Emmett and I met through a web of connections: friends of friends of friends. I traveled down to see him in April 1985; my first real trip to the rural South. By either urban or rural standards, Emmett’s quite a catch. At twenty-seven, he owns his own two-bedroom home and car and has a manufacturing job with a future. More importantly, he’s warm and down-to-earth. What follows is most of our conversation on the evening before I left. We had spent the previous four days getting to know each other, enjoying the sunshine, and comparing notes. We sipped whiskey and...

This essay focuses on the lives of gays and lesbians and their experiences growing up in the Appalachian mountains. The idea for this project began when I wanted to do a research paper on lesbians and gays in Appalachia and asked Kate, then curator of the University of Kentucky Appalachian Collection, about prior research on the subject. Kate said, “There isn’t anything.” A few months later, while returning from the 1993 Appalachian Studies conference, we decided to present something about lesbians and gays at the 1994 conference. We knew we could find people to ask about their experiences of growing...

When we considered taping a conversation for this anthology, we decided that we wanted to speak of our differences, our common understandings of certain aspects of race and culture, and our place within the polarized racial structure of the American South. This conversation performs at least two simultaneous functions. First, we attempt a critique of common stereotypes surrounding Asian and Pacific Islander Americans—that we are the “model minority,” that we are all the same (that is, male, heterosexual, middle class, of East Asian descent, and so on, a description that of course represents only a tiny fraction of the...

I am not a southerner, but I lived through five of my most important adolescent years in Durham, North Carolina, and earned my high school diploma at the legendary Carolina Friends School. There I fell in love with my best friend at age sixteen and met my first real lesbians when I daringly attended the 1978 Southeastern Gay and Lesbian Conference at UNC-chapel Hill. Now I return to the South every spring to emcee the Gulf Coast Womyn’s Festival in Ovett, Mississippi.

My “day job” as a women’s studies professor and historian allows me long weekends and long summers for...

A drive to Southern Town involves passing by miles of pecan and cotton groves.¹ The town is 170 miles away from the nearest major urban concentration of at least a million people and is 50 miles away from the closest interstate highway. It is a city of almost 80,000 people and the county seat of a county of about 96,000 persons. Southern Town is at least 85 miles away from other towns of its own size or larger, each of which, like Southern Town, has at least one gay bar. (No place in the southeastern United States is more than...

Some forty years ago, I joined the great migration north. The Ohio State University clinical psychology program was already into affirmative action. The faculty had to assume that a kid named Bonnie Ruth from a school only slightly more imaginative than its name, Alabama College, was African American. Ohio State had a good record of graduating black scholars and scientists, but I was neither. In fact, I was probably the first person from the Deep South that most of the faculty and students had ever met. Of course, I had never met any Yankees either. If the program was committed...

Liberal and nationalist politics has consistently been imagined as a union between black and white men. However, I challenge the idea that masculine sameness is, should be, or can be the basis for equality and justice. In a racist state, “white tribalism” has always been a force for cohesiveness more powerful than masculine sameness.¹

Progressive Politics and the Myth

of Masculine Sameness

The union of black and white men is a myth both old and persistent. In a superb essay, the historian John Saillant located this union in the very origins of the American republic. In the latter part of...

One of the stories that I tell about myself begins something like this: In 1982, I moved to San Francisco to become gay, and there I found out that I was southern. Of course, this story is not literally true, but it does reflect an emotional truth, for it was not until this move to San Francisco that I felt gay and southern; it was there that I began to experience a gap between where I am from and who I was becoming—a gap that gave new meaning and self-consciousness to both identities. Behind this story is a question...

Columbus, Mississippi, is the birthplace of Tennessee Williams. In a recent move by the city, the house of the playwright’s nativity was purchased from the Episcopal Church, upon whose grounds it had rested, and was moved one block north to Main Street where it was established as a Mississippi Welcome Center. In its new location, the house has been given a complete face lift. It has a brand-new foundation and a new colorful paint job, making it the nicest building on Main Street. It is brightly illuminated with spotlights at night, thus calling attention to itself. The building occupies a...

Ellen Spiro, at the beginning of her 1993 videoGreetings from Out Here, after telling us that she moved from the South to New York City and “became a full-fledged gay activist,” muses: “But there was something funny about this picture. Here I was being an out dyke, and back home I was still in the closet.”¹ The narrative framing of Spiro’s documentary uses a trope familiar in contemporary southern literature—for example, Peter Taylor’sA Summons to Memphisand Gail Godwin’sA Southern Family—in which an expatriate southerner living in New York City returns home to the South...

Glenn Memorial Church sits on a hill at the edge of Emory University’s green campus in Atlanta. Large, brick, with long white columns framing its portico, it strikes you with its importance. Going inside, I find a seat by myself in one of the first rows. I am early, but already there are familiar faces in the crowd. The audience grows steadily to perhaps just over one hundred. It is a large auditorium, so the assembly at first seems somewhat meager. But most, like me, take a seat near the front, creating a close-knit feeling. Tonight, Glenn Memorial is the...

There is no place for nonconformists in the Southern Baptist Church and no legitimate place for women, so it’s no wonder that I and others like me have fallen away. Perhaps fled is more honest. No mere backsliders, we are fighting for survival and looking for salvation in a culture that says female is bad and lesbian is out of the question. Add to this the schizophrenic pride and shame of being southern and the expectations for southern girls to be belles-smiling, self-deprecating women dependent (or pretending to be) on the trinity of Daddy, Jesus, and Hubby-and there’s no place...

I did not know the word “homosexual” until I was twelve and read an article on the subject inLifemagazine. It worked on me like a silent bombshell, this revelation that a whole group of people—enough for there to be a word for it—were powerfully drawn to members of their own sex. As I looked atLife’ssinister pictures of sad, scared men walking down dark and deserted streets, I saw that those feelings reverberating in me meant a life of loneliness and alienation. This knowledge so overwhelmed me that I pushed it to the back edge...

We live in the South, that strangest of regions, where pigs once ranged free over the land. We descend from people who settled in wild country, who carved farms out of forests, who hated fences and yet built them anyway. We descend from people who were stolen from their land and imported for their labor. Some of us are the people from whom this land was stolen, whose lives were forever shattered by the arrival of the others. We have all lived in the same neck of the woods, on the same hills and strewn across the same sandy plains,...