Living in the Catacombs: John Howard's Men Like That, part three

4. "I don't have a good definition for a homosexual."

In 1955 a Mississippi man named John Murrett was murdered by two young Air National Guardsmen he'd picked up and taken to a Jackson hotel. During the ensuing trial, medical examiner Forrest Bratley told defense attorney W. W. Pierce: "A homosexual is out of my line of work. We don't see them pathologically. In performing an autopsy one cannot differentiate between a heterosexual or a homosexual. I don't have a good definition for a homosexual."

P[ierce]: Would a homosexual or a queer differ materially in his physique, in ordinary behavior in public from the average individual?
B[ratley]: In physique or appearance there would not be any difference. In behavior among the general public there would not be any difference. How they might act before an individual, which I wouldn't consider public, I don't know.
P: Doctor, sex has a great deal to do with the behavior of a good many people. You know that as a medical man, don't you?
B: Sex does determine some of our behavior patterns.
P: And in some instances it can be an uncontrollable urge in the individual. Don't your medical books teach that?
B: I am sure some of the specialized books do. I haven't had that specialized training.
P: Doctor, would a person who would engage in sex perversion, would he be a person who might be aggressive if the sex urge was strong enough?
B: I am sure the sex urge would be just as strong if he wasn't a homosexual.
[Howard 135-136]

Bratley's assertion that homosexuals are physiologically indistinguishable from the general population is at odds not only with mainstream 20th century medicine, but with the present-day mainstream gay movement, which predominantly declares that homosexuality is an inborn physical condition. Not much has changed since Bratley's day, either: we still don't have a good definition for a homosexual. At around the time of this trial, the UCLA psychologist Evelyn Hooker was conducting research in California which turned out to indicate that homosexual men are psychologically indistinguishable from heterosexuals as well. "Homosexuality as a clinical entity does not exist. Its forms are as varied as are those of heterosexuality. Homosexuality may be a deviation in sexual pattern which is in the normal range, psychologically" (Hooker 1957, 30). Bratley's remarks are very close to Hooker's conclusion -- and no less at odds with the views of mental health professionals at the time, or later.

Howard understands Bratley's testimony differently, however. Though he credits the doctor with "refut[ing] societal stereotypes of queer promiscuity and pathology", he says (approvingly, it seems) that Bratley "depicted homosexuality as ... a state of being for a definable minority of individuals" (135) and "homosexual persons" as "a distinct and fixed minority of individuals" (168). Maybe so, but in the testimony Howard quotes, Bratley said just the opposite: he could not define homosexuals, and they were indistinguishable from the general population except perhaps in private behavior.

Howard is generally hostile to the kind of "gay identity politics" (252) which regards gay people as "a distinct and fixed minority of individuals." This "master category" or "identity mechanism" creates "essentialized gay men" (122), and is apparently the work of "more liberal strains of midcentury American medical discourse" (135), but also of "gay publications in North America's urban centers" (183) whose hegemonic power created such an "irrefutable trajectory" (170) that even Howard finds himself tempted to project "presentist identities and cultural models on to historically situated actors", instead of "attending to the exigencies and specificities of their time and place" (192). Nor, when he's laid aside the bladder he uses to flog the Evil Essentialists, can he seem to refrain from using such essentializing language as "their kind" (xvi) and "men like that", let alone "queer."

Howard shares this ambivalent distaste for "gay identity" with a large number of his colleagues, probably the mainstream of academic writers on gay history and gay life at the end of the century. For example, historian Leila J. Rupp: "What is important is that we avoid thinking that all the terms used by people in the past are synonyms for what we today mean by 'gay' and 'lesbian'" (1999: 104). Or journalist Frank Browning: "To the leading [and forever unnamed] authors and strategists of the American gay movement, sexuality -- sexual orientation -- is an identity, something sure, certain, reliable, around which rites and rituals are being invented" (1996: 16).

Or, from a paper on counseling "men of color" (Tafoya and Wirth 1996: 60): "For some tribal men, one's identity as a homosexual may not be defined by the gender of one's partner, but by the nature of the act itself; thus, as long as one is the active insertor, the gender of one's partner is irrelevant. [On the contrary: "gender" here is clearly defined by one's erotic practices; the authors are confusing "gender" with "sex."] The only 'homosexual' involved is the man who passively receives. [Plenty of "European" binary concepts there!] Such ideas are normative in a number of Native communities, and must be understood from that context." Such ideas are also the traditional white Mississippian understanding, as Howard presents it. What a coincidence.

Jeremy Seabrook, an English sociologist, warns against "projecting onto India Western concepts of straight, gay and bisexual" which he considers "stereotyped and rigid categories" (1999: 140). He quotes "Shivananda Khan, Calcutta-born founder of NAZ in London and a tireless researcher into sexual identities in South Asia" (140): "the withering blast of being labelled 'gay'" destroys "destroys Indian traditions of friendship: indigenous homoaffective and homosocial relationships" (141). Khan doesn't mind using Western concepts and terminology like "homoaffective", though.

Seabrook glibly dismisses gay-identified Indian men, who are "looking at the situation from their own Westernised and socially advantaged position" and "are bearers of precisely those values which Karim and other Indians whose lives are anchored in India deplore" (146). This would seem to imply that John Howard's queer Mississippians are non-Westerners, for Howard considers "gay identity" as intrusively alien to them as Seabrook does for Indians.

Homosexuality in one form or another is not the only erotic practice that has been explained away as an evil foreign import -- consider the way whipping was called the English vice in France, and French in England -- but it has frequently been seen that way, from ancient times right down to the present. And as the examples I've just given show, it is now America, the Wicked Witch of the West, which gets the blame, not only in Asia or Africa, but in the US itself. Seabrook, by the way, deplores Hindu fundamentalists who denounce homosexuality as modern foreign degeneracy, but a major aim of his book is to do the same thing they are doing. The difference is that he sees certain homosexual patterns as indigenously Indian, and only condemns certain others as Western; but this too is typical, as should be clear by now.

Many gay Americans do see homosexuality as a fixed identity or nature (they tend to confuse the two, but so does John Howard), and there are prominent spokespeople for this position, such as essentialist Andrew Sullivan: "The homosexual identity was certainly known to Plato and Aristotle; recent scholarship has unearthed examples of it as recently as New York in the 1920s and as long ago as the Stone Age" (Sullivan 1995: 30). Notice that Sullivan conflates homosexual orientation with homosexual identity; a history of identity would have to rely on verbal evidence, and I'd like to know how there could be Stone Age evidence for it. Even cave paintings could at most depict behavior, not orientation or identity; or have archaeologists perhaps discovered caves with ancient track lighting and industrial carpeting, thus proving the existence of Paleolithic interior designers?

Sullivan as a gay spokesman is a creation of the straight media, who are as ignorant about gay issues as he is. He's not a movement strategist or leader, though many gay Americans are eager to agree with him that gay people are biologically and psychologically distinct from straights. But gay identity is 'socially constructed' if anything is, and so it can never be fixed, sure, certain, or reliable. Others may deny your right to claim a given identity: you aren't a true Christian, Republicrat, Mississippian, American. You may cling to your identity despite all argument or evidence to the contrary. An identity can be changed, abandoned, hidden, or (Goffman 1963) spoiled. Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost's New England farmer says dourly; but identities don't make very good fences. People walk through them as if they were made of air -- and so they are.

At the same time, many gay Americans wish to believe that they are basically no different from heterosexuals, and that if it weren't for drunken leathermen who insist on gyrating lewdly on Pride Parade floats (Graff 1999), heterosexuals would recognize this basic similarity and embrace us as upright (oops!) fellow citizens. Many oscillate between declaring that they are genetically incapable of desiring the opposite sex, essentially and congenitally "different", forever doomed to be outsiders on one hand (Sullivan 1995: 13); and "There's something of both attractions in all of us" (ibid., 11) on the other.

The really curious thing about the old-fashioned down-home notions about queers which Howard and others treat so respectfully, is that they are so similar to the "modern homosexual" Foucault postulated. The queer, the not-man who plays receptor to a manly partner's penis, the gender nonconformist, is very like the invert of 19th century European medicine. If I weren't deathly afraid of being reductive, I'd say that they're the same concept. It's easy to forget this, because (as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed out in Epistemology of the Closet), historians and theorists talk about "the modern concept of the homosexual" without noticing that they are retailing at least two such concepts, and probably more. Howard even cites the pertinent part of Sedgwick's book, but ignores what she said there.

Having offered what he calls a "tentative assertion that throughout the twentieth century, queer sexuality continued to be understood as both acts and identities, behaviors and beings" (xviii), Howard promptly forgets it in the main text. Which is too bad, because any writer "informed by queer theory" (xiv) who's actually read Foucault should know that this "tentative assertion" is normative: Foucault (1978) rejected the repression hypothesis, arguing that 19th century medical theories of sexuality never simply replaced other conceptions. Foucault also had a hard time holding this position consistently, and seems to have been unaware that there hadn't been a single conception of same-sex sexuality before "homosexuality." The sodomite was never only "an aberration," as shown by Voltaire's famous (if apocryphal) retort, "Once, a philosopher; twice, a sodomite!"; the homosexual was never simply a "species."

----
Browning, Frank, 1996. A Queer Geography: journeys toward a sexual self. New York: Crown Publishing Inc.
Foucault, Michel, 1978. The history of sexuality, volume I: introduction. New York: Pantheon Books.
Goffman, Erving, 1963. Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.
Graff, E. J., 1999. What is marriage for? Boston: Beacon Press.
Hooker, Evelyn, 1957. "The adjustment of the male overt homosexual." Journal of Projective Techniques, XXI, 18.
Rupp, Leila J., 1999. A desired past: a short history of same-sex love in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Seabrook, Jeremy, 1999. Love in a different climate: men who have sex with men in India. London and New York: Verso.
Sullivan, Andrew, 1995. Virtually normal: an argument about homosexuality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Tafoya, Terry; Wirth, Douglas A., 1996. "Native American Two-Spirit Men." In Longres, John F. (editor), Men of color: a context for service to homosexually active men. New York: Harrington Park Press / The Haworth Press, 1996: 51-67.

[This is as far as I got with my discussion of Men Like That. There were a couple of other parts of his work I wanted to look at, such as his analysis of Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" and his account of the scandal which led to the death of a Jackson classical musician, and I'll try to get to those one of these days.]

Living in the Catacombs: John Howard's Men Like That, part two

I really did mean to post more on John Howard's Men Like That in reasonable time, but time got away from me. So here's more now.

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3.

Somewhere along the line, "identity politics" has become a safe and handy term of abuse, like "political correctness" -- and about as free of content. Howard throws it around several times in Men Like That, without ever making it clear what he means by it.

Impenetrable, unkissable men involved in homosex -- men that [informant and self-identified "trade queen" Ron] Knight describes both as "supposedly straight guys" and as "men" -- should not be understood within the present-day psychoanalytic frame of denial or the identity politics category of closeted. They should not be read as essentialized gay men unable to accept it. As this and the prior two chapters show, in midcentury Mississippi male-male sexualities happened within complicated worlds of myriad desires. To experience or act on homoerotic desire did not necessarily define the person as gay....

As sociologist Steven Seidman puts it, "The very possibility of framing homosexuality as a site of identity presupposes sexual object-choice [the gender of one's sexual partner] as a master category of sexual and self-identity." For many in this time and place, this master category may not have been at work as an identity mechanism; although, certainly, sexual object-choice functioned more broadly in American culture in the framing of acceptable and unacceptable, normative and nonnormative sexual practices [122f].

This passage is a clotted mass of misinterpretations of data, and of misunderstandings of theory. Howard mentioned earlier the amazingly resilient "heterosexual will to not-know, the pretense of ignorance" (xvi); were only heterosexuals capable of denial in those days? I don't agree that it implies essentialism to suggest that someone is in denial over his participation in homosex. If anything, essentialism facilitates denial: "Yes, I'm screwing a man (or getting screwed by one), but it doesn't count because I'm not queer." This mindset has often been lethal for men who didn't believe they needed to use condoms while being penetrated, since only queers got AIDS. An anti-essentialist can point out (as Kinsey did), that someone is engaged in homosexual activity without necessarily implying anything about that person's inner nature.

As for "closeted," there may not have been a mid-century Mississippi equivalent to refer to men who declined to acknowledge (to themselves, or to others) what they were doing sexually. I see no reason not to use the accepted current label unless one is devoted to producing a purely emic account of midcentury Mississippi queerdom, which Howard is not.

Whether trade -- "Impenetrable, unkissable men involved in homosex" -- should be understood as closeted or in denial depends on the individual. For Howard's impenetrable and (initially) unkissable informant Mark Ingalls, who now sees himself as gay, both denial and the closet were definitely involved: Ingalls himself reports his mother's reproval on his second (!) heterosexual marriage: "Knowing what you know, why are you doing this?" (46) As Howard notes, "Avoidance of the topic did not indicate a lack of awareness on either side" (ibid.), and refusing to call something by its name doesn't remotely imply that you don't know that name. Trade don't refuse to think of themselves as queer because they are anti-essentialist: they are extremely essentialist, and in their social world they are essentialized Real Men. "Queer" represents what is outside manhood's carefully patrolled (because highly permeable) boundary.

And Queers were just as invested in that construction, as shown by Howard's informant Ron Knight, who says "A drop of sissy come would choke us. If we were going to go down on anybody, they would have to be men, trade" (122). (Another example, from Mexico City: "The vestidas disapprove of any signs of femininity in their partners. For example, bisexual men who are apparently manly but who secretly let themselves be penetrated as if they were homosexuales are often criticized by the vestidas, even when the vestidas are the ones who penetrate them" [Prieur 1998, 166]) Fellows like Ron Knight, incidentally, make it quite clear that "sexual object choice" – Men -- was a major and defining factor in their sexual identities.

A Real Man out looking for fun in postwar Mississippi would probably not consider a Queer equivalent to a woman as a sexual partner - but that might be part of the Queer's appeal. Women cost money, directly or indirectly; a Queer might pay the Real Man. This risked putting the Real Man in a feminized position, a fact which must never be mentioned, making it all the more important that his Real Manhood be maintained in bed. Or at least officially, out of bed.

The Real Man / Queer binarism is too restrictive to account for all sexual interaction between men, even in areas where that model is the norm. In parts of Latin America where the Real Man / Queer dichotomy still rules, there are Real Men who want to be penetrated some of the time, and who may seek out Queers to penetrate them. But this is a dread secret and may be denied in the act: "My experience of stubborn denial is indeed confirmed by Murray ... , who says he has 'been told by young Latinos with semen inside their rectums that they never get fucked.'" (Prieur 1998, 199). Howard, by contrast, seems unaware of such complexity -- he's at least as invested in the traditional dichotomy as any Real Man, or any Queer.

Finally, it simply is not true that "The very possibility of framing homosexuality as a site of identity presupposes sexual object-choice as a master category of sexual and self-identity." Despite its etymology "homosexual" originally referred to the invert, the Queer, the woman's soul trapped in a man's body – all quasi-heterosexual constructions of same-sex desire and behavior -- and only gradually and inconsistently was extended to all those who loved their own sex, regardless of "gender performance." The invert was an identity, and inversion as a "master category" encompassed both "gender performance" and "sexual object-choice" -- the latter being assumed on the basis of the former or vice versa, which is a reminder that sexual-object choice and gender performance were inseparable in the 19th century. (And still are in many cultures today, including much of the US.) This should not be news to anyone who really has been informed by queer theory, but it seems to be news to Howard.

Howard's insistence on the variety of motivations that brings men to sex with other males then (as now) is well-taken, but it hasn't been news since Kinsey (et al., 1948) at least. (It was an essentializing American society, which included an essentializing gay world, which assumed the 37% of males who'd had orgasms with other males must all be Queers.) More important, he seems to be unable to do anything but state and reiterate that insistence, renouncing essentialist binarism and its evil works. Yes yes yes, not all men who insert their penises into the orifices of other men's bodies, or who receive other men's penises into their orifices, are properly categorized as "gay" or "homosexual" -- so what? Howard has nothing new to tell us about how such men saw themselves, or even how they were seen by the men they penetrated. Nor does he cast any light on those "complicated worlds of myriad desires" in which his Queers and Real Men came together.

Even if we grant that there was "a heterosexual / homosexual dyad prevalent throughout American culture during the twentieth century", it's not obvious that the Real Man / Queer dyad which governed much sexual interaction between males in midcentury Mississippi "did not privilege sexual-object choice, or the biological sex of one's partner, a primary technique of categorization." While the Real Man may truly not have cared whether he penetrated a woman or a man (though I doubt it as a general rule), the Queer wanted to be penetrated by a Real Man, which sounds like a privileged sexual-object choice to me. (An essentializing Queer can explain away any heterosexual contacts he may have by recourse to the same strategies a Real Man uses: it doesn't count, because he really isn't That Way.)

Howard wrongly implies that "binarized conceptions of sexual identity" were something new to the US, or the Deep South; the Real Man / Queer binary disproves that. And the heterosexual / homosexual dyad hasn't become universally hegemonic in American society to this day; if nothing else, the "new" category employed in AIDS education, of Men Who Have Sex With Men, shows that. (See also Leap 1999.) As other writers have shown, George Chauncey among them, it was not just that "the" homosexual concept was transmitted to different regions at different rates; multiple concepts coexisted in any given place, and they diffused through different ethnic and class groups at different rates even in the same city. (It may also be that the Homosexual / Heterosexual dyad provides a touchstone of denial for many Men Who Have Sex with Men, creating more of the latter or letting them create themselves.)

The polemic heats up when Howard discusses gay activism in Mississippi. Though gay organizing in Mississippi began as early as 1959, the Mississippi Gay Alliance (MGA) offered the first sustained activist visibility the state had seen. But:

In the 1970s MGA membership never totaled more than a few dozen, with white membership always vastly outnumbering black. Influenced as it was by identity politics, most notably an increasingly national lesbian and gay movement, gay organizing clashed with local sensibilities, queer and nonqueer. For decades sexual deviants and gender nonconformists in Mississippi had functioned quietly but effectively within rural and small-town contexts, outmaneuvering hostile forces. [Except, of course, when those "hostile forces" -- which according to Howard were never inherently hostile -- arrested, harassed, beat, or killed them. And "effectively" at what?] Queer Mississippians even in remote parts of the state were nonetheless visible and available to one another. Gay politics required a different sort of visibility. Most disturbingly, it required clear-cut identity statements, individuals' open and public avowal of homosexuality, a speech act that some belligerent lawmakers and law enforcers interpreted as a felony in and of itself (attempted sodomy)....

Further, the category gay didn't well encompass the range and inventiveness of sexual and gender nonnormativity in Mississippi. And it made few allowances for those whose sexual and gender nonnormativity served as a relatively insignificant component of identity. For African Americans, for example, to participate in gay organizing meant to participate in yet another white-controlled, white-dominated institution. Though homosexuality and gender insubordination clearly weren't just a white thing, gay political organizing for the most part was [239].

All the evidence Howard musters indicates that non-involvement in MGA had much more to do with wholly rational fear and hopelessness than with a distaste for "identity politics." (As shown, for instance, by the terrified small-town resident who wrote anonymously to the Jackson Daily News advice columnist, asking him to publish MGA's contact information instead of mailing it to him directly: "'I can't reveal my name ... because of the small town in which I live'" [238]. Not because homosexuality was "a relatively insignificant component of identity" -- just the opposite.)

And how is gay African-Americans' reluctance to get involved in one more white-dominated institution -- as though it were utterly unthinkable that they start their own! -- an "example" of people whose queerness was "a relatively insignificant component of identity"? It was significant enough to produce conflict in people who felt they had to choose between one component of their identity and another. Also, since "gay", like "queer," has always been multivalent, including significant amounts of gender insubordination (and certainly did in the early 70s), in Mississippi as elsewhere, how can Howard say that it doesn't "well encompass the range and inventiveness of sexual and gender nonnormativity in Mississippi" etc.? Once again, his evidence just doesn't support his conclusions.

Nor does the "different sort of visibility" and "individuals' open and public avowal of homosexuality" required by gay activism have anything to do with "clear-cut identity statements." Rather, as Howard is aware, the difference is between being visible to other gay people and being visible to straights. Such visibility meant a whole new way for queers to think about themselves, but that was as true, as challenging, and as disturbing to college-educated white professionals in New York City as it was to preachers' sons with an eighth-grade education in Mississippi. Chanting "identity politics" like a mantra obscures the real issue, which is that being visible to straights as a Queer formerly happened only involuntarily, through arrest or murder. What the gay movement advocated was not "identity" -- that was already present -- but a rejection of shame in being gay. It also wrested the power to label from straight society, and put it into queers' own hands, an act of insubordination that bothered many straights for a long time after.

Finally, Howard cites the nascent Metropolitan Community Church as a corrective to MGA's thoughtcrime: "They [the MCC] found fertile soil in Mississippi" (245). "Such ecclesiastical gatherings, in stark relief to in-your-face activism, could generate the support of some liberal politicians" (240). But the binary opposition he hopes to construct collapses almost immediately, since "The leadership of the two organizations [MGA and MCC] was intimately intertwined..." (248), and the MCC became involved in "in-your-face activism" by opposing Anita Bryant's late-70s antigay crusade and the Mississippi Moral Majority. In other words, it may not have been that the MCC itself was so attractive, as Howard implied earlier in the chapter, but the visible threat of organized bigots that got Mississippi homos off their butts. But with that came once again the serpent in the Garden, the spectre of "identity."

"While the enumeration and articulation of gay institutions appeared an invitation to many, it seemed a barrier to others, a signal that an identity-based community, by its very nature, excluded some as it smoothed differences among the elect ... Where gay identity politics flagged, a gay social gospel flourished" (251f). This is a false antithesis, and anyway, it ain't true, as the next quotation shows. The "gay social gospel", Howard laments, included "gay identity politics":

Some visitors to MCC felt particularly unwelcome. As Kathy Switzer recalls, the congregation was entirely white. Though African-Americans visited, "they would always go back to their home churches because they felt more comfortable there." One black worshiper explicitly stated the dilemma to the group: "It's hard enough to be black. You want me to be gay too?" "Yes," came the response. "You play with the boys, honey. Don't you think it's time to identify yourself?"

Indeed, identity was the issue... [253]

Indeed, was it? It wasn't that the MCC whites wanted that "black worshiper" to "be gay" -- he was already, and he knew it. What was going on there was not a conflict between those who espoused "identity politics" and those who didn't: it was about conflicting allegiances to different identities. Howard approvingly tells the story of an African-American community leader whose political career managed to survive repeated homosexual scandals. This was a triumph of African-American identity politics -- the demand that racial solidarity should trump every other consideration, a demand that finally ran aground on the controversy over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court. Howard seems not to be aware that racial solidarity is the paradigm case of "identity politics" in the US, or that such "identity politics" were what kept so many gay African-Americans closeted.

We're now seeing the rise of specifically African-American lgbt organizations, which is probably the only solution to the problem, and long overdue, since there are plenty of gay and lesbian and bisexual African-American exemplars. This will only confuse those who, like Howard, insist that you can only have one "identity" at a time. Like being bisexual, being gay and African-American is a multiple identity: the solution is to choose both, or more than both -- lesbian, feminist and black; gay, black and Muslim; and so on.

WORKS CITED:
Kinsey, Alfred; Pomeroy, Wardell; Martin, Clyde. Sexual behavior in the human male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948.
Leap, William L. "Sex in 'private' places: gender, erotics, and detachment in two urban locales." In Leap, William L. (editor), Public sex / gay space (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 115-140.
Prieur, Annick. Mema's House, Mexico City: on transvestites, queens, and machos. [Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture] Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Living in the Catacombs: John Howard's Men Like That, part one

(Yeah yeah yeah, I know I know: Dogpatch was in Kentucky, not Mississippi. So sue me.)

I've had this long piece sitting around for some years now; I figure it might as well go here.

John Howard. Men like that: a Southern queer history. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999.

1.

Depending on whom you believe, either an Evil Essentialist Empire has seized hegemonic power over American queerdom, and is poised to extend its nefarious rule over the entire world; or Satanic Social Constructionists, having gained a stranglehold on public discussion with secret subliminal backwards messages, are sapping the precious bodily fluids of decent Homo-Americans.

Essentialists get more corporate media access, since those media tend to favor and promote biological determinism; but in order to denounce social constructionism, they must mention it now and then, so word gets out, and some of the impressionable young will be tempted by this unnatural sin. Social constructionists are well-represented and influential in academia and in the publications of university presses, but are lucky to get a soundbyte in edgewise now and then outside the classroom. These opposing viewpoints make for gripping Family entertainment (tune in next week to see Andrew Sullivan and Michael Warner bludgeon each other on Celebrity Death Match), but they are really just more-or-less amusing caricatures.

Social construction is counter-intuitive, so it's not surprising that even its proponents often have trouble understanding it, let alone applying it consistently. Some confuse it with cultural determinism, the belief that human beings are blank slates written on by Society. When gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay was promoting his hypothalamus theory of the cause of homosexuality, he told an interviewer that friends had told him there was no need to look for a biological cause, since 'we know it's socially constructed.' I’ve always wondered whether it was LeVay who misunderstood the meaning of 'socially constructed,' or his friends, or both.

There's no question that skin color and such traits have biological roots, for example, but "race" and its meanings are socially constructed around these physical features. It's often been pointed out that few people identify themselves as essentialists -- at least, people in the formal study of sexuality. But even those lay writers like Andrew Sullivan who denounce social constructionism most fiercely, seldom seem to refer to themselves as essentialists. (Is essentialism genetic, or is it a lifestyle choice?)

Essentialism correspondingly is often equated with biological determinism, though there's not a necessary connection: social constructs are built from material, biological traits like physical sex or skin color. Essentializing is social construction in action: when a person who writes is called a writer, when a person who lies is called a liar, when a person who commits sodomy is called a sodomite and thereby essentialized, social construction is taking place. The belief that a thief, or a writer, or a Sodomite, is "born that way" will then be rationalized with whatever naive theory is available: it's in the blood, the genes, the soul, one's nature, etc.

Some use social construction, as some essentialists use essentialism, as a weapon to settle political or personal scores. Every few pages they haul out a catchphrase like a burlesque clown's bladder and give their opponents a good basting for comic relief. Or they use it as a sort of good luck charm, which they touch periodically to reassure themselves that they are on the right side, whether or not it relates to their subject. It might be more accurate (or at least clearer) to refer to many self-identified social constructionists as "anti-essentialists", since they are sure that essentialism is of Satan but aren't sure what social construction means. Something like this seems to be going on in John Howard's much-praised book Men Like That: a Southern Queer History.

I picked up Men Like That because I liked Howard's stated aim: to explore queer life in postwar America outside of the large cities that have drawn most scholarly attention so far. (Though not all of it by any means. Howard himself edited a collection of writings (1997) about glb southern life, which ranged outside the major urban centers; it included a version of Martin Duberman's "Writhing Bedfellows" (1981), including the text of erotic letters by one antebellum Southern male to another. James T. Sears has published at least four books (1991, 1997, 2001, 2009) on glb life in the South. Buring (1997) covers Memphis, Tennessee. Kennedy and Davis's groundbreaking 1995 study of lesbian life in Buffalo, New York ranged beyond Metropolis. Fellows (1996) collects oral histories of gay men who grew up on farms in the Midwest. Appearing at about the same time as Men Like That, Rupp (1999) includes not only the usual suspects in a "short history of same-sex love in America." Bailey (1999) includes information about gay life in Nebraska since WWII. And now there's Wilson 2000.

Of course there's also a growing body of non-scholarly writing, including fiction, on the topic. Neil Miller (1989), like Edmund White (1980) before him and Darrell Yates Rist (1992) after, traveled between the coasts, even to small towns; Pratt (1995) writes as a white southern lesbian. Preston (1995) writes of relocating to Portland, Maine after living for years in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other large cities; Riordon (1996) interviewed gay men and lesbians in rural and smalltown Canada. Osborne and Spurlin (1996) collect writings by lesbian and gay midwesterners. And so on; this list doesn't pretend to any completeness, it's just a reminder that Howard isn't blazing totally new trails.

Howard draws on his predecessors, and adds some new information as well, from interviews, newspaper archives, and popular culture. But he isn't as different, or as consistent in his approach, as he wants to believe. If his focus is supposed to be on rural life, then he spends rather too much time serving up dish on scandals in Jackson and other Mississippi cities, even if they are smaller than New York. If I take his subtitle -- a Southern queer history -- at face value, then perhaps Howard should have spent less time than he does devaluing the work of scholars who have focused on urban areas elsewhere in the US. The reason for their focus on cities is the same as Howard's: the light, so to speak, is better there. Sexual nonconformists are concentrated more visibly, in greater numbers if not necessarily larger proportions than in the countryside, and there's, duh, more accessible documentation. Even in elite universities, scholarship on sexual nonconformity can still pose risks to a scholar's career; so it's hardly surprising that we don't have enough full studies of postwar queer life in mid-sized cities, done by historians at regional campuses or community colleges. It's still worthwhile to move beyond the coastal and metropolitan provincialism that has largely neglected the American heartland, and Howard doesn't need to defend it by dismissing those who have worked elsewhere.

I appreciate Howard's labors, but there are many problems, some serious, with Men Like That. Some arise from dubious interpretation of his data; others involve misuse of his social-constructionist theoretical frame, and to those I will return.

2. "I guess people felt like they had to be pretty careful."

Howard paints an attractive bucolic picture of queer life in Mississippi after the Second World War: farm boys and ministers' sons peaceably fucking and sucking in haylofts and choir lofts (52f) and in the woods surrounding highway rest stops, participating with their straight families and neighbors in womanless mock weddings and beauty pageants for church fundraisers, "well enmeshed" (xi) in their society -- until "unkempt", "brusque and shrill" (239) activists imported "identity politics" from outside, shattering the harmony and contentment Mississippi queers had enjoyed until then. The similarity to Jim Crow apologetics (whites and Their Colored lived in segregated harmony until dirty beatniks and other outside agitators from Jew York came down and stirred things up) is not coincidental, though it seems to be unconscious.

It would be pleasant if this portrait of queer life in Mississippi were accurate, but it isn't. Howard has to qualify his own generalizations rather seriously, until nothing remains but a warm Southern smile, floating disconcertingly in the air. Though at one point he denies that Mississippi police harassed queers before the Sixties (in order to argue that such harassment was a reaction to the Civil Rights movement), he refers to busts at highway rest stops and tearooms and bars during the Forties and Fifties. Maybe these weren't anti-queer campaigns with full media coverage, where politicians, including police chiefs, made political hay from their protection of decent people from the homosexual menace; but such anti-vice campaigns leave a convenient paper trail in the press and courts for the intrepid queer historian to follow; clearing out a highway rest stop now and then doesn't.

More important, while many people did manage to have reasonably fulfilling queer lives in the pre-Stonewall dispensation, even outside large cities, it is also true that such people lived in danger most of the time. As Howard acknowledges, "If forced to the surface, however, if held up to the light, transgressions were indeed punished" (171). "Police ... seemed a threat only when bars became 'too notorious,' as Chuck Plant put it" (94). "The wide-open [?] attitudes of World War II persisted in Jackson, and white gay bars operated downtown into the 1950s. ... sufficiently perceptible to attract men like that, sufficiently ambiguous to allay police officers who patrolled the area. ..." (95). It was, of course, up to straights to decide when a meeting place had become "sufficiently perceptible" or "too notorious." This was the era of the open secret, where 'everyone knew' but pretended they didn't, and toleration was conditional on keeping quiet and acknowledging queer inferiority. Howard says nothing to refute this; he merely denies it, like a Jim Crow politician assuring outsiders that southern whites loved their nigras, I mean Negroes.

The work of gay and lesbian historians since Stonewall should forestall any assumption that pre-Stonewall gay life was unrelieved persecution and misery, or that no gay people in those days (or outside that dispensation now) felt good about themselves. But it also does not justify Howard's opening claim that Mississippi society and its institutions were "Never inherently hostile to homosexual activity" (xi), which he typically contradicts a few sentences later by admitting "complications": "In Protestant evangelical Mississippi, most everyone took for granted that it was sinful, and it was legally proscribed by the 1839 sodomy statute" and again a few pages later: "Though sometimes subject to intimidation and violence ... queer Mississippians proved adept at maneuvering through hostile terrain" (xiv). Chuck Plant, one of Howard's informants, sheds light on maneuvering through the Fifties: "But you needed to be careful. You could meet behind closed doors with the drapes drawn with your friends, but you didn't want it known" (82). I suppose the key word in Howard's earlier sentence is "inherently," whatever it's supposed to mean. Was Jim Crow society "inherently" hostile to people of African descent -- or did it only become hostile when Colored got too big?

Howard declares at the outset, "The extent to which queer genders and sexualities in Mississippi appear akin to those in other places is a question I leave to future writers of larger syntheses and surveys. ... I argue primarily for a specific queer Mississippi, which is not to say a wholly unique queer Mississippi" (xix). As we'll see, this is a slight exaggeration. Howard is quite sure that the good folks of Mississippi are different from the degenerate heathen in other regions, and he rarely misses an opportunity to say so.

WORKS CITED
Bailey, Beth L., 1999. Sex in the heartland. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Buring, Daneel, 1997. Lesbian and gay Memphis: building communities behind the Magnolia Curtain. (Garland Studies in American Popular History and Culture) New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Duberman, Martin Bauml, 1981. "'Writhing Bedfellows' in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence." Journal of Homosexuality (Fall/Winter 1980/1981).
Fellows, Will, 1996. Farm boys: lives of gay men from the rural Midwest. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Paperback reprint with new afterword, 1998.
Howard, John, 1997 (editor) Carryin' on in the gay and lesbian south. New York: New York University Press.
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky; Davis, Madeline D., 1993. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge.
Miller, Neil I., 1989. In search of gay America: women and men in a time of change. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Osborne, Karen Lee; Spurlin, William J. (editors), 1996. Reclaiming the heartland: lesbian and gay voices from the Midwest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pratt, Minnie Bruce., 1995. S/HE. Ithaca NY: Firebrand Books.
Preston, John, 1995. Winter's light: reflections of a Yankee queer. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Riordon, Michael, 1996. Out our way: gay and lesbian life in the country. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Rist, Darrell Yates, 1992. Heartlands: a gay man's odyssey across America. New York: Dutton.
Rupp, Leila J., 1999. A desired past: a short history of same-sex love in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sears, James T., 1991. Growing up gay in the South: race, gender, and journeys of the spirit. New York: Haworth Press.
--- , 1997. Lonely hunters: an oral history of lesbian and gay southern life 1948-1968. Boulder: Westview Press.
--- , 2001. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and rhinestones: queering space in the Stonewall South. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP.
---, 2009. Edwin and John: a personal history of the American South. London: Routledge.
White, Edmund, 1980. States of desire: travels in gay America. New York: Dutton.
Wilson, Angelia R., 2000. Below the belt: sexuality, religion and the American South. London and New York: Cassell.

(part two to follow soon)