Sharing & Caring | Choosing to Live in Community

Sandor Katz

Transcribed by Anne Ennis

My name is Sandor Katz, I'm 46 years old. I am a Writer, I've written a couple books about fermented foods, I do a lot of teaching and a lot of gardening. I'm helping to keep this place, Short Mountain Sanctuary, together.

Short Mountain in a nutshell: Short Mountain Sanctuary was started in 1973, so last year we passed our 35th anniversary. It was a group of hippies from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who bought the land in 1973 with the intention of starting a community. And a couple of years later, this guy Milo, who I can consider the figure of continuity in the Short Mountain story, found himself living alone. Everybody else had bailed, and he was living alone with a herd of goats and one cow. He was going through a coming-out process, and started putting notices in some gay and lesbian media, that he was looking for other gay and lesbian folks to come be on the land with him. He ended up going to one of the early Radical Fairy gatherings in Arizona, or somewhere like that, and invited people from there to come here. So, it had an evolution in the late 70's into a predominantly lesbian and gay community. In 1981, it reconstituted as Short Mountain Sanctuary Incorporated, a not-for-profit corporation that took over the ownership of the land from the original group of hippies who bought it back in 1973. And so, it has been running as Short Mountain Sanctuary as a queer-safe space since around 1981.

Well, there are about 16 people who live here, although the number is always fluctuating a little bit. Lots of different things happen here: we have beautiful gardens, keep goats and chickens and bees. A certain amount of what we do has to do with food production. We have beautiful buildings: we maintain all our own infrastructure, all our electricity is solar electricity, our water systems we have created and maintained on our own. We host as many as 600 people at a time here; so we host festivals, educational events, spiritual events. So lots of things go on here; this is really a meeting grounds for this sort of subculture that spread all over the place. We get visitors from different continents and from all over the United States, but the on-going residential community is a small group of people, and our daily activities mostly have to do with chopping wood, carrying water and creating food.

So, for a handful of people this is home, this is where they live, where they return to when they are away. But then, we've also been a magnet for an extended community of neighbors; we've been a draw for many people to move to this area. So at another level, this is the place where an extended community of neighbors and friends come together. And then at a larger level, there are these hundreds of people who come to our gatherings, for whom this place is like a kind of like a sacred retreat space where they come to recharge and relax and maybe reconnect with something that they feel is not present in their daily lives. So this place has sort of become sort of like a sacred space, like a symbol of some things that people would like to have more of in their lives, but because of all the pressures in their lives they are not able to. So I think that this place carries really a lot of meaning in the hearts and minds of lots of people who are geographically dispersed, as well as for the people who are here. This place is bigger than the place that some people are calling home, and has a lot of meaning for a lot of people that live far away.

I think this community is very unusual in that, it's primarily queer folks creating a very queer-friendly community. Mostly queer communities are found in big cities and there are little children who don't really necessarily fit into normative gender roles everywhere; but when kids grow up in rural areas like that, they mostly get out as soon as they can and they go tot the cities where they can find a sort of supportive culture where they can be themselves. One of the things that I think is really unusual and exciting about what we've been creating here is this thriving pocket of queer culture in a fairly remote rural area, and so I think that is what gives rise to the scene that you found kind of startling; you have drag queens and people dressing up and kind of things you wouldn't be shocked to see at a nightclub in the big city, but it is a scene that you would see in a nightclub in the big city transposed onto a beautiful wooded area with all of these crazy yellow daffodils. It's exciting what we are creating here; it's really unusual and unique, and uncharted territory perhaps in certain ways but it's exciting.

Well, I mean, the most challenging things about living in community are the same things, I think, as all people trying to live in community... like about the dishes, people's expectations of other people's commitments to different projects. You know, the real problems we have day to day have nothing to do with being queer and just everything to do with groups of people have to work out with each other when they are trying to share resources and share space. Yeah, we have to contend with a little bit of homophobia, but no more than any other of us have had to contend with in our lives, in other places before. For the most part, people are very polite here, and even to the degree that they may not like who we are or what they perceive that we are, it's very rare that anyone says anything about it. So, it's been alright. We actually end up getting to be friendly with quite a few of our neighbors and haven't really experienced any real incidents of homophobia. We have had a few experiences but nothing too remarkable.

So basically, the way that our community is structured is with a minimum of structure. There's certain things, like taking care of the animals, we need for someone to take that on everyday, so we have a sign up system for that. For most things, it much more informal. The people who garden will typically co-ordinate with each other and try to find times when we can collaborate with each other and work on projects together, but we don't have any kind of work quota or anything like that. We have an ethic of, Don't do it unless you want to do it. We encourage everyone to get involved, but we leave it to each person to decide what kind of work calls out to them. Some people love to clean, some people love to build, some people love to garden, some people... well nobody right now likes to take care of the vehicles, but it works out, and sometimes the standards are higher, and sometimes the standards are lower, but it works out.

We all pitch in money for food. We have a meeting every week (which will be later this afternoon) where we try toco-ordinate things that are going on, and make sure two people aren't planning to use the truck for different things on the same morning, and just co-ordinate, plan things like that.

People always tossed around ideas for cottage industries, that there would be more work for people who come here to plug into, but the flip side of that is then there would be more labor quotas. If there's an industry we're trying to maintain for everyone to plug into, then we lose one of the things people find one most charming aspects of this place; that there's no specific demands being made on anybody's time.

I mean, the biggest thing that has shifted in the 16 years that I've been living here, is this whole extended community that has drawn together around us. So when I first moved here, it was just the people who were living right here, and a few random neighbors in the area. But now, there's like 50 people, we have 50 people living within a 20 minute drive who've moved here to be part of this; so we've a much larger circle of people who are coming together here, and a much... You know, when people show up here, enchanted with the idea of living here, it's not necessarily just living here at The Sanctuary, but there's this whole other, there's all these other possibilities and we're sort of a port of entry for people considering a much wider range of living situations. So that's a huge thing that's changed in the social dynamic in the time that I've been here.