Essay
In July 1993, Wanda and Brenda Henson bought a “defunct pig and grape farm” in Ovett, Mississippi. Brenda described the land as “right outside Hattiesburg, 77 miles from the Gulf Coast,” where they’d been living in Gulfport. Located on Bogue Homa Creek, the 120-acre property had “five barns and one house to be renovated” and »
Interview
The following is an excerpt from Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Books, 2024) and has been lightly edited to appear on Southern Cultures in collaboration with the Queer South issue. Early in the spring of 2014, I borrowed a neighbor’s video camera and recorded myself, with my ducks hanging out in the background, rambling »
Essay
By almost any account, North Carolina has undergone dramatic changes in the past half-century. What was once a slow-growing, largely rural state is now a fast-growing, increasingly urban one. While the state used to be known for textiles and tobacco, it is now a center for banking, technology, and medicine. This transformation was not accidental. »
Memoir
I come from a long line of people whose lives seemed straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Landless whites, rootless, disposable—“white trash.” It’s hard to create home from contingency, or a feeling of belonging from worthlessness. They say southerners are people defined by place, but I never believed it. At least it wasn’t true »
With deepest gratitude, we dedicate this issue of Southern Cultures to Dorothy Allison (April 11, 1949–November 6, 2024) and Minnie Bruce Pratt (September 12, 1946–July 2, 2023), two paragons of the queer South. Lesbian artist-activists, Allison and Pratt showed us the power of queers in the region. They questioned power structures, racism, and patriarchy, and fought for »
Art
On the cover and throughout the issue, we’re pleased to present artwork by Austin-based artist RF. Alvarez (b. 1998, San Antonio, Texas). His figurative paintings are characterized by nocturnal color pallets and evocative scenes that blend personal memory with romantic allegory. Using a process of dry-brushing paint onto raw linen—and borrowing stylistic techniques from Old »
Essay
In 2017, I was knee-deep in queer southern literature. Unbeknownst to my colleagues and students at the University of Mississippi, I was building a stock list for Violet Valley Bookstore, Mississippi’s only queer feminist bookshop, which I planned to open in November of that year. I was teaching a syllabus I’d developed for a graduate »
Poetry
I seeped out of a middle-passage wound, a continental Africandescendent of the un-took. Immigrant,in search of lost lineage. I dove into the AtlanticIts unending Blackness—turbulent & queer.
Poetry
“That’s some part of Queerness, isn’t it? Reaching out and reaching out and wondering about and learning from each other.” Yesterday, Sunday, February 7, I was working at a coworking spot here in Durham. My wonderful friends and colleagues at my teaching job got me a subscription to this place for my fiftieth because my »
Essay
“Having spaces where Black queer people feel affirmed and safe is essential, and some participants decided to leave their church when they didn’t feel safe and affirmed in them.” My story of queer becoming was a communal affair. After the fallout from coming out, the tears, and the imagined casting out of my queerness, there »
Memoir
During my first Thanksgiving away from home since I had moved to San Diego for graduate school, my mother, Lita, called me after she and my stepdad, Mike, returned home from the family Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner was hosted by Annie and Steve, my pseudoparents, and it turned out that year, 2019, was one of »
Memoir
One evening in March 2024, I attended a cabaret fundraiser presented by the Common Woman Chorus, a Durham, North Carolina LBGTQ+ choir, and hosted by local drag queen Stormie Daie. Dressed in fancy sequined gowns or T-shirts and jeans, members of the choir sang everything from the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” to Saturday Night Live’s “Tampon Farm,” »