About the Rêve
On this page, you can find:
Our Values
We believe a better world is possible*. Part of fostering that world means connecting to the legacies of our queer ancestors and nurturing our queer descendants. We are committed to actively practicing “hope as a discipline,”** and behaving as though we have already won. Even on the darkest of days, we can nurture the seeds for the future we want to live in through rigorous optimism.
We center the needs of the marginalized. This space is welcoming to all, but centers the needs and safety of its trans residents. We do our best to be mindful about financial and racial power dynamics to best ensure we are not harming each other. Our goal is not “equal” exchange, but instead ensuring everyone's needs are met to the best of our capacity and capability. Everyone's voice and agency is a priority here regardless of how much they are able to contribute.
We make thoughtful impacts on each other and the world around us. We find ongoing ways to be involved with the existing community that was here before us, both in its current form and through giving back to the Esopus tribe of the Lenape people—original inhabitants & stewards of this land we are on. It is also important to us to do what we can to be environmentally sustainable as well as conscientious of the land and the creatures in it. Internally, we aim for clear and direct communication to minimize perpetuating harmful dynamics. We also strive to be thoughtful instead of reactionary in the face of conflict. We know when conflict arises it can act as an opportunity to better understand ourselves and each other.
Everyone here is valued/loved in good times and bad. It is our belief that everyone is worthy of love and support through all their complexities. This does not mean we will withstand mistreatment of one another, or that “anything goes.” It does mean that we can and are capable of doing the hard work to see conflict as generative and that we value repair over burning bridges. It also means that we acknowledge the realities of living in disabled bodies whose capacities may drastically fluctuate, and we organize accordingly.
We celebrate a diversity of tactics. We believe there is no single way of changing the world and that, in fact, change is only possible through a diverse range of strategies. In that light, we see our creativity and our ability to bring together different (yet overlapping) ways of seeing the world as strengths. This allows us to be more than the sum of our parts. This helps us resist binary, colonial ways of thinking that prioritize assimilation, reject difference, promote extraction, and squash complexity. While we’re a community with shared ideals and some shared experiences, we are also a collective of individuals with unique backgrounds and individual interests. At the Rêve, we seek to support both our group as an entity and nourish the individual growth of its members.
We practice interdependence. Rather than creating transactional relationships where each act of kindness is a coin in a slot to later redeem for something else, we aim to help each other out of generosity and a desire to see all of us thrive. This means we take clear and honest stock of our needs and resources—individually and collectively. We operate in a way that seeks to flatten hierarchies and foster a sense of cooperation and responsibility to each other. We also respect that, while all our opinions matter and influence decisions, some of us have specialized knowledge in certain areas. Rather than reinventing wheels or expecting everyone to have the same skillsets, “in the matter of shoes, we defer to the shoe-maker.”***
This is a place of abundance. Rather than acting from a place of fear and scarcity, we try to remember that many resources are actually abundant. While we know struggle and suffering form part of our world, we reject the idea that we must struggle and suffer to earn rest and pleasure. So, we try to make this a space where joy and laughter are frequent, where letting one’s armor down is possible, and where fun is a key ingredient to most things. We can be generous rather than guarded, even when we are scared.
*This slogan, as well as "another world is possible" have been popularized in various spaces, such as the Zapatista Movement and the World Social Forum of 2003.
**Concept popularized by Mariame Kaba.
***Attributed to Karl Marx.
History of The Reve
2014 – The Rêve began as a literal dream, an unconscious belief that we could live together in a place loving and caring enough that it could hold us all. We started writing and imagining into existence what it could be, saying to each other, “next year in the forest!” whenever we parted, believing it could be so.
2017 – When a lease in Brooklyn ended for Andy and Roo, we decided it was time to try and make it real, and began hunting for the right location. Somewhere far enough from NYC, but close enough to a train; rural enough for privacy, but not too far from a crunchy grocery; with PoC and queer community, and water, and a forest.
2018 – We found it! With support from families chosen and biological, great magic, and bureaucratic fortitude, we purchased what we now call the Back House, with the 14 acres of woods and stream and pond around it. Cal, Andy, and Roo moved on site in May. We started planting roots and flowers and joy, and hosted our first of many camping weekends.
2019 – We hosted three camping work events over the summer, aimed at preparing the land for our biggest event. More than 150 people gathered here for our Hearthwarming celebration, a commitment ceremony to the land and each other.
2020 – This year changed everything, for us as it did for everyone. We started the year having to replace the Back House roof due to water damage, with a successful livestream fundraiser bringing in the funds we needed, just as COVID-19 quarantine landed in New York. Later in the year a comrade was able to help us put solar panels all over that brand new roof! Our dear Renée escaped Hell's Kitchen in the summer to join us for several months in a camper. Then the Front House, closer to the road, came on to the housing market. We put out the call to our networks to see if any comrade wished to purchase it, and our dear friends Charlie and Ryan answered the call with gusto! Charlie moved on site permanently in August.
Who we are
The Rȇve is a beautiful shifting amorphous blob of tranimals in a variety of relationships to the land that we love. Some of us live here full-time, some of us live here part-time or for shorter stays, and some of us gather for celebrations and discrete events and then return home. We think of the Rȇve as a set of concentric circles centered around a core organizing group that lives here full time and dedicates a lot of our labor to putting on our events and the other work that we do.
The core organizing group at the Rȇve is made up of five members who live onsite. We are all a variety of flavors of trans and genderqueer, and our organizing and events are centered around trans liberation and trans joy. We all also have a wide variety of other identities and community connections, and so we produce a wide variety of identity-based and community programming, including trans lady picnics, POC-only spaces, anti-zionist Jewish ritual, Fat Liberation events, mental health supportive work, art and poetry retreats, and lots and lots of opportunities for people whose journeys through the world are difficult in different ways to find sanctuary, abundance, and play.
Location & Land Back
thank you to the original stewards of this land and no thank you to the fuckass colonizers who ousted them
The Rêve is located on 16 acres of mostly forest and wetland. The land lies in a geologic bowl between two ravines, and includes a pond, several swamps, slate formations, hemlocks, oaks, cedars, beeches, and a maple sugarbush. The forest is primarily deciduous with incidental evergreen trees.
We are in USDA Zone 6a, the Northeastern Coastal Forest subregion of the WWF Eastern Temperate & Broadleaf Mixed Forest ecoregion, and the CEC Eastern Great Lakes and Hudson Lowlands ecoregion (8.1.1).
We know that this was farmland in the recent past, and the piece we live on was parceled off from a large family farm, along with our neighbors' homes. The front house was built in the 1800s and served as the original farmhouse. We are told that the Momma Renée Sanctuary Casita was originally some kind of milk shed. The back house was built in the 1980s, which luckily means we haven't had to treat it for lead.
This land was originally stewarded by the Delaware and Munsee Lenape people: People of the Waters that are Never Still. The Rêve pays an indigenous land tax through monthly donations to a local landback project, the Ramapo-Munsee Sweetwater Cultural Center. We also donate periodically (and encourage our community to donate) to fundraisers by our Mohawk neighbors to the north, including this ongoing GoFundMe campaign to buy them a new tractor.
Wildlife
We share our land with several wild non-human residents, in addition to our beloved pets.
There are bats (all named Bruce), frogs (all named Aiden), squirrels, opossums, deer, snakes (including Siouxsie the black rat snake), mice, turtles, groundhogs salamanders, spiders, insects, and many birds both big and small.
We mostly treat them as neighbors, and we are thoughtful about the effects we have on them, and that they have on each other.
In collaboration with the local organization Partners for Climate Action, we are investigating the possibility of installing a deer exclosure in our forest to prevent overgrazing of native plants by overpopulated white-tailed deer. For more information about that initiative, you can check out the PCA website.
Press & media
Over the years, we have done a few photoshoots and interviews talking about the project, how we think about it, and what we dream together.
- In 2019, Erika Kapin of the Open Photo Project photographed our commitment ceremony to each other and to the land, and interviewed with us about it. Read more here.
"It goes without saying that there is a queerness to the life that we’re building here. And that queerness is in an unbroken line to our queer ancestors. The way that we’re told that we’re 'supposed' to live, queers have never lived that way. And the conformity to that norm has never been something that serves as a functional lodestar for people like us."
- In 2021, we interviewed with Andrew Solomon for the New Yorker. Elliot Ross took photos of our family to accompany the piece. Read more here.
Andy Izenson, Roo Khan, Cal T., and Aida Manduley envisaged creating a utopian place where queer, trans, and polyamorous people could feel safe and welcome. For years, they had told one another stories about the property they would build. At the end of 2017, when Andy and Roo lost their lease, in Brooklyn, the time had come…
- A right-wing blog, the Muslim Skeptic, wrote a response to our New Yorker interview that really tickled us. We won’t link to it because we don’t want to give that guy hits, but here’s an excerpt:
“Along with the danger of it being increasingly difficult to communicate with one another—the primary purpose of language—is this basic breakdown of society as we knew it…the more that fighting against one’s biology is normalized, the more that those with seemingly flippant desires to do so (we’re all human after all) may try it. You can imagine the thoughts running through one’s mind: “Feminizing hormone therapy is offered by my insurer; I’ve always felt too delicate to be a man.” …If such pursuit of base desire (i.e., perversion) is seen as acceptable, then it’s much easier for members of that society to engage in such behavior.”
- In 2023, Liana DeMasi visited and wrote a beautiful article about our home. Read more here.
So the choice of Rose of Sharon, a flower that represents ever-lasting, continuous love, makes sense for a commitment ceremony, even if those same vows buried under the earth with the flower’s roots included a tidbit about honoring the commitment to one another for as long as it is healthy and joyful for each of them. What is love if not a representation of choice? Of freedom?
FAQ
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Social links
We maintain more frequently-updated online presences via several social media and mass-messaging platforms.
- For photos, event announcements, and occasional silly posts, check Instagram, Facebook, or our Signal Annoucements chat channel.
- Signal Announcements
(If you're new to Signal, you can download the secure messaging app for computer, iPhone, or Android here!)
- For invitations to events during the hosting season, and occasional posts about online offerings, try our email list.
- If you'd like to support us financially and receive occasional mail and access to videos and zines, those can be accessed on Patreon, which is also how we fund the grocery, transportation, and infrastructure fund for our event hosting. (Thank you Patrons!)
- If you'd like to reach out directly and have a live human respond to you (eventually), there's always good old-fashioned email!
We can't wait to hear from you. 💗