Sipsey's Tomatoes: Reading Fannie Flagg in the Summer of Black Lives

 

There’s a critical scene in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café around which hinges the plot of the novel, though since the novel is told in a series of flashbacks with a shifting sense of limited and omniscient narration, when we first encounter the scene, it’s significance is not readily apparent. Grady Kilgore is leading a bunch of Georgia detectives, including Curtis Smoote, through town on their search for the missing Frank Bennett. When they arrive at the café, Idgie feigns ignorance about this missing man, who is, in fact, the husband of her lover, Ruth, and greets the detectives with that show of false courtesy so often gratuitously on display in the hospitable South. She offers the men coffee. She offers them pie. She’ll eventual serve them a unique and tasty barbeque.

 For each of these, she figures herself as the server—these men are in her café, where she holds court and feeds the locals, paying and non-paying customers alike, white and black, despite angering the local Klan. But a slight-of-hand occurs in this scene that deserves attention. It’s embedded in the grammar of my sentence above. Idgie holds court, which is true enough, but she doesn’t feed anyone. She owns the food and the means of production, but when she offers coffee, she yells back to the kitchen for Sipsey to bring it out. When she offers pie, she yells again for Sipsey to bring the pie.

 Idgie and Ruth own the café. Sipsey is their employee. Later, when Ninny gifts Evelyn the old recipes from the café, we discover that all the recipes were actually Sipsey’s all along, who did all the cooking in the kitchen while her (adopted) son, Big George Pullman Peavey, killed and cooked hogs out back. Yet, there’s Idgie, offering these detectives coffee—just as soon as her black cook can bring it out front for them. Though seemingly subtle, this scene has heavy implications for the novel and the nostalgia for that dream-like town of Whistle Stop, when the trains still ran and the world was less complicated, when a good tall-tale could diffuse any situation, when a prank on the local preacher over his advocacy for temperance was all in good fun.  

 Fans of the film might remember that, when this scene is converted to that medium, the focus is the barbeque that the Georgia detective eats. He compliments Idgie on it, though while she serves it to him, she seems a bit sweaty and nervous. Later in the film, we find out why: Frank Bennett is in the barbeque! The film makes it known that Idgie is entirely aware of how his body has gone missing. In the film, she knows that she’s feeding the detective the missing man.  

 In the novel, Idgie really is over at the Threadgoode house with Ruth, sitting up with Momma, when Frank comes to town and has his skull cracked open. Though in the courtroom scene (many years and many pages later) she is unable to prove her alibi, it turns out to have been entirely true. Idgie didn’t kill Frank. No evidence in the novel suggests she knows what happened to him, which adds a layer of complication to the lies she needs to tell to pull the appearance of guilt away from Big George in the trial overseen by the former-detective, now-judge Curtis Smoote, who is pleased to have a reason to dismiss the case with little real evidence of innocence. No one really misses Frank anyway.

 The “true” story of what happened to Frank is not known to any white folks in the novel. As Ninny explains to Evelyn, it is the “sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” known only to long dead individuals; and “dead men tell no tales.” The answer to the question is not a man, though. Sipsey, a black woman, kills Frank. No one mourns his loss and he is presented in every way as a vile character undeserving of our sympathies, but he was still a white man in Alabama. Sipsey’s action would never be deemed justifiable by the legal definitions of homicide at the time where the truth to out.

 Both the film and the novel depict Sipsey as the responsible party for the death of Frank. However, in the film, the white characters are part of the cover-up. In the novel, when Smoote warns Idgie to make sure there is no trace of Frank anywhere in Whistle Stop—and he hates Frank as much as Idgie does, since Frank had gotten an illegitimate child on his own daughter, leading to her eventual early death on the outskirts of Valdosta—Idgie is not privy to the fact that Smoote is eating the very evidence he is warning Idgie to hide.

 In the novel, only three people know what happened to Frank: Sipsey, who cracked his skull with a frying pan; George, who butchered and cooked him, and George’s son Artis, who witnessed all of this, sat with the body, and helped his father cook. Artis suffers for the rest of his life because of what he’s witnessed; he dies crazy and alone, glad he got to stab a white man—the decapitated Frank—but his inability to settle and make a life for himself stems directly from this specific horror of his youth. He kept his father’s secret, who in turn was keeping his grandmother’s secret. As black folks in Georgia, they knew the price of knowledge. We do, too: long before we get the “true” story of what happened to Frank, we’ve already encountered Mr. Pinto in his coffin, electrocuted by “Big Yellow Mamma” for his crimes. Of course, any reader willing to accept the realities of American history knows it would have been unlikely for a black man to make it through a regular trial to a state-sanctioned execution (And even in that other Alabama novel, when Atticus Finch manages to keep Tom Robinson alive long enough to be sent to prison, Tom Robinson still dies there).

 The narrative changes from novel to film go well beyond the death of Frank Bennett. I wouldn’t quite say that the goal of those changes was to more thoroughly center the white characters in the story for a movie audience. Ninny’s stories (and Flagg’s authorship) more than centers whiteness in Whistle Stop, and the more significant change to black characterization is the complete erasure of most of the black characters from the film except Big George and Sipsey. At least Flagg’s novel has scenes set in hobo camps and black spaces like Troutville, Slagtown, and the Southside of Chicago, but then I return to that scene with the Georgia detectives and Idgie offering coffee to them. Who does the offering? Who does the work? And what does this say about the way Flagg understands and depicts whiteness in her down-home novel about those good ole days, before the world got all complicated with skinny girls stealing parking spots at the Piggly Wiggly and asshole teenagers calling a menopausal woman a nasty name?

 In some other universe, I’m a bonafide literary scholar, complete with a PhD and some decent research skills. I suppose I could now sign into my university library account and run a database search for journal articles on Fannie Flagg and depictions of race. That Sipsey uses her frying pan, George his barbeque pit to kill and literally cook Frank Bennett has surely attracted scholarly attention in a field of literary studies (Southern Literature) that dwells at great length on race and also at great length on foodways. But barring that rabbit hole of actual scholarly effort—this is just a blog, for Christ’s sake—I’d like to dwell on a few reasons these details, among others, stood out to me as I reread this book this summer in mid-August 2020.

 I’m currently scheduled to teach a course on Southern Lesbian fiction this Fall semester. Well, an independent study with an advanced English major as a capstone experience. Getting to reread some landmarks of Southern Lesbian fiction, and then getting a chance to construct and deconstruct the terms of that fiction with a badass student, appealed to me last Spring when I surveyed the coming Fall semester through the lens of the bleak late Winter outbreak of coronavirus. Reading a book like Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café sooths the soul in the hellscape of our current moment. As an ex-pat Southerner, I derived a great deal of joy from reading passages aloud in the thickest, twangiest accent I could muster by myself when no Sconnies were around to hear me. It’ll be a great book to discuss in a capstone class.

 But then two things happened after I set up plans for this course this semester. First, over Memorial Day weekend, the murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests and relit the simmering fire of grief and anger over white supremacist practices in law enforcement (and at this point, I’d mention, Grady Kilgore is supposed to be a noble character in Flagg’s novel, a local law enforcement officer, and a member of the Klan). Bookstores have made a small fortune this summer by selling the latest guidebooks to anti-racism published by the biggest publishing houses in large east coast cities for the avid consumption of white people looking to be woke and looking for just the right purchase of a decidedly bourgeois object to display to friends on a living room bookshelf beside trinkets from Pier 1. But, hey, better than ignorance, I guess. This investment in literature to answer our questions about the nature of racism, however, has led to a natural supplementary conversation in the world of books, or, in this case, the second thing that happened while I was planning my course: folks returned to re-evaluations of the position of white authors in the canon, and they aimed for the big names in a way that brought these re-evaluations very close to home.

 The process of revisiting our old white (male) American authors with an eye towards their complicity (or worse) in the discourses of institutional racism and white supremacy is not new to students of literature. Ask a Twain scholar; ask a PTA meeting faced with an agenda item calling to ban Harper Lee. This summer, that conversation took a turn towards fruit much higher on the branches of the tree of great writers. This summer, voices have begun to ask, “Why are we still reading Faulkner these days?”

 I’ve previously blogged a bit about that conversation and will continue to prophesize on Billy’s utility to the canon. As a Faulkner scholar, I’d like to keep him around, but I’d also like more honesty, less apology (or apologia) for his blunt racism and troubling misogyny. White male scholars over the age of 60 insisting that he’s much more progressive than we realize—you know, they just don’t convince me anymore.

 And then I reread Fannie Flagg. For all the importance of her novel, for how it reconfigures lesbian representation and for how her success helps restructure the canon of Southern Lit to include women writers, it was difficult to read her depictions of black characters and not wonder, “What happens if we turn our critical racial eye here right now?”

 The problem is not just foodways; the problem is whiteness and the source of its sense of self and feelings of supremacy, or, in a word, its "power." Sadly, I don’t have my copy of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark available, but that extended essay on race in white literature crept its way back into my head, all these years after my comprehensive exams, while I reread a book about two white women whose place in their community is built on the labor of two black cooks.

 When Idgie offers Smoote coffee and pie at her café, purchased with $500 dollars gifted to her by her parents when she “married” Ruth, her sense of ownership and her confidence is belied by the fact that she doesn’t even try to fill an order for coffee and pie herself. She yells to a black woman to get it for her. For a white woman to offer up the things she owns and the goods she believes are the fruits of her labor and from which she derives her place in her community, she must rely on the work of someone else. Her “power” is an extension of her confidence that coffee will be served because she calls for it. Pie will be served because she wishes it so.

 Similarly, Evelyn relies on black identity to affirm herself through the anger of her feminist awakening. After envisioning herself as Tawanda, a name that could be construed as black, she gains peace when she makes herself go to a black church and sit through a sermon. She is in awe of the fact all these black people around her are human beings—she admits that she had never seen that in their lives before. She gains confidence from the experience, so much so that she knows she never even needs to come back to the church in future. Notably, her sojourn into the black church—during America’s most segregated hour—comes right after she wishes aloud to Ninny that she were black because black people just seem so self-possessed and happy.

 Her comments about black folks are obviously racist, and in her church experience, she actively works through her acknowledged fear of black men, which is to say that Flagg, as author, recognizes the racism of that fear. To craft a believable white woman in middle-class Birmingham in 1986, Flagg draws on the reality of racist assumptions. We can see Evelyn’s conversion as a kind of anti-racism for boomers in need of nudges towards being woke.

 Nonetheless, the greater reliance on black spaces and the seeming exoticism of black religion as the source of Evelyn’s new self-assurance presents to readers a deeper racial problematic, one which Flagg seems unaware of, but one which we, in 2020, can confront.

 Flagg is playing in the dark in her novel. Her depictions of black characters stray into stereotypes of devoted “mammy” figures and faithful family retainers. At times, her black characters speak in the nonsense language that white writers ascribe to black dialects (the only word marked for special spelling in all of Ninny’s ramblings is “cain’t” but we are supposed to hear her with a southern accent; meanwhile, when Big George talks, his dialogue is entirely full of misspellings meant to suggest he talks differently than the white folks around him). But the bigger problem is not the moments of what we can now, over thirty years later, identify as overt racism surfacing in the text. The problem is the covert, deeper structures of racism on which the white characterization in the novel is based.

 Sans white authority over black characters in roles of devoted servitude, the story falls apart. Sipsey tells Idgie to fry her own damn tomatoes; Big George tells Idgie he won’t go stand a prop against a truck, coring an apple, while she retrieves Ruth from Valdosta because he’ll be the one lynched for it, even though he’s just there so Idgie feels confident enough to confront Frank. Were these revisions made to the novel, Idgie would be powerless. She’d look foolish in front of the men who come into her café and with whom she makes brotherly gestures of shared masculinity—and yes, I’m aware that she is a woman. I’ll save comment on gender in the novel for a later post. She’d actually be powerless in the face of Frank when she goes to Valdosta by herself without a very large black man to scare white people just be default of standing beside a car. Her power derives from the fact that she can tell Sipsey to serve her customers everything from coffee to pie to barbeque to the titular green tomatoes. Her power also derives from her reliance on the intimidating size of a large, hog-slaughtering black man.

 So maybe the book does itself one big favor: Flagg does include several stand-alone chapters about George and his children. When Frank Bennett comes calling to steal Buddy, Jr., no white characters from Whistle Stop need be present for his defeat and erasure. Maybe there is evidence in the book for an alternative reading that de-centers the whiteness that seems—but only seems superficially—to lend the novel its strength.

 Maybe Fannie Flagg needs a Thadious Davis writing a Games of Property about the true protagonists of her novel about the Whistle Stop Café. The novel is not about the Threadgoodes, despite the insistence of the blurb on the back of the 2016 reissue paperback. The novel is the story of the Peaveys: Sipsey, Onzell, Big George, and their children and grandchildren.

 Okay, let’s burn down the house of some heterosexual, cisgender male Southern authors before we come loaded for bear against a Southern lesbian writer like Flagg. If the time has come for a critical reassessment of Faulkner, better we focus on him than take aim at writers from other historically marginalized groups, though at some point we have to be honest in our assessment of all the old (and new) devils of the Southern canon. Hopefully, we won’t have to chunk them to the curb, but we can consider more appropriate titles: Sipsey’s Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. Recognizing the real protagonists of the story is a good start. 

To the University of Mississippi, from a "Deeply Troubled" Alum

 

    I Don't Hate the South, per se . . .

From a little after August 1^st in this year of the pandemic, the Mississippi Free Press has run a three-part series, written by Ashton Pittman, about a cache of internal emails from the University of Mississippi. These emails were obtained through an open-records request by a third-party, which turned them over to the MFP.

 These emails contain conversations wherein administrators courted alumni donors by privately coddling to deeply racist and homophobic beliefs. Simultaneously, the university was publicly, if by force and tepidly, endorsing efforts to change the entrenched racist and homophobic institutional practices of the university.

 The three articles in the series are difficult to read, less difficult to accept for those who went to school at UM.

 Most of these damaging communications focus on racist comments and stem from an incident involving Ed Meek, an alumni donor and former namesake for the School of Journalism. In 2018, Meek was part of a racist video about the presence of black students, specifically black female students, on the Oxford Square. As I am white and as I am read as a cisgender male, I am mortified by these revelations, I am also angry, but I cannot speak to the pain or other emotions felt by black people in the face of these kinds of incidents—and there are so goddamn many of these kinds of incidents involving UM and Oxford (and elsewhere, and everywhere else).

 However, the final article in the MFP series turned to homophobic content in these emails, specifically regarding an email about Shepard Smith, a gay alumni and former host on Fox News. In 2019, in the days before Smith was scheduled to receive an award from the School of Journalism and New Media, also shortly after his departure from Fox News, the dean of that school, Will Norton, responded to an alumnus who was “surprised to learn that [Smith] is gay” by saying that he thought Smith was “deeply troubled.” I can speak to this comment as an epitome of anti-gay sentiments at UM, in Oxford, and in Mississippi, places I consider my intellectual home.

 I received my MA (2008) and PhD (2013) from UM before working a year there as an adjunct. I am also the author of a book on the influence of homosexual identities and communities on the life and works of Oxford’s most famous citizen, William Faulkner, a study I wrote at UM and which concerns the presence and visibility of gay people at UM, in Oxford, in his fictional Yoknapatawpha, and “beyond.”

 In my last post, I wrote about the closet and teaching Gay and Lesbian Literature in Wisconsin compared to my experience teaching it at UM. Speaking to the complexity of coming out and always having to hedge one’s bets with your audience, I riffed on a question posed by W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folks. I asked: How does it feel to be a controversy?

 The MFP series and the conversations it has started offer an answer to that question. It feels a great deal like this.

 In response to the idea that a gay person is “deeply troubled,” I am returning to this question, only with a twist. I would rephrase the question thus: Do gay people belong at the University of Mississippi? To speak back to, or “turn against,” the statement made by the dean in his email in an effort to place gay identity in Oxford is to be “controversial” in the truest sense of the word. It is not a controversy one courts, but it is a controversy one must sometimes engage. There is something “deeply troubled” here, but it is not what the dean thinks it is.   

    The Tragedies of the Night Become the Diversity Statements of the Morning

 Probably back in what must have been the summer of 2007, I met a friend, a fellow MA in English, at a café/junk store on North Lamar in Oxford, Mississippi. The store, a remodeled house, had a vaguely Jamaican aesthetic in its choice of décor; it humorously, but also problematically, called itself “Local Color.”

 My friend was there to work on an essay. I just wanted to hang out. I arrived after her, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, nicely tanned from being outdoors too much. As I swept in, loudly and jovially, she laughed at me, then joked about my persona as a “robust Southern male.” The joke derived from the fact that, while I certainly can fit that part when the circumstances would make it safest to do so, rarely do people confuse me for a robust southern anything. Usually, I’m just a gregarious queen, and even if I grew up less than 100 miles from Oxford, over the Tennessee border, few people ever associated me in my grad school days with the stereotypes of Southern maleness on display in the iconically southern space that is Oxford, home to the University of Mississippi since 1848.

 Oddly, my life in Oxford from 2006-2014 was largely defined by the intersections that made my friend’s comment so funny. I spent much of my time in Oxford, among the eccentricities of egregious Southern pomp—from exaggerated accents to offensive flags, from racist mascots to racist monuments—trying desperately to get people to understand: “Damnit, I’m the one who belongs here!” Jackson, Tennessee, where I grew up, and Memphis, where I was born, are the proximate cities to Oxford, key Mid-south municipalities far closer than the Jackson to the south, much less New Orleans, Birmingham, Nashville, Atlanta, or even smaller towns, the Laurels and Magnolias in the pine woods below Interstate 20 and down to the coast.

 My pleas fell on deaf ears for the most part, giving rise to what proved, for me anyway, to be a creative tension. It is precisely this tension that drove much of my academic pursuits, especially my interest in William Faulkner. And it led me to a question similar to the one I write in response to here: Is the issue with my belonging at UM a matter of my being gay?

 Two buzzwords define my experience of the University of Mississippi: Tradition and Diversity. These words traipsed themselves across the stage of Oxford life in a queer dialectic for the eight years I called that place home. The first, Tradition, was always a dog-whistle to signal a mythic south of plantations with happy, obedient black people in menial, invisible roles; the second, Diversity, was always an apology—if on any given morning the administration issued a statement about Diversity, you can be sure that it meant something terrible had happened the night before.

 Being gay meant being on the Diversity side of the dialectic, in opposition to Tradition, which is to say that being gay meant you never really belonged, unless you wore a Colonel Reb t-shirt while scouting the local bars for someone to take home for the night—but never openly gay bars, always only tacitly accepted gay spaces. We didn’t speak openly about homosexuality. It was then, had been, and apparently still is very much Oxford’s love that dare not speak its name.

 Well, I say “we didn’t speak openly about homosexuality.” I did, and often, along with a cohort of friends—professors and fellow students—but I also knew that such talk was fundamental to the tensional dialectic that made me, no matter how local, never quite the right kind of robust Southern male at “Ole Miss.”

    Gay Space in the Mid-south

 In the late 2000-aughts, the first years after my arrival, the touchstone for gay life in the environs of North Mississippi was the 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar, which focused extensively on Rumors, a gay bar in Shannon, Mississippi, just south of Tupelo and less than an hour away from Oxford. The documentary did not focus on the gay spaces in Memphis—Overton Square has long been a queer mecca, though in the 2000s, Cooper-Young emerged as a visible gay neighborhood as well. As an undergrad in rural West Tennessee, I had ventured into the gay club scene of urban Memphis, which boasted large clubs like Backstreet and smaller, more low-key hangouts, as well as at least one lesbian-specific bar, The Flame, in addition to the seedy associations of Overton Park, which, whether one liked it or not, had that reputation.

 The documentary swept, instead, across North Mississippi on Highway 78 to Tupelo, then south to Shannon to craft an image of secrecy, rejection, hard-scrabble living, and threats of constant surveillance and violence in the anti-gay hinterlands of the rural SOUTH.

 Smack between these two poles, though south just tad, is Oxford, home to the state’s flagship university; and if Oxford prides itself on small-town charm relative to the other large state schools in the Southeastern Conference, it has long been a relatively cultured city with as many art galleries as five-star restaurants, football tailgating alongside the Double-Decker Festival, more concerts than the average citizen of Lafayette County could ever afford to attend, and a famous independent bookstore with three storefronts on the over-priced Square.

 Oxford failed to factor into the documentary because it would have ruined the mystique of the south the filmmakers craved to present in all its haunted ruin, more Tobacco Road than The Unvanquished, and certainly not The Welcome, a gay-themed novel set in a North Mississippi countryside as foreign to the filmmakers as Dean Norton’s understanding of sexual otherness is to anyone who has seen two boys holding hands on campus on an sunny day in Spring.

 Oxford’s small-town bonafides might appear to give it cover to pretend that homosexuality is not part of its identity. It is the rural to the (not-that-distant) urban space of Memphis, and aside from a gay-straight alliance, ubiquitous to all public universities since the late 90s, it can seem easy enough to see homosexuality as separate from the pillars of identity in which the university community wraps itself.

    Gay Panic as Visible History

 There certainly have been incidents that support the otherness of gay identity at UM. In October 2013, on the 51^st anniversary of the integration of the university by James Meredith, an incident involving a student performance of The Laramie Project became a crystalizing moment in the history of queer visibility on campus. The university response praised a diversity that needed naming to put out old, entrenched flames and, notably, salvage the football team’s reputation.

 I was in New Orleans the night of the incident with The Laramie Project. I read about it online the next day—because the tragedies of the night become the Diversity statements of the morning, though apparently couched in duplicity. During a performance in front of a crowd that included students attending the play as part of an assignment for a theater appreciation class, members of the audience began to shout gay slurs and anti-gay rhetoric at the actors. The situation escalated to the point of requiring intervention; the play was halted. That most of the actors on stage playing gay roles were not, themselves, gay did not stop the heckling. That at least one actor did identify as gay when not in performance matter not one jot to the hecklers. That the play was about the response of a community to the murder of a gay student in a college town was too on point to bear—I cried reading about it. That football players in the audience, members of the theater appreciation class, seemed to be the primary culprits became the story—if it hadn’t involved football players, one wonders if the story would have made waves beyond campus at all.

 When the national news zoomed in on the shenanigans at UM, the university felt compelled the respond, largely to rhetorically castigate but not otherwise sanction unnamed members of the football team—they had a game that week, after all—which led to the administration issuing a kind of boilerplate statement about the values of the university community and diversity. It was a bad moment. Students needed to be corrected. Values needed to be “re”-asserted. Or asserted for the first time; it was difficult to tell which.

 In the undulations of the story, however, there were deep folds—implications, the phantasm of silently asserted “truths.” UM’s gay community became a lone theater kid who was gay and playing gay. The trauma of his experience was both a footnote in the story, not the focus, and a re-affirmation of understood axioms about gay life even in the educated portions of the rural south. It is fears and threats, loneliness and persecution. It requires an administration to deign to admit that diversity is probably a good thing to endorse lest folks think all southerners are backwards, and football players shouldn’t be so rowdy because it might cost of some points in the upcoming game.

 If there is a “deeply troubled” angle to this story, it is not the gay kid playing gay in The Laramie Project. The deeply troubled part of the story is the myopia of the administrative response. It was not an incident in isolation. More importantly, the actor wasn’t some lone gay kid.

 Diversity may feel at times like a watchword for the supposed progressive takeover of education. A more accurate understanding of it would be that it is the end to the silence surrounding who has been present all along. The dialectic that feels like a tension between Tradition and Diversity only feels that way because Tradition, not Diversity, has been so ill-defined.

 UM has had a particularly rough go at recognizing that nothing is new about the endless catalogue of racist and homophobic incidents that so often defines the university except now people are bearing witness to them and speaking up. The only Tradition anyone is clinging to is a deep desire for silence to hold longingly to mythic images of Tara and hoopskirts and defeated generals astride scraggly horses that they never once fed nor watered themselves. Then they can attend the yearly Old South party sponsored by the KAs on campus and drink the rum punches and mint julips of Lethe and hold the urn of the still unravished bride of quietness just close enough for a genteel kiss. Behold the sacred planation mistress, spirit mother of these white patriarchal dreams.  

    Revising the Received Assumptions

 Small Town Gay Bar and the incident during the performance of The Laramie Project actually formed the bookends to my time in Oxford, which leads me back to the question I have posed here: Do gay people belong at the University of Mississippi?

 We need a healthy historical revision, and what I offer here is far from an exhaustive history, but this question of belonging ignited my intellectual life in Oxford; that it finds itself restoked now offers me an opportunity to respond to what is yet another UM incident. This incident does not need a ham-handed diversity statement issued the morning after the night during which something terrible has happened, or, in this case, come to light from what can seems the endless dark age of “Mississippi.” Such methods to address these institutional problems only exacerbate them by treating them within the framework of the dialectic: Tradition and Diversity. We cling too hard to the mistaken assumption that these two concepts are in opposition to each other. We craft institutional policy and action from the position of this mistaken assumption. As the series of articles in the Mississippi Free Press makes clear, this approach does not work.

 A more productive solution is to place Diversity into context as Tradition, and then recognize how desperately UM has tried for years to be the holdout that won’t accept anything outside its own increasingly small self-assuring myth of exclusivity and white privilege—which is predicated on heterosexuality as normal and non-heterosexuality as “deeply troubled,” per the example offered up in Part III of MFP series on the bad faith of university administrators courting money from donors who despise the very students who make up the institution they supposedly support.

    My (University of) Mississippi

 I remember picking up The Daily Mississippian one day, which I did everyday despite its history of stirring the pot over that fallen soldier Colonel Reb or musical suites at football games. I remember that the same-sex marriage debate was shifting at the national level from absolute rejection to modicums of acceptance, at least in states in the Northeast, if not states in the mythic “South.” I remember that it was probably around 2009 or 2010 when the contours of the debate were shifting. I remember that an editorial that day challenged Mississippi to think about progress and history. I remember that the argument made a lot of sense. I remember that the author, a student at UM, argued that given Mississippi’s history of fighting Civil Rights the marriage debate offered a unique opportunity for the state to get not only on the right side of this one Civil Rights issue but also ahead of the curve for a change. I remember being impressed by the reasoning. I remember thinking, hey, a student at UM wrote this. I remember thinking, hey, people should listen to what is being proposed here.

 I remember no one really paid attention to the editorial. I remember that it came; it went.

 Ephemera in campus newspapers hardly makes gay identity legion, but these kinds of small documents suggest the groundswell waiting to rise when the opportunity presents itself for acknowledgement. Finding and recording that groundswell, on campus or in Mississippi generally, has proven a daunting task for queer historians and scholars, though one that has produced several important works. The central work in tracing gay Mississippi history is John Howard’s book Men Like That, but other works have made headway as well—including studies such as Benjamin Wise’s biography of William Alexander Percy from Greenville, who chose Sewanee over this home state’s flagship school, though another gay man from Greenville, Ben Wasson, would attend UM, where he’d meet a man who was also friend’s with gay UM alum Stark Young (the house Young lived in while his family lived in Oxford is now a University Museum). Young’s homosexuality is well-known though not the subject of an extended study such as Wise’s biography of Percy, but they were both gay, both writers born in the late 19^th-century, both native Mississippians, one a denizen of Oxford. The other just had his poetry reviewed in the campus newspaper in Oxford by that guy who was friends with the afore-mentioned Ben Wasson.

 UM has recently unveiled the Queer Mississippi Oral History Project, a projected funded by the Isom Center on campus and affiliated with the larger Invisible Histories project, which has done much work in recent years to reclaim the silenced experiences of queer southern lives. The Queer Mississippi project already boasts a large collection of oral histories, including of UM and Oxford, that place gay lives on campus as far back as living memory can record.

 Records beyond living memory are harder to come by, not the least of reasons being that prior to 2010, no census collected data on LGBTQ+ identities. Prior to 2003 courts were effectively forbidden in Mississippi from record anything concerning LGBTQ+ lives beyond violations of anti-sodomy laws. Prior to the 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, there are also no wedding certificates recording same-sex partnerships in Mississippi, no birth/adoption certificates recording same-sex legal guardianships, and no death certificates recording legally wed spouses left to mourn real lives lost even if they were not counted. The dearth of legal documentation of LGBTQ+ lives was always intentional; when our lives finally proved worth recording, the data painted pictures of our presence in defiance of stereotypes.

 Take, for example, data from the 2010 Census. The Williams Institute at UCLA analyzed 2010 census data, the first census to ask respondents to self-identify on matters of sexual orientation. That data showed that Mississippi ranked sixth in the nation in a per capita measure of same-sex couples who identified as “spouses,” a ranking that stands out even more impressively when one realizes the five states ahead of Mississippi—Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Iowa, and New Hampshire—had all legalized same-sex marriage prior to the census. In 2010 the Magnolia State most assuredly had not.

 But, then, when one bothers to break the codes of silence surrounding LGBTQ+ lives, the response is epic, if not downright Biblical—for, as the good book tells us, ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and your gay neighbors’ door might even open for you. It’s the south, folks. Of course we’ll invite you in for dinner, if you just bother to ask.

    A Welcome Place

 John Marszalek, III, did ask. Just three months ago he published his study Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi, a book that has remained on the bestsellers list in independent bookstores in the state since its publication. Marszalek’s book offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the grim, haunted scenes in Small Town Gay Bar, and his interviews with same-sex couples explore the potential for Civil Rights progress in Mississippi, just exactly in line with that old editorial in the DM ten or so years ago. A focal point of the book is that Marszalek positions his study against the challenges faced—and overcome—by LGBTQ+ folks in Starkville as they attempted to host a Pride event in town. Starkville’s experience became the focus of national news, especially because the city tried to deny the event permits. The organizers won the day, however, and images from their first and second Pride events in recent years suggest that LGBTQ+ populations in that other college town and its surrounding counties are not insignificant, nor do all the locals look like anti-gay bumpkins a-la Taylor Swift’s video for “You Need to Calm Down.”

 Tupelo has also hosted a Pride event, in October 2018, which was documented by a grad student filmmaker also associated with the Queer Mississippi Oral History Project at UM (the film and a limited publication about the event made the rounds at some academic conferences). South of Tupelo on the road down to Starkville—and Columbus, childhood home of gay Mississippi writer Tennessee Williams—is Shannon, site of Rumors, the scary gay bar in the wilderness. No doubt, LGBTQ+ folks from these places face challenges, but that does mean they all hide in caves in the pine hills. Oxford has also hosted Pride events, under the auspices of the L-O-U community (Lafayette County, Oxford, and University) with less national fanfare but still with large crowds.

 While Marszalek’s work documents contemporary aspects of the long gay marriage conversation, his work also pairs well with a 1948 gay novel published by gay Mississippi writer Hubert Creekmore, a UM alum from a regionally significant family (his older brothers were both SAEs with Ben Wasson and William Faulkner; his father a local judge). Creekmore’s novel The Welcome was originally subtitled “A Novel of Modern Marriage.” The marriage in question was a heterosexual one which caused grief to all parties involved—the marriage that could not take place, between the true minds of Don and Jim, the novel’s protagonists, haunts the later straight relationships detailed in the book. Hiding in the closet from each other, Don and Jim missed their chance for love and lived to regret it. One went to New York and came back to “Ashton,” Mississippi, a small town modeled on Creekmore’s hometown of Water Valley, 20 miles south of Oxford over the Yalobusha County line. The other goes to The University of Mississippi and marries a co-ed, a decision he regrets immensely as their marriage disintegrates.

 The novel is set in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which would coincide with Creekmore’s own matriculation through UM, where he was part of the theater company, The Marionettes, and befriended William Faulkner, who seems to have recommended his first book to publishers in New York. It is unlikely that Faulkner would have been troubled by the depiction of gay desire in The Welcome seeing as how, in 1925, Faulkner himself wrote an editorial to the New Orleans Item-Tribune arguing that same-sex “partnerships” have a better chance at success than opposite sex ones—though he didn’t say “marriage,” as a matter of rhetorical evolution, his comments are part of this longer conversation that now is recorded in Marszalek’s book and prompted an that undergrad to write an editorial for the campus paper at UM.

    And, of course, Faulkner

 As I’ve detailed in my book, Oxford’s most famous citizen was, even as early the late 1910s, aware of and accepting of gay men on campus. His relationships with one gay man in particular, Ben Wasson, led his classmates to call him “queer,” a word that had acquired homosexual connotations by the time it was applied to Faulkner (who was called varieties of this word throughout his youth)

 Wasson’s angelic face was praised on campus; he was a beautiful youth who turned the heads of many upperclassmen and was, according to students from the time, spoiled by many of them who doted on him with attention. Wasson seems to have had a dorm room in the Lyceum, behind those pillars so associated with UM, though certainly in need of a revision for the Traditions for which some people think they stand. Faulkner and Wasson spent much time together, perhaps most famously with Faulkner reading Wasson queer-themed poetry on the verdant grounds near the Grove while students walked by giving queer looks to these two young men performing a public courtship, regardless of what they did in private—this is why people called the “queer.”

 Faulkner was mostly a poet in those days, and he began his literary career publishing short prose sketches and poetry in the Mississippian, the campus newspaper, which was a weekly at the time, though now publishes a daily edition. Many of these poems were lesbian-themed and played with 19^th century models from Charles Algernon Swinburne and Stéphane Mallarmé.

 In 1981, Joseph Blotner, Faulkner’s official biographer, received a series of letters about those poems from an alumnus from Faulkner’s time as a student named Paul Rogers. Blotner was revising his original two-volume biography (1974) to a one-volume edition (1984), revisions which would rely heavily on Wasson’s coded gay memoir of his life-long friendship with Faulkner. Rogers was providing various information about campus life, but particularly dwelled on homosexuality at UM in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

 He, of course, insisted it didn’t exist back then: “The University of Mississippi is the one place where I have lived as an adult that homosexuality was of no interests to the students.” Of the word “homosexual” he claimed he never heard it on campus, but he did supply an alternative if only to say that “it was so seldom heard that it is fair to say it was hardly ever discussed.”

 He goes on to supply some telling information about that other word, hardly ever discussed: “[O]ne thing is certain, the subject of homosexuality was not at that time of much concern, as it is now and has been for the last fifty years. In fact, at the university there was only one word for it (indicated by the letters C & S), and the male students pundonor, or point of honor, was phrased as follows, ‘If one ever approaches you, sock him.’”*

 For a word that was “seldom heard” on a campus where students didn’t seem to think about it all that much, more is said here in the evasion and derision than meets the eye. Indeed, read the silence—we were there. They just preferred derisive comments and threats of violence to acknowledgement and acceptance. And if we weren’t called “gay people” and “same-sex couples,” the pejorative implied by “the letters C & S” hardly erases our presences from those old, halcyon days of the university’s supposedly better past.

 In contemporary parlance, we might call these comments an early form of the tension inherent in the received dialectic: there is Tradition and there is Diversity. Except this dialectic is entirely phantasmic, though surprisingly efficacious. The only thing “deeply troubled” here is how long there has been an insistence that people like me, that I, and so many others don’t belong.     

    Alma Mater

 The spiritual mother of my University of Mississippi is a boy with an angelic face being read poetry in the Grove by his lover. He was there listening a hundred years before the series of articles released this week by the Mississippi Free Press. He has been there since, he could be there now, he will be there tomorrow, too, probably, though I hope he does a little better for himself in the world that sitting a desk for Fox News.

 Maybe the biggest flaw in this ranting blogpost is the need I seem to have to offer redemption to a possibly irreparably flawed institution. Maybe the better response would be to just say Goddammit, Mississippi, walk away, and leave it to its Grecian urns and mythic dust.

 And yet, I return to my initial question: Do gay people belong at the University of Mississippi?

 Yes, we do. As I live and breathe.

    An Open Letter to the Fundraisers for the University of Mississippi

 Dear fundraisers for the University of Mississippi,

 Do better.

 Yours—

           An Alum

 

 *Quotations from Paul Rogers are from Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, UP of Mississippi, 2019.  

Classrooms and Closets: Teaching Gay and Lesbian Literature in Wisconsin

Earlier this summer, though not for the first time, I found out that, again, the Women’s and Gender Studies program at my university failed, rather clumsily, to add the courses that I regularly teach even as electives to the WGS minor and WGS certificates offered here. I’m about to start my seventh year in my current job, and this omission has been a little too glaring for a little too long—its origins are from before my arrival, and yet that gap just doesn’t seem to want to (be) close(d). Rather too coincidentally, I found out that changes to the WGS program “had been made” on the day the Supreme Court issued the Bostock ruling. Talk about feeling marginalized.

We live in a panopticon in which all the old devils are myopic. So it goes, and so a new semester is slated to begin.

This week, I sat down to prep the syllabus for a class that I’ve taught every year since I arrived here; and even before I arrived here. It led me down a familiar path, to ruminations about where I am and what, exactly, I am doing here, which, alas, I now record for virtual posterity on this blog.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I am an English professor. Inevitably, they ask what I teach. I tell them American literature. When that answer doesn’t suffice, and they ask what classes I teach, I tell them the surveys of American literature and some classes in gender studies. And I hope that’s enough. I try not to say more.

See where this is going? It is not an enigma wrapped in a mystery. I teach Gay and Lesbian Literature; I am a Gay Studies Coordinator. I am amply talented at avoiding saying both in conversation.

Don’t misunderstand me: I am as openly gay as I can be without announcing it on an intercom when I walk in a room. I have a pride tattoo conspicuously placed on my left forearm. I wrote a book titled Gay Faulkner, though even now, I often tell people I wrote a book on Faulkner and work my way through a variety of contortions to avoid saying the title (I used to explain, “Well, it’s about his life in New Orleans, soldiers, the Cold War—lots of things. It’s a long book.”) Whatever I might write about openly on a blog or on social media, in person I bend into all sorts of queer rhetorical shapes to avoid saying sometimes very simple, direct information about which I (swear I) make no bones.

Such is the world of LGBTQ+ identities and the long traumas of LGBTQ+ experiences. It’s not that I’m afraid to say I teach gay literature, per se, though lord knows the places I hang out can be a bit anathema to queer identities. Every queer person whom I know will tell you: we all feel unsafe sometimes, and we all know never to take a sense of safety for granted.

Sadly, I seem to pass for straight when I just sit quietly and pretend like I enjoy whatever football game is on at the bar. My reticence does not usually stem from fear so much as just avoidance. When you meet someone new, it always feels like you need to warn them that the conversation is going to delve in directions away from the straight and narrow before bringing up certain topics. You have to determine if they want to talk about it, if they are comfortable talking about it, if they will reassess your relative coolness and likeability as a result of it, and whether or not you want to play it cool when that shadow crosses their face or that ever-so-small pause holds back their response.

I will channel my inner DuBois for a moment: How does it feel to be a controversy? A bit like this, it turns out. Also—to channel my inner voice free from the influence of better genius: Y'all, the closet is a bitch.

Eve Sedgwick knew what she was up to when she wrote about the closet as the defining epistemology of sexual identity, especially gay identity, in the 20^th century. Oddly, if the closet has changed, it is still a closet, and scholars might be able to write a 21^st century Volume 2 on behalf of St. Eve, may she rest in peace, but only a dull opportunist seeking a lot of flair but having limited substance could reasonably claim that her theories are now quaint, outdated, or otherwise bunk. Volume 2 would probably be something along the lines of “Intersectionalities of the Closet” but the closet, old episteme of my youth, would still be there. To quote Beyoncé from Black Is King: “History is your future.” I’m taking that quotation out of context, but damned if it isn’t on point.  

But who even reads Sedgwick these days? Folks read Judith Butler, maybe, because she has outlived the so-called “Theory Wars” of the late-90s, when everyone wanted to be a cool post-structuralist who could couch inane ideas diffusely related to a text in the semiotics of bad grammar and big words. Mind you, Butler increased her shelf-life by moving from gender to ethical questions about Palestinian/Israeli relations and non-gendered accounts of selfhood. Sedgwick moved into Affect Theory, which was probably the natural evolution of complexity for complexity’s sake in the aftermath of those distant theory wars. Maybe regular readers of QLF are plugged into that area of theoretical probabilities, but those discourses don’t translate to the undergrad classroom effectively, if at all, especially in an academic climate where even the best students struggle to read critically anything that isn’t labeled YA lit.

I mean, I read Sedgwick, but Imma take a step back here—away from the theoretical cliff— to explore some genealogy of gay and lesbian literature. In this case, my own.

In grad school, I formally studied 20^th-century American literature. At the University of Mississippi, this period consisted of more than a healthy dose of southern authors and, by extension, critical conversations about black writers, often in relationship to the imaged south. I was also interested in LGBTQ+ literature, Queer Theory, and queer studies generally—lots of issues with naming things in this field, btw. My academic background, from the classes I took to the papers I wrote, easily read as the education of a burgeoning scholar of gay and lesbian studies, even if ostensibly the classes I took don’t look that way just by their titles on my transcript (my CV on the other hand, especially the portion on publications, is hellagay).  

My dissertation director was quite aware of my interests and encouraged them—in fact, fostered them. She helped me carve out that queer space in otherwise non-queer coursework. However, she also often warned me that I could never go on the job market as a Queer Theorist nor as someone who studies LGBTQ+ anything as my primary focus. Those jobs didn’t exist anymore, she told me; or if they did, they were few and far between—holdovers from the ashes of the Theory Wars, mostly being blown away in the winds of focus on race and global capitalism as the modus operandi of our present-day literary conversations. So, we plotted a strategy—I’d be an Americanist with a sub-specialty in LGBTQ+ studies. It really is all in how you frame yourself in the cover letter for the specific job you apply for. Always best to emphasize what your audience wants to perceive as your strengths. It’s all a performance, after all.

Because, alas, as Judy B. would remind us—we can’t all go to Yale to be lesbians. Nor to regional public universities to be lightning rods of queer activism wrapped in the cloak of literary studies. Me, I ended up in Wisconsin, a somewhat less queer space than I had imagined it to be.

But how now, brown cow, didst thou arrive in this strange state? Shortly after my dissertation defense, I was hired at the University of Mississippi as an adjunct instructor to teach . . . the Early American literature survey! Admittedly, any decent Americanist should be able to teach both early and late American literature surveys, and I gladly jumped right into the role as lecturer overseeing TAs and delivering two well-rehearsed lectures per week on the foundations of and deep contradictions inherent in American literature prior to a Civil War. I also taught a course primarily for English Ed majors on the history of literary criticism. And thanks to some finagling by my dissertation director, in Spring 2014, I got a shot at LGBTQ+ coursework via a junior-level course on Gay and Lesbian Literature. So began my halcyon days!

Oxford is the kind of place that encourages the melding of creative and scholarly minds, both as a matter of associations and within one’s own intellectual life. I drafted my first novel in this period as a side project to essays on gay Mississippi writer Hubert Creekmore and interpreting Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as an AIDS narrative, all while writing weekly lectures to explain that all American literature prior to the Civil War is an attempt either to ignore the genocide of native peoples or ignore the realities of slave economies. And then I’d get to talk about the 20^th century history of queer identities as they are reflected in literature—and how that literature in turn influences how we understand these identities anew.

At UM, my Gay and Lesbian Literature course consisted of a classroom full of genuinely brilliant students—not always the best writers, but all there for solid reasons. Either they were majoring in English and the course offered them an elective, but as majors, they loved to read, regardless of the topic; or they had an interest in Gender Studies, and the course was a variant of coursework aligned with the Isom Center and the Women’s Studies program, of which my dissertation director was interim (now full) director; or they were, well, you guessed it—curious readers looking for general elective credits towards degrees in Liberal Arts. But curious about what? Ah, yes, themselves and histories and identities that just weren’t covered so much in other courses. Many of my students were there because they identified as queer.

About that last reason—it is a true story that I had more than one student in that class who had not told their roommates/friends/frat or sororities siblings where they went those two days a week in the afternoon. They basically either lied and said they were in study hall or working, not unlike I used to tell my parents, when I was in high school, that I was out with “friends” when I was out on a date.

Like I said: y'all, the closet is a bitch.

For some of these students, they realized that telling their friends that they were taking a course on gay and lesbian literature would be to come out. And YES, that is crazy! But, still, that is true. The conversation was rehearsed to me by students in that gallows humor for which minority communities have such affection: “If I told my [friend, roommate, siblings] I was taking gay and lesbian literature, they’d be all like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know. Are you trying to tell me something? I love you no matter what. We’re still cool, right?’” We laughed over it, in pantomime away from said friends/roommates/siblings. I’d secretly wonder if it was kosher to ask said student out for a drink because damned if they didn’t deserve it.  

Probably the most significant story of my gay teaching life emerged early in this class. At UM, there was a clear gay and lesbian community, but other identities, especially other gender identities, were not as discussed. I made the mistake of focusing on sexual orientation in the class, which worked out because sexual orientation and gender identity are not exactly separate things even if they are not fundamentally related in a fixed way, but I was still learning. My focus was too narrow, and I work to do better these days.

Apparently, I did something right in my first class meeting, though, because afterwards a student approached me, whom I had read as a butch lesbian, and asked if I would call him by he/him pronouns. Recognizing my erroneous assumption, I immediately said of course I would. But then the student said something that I will never leave behind in some arrogant sense that I’ve grown beyond it. The student told me, “This is the first time I’ve approached a professor to ask them to call me by my pronouns and not felt like I was going to vomit.”

They don’t train you for these moments in graduate school. I felt flattered that I’d done something to make the student feel that comfortable; I felt deeply moved by the compliment paid to me; I felt violently angry that a student had to feel that way at all in any situation; and I realized that I learned more in those 30 seconds of conversation than I had learned in whole semesters of the previous seven years of study to get me to the point I could even teach that class.

Yet, there I was. I was a “temporary employee” on my ID card, but it was a good year teaching. I was happy to be where I was. I was also on the job market, of course, and that is when is I applied for and got my current job. Funny how these experiences played out in that process. And by funny, I mean . . . well, “queer.”

The application for my current job listed the requirements as teaching freshman writing—a standard requirement for teaching universities—and the Early American literature survey! I shouldn’t have qualified even for an interview except I had found my way to teaching just exactly that survey at UM, though it wasn’t quite my area of expertise. Again, it’s all performance and I can perform. But I have my own ways of handling different performances. Recalling that many of my peers went down the rabbit hole of researching prospective employers when they landed an interview at a university—which subsequently didn’t hire them—I opted simply to google the university and town one night. Beyond that, I just let it ride. I did pack syllabi for my gay and lesbian literature course as well as for the literary criticism course to take with me to the on-campus interview, for one never knows just what will come in handy in those settings. I did not bother even researching to find out that the university I was applying to had a gay studies program, including three specific gay studies courses listed in the catalogue, all in the English department.

As it so happened, two coincidences joined forces when I was traveling north for my day on campus—well, three coincidences, but the third is worth its own blog post. My original plans for a trip of approximately 48-60 hours turned into an epic four-day ordeal due to multiple tornadoes and cancelled flights. The two pairs of pants, two shirts, and accompanying, well, two pairs of other clothing items that I brought with me when I left pushed my creative limits on the “what to wear for an interview” front. The other two coincidences matter more, though, for this posting.

First, the university had those three gay studies courses!

Second, as I waited in an airport for another tornado to pass, I got a call from a contact at the university to tell me, “So, the guy who teaches the gay studies curriculum just resigned,” followed by, “We’ve seen from your CV that you can teach those classes. Any chance you could talk about that while you are here? Did you bring a syllabus?”

Per Deadpool, it is obvious to me that my mutant power is just unreasonable luck. I gave my teaching demo on Early American Literature, a course I’ve since taught one time in six years here. Instead, for my first semester on campus, I taught Gay and Lesbian Literature—like, the course had the exact same title as at UM. Then that spring Gay and Lesbian Literature for Young Adults, a course mostly designed for English Ed majors but that also appeals to literature students. I’ve taught Gay and Lesbian Literature every year since 2014. I’ve taught the YA version of the class once as a regular class, twice as directed studies, unpaid overloads for students interested in the class for specific reasons relevant to their degree programs beyond general education requirements. And I’ve taught a course titled Introduction to Gay Studies more times than I can remember—usually every semester with rare breaks.

The catch to what I’m getting at might have just slid right past you in that last paragraph if you weren’t paying attention. That part about general education. My classes in my current job, when I teach them as regular seminars, are packed to the gills, every semester, usually with students emailing begging to be added over the cap. I’d like to tell myself this craving for my classes is a response to my awesomeness. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Their interest is because students need classes like mine to graduate—all students do. My gay studies courses fill general education requirements. My courses count as “Humanities” credit, of which all students need two; additionally, they count as “Gender Studies” credit, of which all students need one per a system-wide policy that guarantees I’ll never have empty seats, even for a gay-themed class.

And no one lies about their whereabouts to their friends, roommates, or Greek siblings. And most students in the classes do not identify as queer in any capacity. In fact, they often feign utter ignorance of even basic knowledge of sexual alterities and gender variance. And most of them are just stunned (at least for the duration of a class period) about the nuances and challenges of coming out. They’d, like, just never thought of it that much before. But they did know this kid in high school . . . or their cousin . . . or this kid in the dorms.  

In Mississippi, that one semester I taught gay and lesbian literature, the students had specific cause to be in the class—they wanted to be there, for lack of a better way to put it. In the wilds of Wisconsin? For most students (notably, not all), my courses are a box to check on a checklist. Even the junior-level gay and lesbian literature course—better than half of the students are just gen ed students, seeking credits in one of the rare examples of a program devoted to Gay/Queer/LGBTQ+ studies remaining outside of the world of R1s.

I am the last, distant line of defense in the smoldering ruins of an ancient theory war battlefield, or so it feels like I am sometimes. But woe to they who focus on theory, history, and context in this faraway land among the new-age barbarians. In the best of situations, the complexity of teaching this material is challenging. In lesser situations, the problems compound.

The goal of this post is not to lament that my prodigious talents are being wasted in the wilderness, far from the celestial city atop some academic ivory tower I do not care to climb. A good teacher adapts to the setting, and for now, this world is my scholarly world, these classes my classes. Yes, it is true that I spend my days inch-worming marigolds with students who seem decidedly underexposed to most everything, not the least of which being history, queer or otherwise; but I have had some FUCKING AMAZING students here among the rabble of students just checking boxes towards graduation.

The goal of this post is to situate the challenge of teaching marginalized histories and about marginalized and closeted identities in an America that can’t even teach its own mainline history effectively or come to terms with its own identity politics beyond blind whiteness and unquestioning patriarchy. 

How do you explain to students the impact of AIDS of gay communities when they 1) don’t know the blood ban from that era is still in effect and 2) at best have been told AIDS is a gay disease if they’ve ever encountered discussion of it at all? How do you explore the problems of discourse, even the simple concept of labeling identities, for students who can’t even define “gay” beyond, “like, when you like someone of the same sex” (this answer is problematic because what they actually mean is “same gender”, which is, itself, a social construct that students blank out on during discussion; and there is much to unpack with “like” versus “desire” versus “has sex with” versus “wants to have sex with,” which are among the many discussions one has with students who are just at the beginning of queer wokeness. There is little room for more advanced themes)?

It is not uncommon for students to admit they are afraid to answer questions during discussion—such as when I ask, “Define homosexual, anyone?”—because they think no answer that they give will be right. And I’m like, “Yeah, well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” before asking them, “would you prefer to define heterosexual instead?” Much silence ensues.

Notably, I rarely have students coming up to me to ask about pronouns after class—largely because most of the queer students already know me and spend time chilling in my office, where I have a chance to learn their identities outside of the classroom space. On campus, I work hard to be the biggest gay lightning rod set out to attract every strike of lightning. It’s a professional persona, and a necessary one lest students scan the horizons of the halls of learning and fail to see the LGBTQ+ folks among them, some even in positions of authority and rank.

But then, there’s always a catch, even now, even when I’m soldiered out in my last-line-of-defense drag for the cause of queer academic viability. See, not all my class are “Gay Studies,” and in 2020—and in 2018, 2016, and certainly in 2014 when I arrived to this wilderness outpost, most students here struggle mightily to accept the reality of queer people (“there’s this kid in the dorms”) and only take these classes for gen ed credits. It is not always at a bar where I am asked about what classes I teach.

I also teach first-year writing. When my freshmen in that class ask me what other courses I teach (so they can have me as a professor again), I respond with, “Well, some upper-level literature courses, they’d count for your Humanities credits; I also teach some gender studies courses. You can look those up.” Because most of them don’t know (apparently, I can read as straight even when I’m not faking interest in football); or if they do know, they think they are in on some secret, like they are special because they get the joke.

Because y'all, I told you, the closet is a bitch.

I do sometimes attempt to have my students read Judith Butler’s essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” So they can read Butler’s commentary that we come out of the closet, but into what? (this) And that we (have to) come out again and again (like I'm trying to explain here), if we are not outed against our will by others (“there’s this kid in the dorms”). And then she goes to Yale to be a lesbian. At that point, my students tend to blank out.

The few who stay with the vein of the conversation get a small laugh when I explain that whatever I’m wearing that day in class is my professor drag, just a teaching persona. And it’s all drag really, all of it! And that’s when I roll up my left sleeve to show off my pride tattoo, which I said was conspicuous, but which I never said I couldn’t, when I felt the need to, hide.

The past is prelude (history is your future!), but this is the place I return to, this rhetorical rabbit hole that I find myself in at the start of every fall semester as I prepare to teach Gay and Lesbian Literature, a junior-level survey I’ve taught in Mississippi and now teach regularly in Wisconsin. My class has been fully enrolled since before semester ended in Spring. At UM, I taught eight novels, including both The Well of Loneliness and Tales of the City, neither difficult reads, but neither short, especially for students who read, it seems, almost nothing outside of class. And maybe nothing in class either.

Here, I’ve tried eight novels, and struggled, even when one novel was a graphic novel. I’ve long since reduced the reading to six novels. I like novels. I like the fullness of their narrative texture, the chance to explore text and context in detailed ways. No Hemingway and baby shoes—but communities and identities told in textualities. This is what “gay and lesbian” literature is to me, and some students here keep up.

As I’ve prepared my reading list this semester, I’ve got five novels, plus a very limited selection of short stories and poems. Now, a thought experiment: take any substantial category of human identity, marginalized or not, and reduce it to five texts. Then tell yourself that those five texts will tell the full story to students for whom this reading list is the entirety of their exposure to these ideas, this their whole experience. One is a YA novel, Simon v. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which is where we will begin the semester because it is generally devoid of cultural context—minus a few throwaway lines about “the south” since it is, technically, set in suburban Atlanta. One character does have an accent. It makes him stand out.

The entire novel is a study of (upper) middle-class sheltered high school students confronting the fact that one of their cohort is gay, and no one will really care about it, but he just “doesn’t want to change anything” and he’ll just wait til college to come out if he can—that is, until he’s blackmailed by a classmate who wants a date with a girl. The novel contains no serious attempt to position this coming out against the AIDS crisis in the south, especially in Georgia, which is, also, to the CDC; no serious discussion of gay marriage, though Simon is a high schooler, so we can forgive him that, even if his story, published in 2014, happens to coincide with the critical year between Windsor and Obergefell, both of which were predicated on Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, a case out of Atlanta, Georgia that had national effects on anti-sodomy laws. At the end of the novel, Bram turns out to be both part Jewish and part black, and this is the extent of racial discussion in the novel, though his coming out experience mostly mirrors Simon’s because, though of different ethnic backgrounds, both are from financially solvent homes. Both plan to go college; both represent characters who, if real, could.

It is a garden variety coming out story about a garden variety gay teen, but the students really get into the discussion and think of their own high school experiences, or the experiences of their friends, or people they knew in high school. Never that kid from the dorms. He/she/they is other to their experiences; and those are the walls that give the closet its shape. 

The other novels—I rotate what I teach, hoping something will stick—devolve into consternations. When the story is not so accessible as a YA novel about coming out, sans the complexity of Butler’s essay on that topic, class tuns into me wondering what I’m supposed to be teaching—basic textuality? Or context and history?

It feels like a yearly viewing of some far away object but through a glass darkly. Every year it is a return to one question: what to do to help them see?