Yes, There Is a "Quare"/Queer South!: A Review Essay

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Yes, There Is a “Quare”/Queer South!: A Review Essay
• Leisa D. Meyer (bio)

The Real Rainbow Row: Explorations in Charleston’s LGBTQ History. By Harlan Greene. (Charleston, S.C.: Evening Post Books, 2022. Pp. xiv, 337. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-929647-76-7.) Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists: Queer Women in the Urban South. By La Shonda Mims. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 237. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7055-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7054-6.) Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement. By Wesley G. Phelps. Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023. Pp. x, 292. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4773-2232-1.)

Recently I was one of the faculty representing William & Mary at an “affinity group” breakfast for parents and friends of newly admitted students. This particular affinity group was for families whose children identified as LGBTQ+. The most frequent question (and, in many ways, the biggest fear) expressed by those attending was whether their child would be safe at William & Mary. When I asked them to expand on the question, their focus was not if their child would be “safe” at college, but rather if their queer child would be “safe” in “the South.” I cannot blame them for the assumption they were making, that the southeastern United States—the “American South”—was likely to be less welcoming of their queer children. In our current cultural moment, when there is an ever-expanding number of laws being passed in state legislatures focused on regulating the bodies of women and youths (and particularly trans youths), the states occupying the southeastern portion of the United States are certainly leading the way on some of these measures.¹ That said, as we spoke more, it became clear [End Page 581] that their presumption that the South might be dangerous for their children was also based in their sincere belief that there was nothing queer in the South—that it is a region queer people flee from not to, and that it is a region where LGBTQ+ culture never had the opportunity to develop and was stifled if it was tried.

This presumption seems even more problematic given the explosion of books, articles, and digital projects (among other online and print publications) that we have witnessed in the last two-plus decades engaging and narrativizing the “queer South.”² Among this work is Mary L. Gray’s study on Appalachian Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, Out in the Country, which finds some truth to the assumptions made by the William & Mary families. Yet Gray also finds evidence to push back—in, for example, the impromptu Walmart drag balls created by a half dozen queer high school students and facilitated by a friend who worked there. These balls ran for almost a year before being shut down by local authorities and Walmart management. In her ethnographic research, Gray also finds that “kinship” often translated into protection for some, even if their nonnormative gender and/or sexual identities contravened extant religiously based standards of behavior. Here Gray holds that the broadly defined familial associations of individuals meant that “kin” would sometimes intervene between those who would punish and those kinsmen and kinswomen who were the targets of retribution. Often, though, these kin protectors/allies might themselves have targeted someone else for a similar “offense.”³

Moreover, these families’ presumption that the Bible belt (a term used by one parent) was a space where nothing queer could grow might also [End Page 582] have some truth to it. Yet the recent monograph by Gregory Samantha Rosenthal, Living Queer History, documents the long-standing and quite visible queer communities and cultures in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city located on the northern edge of the Bible belt and abutting Appalachia, in what is generally understood to be one of the more conservative areas of the commonwealth. Rosenthal details the collaborative work that she and Roanoke College students have done over eight years with individuals from local Roanoke queer communities—work that was initiated by some...