Author Talk - Under Mountain Shadows

Book Summary: From her world-famous dude ranch in Washington state's Yakima County, Kay Kershaw exerted tremendous influence on conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest and, tangentially, on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. After gaining local renown in sports and aviation, she established the ranch at Goose Prairie with her first partner, Pat Kane -- a fraught undertaking in a region closely associated with the John Birch Society. Operating under the guise of two "spinsters", Kershaw and her later life-partner Isabelle Lynn guarded their privacy closely, but local encroachment by the U.S. Forest Service and the timber industry forced them into the public arena as environmentalists. In partnership with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Kershaw and Lynn spearheaded a decades-long campaign to save the ancient forests and ecosystem of Washington's Cascade Range. In the process, Kay and Isabelle's devoted relationship proved a marked contrast to Justice Douglas' own turbulent love life, perhaps affecting his perception of the law and his precedent-setting judicial opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which provided the basis for major LGBTQ+ Supreme Court decisions in the twenty-first century -- as well as Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

An inherently fascinating and impressively informative personal and political biography, "Under Mountain Shadows: Kay Kershaw, Lesbian Eco-Warrior of the Pacific Northwest" is an exceptional study by William D. Frank and one that will be of particular appreciation for readers with an interest in LGBTQ+ biographies/memoirs as well as environmental/environmentalist studies.