On Civil Disobedience: In the Arms of Mountains by Cole Nicole LeFavour

LGBTQ activist LeFavour discusses their approach to civil disobedience in conversation with Culver City councilmember Bubba Fish.
About this Event

Join us for a conversation with Cole Nicole LeFavour, author of the new memoir In the Arms of Mountains!

Cole is touring the country to discuss their unusual life in politics and activism with an emphasis on civil disobedience. Joining Cole is Culver City councilmember Bubba Fish. Proceeds from the event go towards supporting The Outwords Archive.

About the author:

Cole Nicole LeFavour is an activist and award-winning journalist and writer whose stories and essays have appeared in the North American Review, Idaho Wilderness Considered, and Sawtooth-White Cloud, among others. In 2004, LeFavour became the first openly LGBTQ+ member of the Idaho Legislature, elected four times, serving as a state senator and leading multiple acts of civil disobedience at the State Capitol.

About the book:

Rural America deserves more than an elegy: a powerful story of hope, resilience, and political resistance where you least expect it, from Idaho’s first openly LGBTQ+ lawmaker.

Cole LeFavour was 11 years old when their hippie parents moved the family to a guest ranch in Idaho. Hours to the north, as the LeFavours unpacked pots and pans, Richard Butler dreamed of establishing a white separatist nation. It’s here, in one of the reddest states on the map, where Cole learned to raise ducklings, hike the wilderness alone, and build political resistance where you'd least expect it.

This is the story rural America deserves to tell—and that the rest of the country needs to hear. Follow LeFavour’s journey from their 2-mile walk to the school bus along a dirt road to their monumental election as Idaho’s first openly queer state senator. Cole recounts anti-apartheid protests at Berkeley, the solitary life of a fire lookout, and the gravitational pull of unexpected romance and loss. In the Arms of Mountains is a memoir with dirt under its nails and heart on its sleeve. It shatters the carefully constructed “monolithic heartland” myth and rewrites Hillbilly Elegy’s bleak epitaph.

Haunting, hopeful, and full of fight, Cole’s story reminds us of what’s possible when we look beyond red and blue, right and left, to meet each other at the edge of the wild.