Chicago Tribune
August 6, 2006
Dean Kuipers’ “Burning Rainbow Farm” chronicles a forgotten chapter of a struggle peculiar to a nation founded by landed rebels: how to balance the social benefits of strict law and order with the ideals of individual freedom and property rights.
Kuipers tells the story of a […]
LA Times
August 6, 2006
WHAT’S a high-school-dropout, Harley-riding, long-haul-trucking, fist-fighting, George W. Bush-supporting, pot-smoking, gay rural Midwestern real estate investor to do when he gets close to 40? For Tom Crosslin, the answer was simple: Buy a 34-acre semi-fallow farm in Michigan’s Cass County, move there with a lover 19 […]
Rocky Mountain News
August 4, 2006
Making fun of hippies is a worthy pastime, especially here in Colorado, which hardly wants for natural resources. (Drop that Boulder joke right here, baby…)
Part of the joy of skewering this subculture is that it’s risk-free. Since they’re all about the peace and the […]
Drug Truth Network with host Dean Becker
In These Times
July 18, 2006
The motto of Rainbow Farm in Vandalia, Mich., could have been “A Working-Class Hippie Is Something to Be.” On Memorial and Labor Day weekends from 1996 to 2000, a few thousand amplifier-factory workers, hippie girls and truckers’ wives-turned-political-activists camped out there to smoke weed, listen […]
Lux Esto
July 7, 2006
Surrounded by forces in blue, and most every other color of uniform, Rainbow Farm blazed in a fury of flames while guns were trained on the two owners as they emerged: first, Tom Crosslin, 46, then his much younger lover, Rolland “Rollie” Rohm, 28. Crosslin was […]
Lansing City Pulse
June 22, 2006
There was no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow only fire, destruction, death and the end of a dream. In 1997, when Tom Crosslin decided to call his 34 acres near Vandalia, Michigan Rainbow Farm it had nothing to do with gays, […]
Detroit News
June 20, 2006
Some call it Michigan’s own mini-Waco.
Just one week before the September 11 terrorist attacks, FBI and state police sharpshooters took out the two owners of a pro-marijuana, libertarian enterprise known as Rainbow Farm in the southwest corner of the state.
The dead men, Tom […]
San Diego Union-Tribune
June 18, 2006
In a famous 1928 U.S. Supreme Court dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis articulated what he believed was a cherished constitutional right — “the right to be left alone.”
Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm built a life around that notion, and then died for it. In this […]
Nashville Scene
Why were a couple of gay Republican potheads blown away by the FBI?
June 15, 2006
On Monday, Sept. 3, 2001, at 5:25 p.m., FBI special agent Richard Salomon, from a distance of less than 10 yards and using a bureau-issued .308 sniper rifle, shot Tom Crosslin between the […]