I Don't Hate the South, per se . . .
From a little after August 1st 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 51st
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
19th-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 19th
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.
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