Greener Pastures: Filming Sex and Place at Druid Heights

In 2018, the US Park Service finally deemed the informal artist colony Druid Heights, in California’s Marin County, eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. There is no act of preservation that can do justice to everything Druid Heights was and is, and it remains to be seen which aspects will get fixed as official history and which others will fade away or be left to haunt the place in unexpected ways. This chapter analyzes three films that staged competing visions of sexual freedom at Druid Heights: James Broughton’s experimental short The Bed (1967), the Mariposa Film Group’s gay and lesbian interview documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977), and Ed De Priest’s heterosexual pornographic feature Skintight (1981). Together, these films present a valuable case study for understanding the role of cinema in political contestations over the meaning and use of space.

Additions to the millipede family Caseyidae. II. Martenseya, a new genus of miniature, blind millipedes from California (Diplopoda, Chordeumatida, Striariidea, Striarioidea, Caseyidae)

A new genus, Martenseya, is described for Martenseya minutocaeca n. sp., a tiny, blind species in the family Caseyidae from Marin County, California, USA. A key to the chordeumatidan families of northwestern North America is provided, as well as a key to caseyid genera.

How War Makes (and Unmakes) the Democratic State

Focusing on the figures of the terrorist and the migrant, Huq suggests that war in the twenty-first century, in partial contrast to its precursors, may prove costly to democracy. Whereas war once served to develop bureaucratic capacity, shrink wealth gaps, and expand the franchise, it is less likely to perform these functions in a period when war is increasingly cabined to distant zones of violence, mechanized, and privatized. Huq considers a pair of novels by Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West. The former documents the transformation, and potential radicalization, of a young Pakistani professional in the wake of the September 11 attacks; the latter follows a couple from an unspecified city on the brink of civil war to the Greek island of Mykonos, then to London, and finally to Marin County, California, where their relationship dissolves. Whereas right-wing populists cast the terrorist and the migrant as racialized threats to civilization and national culture, Hamid’s protagonists instead embody a commitment to pluralism, inclusion, and democratic openness.