<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">August 16, 2002

At Russian River, Gay Campers Find They Are Not Alone
By SARA RIMER

THIS is the sixth summer that Joe Selph and Marty Bracciotti have gone camping together. Over the years they have made the rounds of the traditional spots — the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Bryce Canyon — pitching a tent, cooking outdoors, hiking mountain trails. But the two men have decided that Fife's, a 15-acre camping resort in the lower Russian River Valley, a 90-minute drive north of San Francisco, is probably more their kind of place.

It isn't that the two men don't enjoy touring the country's national parks, Mr. Selph, a 44-year-old children's entertainer from Los Angeles, explained as he sat in a canvas chair on a warm late July morning sipping a cup of coffee that had just been brewed on a Coleman stove outside his tent. It's just that those places impose certain limitations, Mr. Selph said: "You're not going to come out of the shower with a towel wrapped around your head pretending you're Norma Desmond."

Fife's and the two dozen or so other resorts scattered around the valley, a verdant stretch of redwood-rich land about 15 miles from the Pacific Ocean, have long offered a bucolic refuge for gay men and lesbians, a place where a mix of freedoms — social, personal, sexual — transform the annual summer holiday into something more than just a week's break from the grind of the workplace.</font>