Authors: Robert Howard
ISBN-13: 9780814735138, ISBN-10: 0814735134
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: New York University Press
Date Published: August 1997
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Senior associate editor of Southern Historian and a native Southerner, John Howard is Director of the Center for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Life and Visiting Instructor of History at Duke University.
[Author Bio]
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 Southyet 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 historythat of regional history.
Acknowledgments | ||
1 | Introduction: Carryin' On in the Lesbian and Gay South | 1 |
2 | "Writhing Bedfellows" in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence | 15 |
3 | "Only a Woman Like Yourself" - Rebecca Alice Baldy: Dutiful Daughter, Stalwart Sister, and Lesbian Lover of Nineteenth-Century Georgia | 34 |
4 | Sex, Smashing, and Storyville in Turn-of-the-Century New Orleans: Reexamining the Continuum of Lesbian Sexuality | 54 |
5 | William Alexander Percy (1885-1942): His Homosexuality and Why It Matters | 75 |
6 | Personalizing the Political, Politicizing the Personal: Reflections on Editing the Letters of Lillian Smith | 93 |
7 | The Library, the Park, and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in Post-World War II Atlanta | 107 |
8 | Closet Crusaders: The Johns Committee and Homophobia, 1956-1965 | 132 |
9 | Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Pre-Stonewall Charleston: Perspectives on the Gordon Langley Hall Affair | 164 |
10 | Softball and Alcohol: The Limits of Lesbian Community in Memphis from the 1940s through the 1960s | 203 |
11 | Louisville's Lesbian Feminist Union: A Study in Community Building | 224 |
12 | "Women Ran It": Charis Books and More and Atlanta's Lesbian-Feminist Community, 1971-1981 | 241 |
13 | Post-Lesbian-Feminism: Documenting "Those Cruddy Old Dykes of Yore" | 285 |
14 | Dateline Atlanta: Place and the Social Construction of AIDS | 331 |
15 | Queering the South: Constructions of Southern/Queer Identity | 370 |
Contributors | 387 | |
Index | 391 |