LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing books that have made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any book that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a Kosmail to Chrislove.
It comes as no surprise that LGBT people in rural areas--particularly the rural American South--face a peculiar set of challenges. When one thinks of LGBT communities, an urban environment might immediately come to mind: San Francisco's The Castro, Los Angeles County's West Hollywood, Houston's Montrose, Philadelphia's Gayborhood. Historically, the rural land surrounding these urban enclaves has often been seen as a kind of hinterlands, or a very large closet from which LGBT people escape into the city. This is not necessarily completely wrong. Even today, the rural South is especially seen, and not without justification, as an environment of extreme hostility for those who step outside sexual and gender norms. The 2006 documentary
Small Town Gay Bar captures this very well as it documents the struggle of gays and lesbians in the rural Deep South to maintain community in the face of such deep, widespread homophobia.
Up until not too terribly long ago, the relatively young field of LGBT history all but neglected two separate, but overlapping, groups of LGBT people: rural dwellers and southerners. I wrote a diary for this series almost a year ago about the book of essays Carryin' On in the Lesbian and Gay South (1997), which really got the ball rolling on uncovering southern (including rural southern) queer history. Not coincidentally, the editor of the book (historian John Howard) is also the author of the book I'm discussing this evening. An excerpt from what I wrote on Carryin' On:
Prior to Carryin' On, historians largely ignored queer southerners. There was certainly no dearth of books on southern history, which some might consider a "queer history" even without the presence of LGBT people, but as Howard notes in the introduction:
Some Southerners and Southern historians may take pride in eccentricity and difference here in "the perverse section," as C. Vann Woodward called the South. But we queers are just a tad too perverse.
Not to mention, as will be made clear in the first article from the volume I highlight below, some southern archivists have very actively sought to scrub queerness from the historical record.
The field of LGBT history, which by 1997 had been in existence for about 20 years, did an equally poor job at including LGBT southerners in the narrative, although perhaps we can chalk that up to historians in a young field necessarily focusing on the obvious urban queer meccas. What had resulted by the 1990s was an LGBT history that had what Howard calls a "bicoastal bias," with historians focusing on gay communities in New York or San Francisco. To some extent, that bias persists today, but we have come a long way. The urban, coastal focus of LGBT history had left entire swaths of rural-dwelling queer people out of the historical record. Howard makes an even more poignant point about the limits of LGBT historiography in 1997:
The history of (homo)sexuality, as currently framed, is less about sex or desire than it is about identity, community, and politics. Southerners, rural people especially, don't fit. Industrialization and urbanization don't figure prominently enough in their lives. Many never move to the city and "come out" in the traditional sense. But to say that individuals don't become a part of an urban culture, don't self-identify as lesbian or gay, doesn't preclude the experience of same-sex desire. Nor does it preclude acting on that desire.
In the introduction to
Carryin' On, Howard ties together extraordinarily diverse southern queer experiences by outlining what he calls "the three r's": race, religion, and rurality.
The South holds no monopoly on racism. However, legally sanctioned racism (including the Indian Removal Acts of the 1830s), statutory segregation, and their legacy distinguish the South from other parts of the nation over much of its history.
[...]
Racial categories inform and structure homosexual interactions in profound ways.
[...]
In teasing out the legal, medical, and religious discourses shaping the lives of lesbians and gays, Christianity--particularly Protestant evangelicalism--proves vital in the South.
[...]
Any person, all alone, can experience same-sex desire. Acting on that desire requires the meeting of two of more people, the traversing of distances, great or small.
This analysis excellently foreshadows Howard's next book,
Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (1999).
Men Like That is one of my favorite books on LGBT history. It unfolds in a very unorthodox way as it moves between long excerpts from oral histories and analysis, and it is not necessarily an easy read because of the theory interwoven throughout the text. This led one scholarly reviewer to call the book "irritating." But at the same time (in this reviewer's opinion), Howard does a masterful job at unearthing queer southern voices that would have otherwise been lost to history. As a historian whose work focuses to a large extent on southern (and often rural southern) LGBT people, I am in debt to
Men Like That. I think you'll like it, too. Follow me below the fold for more on the book.
Consider this a sequel to my diary last year on Carryin' On. Where the essays in Carryin' On cover a variety of lesbian and gay experiences in the South across a wide swath of time, Men Like That zooms in on men who transgressed gender and sexual norms in Mississippi from the end of World War II to the age of the AIDS. The demographic is not as narrow as you might be tempted to think.
Focusing on one state in a historical study like this is sometimes warranted and sometimes problematic (and sometimes both). In this case, it works as Howard moves adeptly from rural landscapes to underground gay life in Jackson. He goes deep into queer Mississippi in ways that would not have been possible had he undertaken a broader project, giving this study real value. From the outset, Howard outlines the assumptions people make about a place like Mississippi and homosexuality:
A compendium of superlatives, Mississippi was the nation's poorest state; its people, the least educated. A sparsely populated landscape with grossly inadequate public serves, it was readily available to ridicule. Its bigotry and backwardness, many Americans felt, were unequaled. Mississippi, of all places, seemed least receptive to homosexuality.
But, as we find, not necessarily so. Homosexuality in Mississippi took many different forms. As Howard notes, "men who transgressed gender and sexual norms" covers a large array of experiences, and a number of these men cannot neatly fit into identity boxes like "gay":
Queer sex in Mississippi was not rare. Men-desiring-men were neither wholly isolated nor invisible. From the most secluded farms in Smith County to the densest neighborhoods of the capital, Jackson, homosexuality flourished between close friends and distant relatives; casual sex between strangers was clandestine but commonplace. Androgyny, though doubly suspect, also thrived.
And it is here that
Men Like That really departs from many other works of LGBT history, which--in addition to being urban-centered--tend to be focused on identity. As Howard shows, life in rural Mississippi and elsewhere is not always as simple as the gay-straight binary suggests. Rather than focusing solely on men who identified as gay, which would have left out many of his historical subjects, he hones in on queer
desire. This is also where it gets a little heavy on theory:
Informed by queer theory and spatial theory, the work argues that notions and experiences of male-male desire are in perpetual dialectical relationship with the spaces in which they occur, mutually shaping one another.
I know, I shut down when I see "spatial theory," too. But when you cut through the theory, it's just common sense. Men who desired other men in Mississippi, whether for relationships or anonymous sex or whatever, found ways to exercise that desire based on their location (rural vs. urban)--and it did not always involve identifying and living as gay. Often, the shape these queer interactions took depended on a person's ability to travel. Indeed, the automobile is very central to Howard's study, giving rural Mississippians a chance to find male-male sex and, in the "big city" of Jackson, gay nightlife. This transport back and forth from Jackson complicates the more traditional narrative of LGBT people fleeing to the city.
Largely homebound, living in familial households, these Mississippians nonetheless traveled. With new and improved roads in the 1950s and 1960s, Mississippians had greater access to networks of homosexual desire. Hardly an exodus to the cities, queer movement more often consisted of circulation rather than congregation. In their cars, queers drove through complex, multidirectional avenues of interaction, prompting exchanges of ideas and affections. Still, many queer Mississippians, especially agrarian and working-class people--those with limited mobility--found companions as they always had, within the immediate vicinity. Though sometimes subject to intimidation and violence . . . queer Mississippians proved adept at maneuvering through hostile terrain. They often remade material and ideological spaces and thereby regularly found themselves in the company of like-minded souls.
And, having covered rurality, here we move on to another "r": race.
This company, in keeping with broader cultural conditions, was racially polarized; on either side of the color line, black men and white men participated in markedly similar worlds of desire that rarely overlapped before the 1960s.
Given the history of the Deep South, and Mississippi in particular, it should come as no surprise that
Men Like That deals extensively with race. Howard finds that race and sexuality in Mississippi are
deeply intertwined, even more so than we have previously recognized. As indicated by the above quote, the racism permeating Mississippi society in the 1950s certainly extended to the state's gay community, which was highly segregated leading up to the 1960s. Black and white queer Mississippians lived largely separate lives and rarely mixed in any substantive way.
But then, Howard argues, something interesting happened. After the Civil Rights Movement got underway, in which some queer Mississippians played a role, the ensuing white backlash included a wave of homophobia. But it was more complicated than that as "queer" took on new meanings--where it once referred to the curiosity of men having sex with men, it took on a whole new racial connotation as the categories of race, sexuality, and gender became intertwined. Then there were high-profile scandals, such as white liberal attorney and civil rights activist Bill Higgs and Mississippi NAACP leader Aaron Henry (separately) facing morals charges and accusations of homosexuality. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement as it unfolded in Mississippi, the epithet "queer" began to drip with racism in addition to homophobia. In turn, the twin black and white queer worlds began to gradually mix in the 1960s. This is not to say, of course, that racism in the gay community was dead:
Parallel black and white queer realms cautiously intermingled after the early sixties, as queer no longer denoted a nebulous eccentricity but was used as an epithet of sexual, gender, and racial nonnormativity. Whereas before, same-sex interracial intercourse usually involved advances by white men of privilege on their black class subordinates, desegregation enabled more--if seldom more egalitarian--interactions across the racial divide. Obstacles remained; racism persisted. In Jackson, though formal barriers eased, a queer boy out on the town could still expect to choose between the white bar and the black bar--located, at the end of the period, directly across the street from one another.
In fact, another contribution Howard makes to specifically LGBT historiography is by complicating the idea that the 1950s were universally an anti-gay decade, while gay people had newfound freedom in the 1960s and 1970s. He finds that, largely because of the Civil Rights Movement and the intertwining of race, sexuality, and gender in Mississippi, the state harshly cracked down on gay people beginning in the 1960s, which followed a relatively lax (as far as Mississippi standards are concerned) environment for queer Mississippians in the 1950s. Following the Civil Rights Movement, police came down hard on gay bars and "tearooms" in Jackson, and authorities attempted to extinguish homosexual networks completely. The white backlash and anti-gay backlash in Mississippi were largely one and the same.
And then, of course, the third "r": religion. The religious fervor of Bible Belt Mississippi also, unsurprisingly, seeped into the state's diverse queer communities. As Howard finds, gay organizing that worked elsewhere was difficult in Mississippi, until gay leaders recognized the importance of religion in the lives of Mississippians:
The state's first sustained lesbian and gay political organization, the Mississippi Gay Alliance, founded in 1973, largely floundered for its first ten years until its leadership began to acknowledge, respect, and finally harness the centrality of religion in the lives of queer Mississippians. These leaders helped form a local congregation of the worldwide Metropolitan Community Church, a Protestant denomination ministering primarily to lesbian and gay worshipers. A virulent right-wing opposition, headed by Mississippi Moral Majority president Mike Wells, mobilized grassroots xenophobia and warned of a homosexual invasion, while queer Mississippians found a new ease in melding queer sexuality with Christian spirituality.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of what
Men Like That has to offer. In this diary, I simply offer an overview of Howard's major arguments and contributions. If you delve deeper into the book, you'll find very rich oral histories with queer Mississippians who discuss their lived experiences in ways that I can't even begin to capture in this diary. While I certainly find Howard's arguments compelling, what I
love about this book is its showcasing of the voices of white and black Mississippi men who desired men.
Men Like That is unorthodox, yes--but it is a thoroughly enriching read that complicates our understanding of both LGBT history and the Civil Rights Movement. And it highlights a whole new dimension to historian C. Vann Woodward's characterization of the South as "the perverse section."
There is at least one more book on southern LGBT history that I would like to review for this series at some point: James T. Sears'
Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South. I'm not promising it soon, but stay tuned. Have I mentioned that I love the queer South?
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule: