"Hmm..a gay tobacco farmer," I said. "You're a first for me."

"Yeah...well, I don't grow tobacco any more," he growled. "It's too much work. I even let my tobacco allotment go. Then I got into breeding American Pintos. But that's hard work too...and nobody makes a cent in the horse business. Not that what I'm doing right now isn't hard work..."

Lee's farm was the real thing. It was not a city gentleman's weekend property, all prettied and updated for a real-estate ad. It sat in a fertile valley framed by the steep wooded ridges that are typical of that part of Tennessee. The weathered 19th-century frame house had the creaky pillared porch and creaky chairs for "settin'," plus dogs and chickens and a potbellied pig named Katie Scarlett roaming around. The ancient barn, outbuildings, vegetable garden and chicken house sat amid 150 acres of rolling uncultivated fields where his Pinto horses grazed. In the distance to the east, you could see the haze over the Great Smokies.

Lee's dream was to write his first book and create an LGBTQH writer's conference that would bring a lot of people together in that down-to-earth unpretentious atmosphere. Between chores, he managed to maintain a website with one of the first blogs in history, where he posted his wry commentaries. While I unpacked, Lee finished a task of planting daffodils around the place.

"Here," he growled, handing me half a bag of bulbs. "I'm tired and had a few left. Take them back to California and plant them."

To educate me about tobacco growing, Lee took me on a drive through that rugged ridge-and-valley region. I had always thought of tobacco as industrialized agribusiness, but here it was cottage industry -- an endless patchwork of small farms where whole families toiled on their allotments, which could be as small as 25 or 30 acres. From the highway we could see leaves being hand-picked in the old-time way, or curing on poles in a drying barn.

"Now that the tobacco business is going away," Lee said, "a lot of these families have to find another way to scratch out a living...like growing organic vegetables or herbs."

Lee's own toil had customized his farm for guests. The chicken house and a couple of other outbuildings were now the most creative, cozy kind of guest cottages you could imagine. With next to no money, Lee had done the carpentry himself, and decorated with the best in "queer shabby chic" from local antique barns and thrift shops. Inside the house, the cluttered homey kitchen with its collection of iron skillets and huge stove opened into a old-fashioned dining room with a long boarding-house table. The current guests were a group of gay deer hunters from Indiana, who were tenting out in a field and assembled at the long table for noisy meals. Some of them, like Lee, were HIV+.

I spent a delightful week of beer drinking with the hunters, and wine drinking with the writers around a campfire.

Further drives to meet neighbors and shop in Rogersville began to answer my question about the KKK. A couple of miles down the road, a Wiccan woman often had gatherings of the local coven at her home. The KKK had burned a cross in her yard. But they'd never burned a cross in Lee's yard. Yet every soul in that part of the state knew he was gay and out. How did he manage?

Maybe it was because the city guy from New York was a real farmer...with the real farmer's heart. He was the kind of neighbor who could be counted on if your tractor turned over, or your horse was stuck in a mudhole. This impressed the hell out of his Bible Belt neighbors, who were always complaining that country people weren't what they used to be. Lee's coming out in east Tennessee wasn't going to make headlines, or cause any pro-gay legislation to be passed, but it sank in where it counted -- in the local consciousness, as everybody watched the Yankee struggle for survival on the same hard land where descendants of Rebels were struggling as well. If he made it, Lee would add his bit to the local GNP, and that was a good thing.

In the end, it was hard work, not homophobia, that did Lee in. Over the next couple of years, I followed his struggles from afar, as he tried to find assistants who were reliable help with the writers' conference. But the gay men he hired were hothouse flowers who couldn't stand life on a real farm. His immune system was flagging, and the moment came when he couldn't face another damp cold Tennessee winter.

So he gave up his dream -- sold the horses, put the farm into a gay & lesbian home exchange, and went off to his exchange residence on a Caribbean beach to get warm and work on his book. Inevitably he wound up back in the U.S., in a hospital, under a family member's care.

Every spring, Lee's daffodils bloom in my front yard in Los Angeles. His blogs have vanished off the Web, and Google dredges up his name in only a few places. But I'll bet his memory still blossoms in the farm country near Rogersville -- the Yankee gay guy that the KKK left in peace.