At Home with Myself: Stories from the Hills of Turkey Hollow

Drawing on his considerable talents as a storyteller in the tradition on Garrison Keillor and Will Rogers, Mixner chronicles his return to nature at the age of 60. No longer willing to do the things young people do and having lost most of his closet friends to AIDS, he felt out of place in the big cities and “gay mecccas” that had been his home all his adult life. So he chose a mountainside home as a retreat from the busy world, a place of meditation on the small, daily wonders of pastoral life, including the beauty of nature and its constant evolution. Observing the arrival of spring’s new blossoms or the sudden appearance of new born animals (while speaking to life’s daily events) Mixner writes as Thoreau might have had he been gay.

However, At Home with Myself is also a look back on an illustrious 40 year career of protest and politics, including his involvement and leadership in the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and high-powered presidential politics. In looking at both his–and America’s–past and present, Mixner bridges today’s world of openly gay elected officials and an African American US president that he and countless other activists fought to build over the past half century and the difficult but exhilarating road traveled to get here.