Applebaum’s intellectual makeup is unusual — he is fascinated by money, and sees its wide-­angle impact on the world, and thrives at making it, but has little desire to amass it. The interest is almost aesthetic. He abhors waste of any kind; when I reached for a paper towel to clean up some coffee I had spilled on his counter, Appelbaum nearly threw himself in my way, like a halfback, and then handed me a sponge. (‘‘It’s O.K., Neal,’’ Hawkins chimed from the living room in his lilting rural-­Indiana cadence, ‘‘he is allowed to use a paper towel.’’) The house Appelbaum shares with Hawkins — the first fully solar house tied to the power grid in Middle Tennessee — bears out this ethos. It is well built and sturdy, but the downstairs, where they sleep, has a concrete floor and bare plywood walls. ‘‘This is way more house than I need,’’ Appelbaum insisted shortly after I arrived. ‘‘Look at it, it’s a palace!’’ He drives a dented 2000 Chevy Cavalier, and rarely faster than 35 miles per hour. Even the pets are not safe from his frugality. Appelbaum believes that cats are ‘‘basically unreliable,’’ so he began naming his after the letters of the alphabet. He’s named the two that live with him now C and D, after A vanished and B was killed by a dog. The most extravagant object on the property may be the Kubota tractor, which, on days it isn’t being borrowed by a neighbor, sleeps peaceably near the barn. On some days, Hawkins, who favors cowboy hats and Western shirts from the Truck Stops of America, will sit on the tractor and puff thoughtfully on a cigar, looking like Jeff Bridges circa ‘‘The Big Lebowski.’’

Worry rippled across the Gayborhood again in 2006, when the Drug Enforcement Administration and a posse of sheriffs arrested a local excavator named Jeff Young — the charges concerned two semis parked on his property that were crammed with marijuana belonging to a Mexican cartel — and seized much of Young’s land on Short Mountain, much of it near the Commune. The Marshals Service auctions off land seized in raids to developers, but Appelbaum saw an opportunity. A zoologist named Brian Miller had discovered unique species of beetle and salamander in some nearby caves, and Appelbaum, after making many calls, found Withers, who was wondering whether consequential fauna might be found on the mountain too. Withers began digging up the creek beds on Young’s land and located two endangered species: the Brawley’s Fork crayfish and the Short Mountain crayfish, which was previously unknown to science. ‘‘In conservation terms,’’ Withers said, ‘‘that was a slam dunk.’’ Appelbaum drove to meet with every caliber of federal and state official and peppered them with endless emails, calls and memorandums. In 2012, when they agreed to sign over the seized land as a wildlife management area — the first such land transfer in Tennessee history — Appelbaum made national news.

In the meantime, he had branched out. He bought foreclosed buildings, hired a crew of builders from Short Mountain to renovate them and turned them into rentals, finding homes for many strapped members of the Family. Because sympathetic real estate agents weren’t easy to find in Woodbury, Appelbaum got his license. Soon enough, people began to call him with their problems, because he seemed to enjoy solving them. He helped a neighbor who was going blind renovate his home and helped others procure health insurance, dentures, a marriage license. A 69-year-old Vietnam vet and home health care worker named John Greenwell, a onetime resident of Short Mountain who was dying of cancer, wrote his family out of his will and left a quarter-­million dollars to Appelbaum, who dispensed Greenwell’s money as micro­grants that paid for water tanks, driveways, hearing aids, diabetic supplies and an additional 90 acres for the Commune. And the denizens of the Gayborhood would have continued their bucolic existence, except that at some point along the way, Appelbaum became interested in the larger place that they, and now he, occupied.

In business dealings, Appelbaum makes it a point to clarify that he is gay, a habit that occasionally irritates both his detractors and friends, including Hawkins. He isn’t confrontational about it and remains unperturbed by the ideological distance that remains between him and many local residents. When he was being interviewed for the arts-­center position, he told the hiring committee, ‘‘I’m gay — if that’s a problem, let me know.’’ ‘‘We’re all sinners,’’ one of the men responded. Appelbaum and Hawkins married in 2013, at City Hall in Manhattan. ‘‘I wanted everyone in Cannon County to know the exact nature of our relationship,’’ Appelbaum told me.

His candor hasn’t exactly turned the county into the cast of ‘‘Glee.’’ ‘‘Neal never brought his husband to anything, and I hope he doesn’t,’’ said Austin Jennings, the 88-year-old former international president of the Lions Clubs and one of the county’s leading citizens. (Hawkins said that Appelbaum takes him to everything, but that Jennings doesn’t realize who he is.) Appelbaum ‘‘aggravated the crap out of me at first,’’ Charlie Harrell, the vice mayor of Woodbury, told me, adding, ‘‘I don’t care if you’re Angela Davis, if you come here and work hard, we will treat you fairly.’’ I was speaking to Harrell and Mayor Harold Patrick in a flourescent-­lit office at the end of a long hallway in the one-­story town hall. I asked how they felt about working with someone who was openly gay. ‘‘We don’t think of Neal as being gay,’’ Patrick explained. ‘‘We think of him as being a Cannon Countian.’’