Essay
Mapping Queer Southern Scholarship
by Hooper Schultz,
Jaime Harker
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 »
Essay
A Queer Southern History
by Julio Capó Jr.
On a spring night in 1960, Miami detectives visited a popular nightspot, the Clover Club, where they gaped at a provocative striptease performed by Zorita, who writhed onstage accompanied by a live boa constrictor. They charged Zorita, as well as the manager of the club, with indecency. A city court judge eventually dismissed the charge. The »
Essay
by Joe Edward Hatfield
“Chablis opens opportunities for investigating the complex and often ambiguous nature of gender variability in the South, particularly during periods before the widespread usage of stable identity classifiers like ‘transgender.’” The Lady Chablis (1957–2016) was a Black trans southerner whose style made her legend. Born in Quincy, Florida, Chablis worked as a drag performer across »
Essay
The True Story of a Quarter Rat and His “Most Important Asset”
by Robert W. Fieseler
“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 »
Art
Jimmy Wright’s Down Home
by Jimmy Wright,
John Corbett
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
by Rachel Gelfand
“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 »
credit: Open Sunflower, by Jimmy Wright, 1998.
Interview
A Roundtable Conversation
by Eric Solomon,
Joshua Jacobs
“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 »
Memoir
Asexuality in the South
by Ellie Campbell
“I don’t want the only option for committed relationships to be reserved for a two-person sexual and romantic partnership . . . I want to belong to a community that embraces more options.” 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 »
Memoir
by Joanmarie Bañez
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 »
Essay
The Spiritual Communities of Southern Black Queer Women and Nonbinary Folks
by Montia Daniels
“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 »
Poetry
by Gaby Calvocoressi,
Destiny Hemphill
“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 »
Dorothy Allison and Minnie Bruce Pratt
by Hooper Schultz,
Jaime Harker
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
by RF. Alvarez
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 »
Poetry
by Honora Ankong
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.
