R. G. Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, jumped stage from this plane of existence on the Summer Solstice.** Ronnie was one of a kind, impossible to replicate, impossible to forget. His ideas, his actions will live on in our memories and in the countless ways he shaped our lives.

Ron was one among a group born in the 1920s and 30s that were at the forefront of the Sixties Counterculture. I’m thinking of Allen Ginsberg the poet visionary of the Beats who liberated a generation and revived the Avant-Garde amidst the wasteland of the Fifties. I’m thinking of the radical pacifists who went to prison during World War II and became the core group protesting the nuclear age in the Fifties and beyond. Ron brought his passion, his intellect, and his vision to theatre. As one who had been schooled in classic mime but who also had a materialist historical perspective, Ron combined the avant-garde and the radical political. That is the uniqueness of the Mime Troupe. It is out of that cauldron that so many were activated. Ron wrote an essay in 1966 titled “Guerrilla Theatre” that became the blueprint for social change. The Diggers were the epitome of guerrilla theater — “teach, direct toward change, be an example of change.”

Ron and the Mime Troupe were catalysts above all. Ron’s arrest in 1965 for defying the capricious whims of the social elite in the person of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks department inspired a series of events that were crucial in the formation of the new Bohemia that emerged in the Haight-Ashbury. In this sense, the cover of Ron’s history of the Mime Troupe is especially apt. (See image below.) The creature appears as a griffin chained but giving birth to a new generation of baby griffins that are flying away under the banner “Engagement, Commitment, Fresh Air.” A perfect analogy of the role that Ron and the Mime Troupe performed in giving birth to El Teatro Campesino, the Artists Liberation Front, and the Diggers (most directly) and to numerous radical theatre groups (indirectly).

Word Cloud for Ron’s 90th

For Ronnie’s 90th birthday celebration, Joseph and I produced a two-sided 17″ x 22″ poster featuring a word cloud compiled from the names of people, groups, shows, concepts and events mentioned in Ron’s history of the SFMT.

Actor’s Workshop -> Mime Troupe -> Diggers -> Yippies: Radical Inheritance

In conversations I had with Ron Davis about the Diggers, he repeatedly returned to a problem of lineage: how radical movements acknowledge, deny, or rewrite the sources from which they emerged. A conversation we had in 2021 was especially illuminating because Ron linked the Diggers’ relation to both the Yippies and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. His argument was not that later groups were merely copies of their predecessors. Rather, he insisted that new formations could become quite different while still owing something real to the institutions, people, and practices that made them possible.

Ron’s basic point was that the Yippies were a genuine offshoot of Digger ideas, but not simply “the Diggers in New York.” He recalled that Abbie Hoffman came to San Francisco wanting to speak with Peter Berg, who told him, “No, go away, you ruined an idea.” Ron understood that East Coast activists had adopted the name “Diggers,” drawing on San Francisco practices such as free food programs, free stores, and the Free City mutual aid model. When the San Francisco Diggers objected, the East Coast group dropped the name and, as Ron put it, “they got together Jerry and Abbie and Krassner, and they came up with Yippie.” For Ron, “that’s the transition there”—but also “another spin-off.”

At the same time, Ron was emphatic that the Yippies developed within a distinct political milieu. He contrasted the Diggers’ anarchistic, local, theatrical, and communal practice with the Yippies’ more national, antiwar, media-oriented, and international political orientation. The East Coast figures, he said, “were international political; they were not anarchists,” whereas the Diggers were something else altogether. Yet he believed that historical distinction did not erase descent: “the idea of some of the ideas of the Diggers in San Francisco was used by the people in East Coast,” even though they were “quite different politically.”

Ron’s comparison with the Mime Troupe clarifies what he meant. The Diggers themselves were, in his view, one of the many formations that emerged from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s generative milieu. He recalled that “80% of the people came from the Mime Troupe,” but that some participants immediately responded, “‘No, fuck the Mime Troupe.’” Ron did not take this repudiation at face value. “You can’t deny the spin-off,” he said. The point was not that the Diggers were reducible to the Mime Troupe, but that their theatrical methods, personnel, and political sensibility had roots there.

This was the larger historical pattern Ron wanted to expose. Groups break away, create something new, and then often deny their formation in order to claim total originality. As he put it, “each one, there’s ego involved,” producing the familiar declaration: “We did our things, we were independent, we didn’t learn anything from you, and you didn’t learn anything from them.” He called this a particularly American habit: “everybody’s got to be an individual, they have no history, they didn’t work anywhere else.”

Ron saw this tendency not merely as vanity but as a falsification of history. He cited former Mime Troupe members who went on to establish other companies and projects while minimizing or denying the troupe’s formative role. In contrast, he insisted on naming his own debt: “where I came from was the Actors’ Workshop. Without the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop, I wouldn’t have been here today.” For him, that recognition did not diminish later achievements; it made their development intelligible.

His anger about Tom Weinberg’s handling of the Chicago Conspiracy footage belonged to the same argument. Ron believed Weinberg presented himself as the person who had discovered and publicly revealed the material, despite Ron’s requests concerning the edit and introduction. Ron saw this as another act of appropriation: collective history or inherited material being treated as the private possession of the person controlling its circulation. In that sense, the dispute over the footage was not separate from the Digger–Yippie or Mime Troupe–Digger questions. All involved the same struggle over who gets to narrate origins, claim credit, and define what counts as the history.

Taken together, Ron’s argument is a defense of continuity against the mythology of pure originality. The Mime Troupe helped produce the Diggers; the Diggers helped furnish ideas and practices that the Yippies adapted; and each subsequent formation developed its own style, politics, and identity. But none of these movements emerged from nowhere. Ron’s insistence was that one can acknowledge both difference and descent: the Yippies were not the Diggers, and the Diggers were not simply the Mime Troupe, but each was shaped by the ground from which it arose.

Links:

1. Guerrilla Theatre, Ron’s essay that defined the form.
2. Have You Heard of the San Francisco Mime Troupe? A film by Don Lenzer and Fred Wardenburg, narrated by Paul Herlinger (1966)
3. Conspiracy 8: R.G. Davis Interviews the Chicago Seven
4. Ron’s obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle.

* Brighella was one of the principal zanni, or servant-trickster figures, of commedia dell’arte. He was neither a naïve innocent nor a harmless clown. Quick, watchful, verbally agile, and often sharp-edged, Brighella survived by wit, improvisation, and an ability to turn the pretensions of masters, soldiers, merchants, and officials against themselves. He could be a servant, innkeeper, fixer, schemer, or sometime rogue: socially subordinate, yet often the most capable person on the stage. Where Arlecchino was hungry, impulsive, and acrobatic, Brighella was more calculating—a practical strategist of disorder, alert to power and adept at exposing its absurdities. R.G. Davis played Brighella on the day he was arrested in 1965 for defying the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Commission after they revoked the Mime Troupe’s permit to perform in the parks.

** June 21, 2026. Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere, as I’m sure Ronnie would have wanted me to clarify.

This video is a recording of a presentation I gave at the Book Club of California on February 2, 2026. I was invited to speak about the Diggers and the archive assembled over the past half century. The talk approaches the “Digger movement” as extending beyond the original Haight-Ashbury moment to include the Kaliflower network of communes, which carried forward the legacy of Free. [Click the image to view the video.]

Note: the following post lists sources that I referenced in the talk.

This is a sheet I handed out for the talk February 2, 2026 at the Book Club of California, “Digger Do: Excavating a Social Movement Through Its Print Ephemera.”

1. Roots of the Movement

• English Diggers 17^th century
• English Digger Writings
• San Francisco Mime Troupe
• Guerrilla Theatre
• Artists Liberation Front

2. San Francisco Diggers (1966-67)

• Overview
• Digger Writings
• Free Feeds in the Panhandle
• Free Store
• Digger Bread/Free Bakery
• The Invisible Circus
• A Brief History
• Les Diggers de San Francisco (film)

3. Communication Company (1967)

• Overview
• Chester Anderson’s Archive
• Catalog of Com/Co broadsides

4. Free City Collective (1967-68)

• Overview
• Free City Magazine (#1, #2)
• Free City News
• Digger Papers 1968
• NOWSREAL (film)
• Free City Bank

5. Free Print Shop & Kaliflower (1968+)

• Overview
• Angels of Light Free Theatre
• Free Print Shop
• Free Print Shop Catalog
• Deep Tried Frees
• Kalflower Covers
• Selections from Kaliflower
• Apostles of Free: A History of Kaliflower

Link to the GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/b5046cccf

The Angels of Light Free Theatre were one of the most dazzling offshoots of the San Francisco counterculture. Emerging in 1970 from the spirit of the Diggers and Kaliflower communes, the Angels dedicated themselves to creating free theater for the people of the city. Their shows were kaleidoscopic pageants of color, costume, and imagination—part Greek tragedy, part acid vaudeville, part street carnival—performed in parks, warehouses, lofts, or wherever an audience could gather. The Angels believed that art should never be sold, only shared. Their performances, given without charge, invited everyone present to step into a world of collective joy and transformative possibility.

Debra “Beaver” Bauer was one of the core members of the Angels of Light. Aside from her skill as a performer and designer, she has been the guardian of the Angels’ creative legacy. For decades, Beaver has carefully curated an extraordinary archive: photographs, drawings, costumes, scripts, music, sets, masks, props, programs, posters, announcements, and the lived stories of a communal troupe that redefined what theater could be.

Recently, Beaver uncovered a rare treasure: six Super 8 film canisters shot by fellow Angel Brian Mulhern between 1972 and 1979. These reels contain living history—performances, gatherings, and glimpses into the communal magic of the Angels of Light—that have never been seen outside their circle. One of the main goals of this GoFundMe is to digitize these films at the highest 1080p resolution, ensuring their survival for future generations.

We also want to help Beaver continue her curatorial work. She has been relying on a ten-year-old computer that is now on its last legs. A new computer will allow her to preserve, catalog, and present the Angels archive in ways that match the brilliance of the material itself.

This project is sponsored by The Digger Archives, which has long been dedicated to preserving and sharing the legacy of the Diggers, Kaliflower, and the many free cultural movements that sprang from them. Supporting this campaign means helping to keep alive one of the most visionary communal art experiments in San Francisco’s history.

The Angels of Light taught us that beauty and generosity can change the world. With your support, Beaver can continue to safeguard their vision and make it accessible to artists, historians, and dreamers everywhere. Please help us honor this extraordinary legacy. Every contribution brings the Angels’ shimmering, communal light one step closer to being preserved for all time.

Thank you for your support.

P.S. In the photo collage at the top of this page, that’s Beaver in the upper right corner wearing red and purple, costumed and radiant as ever, embodying the spirit of the Angels of Light.

What We’re Raising Funds For

1. Digitization of six Super 8 film canisters (footage by Brian Mulhern, 1972–1979)
   – Cost: $691.40
2. External hard drives to safely store and back up the digitized films and archival materials
   – Cost: $130.32
3. A new MacBook Air to replace Beaver’s ten-year-old computer, giving her the tools she needs to continue curating, cataloging, and sharing the archive
   – Cost: $1,954.16

Total: $2,775.88

If we are fortunate enough to raise more than this goal, the additional funds will be set aside for future Angels of Light archival projects—ensuring that more of this remarkable history can be preserved and shared.

Link to the GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/b5046cccf

Tracing the Digger Movement Through Them That Lived It

This is the program for a talk that I presented at the closing event for the Our Commons Are Free exhibition at Fort Mason in San Francisco last month (August 9, 2025). The booklet was printed “fan-fold” style and measured 4-1/4″ x 5-1/2″.

“These are the times that try our democracy”

A Digger Paper

On the Summer Solstice 2025, at the Our Commons Are Free exhibit at Fort Mason in San Francisco, the Diggers distributed a new Digger Paper. It was a fan-fold booklet similar to a street zine. Here is the text and the images of each page.

Fellow citizens and netizens,

Our country stands on a knife’s edge. What was once a noble experiment to establish stable self-governance now teeters between farce and catastrophe. We are beset not by foreign tyrants but by domestic demagogues who wrap their ambition in the flag, speak of freedom while silencing dissent, and claim the mantle of the people while serving the wealthiest few.

Let it be plainly said:

A government that permits billionaires to purchase lawmakers, that rolls back voting rights while expanding corporate rights, that attacks science, justice, and truth—is no government by the people. It is a counterfeit of democracy.

The Founders warned us against monarchy, and yet we flirt again with rule by strongmen. We see courts stacked, laws twisted, and public trust sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder. This is not “politics as usual.” It is a campaign against the common good.

The crisis is not one man, but a system that shields the powerful and punishes the poor. A system where schools crumble and hospitals close while defense contractors and oil companies grow fat. Where the working majority is told to tighten belts as billionaires blast themselves into space.

The hard-won victories of the civil rights era are under siege. The right to vote—bought with the blood of Black Americans—is being hollowed out. Women’s autonomy is rolled back by courts that ignore precedent and scorn equality. And LGBTQ+ citizens, once emerging from the shadows of criminalization, now find their rights to healthcare, expression, and even existence debated anew. What was once enshrined as progress is now dismissed as excess. This backlash is no accident. It is a calculated effort to reverse the freedoms that millions marched, fought, and died to secure.

The earth itself is under assault. Protections fought for by generations—clean air, safe water, wild lands preserved for all—are stripped away for short-term profit. Polluters are rewarded, climate science denied, and natural disasters met with indifference or opportunism. The sacred balance between humanity and the planet is treated as collateral damage in the pursuit of endless extraction. This is not progress. It is plunder. And it leaves our children a diminished world—hotter, harsher, and more unjust.

And where immigrants—who labor in our fields, care for our children, and enrich our culture—are demonized, detained, and deported in the name of fear. The promise etched at the base of the Statue of Liberty is betrayed daily by policies of cruelty and exclusion.
Is this the liberty we were promised?

Let us return to first principles.

No monarchy.
No ruler above the law.
No government without the consent of the governed.
No justice denied because of wealth, race, gender, or belief.

We need not accept corruption as fate. We need not live under permanent emergency, culture war, or oligarchic rule. Power can be reclaimed. The soul of a nation is not for sale.

We must declare independence from cynicism. From fear. From lies. And affirm again our allegiance—to democracy, to community, to truth, and to one another.

Do not wait for saviors.

Be the revolution.

Join the movement to rebuild the Republic—free, fair, and for all.
Now is the time. Not later.

Not after the next election.

NOW.

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”— Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Cover image: Thomas Paine, a corset maker from England, immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1774 at a moment of rising revolutionary fervor. His 1776 pamphlet Common Sense laid out a plainspoken argument against monarchy and for democratic self-rule. Published at a time of low morale, it became an instant sensation, electrifying the spirit of resistance that resulted in the Declaration of Independence six months later. By the end of the Revolutionary war, one in five Americans owned a copy of Paine’s catalytic essay.

Ben Kinmont arrived at my doorstep in 2022 asking to see the Digger archive. Ben is a project-based artist, and out of that first encounter emerged Our Commons Are Free. The initial iteration took place in a Santa Rosa park later that year, where Ben set up a Risograph—a stencil-based duplicator similar in spirit to the old Gestetner mimeograph machines used by the Communication Company and Free City—to print copies of A Short History of the San Francisco Diggers (and the movement they spawned) for anyone passing by.

Since that first production, Ben has taken Commons to Italy, to Paris, and most recently to the Wigan Festival in England. Now, this celebration of the Diggers is coming home. Beginning June 21, Fort Mason will host the latest iteration of the project. Ben has added new dimensions to the exposition, expanding its reach and resonance. Here is a link to the Fort Mason announcement.

Peter Coyote posted a message on Facebook this morning that struck me with the same force as when I first read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. For those who may have forgotten their American history, Common Sense was the spark that resulted in the Declaration of Independence six months later. (More about Paine and his pamphlet later—it sold 500,000 copies in a population of just 2.5 million.) But first, read Peter’s words. Share them far and wide. In this moment, Peter Coyote is Thomas Paine incarnate.

Quieting the Canaries (by Peter Coyote)

There are some spectacles, like staring into the sun that are so overwhelming they become destabilizing. They strip our sense of norms and proportion which might buttress any conventional reality. As a Zen priest who has meditated for over 50 years, my own mind and its projections, I would like to share my perceptions of this current moment as a source of  possible clarity.

An entire class of people, powerful because they are wealthy—conservative billionaires funding Christian Nationalists and other varieties of anti-democratic upheaval; tech billionaires who’ve concluded their mathematical talents should exempt them from social responsibilities and any consequences for the feral and deliberately addictive Social media they’ve unleashed on the Nation. This list would include C-suite Executives so fixated on share price, corporate bottom lines and bonuses, that the disintegration of our National life is collateral damage.

This cabal has concluded they’ve reached the zenith of their possibilities and would like to freeze their advantages where they are. They have successfully strategized how to loot the Nation of every form of its wealth, simultaneously exempting themselves from every social and legal responsibility to the majority of its citizens.

There is no other way to appreciate the self-benefit they’ve designed into the current Republican Administration budget—its tax-cuts for them alone, imposing on every citizen, business, and national event, the exorbitant interest costs of a $9 Trillion dollar National debt (about a Trillion a year). It’s an inconceivably large number. A thousand seconds is about 16 minutes. A trillion seconds is 32,000 years. 1,000 pennies would fit in a small jar. A trillion pennies would make a cube the size of a football field. $9 Billion dollars represents nearly 30% of our entire 2025 GDP of  $30.34 Trillion. It’s an amount larger than our current military budget and will constrict economic possibilities and policies, public investment for research, innovation, public health services, Medicare and Social Security for generations.

The current abandoning of medical and scientific research, once among America’s greatest contribution to the world: the cancellation of aid, food and medicine to the world’s poorest people, the decision to end the global detection and cure of pandemics for our own early warning, the refusal to acknowledge climate crisis or diminish the amount of oil, diesel and jet fuel that we burn, or to acknowledge our failures to protect our citizens of color and non-standard gender definitions from vastly unequal treatment is a public announcement by bullhorn from this class to the rest of us, that their value system includes nothing but their personal empowerment beyond which nothing is worth a moment of their consideration.

This is an entire class of people, the real enablers of the Trump Republican agenda. It includes every Republican official, State, Local or National who have surrendered their Constitutional right to legislate and control the spending of our revenues. They deny the Constitutional birthright of Congress itself and in this regard are equally culpable to the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6th.

Stories of brazen arrests and attacks on public officials advertise over mass media which people do and do not count to them, which ones are exempt from regulation and law and which are not. In the face of this daily insult to our body Politic, our news media takes delusional cheer celebrating unenforceable Court decisions, convincing ourselves that we are not in a “crisis” because “the judges are on our side.” This is the self-delusionary myopia that lulled thousands of Americans to their deaths and spilled our blood and treasure into the dirt, sand, and rice paddies of Vietnam, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

TV rakes in ad revenues from describing the chaos as the entire Nation is dismantled in front us by this lawless class, supported by a majority on the Supreme Court, whose flagrant public corruption would embarrass a hypocritical tele-evangelist.

The political class has sat idly by for decades allowing money unrestrained rule over our every political and cultural institution. They have pawned our public airwaves off to the corporate sector and the public never noticed it. Until we begin serious deliberations to curtail that power—Universal or Mandatory voting, prohibition of corporate contributions to politics, fully funded National elections—we will do nothing but continue to witness and chitter about the catastrophe amongst ourselves, like pet canaries, at day’s end as the night cloth is draped over the cage, stilling our song.

—Peter Coyote (May 13, 2025)

Recently, I was able to locate the video of Peter Berg’s memorial in 2011. The event took place in the spacious auditorium of the Randall Museum, on Corona Heights near the tip-top of that rocky outcrop that overlooks the expanse of San Francisco at its feet. This is the very location where many of us had welcomed winter solstices in years past. Peter with his conch shell welcoming the sunrise would always be a memory frozen in time.

There were hundreds of souls who showed up to honor Peter’s memory on October 1, 2011. There were bouquets of herbs, flowers, totems, instruments and offerings on the altar at the front of the stage. Someone had prepared a listing of the dozens who had volunteered to speak. Rob (as he was introduced) was near the last. Here are his words. Ever since hearing Rob talk about what he saw as Peter’s contribution to anarchist theory, I had wanted to find the video and get the transcription entered into the historical record. At last, it is done.

Rob Young’s Eulogy at Peter Berg’s Memorial, October 1, 2011

When you guys were doing your thing in San Francisco there were a bunch of us, 200 million of us, that were elsewhere, living in a faraway country called the United States of America. We were growing up good and proud and watching John Wayne, and when I delivered the newspapers, I used to report the latest American victories on the Vietnam fronts to my clients. And then one summer, I was up in Canada at the family cottage, and in the cottage there was a pile of battered old paperbacks with the front covers torn off. And there was one in the stack. I was about 14 or 15 years old, and it was called Notes from the New Underground. And there were some Digger essays in this thing. So, I read them, and they made so much sense to me that I thought I need to leave the country I’m in right now — not being Canada — United States of America and find these people who have written this stuff and learn more from them about that.

And many years passed and through the inevitable circuitous route by which all of you came to be connected with these people, I, too, followed that circuitous route and came to work at Planet Drum for a while. And while I was there, I was going through the mid-20s, tumultuous, horrific period of life, right? There’s three of those. There’s the terrible twos, and then there’s the terrible 20s, and there’s some other thing I haven’t experienced yet, but later in life that some of you know, and I don’t know. (Voice from the audience says, “menopause.”) Menopause. Thank you. Now I have a word for it, and it was a very difficult time for me at Planet Drum. I was trying to work there and trying to sort some stuff out. And one day, Peter and I were walking down the street together, and as we’re walking down the street, I was thinking about how my dad and I used to walk down the street, we’d hold hands. I was ruminating on this, and suddenly Peter just stops and looks at me like he has that sort of “Owl-Hawk” look thing that he does, you know, and he says, “What?” “You want to hold hands with me, or something?”  It’s like holy shit!  And so that’s when I knew he was really something special.

So, he was all about location, you know, where are you and what is home, and where are you? And is your head up your ass, or is in the watershed somewhere? And I want to locate Peter for a second, world historically, right? Because a lot of interesting people … as a person said tonight, this is a high character environment for me tonight, looking at all of you. I want to locate Peter in world historic terms. Peter Berg for whatever all the things he was and is, made a very significant contribution to anarchist thought. Anarchist thought up until that point, things like “Anarchist Communism,” by Kropotkin, Bakunin’s theories and Max Sterner’s individualist anarchism, all that stuff. They always talked about the social structures that were necessary for a liberated society, and they elaborate on them in different ways, but they remained modernist theories, because they were social structures that could zip around the planet and sort of be anywhere. You could have this social structure in Bulgaria, you could step over here to England, and it was nowhere. And then Peter Berg came along and answered two important questions in anarchist theory. Where do you locate those social structures? In the bioregion. And secondly, who is the constituency for those social structures? And that’s all species. And Berg made those two contributions. He has radically advanced and matured anarchist thought by those contributions, no doubt heavily influenced by another very important anarchist, Judy Goldhaft. [Audience acclamation.] So, when he said, “What do you want to do, hold hands?” like I wasn’t sure if he wanted to — that’s my personal thing about his magical stuff. But the other thing is his contribution to anarchist doctrine in the world.

And the last thing I want to tell you is, in July of this year, I was walking through some fields, I live in Eugene, and I was walking with my six-year-old daughter and my four-year-old son, and up above us, three military planes were flying, jets, fighters ripping across the sky. And I looked up and I said, they’re flying in the missing man formation. And my son and daughter said, “What do you mean? What’s the missing man formation?” I said, “Well, when somebody who’s very important dies, the United States Air Force will do a flyover in the missing man formation.” And they said, “Where are they going?” And I said, “Looks like they’re going south. They’re headed toward San Francisco” and I didn’t have the word yet, and my six year old daughter said, “Clearly someone very important has just died in San Francisco.” And the next day, I got a call from Judy. So, even the United States Air Force is compelled by the magic of Peter Berg to honor one of their fellow men in arms when he passed away. Peter, you’re so fucking present, I want you to go someplace else for a little while, because you’re filling up the room. Thank you very much for what you’ve done.

[Transcribed by Judy Goldhaft, Eric Noble, with machine assistance, 26 Sept 2024]

Rob died in 2018. Here’s an obituary.

Many of you have contributed to previous GoFundMe projects of The Digger Archives. This is another fundraising plea to help preserve our tribe’s history. Jesse Cox is a people’s historian of the most authentic variety. Jesse’s writings are a cross between a geographer’s intimate association with the landscape and the be-bop prosy of a Jack Kerouac. We hope to eventually share his stories of our communal past, stories of one of the first communes on Castro Street, stories of the Hearthshire Community in northern California, and — the aim of this GoFundMe — the stories of Assunta Femia, the progenitor of a transgressive gay feminine spirituality.

Jesse is 72 years old and he is struggling with the age-old dilemmas of physical and economic limitations. Jesse still is moonlighting gigs while pursuing a passion for finishing his deep history of Assunta, once Jesse’s love and guiding spirit. Assunta was both shaman and prophetess. Her legacy must be preserved and Jesse is the best person to do it. Read the memorial that Arthur Evans wrote after Assunta’s passing in 2006.

There will be much more shared in the coming days and weeks as we grow this fund. Jesse has his fingers in many pies but Assunta is top of the list.

Thank you, all and everyone!

Here’s the full GoFundMe link: https://bit.ly/GoFundMe-for-Jesse