This Life Our Life: Faulkner Conferencing in a Time of Pandemic

2020 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Virtual Reading

(The link above is to a reading from Gay Faulkner for the virtual F&Y Conference in 2020, the year of our pandemic)

I was supposed to spend this last week in Oxford, Mississippi. Mind you, nearly everyone who has lived in Oxford—and a lot of folks who have just been there—probably have random moments wherein they pause, get that faraway look in their eyes, and tell themselves, "I was supposed to be in Oxford today." It is a lamentation, an absence—instead, we get off at Cemeteries and find our way to Elysian Fields. In a world of strangers, Oxford will always be an old friend we can trust (even when we need to fight about its legacies and symbols).

In this instance, however, I had cause to let my mind wander. I was scheduled to present at this year's Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The theme was scheduled to be Faulkner and Modernity, or some variant thereof. I submitted a paper for inclusion on a panel. The day I got my acceptance email was also my beginning of our current pandemic (early March), and the director of the conference—a friend and former mentor—warned me not to make hotel reservations just yet. His warning was my first encounter with the nature of what was, at the time, still mostly an inconceivable upheaval in one's daily life. Less than two weeks later, my own university had shut down. My book tour, planned for the second half of March and into early April was "postponed" (though some events probably won’t ever be rescheduled, most venues seem eager to think positively about future opportunities).

My events for that book tour ranged from sitting at a table at Starkville Pride to being a panelist in Oxford for the first annual Glitterary Festival. I also had scheduled readings in Water Valley, Jackson, and Pass Christian, as well as a lecture scheduled for the Mississippi Museums as part of their History Is Lunch series. Only one of these events finally arrived, in early July, when I traveled to Jackson to live-record the History Is Lunch event. I was able to reschedule that event in the seeming doldrum of June, when the number of new cases was obscured by the state of conservative political rhetoric and hopes for a summer reprieve. Even as I arrived in Mississippi, however, the numbers were climbing again. Now, in late July, we are back in the throes of the pandemic. The other events are beyond the horizon we are all looking towards right now, somewhere over the rainbow, with shooting stars and melting lemon drops. One day, I tell myself, I’ll dream them one day.

Notably, in the midst of these altered plans, I did get to present at a conference, the 3^rd Annual Faulkner Colloquium in the UK in late May. That opportunity opened up as a result of the pandemic—the colloquium was forced online. I zoomed in from Wisconsin. I spoke to people scattered across the UK, Europe, and throughout the United States. I had not originally been able to attend, but our new circumstances allowed my participation. This was a nice silver lining in otherwise gray skies, sans those lemon drops.

But the big Faulkner conference—the yearly one in Oxford—was postponed early on; all the evidence clearly supports that this postponement was the right decision. I believe this year's conference theme (and schedule) have been moved to 2022, so I'll still get to present my paper. . . one day!

For those unfamiliar with it, the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference is the OG of single-author focused conferences. It is a staple of the American conference cycle and a staple of mid-Summer Mississippi. As some small evidence of how enormously influential this conference has been, back in the 1980s, Toni Morrison spoke at the conference and read draft from a novel she was working on. That novel, Beloved, would be published a year or so later. Its connections to Faulkner's work run deep.

I was scheduled this year to read a 20-minute paper on the place of Jackson, Tennessee in Faulkner's fictional universe. I consider this J-town, not the Mississippi one, my hometown, even though I was born in Memphis and lived in Milan in the wee stages of my life. I was still a toddler when we moved to Jackson, the northeast side of which and up to Medina, Milan and Gibson forms the specific postage stamp of my native soil. It also shows up in relation to Faulkner's life and so-called apocryphal postage stamp. I've been tinkering with the idea of this paper for a while now, but since I finished my book, I finally have time to devote to it as a "new" project, part of the "next book" all scholars are trained to speak about at job interviews and in professional settings—never what you are doing or just did; always what you'll do next, down the road, to prove you are planning ahead, engaged, never deterred by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Never side-tracked by a global pandemic.

Also, attending the OG Faulkner Conference this summer would have had that one, additional and significant perk of being a fantastic space to talk about, celebrate, and maybe even be feted for the book I just finished, Gay Faulkner, a year's-long project of revision that, as the author of said book, I have high hopes for. Maybe it will even matter a bit.

My self-indulgent fantasies, however, have always been tempered by a reality I learned from attending past Faulkner Conferences. This reality has long worried me, and having the book in hand for this year's conference did not assuage my anxieties. Quite the opposite.  I have seen too often how a gathering of Faulkner scholars can go terribly wrong, especially when the topics turn to queer identities, queer representation, and queer implications latent in Faulkner's work.

I arrived in Oxford all the way back in 2006. I graduated from UT-Martin in December 2005, worked on campus in the Writing Center for a semester, and moved to Oxford in July. My first full day in my apartment on my own—post move-in—I walked the mile up Lamar Avenue to Square Books and bought The Yoknapatawpha Country by Cleanth Brooks. At the time, basic New Criticism was all I knew, and Brooks seemed like the right place to start reading beyond just the novels, the texts themselves. I read a chapter a day for the next couple of weeks. My heavily annotated copy is still on my shelf here in these wilds of Wisconsin. It is one of the more bluntly racist and unabashedly misogynist books I own.

That July, the conference theme was Global Faulkner, but as I wasn't a student yet and was new to town, I didn't attend. I took a Faulkner seminar my first semester on campus. I did not get along with the professor, whose approach to Faulkner was of the Brooks school. There was a day in class when said professor proposed to us, in all seriousness, that it is likely Faulkner was a virgin when he married Estelle Oldham (formerly Estelle Franklin from her first marriage). I have never been able to verify the accuracy of this assessment, but the evidence on offer was primarily Faulkner's virgin/whore dichotomies for women in fiction from near his marriage. This period of his writing, when viewed for evidence of heterosexuality, includes an image of young boys staring at their sister's ass while she climbs a tree to spy on a funeral; Temple Drake being assaulted by a corn cob; and an eccentric woman murdering her beau so she can sleep with his rotting corpse for thirty years in her somewhat grotesque bridal chamber. But apparently, there was only limited room for queer themes in Faulkner's work, and he was assuredly a virgin until his one right woman came along.

The conference in 2007, however, is where I encountered the most overt anti-gay animus in Faulkner Studies. The theme that year was Faulkner's Sexualities. Yes, plural: Sexualities. At least through the grapevine of local chatter, the reason for phrasing the theme this way had several origins. First, most previous versions of the conference had themes expressed in the "Faulkner and _____" structure. Thus, Faulkner and Sexuality felt a little dull (and might have confused folks who remembered Faulkner and Women, the theme-party at which Morrison read from draft of Beloved, and Faulkner and Gender, at which one scholar had read a paper arguing in favor of a gay panic defense in Faulkner's anxious presentation of male same-sex desire. Admittedly, Faulkner and Gender occurred a few years prior to the murder of Matthew Shepard, so I suppose the oversight in tact is understandable alongside the historical context of DOMA and DADT, also contemporary to the theme). Of course, Faulkner and Sexuality would only seem like a repeat of "Women" and "Gender" if one collapses meanings to equate these all under some broad portmanteau feminism (and I do not mean that feminists make this mistake, only non-feminists and scholars who see feminism as a single school of thought about "those people of the radical burning bras").

Second, Faulkner's Sexuality—remove the "and," add a possessive—just hit entirely too close to home. Such a theme would all but demand interrogations of his sexuality, and apparently it was difficult to imagine discussions that would find it lacking in whatever version of virility and heterosexuality to which some ascribe.

Third, Queer Faulkner was a non-starter. Nope. Nope. And nope.

The settled-upon solution was "Faulkner's Sexualities," no doubt a nod to post-modern performative theories but also a dilution—a way to say, "If we don't like your answer, we'll just pretend like it was a pick-your-own-adventure attempt to understand Faulkner's works, from the position of reader-response theory."

(Okay, before anyone reading this blows a gasket about the story I'm telling, full disclosure: I was not privy to any of the listserv conversations about the theme. I had to piecemeal the story together from overheard conversations and good listening skills. It is a reconstructed history, and you are welcome to dismiss it as my own reader-response version. It is, much like all scholarly readings, an inference and deduction backed up by things we don’t put in archives if we can help it).

Any good chemist will tell you: Dilution is a powerful agent to stifle change. Pure hydrochloric acid will burn a hole in damn-near anything. Dilute it enough and it might not even sting (avoid your eyes, though; never play games with vision). Most presentations at the 2007 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference steered clear of queer readings of Faulkner's life or works. A few dabbled in what the authors probably thought was "Queer Theory,” which is basically the premise that "everything is queer so nothing is." To this day, I don't consider myself a Queer Theorist because of this particular conference experience. In my work, I try to argue for meaning, not against it. Most papers that got even a little explicit denounced what they perceived as politically inflected readings. Two papers delved into actual LGBTQ+ readings, and both were brilliant. Both were reviled and rebuked.

To understand how this brood of scholars (or murder? like crows) treated queer themes in Faulkner, I can highlight three examples. The first was from a Queer Theorist. Her paper was, well, confusing. It was introduced by the conference emcee with an excited preamble about how awesome her scholarship was and how excited the conference director was for her paper. It took the presenter about 30 minutes even to mention the short story by Faulkner she had traveled down to talk about. Before reaching that point of her paper, she spent considerable time explaining the lack of imagination of the average queer reading, based in political identities instead of textual objectivity and all. She hedged her bets with a thought experiment: she asked us aloud what we thought where the two most important works of Queer Theory. The first she conceded was Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. The second she teased us with, offering that it was by Eve Sedgwick. Only, when the audience began mouthing the seemingly obvious title Epistemology of the . . . she cut us off to say, "No, not Epistemology of the Closet, which is too political, but Tendencies." I think people read that latter book in the late 1990s in grad school, but I'm not sure. No one really talks about it anymore. I believe its premise is that queer desire is just a tendency we all have; so nothing is really queer.

Later that afternoon, I ended up sitting next to this presenter at the fish fry at Rowan Oak. I did the polite thing a southern boy learns to do. I said, simply, "I enjoyed your paper." I left it at that. Meanwhile, unprompted, she began telling me about traveling to Oxford and missing her family. She had three kids, all just hitting their teenage years when they are just so interesting. She missed them; they were home with her husband.

This was 2007. I thought to myself about the nature of "politics" and privilege. If you need a primary on the political realities faced by LGBTQ+ people at that moment in our social history, you either weren’t old enough so need a good history lesson; or, possibly, aren’t actually queer. I didn’t eat my dinner. My appetite was stifled by my quiet anger at her obliviousness, but maybe I was just too involved with the actual world, political queer that I was becoming (. . . non fui, sum, still sum political queen!).  

Two other presentations were way cooler. One was by Gary Richards. His paper on Faulkner's time in New Orleans would be an important influence for my own work. Unfortunately, in his book Lovers and Beloveds, Richard argues for readings of same-sex desire that are "lavender" more than "shockingly pink." His book is great—I had just read it the semester before the conference. When he took me out to lunch and a generous conversation about my nascent ideas, I asked him to sign my copy of his book, which he did. Only as he started flipping through it did I realize how many nasty notes I'd written in the margins about his lavender approach. I knew already that I wanted to embrace an LGBTQ+ perspective with more edge. Gary never noticed (or never mentioned) the notes in my cramped handwriting. He did, however, joke with me about how often he'd heard critiques of his lavender approach. At the conference, he delivered a paper with the basic thesis that Faulkner knew a lot of gay men in New Orleans and many of his early sketches written during that period of his life demonstrate anxious heterosexuality.

That's it. That's all he said. It was a revolutionary paper at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference—lavender though it may seem. It was, also, about as plain and obvious as a queer paper could be (and, btw, great). He delivered his paper early in the week. Afterwards, during the Q&A, one man in the audience took the mic to declare for Gary’s sake, "I knew Faulkner in Virginia in the 1950s; he wasn't gay." More people affirmed the comment than embraced the paper. It was a queer thing to observe.

The other queer presentation, as it so happens, is also probably the best work of LGBTQ+ criticism ever done on Faulkner—which I don't say only because my eventual dissertation director gave the presentation. I say that because when she gave the presentation is when I knew that, no matter what, she was going to be the central figure in helping me get to where I wanted to go with Faulkner. Jaime Harker presented on the lesbian space in Absalom, Absalom! Her paper engaged in a simple close reading mixed with discussion of queer historical context for Mississippi from Faulkner's time to our own. Unlike literally every queer-themed study of Faulkner published prior to 2007, Jaime argued that this emanation of queer space and desire was not angsty nor fraught. It was productive and nurturing, if generally ignored by scholars and readers who most prefer to write about the sad homoerotics of the menfolks in the novel, if they are inclined to explore queerness at all.

Afterwards, the Q&A escalated quickly. At one point, unsatisfied with Jaime's calm answers to a myriad of awkward questions, one participant seized the mic and yelled into it, "What do you mean by lesbian?" I was sitting next to Gary for all this (gay people always seek community). He looked up, caught Jaime's eye, and made a hand gesture to say "don't. Let it go." Jaime’s partner at the time was also sitting with us. She just rolled her eyes.

At a cocktail party in the (at that point still-not-remodeled) campus inn, grumbles about Jaime's and Gary's papers pervaded. These readings had gone too far. What was the scholarly world coming to!

The theme for the 2008 conference was later decided as "Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text." I have only intermittently attended Faulkner conferences since 2007, even though I was a grad student in Oxford until 2013 and lived there until August 2014. I actually packed the U-Haul for Wisconsin the week of the 2014 conference. Starting with the 2008 edition, it just felt like it wasn’t the best space to explore the vicissitudes of Faulkneriana.

I am recalling events from thirteen years ago. The world has certainly changed since then, as has Faulkner studies, though the proclivity for traditional modes of discussion can still dominate. Earlier this year, about a month after the publication of my book, Carl Rollyson published the first of his planned two-volume biography of Faulkner. Billed as the first biography of Faulkner in ten years or so (it is not), it uses the same archives on which I relied for my study, also a biography. In a review of Rollyson's work in the Washington Independent Review of Books, Colin Asher offers general praise for the effort but questions the thinking that there will always be room for another Faulkner biography, especially one that makes some tepid but not full-throated attempts to counter his legacies of racism and misogyny.

Asher's most damning line, however, is his conclusion:

Of course, Faulkner’s work will always be read and taught — there is no way to write the story of 20th-century letters without him — but it’s hard to imagine a more diverse generation of academics devoting themselves to Faulkner’s legacy by perpetuating the conferences and lectures whose participants this book is geared toward.

I die inside when I think of someone writing something like that about me or my work! AAAGGHH!!!

Of course, as of 2019, scholars were still working overtime to explain all the pitfalls of gay-themed readings of "A Rose for Emily." Historically, a lot of ink has been spilled to refute the question of Homer's sexuality in that text, rarely to do more than give teachers fodder to deny it. Other famous essays devoted to gay themes in Faulkner include equating a black character whom the authors of the study assume is engaged in bestiality with possible homosexuality as well (yes, you read that right). Another central essay to gay-themed Faulkner studies argues that Will Varner in The Hamlet is a homosexual because one day he has trouble sitting on a wagon because—yes, you know where this is going—his ass hurts from anal sex. More personally, at one point in my own work, I was told that my reading of the story "A Courtship" for homoerotic themes needed to include a section on what this commentator considered a much more obvious gay element: there is a character in the story named "Log-in-the-creek." For what it’s worth, less than ten years before I published my book, Judith Sensibar declared in the introduction to her book Faulkner and Love that we need not consider additional gay and lesbian studies of his fiction—they had all been done.

Alas, the anecdotes. They pile up after a while. They resonate around a fixed point, too. There is only one Faulkner, in his eternal sunshine, and attempts to offer alternative perspectives will be allowed only in a few ways: as an anxious joke, as a nod to ephemeral moments of forced progressivism, as marginalized readings too far removed from the text to be warranted. Faulkner remains—we will just come back to him after some token untoward readings. We will shuffle away these trifling assertions of queerness. He is ours. He is mine. He is a squirrel trapped in one tree left in the clearing. Better to use the bullets to scare off those who would come near the tree than shoot the squirrel and see if he's more than one animal or maybe even capable of surviving the blast.

For these reasons, I was nervous to stand among other Faulkner scholars at the OG yearly conference with my book in hand. Of course, the pandemic postponed that (imagined) confrontation. At least when signing books at the first annual Glitterary Festival (a queer-themed book fest planned for Oxford this last April that was postponed due to COVID-19), I could have expected a friendly audience, if not the most dedicatedly Faulknerian. Among a die-hard Faulkner audience, one always has a suspicion that it's Faulkner mad but friendly less, unless one says just so much as is acceptable.

The fantasies one entertains about a book don't often meet the reality. Indeed, I haven't won the Pulitzer yet (one always dreams) or the National Book Award (I'd be eligible this coming winter). The president hasn't called me to ask my opinion about Faulkner, but c'mon. Let's state that better: THIS president hasn't called me, but maybe the next one will (I met Joe Biden in Oxford, shortly after that conference on Faulkner's Sexualities, when he came through on a book tour just before launching his 2008 campaign). I shall hold out hope for my wildest dreams to come true until the very end of days, I tell you! A world without ridiculous fantasies is too adult and frumpy for me.

Simultaneously, I've so far received no push back at all over Gay Faulkner, now nearly eight months into its young published life—minus one alt-right internet troll more comical than engaging. It appears my delicious fantasies of righteous persecution might have been a bit overblown. In fact, so far, it's been all congratulations. It's been a warm, if often virtual, embrace.

Still, here is some Faulkner history for why I'd be concerned, and if this history feels past, we all know what any Faulkner scholar would immediately say to that. Which is why the anecdote that matters the most to me—the one that put into perspective for me what I've spent all these years doing, crafting that shockingly pink approach to literature, building on models of queer possibilities I saw first hand in two papers at a conference thirteen years ago—is one that happened in the final stages of the book’s production, after I signed my contract, as I did final revisions, the acknowledgement, and, most notably, my dedication.

A high school student emailed me one day. His class had been reading "A Rose for Emily." He thought there might be some queer (gay) themes in it. His teacher told him to prove it. He got online and started searching around. A bio that he found about me included for an essay on Faulkner but unrelated to sexuality did mention I was working on a study of homosexuality in the great author's works. So, this (rather intrepid) high schooler emailed me. He asked me for some support.

It was, at that point, that I deleted what was my dedication (to my parents and brother—to whom belongs much credit and much love). I thought on it. I considered: what am I doing? For what audience? For what goal? Who even cares about William Faulkner, one might ask as one prepares to wade into the conversations about his significance? What I landed on as the right dedication I offer here:

For the "quair" kids—and the queer kids—for all the kids who have known how certain labels are meant to exclude us. Never forget that this world is our world, this life our life. This book is for you.

This, in a bridge across these water, I place as my stone.

Why I Can't Read Harry Potter Right Now

From the wilds of Wisconsin in a blog devoted to Southern Queer things, maybe it's only fitting I throw all geography to the wind and simply write about Harry Potter.

I have a Harry Potter tattoo. Right arm, below the elbow, "inside" so that when I'm out for a run, I can turn my wrist out and see it. This placement was the point—the tattoo reads "Expecto Patronum," which is a spell one can only conjure by thinking of your happiest memory. In the series, a patronus has some crazy powers (apparently, they can even be directed to hide swords in the bottoms of lakes). They are first introduced to readers in Book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban, when the Dementors ostensibly on the look-out for Sirius Black take a fancy to Harry, so Remus teaches him the patronus spell. A Dementor does not like a patronus. Happiness is anathema to them. The spell and the shining white spirit animal associated with it function as a shield against darkness. Only later in the does the role of a patronus turn into something like a shiny minion. 

One of the most brilliant things about the Harry Potter series is the elegance of its metaphors. Dementors are only visible to the magically inclined, but even muggles can feel their presence. For wizards, the Dementor is a physical being that would like to "kiss" its victims, drawing out their soul and leaving them in a lifeless catalepsy, not unlike a victim of the most severe depression unable even to believe in happiness, much less feel it, much less respond to it at all.

Non-wizards do not see the Dementors in their ragged, floating awfulness. Muggles only feel them, as if all the happiness has gone from the world. No mere pleasant memories can wade through and overpower the sensation of a Dementor. Only the most powerful memories, summoned from some deep place down inside that is below the superficial layers shadowed by the initial encounter with these demons, can push them back. A patronus has enormous power. Conjuring one is no easy task.

The metaphor is clear; the metaphor is never blunt nor boringly allegorical. The Dementor—a word that combines "demented" and "tormentor"—represents depression, something that can visit anyone, not just the magically inclined. A patronus is something inside of us (selfhood? a soul? the most naked and personal memory of one untouchable moment of inner joy?) that we can use to fight back against the darkness of depression.

No doubt, depression can smother even those perceived as immune to it or too strong to succumb to its gravity. Without powerful assistance, we can all fall victim to the Dementor's kiss. A patronus is not Zoloft nor a suicide hotline, both of which are some of the resources those who suffer from depression can call on sans magical powers—in a world without magic, one can't simply will the Dementors away. Still, a patronus can save you that one time, in that one dark moment; it can be the stay against absolute darkness. To call on your patronus takes extreme effort. When you are under fire from more than one Dementor, a lone patronus can only do so much. At that last moment, right when the darkness seems almost completely unbearable, as we wait for a hero to save us ("expecto patronum" translates as "I need a hero" from Latin, btw), it is worth remembering, though, that the patronus is inside us. We save ourselves. In that last spark of a survival instinct, what emerges can be a thing of such splendid beauty. It can save your life (because it is your life; and that's the thing of beauty—a patronus is very much like reaching into the darkness for a hero and grasping your own hand).  

I got the tattoo for a general pick-me-up in the late stages of a long run. I had hopes of running another marathon, though as I prepared for the specific marathon in question, as always happens to me when I train for a marathon, as soon as I made it over ten miles on my long runs, I once again realized a marathon is a long way. I had previously attempted three marathons. I finished only one, of which I walked eleven miles. In this case, I was aiming for a marathon just over the Mississippi River in Dubuque in honor of veterans and active-duty soldiers. I wanted to run the marathon, without making a big deal of my more personal motives, in honor of a friend from high school who had died not during her tours of duty in our current endless wars but back home as a result of a drug overdose. From my understanding, based on what I was told when the news finally reached me about her death, she and members of her regiment had gotten into some hardcore drugs during their deployments and used them upon returning stateside to cope or adjust or escape, or something like that. One night she OD'd. I don't think about her death every day, but when it does cast a shadow over my inner vision, it does so as a simple question: how is it possible that I am living in a world in which she is no longer present? It is a question I cannot make sense of. When it crosses my mind, it seems like all happiness has gone from the world, having left with her departure from it.

I also got the tattoo because I love Harry Potter—every book in that series is magical to me. I did not read them until I was in college, until I worked at a Books-a-Million when Book 6 was released and I helped with the festivities for the midnight release party. Familiar with the story from the films, I bought a copy, sat down to read it, and failed to eat for the next 12 hours. I didn't go to bed either. I sat up enthralled. When I finished it, I went downstairs and pilfered my mom's copies  of the other books (she was an early convert and has a full collection of first edition hardcovers—in fact, I had bought Book 6 for her). I started at the beginning. For the next five days, I loathed falling asleep. My mom would call up for dinner, and I'd scorn to come downstairs. By Book 5, I was so totally into the story that I was having violent reactions—the mere presence of Dolores Umbridge on a page filled me with venom and hate (as an English major who had plans to attend grad school, I could step back enough, even during that first reading of the series, to respect a writer capable of creating so entirely loathsome a character). The death of Sirius, with whom we spend considerably more time in the novels than the films, crushed me, even though I knew it was coming. The metaphor of that crushing moment—passing through an arch to oblivion—would be worth a lengthy blogpost of its own.

But to speak of Sirius and metaphor brings me back to the patronus. The scene from the books I love the most—a scene that is translated very well into to film—is the ending of Book 3, when Harry saves Sirius (and himself) from the Dementors. The metaphors in this scene run deep, and they also highlight one of the most striking aspects of the series to me: its profound embrace of queer self-affirmation.

Throughout the novel, Harry has assumed Sirius murdered his parents, but upon slowing down enough to listen to Remus (and meet Peter Pettigrew out of his mouse costume), he realizes just how wrongly he has viewed his own personal history—as if all he thought he knew about his life had only been received through external sources telling him their speculative but entrenched narrative, which must always be correct because, through repetition, it has become compulsory. There were certain bad guys and good guys. The (male) friend of Harry's father must obviously have betrayed him; such conclusions are easier to reason than allowing for more feelings than just the flow of heterosexual desires between men and women and masculine competitiveness between men and men. But we are all wrong, as Harry comes to discover. Sirius, emblematic of your garden-variety gay uncle, has been swept away from any direct contact with Harry. He is the bad guy! Harry internalizes his pain associated with his lost parents and then externalizes it not only on "he who must not be named" (only a minor rephrasing of another famous phrase of avoidance and elision) but by directing it to Sirius. He doesn’t know better. He is reacting with the only emotions that he has been taught.

The power of Harry's anger matters. Only with so much emotion at stake can the scene of Sirius's salvation occur. Harry discovers he is wrong. He begins to see for the first time the deep rivalries and passions of not just Sirius, Peter, and Remus but also the abiding hatred Snape directs towards him. Indeed, Harry looks so much like his father that, at a glance, you'd almost think Harry was his father James (except for those eyes, of course). Then, in the moment of this sudden recognition, which carries with it the full weight of realizing not only that is he not alone in this world but that he, Harry Potter, boy in the closet under the stairs, is also loved—even by a man who has not seen him since he was a baby, with a love that is, simply, unconditional—at that moment, he loses him. Or thinks he does. Beside a pond in the Forbidden Forest, the Dementors crowd Sirius and Harry. They come in close—there are too many of them—they overwhelm the sputtering sparks of Harry's meager patronus. They lean in to deliver to Sirius their shattering kiss.

When Harry wakes up in the infirmary, he swears he was saved by his father. A stag of a patronus comes sweeping in; off in the distance, a figure emerges that looks just like the pictures of James with which Harry has become familiar. However, as he and Hermione use her "I can be in two places at once" charm to repeat the events of the night, readers begin to realize who is really responsible for Harry's salvation. Harry, meanwhile, steadfastly refuses to reach that conclusion until there, off a distance from Sirius and his former self, he stands by a pond as he watches those Dementors circling their victims. He is waiting for his father to show up—some strange magic, no doubt—but he is also watching not only himself but also this new man who loves him dying. And that's when he realizes what has really happened. It was never James; it was always Harry. All the deep pain and heartache and loneliness of his entire life reverses its polarity in an instant. He steps out from his hiding place and, with a love so entire it is pure light that can overcome any darkness, he casts a patronus powerful enough to save the thing that brings him the most joy: the recognition that he is loved by someone, that he is not so alone.

Metaphors for accepting one's queer identity are strong in this sequence of events. Harry gains power by being loved and by recognizing that he is the author of his own salvation. Thus, he beats the demons away.

The appeal of this scene to queer readers resides in the lesson it encompasses, a lesson we all must learn, often on our own—minus when we queer kids are reading books about wizards. Perhaps non-queer readers don't quite get what I'm driving at here. Queer kids are rarely taught in schools or from parents (even loving parents) the basic ways to survive in this world. The world is made for muggles. Harry's aunt and uncle clearly represent a version of muggle guardianship that hates what makes a child special, that actively denies knowledge of self to a child, much to his detriment. However, the other side of the coin is also limited. Hermione's parents are delighted that she is a witch! They are just dentists, but they are thrilled by all the wonders of their daughter's magical world. Yet, there is only so much they can teach her about it. It is not their world. They know nothing of its history. They never read their daughter Beedle the Bard. They don't know the first thing about the flick of the wrist that makes a feather float, nor the magic words to summon such wonder.

All queer kids encounter one pervasive truth in our road to self-realization: when we want to know more about ourselves and what our identities can do to define us, we are on our own to discover it. In the most obvious way, it begins with the utter dearth of useful sex ed for queer sexual expression. It extends to the books we are told to read, the histories we are told to learn, the heroes of the values and morals on which we are told our society is founded—that we shall not tell lies (tut, tut, Harry Potter); that dreams belong to memorized speeches spoken only once a year; that everyone throughout all of history prior to "me" was obviously heterosexual. Period. Full stop. The lesson is clear: if I am gay, I am the first (and, they seem to hope, last) of my kind. I have no history. I represent nothing of value. What I do and with whom are things too perverse to discuss in school.  

But there are other lessons queer kids learn in the formative years of our self-discovery, hard fought and learned with more than a little pain, more than a little loneliness: that those words they call you are true, but they can mean more than a pejorative; that it is okay to dress differently than expected; that love is love is love is love—certainly a significant lesson that rarely finds affirmation in our mainstream institutions. And there are bigger realizations: that we should save our own money for a cabinet full of fine dinnerware and a kitchen full of appliances—our wedding registries might not work out so well as for couples more in line with social expectations, assuming we have weddings at all. That we must learn to recognize subtle clues of allyship and safe spaces—just as we can metaphorically tap an umbrella on a wall in a certain pattern to find the entrance to a secret world, we learn to figure out the meaning of gestures, contexts, smiles. Even the geography of our environment takes on new dimensions; new spaces create themselves. Then we realize that they were there all along, just passed by with limited acknowledgement by our muggle kin, so we, too, never learned to see it until we realize it is a space for us.  

Or more fundamentally, we learn that we will have to fight to defend the things in this world that matter most to us. Others won't see that which we hold sacred as sacred, that which we love as loved. The world expects its children to hit benchmarks that make each child like other children, following trajectories to selfhood on old, well-trodden paths. To be ourselves is to learn to love deeply the things we chose to love, the things and persons who matter to us. We also learn that we are the only one's who are truly committed to preserving that which we love in a world that either actively hates us or, at best, turns away in the banality of complete disregard.

These lessons undergird the ability to conjure a patronus. These are lessons one learns outside the daily lives and values of muggles, which may feel the chill of a dementor but which rarely understand the full magical power of the manifest lives of those who see the world through different lenses.

Or at least this is what I got out of reading Harry Potter. But then why would I not be able to read Harry Potter right now?

After a few minor incidents hinting at her convictions, in the summer of 2020, during a raging pandemic, the author of books that can be read with so much profound and moving queer energy finally pulled back her own mask. J. K. Rowling has recently retweeted rhetoric associated with the pernicious reactionary syndrome known as "Trans Exclusive Radical Feminism." Convert that last word to "feminists" and you get the abbreviation for members of this movement: TERF. Or, less laconically, "all your liberal friends when they realize that trans rights means sharing a bathroom, changing room, locker room, or experiences of gender discrimination." Then there is a pause, an inhalation, a shrugging of shoulders, perhaps even a spoken response: "Can't I just stick with Black Lives Matters? I'm not sure about all this other stuff." TERF rhetoric represents a significant ethical violation of the very nature of the queerness the Harry Potter books seem so wonderfully to endorse. Rowling has recently begun to amplify TERF rhetoric.

More pointedly, when called out for broadcasting this hateful rhetoric via her twitter account, Rowling wrapped herself in the cloak of victimhood and sided with scholars and thinkers (largely white, largely cisgender) lamenting the rise of "cancel culture." In fact, Rowling joined the academics and authors who signed the Harper's Magazine open letter against so-called "cancel culture" (for what it's worth, if people did, at this exact moment, stop purchasing, reading, and/or viewing every book she's written or film made from her work, she could live another fifty years as one of the wealthiest authors in recorded history—also, I'm pretty sure the next installment of Fantastic Beasts is in production and all the films and books are still available on Amazon).

At some point in the ancient past, Rowling threw a bone to gay fans and let slip that Dumbledore is a homosexual. However, in the films made for the Fantastic Beasts series, wherein Dumbledore is played by Jude Law, who on more than one occasion has played gay in his career, this part of the narrative is entirely implicit, existing only in veiled glances and ambiguous dialogue, as if a magical world prior to Voldemort was already well-versed in scary demons "that dare not speak its name." Worse, in The Cursed Child, the clearest, most explicitly gay relationship in all the published Potter universe—between Harry's and Draco's sons—is wiped away in a clumsy conclusion that traipses in a girl who has had, at best, an ancillary role in the narrative, thus using the triangles of pre-modern literary homoeroticism to craft the Deus ex Machina of safe heterosexuality. For surely, all stories end with a boy and girl falling in love which each other, right?  

One can feel at times as if the series is a giant practicum in gay-baiting, or at least that the metaphors and implications of the novels, having gotten too close to the surface and too potential, needed to be swept back into a cupboard, possibly under some cobwebby stairs.

And now Rowling, performative Petunia, has taken to sneering at trans identities without even a modicum of acceptance, not even a pretense of civility. But woe be the lamentations of a rich white woman when we humorless queers ask that she tone it down a bit. 

When I run these days, I don't really look down at my tattoo much, as originally intended. When I'm complimented on it, I offer thanks and try to conjure the magical feeling I had for the series. I think on that scene where Harry saves Sirius. I think on lessons I've learned in my queer life—that I must save what I love on my own, that nobody else will save it for me—and how deeply interwoven into one's self that source of joy must be to cast an effective patronus. And then I think about what the author of these exceptional books has taken to promoting. I flick my wrist, I speak the words, but no sparks fizzle. That little bit of darkness falls like a shadow, overwhelming my best intentions. I cast nothing. I can't even make a feather fly.  

First Post: Hello!

Hey, y'all. My name is Phillip "Pip" Gordon, and this is my blog. I am the author of the recently published book Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). I've also published essays on Alice Walker, AIDS narratives, representations of bullying and suicide in LGBTQ+ YA film and literature, Harper Lee, Hubert Creekmore, and Faulkner, some more Faulkner, and then some Faulkner after that.

I am in the process of self-publishing some fiction via Amazon KDP, which is probably a bit low-class but enjoyable. More on that later, when I use this blog to plug  my self-published works.

I am currently at work on some new scholarly projects, mostly with . . . wait for it . . . William Faulkner but also focused on trans identities in Southern literature.

I work for a living as a professor; I teach American literature and LGBTQ+ Studies, rather obviously.

I hold degrees from the University of Tennessee at Martin (BA) and the University of Mississippi (MA and PhD)--I am in the process of unlearning the traditional shorthand for that latter alma mater. Here, on this blog, I will call it by its full name or UM.

I am from Memphis; I am from the South (more specifically the "mid-South").

I live, however, in the cold wilds of Wisconsin, my only connection to my distant origins the Mississippi River that runs near my house and a collection of highways connecting the Gulf to the Great Lakes region. Arriving here was like moving from earth to the moon but finding there is, in fact, a ladder tethering them to each other. Long trip down but connected, barely. It's better than nothing at all (and I tried to drink from Lethe on the journey northward, but after six years in this northern garden, I find myself looking south a lot).

This blog will be devoted primarily to LGBTQ+ art, film and literature, especially LGBTQ+ art, film, and literature from what has been considered "the South" in the context of the United States. And maybe sometimes just literature, but always with a queer eye for it, however straight said literature might appear.

If these are topics that interest you, I hope you enjoy reading. If not, find another blog to follow. The internet is large; it contains multitudes.

Recommendations for good reads and good viewing are welcome. Just, please, try to keep it queer.