Wild Mares by Dianna Hunter

A wry memoir of growing up, coming out and going back to the land as a lesbian feminist in the rural Midwest of the 1960s and 70s. Dianna Hunter was a softball-loving, working-class tomboy in North Dakota, growing up in the shadow of a Strategic Air Command base, where communists and antiwar hippies were the enemy and lesbians were seen as criminal and insane. It took her a while to realize she was one, and longer to find where she fit. Her route runs through the Twin Cities and rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, the antiwar movement, women's liberation and lesbian feminism, as she and her friends try to build a rural utopia free of sexual oppression, violence, materialism, environmental damage and men. When Dianna buys a dairy farm, the Reagan-era farm crisis brings a new set of problems.