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
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 amazing mother-in-law lost her housing to a developer and has moved in with us, and my former office (where I »
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,” »
Interview
“I realized that what fascinated me went beyond the historic record to the lifelines—indeed, the life stories of those who made and continue to make queer Atlanta.” I moved to Atlanta from Mississippi in July of 2011 to attend graduate school. In the fall of 2018, I began to teach at nearby Oxford College. My »
Essay
“She saw seven men in suits and her roommate, who mouthed, “It’s the F-B-I.” In 1973, Vicki Gabriner lived in an Atlanta lesbian collective house at the corner of Euclid Terrace and Euclid Avenue. The house in Little Five Points had an ornate glass window on the front door and was one of a handful of neighborhood »
Art
Jimmy Wright’s many collectors and enthusiasts quite reasonably think of him as a New York painter. Wright (b. 1944) has lived and worked in New York City since 1974, and since the early ’90s he has been celebrated for his incisive self-portraits and his luscious paintings and pastels of sunflowers. The New York Times described Wright’s sunflowers »
Essay
“I’ve decided to tell you all the bad side of my life first. And then after I tell you all my bad side, I’ll tell what I remember of the good. Because, with everybody’s life, there’s a little good. Even mine.” Rookie porn star Rodd Donovan stood in possession of God’s gift, what the narrator »