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Uncovering hidden history
By
Michael Bronski
Men Like That: A Queer Southern History
John Howard
University of Chicago
Press
How to order
Did you ever think that there was
something, well, queer, about Billy Joe
the young man who Bobbie Gentry sang
about in her late-1960s country hit
"Ode to Billy Joe"? That's the
song about the fellow who, along with
the song's narrator, throws something
off the Tallahatchie Bridge and then
commits suicide. According to John
Howard, in his wonderful examination of
Southern gay male life over several
decades, there was something
very queer going on.
Men Like That: A Queer
Southern
History (University of Chicago
Press, 366 pages,
$27.50), is a remarkable, readable,
and resonant cultural history that
revises received ideas about
gay life. It has become a given in gay
history that sexual freedom is only
found in cities, because rural areas are
so harsh in their regulation of taboo
sex. John Howard, in this
ground-breaking analysis of gay male
life in
postwar Mississippi, demonstrates that
gay sex and culture flourished in small
towns and agricultural communities
throughout the state, and by
implication, the whole South.
Howard has structured the book
around 55 personal interviews and oral
histories with men of varying ages.
Their stories are variously funny,
poignant, informative, and unsettling.
But some of the book's most
exciting parts are Howard's explication
of the homosexual presence in popular
culture. His reading of the gay themes
in Bobbie Gentry's 1967 "Ode to
Billy Joe" is a
prime example, but he has also uncovered
spirited defenses of homosexuality in
Joe Hains's popular entertainment column
in the
Jackson Daily News from 1955 to
1975. Howard interprets the 1955
queer-bashing murder of
John Murrett of Jackson, and the ensuing
trial, to bolster his thesis that
homosexuality in the South was anything
but hidden. Howard is at his most
provocative when he details how gay sex
and homophobia fueled and shaped
white resistance to the black civil
rights movement. This is material few
have written about before. **
| Author Profile: Michael Bronski |
|
Michael Bronski is the author of
Culture Clash: The Making of Gay
Sensibility and The Pleasure
Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the
Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes
frequently on sex, books, movies, and
culture, and lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. |
| Email: |
mabronski@aol.com |
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