University of Nebraska Press. The subtitle is Gender and Race in U.S. Self-Sufficiency Popular Culture, and I was interviewed for book. In 1981, I had written Helen & Scott Nearing (authors of Living the Good Life) asking if they would try to influence the magazine “The Mother Earth News” to accept contact letters from gay homesteaders. The Nearings wrote a column for the magazine, and Carroll came across my old letter in their archives as she was researching her book. Carroll sent me scans of my four-page letter and I posted them on Facebook a couple of years ago.

One page of that letter is reproduced in Carroll’s book as well as a photo of me taken in the early 80s. The photo was one of several taken by my old friend, the Huntsville, Alabama, photographer Roy Simmons in the passive solar underground house that I built (with help from friends) in Hotrock, Tennessee.