Gay Community Seeks a Home on the Range : Proposed Site in Western Nevada Drawing Opposition

A pit bull named Spud patrols 160 acres of sagebrush and cheatgrass near this truck-stop town in western Nevada. By Spud’s rules, cattle and deer have permission to pass; humans do not.

Spud’s owner, rancher Bill Dale, concurs. He and his wife, Toni, tried staying in trailer parks on a recent vacation, but they abandoned the trip because Bill Dale couldn’t stand being hemmed in by folks. It’s clear that Spud and his owner don’t like company of any sort.

Yet it looks as if they may have neighbors. A Reno man who plans to found the nation’s first gay and lesbian city has chosen a site--the abandoned goat ranch right outside the Dale’s trailer window.

“I don’t want them (gay people) on my property, I don’t want nothing to do with them,” Dale said, sitting in the breakfast nook of his trailer on a recent afternoon. “The cowboys around here don’t want them either, or the truckers.

Wait-and-See Attitude

“I’ve never seen one (a gay person) that I know of.” Dale’s blue eyes were cautious under the rim of his cowboy hat. “I’m 67 years old and I won’t put up with a bunch of bull. So I and Spud, we’ll just wait and see.” He carefully stroked the dog who had fallen asleep and was snoring beside him.

Dale is just another in a long list of enemies Fred Schoonmaker has made since he first announced his intention late last year to form a small community called Stonewall Park, where gays and lesbians would predominate.

A 44-year-old former casino worker, Schoonmaker originally intended to take over the ghost town of Rhyolite, near Beatty, then abandoned that location for the Mill City site, 138 miles northeast of Reno. On this rather forlorn patch of soil, Schoonmaker envisions the growth of a small town with gay-owned banks, shops and gas stations. The enterprise would be supported by gay tourists who would come to gamble in the town’s casinos.

Gay men, and some women, from around the country have contacted Schoonmaker with offers of everything from small amounts of cash to assistance with hammering and sawing the town into shape. Due to a lack of substantial financial backing and other obstacles, however, the chances seem small that the town of Stonewall Park will take shape anytime soon--if ever.

But Nevadans are gearing up for a fight just in case.

About 200 Pershing County residents signed a petition to that effect and presented it to the county commission last month. District Attorney Richard Wagner said the petitioners are offended by “both the moral aspect and the health aspect (of the proposed town) having to do with the fear of AIDS.”

Nevada State Assemblyman John Marvel recently told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he has received dozens of outraged phone calls in opposition to the plan. “I think it (the proposed community) stigmatizes the whole area and local tolerance is about zero.”

Marvel said he opposes such a settlement because homosexuality violates his notion of proper behavior for men and women. “Since I raise animals, I’m very gender conscious,” he said in a telephone interview. “If I have a bull that doesn’t know the difference between genders, he goes down the road.”

Making a Statement

Pershing County residents are not alone in their feelings. Gov. Richard Bryan said, via his press secretary, Karen Zupon, that it was his impression that most of Nevada would prefer to see the gay utopia in another state.

After listening to such passionate opposition, one might wonder why Schoonmaker would want to settle in a conservative, rural area such as Pershing County, where 3,800 people--mostly ranchers and miners--are sprinkled sparingly over 6,120 square miles. Schoonmaker explained that he feels as though he’s making a statement by moving into an area where there is still strong resistance to gay rights. “Nevada needed a little shock treatment,” he said.

At least one other gay leader has proposed that “smoking out homophobia” in the hinterlands is a good way to wake people up to injustice. Morris Kight, a longtime Los Angeles gay activist and founder of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, said that during a 1969 press conference, he and a crew of radical gay liberationists announced that they intended to take over Alpine County, Calif., population about 500 at that time.

As Kight tells it, they never really planned to move there (“We all knew we would starve to death in Alpine County; the growing season is 90 days”), but they managed to convince the media they were sincere. When the group caravaned up to the backwoods county, the press followed.

“CBS, ABC, AP, UPI and the whole crowd--everybody was there,” Kight recalled in a telephone interview. Years later, he is still delighted with the farce. “This new city was going to have universities, hot tubs, a vast communal bath. It would be paradise, nirvana, ambrosia, Lesbos. . . .”

Kight, 67, called a halt to the caper when he felt he had accomplished his mission--making people aware of the hatred that existed toward gays in many parts of the country. (Letters to the editor appeared in local papers across the land denouncing the plan, he said.)

Kight believes Schoonmaker is sincere in his efforts to build a gay town and intends more than a symbolic statement. But the L.A. activist is of the opinion that a homogenous society--whether it be all gay, all black, all female or all Asian--works better as concept than in reality. A mix of life styles is what makes a community healthy, he said.

No matter what / No matter where

It’s always home / If love is there.

The framed verse hangs over the table in the home Schoonmaker shares with his lover of 15 years, Alfred Parkinson, a baker at the El Dorado Hotel and Casino in Reno.

Although home is only an unkempt trailer in a slightly dog-earred complex on the edge of town, the place satisfies a yearning in Schoonmaker. Ever since he was a youth, the son of a steelworker in rural West Virginia, he dreamed about someday living with a man in a comfortable house and reveling in “true love and happiness.”

Now that that is taken care of--Schoonmaker says he wishes everyone, gay or straight, had as happy a relationship as he and Parkinson--Schoonmaker has felt a calling to do something that surpasses his personal concerns.

A previously self-involved individual, as he describes himself, even Schoonmaker is a bit puzzled by this altruistic impulse. He’s not, as he points out, an obvious candidate for leadership or the limelight. His answers to questions take circuitous routes, and he’s not all that outgoing.

But ever since two 16-year-old gay boys he knew as a youth committed suicide--in part, presumably, because they knew what society thought of gay people, and didn’t anticipate a happy future for themselves--Schoonmaker has, he said, rebelled against the treatment he and his friends often receive at the hands of straight society.

‘A Waste of Energy’

“Enough,” he said. “It’s enough. It’s a waste of energy to be fighting all the time because I happen to be spending my life with a man.”

The activist got the notion that he could start an exclusively gay settlement which would provide rural gays--himself included--sanctuary. Three years ago, Schoonmaker and some friends formed Stonewall Park Inc., and announced in gay newspapers throughout the country that they were looking for people to live in and invest in a gay city that would be built as soon as the right location could be found.

Last October a Las Vegas gay newspaper, the Bohemian Bugle, broke the news that Schoonmaker, Parkinson and friends had moved to Rhyolite, an old ghost town, and had plans to purchase it and turn it into a homosexual mecca.

According to Schoonmaker, the whole thing happened too fast. The Las Vegas Review-Journal picked up the story before the potential buyers had time to evaluate the site, and the national media followed.

The Rhyolite plan fell through in less than a month; Schoonmaker said it was because there was not enough water to support their dream town. Nor were there enough investors to make a down payment on the $2.25-million property.

Abandoning the Rhyolite dream was a disappointment to Schoonmaker, but getting out of town was a relief, he said. Most nights during the month Schoonmaker and Parkinson spent at Rhyolite--living in a red caboose--bottles, rocks and firecrackers crashed through the windows of the town’s mostly abandoned buildings. Residents also showed their displeasure with the proposed community by painting highway signs black, and printing anti-gay graffiti on the buildings.

Needed Watchdogs

It was then, for protection, that Schoonmaker and Parkinson got their two dogs, Rusty and Katy, that now live with them in the trailer. (Their puppy, Tribble, is a new addition.)

Schoonmaker said he was run off the road on occasion going to and from Rhyolite, and he was threatened with guns. A man who did not identify himself came to see them, saying he spoke for the powers-that-be in Las Vegas and that he’d give them $2 million to get out of the state, Schoonmaker said. The second time he came, it was not to offer money, but to say that the gay activists’ arms and legs would be broken if they persisted with their plans.

Schoonmaker is fighting back in a way he believes Nevadans can understand--in economic terms. He has pointed out in letters to local politicians that gay visitors from the San Francisco Bay Area contribute a great deal of business to the state’s casinos. The antagonistic response to the Stonewall Park plan might cause these visitors to reconsider before planning their next gambling holiday, he said. “Nevada just cannot afford to be alienating tourists.”

Schoonmaker is depending on some of those gay visitors to someday spend their gambling dollars at Stonewall Park casinos. Establishing a gambling resort, he said, is about the only feasible way he can think of to finance his social experiment. “American Can is not going to rush in and build a plant in a gay and lesbian community,” he said.

District Attorney Wagner cited zoning laws that would complicate establishment of a town or gambling resort on the former goat ranch site; in most of the county, only one dwelling is allowed on a 160-acre parcel. The regulations might be waived, Wagner said, if someone for example wanted to put a subdivison on the property. But considering the proposed use of Schoonmaker’s land, “Frankly, I would foresee an uphill battle,” he said.

More central than casinos to the community’s well-being as Schoonmaker envisions it are facilities such as a library--named in honor of a 70-year-old retired librarian who supports Schoonmaker’s dream--and a nursing home for aging lesbians and gays.

Heterosexuals won’t be turned away at the city line. “Some of my straight friends are my biggest supporters,” Schoonmaker said.

And will there be bars and baths in this settlement? “That isn’t one of my personal priorities,” Schoonmaker said, “but eventually I’m not going to be the only one living there.”

Thunder Mountain, the local landmark that hovers above Mill City, was clouded over on a recent afternoon when Fred Schoonmaker and his friend M. A. Caldwell drove out to inspect the future site of Stonewall Park. There was patchy snow on the ground. It was around 20 degrees, with a fierce wind blowing.

Caldwell, a lesbian who sold the goat ranch to Schoonmaker (she has a more colorful nickname but prefers the initials M. A. for public use), knows just how harsh the weather and the life can be out here. There was nothing at all on the land when she moved here alone in the early ‘70s. Her lover of 18 years had died, and Caldwell wanted to be by herself for awhile, away from friends in South Tahoe where the couple had lived.

She moved into a 15-foot trailer while she built a tiny house and some sheds for her goats. There were no conveniences--the nearest utility pole is three miles away, and there is no telephone. She remembers muddy roads, cold, and unrelieved isolation.

“It (the site) has bad memories for me so I don’t think I’ll move back there,” said Caldwell, 55, an accountant who lives in Reno.

Affordable Price

She sold the 41 acres to Schoonmaker at a price he could afford: $4,000 down with payments of $100 a month. As long as the Stonewall Park group pays up within 10 years, even the monthly payments can be waived--a feature that fills Schoonmaker with gratitude.

The place does need work. The building Schoonmaker intends to be the town’s first full-time home is nothing more than a shack. The snow, sifting in through a paneless window, covered books, old shoes and other unwanted belongings left behind by Caldwell. The shack had been ransacked several times since Schoonmaker’s plans became public.

Schoonmaker shivered as he surveyed his new home. Even with two shirts under his yellow turtleneck, he still looked skinny. A devotee of cigarettes and coffee, he has a constitution seemingly unsuited for the rigors of rural Nevada.

Yet he is determined to become Stonewall Park’s first resident sometime this spring. He remembers what it was like to go to the pump for water and bathe in a washtub when he was a youth, and he believes he and Parkinson can adapt to that--and poverty--again.

‘We’ll Do All Right’

“We (he and Parkinson) like potatoes, so we’ll do all right,” Schoonmaker said.

Yet he is realistic enough to understand that people will not be moving here in droves until there are some basic comforts and some sort of economy established. A few settlers might be able to support themselves by working the five casinos in Winnemucca, 30 miles to the north, or the nearby tungsten and mercury mines.

Sometimes Schoonmaker stops spinning plans aloud and grows silent for a moment as if he’s pondering the truly enormous odds against his making it out here. (Dist. Atty. Wagner said that Schoonmaker might be in for some brawls since he is in essence waving a red flag in front of the notoriously rough characters who people the region.)

Schoonmaker sighed when asked if he is fearful and wondered what else can he do but go ahead and try to make a place where he and Parkinson can one day live as openly as other people. “I’m happy with my life,” he said. “I don’t want to dig a hole.”