7/22/2023 0 Comments Druid city retreat“By recovering the voices that have been erased and marginalized, the NPS embarks on an important project to capture and celebrate our multi-vocal past,” the agency stated. Because of centuries of general anti-gay sentiment and laws punishing queerness, little queer history has been preserved, and much of it has been erased-a fact the Park Service acknowledged in its 2014 LGBTQ Heritage initiative, which identified Druid Heights as a site of significance. The site’s poor condition is representative of a larger trend in historic preservation. And though the Park Service has conducted some vegetation removal, rodent protection, and roof replacement on the site as a whole, the federal government has otherwise largely left its fate up to the elements. Since then, her parcel has sat uninhabited. A series of tenants rented out her portion of the property until 2005. Gidlow stayed at Druid Heights until her death, in 1986. After the government invoked eminent domain, only legal tenants were allowed to live there, ending its status as a revolving door for artists and thinkers. In 1977, the National Park Service absorbed Druid Heights into the Muir Woods National Monument, an area of historic redwood trees it had folded into the recently created Golden Gate National Recreation Area (or GGNRA), a sprawling nature preserve on the outskirts of San Francisco that would become one of the most visited national parks in the U.S. That is, until the federal government decided it wanted the land in 1972, setting off a chain of events that would not only threaten the community’s continued existence, but to erase it from collective memory. Gidlow had plans to turn it into one of America’s first retreats for women artists. For 12 years, it would serve as a hangout spot, and eventually a base of operations, for the influential philosopher Alan Watts, who popularized the practice of Zen Buddhism and the study of Eastern philosophy in the West.Īt its height in the late 1960s, the community was home to around 34 people-and to one of the most fascinating chapters in American counterculture and LGBTQ history. One of them was Elsa, I Come with My Songs, regarded as the first autobiography by a lesbian in which the author did not use a pseudonym.įrom the 1950s to the mid-70s, Druid Heights attracted a revolving cast of guests and short-term residents that included some of the biggest names in the American cultural avant-garde, from Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, to musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Steve Miller, to prominent feminist reformers Catharine A. It was there-holed up in a small cottage up a windy mountain road, living off pesticide-free crops from her garden-that she would complete work on nine more books and live out the rest of her days. But it wasn’t until her 50s that she felt she’d finally found a place to call home: In 1954, she established what she called the “unintentional community” of Druid Heights, a collection of idiosyncratic, eco-friendly buildings scattered across 6 acres in Marin County. Somehow, she evaded repercussions.īefore long, Gidlow made a permanent move to the Bay Area. By attaching her real name to the work, Gidlow risked the very real possibility of imprisonment on indecency charges-a common tactic the federal government used against other gay writers of the era. Three years later, while living in Manhattan, she published On a Grey Thread, making history once again as the author of what historians believe to be the first openly lesbian poetry book released in North America. In 1920, Gidlow moved to New York City, bringing Les mouches to a close after a five-issue run.
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