TCNJ

8 The College of New Jersey Magazine ESSAY A DIP INTO HIS HIPPIE PAST Life on a commune is the topic of Juda Bennett's latest book. Most of the TCNJ community knows Juda Bennett as an English professor, now emeritus. But before he earned his PhD, he was a 1970s hippie spending his time "knitting, milking cows, and reading books." It was a past he didn't like to bring up to his students or on campus. "I always tried to keep my hippie commune past kind of quiet," he says. "I never wanted to really get into it, because I was a very serious teacher." When Bennett retired in 2022, he felt it was time to bare his soul. What resulted was Qtopia: A Memoir of Love, Land, and Liberation, a book about his time at Lavender Hill, a queer commune in Central New York where he moved in 1975, and the fluid lifestyle he lived for the decade that followed. It was a life that almost didn't get its start. He tells that story, excerpted here. . WHILE SHE WAS TALKING, I reached into my duffel bag and pulled out the brochure, trying to offer it as evidence that I had written. "Yes, but that's for Twin Oaks, our sister commune," Chris said. Since she would not take the brochure, I started reading it to myself, and then aloud the phrase, "North Mountain Community is now accepting members." "Yes, we are accepting new members," Chris said, finally a little flustered, "but you still have to get on the schedule. All are welcome to schedule a visit." She said these words firmly and with a different tone than I had heard from her before. I started to panic. Was I being rejected? I looked around, but there was no one present. I knew that she was supposed to say something else to help. She was, after all, an adult, and I was just a kid, only having turned eighteen two months ago. When she told me brightly that she was happy to put me on the schedule, I misunderstood; I thought she meant now and not in the future. She told me there were openings in July and my head dropped, my gaze fell. "That's next month," I muttered, barely audible. "And August is wide open." I stared in disbelief. What did she expect me to do? Walk back to the bus station? Call my parents and ask them to pick me up? Go back to Delaware and tell everyone I made a mistake? At this point, Chris made a show of craning her head around, looking to her left and right and making sure we were alone, and then she asked in a low voice if I was really eighteen. She reached out and rested her hand on my shoulder, a gesture that comforts no one, and I wanted to twist out of her grip and tell her she would have made a terrible teacher and wasn't even a good hippie. "I wish I could do something," she said. "But we already have two visitors staying with us, and it's impossible to let people drop in unannounced." I panicked. Juda Bennett in 1975 at Lavender Hill in West Danby, New York.

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