Carryin' On in the Lesbian and Gay South
To date, lesbian and gay history has focused largely on the East and West coasts and on urban settings such as New York and San Francisco. The American South, on the other hand, identified as it is with religion, traditional gender roles, and cultural conservatism, has escaped attention. Southerners wrestle with their past, lesbians and gays wrestle for visibility, historians wrestle over the South - yet rarely have the three crossed paths. John Howard's ground-breaking anthology casts its...
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To date, lesbian and gay history has focused largely on the East and West coasts, and on urban settings such as New York and San Francisco. The American South, on the other hand, identified with religion, traditional gender roles, and cultural conservatism, has escaped attention. Southerners celebrate their past; lesbians and gays celebrate their new-found visibility; historians celebrate the South—yet rarely have the three crossed paths. John Howard's groundbreaking anthology casts its net widely, examining lesbian and gay experiences in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee. James Schnur, by virtue of a Freedom of Information Act query, sheds light on the sinister machinations of the Johns Committee, whose clandestine duty it was to ferret out suspected homosexuals during the McCarthy years. In his essay on the great Southern writer William Alexander Percy, William Armstrong Percy provides tangible evidence that Southern citizens, historians, and archivists have long sought to repress or obscure certain individuals within what C. Vann Woodward described as the perverse section. Moving chronologically through America's past, from the antebellum and postbellum periods, through the Jim Crow era and the Cold War, to the present, this volume introduces an important new framework to the field of lesbian and gay history—that of regional history.
Acknowledgments1Introduction: Carryin' On in the Lesbian and Gay South12"Writhing Bedfellows" in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence153"Only a Woman Like Yourself" - Rebecca Alice Baldy: Dutiful Daughter, Stalwart Sister, and Lesbian Lover of Nineteenth-Century Georgia344Sex, Smashing, and Storyville in Turn-of-the-Century New Orleans: Reexamining the Continuum of Lesbian Sexuality545William Alexander Percy (1885-1942): His Homosexuality and Why It Matters756Personalizing the Political, Politicizing the Personal: Reflections on Editing the Letters of Lillian Smith937The Library, the Park, and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in Post-World War II Atlanta1078Closet Crusaders: The Johns Committee and Homophobia, 1956-19651329Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Pre-Stonewall Charleston: Perspectives on the Gordon Langley Hall Affair16410Softball and Alcohol: The Limits of Lesbian Community in Memphis from the 1940s through the 1960s20311Louisville's Lesbian Feminist Union: A Study in Community Building22412"Women Ran It": Charis Books and More and Atlanta's Lesbian-Feminist Community, 1971-198124113Post-Lesbian-Feminism: Documenting "Those Cruddy Old Dykes of Yore"28514Dateline Atlanta: Place and the Social Construction of AIDS33115Queering the South: Constructions of Southern/Queer Identity370Contributors387Index391
\ From the Publisher"This assortment of touching, hilarious, and very smart essays moves lesbian and gay history to a new place, geographically and analytically. Ranging widely from deep South to upper South, from rural areas to urban centers, across differences of race class and gender, the authors explore the intersecting meanings of southernness and sexuality with attention to the widest angles of vision, and to the telling details of daily experience."\ -Lisa Duggan,coauthor with Nan D. Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture\ \ \
