John Cauley
10/20/2015
HIST 4990
Dr.Perry
John Howard in his 1999 book Men Like That: A Southern Queer History explores gay and transgendered male-male sexual desire and actions that goes beyond self- identification as being gay and includes those men that are “like” that and self -label as gay, as well as men who “like” that and engage in homosexual activity but do not consider themselves gay. Howard aims for a more accurate accounting of homosexual desire in Mississippi during the postwar years after World War II and through the mid 1980’s and does not want to “…simply…recuperate past figures previously lost to history, but also to reassess sexual and gender meanings, practices, and regulations across time and place” (p.xviii). Howard believes that in categorizing sexual identity or “gender nonconformity” as a basis for a social study of this type that “…desire as an organizing category” should be his primary emphasis (p. xviii).
To best accomplish his aim, Howard, a professor of American Studies at the University of York used 50 oral history cases, newspaper reports, court documents and his own analysis and research of the civil rights movement, popular culture, religion and geography upon which to base his conclusions. The oral history methodology proved to be the trickiest for Howard and he freely admits that he brings his own “sociocultural positioning” to these oral history interpretations and his “biases, emphases, preferences, predilections” are likely to be present in his analysis and conclusions (p. xxi). Using both oral history and more traditional documentation, Howard effectively meets his goal of examining homosexual desire and action across the differing terrains of Mississippi and the spaces both inherently present and those created by gay men when meeting other gay men for sex.
Howard contends that the unique “spatial configurations” of the rural countryside of Mississippi “forged distinct human interactions, movements and sites” and further that “queer men with stealth and cunning moved in, across, and out of those spaces…retaining normative personae in work and leisure routines” (p. 15). Another factor involved in allowing the spaces to be used for male-male sex is Howard’s idea of silent accommodation by the community around them. While gay men didn’t necessarily come out of any closet, neither did those around him ridicule, shame or shun him because of his desires. As Howard writes; “…silence not only deflected the sometimes harmful repercussions of disclosure, it created psychic space for individual contemplation and affirmation“(p.32).
The oral histories taken by Howard of Chuck Plant and Fitz Spencer illustrate his points regarding silence creating space for contemplation as Chuck is molested by an older male driver on a rainy afternoon. Chuck wonders if he should say something to someone but “…I finally decided not to say anything to anybody. I have no regrets about that” (p.7). Fitz is given oral sex by one of the resident priests at the church his family attends and he believes that another priest there as well as all of the boys were aware of what was happening. “I took it more seriously than the others did. They used to giggle about it” (p.9). Fitz also decides to say nothing.
In chapters two and three titled “Sites” and “Movements” respectively, Howard makes the case that there is a “dialectical” relationship between the subject and the landscape (both social and physical) and warns against assigning any “exclusivity” to his perceptions and reporting of queer desire in Mississippi; Howard is not creating a comparative study of locales and gay behavior and leaves those conclusions to other historians who might choose that topic as a course of study (p. xix). Instead Howard is reporting on specific actions and specific desires at specific locations in Mississippi. Howard claims that the home in general and the bed specifically is the site that gets “queered” first (p. 41). Here we find Fitz again who is now college aged and home for the Thanksgiving holiday. His sister’s boyfriend shares Fitz’s double bed. Consensual sex ensues and is repeated at various other venues while his sister continues to date him. One of the descriptors that Howard uses is “homosex” and he defines it simply as sexual acts between two men. Howard doesn’t use academic or medical terms to describe what is occurring between Fitz and Chuck in bed, behind the haystacks, at public rest stops, in Grandma’s guestroom or bathroom or any other site that is thus changed by queer activity and which in turn changes the performer. Fellatio becomes a blowjob (through a hole in adjoining spaces called a glory hole), anal sex is corn-holing and all manner of locations or space are discussed including tea rooms, bath houses and rest rooms as places gay men can exercise desire as well as action. This activity continues without social repercussions as quiet accommodation continues through the 1950’s. Although it would appear to be counter-intuitive in the generally sexually repressed times of the 1950’s, Howard establishes that gay men in Mississippi enjoyed relative sexual freedom because of the unwritten social mores of quiet accomodationism and that it wasn’t until the civil rights movement of the 1960’s and gay men’s involvement in that movement that increased oppression of gay men began to be seen in Mississippi. Eddie Sandifer is an example of the storm that came in the 1960’s after the relative calm gay Mississippi citizens experienced during the 1950’s. Sandifer was an outspoken leader of the Mississippi Gay Alliance. “Though he was well-known since the 1940’s as a communist, homosexual and civil rights activist, Sandifer never suffered harassment based on his sexual orientation until the 1960’s, when he hosted freedom riders in his Jackson home” (p. 234). It is this research and documentation that is more traditional than the oral histories in part one and Howard is able to make the convincing argument that gay rights involvement in the southern civil rights movement in Mississippi was causally related to the increased oppression of gays throughout that state in the 1960’s Howard concludes Men Like That in 1985 in part because that is when HIV began to make significant inroads into the health of gay men and thus queer social networks were also irrevocably changed. One last oral history is used in Howard’s conclusion and his story is chosen because Howard represents him living (as opposed to dying) with HIV. Howard states his case for rural gay life representing in Mississippi what might be represented in larger urban landscape in the north. Through his own admission this study is not unbiased reporting but what it is a refreshingly candid straightforward telling of a locations history without academic jargon designed only to justify one’s own scholarly existence.