Gays in the Woods At a rural retreat in Mendocino County, queer men engage in forestry, trail clearing, and the occasional orgy

During retreats at the Groundswell Institute in Mendocino County, participants learn everything from how to fell trees to tips for better group sex (not pictured). During retreats at the Groundswell Institute in Mendocino County, participants learn everything from how to fell trees to tips for better group sex (not pictured). Photo: San Francisco Magazine, San Francisco Magazine Photo: San Francisco Magazine, San Francisco Magazine Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Gays in the Woods 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Editor's note: This is one of many stories about LGBTQ life in the Bay Area that San Francisco Magazine is publishing over the next month, all part of the June 2016 Pride Issue. To peruse the rest of the issue's contents, and to read stories as they become available online, click here.

The orgy on the floor before dinner failed to shock me as much as when, a couple hours earlier, I’d found myself in the middle of the forest cutting down a mighty tree. Hacking away at the three-story redwood in the Mendocino wilderness, I had felt a kind of trepidation I hadn’t experienced since high school PE. My life as a gay man in San Francisco had always felt relatively safe; I had never considered living anywhere else. But now, there I was channeling an inner lumberjack that I’d never known was inside of me. I felt much more natural sitting courtside at the orgy, trying to spot the most well-endowed guy through the flickering candlelight.

Such is life at the Groundswell Institute, a two-year-old, 200-acre eco-village in Mendocino County dedicated to creating a queer space that overlaps with environmental activism. Here, campers learn everything from how to cut down trees and build swales to how to don drag and participate in better group sex. Groundswell offers a chance for city dwellers like myself to break free of Castro stereotypes and, if nothing else, play woodsman for a weekend. But it’s also a budding queer community where people come to live, an attempt to build a gay ghetto outside of a metropolitan area. You won’t find a two-for-one well-drink night or a rainbow crosswalk for miles.

Inspired by similar communes around the country, Groundswell was conceived in 2014 by Kyle DeVries, Jim Montgomery, and William Stewart, all three of whom are gay and veterans of communal life. What does being gay have to do with going back to the land? DeVries argues, convincingly, that LGBTQ folks have long experienced injustice and oppression in the same way that Mother Earth has experienced hardship and abuse. Besides the fact that queer rights and environmentalism generally sit together on the left side of the political spectrum, the idea of people with lifestyles slightly outside the norm decamping to some remote piece of land has historical antecedents. See: Thoreau. (Or maybe that’s all BS and Groundswell is just an excuse for outdoorsy gay dudes to cavort in the woods. After a weekend there, I’m still not sure.)

All the film festival flicks and overwrought gay literature I had ever consumed suggested that being in a gay community meant living in a big city. Sure, there are vacation communities like Provincetown and Guerneville, but these always struck me as short-term getaways, not permanent living places. Could a gay community possibly thrive long-term outside of a city’s boundaries? With my mind open and my pecs needing some ax work, I headed up to Groundswell to find out.

A few days before I left, I got an email from the fine folks at Groundswell. “Special will be driving you up,” it read. It took a second to register, but someone named Special, it seemed, was going to act as the Virgil to my Dante. Visions of a creaking VW bus piloted by a Gandalf-cum-Liberace character puttered through my head. When he arrived, Special turned out to be Kevin Clark, an attractive young professional who works at a local medicinal marijuana company and had rented a sleek 2015 Mazda for the weekend. During our ride up, I peppered him with questions about what to expect. “It’s not as burner or hippie as you think,” he reassured me. “Well, it is, but it’s also different. A great group.”

Groundswell mostly serves as a retreat center, hosting short-term experiences like this one using a sliding scale payment system. (I paid $100 for the weekend.) Though it’s technically open to folks of any persuasion, a majority of the institute’s visitors—and every one of the 20 attendees of this retreat, titled “Queer Forestry Camp”—are queer men. There are also a handful of permanent residents who have flocked from various lifestyles in various places to help establish this new community in the woods. They joined in throughout the weekend, acting as guides to the property and leading workshops on homesteading skills.

When Special and I finally arrived at the camp, located in the emerald-hued town of Yorkville, my eyes and mouth went agape at the scene before me: It is, indeed, a camp in the manner of Wet Hot American Summer or Meatballs. But it’s also stunning. Ten little cabins, each lodging up to eight people, decorate the tree-studded land. There’s a dining hall. There are goats. There’s a fire pit replete with a stage for a nightly cabaret. There’s even a little creek cutting across the land.

Formerly a children’s camp with the innocent name of Camp Rancheria, the land’s prepubescent past reveals itself in the communal bathrooms that still feature childlike pastel colors and a pint-size trough urinal. Any ghosts of a kiddie past, however, are banished by the following inscription on one of the doors: “This stall reserved for hook ups.”

It was time to meet my fellow campers. All types of men, ranging in ages, body types, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds, were on display. Most of them were return visitors, some using their Radical Faerie names. (Members of the hippie-like Radical Faeries, who strive to define queerness through spirituality, paganism, and a lack of deodorant, are frequent visitors of Groundswell.) We stood in a circle, joined hands, and introduced ourselves.

“I’m Lion.” “I’m Wow.” “I’m Longevity.” “I’m…Brock?”

After intros, we plopped down for dinner. I’d imagined a meal of vegan slop accompanied by twig-and-bark tea, but the reality was much kinder: pork rotini, vegetables roasted to a crisp, cheese-laced mashed potatoes, and ginger-lemon water. The dinner conversation was surprising, better than I had experienced in ages. Cattiness (or, more precisely, fear) had been left behind. No one felt the need to ask, “What do you do for a living?”; talk of the 2016 election was more or less absent.

But talk of what it means to be queer outside the confines of a metropolis eventually made the rounds. San Francisco, the consensus was, won’t stay a gay mecca forever. Skyrocketing rents, the recent acceptance of queerdom by a majority of society, and a new Castro vibe that features fewer refugees from small-town America and more moneyed, privileged bros have started to erode our gay ghetto. In a city that once had even a minor gay presence in almost every neighborhood (be it a bar, bookstore, or bathhouse), most of the city’s visible queerness is now quarantined in the Castro, with a few scattered remnants in SoMa and the Tenderloin. Rainbow lights decorating a Castro Station Muni escalator don’t bring a community together the way this strange little camp in the woods seems to.

These ideas solidified after dinner as I sipped ginger water and watched my brethren blow one another in a multipronged floor pile. I felt neither pressure to join in nor fear of rejection. Other campers were passing around a bottle of red wine, laughing and swapping stories. I basked in the joy of hanging out with newfound friends, not worrying about who I was going home with or how the night would end.

The next morning, after a breakfast that rivaled the most artisanal hipster brunch (soft-cooked eggs, biscuits, crispy potato hash), we all donned our most flattering outdoorsy gear and hiked up a hill to find a tree to knock over. Some of the forest area at Groundswell is in need of attention; new trees have sprouted out of fallen seeds and led to claustrophobic clusters of redwoods and Douglas firs. After deciding on an enormous tree, we took turns hacking a notch into the base with an ax and a hacksaw, eventually felling it to a round of primal cheers.

Work is also being done to further open up the camp for those seeking out the communal lifestyle. Bedrooms are being added, cabins are getting renovated, and a hot tub is being installed. DeVries says interest in an outdoor gay paradise is growing, a fact confirmed at the end of the weekend when several participants elected to prolong their stay. As for myself, I left Groundswell more relaxed and aware of my natural surroundings than I had been in years. After exchanging numbers and hugging my new friends goodbye, Special and I got into the car and began the drive back to the original gay mecca. Leaving the wilderness behind us, we reflected on the potential Groundswell holds. Perhaps it is time to create a new community, we agreed, the way our gay forebears once flocked to San Francisco. Maybe even somewhere in the woods.

Originally published in the June issue of San Francisco, and online at ModernLuxury.com