Save Misfit Manor: A Queer Anarchist Homestead Needs Your Help
I think a lot of people take words like ‘home’ and ‘family’ for granted, and I suppose I was one of them. I grew up in what I thought was a pretty stable home, a three-bedroom house with loving parents who never actually hit me. But I didn’t know what safety felt like until I was 33 because the stable suburban existence of my seemingly idyllic childhood was dependent on the secrets I kept. About the confusing gender identity that the church my family revered promised eternal damnation for. And about the terrible things that uniformed agents of that church did to that vexing body of mine when I was too small to comprehend it, let alone defend it.
I didn’t even feel safe enough to consciously confront these heinous truths until I met my now girlfriend, Lily, and we were taken in by our dear friends Archie and Em, along with their child, Al. I still remember the first night I spent at the rural homestead they inherited from Archie’s grandmother, sitting around a campfire surrounded by nothing but untouched Appalachian wilderness and other Queer people who understood the unfathomable. Other neurodivergent, gender diverse people who grew up with secrets and the violence they concealed. By the end of that evening, I felt downright high even though I hadn’t inhaled anything stronger than charred marshmallows.
It took me a moment to recognize this euphoria as a simple sense of security; my body unclenching like a fist for the first time since I was five years old, and it would take me another moment still to recognize just how many years I had waited to exhale.
This was the night that my friends became family, and their one-acre property, lovingly dubbed Misfit Manor, became home. I have written about this place before; the ramshackle homestead tucked deep inside a central Pennsylvanian holler, standing defiantly for the unsung cause of Queer rural autonomy in a bastard age of climate apocalypse and imperial collapse. And I’ve written about these people before; my hacker weeb bestie, who I accidentally fell in love with during our overlapping gender transitions; the high school sweethearts who flipped genders, had a child who defied all of them, and took in another longtime friend named James as the missing piece in their polyamorous marriage.
They often form the silver lining in my Queer tribalist tirades against vanilla civilization, but today I speak of them with a tremble in my throat and glass in my chest.
You see, dearest motherfuckers, a couple of weeks ago, what appears to have been a freak electrical fire caused by ancient wiring burned Misfit Manor to the ground. Lily and I still live with our elderly parents most of the time, but Archie, Em, James, and Al barely escaped with their lives, and the flames took nearly everything else; the house, the shed, the ducks and chickens, two charming cats named Toast and Horus, and an abused but impossibly gentle pitbull named Pomni…
All gone. Up in smoke. I drove down the moment I heard, and the strongest people I’ve ever met took turns falling apart in my arms while everything they worked for lay in a smoldering heap beside us.
None of it was insured. Archie’s grandfather had built that house with his bare hands from a dilapidated barn decades ago. They own nothing but the land. However, that fire stole so much more than property. It robbed all of us of a dream of turning that acre into something more. A self-sustaining, off-grid, Queer autonomous zone. One island in what I had hoped would become an archipelago: a confederation of Misfit Manors stretching across the rural rust belt; allowing neurodivergent, gender bending hicks like us (the kind of people the cosmopolitan pride parades left behind) to build a stateless community not unlike that of our Amish neighbors; a sanctuary that would allow us to never have to rely on another straight institution ever again.
In other words, I dreamt of proliferating the safety I found one summer night around the swirling embers of a campfire and turning it into a weapon against isolation and assimilation.
I’m not going to tell you that we ever came close to this dream. I’m not going to tell you that Misfit Manor was some kind of utopian paradise before the flames cruelly turned against us. We are poor people who come from trauma, and like a family of porcupines, we have stuck each other in close quarters many times without even trying. Holding this thing together has been a constant struggle from the beginning, and it has never been easy.
However, I can also tell you that nothing tastes better than homemade bread after three rips of cheap gas station weed. I can tell you that Al taught me how to trust myself after decades of parochial indoctrination just by trusting me to be their “Auntie Anarchy”. I can tell you that I spent the best Thanksgiving of my life playing Cards Against Humanity forty minutes from the nearest Catholic Church. I can tell you that I saw the face of God one summer in a forest shimmering with the lights of a thousand fireflies.
I can also tell you that Archie, Em, and James are the hardest-working people I have ever met in my life and that they have taught me more about anarchism through their selfless kindness than any dead Russian professor ever could. And I can tell you that I am not about to allow this dream to die without a fight.
We will rebuild Misfit Manor from these ashes, but we need your help.
We have put together a pretty bare-bones GoFundMe account, and we have managed to raise enough money on it to dig a new well and install the basic electrical infrastructure, but we still need a used single-wide trailer, which will likely cost us at least another forty grand. We could also use some livestock, a couple shipping containers, and some solar panels so, I can’t tell you exactly how much we’re asking for, probably more than we’ll ever get, but we have managed to make about twenty grand in donations of less than a thousand dollars so, please give anything and we will be beyond grateful, but the greatest thing you can give is to simply spread the word far and wide.
Repost this article or the GoFundMe page attached anywhere and everywhere.
Please, help my family save our home and our dream of a Queer agrarian future amidst the ruins of a post-traumatic civilization. Help us save Misfit Manor.
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