Introduction to Victoria:

I first met Ms. Victoria Jewelle reflected in the bathroom mirror in front of me, slowly applying layers of makeup, constructing a face. She loaded a suitcase into her car and drove a few miles to a sports bar off the highway. I followed her into a crowded storage room at the back of the building, where half a dozen drag queens had transformed the space into a temporary dressing room. Eventually the lights dimmed and the queens paraded out one by one. Victoria emerged between two curtains, silhouetted against a solitary spotlight, suspended in time. The moment seemed to end quicker than it began: wigs and dresses zipped away, suitcases rolled out to the parking lot, cars peeling onto US 31.

This cycle repeated in front of me across Alabama—a small-town bar in the state’s northeast corner, a restaurant in a Montgomery strip mall, a gay bar in Dothan, a rustic event venue in Brundidge, and the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. It’s a pattern that has intensified somewhat since the closure of Montgomery’s last gay bar a few years ago, a loss that left Miss Victoria Jewelle criss-crossing the state to, in her own words, “keep our existence alive.”

Ms. Victoria Jewelle has performed for over twenty years in Alabama. Her drag identity emerged somewhat unexpectedly—a missing piece of expression that she outlined for me as an intractable desire to locate an indescribable piece of oneself. “It’s a wild thing to want to be something and you’re not sure how to get there,” she mused. She found this missing piece unexpectedly one night when living in Mobile. The feeling of seeing Victoria Jewelle, her drag identity, looking back at her for the first time made her feel whole.

This sense of wholeness has persisted even as Montgomery’s gay bars have closed, leaving Victoria searching and stringing together spaces to treat as empty vessels. Designed for other purposes, storage rooms and empty banquet halls are reimagined as the drag queens apply their makeup and zip up each other’s dresses. As a documentary filmmaker, I orient to the circumstances presented to me, including physical spaces. This disposition can be limiting—a fidelity to treat places as I see them rather than how others might. As I accompanied Victoria across Alabama, watching her perform against wood panels, rainbow streamers, American flags, and Bible verses, I discovered that, to Victoria, these spaces function as beads on a thread, extending a family legacy. As I worked through the footage, I began to reconfigure these places, bending them to her movements, allowing for her actions to extend without regard for the physical limitations. In this short documentary, Victoria’s movements—applying lipstick, blending makeup, blinking—begin in one place and finish in another. Her actions transport us between locations, linking pieces of her chosen family narrative—one that began for Victoria years ago when her drag mother applied her makeup for the first time.

I think back to Victoria describing a desire for something that couldn’t be located in the everyday world, something that felt, to her, almost indescribable but that she ultimately found staring back in a mirror. I saw the spaces Victoria inhabits as similarly unrecognizable. Temporarily reimagined through the perspective of a drag family searching for a home, these places are unbound by physical restrictions we normally use to organize our world. Victoria, the documentary, seeks to recognize this reimagining through the movements and feelings of a drag queen assembling the pieces of her drag identity.

About the Filmmaker

John Haley is a documentary videographer, artist, and educator who examines fissures and seams in the American social fabric. His work juxtaposes personal narratives against institutional structures using observational cinematography, testimonies, symbolic imagery, and vivid, recurring soundscapes. Haley’s films have screened at DOC NYC, Palm Springs International ShortFest, Nashville Film Festival, Virginia Film Festival, St. Louis International Film Festival, New Hampshire Film Festival, Santa Fe International Film Festival, Tallgrass, and Sidewalk. His short documentary Sanctuary was named a Vimeo Staff Pick for 2025. Haley’s work has been supported by the Verdant Fund, the McCanna House Artist-in-Residence Program, the Southern Exposure Fellowship, the Anderson Center Residency, and more. He is currently an assistant professor of creative media at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Banner: still image from Victoria video copyright 2025 by John Haley.

Prelude: Fragments of Family

This book is an essay on men’s existence in the South Asian domestic world, and on their self-contradictory articulation in that world of ideas of freedom, or liberation, for themselves and their loved ones: women, children, family, community, nation, and more.

The work begins by situating men firmly in the domestic arena—a domain they, and others, often treat as incidental to their lives and being. Nevertheless, men spend a good deal of their time in this secluded familial space and are plainly dependent on it. The study proceeds through an exploration of the discourses surrounding the mysterious absence/presence of men in—and from—a large part of their own existence, and the expectations and behavior that flow from the resulting rhetoric.

The title of this prelude underscores the conundrum. “Fragment,” as I use the term, is not simply the dictionary’s “piece, broken off.” Rather, it is an interruption, a disruption, an unexpected departure in a conversation or line of thinking: an answer to a question that has not been posed in the conversation, or in the received reflections or inherited common sense of a specific question.¹Louis Althusser uses the phrase "an answer to a question that is nowhere posed" in Althusser, Reading Capital, 29. For an explication of my usage of "fragment," see chapter 2 in Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford University Press, 2005). A slightly different articulation appeared in the original version: Gyanendra Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today,” Representations, no. 37 (1992): 27–55.

 Men in the home are a fragment in both senses of the term: a part of, and an interruption in, a widely received understanding of family life.

Startling changes occur in ideas of the home and the family in South Asia, and in ideals of the good modern man and woman, between the later nineteenth century and the middle decades of the twentieth—the anti-­colonial moment in India’s colonial and postcolonial history. Parallel shifts take place over much of the world in the industrial and postindustrial age. Yet, the context and the fallout have their quite distinct, colonial and postcolonial, inflections in the Indian subcontinent.²I use India and South Asia interchangeably in these pages, since much of the investigation deals with areas in the northern, central, and western regions of the undivided subcontinent, before and after its partition and the establishment of the independent nations of India and Pakistan in 1947 (and the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971).

Consider the advent of notions or ideals of (and aspirations to), among other things, “industrial time” and the small, consanguine, loving family—greatly modified as these are in the urban as well as rural Indian context. Industrial time—factory or clock time—is an emphatic feature of this new age, even as it coexists with the more fluid time of light and dark, agricultural seasons, and the ritual calendar. It is especially marked in urban areas, where the clock tower, the factory siren, and other accessories of modern states and entrepreneurship shape timetables for much of the population. However, it extends forcefully into the countryside, to apparently non-capitalist sectors of the society, through the interventions of police, bureaucracy, modern law, and medical institutions; the influence of schools and colleges; and even social service and civic reform.

Similar “deviations” characterize the second symbol of South Asian modernity I have mentioned: understandings of the fundamental unit of domestic life. While the nuclear family— the small, intimate unit of a loving husband, wife, and children—emerges as an ideal, this smaller modern family often includes older generations (grandparents and sometimes great-­grandparents), as well as cognate units like “nuclear” families of male siblings, living under the same roof or in adjacent dwellings.

Other radical departures may be noted in the domestic order. Fatherhood emerges in transformed guise. It is attached now to an individual male, the biological father, who in theory has primary responsibility for the maintenance of his immediate family and the training of sons. Fathers become educators. Education is equated with school certificates and college degrees, as cleanliness is with tailored clothes, shoes, soap, and hair oil: objectified and separated from a rather different sense of learning in a wide variety of ways in the community and environment of one’s birth (kith and kin, human and nonhuman neighbors, physical surroundings).³I refer to important scholarly writings on several of these themes in the section titled "Historiography" in chapter one.

The notion of “inner” and “outer” worlds, the “private” retreat inside domestic space and “public” activities in the world outside, comes to be more sharply etched. This is accompanied by a thickening and concretization—one might say, externalization and objectification—of the inner and outer, the home and the world. The wider community, collective gatherings, and storytelling sessions recede as places where inheritance, tradition, and knowledge are passed on in the course of other social engagements. Notions of fostering, nurturing, and training the young are redefined, as is the understanding of men’s and women’s role in history.

Given the heft of these developments, the following chapters underline the importance attached to formal schooling, to cleanliness in dress and appearance, and to the roles of men and women in child-­ and homecare—all seen as signs of modern and the future. I focus on conjugal relations, central to new ideas of family and home, and detail the daily attrition and constant negotiation that accompany the reentrenchment of domestic hierarchies. One of my aims is to draw attention to the physical, psychological, and emotional costs incurred by men and women, the axiomatically privileged and the routinely disenfranchised alike.

There has been considerable writing and commentary on the question of the modern South Asian domestic order and its enduring hierarchies and discrimination. Why, then, another investigation of the theme? I offer a few reasons. First, whether they are well-recognized, statistically documented, targeted, critiqued, and repeatedly condemned, or not, the discriminatory structures and the violence attendant on gendered hierarchies, male privilege, and women’s subordination are still in place—doggedly persistent and deeply damaging. They are compounded by every man-made and natural disaster, from the climate crisis, to Covid-19, to war and displacement and famine. At the same time, they are regularly brushed under the carpet in the name of “sacred” inheritances that families, communities, and nations tout as needing protection from alien assaults. Or, alternatively, by the logic that such commonplace discrimination and violence is not a crisis of nation or state, not an event in World History, but a matter of secondary importance.⁴Cf. Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Such issues, regrettable as they might be, can only be tackled over time, it is said: best of all, through quick economic growth and expanding opportunities and education around the globe.

I believe the present work is necessary also because, for all the commentary on familial hierarchies and oppressions, there has been little investigation of the real-­life, flesh-­and-blood meaning of being embedded in structures of discrimination and denial in privatized, domestic spaces. This is true not only for women, servants, poorer relatives, and hangers-­on, the drudges of the inner world, reflective not only of the humiliation, physical distancing, indignity, and invisibility that they suffer daily: it is true also for those in power in this domain, the upholders of family and national “honor” fulfilling their “duty” through open acts of violence if necessary.

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This is a “personal” book in terms of the questions it asks about family, community, culture, and history in contemporary South Asia. I have in some ways lived with the inquiry all my adult life, though it has taken concentrated research over the last decade to bring it to fruition. The exploration flows from observations and questions I had from childhood onward, growing up in a home with a present/absent father and exposed to many homes that were structurally not very different from ours, however diverse they were in terms of the strictness, ebullience, forcefulness, or timidity of the men who were supposedly heads of these modern households, centered on the “nuclear”—yet often three-generational—family.⁵One might even call it the “extended nuclear family.” The 1935 photograph that appears on the book's cover, marking the wedding of two protagonists whom I center in chapter 4, Hameeda and Akhtar Husain Raipuri, points nicely to the paradoxical character of this modern South Asian family. The bride and groom are tucked away on the extreme right-hand side of the gathering, the bride sitting in the middle row, the groom standing behind her. The photo of the “Khandan” (or extended Omar family), taken in front of the bride’s parents’ home, built by her police-officer father Zafar Omar, is dominated by the elders. The bride’s mother and father are seated next to her in the middle row, on her right, and the oldest “elders,” Zafar Omar’s mother and father, are placed at the center of the assembly.’ 

My father had little time for hands-­on care of children or other domestic duties. He appeared as a distant authority figure, a spectral presence with “more important things to do”: absent even when physically present, a haunting shadow even when absent. A hush fell on the rest of us when he walked into a room, though we waited eagerly to see what gifts he had brought when he returned from an official tour or other engagement out of town. Often, they were fruits and sweets he himself was fond of, from places especially known for them. The shadow of authority surrounding him was accompanied, as well, by his boisterous laughter and storytelling (he was a fiction writer as well as a bureaucrat), as he held court in an outer drawing room where a homosocial company of friends, acquaintances, and sundry male relatives, close and not so close, assembled frequently.

As schoolboys, my older brother and I were often invited to meet these visitors, and then invited to go away and play or do something else. My mother and younger sisters were free to wander in the garden, and to go out for specific ends—to school, to shops, and to friends’ houses. There were also invitations for lunches and dinners or other outings with family friends in which all of us participated. But for much of their time at home, my mother and sisters kept to the inner

rooms and courtyard, adjoining the front rooms—for these weren’t great mansions. The “women” met important visitors infrequently, my mother ate last, and my mother and sisters were expected to be withdrawn, the seclusion and watchful eyes of the elders growing keener once my sisters reached the age of puberty.

Questions that arose in my mind in childhood and adolescence multiplied in my years as a college student and university teacher. Extended research, as well as conversations with colleagues, students, and interlocutors from diverse castes, classes, communities, and countries, led to the conviction that closer investigation of the history of domestic interactions was necessary for a more realistic understanding of modernity, democracy, and dreams of the future in colonial and postcolonial India, and of the social conservatism that survives in the subcontinent even in what appear at first sight as politically and intellectually enlightened circles.

Another word on “beginnings”—moments that are always indistinct and uncertain. A decade or so ago, I re-read Shivrani Devi’s memoir of her life with her husband, Premchand, perhaps the biggest name among the founders of modern Urdu/Hindi literature and hailed as “the storyteller of India’s Independence movement.” That renewed encounter with Shivrani Devi’s Premchand Ghar Mein (Premchand in the home) convinced me more than ever of the need for a study of Hindustani Aadmi Ghar Mein (Indian men in the home)—a theme I had been mulling over for some time.⁶Shivrani Premchand, Premchand: Ghar Mein (Nayee Kitab Prakashan, 2009).

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Premchand’s second wife’s reconstruction of the thirty years she spent with him differs startlingly from the single summary comment Premchand left on their life together. Hers is an uplifting account of two sensitive and committed human beings discovering each other—warts, foibles, exceptional qualities, strengths, weaknesses, all: drawing close together, sharing interests and activities, doing everything they could for one another and for others in their domestic circle. His is a brief and unexpectedly dry statement in a letter written in English in 1935, the year before he died. Following the death of his first wife, he says, “I married a ‘Bal Vidhwa’ [child widow] and am fairly happy with her. She has picked up some literary taste and sometimes writes stories. She is a fearless, bold, uncompromising, sincere lady, amenable to a fault and awfully impulsive. She joined [Gandhi’s] N[on] Co-op[eration] movement and went to jail. I am happy with her, not claiming what she cannot give.”⁷Madan, Premchand, 20.

I have much more to say about Shivrani Devi and Premchand in the chapters that follow. For the moment, I mention Shivrani Devi’s memoir on their marriage as one intimation of a beginning.

Another beginning occurred when I was nearing the end of a first draft of the book. As I worked on what I hoped would be a close-to-finished version of one of the concluding chapters, I stopped short on encountering a term I had read—and passed by—several times before in my engagement with the distinguished Dalit writer Baby Kamble’s 1986 autobiography in Marathi, Jina Amucha, and its English translation, The Prisons We Broke.⁸Baby Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, trans. Maya Pandit (Orient Black Swan, 2018). Original text published in 1986. Dalit is the name that Dalit activists give to the depressed castes and classes formerly known as Untouchables. The term, navrapana (husbandness, from navra, husband), condenses multiple dimensions of the history of male privilege, and the expected but not always welcome assertion of manly behavior and male priority, in a single edgy concept. Kamble used it to explain why she had kept her autobiographical writings secret from family members for twenty years. She had to do this, she said to the scholar who translated her memoir into English, because of her husband: “He was a good man, but like all the men of his time and generation, he considered a woman an inferior being.” Her comment on this common mindset and behavior was sharp: “Husbandness [is] the same in every man…Their male ego [gives men] some sense of identity.”⁹Kamble, Prisons We Broke, 147, 155, 156.

I had not come across anything like Kamble’s conceptualization in Hindi, Urdu, or other Indian languages I know—or, for that matter, in English. There is common talk in north India of mardangi and aadmi bano for manliness and being-­a-­man. Haughty male behavior is characterized as zamindarana adab, the bearing and behavior of a ruler or aristocrat, and sometimes as sahabi-­pan, behaving like a Sahib or overlord, like the British rulers of India. Notably outspoken, brash, or “independent” men might also be described as suffused with devil-­may-care life: full of dillagi (fun-­loving, jocular), rangeela (colorful), aazad-­khayal (freethinking). Rarely are they encapsulated in terms of their readily observable attitudes toward and interactions with a constant presence in their lives, their wives: that is, in terms of an everyday relationship that has come to occupy a central place in most discourses on family life in India.

Contrary to the experience of women, it is unusual to have man, and man’s behavior, reduced to one aspect of his being: in this instance, “husbandness.” Women are regularly defined through a relationship, usually one in a confined domestic world, as wife, mother, or daughter who will soon be a wife and mother. Wifehood itself is subsumed in motherhood, for the maternal instinct is taken to be the “essential” quality of woman. The world is different for the other half of humanity, represented as being complete in themselves, almost from birth: the male of the species growing into himself. There is extensive talk of boyhood, manhood, fatherhood, alongside other “essential” attributes, which can encompass head of household, property owner, breadwinner, professional, laborer. Certainly not qualities that can be condensed into something as reductive—primal and “primitive”—as husbandhood.

The status and authority of woman in an Indian home derived commonly from motherhood, from becoming a mother, or better still, in much of the world, the mother of sons. In the case of men in modern South Asia, that authority comes earlier, but it is not given from birth. It is captured perhaps in the relationship of husband and wife—“a man” in charge of his “little community,” even if that is a community of two, or a few (a wife/wives and in time children). Yet, we must remember that in traditional multigenerational families, age and other factors often trumped “gender” (reckoned as man/woman).¹⁰One scholar makes the point about the crisscrossing axes that determine gender power in South Asian homes as follows: a woman's place depends on "the status of her husband, her possession of sons, her fertility, looks, health and capacity for domestic labour. The middle-aged mother of grown-up sons could be a powerful matriarch and elderly mothers-in-law could command and oppress young [daughters-in-law]." Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 21. The biological father did not even have primary authority over his children; that privilege was reserved for the grandfather and granduncle, or, if that generation had retired, the father’s older brothers and cousins, along with family elders more generally.¹¹It is worth noting that this applied to Baby Kamble's husband: an unemployed young man in a house full of elders, whose enterprising wife (Baby Kamble) comes up with an idea that allows him to contribute to the family's income, he is still someone from whom she has to hide her writing for twenty years. Consider the implications of Baby Kamble’s navrapana (husbandness, husbandly authority and behavior) in that context.

Navra, in Marathi, refers to a bridegroom or husband. The dictionary suggests it derives from the root nav, new, suggesting a “new man,” reborn as in Preludemany societies on the attainment of maturity, on becoming adult and independent, a stage signaled in India by marriage. Navri, “new woman,” is also used for a bride, wife, or girl of marriageable age, but usually for a short while, no more than a few months following marriage, after which the common term for wife or woman of the home, bai-ko (patni, gharwali in Hindi), supervenes.¹²Another term that may well come from the same root (route?) is nivri in Kutchi, which refers to girls or young women sitting around idling, as a young bride might be allowed to do briefly! I am grateful to Sabrina Datoo for drawing my attention to this term and its meaning. For the modern South Asian man, this moment in the passage from adolescence to adulthood marks the onset of new responsibilities and authority in his bit of the domestic world—and perhaps beyond. The male, now recognized as a grown-up, gains manly status in husbandhood. Conceptually, a shift occurs in the location of this individual from the realm of nature and nurture to that of politics, responsibility, and authority. And many men claim the latter as their primary, if not sole, arena of work.

It takes the doughty, down-­to-earth, insurrectionist language of a Marathi Dalit woman, freshly energized and assertive in the era of the anti-­Brahmanical movement inspired by Ambedkar, to deploy an idea so “ordinary,” arresting, and rich in its ability to capture the banality of men’s claims to God-­given privilege and power. A banality daily on display in men’s comportment and behavior in the mundane, unremarked, everyday domain of the domestic—the supposedly sequestered and invisible space of family and home.

The concept navrapana (husbandness or husbandly authority), with its implicit critique of male arrogance in the assertion of men’s rights as men, opens up the question of male comportment, claims to manliness, and men’s vulnerability—central themes of my study—in unexpected ways. Throughout this book, I use men’s physical and psychological being in the home as an entry point for investigation of their privileged place in the domestic world and of their simultaneous denial of any serious responsibility in that space. Baby Kamble sees husbandness as emblematic of this privilege. I will argue that across castes, classes, and communities in modern South Asia, male authority has been signaled in what she calls husbandness. The privilege of boyhood mutates into the authority of man with the onset of marriage, the stage of householdership (the grihastha ashram) and the responsibilities that stage implies.

A central thread of the present study emerges more sharply from my belated recognition of the implications of Kamble’s insight.

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Men at Home is not a history of nation, state, and institutional politics—the well-established subjects of World History—viewed from an unusual vantage point. It is better seen as a history of ordinary life among ordinary people (with both phrases appearing under the sign of a question mark), told from the location of the home—or what I shall for convenience, in the interest of flexibility and in recognition of its uncertain boundaries, simply call domestic space in modern South Asia. If the changed perspective and object of inquiry say something about the limits of World History, or of what a richer world history might be—a history of how people lived, and what it felt like to live in their times and conditions—that is a welcome bonus.

I have framed the inquiry under the mundane rubric of men in the home, since that bland formulation engages questions of male entitlement, authority, and hierarchy in a relatively accessible and open-ended way. Perhaps it will also invite in readers who are daunted by the theoretical language that is often key to close analysis of issues of gender, patriarchy, and masculinity.

About the Author

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Workshop at Emory University. His books include A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford University Press, 2005), Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford University Press, 1990).

Introduction

Ruth Coker Burks (born Frances Ruth Coker in 1959) is an Arkansas woman who was a caregiver and AIDS activist in central Arkansas from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1986, when Burks began her informal care work, she was a mid-twenties single mother who sold timeshare condominiums on Lake Hamilton near her hometown of Hot Springs in central Arkansas. Over the next few years, her informal end-of-life care expanded into daily care work, AIDS activism, and education. Newspaper and magazine profiles, television interviews, a popular memoir, and social media posts have documented her efforts as the ‘Arkansas Cemetery Angel’ (we will refer to Ruth Coker Burks as Ruth since this is how she is named in her memoir and in most press coverage). Laudatory media coverage also led to pointed criticisms of the limits of Ruth’s efforts and to potential flaws in her memory. Rather than evaluating the accuracy of Ruth’s account or those of her critics, this article investigates what her rich, if fragmentary, archival materials, along with her published memoir and newspaper accounts, can reveal about care work, gender, and the lived experience of the AIDS epidemic in Arkansas. More broadly, it begins to address what the publicity (and controversy) around Ruth’s life story offers the study of queer memory in southern spaces.

Ruth’s career as an AIDS caregiver and activist began with a case of mistaken maternal identity and a contested family cemetery. As described in newspaper profiles and her memoir, All the Young Men (2020), in 1986, while visiting a friend in the hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas's capital city, Ruth noticed a neglected patient, Jimmy, who was dying of complications from AIDS. When she went into Jimmy's hospital room, he mistook Ruth for his mother, who refused to visit him. After she confronted the nursing staff, who largely avoided Jimmy's room and failed to convince his mother (over the phone) to come to visit her dying son, Ruth returned to Jimmy's room. And it was as his ‘mama’ that Ruth sat by his bedside for hours, holding his hand and comforting him as he died. This moment of assumed maternal identity marked the beginning of Ruth's decade of informal care work.¹Ruth Coker Burks and Kevin Carr O’Leary, All The Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South (New York: Grove Press, 2020), 3–11; Michael Garofalo, “Lessons in Love,” StoryCorps, December 5, 2014, https://storycorps.org/podcast/storycorps-449-lessons-in-love/; David Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel,” Arkansas Times, January 8, 2015, https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2015/01/08/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel.

Alongside care work and public activism, Ruth provided a final resting place for some men she cared for in the Files Cemetery in Hot Springs, an hour's drive southwest of Little Rock in the Ouachita Mountains. It was for Jimmy, who had mistaken Ruth for his mother, that she turned to Files Cemetery.

From the first chapter of Ruth’s memoir, the Files Cemetery is described as a site of commemoration, refuge, and conflict.²Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 11–14. In the following decades, this cemetery has become an essential site of LGBTQ+ memory in Arkansas. Layers of informal commemoration at the Files Cemetery and Ruth’s fragmentary archival record speak to the kinds of alternative archives of AIDS activism—beyond the public sphere—that Stephen Vider has examined in his discussion of community caregiving during the AIDS epidemic as part of his more extensive study of the importance of domestic spaces in LGBTQ+ politics in the United States.³Stephen Vider, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021). As far as we know, the Files Cemetery is one of only a few cemeteries in the United States that became a documented resting place for people who died during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.⁴Two other documented final resting places for those who died during the HIV/AIDS epidemic are the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC and the Hart Island Potter's Field in New York City. The Files Cemetery operates at a much smaller and more informal scale than either of these.

There also is scattered but evocative evidence of continuing engagement with the Files Cemetery as a space for queer memory-making. Facebook posts from March 2019 record how the drag troupe, the Arkansas Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence: The Abbey of the Hillbilly Harlots, cared for the cemetery’s grounds and planted rose bushes. A series of photographs of the Files Cemetery taken at regular intervals from spring 2020 to fall 2024, which are part of a forthcoming donation to the Center for Arkansas History and Culture, reveal earlier layers of informal commemoration (including notes, beer bottles, Mardi Gras beads, and devotional objects) near the resting places of some of the men. In 2020, a grave was added to the cemetery (of which Ruth was unaware.) Some of these later commemorative efforts at individual graves did not involve Ruth and were potentially enacted by local critics of Ruth, as evidenced by one stone that was partially funded by a critical host of a YouTube podcast.

Praise extended to the national and international levels. The first prominent news article on Ruth, which predated the Arkansas Times' profile, was a twelve-minute interview with NPR's StoryCorps in 2014. The December 7, 2020, issue of People magazine featured a glowing article, “They Call Me the AIDS Angel.”⁵Jason Sheeler, “They Call Me the AIDS Angel,” People, December 7, 2020. Exemplifying Ruth's newfound fame, the Guardian published an article on February 3, 2021 titled, "The Aids Angel: How Ruth Coker Burks Comforted Dying Gay Men." That same year, however, the Arkansas Times published a more critical piece by Austin Gelder about a “missing monument.” Gelder's piece centered on accusations that Burks had exaggerated some of her claims and failed to establish a much-discussed monument at the Files Cemetery in honor of those for whom she had cared.⁶Austin Gelder, “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument,” Arkansas Times, July 8, 2021, https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/07/08/ruth-coker-burks-and-the-missing-monument. National press coverage trended from the laudatory to the skeptical with pointed questions about Ruth's claims about the number of men for whom she cared, the number of gravesites at the Files Cemetery, and her contested ownership of the cemetery.⁷Alexander Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men,” NBC News, October 29, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/doubts-surround-viral-story-aids-angel-says-helped-hundreds-dying-men-rcna4163. These critiques came largely from residents of Hot Springs, some of whom knew Ruth, some of whom wanted a more thorough history of the events, some who are invested in the history and its public telling, and also those who feel that her version of events is somehow maligning the city. A YouTube podcast, RUTHLESS: The Real Story Behind the ‘Cemetery Angel of Arkansas’ is representative of this critique and is discussed in more detail below. In the wake of this praise and criticism, the Center for Arkansas History and Culture at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has collected Ms. Burks’ archival materials in an ongoing effort to preserve LGBTQ+ history in Arkansas. The CAHC's archival work complements that of Invisible Histories—an organization who "believes archiving is resistance to oppression and history leads to liberation"—to document queer histories and spaces of memory in the southern United States.⁸"Invisible Histories." Accessed January 3, 2025. https://invisiblehistory.org/.

This article discusses the history of Ruth's care work and activism in central Arkansas in the broader context of scholarship on gender and care work during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We will survey the gendered construction of care work and motherhood in Arkansas in Ruth’s memoir and archival materials. Then, we will tackle the life histories of the predominantly white and Latino working class and rural men she cared for and what her archive—with its evocative fragments and enduring silences— reveals about the lived experience of the AIDS epidemic for some people in Arkansas. We conclude with Ruth’s critics and what her story can teach about the contested memory of the AIDS epidemic. This article does not attempt to evaluate the accuracy of the claims of either Ruth or her local critics, but rather examines the possibilities and limits that her archive, and the published materials about her, open up. The historical importance of Ruth’s care work and the validity of some of the criticisms of her are not incompatible. Rather than a binary understanding, we are interested in what Ruth’s archive reveals about the history of the AIDS epidemic and the construction of the role of the idealized caregiver for some women in Arkansas.

Care Work and AIDS Activism in Arkansas

Ruth was one of many women across the United States who played leading roles in AIDS activism and care. As the ACT UP Oral History Project states, “Women were an integral part of the AIDS crisis—first, and foremost, as People with AIDS, but also as leaders of the AIDS Activist Movement, and as caregivers.”⁹“Women and AIDS,” ACT UP Oral History Project, digital archive, https://www.actuporalhistory.org/actions/women-aids. Ruth’s trajectory reflects what scholars have argued was the complex array of personal, political, social, and spiritual motivations behind many women’s activism during the AIDS epidemic in the United States.¹⁰See, for example, Ulrike Boehmer, The Personal and the Political: Women’s Activism in Response to the Breast Cancer and AIDS Epidemics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Angelique Harris, “Emotions, Feelings, and Social Change: Love, Anger, and Solidarity in Black Women’s AIDS Activism,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 6, no. 2 (2018): 181–201; For a more expansive history of women’s activism in the United States, see Dawn Durante, ed., Women’s Activist Organizing in US History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Ruth was a single mother who sold lakeshore timeshares in Hot Springs when she began her informal care work. Her work's flexible and commission-based practices facilitated Ruth’s initial care work. AIDS activism and end-of-life care were not how recently divorced Ruth planned to spend her twenties and early thirties. “All I want sometimes is to be a wife and be in the Junior League.”¹¹Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 74. While Ruth did not come from a well-off background, she hoped to advance in the social scene of Hot Springs. Ruth’s care work encompassed a shifting range of activities from 1986 to 1995. Initially, she focused on visiting the hospital, comforting dying men, and providing supplemental food for those still alive.¹²Burks and O’Leary, 62; Paula Cocozza, “The AIDS Angel: How Ruth Coker Burks Comforted Dying Gay Men,” The Guardian, February 3, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/03/aids-angel-ruth-coker-burks-dying-gay-men. As she described at one point (she had started dumpster-diving to get adequate cooking supplies), “I could be like this little grocery-delivery person.”¹³Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 96. Word of mouth drove her first few years of care work as anxious Little Rock and Hot Springs hospital staff contacted her. “More calls started coming. I guess the nurses and doctors all went to the same places to drink and unwind because I later found out they got to talking. ‘Oh my God, we had this insane woman come in, and she went right in the AIDS patient’s room.’ . . . I had two calls that first month, which I thought was crazy. Then three the second.”¹⁴Burks and O’Leary, 24–25.

This soon shifted to men calling her directly, either for themselves or for a friend or loved one. As Ruth notes, by 1988, this “network of calls from the hospitals and gay men giving out my number” kept her more than busy, along with caring for her young daughter and trying to make a living.¹⁵Burks and O’Leary, 54, 83. It is important not to reify the assumption that persons with HIV/AIDS were always gay men, even if that is often how Ruth discusses her experiences in central Arkansas in her memoir. Ruth’s archive and the ambiguities surrounding the Files Cemetery underline the importance of not projecting contemporary categories onto the past and respecting privacy in the telling of these histories.

From 1986 to 1989, Ruth worked quietly, and from 1989 onwards, she was much more public in attempting to raise awareness and draw local media attention to the AIDS epidemic in central Arkansas. Building on her connections to some of “the town elders” of Hot Springs, Ruth also gave talks at Rotary Clubs across Arkansas and quietly facilitated donations from well-to-do residents of Hot Springs. In her description of one of her early speeches at Rotary, “I talked about the people with AIDS in town, how they needed food and access to care, but what we mainly needed was education.”¹⁶Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 125, 129–134, 184, 257. Formalizing her activism, Ruth assisted Norman Jones, who ran the Arkansas non-profit, Helping People with AIDS (HPWA.) Ruth’s work with HPWA encompassed everything from the distribution of accessible sex education materials to creative publicity efforts, including the production of humorous T-shirts with the phrase “I believe in Jesus. Do you?” transformed into “I DO. DO YOU?” about safer sex practices.¹⁷Burks and O’Leary, 270–271.

The sharply diverging reactions to Ruth in the present-day echo in her recollections of care work and AIDS activism from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Ruth claims that initially, she was perceived as a prim “‘church lady’” by many of the men she cared for. However, she remembers that to most of Hot Springs, she was viewed as “this insane woman” and “that crazy Ruth Coker Burks,” who wouldn’t stop talking about AIDS and gay rights.¹⁸Ruth Coker Burks, "All Her Sons: The Cemetery Angel," interview by Seth Doane, Video, December 1, 2019, CBS Sunday Morning, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/all-her-sons-ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/; Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 24, 94, 156.

Along with public-facing activism, Ruth’s informal hospice care evolved from providing company at the bedside of dying men to helping ‘her guys’ live as long as they could by securing housing assistance, filling out death certificates, seeking social security payments, filling AZT prescriptions at often hostile local pharmacies, HIV testing, and ultimately AIDS education.¹⁹Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel”; Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 57–58, 72, 81–83, 86–88, 112–113. Ruth regularly visited hospitals in Hot Springs and Little Rock and frequently cared for people in their homes. At times, she appears to have operated as an informal pharmacy herself, distributing leftover AIDS medication across central Arkansas.²⁰Garofalo, “Lessons in Love”; Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 173. These shifts did not mean she stopped providing personal daily attention. For example, in her time with one of the men for whom she cared, Chip, she visited daily, fed him, bathed him, and read him the newspaper.²¹Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 234. In his study of queer public history and the home, Vider challenges the often-presumed division between political action (outside of the home) and care work (inside the home). Rather than framing the home as a space away from politics, Vider argues that the home and the care for people with AIDS in their own homes constitute an essential site for activism.²²Vider, The Queerness of Home, 179–213. The contours of Ruth's care work reflect Vider's argument.

While Ruth’s individualized efforts to keep ‘her guys’ fed are distinct from the more extensive history of food justice organizing in the twentieth-century United States that Emily Twarog studies in Politics of the Pantry (2017), food was at the center of Ruth’s work, especially in the late 1980s, and her subsequent gendered construction as a caregiving angel.²³Emily E. LB. Twarog, Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). In early media profiles from 2014 and 2015, Ruth estimated that she cared for "nearly 1,000 people" and "hundreds of dying people" from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.²⁴Garofalo, “Lessons in Love”; Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel.” As discussed below, these numbers have been contested. While it is beyond the scope of this article to fully address how Ruth’s efforts intersected with formal and informal care networks in Arkansas, there were additional organized efforts, including the important work of RAIN (Regional AIDS Interfaith Network), which was profiled in a 2016 Arkansas Times piece, among others.

Ruth’s unprocessed archival collection at the Center for Arkansas History and Culture provides some indications of how her care work intersected with broader caregiving networks in Arkansas. Specifically, her archives include a binder of letters of recommendation and typed endorsements from prominent community members regarding Ruth’s nomination for the Arkansas Community Service Award, the establishment of an HIV/AIDS program at Levi Hospital, and the nomination of Ruth for the position of Executive Director of the Arkansas AIDS Foundation. In one letter, the assistant director of the American Psychological Association recommended Ruth for the Arkansas Community Service Award with the argument that “Ruth’s efforts in promoting the conference have remained unflagging. Most impressively, Ruth has served without remuneration, preferring that we hire two part-time local coordinators from our community of those directly affected by AIDS. As one of our local coordinators has suffered an unfortunate precipitous decline in health. Ruth has generously stepped forward to assume his responsibilities while insisting that he still receive the full salary offered for the position.” A local attorney wrote in a separate letter of recommendation, “I would like to recommend Ruth Burks as the person to get this program started. Ruth has demonstrated her commitment to the care of those who are HIV positive and we are fortunate to have someone already in the community who is prepared to immediately take on such a responsibility.”²⁵These recommendation letters are part of Ruth's collection donated to and being processed by the Center for Arkansas History and Culture. Box 6, Folder 20, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Ruth's memoirs and archives only get us so far in researching the experience of AIDS in Arkansas and of women activists during the AIDS epidemic. Ruth remembers primarily, but not exclusively, caring for white and Latinx men. Her life story and archival materials tell us little about the impact of HIV/AIDS on Black communities in Arkansas (15.5% of the Hot Springs population in 1990) or the work of Black women in AIDS activism both at the state and national levels. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the central role of Black women to AIDS activism and care work in the United States. In her influential study of Black women activists, Angelique Harris argues for the importance of the intersecting emotions of love, compassion, community solidarity, anger, and frustration in AIDS activism and care work.²⁶Harris, “Emotions, Feelings, and Social Change,” 181–183, 186–188, 191–195.

While this article centers upon Ruth’s life and her account of primarily caring for white and Latinx men, it is critical to acknowledge how racial disparities in healthcare profoundly shaped the history of HIV/ AIDS. Unfortunately Ruth’s archive does not tell us much about the impact of the AIDS epidemic on Black people in Arkansas. However, our study of Ruth’s memoir and archival fragments builds on Cherisse Jones-Branch and Gary Edwards’ compelling model of biographical essays in Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (2018) and Jayme Stone’s 2010 study of Black women as activist mothers in the Arkansas Delta.²⁷Cherisse Jones-Branch and Gary T. Edwards, eds., Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times, Southern Women: Their Lives and Times (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); Jayme Millsap Stone, “‘They Were Her Daughters:’ Women and Grassroots Organizing for Social Justice in the Arkansas Delta, 1870–1970” (Memphis, TN, University of Memphis, 2010), https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=etd. Our examination of the richness and limits of Ruth’s archive expands on these authors’ approach of using various sources to demonstrate women's diverse and multifaceted historical roles.

If contested understandings and expectations of gender run through Ruth’s memoir and archives, and the discrimination experienced by many of the men she cared for, Arkansas’s enduring racial divisions implicitly shaped her narrative and its silences. In the words of Catherine Fosl and Daniel Vivian, “the same race, gender, and class divides that mark US society are evident within LGBTQ communities, making histories of queer people of color, women, and trans people more difficult to access, especially by those who do not identify as such.”²⁸Catherine Fosl and Daniel Vivian, “Investigating Kentucky’s LBGTQ Heritage: Subaltern Stories from the Bluegrass State,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (2019): 221. Ongoing archival projects in Arkansas are beginning to address these histories. The Historical Research Center at the UAMS Library has collected and preserved the papers of Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Director of the Arkansas Department of Health (1987–1993) and Surgeon General of the United States (1993–1994), who played an important role in the AIDS epidemic both in Arkansas and nationally.

To understand Ruth’s story—and what her archives and cemetery mean for queer memory in the southern United States—we must address how Ruth embraced and struggled against an ideal of “southern femininity” in the 1980s and early 1990s. Ruth’s memoir is a record of the constricted gender expectations imposed on her and her strategic use of her identity to help the men for whom she cared. In her 1991 essay, Frances Ross provides a formative background on changing notions of femininity and how women addressed social problems in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Arkansas.²⁹Frances Mitchell Ross, "The New Woman as Club Woman and Social Activist in Turn of the Century Arkansas," The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1991): 317–351. These norms remained decades later, as Anna Zajicek, Allyn Lord, and Lori Holyfield argue in their article on the women’s movement in northwest Arkansas: “To become activists in the civil rights movement, these women had to challenge the ideals of southern femininity and create a new sense of self.”³⁰Anna M. Zajicek, Allyn Lord, and Lori Holyfield, “The Emergence and First Years of a Grassroots Women’s Movement in Northwest Arkansas, 1970-1980,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2003): 155. Ruth also grappled with ideals of femininity while embracing the gendered role of caregiver.

In her memoirs and archival notes, Ruth does not directly discuss feminist politics in Arkansas. However, her complex experiences as a caregiver and activist contribute to what Janet Allured referred to as alternative “wellsprings” of “southern change-seekers” in her study of second-wave feminism in Louisiana.³¹Janet Allured, Remapping Second-Wave Feminism: The Long Women’s Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950–1997 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 49. Moreover, when we examine Ruth’s experiences, it is vital to consider the historical context of Arkansas in the mid-1980s, a little over a decade after the intense political backlash against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. As Janine Parry argues, “the Equal Rights Amendment in Arkansas had swiftly moved from being perceived by many observers as ‘virtually assured’ of ratification in January of 1973 to being openly reviled at the next legislative session.”³²Janine A. Parry, “‘What Women Wanted’: Arkansas Women’s Commissions and the ERA,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2000): 283. While distinct from Ruth's story, these conflicting political currents indirectly shaped her activism and experiences.  

Constructing Care Work and Motherhood in Arkansas

Ruth’s written and archival ephemera record the gendered expectations of care and motherhood  often imposed on women in late twentieth-century Arkansas. Her autobiography contains a steady commentary on the contested meaning of motherhood in her life and care work. The figures of abusive mothers, absent mothers, and idealized alternative mothers run throughout the book. Ruth’s deeply damaging mother and her own constant worries that she might cause her young daughter harm through her AIDS work are recurring themes.³³Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 100–102. Ruth’s memoir and archives contain glimpses of the range of substitute mothers these dying men sought, including Ruth, the Virgin Mary, and even Dolly Parton.

As mentioned, Ruth's career as an informal caregiver in the mid-1980s began with a case of mistaken maternal identity. With only a few exceptions, the men's families for whom Ruth provided care rejected their sick and dying sons.³⁴Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.” “So many arrived [back in Arkansas] thinking Mama would take them back. Sometimes I would go to their homes with them, mostly just to save me a trip of driving back out there when she wouldn’t.”³⁵Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 55.

Alongside this parade of neglectful parents, another narrative of idealized mother figures runs through Ruth’s life history and archives. A letter she wrote to Dolly Parton on August 20, 1993, on behalf of Billy Ray Collins soon after he died, fashioned the beloved country music singer as a substitute maternal figure for the dead man. Ruth wrote the letter thanking Dolly for a picture that she had sent to Billy, a devoted fan. “Billy’s mother never saw the picture or even knew that you had sent it,” the letter begins “You see, Billy’s mother wouldn’t come in his last days. . . . Billy was crushed.” Ruth's letter underlined a profound sense of loneliness: “But in the end, even his friends stopped coming by to see him. They just couldn’t take it. His lover, Paul, and I were the only ones there in the last weeks and minutes of his life, except for you.” Ultimately, Ruth had to tell the dying Billy that his mother would not visit him. “I finally told him that his mother wasn’t coming but that I would be there with him as would Paul. And that he would not die alone. All he said was ‘and Dolly’.” In Ruth’s memory of Billy’s final days, recorded in a letter to Parton, a photograph of the singer was transformed into an icon standing in for Billy’s absent mother.³⁶See, Box 6, Folder 16, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas. Billy was certainly not the only one of Ruth’s guys to reach out for their mothers and be denied at the end of their lives. This is a recurring theme in Ruth’s memoir.

This search for an alternative maternal figure is perhaps best exemplified by Ruth’s visits with the men she cared for to that most idealized, and unrealizable, of mothers: the Virgin Mary. They often visited a small grotto at St. Mary of the Springs Catholic Church in Hot Springs. “There’s a statue of the Virgin Mary there,” writes Ruth, “in a red-brick shrine, hidden from the street. She’s on a pedestal, so she looks down on you, but there’s kindness in the stone of her eyes.  . . . Whatever their religion, or lack thereof, my guys often like to visit her . . . sit on the brick and talk to her.”³⁷Burks and O’Leary, 232.

All the Young Men

At the heart of Ruth’s memoir, and of recent criticisms of her memory, are the men, including Chip and Billy, who she cared for and those she later buried, such as Jimmy, in the Files Cemetery. Who were the titular ‘young men’ of Ruth’s autobiography, or as some of her critics lament, the lost ‘forty names’ of the Files Cemetery?³⁸Gelder, “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument.”

Based on Ruth’s account, she cared for hundreds of men dealing with HIV/AIDS in central Arkansas from 1986 to 1995.³⁹Garofalo, “Lessons in Love”; Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel”; Burks, "All Her Sons: The Cemetery Angel.” The ashes of a small number of them are interred in the Files Cemetery. These men had returned to Arkansas in search of care after living in New York or Washington, DC, or when they had left more rural parts of the state for Hot Springs or Little Rock. In Ruth’s telling, many of these young men only reluctantly returned to Arkansas for care that their families denied them.⁴⁰Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 30–31, 76–77. “My guy who made it all the way to DC,” wrote Ruth upon visiting Chip’s grave, “only to end up in the place he’d escaped from.”⁴¹Burks and O’Leary, 343.

She cared for primarily working-class (sometimes indigent) young white and Latino men. Specifically, Ruth’s memoir, archives, and interviews record her work with numerous white country boys from the hills of Arkansas, Mexican immigrants in Hot Springs, and working-class drag queens. Many came from Mount Ida, Dardanelle, and other rural towns in central Arkansas.⁴²Burks and O’Leary, 148–149, 165–167. Exemplifying this, Ruth’s beloved Billy, a luminescent drag queen, was “the movie star from Dardanelle.”⁴³Burks and O’Leary, 166. Her guys included everyone from Jim, her first patient; to Tim Gentry, “a hillbilly dandy”; to Roger, whose family tried to wash away his sins in a creek baptism; and to the aforementioned Billy, the charismatic drag queen from Dardanelle who prominently featured in many newspaper profiles of Ruth and her book.⁴⁴Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel”; Matthew Kincanon, “Ruth Coker Burks Describes Her Lifetime Caring for AIDS Patients to the Gonzaga Community,” The Gonzaga Bulletin, March 1, 2017, https://www.gonzagabulletin.com/news/ruth-coker-burks-describes-her-lifetime-caring-for-aids-patients-to-the-gonzaga-community/article_0e5de906-fdeb-11e6-b294-d72df02858f2.html; Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 70. They also included men from Mexico who worked in tree planting or at the Hot Springs racetrack Oaklawn Park, including Angel Mestizo, whom Ruth recounts assisting as he simultaneously sought medical care and to avoid deportation.⁴⁵Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 274–277. The marginalized status of many of these men led them to Ruth, who, as she frequently reminds her readers and interviewers, lacked any formal medical training. As Paul Wineland, Billy's former partner, notes in the 2014 StoryCorps interview, "You were the only person that we could call. There wasn’t a doctor. There wasn’t a nurse. There wasn’t anyone. It was just you."⁴⁶Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.”

Occasionally, Ruth did comment on the class divisions. She provided concise descriptions in her efforts to keep her childhood friend, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, informed about the AIDS epidemic: “But I knew he didn’t know the gay men I saw—the poor, the rejected, the ones with nobody to care for them.”⁴⁷Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 92. In discussing a professional ballet dancer whose partner came home to die in Arkansas, Ruth described “this ballet dancer who seemed so out of place and of a different class than the Hot Springs guys.” Ruth remembers the drag queens she saw at Our House in Hot Springs as goddesses who transformed the city. “The performers came and went  . . . It was like Dynasty, but that was absurd because we were in Arkansas, which meant these people didn’t have the means to have a fabulous life. But there they were in fabulous gowns.  . . . They were goddesses. The idea that I could breeze by someone like this in Hot Springs.”⁴⁸Burks and O’Leary, 161, 267.

Not all of the men lacked political or social connections. Chip exemplifies this. While he was from Glenwood, which Ruth described as “one county over from Hot Springs and about forty years behind,” Chip had enjoyed a rising career working for the Democratic Party in Washington, DC. Chip lived with Ruth and her daughter for a few weeks, and she cared for him as he died.⁴⁹Burks and O’Leary, 230, 233–235. This simultaneous intensity and brevity helps explain some of the gaps in her detailed knowledge of these men: “I felt at home, yet still at a distance from what these men were going through.”⁵⁰Burks and O’Leary, 53. Ruth often provided daily care for weeks or months before their families sometimes stepped in for their last few days of life.⁵¹Burks and O’Leary, 260–266.

While Arkansas was the site of flight and reluctant return in Ruth’s memoir, Hot Springs served as a refuge for many rural gay men. At the gay bar Our House, “almost all the regulars had left their hometowns to create their own lives here in Hot Springs.”⁵²Burks and O’Leary, 5, 37, 166. For a fuller queer history of Arkansas, see Brock Thompson, The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2010).

If Hot Springs was a refuge, the Files Cemetery emerged as a site for queer memory. Flagging the commemorative importance of this small cemetery, Ruth says “I wanted them to be counted, to have their lives matter, and I wanted them to have control over their destinies, no matter how limited they might seem to others. If I felt they were strong enough, I brought them to Files Cemetery and asked them to tell me where they’d like to be buried.”⁵³Burks and O’Leary, 58.

A significant challenge of working with Ruth's archives and autobiography is the enduring ambiguities surrounding the number of cremations interred in the Files Cemetery either by her from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, or in the following years as the cemetery became informally associated with LGBTQ+ memory in Arkansas. Estimates of the number of men whose ashes Ruth interred range from five to approximately forty. In her early interview with StoryCorps, Ruth stated, "I’ve buried over forty people in my family’s cemetery because their families didn’t want them."⁵⁴Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.” As one longtime resident of Hot Springs, Tim Looper, notes, there are five identifiable graves of men who died during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he remembers explicitly going to six funerals there.⁵⁵Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” Ruth has long maintained that dozens of other cremations have been interred at Files; she mentions fifteen names in her memoir. She insists that given the passage of time and her health problems, she does not remember the names of all the men she cared for.⁵⁶Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel”; Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” Moreover, she claims that initially in the 1980s, she concealed what she was doing in the Files Cemetery so that those who would have opposed burying abandoned people associated with AIDS there would not find out.⁵⁷Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 27–28. Further complicating the matter, Ruth claims that she started to receive anonymous ashes in the mail once she was interviewed about HIV/AIDS in local news outlets, and she proceeded to inter these ashes as well.⁵⁸Burks and O’Leary, 133–136. Finally, the ashes of people Ruth did not know personally have also been interred at Files, as it became a potent space of LGBTQ+ memory. During an August 2020 visit to the cemetery, Ruth noticed a recently added memorial to a queer-identifying young man whom she had never met.

Ambiguity, anonymity, and informality have been central elements of Ruth's work from the beginning. In response to praise during her StoryCorps interview, Ruth said, "You know, they always say 'fake it ‘til you make it,' and I faked my way through the whole thing. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know anything."⁵⁹Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.” Respecting the anonymity of many men is central to Ruth's understanding. "I'd go to an apartment to bring food, and another man would be there,” she writes. "There were people I recognized, though I pretended not to know anything about them."⁶⁰Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 97–98. Ruth's publisher noted in 2021, "Many of the men Ruth helped and eventually buried approached her asking for anonymity due to not wanting to be outed."⁶¹Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.”

The cemetery is a throughline in Ruth's memoirs and interviews. She returns to this commemorative geography at the end of All the Young Men as she narrates the journey from Rogers, in the northwestern corner of Arkansas, where she currently lives, back to her hometown of Hot Springs. “I make my way, finally, to Files Cemetery. The carpet of pine needles crunches under my feet as I make the rounds. The mockingbirds still caw above me. I clear brush here and there on the graves, saying hi to Misty before walking over to see Angel, Carlos, and Antonio.”⁶²Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 344. Alongside its status as a refuge and commemorative space, the cemetery is a site of considerable pain for Ruth, not only in terms of the family conflict that resulted in her contested ownership of many cemetery plots and the memory of the men she buried there, but also the more recent debates over what she did (or did not do) in caring for them.

Ruth's Fragmentary Archive

There are scattered, evocative references to Ruth’s archival materials throughout All the Young Men, whether to her pink leather daybook or to the collection of newspaper clippings related to her successful efforts to mobilize the Downtown Merchants Association of Hot Springs for Worlds AIDS Day on December 1, 1993.⁶³Burks and O’Leary, 154, 337, 339. Her fragmentary archive complements recent public history scholarship on queer history and memory in rural areas of the United States. For example, a 2019 special issue on “Commemorating Queer History" in The Public Historian explored how museum exhibits and historical sites, especially in smaller towns and more rural areas, engage queer history.⁶⁴See Rebecca Bush, “Woman, Southern, Bisexual: Interpreting Ma Rainey and Carson McCullers in Columbus, Georgia,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (2019): 94–115; Christopher Hommerding, “Queer Public History in Small-Town Wisconsin: The Pendarvis Historic Site and Interpreting the Queer Past,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (2019): 70–93; Fosl and Vivian, “Investigating Kentucky’s LBGTQ Heritage.” As Christopher Hommerding argues, such histories in non-urban areas “[give] lie to the notion that queerness outside of urban centers was historically hidden, invisible, and cut off from queers in other locations.”⁶⁵Hommerding, “Queer Public History in Small-Town Wisconsin,” 73. Moreover, public historians such as Fosl and Vivian have foregrounded the challenge of “an uneven, often spare historical record” and the need for “better geographic representation” of queer histories in southern spaces.⁶⁶Fosl and Vivian, “Investigating Kentucky’s LBGTQ Heritage,” 221–222.

In 2022, Ruth donated her archival materials to the Center for Arkansas History and Culture (CAHC) in two batches. The first, more significant donation of materials primarily consisted of biographical and professional information, including planners, personal writing, news clippings, Christmas cards, and scattered photographs from Ruth’s activism and travels in the 1990s. This also included ephemera such as AIDS education t-shirts, drag ball gowns (one of which Ruth wore to Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ball), and the final pottery urn from Dryden Pottery that Ruth never used. The second, smaller donation comprised photo albums, newspapers, magazines, and All the Young Men publication materials. We wish that Ruth had kept better records, but this is the regrettable reality of many archives. Perhaps a better question than why Ruth did not keep better records is what this rich, if incomplete, archive can tell us about the history of HIV/AIDS.

Ruth’s daily planners illustrate the simultaneously rich and fragmentary nature of the collection. The planners in the archival collection include more blank pages than written ones, with some pages marked with only a single name. These fragmentary entries are mundane, a day-to-day account of an individual woman’s hopes and fears. Many are simple notes or reminders, the importance and context coming from either conversation with Ruth or other external sources.

Ruth’s archive reveals what it must have felt like in those difficult early years when she claims she primarily acted alone. As she puts it in the epilogue of her autobiography, “There was no one behind me. I had no choice but to help them.”⁶⁷Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 343. David Koon began his 2015 profile of Ruth in the Arkansas Times as “one lonely person” attempting to “budge the vast stone wheel of apathy.”⁶⁸Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel.” This theme of isolation and hostility runs throughout her memoir. As Ruth notes of one church supper, other parishioners “eyed me suspiciously, but they always eyed me suspiciously, even before I was the town pariah.”⁶⁹Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 152.

But Ruth was not the only individual caring for AIDS patients in central Arkansas. All the Young Men can be read as a record of “the town elders” of Hot Springs who quietly assisted her. This is best exemplified by Clay Farrar, a prominent Hot Springs lawyer. Clay introduced Ruth to a network of Rotary Clubs where she spoke about her care work and AIDS activism and connected with prominent men who were willing to provide support quietly. Several bankers in Hot Springs occasionally assisted Ruth with monetary donations or by requesting favors in the medical profession.⁷⁰Burks and O’Leary, 182–184, 257–258.

Certainly, a range of individuals and non-profits attempted to help those dealing with HIV/AIDS in Arkansas in the 1980s and early 1990s; however, Ruth’s searing memory but factual inaccuracy in insisting that she acted alone evokes the experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic for the men she cared for, many of whom—working class, indigent, and abandoned—were from the hills of Arkansas or were Mexican immigrants far from their families. These men were on society’s margins in multiple abject ways. As Ruth describes visiting Angel in the hospital, “Angel and I smiled at each other, together in our lonely place.”⁷¹Burks and O’Leary, 277.

This sense of isolation is also represented in Ruth’s archival materials, for instance, in two poems she wrote in the early 1990s, “Shades of Black” and “THIRTYONE.” In writing about her first patient, Jimmy, in “Shades of Black,” the death Ruth recalls is sudden and lonely; there is only Ruth and a dying man crying out for his absent mother. Ruth went into the room alone, held this man’s hand, watched him die, and walked out of the hospital room alone. “Remembering the day that brought me here. He was the first one who just died. Right then, right there. I walked into his room, he took my hand, he nodded and then he died.”⁷²See, Box 6, Folder 16, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.

In “THIRTYONE,” the sense of isolation is deployed in anger against society and religious institutions. Ruth writes: “He’s 31 and dying of a disease that not so long ago was God’s revenge, punishment for THEM. While Ruth was sharply critical of the hostility of many religious institutions in Arkansas from the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, she remembers her care work and activism relative to her religious faith. As she has repeated in conversations with us, “I never lost my faith; I just lost faith in everyone else’s faith.”⁷³See, Box 6, Folder 16, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.  

Criticism in Context

In time, media coverage of Ruth shifted from the laudatory into two overarching criticisms. First, Ruth either kept shoddy records of the men whose ashes she interred in the Files Cemetery or was guilty of exaggerating the number she cared for or buried. Second, she has either been unwilling or unable to put up a monument to these men at the Files Cemetery despite advocating for a memorial for years. Some of her critics suggest that a successful GoFundMe campaign (to raise money for a cemetery memorial and Ruth’s medical bills) was entirely used for the latter purpose and not for the former. For example, in a 2021 piece, the Arkansas Times journalist Austin Gelder discussed how there was not yet a memorial, local disappointment in the limited impact of Ruth’s newfound celebrity on Hot Springs, and debates over ownership and oversight of the Files Cemetery. In a subsequent piece for NBC News, Alexander Kacala expanded on these concerns over funding, management of the Files Cemetery, and local disappointment (and anger.) Kacala also suggested that Ruth may have exaggerated or even fictionalized some of her claims, particularly regarding the number of men for whom she cared.⁷⁴Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” It is important to note that in late 2022, Ruth arranged for a monument to be constructed and delivered to the Files Cemetery.

As Gelder notes, most of her critics still “commend Burks . . . [and] don’t want to detract from her good deeds” while insisting on clarity.⁷⁵Gelder, “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument.” In turn, Kacala surmises that beyond the good deeds that Ruth did in the 1980s and early 1990s, “over the years either she or the media have sensationalized the story for some sort of gain.”⁷⁶Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” Some in Hot Springs are more critical, including Robert Klintworth, a former friend of Ruth who cared for the Files Cemetery for many years (Klintworth provides much of the criticism in both the Arkansas Times and NBC News pieces). Klintworth claims he and his partner, Paul Wineland (who was Billy's partner before his death), cared for the cemetery and provided Ruth with significant assistance in remembering details and names for her book, but that the rewards of the “book deal, a movie deal, and international recognition” have accrued to Ruth alone.⁷⁷Gelder, “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument.” Paul Wineland was also central to the 2014 StoryCorp profile, which fed the media's interest on Ruth’s story.

Along with Klintworth, Tim Looper cared for the cemetery for several years after 2015. Looper also is one of Ruth’s prominent local critics, and has argued that Ruth exaggerated her narrative and/or does not remember events accurately.⁷⁸Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” Looper maintains, for instance, that Ruth’s first hospital visit occurred in Hot Springs and not in Little Rock, as she writes in her memoir. According to Ruth, some local drag troupes have also provided informal care for the cemetery. In 2023, Hot Springs resident Jim Thompson began to care for the seemingly neglected cemetery, as reported by the local news.⁷⁹Rolly Hoyt, “One Man’s Mission Helps Restore a Site of Arkansas Cemetery Holding Remains of AIDS Victims,” THV 11, October 26, 2023, https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/arkansas-files-cemetery-aids-restoration/91-39e9dad1-7ece-4244-b854-4e1d2091c5bc.

A June 2024 YouTube video podcast, RUTHLESS: The Real Story Behind the ‘Cemetery Angel of Arkansas’ alleges to uncover the “scam” perpetrated by the “grifter” Burks. The three-hour video is a sensational retelling of the 2021 Arkansas Times article. Looper is the principal source and the recurrent themes include the alleged exploitation of gay deceased men for fame and fortune, the accusation of profiting from a never-constructed (but since built) memorial, the flagging of factual errors and inconsistencies in the memoir, Ruth’s alleged failure to recognize other individuals and entities who provided aid, and a general sense that her version of events has disparaged Hot Springs and Arkansas. Posted comments about the video are overwhelmingly critical of Ruth, but it is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate these claims.

The CAHC is working to process Ruth's and others' archival papers from these years. However, it would take a large research budget (and a significant scholarly team) to, 1) carefully and responsibly reconstruct the life histories of the men buried in the Files Cemetery, 2) locate the interred cremations within the Files Cemetery with both precision and respect for anonymity, and 3) carefully and empathetically adjudicate the conflicting claims by drawing on state and local records. Complicating any research efforts is the reality that almost all of the direct witnesses of what Ruth did are long dead, and the remaining few include both fervent supporters and biting critics. These conflicting accounts rely on individual memories of traumatic events that occurred at least thirty years ago.

Many of the critiques voiced in newspaper articles and videos are valid. We too would like to know more about the men's life histories and see the Files Cemetery physically transformed into the commemorative site it already is in the minds of so many. In telling and retelling Ruth's story, it is clear that many details and claims remain constant, alongside some ambiguities and exaggerations. Ruth is not necessarily the appropriate target for all of these legitimate concerns. Or to reframe Kacala’s observation as a question, if elements of Ruth’s story have been ‘sensationalized’ over the years, to what end have they been sensationalized for a reading public in Arkansas and beyond?

Our preliminary research suggests that the presentation of Ruth as an almost saintly figure began with the 2014 StoryCorps interview and the 2015 Arkansas Times profile. In the StoryCorps interview, Michael Garofalo notes, "Ruth is one of those rare people who doesn’t run away from suffering. She runs toward it without hesitation."⁸⁰Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.” David Koon’s article in the Arkansas Times in 2015 was titled, “Ruth Coker Burks, the Cemetery Angel.” A photograph of Ruth overlayed with the text, “St. Ruth,” was the cover story of the initial print edition (the “St. Ruth” title was removed from the online version). It was more often in the headlines of stories, rather than in the body of articles, that she was presented in saintly or angelic terms.

These binary understandings of Ruth, either as a living saint and the Arkansas cemetery angel, or as a fantasist and teller of tall tales, do not map onto the reality of her evocative and fragmentary archive. Returning to the questions we posed at the beginning of this article, what can Ruth’s archive tell us about the history of the AIDS epidemic in Arkansas and the construction of the role of the idealized caregiver for some Arkansas women at the time?

One answer that her archive does provide is that contestation and debate have long been integral to Ruth's care work and activism and that she has always had both enthusiastic supporters and harsh critics. Based on newspaper clippings from her archival donation, the criticism of Ruth and her work began in the early 1990s. In a 1993 letter to the editor published in the Sentinel-Record (Hot Springs, AR) that echoes some of the later criticism, the author states that Ruth “claims too much credit . . . her statistics are out of this world,” and that Ruth made AIDS patients stand out in the cold during a World AIDS Day service. Other local newspaper pieces saved by Ruth from the early 1990s had less to do with Ruth herself and instead reflected rampant prejudice against gay men. An undated letter to the editor states that the author is withdrawing their membership to the Downtown Merchants Association of Hot Springs due to the Association’s support of AIDS Awareness Day since, in the words of the outraged author, “AIDS is a behaviorally transmitted disease and does not need awareness or anything other than saying 'no' to homosexual activity or drug use. How much does it cost to teach that?”⁸¹See, Box 6, Folder 2, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Criticisms of Ruth are not the only subject of the news clippings that she assiduously collected. There are several undated articles praising Ruth and her work. These positive assessments from the early 1990s foreshadow the recent praise of Ruth's care work and activism. One letter by Robert Gale (the vice-president of Helping People with AIDS) refuted the claim that Ruth was not the executive director of HPWA, and praised her efforts in that role. At least two articles in Ruth’s collection mention her professional work at her day job at Prudential Lakefront Real Estate.

Ruth’s archival collection includes a binder of letters of recommendation and typed endorsements from prominent citizens regarding Ruth’s nomination for the Arkansas Community Service Award, the establishment of an HIV/AIDS program at Levi Hospital, and the nomination of Ruth for the position of Executive Director of the Arkansas AIDS Foundation. These letters provide further evidence of the sustained care work that she offered. For example, a local attorney wrote that “Ruth has demonstrated her commitment to the care of those who are HIV positive, and we are fortunate to have someone already in the community who is prepared to immediately take on such a responsibility.”⁸²See, Box 6, Folder 20, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.

The testimony of some of Ruth’s critics lends credence to her sustained, if controversial, presence. Kacala includes an extended quote from Hot Springs resident Daymon Jones, a long time survivor of the AIDS epidemic in Hot Springs, who is harshly critical of Ruth. In Jones’ own words, “I have contempt for her … She makes it look like my town was hostile to people with HIV. It’s the fact that she has used that stereotype to portray my town and my community as something horrible and that was not the story.” Jones was particularly annoyed at what he saw as Ruth’s pushy methods in attempting to provide him with unwanted help. Again, in Jones’s own terms, “What really got me riled up [was] how she does it. . . . She said, ‘Well you know I can bury you, too, when you die.’ Well Ruth, I have no intention of dying right now, and even if I do, I have a family cemetery. ‘They won’t let you in, you know that.’ Oh yes they will. We discussed this already. She tried to use fear to make herself look like she was somebody that was going to help.”⁸³Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.

Jones’ comments clearly illustrates that some people living with AIDS in Hot Springs found Ruth’s efforts unnecessary and even offensive. At the same time, the anecdote also suggests that by the early 1990s, Ruth was locally well-known for AIDS-related activism and care work and that she regularly discussed her cemetery as a possible final resting place for those excluded elsewhere.

Conclusion

What can we make of the competing media narratives depicting this individual woman to be either a saint, selflessly salving the wounds of AIDS patients, or a sinner, exaggerating what she did and pocketing the cash? We want to argue that the legitimate anger aimed at the incomplete historical record of these men's lives and the decaying state of their final resting place is standing in for a much larger problem—the terrible treatment accorded those dealing with HIV/AIDS in Arkansas in the 1980s and 1990s by many medical institutions, by civil society, by their families, and by religious congregations. As Ruth put it, with hopefulness, “if I sound the alarm . . . the cavalry will come.”⁸⁴Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 183. Yet the cavalry never arrived, at least for many of the men for whom Ruth cared. These conclusions are born out in the two persistent emotions that weave their way throughout her story: her searing anger at the failure of others to not do more, and her deep, enduring love for these men whom she often only knew briefly at the very end of their lives. This echoes Harris’s influential analysis of the role of a range of emotions in Black women activists' perspective on their AIDS activism, especially the entanglement of love, compassion, and solidarity with frustration and anger.⁸⁵Harris, “Emotions, Feelings, and Social Change,” 191–195.

Maybe this rush to canonize or vilify Ruth is an effort to displace this broader societal failure. Suppose Ruth was an angelic caregiver for those dying of AIDS. In that case, it absolves all those in Arkansas (and elsewhere) who either did nothing or actively discriminated against gay men. In turn, if Ruth was an imperfect record keeper with a shaky memory, she could become the target of all the legitimate anger of how these men were treated in life and death.

The archive of Ruth’s life, activism, and care work, and its fragments offers a much more sobering history of AIDS in Arkansas: a colossal tragedy and a systemic failure. Not a failure on the part of Ruth or the other individuals who, at a tremendous personal sacrifice, helped those dealing with HIV/AIDS, but rather a systemic failure on the part of many medical institutions, state government, and civil society. Returning at the very end of her autobiography to the very beginning of her story (when she walked into Jimmy’s hospital room in Little Rock in 1986), Ruth puts it a different way: “The question I get most, the one I hate, is why I went into his room. And why I helped people. Again and again . . . the answer is, How could I not? The real question is, How could you not?”⁸⁶Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 345.

Ultimately, it is not a question of what Ruth Coker Burks did (or did not do) to become the Arkansas Cemetery Angel, but rather what the depictions of Ruth as an angel and a saint in print and the media reveals about the memory (and continuing reality) of AIDS in Arkansas. At its most potent, Ruth's memoir and archives—alongside the Files Cemetery—not only illustrate the deep commitment of one inspiring individual, however imperfect, to help those suffering at society's margins, but also provide a glimpse into the lives of the men she cared for, whether in documenting their loneliness, their heroic efforts to live as long as they could, or in their fashioning of substitute mothers and chosen family.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Nathan Marvin, Marta Cieslak, and David Baylis for their encouragement, generous feedback, and insights that contributed to the development of this article.

About the Authors

Andrew Amstutz is an assistant professor of history at Queens College, CUNY. He has published articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Philological Encounters, and South Asia. Prior to joining Queens College, he taught at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. 

Jess Porter is executive director of the Center for Arkansas History and Culture, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's archive. He is a geographer and former chair of UALR's history department. 

Phoenix Smithey is the head of special collections and university archivist at the University of Central Arkansas. Smithey is active with the Academy of Certified Archivists, the Society of Southwest Archivists, and the Arkansas Humanities Council. She teaches in the fields of archival management and archival preservation.

Introduction: The Selected Shepherd: A “Fair, Just Place”

Let us live beyond the here and now by nurturing each other and supporting one another’s works.—Assotto Saint, “Why I Write”¹Assotto Saint, “Why I Write,” Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays and Plays of Assotto Saint (Richard Kasak Books: New York, 1996), 3–8, 5.

In the first lines of his introduction to The Selected Shepherd (University of Pittsburgh Press 2024), editor Jericho Brown writes of the impossible effort of introducing “a dead man,” the late poet Reginald Shepherd , to readers: “You mean to honor him knowing that you cannot present him as he might present himself.” Brown’s work with The Selected Shepherd allows Shepherd to introduce himself to readers as he would were he still with us: directly through his poetry. Brown describes Shepherd as an unpredictable, fearless, and brilliant poet who wrote “a little more wildly” across each of his six published collections.

Following a short biographical sketch and brief framing narrative written by Eric Solomon, Southern Spaces presents an edited conversation between Eric and Jericho Brown about the work, resonance, and legacy of Reginald Shepherd.²This conversation took place at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship on August 6, 2024. Brown previously spoke with Natasha Trethewey for Southern Spaces in 2010. See Jericho Brown, “Naming Each Place,” Southern Spaces, March 4, 2010, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2010/naming-each-place/.

Shepherd met his partner, Robert Philen, in Ithaca, New York, in 1999, and the two moved to Pensacola, Florida, in July 2001. After a battle with colon cancer, Shepherd died on September 10, 2008, in Pensacola. Though he accomplished much in his career, Shepherd remained aware of the structural inequities that prevented men like him from accessing what he called “fair, just” places of belonging in the academic and literary worlds.  “Sometimes I stand in the poetry section of Barnes and Noble and wonder how many authors there come from backgrounds like mine. They can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” he writes in an essay published the year before his death. “Unlike the vast majority of those in academia or the literary world, I have nothing to fall back on. Since leaving Georgia at seventeen, I have been on my own… I have gone from place to place, from circumstance to circumstance, and still I haven’t found that fair, just place, but I continue to search, hoping and believing that there’s a place for me.”⁴Shepherd, “To Make Me Who I Am,” Orpheus in the Bronx: Essay on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), (7­–38), 36–37. Sixteen years after his death, Jericho Brown’s The Selected Shepherd has helped secure the poet’s “fair, just place” on the bookshelves of our great poets.

Searching for Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd’s six volumes of poetry continue to amass a dedicated following from fans, fellow poets, and scholars. Shepherd’s work contains an intoxicating blend of image, metaphor, allusion, formal innovation, and often dizzying complexity. His work incorporates references from Hart Crane to Wallace Stevens to Walter Benjamin to Sam Cooke to Barry White while always remaining the work of an original voice and visionary.

“I was around twenty-four years old when I first read Reginald Shepherd’s poem ‘Semantics at 4 P.M.’ in an edition of the Best American Poetry edited by Rita Dove,” Jericho Brown writes. Transfixed, Brown recalls asking other poets why he had not been made aware of Shepherd’s work beforehand. He continues, “the poem itself does not identify its speaker as gay, but if there is a queer voice, I believed I was reading it.” For Brown, Shepherd became an example of a “gay, Black poet who was alive,” and for those of us lucky enough to have discovered Shepherd’s work, it is the vitality and the voice—queer, brilliant, difficult, propulsive—that resonates long after the initial encounter. Though Brown’s work with The Selected Shepherd will now make a first encounter more accessible for many readers, I would argue that one does not find or search for Shepherd’s poems. As Brown’s story illustrates, you don’t find the poems; his poems find you. Or, as Brown states, poets “are the makers of the beauty that people didn’t know they needed until they see it.”⁵Jona Colson, “On Truth, Queerness, and Social Media: A Conversation with Jericho Brown,” Literary Hub, November 10, 2020, https://lithub.com/on-truth-queerness-and-social-media-a-conversation-with-jericho-brown/.

Similar to Brown, I (Eric) was twenty-three when I first came to Shepherd’s poetry by happenstance at a time when I needed to “see” his work. I was in an MFA poetry workshop as a MA student in English studying men and masculinities—i.e. not a poet—but we were allowed to take creative writing workshops as our schedules permitted. I recall vividly feeling like an “outsider” to what I perceived to be the “real” poets in the room (classic imposter syndrome), and I found my work at the time out of step with the much more highly innovative and experimental work of my colleagues.

In retrospect, I was attempting in my juvenilia poems to rescue the stories of our queer dead from the tragic detritus to which their lives had forever been relegated in our collective memory. In one poem titled “Appendix,” I elegized Scotty Joe Weaver, an eighteen-year-old gay man from Bay Minette, Alabama, who was killed by two of his roommates in 2004. In another, I attempted to grapple with the death of Matthew Shepard, whose name now serves on official federal hate-crime legislation. One colleague recognized in my meditations on the queer dead something he called a poetic sense of rescue and reclamation, and he invited me to consider Reginald Shepherd when it came time to give presentations on the work of one contemporary poet in our MFA workshop.

Unlike Brown, by the time I found Shepherd, he had passed away. At my friend’s suggestion, I ordered copies of his published work, in which I found poetry full of life and resonance and contradiction and complexity and difficulty but not obscurity. Though they made me feel, I did not then, nor do I now, fully understand what I feel when I encounter and re-read a Shepherd poem. As Brown observes in The Selected Shepherd, Shepherd’s work is not easy by design. Shepherd thought poetry should be “hard enough” to sustain multiple re-readings, not written in such a way that it could be “used up” by readers after a few encounters.⁶Shepherd, “On Difficulty in Poetry,” A Martian Muse (33–45), 34. For Shepherd, poems should be able to contain different resonances with each return. In a conversation with Krista Tippett, Brown similarly states, “I think poems are better built out of what we don’t understand, not what we do already know, but what we’re trying to figure out and better understand.”⁷“Jericho Brown: Small Truths and Other Surprises,” On Being with Krista Tippett, June 6, 2019, https://onbeing.org/programs/jericho-brown-small-truths-and-other-surprises.

In searching for and finding Shepherd, equal in importance to the poems for me were something you will not find in The Selected Shepherd: his essays where the poet further attempted to understand his craft, his poetics, as well as identity, politics, and his life journey from the Bronx to Georgia to Boston to Brown University to Iowa and eventually to Florida. In the essays, Shepherd reveals his personal struggles as well as the difficulty of his relationship with academic institutions and the literary world. He also displays his vast critical knowledge and broad reading practice.  Shepherd, comments Brown, “was a man who seemed to have read all the books you keep meaning to read.” Further, his insights on what we might call a queer literary canon are must-reads for those of us who study LGBTQ+ culture, past and present.

 “My aim,” writes Shepherd, “is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning, including always myself.”⁸Shepherd, “Why I Write,” Orpheus in the Bronx: Essay on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), (188­–198), 188.It seems to me that Shepherd’s “aim” exists in conversation with our queer cultural tradition: those of us in subsequent generations keeping “alive” some portion of the work of those who have gone before, many of whom were lost far too soon. When necessary, we rescue them from the dustbin of memory and place their stories and their works back on the central shelves of literary culture as Jericho Brown has done with The Selected Shepherd. Whether in our creative work or our work as editors, curators, scholars, documentarians or memory-makers, we claim places for our queer kin. As Brown writes, “we know poets don’t die. And if they do, people who love poetry can always resurrect them.” And in rescuing them, in resurrecting them, we rescue, always, ourselves. As Shepherd writes, no matter the challenges we face, we queer folk refuse to “forget beauty, however strange or difficult.”⁹Shepherd, “Why I Write,” 197.

Interview: Jericho Brown on Selecting Shepherd

Eric Solomon: Thank you, Jericho, for being here for this conversation in our Southern Spaces series “Queer Intersections.”  I’ve organized the questions in two parts. First, is thinking about your editing of The Selected Shepherd . And then perhaps we can talk about how Reginald Shepherd’s work helps us think about Jericho Brown.

In choosing poems for The Selected Shepherd, you present a generally equal number from each of his six collections, with a little bit more from Angel, Interrupted.  What were you looking for as you were editing?

Jericho Brown: When I got the opportunity to do this, I had somehow already started doing it in my head. It was the kind of thing, you know that phrase “comes to fruition”? it was the kind of thing that I don't even think I was aware of it until I was asked to do it. But I had started doing it somewhere in my brain as a Reginald Shepherd reader, as a person who teaches his poems, as somebody who's interested in his work, as someone who is actually taken by the ways in which his work could be uneven, even.

I don't love every Reginald poem. I don't love every poem by anybody with that many books. I had already started this system of ranking of this particular poet's work, which I think happened because there were so few Black queer poets on the national scene when I was first figuring out that I wanted to be a poet. There were so few that I could hold them all. I could read all of everything they said in every interview. I could read every book. I could read every essay that they had written. Now there are more than I can keep up with. But because there were so few, picking poems for me was at first a matter of going after what I already knew and trying to figure out which book -- was that in Otherhood? Was that in Wrong? Trying to remember exactly which book each poem is in. Rereading the books put me in a position where I could see what Reginald Sheppard's concerns were, or his obsessions, throughout his work. But more than that, it gave me the opportunity to see how he changed from book to book.

My goal in selecting the poems was to register those changes. I wasn't going to be able to make a book that only was the poems about nature, only was the poems about queer desire, or only poems about his mother. It was never thematic. It was always craft based. For instance, in Angel, Interrupted, he's very clearly trying to write a longer poem. In Otherhood, he's trying to figure out what to make of fragments. In Wrong, he's following up an influence through trying to see what would happen if Wallace Stevens wrote the queer love poem. All of that had a lot to do with how I went about selecting poems. As you mentioned, there are more poems from Angel, Interrupted and from Otherhood, but I just needed more poems to make it clear what those books were doing because they were doing it in a different way.

It was never sex I wanted, the grand etcetera

with a paper towel to wipe it up. I wanted him

 to talk to me about Rimbaud while

I sucked him off in the park, drunk

as any wooden boat and tasting of old cigarettes

and Bailey’s Irish Cream, my juvenilia. Don’t talk

with your mouth full. (In the clearing

at the bottom of the artificial hill, his two hands

covered every part of me until I couldn’t be seen,

a darkness past the burnt-out lamppost.

There's something about that kind of audacity. And the way that it includes him. It is indeed that sort of thirst, that primal energy that we associate with desire. But it's also this guy who likes to read Rimbaud. Which is a specific and a particular guy. It's also somebody who's very aware; most of that particular poem includes cruising outside and having sex outside. But also being very aware of the natural landscape that surrounds him as he is following that primal desire, that urge to make love. I'm really taken by that poem and by a lot of the work in Wrong. I would read these books like crazy. I loved Reginald Shepherd, and I would look forward to the next book.

When it became clear to me that he was dying, I felt a kind of sadness. Not because I knew the man. I felt a sadness because I wouldn't be able to see what he was going to pull off next. I thought he was brilliant, and I loved his prose, and I loved following his blog -- at the time that people had blogs. You could wake up and go to the internet and see a beautiful new essay about poetry from Reginald Shepherd, which always included names of poets you never heard of. And because you had never heard of them, you could look them up. You had more reading to do. In many ways, he was like my teacher. I had a lot of respect for him. And I'm glad Terrance Hayes and the editors at Pitt asked me to do it.

Shepherd and Myth

Solomon: I love your craft-based approach being one to register the changes across the six collections and to pull poems that spoke to those changes. And I was reflecting on my own reading of Shepherd. I first encountered his work in 2008, 2009 -- Wrong meant something to me as well. Reading it now, in the light of what you're saying about honesty and audacity and that kind of drive that you see with desire in the poem.

Before we get into thinking about the resonances between Shepherd's work and your own, speaking of those essays that he would post on his blog, he says something about myth, and I'm curious how you understand the role of myth as you were selecting Shepherd's work. He writes in 2007 that “myth can also be used to place one's own experiences, thoughts and feelings in a larger context, opening them up to realms beyond the individual, making them less purely personal.”¹⁰Reginald Shepherd, “Mythology in Poetry,” Reginald Shepherd’s Blog, August 17, 2007, https://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/08/mythology-in-poetry.html#:~:text=Myth%20can%20also%20be%20used,of%20the%20myth%20of%20Odysseus. How do you see myth in Shepherd's work? Is it speaking to that kind of audacity and that honesty? How is it functioning? As you were selecting poems, did you find yourself drawn to examples of the Adonis, Orpheus, and Narcissus figures?

Brown: No, he uses Greek myths so much that you wouldn't have to plan it out. It's going to happen. Any book you would do selecting Reginald Shepherd's poems, there are so many allusions to Greek mythology that you wouldn't be able to get around it. He had questions about this himself. If you check out the interview he did in Callaloo with Charles Rowell, he talks about that relationship to Greek myth, but also what that might suggest about his relationship to whiteness in general -- which I was really taken by.¹¹Charles Rowell and Reginald Shepherd, “An Interview with Reginald Shepherd,” Callaloo 21, no 2 (Spring 1998), 290–307.He was always honest, and even though he was participating in it, he would also question the ways in which what he thought of as beauty had been informed by whiteness, by white beauty standards. Of course that included not just who he was attracted to physically, but his reading and how that reading played out and how it worked out. And we're all doing that in some way or another. You can only write as wide as your reading is. If you have various kinds of cultures coming in, then that will come through.

People think differently about what writing is and how it's done. What the “we” means in a poem and what the “I” means. That's different considering who you're talking to. And if everything you read is informed by the same classical rendering, then you're going to have a lot of Greek myth in your poems and you're going to have a lot to question about why that Greek myth is there. What does it really mean? And many poets do it. Many poets of color, many African-American poets, even Indigenous poets are making use of, or identifying with, mythological figures from the Greeks. And part of the reason we do that is this understanding that this is something our readers will share. I think Shepherd was very serious about making use of Greek myth because he was very serious about beauty, and he understood that poems must be beautiful.

You said something earlier about the book Wrong, and it having meaning for you. Even the titles of Shepherd’s books are so tragic: Otherhood, Some Are Drowning, Wrong, Fata Morgana,  Red Clay Weather. It does not sound like a good time. Greek myths lend themselves to tragedy. And Reginald Shepherd, I think, needed a kind of, how do I say this, a backdrop or a landscape of tragedy on which his poems could grow and through which he could build artifice. The Greek myths are full of rapes. They're full of wars. I think it was very important to what he was doing, but I chose poems thinking, okay, in these poems, Reginald Shepherd is making a lot of leaps, a lot of what seems to be non-sequitur leaps. And Orpheus happens to be in here. But in this poem, in another book, for instance, things are very narrative, but Orpheus happens to be in here. So, Orpheus is going to be there.

Solomon: Myth is just a vehicle for him, one of the traditions that he's drawing from and reimagining throughout his work. I know that you were registering changes as you were selecting, but myth is, as you're saying, omnipresent. You couldn't get around it, but it wasn't a strategic thing as you were selecting the poems.

My next question is about the relation of Shepherd with your work. Certainly, the use of myth is a common thread, but I'm thinking in another interview you talked about how poets love flowers, and the use of flowers that connects your work with queer culture. As I was reliving these poems through your work with The Selected Shepherd, I noticed ways in which Jericho Brown and Reginald Shepherd's poetry were in conversation with each other. Have you reflected on these resonances? Either as you were selecting the poems, or post the volume coming out?

Brown: It's hard to tease out.

Solomon: Maybe it's easier for a scholar looking in.

Brown:  Yeah, I actually like hearing that. I like finding out what I'm doing and how people relate it to the poets that I'm influenced by. Because I always see things I've never seen before. I recently realized I’ve been reading this poem by Shepherd for years -- I can't think of what poem it is -- but there's a certain kind of phrasing that he uses that I use toward the end of a poem of mine called “Say Thank You, Say I'm Sorry.”  As I was reading on a podcast, I'm like, “Oh, I stole that syntax.” I don’t use the same words. I realized there's a lot about my work in terms of syntax that I probably learned from Shepherd.

There are other poets who helped with this, but Shepherd helped me realize that what was most important about my writing would be how singular it was, or is. That I had to somehow either be myself or create a version of my self, and that had to be the speaker of my poems. The way Jericho Brown makes use of sentences. What I sound like in a poem has to be only what I sound like in a poem. So, part of what Shepherd does for me, reading his work through and through, is you realize nobody else wrote these poems.

No one could have written a book like Wrong but Reginald Shepherd. No one could have written “My Mother Was No White Dove,” or “Semantics at Four P.M.” but Reginald Shepherd. And I think he is the person who led me to understand that. It’s like when musical artists appear on the radio, I know its them. The deejay at the radio doesn't have to say “here's the new song by . . . .” I just know, because I've been listening to music, and I know what they sound like. There's really never a question when Mary J. Blige comes. And I figured out through Shepherd that in my own work, when people are reading a Jericho Brown poem, they need to be like, is that Jericho Brown?

So, what does that mean about a consistency of heart, a consistency of intellect, of line, of phrasing, of a kind of experimentation? Which I think was his goal. How do I continue to question myself and to challenge my idea about what a poem is and yet remain who I am throughout the poem? How is it still me? And obviously “me” changes and grows. And yet there's a way that when we look at that last book and we look at that first book by Reginald Shepherd, we can see that it's the same guy, but it's so different. That last book is so different from anything else he's written mostly because he wrote it on his deathbed. He was dying when he was finishing that book. He didn't even get to put the book in order. His partner, Robert Philen, ordered it, but it's all Shepherd’s poems. Which is why there's so many in that last book. I kind of got frustrated because there's so many very long poems, one right after another. And I'm like, “Bro, Shepherd wouldn't have done that.”  [laughter] Those long prose poems. But I also noticed maybe he would have done it because it was his first time writing prose poems. I'm fascinated by what those poems yield.

Solomon: Yeah. You're comparing what you learned from Shepherd, that sense of voice, with your own. It is a Jericho Brown poem. It is Reginald Shepherd poem. That can be consistent even if, as you said, the experience of selecting these poems was to track the way he changed in terms of his craft across the six collections. Even though it's changing, there's always a sense that when you read a Reginald Shepherd poem, you know it’s him. And I will say that's also true of a Jericho Brown poem.

Brown: Aw. [laughter] Thanks Eric.

Shepherd's Queer Eros

Solomon: You're welcome. Another thing that I notice as someone who considers myself to be a queer cultural historian, I'm always down for seeing tongue-in-cheek play with the queer community or, “mock” is not quite the right word, but just send us up a little bit. Remind us not to take ourselves too seriously. I think Shepherd does something like that in “The God's at Three A.M." Or where you do it in your poem “Host” which, I think is subversive; it has a message. It's not just pure satire, but it is reminding us as queer people to be better to one another.

Brown: Yeah. To be better to one another is interesting. I never knew I wrote that. But I'm happy to hear it. I'm not against hearing that. I think what attracts me to those poems that you're talking about by Shepherd and by any queer writer, is the same thing that attracts me to poems that I'm attracted to by certain Black writers, whether they are queer or not. Because they're “in-house.” There's a way that you can read Shepherd’s “The Gods” and what you and I see in that poem we know other people are just not going to see. Because we've actually been to that bar. [laughter] And we understand that we could go to any city in America and still go to that bar and see those characters. [laughter] And we can see ourselves. Like, who am I in this poem? And yeah, that’s what is meant in a poem by me, like “Host.” Obviously, there's a reader who won't have had that experience, and they're sort of observing it from the outside, and maybe even identifying with it, but in a different way. It's the same thing as when, Future has this lyric where he says, “Y'all move that dope.” And I'm always amazed. When that song was such a huge song, every time I went to a club, every time I turned on the radio, I would hear that song. And I remember thinking, none of these people dancing to this song are drug dealers. [laughter]

Solomon: Were they “in the know”?

Brown: Yeah, like if I was really moving dope, that song probably had a certain kind of meaning to me when it came out, but when I'm listening to this song, I'm just thinking about grading papers. [laughter] I'm not trying to move dope. I'm just trying to stay up late enough to finish a poem.

I do think some things you can extrapolate or translate beyond that immediate in-house audience, but having an in-house audience I think is the actual backbone to voice. If we're having a conversation about Reginald Shepherd, we're talking about a poet who was always willing to be himself, to always have his own experiences in his poems. And so, sneaking around to make love outside, which I think queer people actually know less about than they used to.

Solomon: I agree.

Brown: But sneaking around to make love outside is an in-house conversation. It can translate. It can extrapolate to anybody sneaking around to do anything. But my experience reading those poems is “Oh, there I am.” Thank you, Reginald Shepherd, for writing this thing about yourself that shows that I'm not crazy, that shows that I exist.

Solomon: And that you're not alone.

Brown:  Exactly.

Solomon: A whole history of what we might call cruising.

Brown: Yeah, that I miss. Yeah. [laughter] A whole history of cruising.

Solomon: That some people don't think we need anymore, right?

Brown: Yes. Well, I mean, maybe that's not what this interview is about, so I'll let that go. I don't know if people think we need that anymore. I just know you can meet a guy online and whatever happens from that happens. And you can meet a guy at the grocery store. And if you meet a guy at the grocery store, my personal history has shown that there were more options for what I could do with the guy and what the guy could do with me. When I meet a guy online, it's either I have to make love to you now or marry you? [laughter]

Solomon: There aren’t as many options ... And I love that Shepherd invites us to have this kind of conversation about his work.

Brown: Yeah, exactly.

Solomon: In a way that if I were someone different, if you were someone different, and we were sitting here talking about Reginald Shepherd, maybe we wouldn't be talking about “The God's at Three A.M .” The idea of cruising that you mentioned. I think that's beautiful that his work allows for all these entry points.

Brown: He would love that. And I think that we should also mention that this is all happening for Shepherd from his first book onward at a time when he is in those anthologies with Joseph Beam and Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill -- who also heavily used Greek myth. But there's no mixing up Hemphill and Shepherd. Among Black queer writers, even Carl Phillips at the time, there is this idea: we are going to say what our actual experience is in our poems, and we are not coding it. The code will be the fact that we reach out to you, Jericho, in that library when you're nineteen years old. In this library, actually, which is where I found Essex Hemphill’s poems.

Solomon: What you're saying reminds me of Assotto Saint’s “Why I Write”  where he says (and I’m paraphrasing) we have an obligation to not file away our experiences in a desk drawer. I think that is very much clear in Shepherd's work and in your work and in Hemphill, and Riggs, and the people that you're mentioning.

Shepherd and the Natural World

You write in the Introduction to The Selected Shepherd, about framing his work around three primary concerns: 1) an understanding of the natural world as endangered; 2) his grief over the death of his mother when he was fourteen, and 3) his desire for the white male body and self-identification as a “snow queen,” and his processing of what this desire might mean.

Can you talk about the way Shepherd “reflects on the beauty of the natural world through an understanding of that world as endangered.” How did his thinking change from Some Are Drowning to Red Clay Weather? Or was it always the natural world as under threat? Did you notice different nuances as you were moving through?

Brown: I think that maybe the one thing Shepherd would have in common with a poet like Mary Oliver is this idea that you protect and conserve the natural world not because of conservation, not because of its resources, but because it is holy. Every image from the environment is always a reason to be excited about nature. But we understand in many of the poems that that which we should be excited about could end.

For me, coming up with these concerns first had to do with separating what is a concern or a subject from that which is artifice. Greek mythology is not a subject, it’s an artifice. He's not writing a poem about the Greek myths. He's making use of classical allusion in order to say something about these other things.

Poets have to use what they have. And what we do have is a bunch of trees, flowers, and grass. We have the sky. We got some dirt. Those things seem to have already been here. They seem to have some capacity to be here if you get rid of us. And I think that particular concern is also the reason why poets can tell you the name of every flower. You just don't know what every flower looks like. You wouldn't be able to actually point to a narcissus. [laughter].

Because you read that part of the intro, I'll read what I say right after that, which I think deals with that, that first concern:

In each book, Shepherd reflects the beauty of the natural world through an understanding of that world as endangered. In his first book, Some Are Drowning, this endangerment appears in direct proportion to the fact of whiteness. And then I quote, “My true love's eyes / are nothing like my own, are bland as the suburban lawn / he mows on a summer Sunday afternoon, backyard / cookout with domesticated dog (And the beef cattle / graze x world? And the deforestation proceeds by x miles / per minute?).”

And that endangerment status matters all the more as environmental elements often get presented as characters with agency. Here are a few lines from “Surface Effects in Summer Wind”  from Wrong:

I'm learning to remember the sound 

days make: one sky disdaining the idea

of clouds, sunlight surviving

its centrifuge, breeze keeping blessed September

at bay.

Notice September is what's at bay. Then in the same poem a few lines later, he writes:

Midnight,

look at the things I've done

in your name, in my dark, walking out

into the street that changes nothing

Midnight gets called on and talked to directly. September gets held at bay. That which you think of as the natural occurrence, the natural world, has a mind and a life of its own. And the speaker in Shepherd's poems understands that and is always speaking directly to that mind and that life of the natural world.

Solomon: So, there's a sense of that agency of the natural world and that agency being under threat by human actions.

The Day the 'World Ended': Shepherd's Perpetual Return

The second concern is from the very first page of Some Are Drowning to the very last page of Red Clay Weather. It’s everywhere in his poetry. It calls to mind other poets who have talked about what it means to have that sort of exigence—what motivates you to write; what, in many instances, traumatically or tragically, happened that somehow gave you the engine to write. In his poetry and essays, Shepherd writes constantly about – and is processing -- the grief over the death of his mother. In the poem “Vampires,”  for example, which you select, he writes “a song like every song for the dead” or in “For My Mother in Lieu of Mourning,”  which is in Fata Morgana: “Would you have frozen in these lines? You were their possibility: now love must find another shape.”  Really powerfully returning over and over again to what it was like to lose his mother when he was fourteen years old.

I know you spoke with Natasha Trethewey in 2010 in Southern Spaces, and I think about hearing Trethewey speak about that existential wound, the murder of her mother, and also at such a young age. And Shepherd speaking in an essay that he would publish, talking about the day “the world ended” on March 31st, 1978, which was the day of his mother's death.¹²Reginald Shepherd, “To Make Me Who I Am,” Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 22. Two questions here. One, how did you live with the loss of Shepherd's mother in these poems as you were reading them? How did that return for you? And then the second question is more for Jericho Brown: does that sense of a wound that writers write from jive with you? Does that make sense to you? What was it like living with that concern that you identify in Shepherd's work?

Brown: I just think it's his best work. I think it's his most beautiful poems. I think when his mother comes into a poem, I'm probably going to like the poem. I think that she was his way into and back to blackness. She was a specter to him. There's a way that she haunted him, and therefore, blackness haunted him. Whenever he talks about music in his work, his mother's coming up. If Sam Cooke, Donny Hathaway, or Otis Redding is in the poem, then his mother's in the poem. Also, the color black itself seems to always appear in a poem where his mother appears, if not talking about Black people, just the fact of a black shirt or a black shoe. I think it's also beautiful because it's not Hallmark washed. It's not a Mother’s Day card. The relationship between the speaker and his mother in these poems is fraught. There's fear as well as love. There's regret. There's also a calling out of neglect in some cases. Reginald Shepherd used to write that his mother knew that if she gave him a book, he would be occupied for the duration of the time that it took him to read the book. So, she could do whatever she wanted. She went through the trouble of making sure he was schooled at the best possible places, in spite of the fact that she was impoverished. He grew up until he was fifteen in the projects, in the Bronx. He has poems about that. I'll give a couple of examples.

I’ll start with this one as it will give me an opportunity to talk about some of the things in Shepherd's work that I'm really interested in.

“My Mother Dated Otis Redding” 

My mother is laughing in the hallway with her friends I don’t like much, maybe the numbers runner who gives me dollars to go see movies while they fuck, a mattress propped in the doorway where there’s no door. I know what’s “fuck,” and “dick,” and “pussy.” They’re “tipsy,” she says, they’re having a good time. “Don’t I deserve a good time now and then?” I’m looking through the telescope I just got from a catalogue, while they break out the Tanqueray; I don’t know what that is. They’re putting on some records, it’s 1970, Nixon’s president; there’s a dock in one song and I don’t know how to whistle, but I know what’s a dock, and a bay. There aren’t many stars because of the streetlights, it’s the Bronx, the singer sounds sad, he’s dead. My mother says, “You know, I went to high school with him, back in Macon,” and everybody says “I’ll bet,” and she laughs. I wish I was his son, I wish they’d all go home. It’s late and I just want to go to bed, but she just wants to have a good time. I turn my telescope on the Puerto Rican couple fighting, kissing in a window across the concrete courtyard, three parrots escaped from the loading dock freezing in a trash tree, it’s November, neighborhood kids throwing rocks at each other from bicycles, my mother standing in the hallway with a paper cup of Tanqueray, or lying in the hallway in a pool of her own shit.

That's a poem that's hard on the mother, but also interested in what the mother affords. The mother affords this telescope. The mother affords an awareness of stars. The mother affords an awareness of the speaker's neighbors, of other cultures. The mother also affords this way into Otis Redding's history and music. And then the poem is also political in this way that I think might be in-house for Shepherd. He mentions Nixon; he mentions 1970. What many people don't know is that they would build these projects very purposely without doors in the apartments; you wouldn't have a door on a closet, or a door on a bathroom, or door dividing your bedroom from a hallway. And that was designed to take the idea of deserving privacy out of the minds of people who had to live in the projects. That was real. That was on purpose.

So, part of what he's getting at here goes beyond the mother. And I think what I learned from that poem has to do with how no matter what you start with, the poem's got to include everything. It's got to reach out into the world and somehow be about more than just whatever its obvious subject is.

Here's another poem where Shepherd is talking about his mom:

“My Mother Was No White Dove” 

My Mother Was No White Dove no dove at all, coo-rooing through the dusk and foraging for small seeds My mother was the clouded-over night a moon swims through, the dark against which stars switch themselves on, so many already dead by now (stars switch themselves off and are my mother, she was never so celestial, so clearly seen) My mother was the murderous flight of crows stilled, black plumage gleaming among black branches, taken for nocturnal leaves, the difference between two darks: a cacophony of needs in the bare tree silhouette, a flight of feathers, scattering black. She was the night streetlights oppose (perch for the crows, their purchase on sight), obscure bruise across the sky making up names for rain My mother always falling was never snow, no kind of bird, pigeon or crow ...

Which I think is also a beautiful poem because it allows his mother to be a person. And there's a way that when we think about poems --  we found this out during the Iraq War -- the way Laura Bush thinks about poems is that is that they're all sweet. And that's not what poems are. I'm sorry to tell you. So, there's this way we get his mom being his mom, but also a human being, which I really love. Saying your mother is no white dove is a way also of calling to the beauty of one's mother's blackness.

Beautiful White Men: Shepherd's Desire

Solomon:  I love hearing you read it. Hearing the rhythm and the way in which it was constructed. One of the things that stood out to me as you read it was the use of the word “snow,” which for readers of Shepherd’s, there's a lot of use of the word snow -- allusion, metaphor, imagery -- throughout his collections, throughout his poetry. And I wonder if this is a convenient segue, or too heavy-handed, but I am curious to get to the last concern that you identify, across his poetry, which is perhaps the most controversial still. I know it was divisive for some readers during Shepherd's lifetime. And that’s his self-identification as a “snow queen.” And where readers today might land. I am thinking about, Shepherd's attraction, veneration, of the white male body.

He writes in the 1986 essay “On Not Being White”: “I write about men, and most of them are white. And I write about white men, and most of them are beautiful. So, I write about beautiful white men.”¹³ Reginald Shepherd, “On Not Being White,” in In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, ed. Joseph Beam (Washington DC: Redbone Press, 1986), 30. You can see that in his poems. Do you think that lands differently in 2024? Has anything changed in thinking about Shepherd’s potentially divisive, or confusing, as you put it in your Introduction, presentation of himself.

Brown:  I don't know if it's any different. I don't know why, but I guess I just never cared. [laughter] I mean, I do care, but only intellectually. I don't get it, but I don't need to either. Even Shepherd didn't get it. I mean, he says so; he says this is weird. [laughter] There is a poem where he's looking at a very attractive Black guy reading a book and saying, what's wrong with me that I'm not attracted to you? Why not you? You're reading a book. It seems like an admission that the problem that Shepherd has is with himself, with his own idea of his own beauty or possibility for the beauty of blackness. And to be quite honest, I only feel sorry about that.

But all emotions and all ideas are welcome to be expressed in poetry. Only the Black poet can actually write about Black self-loathing that is the result of whiteness. And that's a real thing among us. And not just in the United States. I went to Nigeria a few months ago [laughter] and was just fascinated by how many blonde wigs there were. We've decided something about  blonde hair that in and of itself is supposed to have a meaning toward what we think of as beautiful.

So, I don't trip about that from Shepherd. And no shade, but you know these writers who call themselves Black pessimists who are all married to white people, maybe I haven't read enough of it, but I don't see the part of their work where they're like, why is my wife white if I care about Black people so much?

Solomon:  So, at least there's a self-reflection that’s happening in Shepherd.

Brown: Yeah.  I'm much more attracted to that than I would be attracted to somebody participating in that without understanding that's what they are participating in. There's an awareness. It’s like when I vote Democrat. Like I'm not crazy. I'm not stupid. I also would like to at least have a home to come to. Like, I don't want, like, no shade, but I don't want porn to be illegal. So, I'm not interested in project 2025. And I'm voting for her, but I don't think of Kamala Harris as some kind of freedom fighter or some kind of rebel. I don't think that that is inherent in the fact of her blackness, either.

So, these poems are in the book because they come up so much and that's what he was interested in. And I am so happy that they're there because I would love to see critics and scholars on race and on whiteness -- fields that did not exist during Shepherd's time -- take these poems up.

Solomon: There's a complexity in these poems and in his essays that should lead to studying Shepherd’s approach to the white male body. His will to process and understand.

Brown: He also probably felt, given what was happening among Black queer writers at the time, a bit of a pariah. But it's not like he's the only Black queer person dating white guys. I think him feeling like a bit of a pariah has to do with him expressing it through his poems. When something comes up in a poem, it ends up identifying you like that's who you are. I think we might not be friends with, but we're friends with somebody who's friends with, a Black guy who only dates white people. [laughter]

Solomon: If you think about it, Shepherd publishing in the 90s into the 2000s, the post- In the Life  generation, Joseph Beam and the Black man loving Black man is the revolutionary act of the 80s, there is a sense that he is publishing as a poet in contrast to those other writers and poets.

Brown: Yeah. The thing about Shepherd that makes him different is his move that, okay, you call me out about this thing. All right. So that's where I'm going. That's what I'm going to do in this next whole book. We got to see how much of that thing I am. And his way of doing things was put the poems first. And, if that's the experience he had for his poems, that's what was going to be in the poems. I'm really fascinated by that and even envious to some extent. Poets are the people who have to say the brave thing. Who have to say the thing that is true in spite of the fact that nobody else seems to be saying it. Even if that truth makes us look bad.

Solomon: Or is uncomfortable.

Brown: Yeah. And I never felt that I was doing that in my work as much as I feel it now.  I feel like, “Oh, damn, I really don't want to talk about this.”  I would actually rather not say this in a poem, because once I do, it becomes who I am. You can say this controversial thing in a poem, in Reginald Shepherd's case, he would say in poems that he wanted to suck white cock, which, I've never said it in my life, but -- and he understood this -- after that, you forget that that same person might want a sandwich too, might want a bowl of cereal, might like watching “Charlie's Angels,” might prefer orange to red. [laughter] There's a whole world involved with being a human being. And yet poets have to deal with the fact that once we put it on the page, we understand we will be identified that way, and in many ways dehumanized for that identification. So, Shepherd is an opportunity for me to not dehumanize somebody. But I don't get it. I don't like it, but I like him. I can still be interested in him, even if I'm not interested in that particular facet. And I as I said before, I think that that interest is allowed because he's aware.

From Shepherd to Brown

Solomon: So next is a series of questions that I teased up about how Shepherd can help us think about your work, poetic philosophy, and approach.

In an essay, “To Make Me Who I Am,” Shepherd writes about the importance of certain kinds of music being present in his poetry. For instance, in relationship to his mother as you mentioned. He adds, “Patti Smith was my first image of what a poet might be. She turned social ostracism, into rebellious outsider-hood, loneliness into proud isolation from the uncomprehending mass.” Do you have a Patti Smith? When you think about Jericho Brown before he was Jericho Brown? Was there a person who served as some type of image for you of what a poet might be?

Brown: I think that's a great question. There were always Black poets that I knew about as a kid growing up. I'm always fascinated about people not having an awareness of poetry. I don't know, it's because of the time that I grew up in. I don't know if it's because of what the Black church was then and how it's different now. I learned who Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes were in church. My idea of a poet were the poets. It is true that when I was a kid listening to Stevie Wonder, I felt like, “Oh, wow, this is poetry!”

I guess the big poet, for me, might be the same as the big poet for a whole bunch of other people. And that's Langston Hughes. Yeah. He seemed to me when I was a kid a kind of unifying force. I was always taken by the fact that the poems are so musical. I loved, and still to this day love, his particularly short poems: “My Friend,” “Island,” “Suicide Note.” He was amazing at creating moments of sublimity. These poems are sublime. When he's good, he's just so good. I don't like “Make America Great Again” or when he goes long. I always thought of him as The Poet because he was given to me as the poet most aware of his people. You know, the self that was made up of many selves; the I that understands there's a we. Later, the more I read his poems, I was taken that he always seemed to be reaching outside of himself.

Hughes was that poet for me. He was the first poet made accessible to me, and I knew when I got him I was getting poems. I never felt locked out of anything. I will also add, I understand people's idea of poetry as a marginal literature. But I didn't understand that at all when I was a kid. I thought poetry was the literature. To this day, I have questions about it. I think there are more poems sitting on people's refrigerators and in their mirrors above their dressers, and right by their door so that they can read them as they walk out, or inside the visor of their car. I think there are more poems in people's lives than there are novels. So, I don't know why we're so marginal. [laughter]

Solomon: Yeah. I wouldn’t argue that.

Brown: Shepherd also in his definition of Patti Smith as that beginning is thinking about how to make use of all the ways that he has been hurt, all the ways that he has been oppressed, both personally and as a Black queer person, and turning that into something else. And part of what he's saying is that Patti Smith was an example of that. I don't think I was self-conscious enough or aware enough as a young person that that was indeed my lot in life. Because I didn't feel that way then, that's not what my need of a poet was.  

I liked Sylvia Plath too when I was a kid. I liked Anne Sexton. I liked Gwendolyn Brooks a whole lot. I thought she was amazing.  And I mentioned Stevie Wonder. Very early on, Wonder gave me the idea that art could be a contribution to the culture; that you can make a feeling and change the entire culture. I love that. In particular, thinking about blackness. We are having that happening right now with an artist like Kendrick Lamar. Where the music is informing the way the people think about themselves. Which means that blackness, yet again, gets expanded.

So, my idea of what a poem is, and what I do when I write one, is to expand that which is expansive. I do the work of showing you just how big it can be; that it can include all these other things -- definitely Black culture, definitely queer culture, but also the wide American culture.

Identity and Poetry

Solomon: Art has the capacity to expand and not collapse any of our identities. One of the fascinating things for me as a reader of Shepherd's essays is the fact that Orpheus in the Bronx is subtitled Essays On Identity Politics and the Freedom of Poetry and he's constantly ruminating on what identity is and how it makes its way into his poetry or not. And I see some connections here. He states in one interview, “I prefer to call myself a writer who is gay and Black, or a writer who is Black and gay, and to call myself a gay Black writer. I would give the priority to me being a writer. And I certainly think that an engine of my writing is my experience of blackness, my experience of gayness, of marginality, and exclusion. But that doesn't mean that the writing arising from that experience is wholly determined by that experience.”¹⁴Charles Rowell and Reginald Shepherd, “An Interview with Reginald Shepherd,” Callaloo 21, no 2 (Spring 1998), 294.

And Shepherd writes in “The Others’ Other”  in a similar way: “I have always intensely disliked what I call identity poetics, the use of poetry as a means to assert or claim social identity.”

He continually is thinking through this in his essays: what is the role of identity or “identity politics” in the making and the crafting of a poem. And I really like what you've said before about learning to write about race and sexuality and blackness, in your words, “as if they are givens” and not as if you're “exposing or exposed.”¹⁵Marian Kaufman, “Interview with Jericho Brown,” Bayou Magazine, https://bayoumagazine.org/interview-with-jericho-brown/.] I see connections between what Shepherd wrote and what you’ve written. But I also see how they're different. Do you still feel that the priority here is on the writing? What role does politics play in the composition of a Jericho Brown poem?

Brown: I think Shepherd and I were going about this probably the same way, but I also think the difference is that he's worried about bad poems, and I'm not worried about bad poems. People get so frustrated. I mean, I get it. When a really bad book wins a really big prize, you're worried about poetry.  [laughter] But if we're doing the immortal thing, let the thing be immortal. It'll work out. It'll happen. But people get really --  and I think Shepherd could have too -- bogged down in the present moment; and in like, oh, why is this a poem? Because you said you were Black three times in it?

I kind of like the idea that maybe a poem is a poem because you say “Black” three times in it. [laughter] I don't care. [laughter] One of the wonderful things about having served on the National Book Award jury was seeing how many poets that I love and admire and respect approached poetry. Even if I don't like them anymore, [laughter] I still think they're poets. They are people with a lot of reading under their belts. I very distinctly remember being on that jury and seeing people bring up books that I thought were objectively bad. But they liked that mess, and with all their reading history, thought those were great poems. And then the opposite would happen. I'd be like, “Here's this book that's really good.” And they'd be like, “Jericho, no, not that book.” As long as I'm aware of that, I'm not really worried.

I think everything comes out. People get what they need. It's important that we get to hear from as many poets as possible so that we know people are getting what they need. But I also think if something doesn't turn me on, I'm not defensive enough to write an essay. Other people are, and I'm glad they're out there. There are people who are meant for that: something turns you off, you write an essay, go for it. And people talk about it on Twitter [X]. I'm down. Go for it. I love it. Lore, lore. I'm always for more lore. But I just don't get into it because it doesn't fuel my own writing.

My writing, on the other hand, can be fueled by disagreement. I can see someone's poetics being in disagreement with my poetics and my poems can prove them wrong. [laughter] Through craft, through the fact of the poem, but not in a way where I'm calling him on the phone and cussing them out -- which I actually would like better.

Maybe I'm going too far in this question, but I'm always amazed by how people get mad at folks in a community as small as Poetry Land. Where you could just call them. Like if there's a mix up, call me. You don't have to write an essay because you read something wrong. You can send me a DM. Send me an email. Text me.

I think everything goes in a poem and that my job when I'm writing a poem is to allow whatever falls into it to fall into it. And if I'm allowing everything to fall into it, then all that I know will fall into it. Orpheus might be there. Kendrick Lamar might be too. And an experience from when I was sixteen and unhappy might be in there, and an experience from when I was fourteen and happy might be all in the same poem.

And I think that's what Shepherd believes. But I think instead of him saying that he's saying something that puts him on the defensive about identity politics, which I don't get into just because I don't know what that means. And every time I try to define it, every time I look it up, every time I talk to people about it, nobody seems to agree about what identity politics means.

And the other thing I don't know that I see people saying a lot lately is race baiting. I don't know what race baiting means. And I clearly don't need to know to make my work happen. I think poems are political. I don't think there's any way around that. I haven't read the poem that is not. I think people are too. I think lives are. And I think poems are living things. When I'm working on a poem, I'm much more interested in the line, and much more interested in rhyme, and the sounds of things, and the construction of the sentences themselves than I am in what the sentences say. I figure out what the sentences say down in revision land. But when I'm in first draft land, I don't care about that stuff. Then when I'm revising the poem, I'm revising based on a system of sentences and sounds and line and rhyme and meter.

Solomon: There's a sense that you're in agreement with Shepherd on the line itself being the writer constructing the poem. Then these other things may be brought to bear on it in revision or as it’s received in the world. I think that that's powerful. Shepherd is writing these essays in a moment that is different than our moment. During the culture wars of the 90s into the early 2000s, there was this need to define, maybe more so than now in what we might call our queerer moment, when it comes to thinking about identity.

Paying it Forward

One of the things that you mentioned earlier and that I find to be a powerful ethic in Shepherd's work, especially some of his essays, has to do with going to Shepherd to find poets that you should know about. He was always uplifting and amplifying all kinds of different, lesser known, or marginalized poets. That was something that he was committed to: good work getting out there.  You've returned to Shepherd here, in the ethic of bringing him to readers today. Are there poets that we should be reading and be talking more about?

Brown: I like everybody, so it's always hard for me. I really do. Nobody believes me, but I do. When I don't like a poet, it's probably because had a run in with them. [laughter] There are poets I don't like. I mean, suddenly your work can get bad to me if you've been disrespectful to me or my students. Or maybe I'm not into it. There aren't a lot of poems out there that I dislike; there are poems that I'm neutral about -- most poems. Most poems happen and I'm like, okay, well moving on. I get Poem a Day, like everybody else and I read poems every day. And sometimes I’m like, ”Oh, God, I gotta send this poem to my ten friends.” And sometimes I'm like, “Okay, girl. Well, you got in there. Go on, go with your bad self.”

So, I like Taylor Johnson, and I think everybody should be reading his work. And I'll stop there.

Solomon: Inevitably someone's going to feel left out.

Brown: Well, it's not just about feeling left out. But there was this other question you had here just about queer poets. I like Brian Teare, Randall Mann, James Allen Hall, Aaron Smith, Danez Smith, Philip B Williams. All of those folks are like the queer men.  I like Ellen Bass. I have never disliked a poet whose first name is Robert: Robert Creeley, Robert Frost. I definitely like Robert Duncan. Robert Lowell.

For me, poets write the Bible. You have this book, and what? You don’t like a part of it? [laughter]  You don't like Second Thessalonians? You don't you don't like Acts? Which gospel do you not like? You might like some things more than others. People love Song of Solomon because they see it as a love poem. People like any scripture where Jonathan comes up because they like to think about David having a good time.  I just think poetry is in and of itself, actually attractive, likable, interesting, complex, a living thing. I like a lot of poets who I think I get on their nerves.

I like Kim Addonizio. I've always liked Terrance Hayes's work. Jeffrey McDaniel. And there are some people whose work I don't get into, but that's just because I don't get into it.

Solomon:  And we don't have to name them, right?

Brown: No, I mean, I could. if you want me to say people I don't like, I could do that, too. We could gossip. [laughter] We could talk about who we ought to get rid of. Because they're out there, too. I'm like, oh my God, how is this person still working? You know? That's what y'all doing? I like a lot of very different things. It's easier for me when I'm dealing with students to make recommendations because I've seen their work and I'm like, “Oh, you should read this or that poem.”  Everybody's hard on Mary Oliver, but she wrote “The Summer Day.” It's a great poem. Y'all can get crazy if you want. And Sharon Olds wrote “May 1968.” It’s a great poem. You can wear her out all you want. She gave us that. I love Yusef Komunyakaa. If you live in Arkansas and your name is Jeffrey, I probably think you're a great poet. You could spell that “Geo,” “Gef,” “Jeff,” however you get to do. I like a lot of poets because I read a lot of poetry. [laughter]

Solomon: I like finding a sense of connection or commonality with particular poets based upon a student's work. That's how I was introduced to Reginald Shepherd for the first time: someone said, “I see something in your work, read this poet.”  

Brown: I like Catherine Barnett. I like Deborah Landau. I generally like poets name Catherine.  All poets named Marie or Mary are always good. Mary Shivers. Marie Howe. [laughter]

I'm using that to show that you can't, you can't narrow it down. it is better to create a family tree for yourself. And that includes figuring out who you do love. When you figure out who you love, figuring out who they love. If you can do that, that's a reading life. You can read for the rest of your life that way.

I didn't even say Lucille Clifton's name.  Lucille Clifton is my favorite poet. Second to her is probably Louise Glück. She's good. Leave her alone.

Poetry, Theory, Resilience

Solomon: Those of us who've spent time with Shepherd know that he's constantly invoking names like Adorno, Benjamin, Lacan. And he has written, “Unlike many poets, I have never been afraid of theory.” You're a poet, a public intellectual, a teacher. What role does theory play in your creative life? In your intellectual life? Is it something that you begin with? He says it's a “challenge and incitement” for him.¹⁶Shepherd, “To Make Me Who I Am,” 31.

Brown: I generally like to read anything that feels like it wants to be read. Anything from novels to criticism to theory to poetry that makes me feel there's an urgency behind it. Sure, I went to graduate school, got a PhD, so I've read these people. Most recently Bettina Judd, a theorist whose work has been so helpful to me. People get frustrated with theorists because they speak abstractly, in the air. And that seems sometimes contradictory to the impulse of poetry to speak on the ground and in images and that which is concrete.

Poets give often the singular situation in order to show that which is common, or known among us. Whereas theorists are doing this other thing where they want to catch the common situation, and then you get to apply it to your individual situation. What I've most recently learned from a writer like Judd has to do with maybe the first question you asked which was about the wound and whether or not I write from it. And maybe I didn't answer that question. Maybe I avoided it.

I think the hardest thing about writing for me has to do with the fact that much of where my earlier writing came from I have healed, or am trying to heal. And knowing that, I am interested in what part of my life, in my personality, only exists because of that wound or because of those wounds. And I want to heal that too. If there is something in me that is a descendant of the abuse I got at the hands of my father, I don't want that thing in me anymore. And some of that I won't be able to get rid of, and it's not like it's bad. I'm like the best friend anybody can have because I am the person who looks forward to cussing people out on somebody else's behalf. But I was never a person that could do that for myself until recently. That's because I always saw myself as a person in a family. And in the family where I grew up, you take care of everybody else, but you don't take care of yourself.

I think that's the case, not just for me. I think it's for my sister. I think it's for my mom. There's this sense that your life is about other people and that you put your life on the backburner, and that's the right thing to do. I just ain’t that person no more. And I don't want to be that person. And so, if I'm not that person, where are my poems coming from? That person wrote Please. So where are my poems going to come from if they're not coming from that wound? And what I've learned from Judd's work is that my present feeling, my present way of being will always have something from which I can pull a poem.

Solomon: It's a powerful reorientation. It makes me think of Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? I've been thinking with that book by Kevin Brazil. He's questioning why we return to certain kinds of narratives as queer culture. Why we're reproducing certain kinds of stories about loss, about the AIDS dead, for example. And that seems to be even for non queer writers, that's how they imagined queer life. One of the things he talks about is how difficult that reorientation is -- to become someone who can write from a place that's not still dealing with that wound in the same way. You're saying healing, which I think is really powerful. It's not healed. It’s that process. So, I look forward to seeing what you write from this space.

Brown: Me too. Yeah.

About the Authors

Jericho Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

Eric Solomon is an instructor of English and affiliate faculty with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is editor of the “Queer Intersections” series with the journal Southern Spaces; chair of the LGBTQ+ Historic Preservation Advisory Committee with Historic Atlanta; and serves as cultural historian with the Mayor’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Board for the City of Atlanta. In 2021, Solomon launched The #TUOR Project, a digital story tour of sites of importance in Atlanta’s queer past. 

Cover Image Attribution

Reginald Shepherd collage created by and courtesy of Eric Solomon, 2024.

Introduction

In 2003, Raymond Mohl’s description of the “latinization” of the late twentieth century US South (the “Nuevo New South”) helped set the stage for an expanding body of cross-disciplinary research on Latinx migration, settlement, and everyday experiences.¹Raymond Mohl, “Globalization, Latinization, and the Nuevo New South,” Journal of American Ethnic History 22, no. 4 (2003): 31–66. While scholarly writing such as Mohl’s documenting this demographic shift offered important insights into the labor and settlement experiences of migrants, there was often little work done to use the geographical imaginary of a “Nuevo South” critically. Rather, as historian Perla Guerrero would later write: “in many instances the term ‘Nuevo South’ is used as if it were self-explanatory, or, in some of the more egregious cases, the word ‘nuevo’ is used simply in an exoticizing manner—Latinas/os are moving to the South and they speak Spanish, so we can now refer to the South as the ‘Nuevo South.’”²Perla Guerrero, Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 8. Guerrero makes a compelling argument for the use of “Nuevo South” as an important political economy and historical framework for understanding racial formations. As the field has continued to grow, however, new works are bringing a critical and longer historical perspective to southern Latinx populations, communities, and experiences. This includes two recent books by historians Cecilia Márquez—Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (2023)—and Sarah McNamara—Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South (2023).

Importantly, the idea of “southern” Latinx history being a new phenomenon is not a driving force in either book. Rather, these works contribute a longer understanding of the Latinx migrations to/through US southern spaces that have contributed to shaping racial hierarchies, labor landscapes, and diverse migrant communities. As two books concerned with individual and collective experiences within a shifting racial hierarchy, Making the Latino South and Ybor City significantly historicize and spatialize Latinx presence in the US South prior to the late twentieth century. Together, Márquez and McNamara call on readers to reject a monolithic definition of latinidad, specifically by paying attention to histories and politics of ethnicity, race, gender, labor, geography, and generational cohorts.

Shifting Racial Hierarchies

In Making the Latino South, Márquez places Latinos at the center of a history that lays bare the ways in which anti-blackness and white supremacy have shaped questions about culture, education, identity, and labor as experienced by Latinos living and working in various locations across the US South. “The history of Latino people offers a new and complex way of understanding the history of race in the South,” writes Márquez. “It is not a monolithic past, and it is one that refuses simple narratives about race.”³Cecilia Márquez, Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 17. Between the 1940s through early 2000s, Márquez places questions about Latino racialization at the center of historical investigations into matters of culture, education, identity, and labor. Across five chapters that illuminate localized Latino histories in Alabama, DC, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, Márquez shows how the racial position of Latinos shifted at the turn of the century. At the center of Making the Latino South is the necessary understanding that “Latino” functions as a constructed category shaped by spatial histories and understandings of race, all of which impact Black and non-Black Latinos in distinct manners.

Marquez’s first three chapters demonstrate how some Latinos benefited from a “provisional whiteness” as they attended white schools, used white facilities, and enjoyed greater overall mobility in the Jim Crow era. She begins in Washington, DC, with Karla Galarza and her family. Galarza’s experiences in seeking education within the city’s segregated school system highlight how “non-Black Latino people were understood through a mosaic of racial categorizations,” with varying characteristics (i.e. skin color, language usage, citizenship status) used to demarcate Latinos’ “proximity or distance from Blackness.”⁴Márquez, 21.

Next, Marquez moves from individual Latino experiences to the ways white southerners imagined and used “Latinoness” to negotiate their anxieties over a shifting racial landscape amid growing civil rights activism. In telling of the infamous South of the Border roadside attraction in South Carolina, Márquez shows how the tourist destination’s racialized figure—or, rather, mascot—“Pedro” illuminated white imaginations about racial hierarchies that increasingly included Latinos. Even with the absence of Latinos in upcountry South Carolina between 1945 to 1965, a “fantasized mexicanness” proved fruitful for a business class that sought to give an escape to white consumers seeking to “revel in the pleasures of racial subjugation.”⁵Márquez, 16.

The third chapter of Making the Latino South delves into the Civil Rights Movement, as Márquez excavates the experiences of Latino activists who traveled to the South to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Between 1960 through 1970, non-Black Latino activists Elizabeth “Betita” Mártinez, Maria Varela, and Luis Zapata lent their support to the movement. As first-time travelers to/through this section of the US, these Latino activists encountered Jim Crow in ways that illuminated their proximity to whiteness. It was, in other words, their “Latinidad” and “non-Blackness” that shaped their experiences with SNCC, including the expulsion of non-Black members in 1966. “The expulsion,” Márquez explains, “recast in light of the history of Latino people in the South, highlights the regional nature of SNCC’s racial vision.” Both white and Black southerners’ understanding of Latino racialization, however, would shift as the 1970s and 1980s saw an increase in migration of working-class, undocumented, darker-skinned Latinos.

Márquez captures the shift that occurred in the late twentieth century as a larger non-white Latino population settled into southern destinations and were racialized both favorably and negatively as “hardworking” and “illegal.” A pivotal point arrives in the 1980s when Latino racialization shifted from a provisional whiteness to a distinct marginalized group that, on the surface, received a warm welcome. Márquez brings important attention to Dalton, Georgia, an industry town known for carpet manufacturing and for its seemingly positive embrace of Mexican arrivals. Here, industry leaders and other local actors cast Latinos as “hardworking,” which allowed white elites to “participate in what they saw as racially progressive ideology” while maintaining an exploitable laboring class.⁶Márquez, 149. The celebration, and exploitation, of the “hardworking” Latino narrative gave way to a new racial script after 9/11. Márquez traces how anti-immigrant sentiments that began in the 1990s contributed to the casting of Latinos as “illegal” by the early 2000s. While Latino remained a racially diverse category that included Black and non-Black people, “citizenship, race, class, color, and other identities continued to structure how Latino people” were racialized and marginalized.⁷Márquez, 180.

Racial categorization shifted between the 1940s through 2000s for Latinos, and Márquez reminds us that, “What is shared across the broad time period is a racialization defined, in large part, by Blackness. It is anti-Blackness and white supremacy that have defined the contours of Latinidad in the South.”⁸Márquez, 184. This is a critical insight that, as the author notes, opens more questions than it offers answers on the experiences of Black Latinos. There is much more work to do in recording and understanding aspects of living and working in southern spaces for Black Latinos. Falling outside the scope of Marquez’s particular project, Making the Latino South also does not contend with the question of indigeneity as it relates to the population and the (re)shaping of racial hierarchies. The book’s strengths lie in its centering of Blackness, an emphasis that will continue to shape the field’s attention to race as it relates to a diverse Latino population.

While Márquez draws readers’ attention to the role that gender plays in shaping Latino experiences, it is not central to her book. For that, we can look to Sarah McNamara’s recent work that not only highlights gender in this southern history, but rather makes it a central framework for understanding community making processes in an unequivocal Latino borderland—Tampa, Florida’s Ybor City.

Gender, Labor, & Generational Politics

McNamara’s Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South offers an exciting multi-scale history told from a local vantage point that attends to the realities of diasporic life in a southern “transnational, multi-racial borderland” that was shaped, in large part, by Latinas who worked and organized around the cigar industry. Women, she argues, shaped the trajectory of the Latina/o community and the subsequent ways it would be celebrated and remembered well after the cigar companies and families moved out of Ybor City. Across four chapters that examine three generations of Latinas/os “who struggled, worked, and dreamed in Ybor City and Tampa, Florida,” Sarah McNamara introduces individuals and families who built the first sustained Latina/o community in Florida.⁹Sarah McNamara, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 10.

Ybor City begins by attending to the ways that categories of gender and race intersected with Latina and Latino labor, politics, and understandings of community and nation. McNamara situates Tampa as a “an international borderland where people and ideas competed for authority” over the meaning of space and place since the sixteenth century. It was not until the 1880s that Tampa, or the neighborhood of Ybor City, became a truly transnational city with the increased arrival of Latina/o laborers, who were primarily Cuban. Examining these early years of placemaking, McNamara unravels the everyday experiences and relationships that animated the establishment of a Latina/o city and shows how the “cigar factory floor was [both] a refuge and a revolutionary space.”¹⁰McNamara, 29.

Next, McNamara takes up the leftist, anti-fascist, and transnational revolutionary politics of Latinas who worked and organized within the cigar industry and their communities in the early twentieth century. She expertly weaves renowned labor organizer Luisa Moreno’s work in Florida with the experiences of Latinas who worked and lived in Ybor City, showing how “the women [that Moreno] organized influenced her even more than she influenced them.”¹¹McNamara, 61. Latinas’ fights for labor and human rights, as well as complex questions about ethnic and racial identities, in Ybor City highlighted the struggle of organizing in a place “where one’s sense of self was fluid and in constant negotiation with anti-radical and anti-immigrant powers within the US South and politically leftist ideologies” that animated Latina/o transnational networks of solidarity.¹²McNamara, 82. Leftist struggles, however, would come increasingly under question as the late 1930s saw the rise of anti-radical sentiments and politics.

Alongside critical attention to gender and the ways it shaped laboring, organizing, and community spaces for Latinas in Ybor City, McNamara points readers to another important social positionality that shaped people’s politics—generational cohorts. She depicts the shift from a leftist radical laboring Latina/o population, to one that “fought to survive in a shifting world where public perception mattered.”¹³McNamara, 106.While capturing the varying ways Black and white Cubans navigated social, cultural, and educational institutions during the Jim Crow era, McNamara also shows how “Cuban” became a category deemed undesirable (often cast as a group of un-American “foreign subversives”) within Tampa’s Anglo population. US-born Latinas/os who witnessed the marginalization of their elders developed their own practices to demonstrate patriotism (or Americanness), which included Latinos enlisting in the army and Latinas engaging in volunteer and community advocacy work. In the shifting labor and racial landscape of the 1940s, Latinas continued to advocate for themselves, their families and community members “in Anglo-controlled spaces by laying claims to their right…to belong.”¹⁴McNamara, 137.

As the war ended and young Latinas/os returned to everyday life, many saw their futures as lying outside of Ybor City’s cigar industry. McNamara follows the ways in which Latinas/os with roots in Ybor City navigated questions about memory, community, and belonging. She argues that the process of “remaking” the community in the postwar era necessitated obscuring the “radical leftist past” of Ybor City, to make way for a “moderate, yet progressive, present” that Latinas/os could use to enter mainstream politics.¹⁵McNamara, 140. Delving into three distinct political moments between 1948 through 1970 (the Henry Wallace campaign; the Cuban Revolution; urban renewal), McNamara highlights Latinas’ presence—and, at times, absence—in shaping local political mobilizations and responses to deindustrialization and urban renewal. She shows how, more than just a capital for cigar manufacturing, Ybor City was a place made, and remade, by distinct generations of Latinas/os who had varying approaches to negotiating issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and labor, all of which informed the ways the community would be remembered for years to come, whether through local museums or at family dinner tables.

With her multi-generational analysis that shows change over time through the experiences of those whose lives intersected with and/or shaped Tampa and Ybor City, McNamara asks readers to “rethink what it means to be of Cuban descent, live in Florida, survive in the South, and advocate for visibility and representation within the United States."¹⁶McNamara, 13. Like Márquez, she is attentive to the racial diversity of the population, writing that “U.S.-born Latinas and Latinos disavowed radical, leftist politics and defined themselves against Blackness to transform their image from foreign subversives to acceptable U.S. citizens.” She continues by noting that this resulted in a “the creation of a new ethnic, non-Black identity as well as proximity to Anglo society and the gain of political power.”¹⁷McNamara, 10. There is some attention to the specific experiences of Afro-Cubans throughout the book, especially as related to the organization of mutual aid societies in the early decades of the twentieth century.

It is McNamara’s specificity that makes Ybor City a key contribution to the postwar, place-based histories of Latinas/os living and working in the various regions of the South.  “Too often,” she writes, “Ybor City, and even Florida, is seen as an exception – a place where latinidad is everywhere and has always existed and is therefore unnecessary for inclusion in broader and more expansive understandings of Latinas/os within the South and the nation.”¹⁸McNamara, 15. By examining this “exception,” Sarah McNamara offers a hemispheric history that informs how Latinas/o lived experiences are shaped by time and place. Another important dimension of Ybor City is its serious consideration of the individual and familial histories. As more Latinx scholars who are born and/or raised in southern spaces record our own histories, McNamara’s book will serve as a model for how to balance individual, familial, and communal histories with attention to (trans)national historical processes.

When and Where You Are Latinx Matters

With attention to matters of ethnicity, race, migration, transnationalism, class, labor, gender, and generational cohorts, Cecilia Márquez and Sarah McNamara offer us important critical readings. Making the Latino South and Ybor City highlight the intersections of race, gender, and place, constructed categories that have historically informed hierarchies of desirability and belonging. They show the diversity of identities and experiences that shaped Latina/o life between the late nineteenth through early twenty-first centuries.

These scholars also raise important questions about scale. Márquez’s book is less a history of specific Latino communities and more a story of how this diverse group came to be described, or rather racialized, as “Latino.”¹⁹Márquez, 4. Geography and racial hierarchies are at the center of her investigations into racialization processes in Alabama, DC, Georgia, and the Carolinas. On the other hand, McNamara begins with her familial roots in Ybor City’s radical Latina history, and extends her analysis to encompass Ybor City as a node within a borderlands where the Caribbean and US South meet and shape each other. These books model balancing of the multitude of voices of everyday Latinx historical actors.

Márquez and McNamara held a roundtable discussion at the 2023 Southern Historical Association meeting in Charlotte about the shifting terrain of Latinx history. Márquez made a key aspect of Latinx history clear: “when and where you are Latino matters.” Later in the same session McNamara added that, along with generational cohorts, “migration patterns matter.” With the various Latinx migrations to/through southern spaces since the late nineteenth at top of mind, the discussion highlighted the nuances of writing Latinx history from a southern vantage point. The conversation illuminated Chicana historian Vicki Ruiz’s argument that “region is intricately tied to Latina identity.” With attention to geographic and temporal specificities, Márquez’s Making the Latino South and McNamara’s Ybor City each demonstrate how Latina/o/x individuals, families, and communities navigated, understood, and claimed southern spaces over time. With their critical attention to the importance of regional racial formations, histories of racial capitalism, and the varied dimensions (racialized, gendered, generational) of Latinx identities and community formations, Márquez and McNamara have each made contributions that enrich more than two decades of scholarship.

About the Author

Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez (“Yami”) is a historian of US Latinx communities. With a research emphasis on the US South, Rodriguez’s scholarship examines Latinx experiences in relation to culture, race, ethnicity, labor, and migration. Her current book project, “Mexican Atlanta: Migrant Place-Making in the Latinx South,” traces the history of Metro Atlanta’s ethnic Mexican community formation and broader Latinx connections beginning in the mid-twentieth century.

Cover Image Attribution

"A bit of Old Spain as seen at Ybor City, Tampa, Florida," ca. 1930–1945. Postcard. Courtesy of the Tichnor Brothers Postcard Collection, Boston Public Library.

Introduction: Series Editor's Note

Martin Padgett's A Night at the Sweet Gum Head explores a cast of historical actors who shaped modern LGBTQ+ politics and culture in 1970s Atlanta, Georgia. This cast includes Frank Powell (who owned "more than a dozen gay bars" including the Sweet Gum Head from the late 1960s until his death in 1996), John Greenwell a.k.a. "drag superstar" Rachel Wells, and the activist and trailblazer Bill Smith, who is featured in Padgett's excerpt published here with "Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces." Padgett, too, is central to the narrative he crafts. He writes: "As for me, [the book is] something of a memoir. In many ways, John and Bill and I have lived the same life, in our search for the place we call home, in search of our true selves. . .This isn't my story of Atlanta. It's mine too. It belongs to us" (xiv, emphasis added).

What follows is excerpted from Padgett's "Preface" and a glimpse into Bill Smith's participation in the first Atlanta Pride march on June 27, 1971. This is one of the many entries in Padgett's book that traces the evolution of Bill Smith in 1970s Atlanta until his death in 1980. This exploration of Smith is a brief snapshot of the many nights at the Sweet Gum Head in Padgett's book: pick up your copy to read more about Smith, John Greenwell/Rachel Wells, and the development of LGBTQ+ life across 1970s Atlanta.

From Preface

Today, American lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, and queers can get married. We can find short-term special friends or life partners on our smartphones. We can venture proudly and safely into the straight world outside the confines of bars and clubs once designated specifically as "gay spaces."

Fifty years ago, none of those things was true. Queer people were shamed and muted, jailed, exiled, and put in danger. Often they were left no choice but to leave home, and to run away to cities where they might be accepted, or at least tolerated.

Even in those cities, gay bars were dangerous and illicit places—but they were also the birthplace of the emerging gay rights movement. Queer communities formed, and they demanded equality. It was a time of heady optimism. Many believed anything was possible, even progress. The movement had its most visible roots in New York and San Francisco, but after it flared in the riots at the seedy Stonewall Inn tavern in 1969, it spread quickly to cities such as Atlanta, a relatively progressive oasis surrounded by ultraconservative mores.

In the 1970s, Atlanta's cruisy, electric core was the Sweet Gum Head nightclub, where an intoxicating blend of drag, drugs, disco, and revolution had a pivotal role in uniting Atlanta's gay civil-rights movement—and in turning Stonewall's rebellion into art. The Sweet Gum Head is where Atlanta earned its reputation for top-flight female impersonation. It's where Atlanta's drag came out of the closet.

Before RuPaul Charles, there was John Greenwell, who ran away from Alabama to Atlanta and found a new home at the Sweet Gum Head. John became Rachel Wells—and Rachel became a drag superstar. Along the way, John put the two halves of his life back together.

John left the marches and protests to activists like Bill Smith. A son of devout Baptists, Bill took a seat as a city commissioner, then took over the most influential gay newspaper in the South, The Barb. When his addictions and predilections were revealed, he lost everything.

Then it all died. In the same summer of 1981 when the Sweet Gum Head closed, the New York Times reported on a "rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals."

Bill Smith, Georgia State Capitol, Summer 1971

The television camera stared at Bill as he strode down the sidewalk. He wore his usual explosion of red-brown hair and goatee, squared-off spectacles, and a white button-down shirt. He clutched protest signs and slung a white purse over his left shoulder as he led more than a hundred protestors from downtown Atlanta to Piedmont Park on June 27, 1971.

He fronted an army of lovers in warpaint and war robes, a Seussian spectacle with signs and bongos and buttons. One marcher hummed through a blue-and-orange kazoo, tootling it beneath a shock of golden hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Another wore a bowl cut, black-rimmed frames, and a mock turtleneck. He sniffed a red carnation and licked his lips luridly.

They marched two by two, animals on an ark, forced by the police onto the sidewalk and to stop for traffic lights and pedestrians. They had asked the ACLU for help with a permit to march, but were told they were not a minority.

People in cars took leaflets and stared as the group tambourined their way to the park and called to motel balconies: "Join us!"

"This is just like the early anti-war marches," one straight-identified protester marveled, "the way passers-by stare at us."

Bill's eyes angled down, dark and serious, as he spoke into the television camera.

"As people find out that you are a homosexual, there's a good chance that you may lose your job," he said with a bit of a lilt in his voice. His bony shoulders shifted while he proceeded with his lecture, part plea, part civic lesson. He told dinner-hour Atlanta how being gay affected every aspect of his life, even outside the bedroom.

"The state will not hire homosexuals," he said. "The schools will not hire homosexuals. The federal government will not hire homosexuals. They consider us a security risk."¹Bill Smith, interview by WSB-TV, "Gay Rights Protestors March in Atlanta," The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at UGA Libraries, Athens, Georgia, June 27, 1971.

He parsed his words carefully. Atlanta was not San Francisco. He warned Northern friends, half in jest, not to mention General Sherman's name unless they were prepared to be bashed. He worried the Klan would shoot at protestors from the rooftops of nearby buildings. He spoke past that fear, directly to the more than 100,000 gay men and women who lived in Atlanta but had not come to demonstrate, who could lose everything—jobs, churches, family—if they joined the first Gay Pride march in Atlanta history.

Bill had worried that Atlanta still was not ready to mount a successful protest. He knew he could count on seven friends to show up, but on the day of the march more than a hundred had shown up, and some of Bill's closeted friends told him that they had driven around where the marchers had gathered, in silent support.

"Five or 10 years ago nobody would have suspected this," Bill said.²United Press International, "50 in Atlanta Mark Gay Liberation Day," Atlanta Journal Constitution. June 28, 1971. 9A. "It is a new beginning for the gay community."

At Piedmont Park, the march re-formed as a rally replete with guerrilla theatre. In the first skit, soldiers shot at Vietnamese peasants under orders, and had their medals ripped off when they questioned why. Next, police threw people to the ground and hurled epithets—"Queer!" "Lezzy!" "Fag!" In the final act, a panel of experts interrogated a straight couple on the Slick Cavett Show: "How long have you been this way?" Atlanta's first Pride ended with promises for bigger, better, and more.³cyclops, "Celebration . . . Very Gay," Great Speckled Bird, July 5, 1971, 2.

Bill went home to see himself on the evening news. He reported for work the next day as usual at the Board of Education's accounting room. His colleagues stared straight ahead and would not speak to him. Bill laughed and got down to work.⁴Dave Hayward in discussion with author, November 11, 2017.

About the Author

Martin Padgett has an MFA from the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and is working on a new book about Michael Hardwick and the 1986 Supreme Court sexual-privacy decision bearing his name.

I. Introduction

In February 2017, playwright and composer Max Vernon debuted their first Off-Broadway musical The View UpStairs at the Lynn Redgrave Theater in New York City. Following The View's success with another hit musical later that same year, which sold out theaters and nabbed a stack of awards, Vernon firmly established their reputation as a "radical" creative mind known for "gigantic" productions in immersive staging that render an "unexpected and marvelous" audience experience.¹Excerpts taken from the following reviews found on Max Vernon's website: Lina Landstroem, "Queer History on Stage: A Review of The View UpStairs by Max Vernon," Public Seminar, March 1, 2017, https://publicseminar.org/2017/03/when-a-bar-was-your-home/; Zackary Stewart, "KPOP," TheaterMania, September 22, 2017, https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/reviews/kpop_82533.html; Elisabeth Vincentelli, "Review: A Gay Nightclub Tragedy, Decades Before Orlando, in 'The View UpStairs'," The New York Times, March 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/theater/the-view-upstairs-review.html. The View UpStairs animates the real life Up Stairs Lounge gay bar environment on the eve of an arson attack on June 24, 1973. The tragedy stands as the deadliest fire on record in New Orleans history, and it once figured as the deadliest US attack on LGBTQ+ people until Orlando's Pulse Nightclub massacre in 2016. Considering the production's immersive staging and use of melodramatic mode, I interpret The View UpStairs as an adaptation in a genealogy of liberatory queer performance tracing back through the "drag reviews" and "deeply interactive, cross-dressing . . . nellydramas" staged at the Lounge in the 1970s.²Robert W. Fieseler, Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018), 227. The View activates a legac­­­­­­y of intersectional coalition that is vital to contemporary social justice activism confronting the racist, nationalist, and anti-LGBTQ+ violence emboldened in a post-Trump America. The View builds new forms of solidarity across impossible limits of time, place, and subjectivity by dissolving distinctions between 2017 and 1973, New York and New Orleans, actors and audience.

II. The Up Stairs Lounge, 1970–1973

As a Los Angeles native and NYU alum, Vernon was drawn to the Up Stairs Lounge fire not so much for its tragedy but because the "fire [had] been erased" from history.³Max Vernon, interview by author, September 8, 2017. Robert W. Fieseler underscores in Tinderbox (2018) that "more stories about the Up Stairs Lounge appeared in major news outlets after the [2016] Pulse shooting than in the previous four decades."⁴Fieseler, Tinderbox, xix. While Vernon was understandably shocked by the tragedy's erasure, the complexities surrounding the arson, its immediate but mostly local news coverage, and its swift muting from public discourse resist hasty conclusions about the cause or consequence of such silence. On the one hand, the contemporaneous frontpage spread in the Times-Picayune had broken a multigenerational "social compact" whereby New Orleans dominant society had tolerated queer society as long as it remained apolitical and out of sight.⁵See the front page spread of The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 25, 1973, Monday Morning Edition, 1. The Up Stairs Lounge arson and media coverage acknowledged a thriving gay culture within the French Quarter. The arson's silencing became a tragedy suppressed from public consciousness. Media coverage also non-consensually "outed" many closeted survivors for whom employment, housing, and other basic needs depended upon privacy. For them, media silence was more than a welcome salve; it was necessary for survival. This ethical complexity between historical recovery work and guarding survivors' privacy presented a daunting challenge: How to restore cultural visibility when so many victims and survivors would not have wanted public exposure, whose agency to "come out" (or not) was taken from them? This exigency guided Vernon's creative work. It underscores why this musical is decidedly not about the arson but, rather, a dramatic "View" of life from the perspective of "composite" characters adapted from Up Stairs patrons, anonymously recovering the kinds of human connections that the bar made possible before and until June 24, 1973, at 7:53 p.m. when "[f]lames gathered on a front step."⁶Vernon, interview by author; Fieseler, Tinderbox, 70.

Aside from some library microfiche newspapers and a few Times-Picayune articles online, Vernon primarily referenced Clayton Delery-Edwards's 2014 book The Up Stairs Lounge Arson. Few other resources existed while Vernon was writing.⁷Clayton Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson: Thirty-Two Deaths in a New Orleans Gay Bar, June 24, 1973 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014); Vernon, interview by author; see also Johnny Townsend, Let the Faggots Burn: The UpStairs Lounge Fire (Bangor, ME: BookLocker, 2011). Townsend's 1989–90 archival work informed Delery-Edwards's research. Delery-Edwards, a native of New Orleans, was drawn to the fire when he "watch[ed] news coverage in 1973."⁸Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 2. His book was only the second book about the tragedy after Johnny Townsend's self-published and poorly documented interviews in Let the Faggots Burn (2011).⁹Townsend, Let the Faggots Burn, vii. Delery-Edwards's work was the clear, better choice for Vernon's research.¹⁰It is important to note that some inconsistencies exist in Delery-Edwards's text, as well. Today, Robert W. Fieseler's Tinderbox (2018) is considered a more thorough, accurate record of the fire.

The title of Delery-Edwards's first chapter, "Beer, Prayer and Nellydrama," scans as an early outline for the plot of The View. Delery-Edwards describes the Lounge as a cultural space that sought to insulate patrons from homophobic violence, what Vernon would imagine in a musical number, "The World Outside These Walls."¹¹Max Vernon, The View UpStairs (New York: Samuel French, 2017), 45. The Up Stairs Lounge operated amid tumultuous years (1970–1973) of gender politics: "Roe v. Wade, the Women's Liberation movement, [and] the Gay Liberation movement spurred by the 1969 Stonewall Riots" and its one-year anniversary parade.¹²Vernon, The View UpStairs, 45. Police brutality and institutional violence compelled LGBTQ+ people to remain closeted for survival, though Delery-Edwards explains that some sought escape via "life in a big city . . . Someplace like San Francisco. Or New York. Or New Orleans."¹³Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 10. However, these urban spaces and the gay bars they provided were not reliably safe. "Police would raid gay bars for no real cause," he writes, "beating up the patrons without fear of repercussion, and arresting people for infractions not much more serious than shaking hands."¹⁴Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 10. It was this kind of police raid that precipitated the New York City Stonewall Uprising in the early morning of June 28, 1969, when LGBTQ+ people—particularly those who were Black and Brown—fought back.¹⁵Although the most well-known, the Stonewall Uprising was not the first instance of LGBTQ+ resistance. The Cooper Do-Nuts Riot (1959) as well as the Compton's Cafeteria Riot (1966), both in California, precede Stonewall. Many have argued that Stonewall became central to the development of Gay Liberation largely as a result of practices of memory (organized activism) that arose to commemorate the event, such as the Christopher Street Liberation Day (1970), often cited as the first gay pride event in the country.

By 1973, the Gay Liberation movement that had been radicalizing in localized spaces before Stonewall was now galvanizing on a national scale, yet political activism still had not animated New Orleans. Ironically, the city's (and specifically the French Quarter's) deep history as a site of celebrated deviance may have delayed political radicalization.¹⁶Ryan Prechter, "Gay New Orleans: A History" (PhD diss, Georgia State University, 2017), https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_diss/60/. Fifteen years before the Up Stairs arson, two significant events in New Orleans gay history occurred within seven months of one another, and their ambiguous correlation underscores gay New Orleans apolitical climate at the time. In 1958, the first gay Mardi Gras krewe—"the Krewe of Yuga"—was formed, and later that year, three white Tulane students murdered Fernando Rios, a gay Mexican man, in what would now be called a homophobic hate crime.¹⁷The three white Tulane murderers intended to "roll a queer," or assault a gay person, the night they killed Rios. Trial testimony revealed that the murderers bragged about the assault after they left Rios for dead. Clayton Delery-Edwards, Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 97. The murderers confessed to the crime but were acquitted. Meanwhile, New Orleans gay society continued to grow and thrive apolitically via the privacy of burgeoning gay Mardi Gras organizations. According to Delery-Edwards, gay society's response to Rios's murder was perhaps only recognizable in social migration toward newly founded gay krewes: "[Rios's] death and the fear it engendered motivated some gay men to join these fledgling organizations."¹⁸Delery-Edwards, Out for Queer Blood, 148. The city's cultural climate—Mardi Gras, gay krewes, cross-racial musical and cultural engagement, sex work, bohemian artistry, jazz, and substance-infused revelry—made the Quarter a mecca for gendered and sexual play, so long as participants abided by the social compact of apolitical invisibility and navigated onerous and Janus-faced local mores (e.g., public cross-dressing was allowed, but only on Mardi Gras).¹⁹James Karst, "Halloween Cross-Dress Costumes Lead to 21 Arrests in 1952: Our Times," The Times-Picayune, October 18, 2015, https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_4522e6d7-b6bb-5143-a772-ee5712675293.html. LBGTQ+ people could enjoy a fragile sense of stability in the semi-closeted niche of the Quarter's gay bars. This local culture blunted the sense of urgency of a national "Stonewall moment," even after the tragedy at the Up Stairs Lounge.

Tucked away from Bourbon Street, just around the corner at Iberville and Chartres, the Up Stairs Lounge provided its patrons with social engagement, Christian community, and queer performance theater. The Lounge's "out-of-the-way location meant that you had to have a definite reason to go there," explains Delery-Edwards, while a continual schedule of events such as "costume parties, tricycle races . . . and the weekly Beer Bust" kept patrons returning for alcohol, comradery, and escapism.²⁰Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29. Up Stairs became a hub for the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a Los Angeles based Protestant LGBTQ+ congregation that was founded and led by the openly gay Reverend Troy Perry.²¹Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 21. In spring 1971, Reverend David Solomon established the New Orleans branch, and by fall, MCC services were relocated to the Lounge.²²Fieseler, Tinderbox, 25, 31–32. Over the year that the Lounge hosted MCC services, congregants became accustomed to continuing "fellowship" at the bar's "Sunday Beer Bust," so much so that even after the MCC moved to another location in 1972, "the congregation kept close ties with the Up Stairs Lounge and maintained the tradition of fellowship."²³Fieseler, Tinderbox, 34. The Lounge owners, concludes Delery-Edwards, "had been very successful at creating a warm, welcoming environment."²⁴Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29.

Early on, a few Up Stairs regulars built a stage and began to perform "light-hearted melodramas," often casting men as women characters, stylistically to "make the plays funnier" and practically "because the Up Stairs regulars included far more men than women."²⁵Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 24–25. Given the plays' gender parody and over-acted pathos, the Up Stairs patrons "stopped calling these plays melodramas and started calling them 'nellydramas.'"²⁶Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 25. Several of these productions were written and directed by Bettye McAnear, and "the Up Stairs Players were known to veer from her script in repeat performances by letting audience members interrupt the action to shout the big lines. In response, casts started ad-libbing to throw off the crowd."²⁷Fieseler, Tinderbox, 33. These highly interactive, gender-playful nellydramas animated the Lounge stage for nearly all of its three years, a fitting performance genre for a gay bar given how melodrama, as Jonathan Goldberg argues, can "work . . . the system against itself, exposing how opposition is possible without imagining the reform of institutions that seem to be impediments to human flourishing."²⁸Jonathan Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 160. Up Stairs patrons and performers would have faced hostility beyond the walls of the bar, but in performing nellydramas, they created oppositional space, even without the capacity to affect systemic change. Plus, they were a lot of fun. Nellydramas were so beloved in the gay Quarter that even after the fire, the performances returned.²⁹Fieseler, Tinderbox, 227.

Although the Lounge celebrated the nellydramas' gay parody, the Lounge owner initially "discouraged drag queens from coming into the bar," perhaps indicating the era's still-nascent articulation of minority gender identities.³⁰Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29. The art of drag reviews in the 1970s took gender performance much more seriously than mere gender parody; a drag queen's success was often evaluated by her "performative act of passing" as convincingly feminine.³¹Bryant Alexander, "Querying Queer Theory Again (Or Queer Theory as Drag Performance)," Journal of Homosexuality 45, no. 2–4 (2003): 351. Acceptance of drag performance was mixed, even among gay communities that had already radicalized politically. Betty Luther Hillman notes of San Francisco's Gay Liberation Movement: "While some liberationists appropriated drag as a symbolic statement against gender norms, others saw drag as exacerbating stereotypes of 'effeminate' homosexuality. Still others aligned with radical feminists who saw female impersonation and drag as an affront to women . . . These debates coalesced into contradictory stances on the political and cultural meanings of drag and drag queens as constituents of gay liberation."³²Betty Luther Hillman, "'The most profoundly revolutionary act a homosexual can engage in': Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964–1972," Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 1 (2011): 158.

When the Up Stairs Lounge welcomed Marcy Marcell (née Marco Sperandeo) as its first drag queen in 1972, it could be argued that the bar was making a bold statement about inclusion in their social community. Or, given that she "was a smash" right from the start, the decision may have just been about boosting beer sales.³³Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29. Regardless, Marcy "was soon a regular performer . . . her shows took place on Sunday evenings at eight."³⁴Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 29. The Lounge owner eventually embraced these delightfully subversive "drag reviews," recommencing them at the bar he established after the Up Stairs Lounge burned.³⁵Fieseler, Tinderbox, 227. On the night of the fire, Marcy was scheduled for her regular Sunday performance, but she procrastinated at home, feeling a premonition. She was watching a "Bette Davis movie" when reports of the fire appeared on television.³⁶Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 50 (ellipses original); See also Townsend, Let the Faggots Burn, 184–185.

Shortly after the Sunday evening Beer Bust on Sunday, June 24, 1973, the patrons inside the Up Stairs Lounge heard the buzzer ringing from the front door of the bar. When a "patron [and] MCC congregant" opened a door to descend the staircase, fire exploded in a backdraft through the stairwell, clawing into the bar.³⁷Fieseler, Tinderbox, 71. In minutes, the fire ripped through the Up Stairs Lounge as patrons and employees attempted to flee for exits in a building that failed to meet New Orleans fire codes.³⁸Fieseler, Tinderbox, 183. When the pandemonium was over, thirty-two victims had perished, either immediately or in the following days as a result of injuries.³⁹Fieseler, Tinderbox, 187. After the fire department turned off their hoses and first responders began sorting through the rubble, rumors arose that a drunken gay patron named Roger Dale Nunez had initiated a fight, been kicked out of the bar, and threatened on his way out "to burn this place to the ground."⁴⁰Fieseler, Tinderbox, 66.

When historians consider why the Up Stairs fire did not stir pro-gay radicalization in New Orleans, Nunez's identity as a gay man frequently comes up: he was part of the LGBTQ+ patronage, not a hostile anti-gay assailant. But there are other, more systemic factors that played into the arson's erasure from public discourse and memory: mishandlings by police forensics, a foiled criminal investigation, political urgency to diminish public attention to a gay bar, homophobic misrepresentation by local media, and outright public contempt for the victims' sexuality. By August 1973, Nunez had evaded arrest by an apathetic police force. Some parents and families of victims had refused to claim the bodies of their dead sons and brothers. To this day, the bodies of four victims—three unidentified victims and one military veteran—lie in a "city-affiliated cemetery for indigents."⁴¹Fieseler, Tinderbox, 191. No protestors stormed City Hall. Few challenged the homophobic culture or city codes. The Up Stairs Lounge arson would not galvanize enduring change or create the organized, "sustained gay activism" that Stonewall's one-year anniversary had inspired nationally.⁴²Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 164. The Up Stairs Lounge would not become a "Southern Stonewall."⁴³Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 164.

However, the fire was not altogether ignored. For a small network of LGBTQ+ individuals aware of the Lounge through the MCC, the tragedy compelled support from beyond New Orleans. Both Delery-Edwards's and Fieseler's books document the days after the fire when nonlocal, gay activists arrived in New Orleans, including Los Angeles leaders Troy Perry (MCC founder) and Morris Kight (President of Gay Community Services Center of Los Angeles).⁴⁴Fieseler, Tinderbox, 111–112. Perry, Kight, and others came to help local survivors and rouse LGBTQ+ support, but people in New Orleans, especially survivors of the fire, were largely resistant to what they perceived as outside meddling by "fairy carpetbaggers."⁴⁵Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 63, 146–149. This name-calling queered the Reconstruction-era slur created by unreconstructed white southerners for northerners who descended upon the defeated South supposedly for personal gain.⁴⁶Delery-Edwards, 63, 146–149. Closeted gay New Orleanians who survived the Up Stairs fire only to be forcibly "outed" as gay in its aftermath desired a private space to heal. The Lounge owner was especially critical of Perry and Kight, suggesting that they were a "divisive force," and that "perhaps there [was] some correlation between the amount of gay activism in other cities and the degree of police harassment."⁴⁷Fieseler, Tinderbox, 228. It was clear that many of the survivors of the fire were hostile toward these "fairy carpetbaggers."

At the same time, it was the work of MCC members, the Gay Community Service Center of Los Angeles, and a wide range of LGBTQ+ activists and donors from beyond New Orleans who provided financial relief for survivors as well as families and loved ones of those who perished. In January 1974, Kight met with "concerned members of the New Orleans Community" and deployed the "National New Orleans Memorial Fund" to disperse $6,000 to support those impacted by the arson, an amount that would grow to "nearly $18,000."⁴⁸Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 147. "[I]n some ways," writes Delery-Edwards, "the most important political activity connected to the fire wasn't local at all; it was a brief, national project intended to provide aid and support to survivors of the Up Stairs."⁴⁹Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 146. Through their skills in fundraising and national outreach, the "fairy carpetbaggers" facilitated donations from "all over the country: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Denver, Boulder, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Francisco."⁵⁰Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 147.

New York, Boston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco: all of these US cities and six more have staged Max Vernon's The View UpStairs since its debut in 2017. Add to the list a 2018 production at the Hayes Theatre Company in Sydney, a 2019 run at the Soho Theatre in London, and an upcoming 2022 performance at Nippon Seinenkan Hall in Tokyo, and the impact of Vernon's musical underscores the representational power of this local New Orleans narrative for national and international audiences. The View UpStairs immerses its audience in an emotionally powerful depiction of that 1973 French Quarter blaze by engaging melodramatic modes of performance similar to the Lounge's nellydramas and drag shows. Vernon's musical adaptation makes room for relationality across generations and geographies of LGBTQ+ experience.

III: "Possibilities in the Impossible": Immersive Staging, Queer Melodrama, and Adaptation

In January 2017, friend and colleague Dr. Ryan Prechter emailed me an article previewing The View UpStairs. We were both incredulous and ecstatic: Ryan's doctoral research on the Up Stairs arson had appeared in his post-1900 history of gay New Orleans, but circa 2017, very few people in the general public had heard of the fire.⁵¹Ryan Prechter, "Gay New Orleans: A History." Googling for tickets, I saw our future. We would attend the production and try to meet the playwright: How did you learn about this occluded event in New Orleans gay history? Why tell the Up Stairs Lounge story now, after all these years? All of these events transpired, and while I was, and remain, awestruck to experience Vernon's production and professional generosity, I could not help but feel apprehensive, too. The scenario that led to the staging of The View UpStairs—whereby an Los Angeles-bred and New York City-based activist/writer imaginatively travels to New Orleans to adapt the closeted Up Stairs patrons into characters engaging a national gay rights discourse—felt eerily similar to the history of the arson's immediate aftermath. I also could not ignore that something about Vernon's production felt different from that history, unexpected.

Walking into the Lynn Redgrave Theater for the 8:00 p.m. performance of The View UpStairs on Saturday, March 27, 2017, Ryan and I pass through double French doors into what looks like a dingy cabaret with a beat-up piano, retro cigarette dispensers, dank velvet curtains, a dildo chandelier, and rafters strung with Mardi Gras beads.⁵²The View UpStairs, written and composed by Max Vernon, dir. Scott Ebersold, chor. Al Blackstone, performed by Jeremy Pope, Taylor Frey, Frenchie Davis, Benjamin Howes, Michael Longoria, Ben Mayne, Randy Red, Nancy Ticotin, Richard E. Waits, and Nathan Lee Graham, New York, Lynn Redgrave Theater, March 25, 2017. Surrounding the cabaret seems to be a compact auditorium with riser seating on three sides. We enter, not into the lobby but, onto the stage, a disarming immersive design with dainty two-top tables and chairs. Some audience members are finding their reserved seats on the set. Ryan and I purchase drinks from the staged and operational Up Stairs bar and find our seats in the front row of the risers. We play Where's Waldo with the queer iconography around the room. Posters of Dolly Parton, Barbara Streisand, and David Bowie cover the walls. A nude Burt Reynolds lounges above velvet curtains. Ryan explains that in a well-known photograph of Up Stairs Lounge's bartender-manager, the same poster adorned the bar wall in 1973.⁵³Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, 20. Our game continues until an attractive blonde man in a mesh shirt and retro-coiffed moustache slides next to my colleague and starts chatting him up: "I've never seen you here before. Are you new?" When the play begins, we recognize him as the Dale character (Ben Mayne)—a nod to the historic arson suspect Roger Dale Nunez.

This intimate dissolution of the fourth wall pulls the audience into a participatory experience that clearly embodies Josephine Machon's definition of "immersive theatre," as The View's production creates a conspicuous confluence of space and time disrupting passive reception, and compelling the audience to actively engage with our bizarre surroundings in a room that is simultaneously 1973 and 2017, stage and audience, New Orleans and New York.⁵⁴Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); See especially "The Scale of Immersivity," 93–102. Vernon explains in their author's notes that the musical "was originally performed in an intimate, immersive setting, casting the audience as patrons in the bar when they walked into the theater. This allowed for actors to ad-lib with audiences in a way that was often hilarious, and also made the fire sequence more immediate and terrifying."⁵⁵Vernon, The View UpStairs, 7. The act of casting audience members underscores "a pivotal criterion" of Machon's immersive theatre: "Where an event is wholly immersive the audience-immersant is always fundamentally complicit within the concept, content and form of the work. As a consequence, . . . the naming of 'the audience' as such becomes a vexed term in itself . . . the special and active exchange that occurs between the performance and the audience member[] illustrat[es] the breakdown of division between audience and creative crew."⁵⁶Machon, Immersive Theatres, 98. The orientation of the audience's entrance onto the stage inaugurates their entry into a "contract for participation" in the audience-immersant role, whereby "the structures of the immersive world . . . invite varying levels of agency and participation."⁵⁷Machon, Immersive Theatres, 99–100. The View's immersive staging compels the audience to assume a participatory role that recalls the The Up Stairs Players' highly-interactive nellydramas.

Vernon's immersive, interactive staging and the emotional intimacy it facilitates between audience-patrons and cast-patrons further reimagines the melodramatic genre of the original Up Stairs nellydramas. However, I interpret The View's use of melodrama not as genre but as mode in Linda Williams's definition; the "melodramatic mode" in theater is "a modality of narrative with a high quotient of pathos and action" deployed to render a moral conclusion.⁵⁸Linda Williams, "Melodrama Revised," in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 51. This modality manifests in The View's immersive production and is compatible with Vernon's explicit script instructions that actors should perform their characters in controlled realism, eschewing hyperbolic "melodrama" in the colloquial sense.⁵⁹Vernon cautions, "While it's important to carve out true emotional beats for the characters, never let the piece veer into melodrama." Vernon, The View UpStairs, 6. Realistic performance by cast-patrons staged in immersive proximity and engaged with audience-patrons produces affective attachment through the immediacy of narrative action, and Vernon most certainly leverages this mode to foster a moral conclusion, as I examine below. As the 1973 cast-patrons assemble on stage, piano man Buddy (Randy Redd) launches into the catchy opening number, and the band "rock[s] the f*ck out."⁶⁰Vernon, The View UpStairs, 9–11. The lights drop, and enters the protagonist Wes (Jeremy Pope), a gay Black millennial fashion designer. In the present day, he buys the burnt-out former Up Stairs Lounge to launch the "flagship for [his] store."⁶¹The View UpStairs, 73; At the time of this publication, the former Up Stairs Lounge now houses office space and the kitchen for The Jimani sports bar.Lamenting the building's condition, especially the "ugly curtain" draped across the blackened windows, Wes "snorts . . . cocaine," inaugurating his drug-induced "trip" back to June 24, 1973.

Wes's future-past presence disrupts the Up Stairs patrons, and the ensuing commotion introduces Vernon's composite characters. The bartender-manager Henri (Frenchie Davis) slings drinks while Willie, played by the indomitable Nathan Lee Graham, struts around the bar stealing the stage, as a "flaming, demented former ballerina" is wont to do.⁶²Vernon, The View UpStairs, 8, 5; Vernon, interview by author. MCC priest Richard (Benjamin Howes) leads a church service attended by all of the aforementioned characters and one "runaway hustler" named Patrick (Taylor Frey) who becomes Wes's love interest.⁶³Vernon, The View UpStairs, 5; For a rich discussion of performance theater that stages LGBT+ engagement in religious liturgy, see Lusie Cuskey, "The Liturgy that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Religious Engagement and Affective Memory as a Site of Queer Activism in Musical Theatre," Ecumenica: Performance and Religion 13, no. 1 (2020): 52–68. Vernon's characters do indeed gesture toward real patrons who were at the bar on the night of the arson, but his adaptation precludes historical reenactment. "Many of these characters are composites of real people who frequented the UpStairs," Vernon writes in their script, "but out of respect and creative license I've changed names and certain details."⁶⁴Vernon, The View UpStairs, 8; Vernon, interview by author. Adaptation helped Vernon navigate the ethical precarity of depicting people who were largely closeted at the time of the fire and who risked losing everything if outed in 1973 New Orleans.⁶⁵Vernon explains, "And so, I think in many ways, where they have these anti-sodomy laws in the South, and where regularly, if a gay bar was raided and they took your ID, your name could be printed in the paper, and you could lose your job. You could lose housing. I think they didn't have the same freedoms as New York to be as visible, so they had a different mode of survival of how they had to exist in these spaces like the Up Stairs Lounge." Vernon, interview by author.

Adapting composite characters in melodramatic mode also facilitates The View's stance on intersectional coalition, which nods to the historic Lounge's rare, inclusive history as one of "a few fringe establishments [that were] brazen enough to encourage interracial mingling"; the bartender-manager "even let[] women into the bar at a time when gays and lesbians were strictly separated."⁶⁶Robert W. Fieseler, "The UpStairs Lounge Fire Killed 32 People. Its Legacy Still Haunts Black Gay New Orleans," The Daily Beast, May 13, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-upstairs-lounge-fire-killed-32-people-its-legacy-still-haunts-black-gay-ne. Gay communities are hardly immune to the racism and sexism that permeates dominant society. For example, in 1973, one of the oldest operating gay bars on Bourbon Street, Café Lafitte in Exile, "had a sign on the door . . . It said 'No Blacks, No Fems, No Women.'"⁶⁷Fieseler, "The UpStairs Lounge Fire Killed 32 People." However, the Up Stairs Lounge was different, and Vernon emphasizes the bar's unique inclusivity especially in their composite characters. For example, although the bartender-manager was historically a gay white man in "a gay white man's community," he "was known to be especially friendly to all comers," regardless of race or gender identity.⁶⁸Regina Adams quoted in Fieseler, "The Up Stairs Lounge Fire Killed 32 People." In this spirit, Vernon composes the bartender-manager character Henri, a "[t]ough as nails, no-nonsense, old-school butch lesbian" played in the original production by Grammy-nominated Frenchie Davis, a show-stopping Black woman singer, social activist, and educator.⁶⁹Vernon, The View UpStairs, 7. While casting a Black performer in Davis was unique to this production, her "old-school butch lesbian" identity is proscribed, as is Willie's Black identity and Inez's and Freddy's Puerto Rican identities (characters who enter the plot later on).⁷⁰Vernon, The View UpStairs, 5. While the Lounge's inclusivity was certainly progressive for its era, one cautions against overstating the diversity of its patronage, which was still largely white men even as Black, Latino/a/x, and women patrons were welcome. The Lounge owner's initial refusal to allow drag queens into the bar, for example, demonstrates the need for a nuanced understanding of the 1970s Up Stairs Lounge as a site of complex, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory social politics.

These historical complexities further contextualize Vernon's 2017 production, as they intentionally wrote and casted characters from underrepresented backgrounds to promote coalition across complex and intersecting subjectivities, even across distinctions between performer/audience. As José Esteban Muñoz explains, "performance permits the spectator, often a queer who has been locked out of the halls of representation or rendered a static character there, to imagine a world where queer lives, politics, and possibilities are representable in their complexity."⁷¹José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1. He further champions that "Queer performance . . . is about transformation, about the powerful and charged transformation of the world, about the world that is born through performance."⁷²Muñoz, Disidentifications, xiv. For the cast- and audience-patrons of The View, the world born through performance creates possibilities for futures even freer than the noteworthy yet limited atmosphere of the 1973 Lounge. Vernon expresses this cautious ethos most clearly in the lyrics of the opening number "Some Kind of Paradise." The playwright explains, "It's not just 'Paradise!' . . . no matter what the time period, the world is always going to be kind of shitty and imperfect and evolving and in-process."⁷³Vernon, interview by author. In fostering relationships across so many "evolving" and overlapping identities, generations, and performance subjectivities, Vernon challenges cast-patrons and audience-patrons together as actor-agents called to realize a more equitable future that was once im/possible in history and has evolved to remain differently im/possible in the present.

The View recasts the subjectivities of and relationships between the 1973 Lounge patrons and contemporary cast- and audience-patrons. Confronting the limits of these impossibilities through melodramatic mode and immersive theatre facilitates new possibilities. "The formal use of melodrama," Goldberg explains, "brings to a point of crisis the ideologies of gender and sexuality."⁷⁴Goldberg, Melodrama, 21. Escalating these "ideologies" to their dramatic limits, the intense pathos can foster transformation by "imitat[ing] ways past the impasses of the impossible gender/political situation; it discovers new possibilities of relationality": "The indeterminations of the remediated nature of melodrama allow for the possibilities in the impossible."⁷⁵Goldberg, Melodrama, 156. Indeed, Vernon's goal in writing and composing The View was to "imitate a way past the impasses" that have foreclosed millennial LGBTQ+ access to the experience and wisdom of generations before them, as manifest in The View through Wes's impossible social and romantic intimacy with a pre-AIDS generation of doomed queer characters.

IV. Exposed Seams: Constructing Identity in Performance

The View's plot centers on Wes's character development as he gets to know each of the cast-patrons before his trip back in time ends at 7:53 p.m., one moment before the fire overtakes the bar: the fire never enters the stage, the tragedy never reenacted. In this way, the narrative emphasizes the interpersonal connections across generations rather than spectacularizing trauma. We learn that, characteristic of millennial stereotypes, Wes struggles with anxiety and disillusionment fostered by obsessive relationships to "little white pills," social media, reality television, and fashion labels.⁷⁶Vernon, The View UpStairs, 58. Spending time with the baby boomer patrons, he learns to appreciate face-to-face human engagement unmitigated by Instagram, even falling in love with Patrick without Grindr or Tinder or texting. Meanwhile, Wes learns how the patrons struggle to survive, rendering visible the ways in which much of 1970s LGBTQ+ life was encumbered by violences that still threaten in the twenty-first century: conversion therapy (Patrick's song "Waltz"), homelessness (Dale's song "Better than Silence"), and immigration (Inez's song "The Most Important Thing"). The exposition builds with these personal encounters until, suddenly, police sirens blare. The bar's beloved Puerto Rican drag queen Freddy/Aurora Whorealis (Michael Longoria) staggers in with his mother Inez (Nancy Ticotin), bloody and beaten. The Cop (Richard E. Waits) barges in, harasses patrons, demands identification, and threatens violence until the patrons pay him off.⁷⁷Vernon, The View UpStairs, 39–42. The violence began on the street; when the Cop assaulted Freddy and Inez, a suitcase carrying his drag costume fell open. They escape arrest for violating the New Orleans cross-dressing ban, but the drag wardrobe is lost. Freddy laments, "What am I going to wear?"⁷⁸Vernon, The View UpStairs, 49. Enter Wes—a fashion designer.

The ensuing scene builds to the musical's narrative climax as the characters facilitate Aurora Whorealis's drag performance. Channeling Scarlett O'Hara in the iconic green curtain dress scene from Gone with the Wind, Wes rips down the drapes wilting across the bar windows and seizes a roll of duct tape. In a flash, the entire Lounge mobilizes to help Freddy become Aurora. Again, the immersive staging engages the audience in the excitement and chaos of the moment. Freddy and Inez run stage right into the audience risers where they style Aurora's hair and makeup just two feet from the nearest audience-patron. Stage left and up the risers, Wes and Patrick immerse themselves near the last row to construct Aurora's wardrobe. Audience-patrons twist in their seats, craning their necks to follow the action. The spatial arrangement builds awkwardness and delight in our unexpected eye contact with other audience-patrons—an embodied moment of chaotic pathos that coincides with the character-patrons' experiences.⁷⁹Mélissa Bertrand, "Performative Theatre: A Queer Theatre?" Whatever 3 (2020): 229. This staging evinces Mélissa Bertrand's concept of "trans-theatre," which I develop more thoroughly later in this essay. Here, Bertrand's emphasis on the body in queer performance implicates not just the performer, but the audience: "the body is given a major role . . . For the audience, it also implies to question the way we position ourselves as viewers of the show. The power of the gaze must be redefined, and queer sequences of theater can help rethink it." The triumphant progression to Aurora Whorealis's drag performance builds as the cast sings "Completely Overdone." Wes shrieks in delights at his frock: "It's like Count Dracula and Miss Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act having a kiki in outer space!"⁸⁰Vernon, The View UpStairs, 52.

The staged construction of Aurora Whorealis's overdone look recalls Bryant Alexander's critical affection for the exposed seams of so-called "bad" drag: "Sometimes I like seeing the seams . . . it is the seams that seemingly call my attention to the constructedness of the venture."⁸¹Alexander, "Querying Queer Theory Again," 351. He suggests that visible drag "seams" offer a metaphor for resisting a dangerous homogenizing trend that emerged in the early 2000s, one that deployed "queer" as an "inclusive signifier" to unify all manifestations of LGBTQ+ subjectivity.⁸²Alexander, "Querying Queer Theory Again," 349. Alexander warns that "queer" discourses gloss over difference and risk silencing "any discussion that links perception, practice, performance and the politics of sexual identity to race, ethnicity, culture, time, place and the discourses produced within these disparate locations."⁸³Alexander, "Querying Queer Theory Again," 349–50. The View's on-stage construction of Aurora Whorealis's drag look refuses such homogenizing erasure by drawing attention to the character's particularity as Puerto Rican, gay, man, son, and drag queen in pre-radicalized 1973 New Orleans. Revealing the multiple facets of Freddy/Aurora highlights not only individual particularity but also shared experience, as homophobic police brutality keenly resonates with a 2017 pro-LGBTQ+ audience in New York City sitting less than a mile from the Stonewall Inn. Freddy, a Spanish-speaking son of a Puerto Rican immigrant, complicates the Black/white dichotomy that has long falsely characterized the multiethnic, multinational US South. Aurora Whorealis, a blonde drag star with a communally constructed look, rejects singular constructs of identity as she "werks" a wardrobe manufactured from manifold referents across time, place, and subjectivity.

Aurora's multilayered frock in the original production (designed and created by Anita Yavich) evokes generations of pop culture and fashion icons that would have been impossible to assemble in 1973. Evoking Scarlett's curtain dress in/as drag, The View alludes to the season two premiere of RuPaul's Drag Race, "Gone with the Window," wherein contestants create a look from a set of window coverings and compete in drag performance.⁸⁴"Gone with the Window." RuPaul's Drag Race, season 2, episode 1, "Gone with the Window," produced and hosted by RuPaul, aired February 1, 2010, on Logo. Wes exclaims, "I love this! I feel like I'm on Project Runway," further highlighting the precursor series that influenced RuPaul.⁸⁵Vernon, The View UpStairs, 50. The curtains are crafted into a "nun's habit" that Aurora wears as she takes the stage to sing "Sex on Legs."⁸⁶Vernon, The View UpStairs, 66. After the first chorus, she throws off the habit to reveal a frock clearly reminiscent of Madonna's "Vogue" looks, merging the superstar's 1990 music video and subsequent MTV Video Music Awards performance. But Wes's version of the dress uses "knick-knacks taken from the bar": the iconic cone bra fashioned in duct tape (music video), seventeenth-century panniers out of red solo cups (VMAs).⁸⁷Vernon, The View UpStairs, 67. Though the costume begins with Scarlett's South, the underdress moves to New York City and reclaims "voguing" as an invention of Black and Latina/x queens of ball drag culture in the 1960s–1980s.

Aurora further strips off her panniers and climbs atop the grand piano for the song's climax; her cones explode into party hats with clown heads as confetti shoots out toward the audience. As the song winds down, Aurora relinquishes the clown bra for a final version made from Mardi Gras beads in concentric circles of purple, green, and gold. What stable category of gender identity lies beneath Aurora's cone bra? Clown heads and confetti. Mardi Gras gender play. Absurd constructed spectacle. Vernon's production asserts that a search for one singular, glossing identity misses the point; gender identity is always performative, always performance, indeed is constituted through the performance.⁸⁸The performativity of Aurora Whorealis's manifold, evolving identifications might also be read through Bertrand: "At the crossroads between the notions of an actor•tress carrying a character's fictional identity through its own body, and that of a performer assuming their personal history and using it as a creative material, a new dynamic emerges, a more dialectical and complex positioning. In shows integrating queer themes, physical identity is located on a breach, on a border. This type of event includes what I would call 'bodies in trans-' or a 'theatre in trans-'." This is understood through the multiple terms that the prefix suggests, "'trance (transe in French), transition, transformation, transidentity, transgression, transfer…" Bertrand, "Performative Theatre," 215, (ellipses original). Exposing the seams of Aurora's constructed look and salvaging icons from disparate histories leverages drag performance as activism that simultaneously constitutes selfhood. Aurora's drag show reclaims these shared histories for the historic Up Stairs patrons and the cast- and audience-patrons participating in her reclamation in the present day.

In constructing Aurora's costume, Wes self-actualizes, too. He creates and manifests the fashion designer facet of his identity: "I forgot how good it feels to actually create . . . This cheap roll of duct tape is giving me life!"⁸⁹Vernon, The View UpStairs, 53. The act of creation returns to Wes a sense of self, underscoring Katie R. Horowitz's important intervention in gender performativity theory that drag is not merely discursive but constitutive of identity.⁹⁰Katie R. Horowitz, "The Trouble with 'Queerness': Drag and the Making of Two Cultures," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 2 (2013): 303–326. "[D]rag [is] in fact productive of the identity that [many gender scholars] claim it merely expresses," Horowitz explains, "drag does far more identity work than an argument premised on the distinction between stage performance and the performance of everyday life can convey."⁹¹Katie R. Horowitz, "The Trouble with 'Queerness,'" 311. She cites her field research at an LGBTQ+ bar in Cleveland, Ohio, where many of the drag kings and queens expressed that they feel their "drag self is in many ways more real than [their] real (i.e., offstage) self."⁹²Katie R. Horowitz, "The Trouble with 'Queerness,'" 312. This inextricability of staged versus "offstage" identity resonates in Mélissa Bertrand's 2020 concept of "trans-theatre," which extends Josette Féral's "performative theatre" to the role of the body in queer performance. For Bertrand, a trans-theatre "go[es] beyond the dualisms that oppose, among other things, theatricality and performativity, the fictional identity of the character and the physical identity of the performer."⁹³Bertrand, "Performative Theatre," 216. Undermining the distinction between what is "real (i.e., offstage)" and what is performed on stage, both Bertrand's and Horowitz's frameworks explicate why Wes is so enlivened by the staged act of creation; the act (i.e., action and performance) both manifests his character development and moves the plot forward.

V. "We all want the same thing": LGBTQ+ Genealogy, Futurity, Coalition

Importantly, Wes's self-constituting act also necessarily reclaims racial histories of enslavement evoked by the Gone with the Wind allusion, mirroring Aurora's reclamation of voguing. In Margaret Mitchell's scene, also depicted in the 1940 film, Scarlett commands Mammy to make her a costume from "moss-green velvet curtains" to perform southern belle planter-class drag so she can seduce "three hundred dollars" from Rhett Butler.⁹⁴Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (New York: Avon Books, 1986), 535, 513; Sam Killerman, "Vocabulary Extravaganza," The Safe Zone Project, accessed February 3, 2019, https://thesafezoneproject.com/activities/vocab-extravaganza/; My use of "drag" to characterize Scarlett's performance in the green velvet dress is intentional. As Killermann defines, the term "drag queen" indicates "someone who performs femininity theatrically." Scarlett's embodiment, before donning Mammy's green dress, is marked by hard labor, starvation, and poverty, all which manifest on her body: "breasts . . . so small," a "scrawny neck and hungry cat eyes and raggedy dress" (Mitchell, 534 and 525). In order to seduce Rhett into giving her the money, she must perform a specific form of femininity, the carefree southern belle who is so "bored" from a life of leisure that she decided "to take a trip and have a good time" (Mitchell, 565). This is, of course, a complete lie, and she must conceal the truth by suppressing her fury at him, feigning tears, and hiding her eyes when she feels she has triumphantly hooked him (Mitchell, 564–571). When Rhett discovers the deception, he says, "You wanted something from me and you wanted it badly enough to put on quite a show" (Mitchell, 570). In the same way that drag queens perform a wide range of femininity across race, class, age, and culture, so too does Scarlett perform drag southern belle. Vernon's queer adaptation rewrites the racial logic of labor inherent in Mammy's formerly enslaved status; Wes seizes the challenge of garment creation with agency and self-determination. The inverse of racial obedience to white supremacy, Wes demonstrates his generative power to constitute meaning out of salvaged refuse, a clear metaphor for the reclamation and adaptation of violent, erased histories. As his lover Patrick affirms, "You just made a dress out of nothing."⁹⁵Vernon, The View UpStairs, 47. The plot's climax in the drag show figures a key moment of Wes's character development; he realizes his own creative power, demonstrating how artistic production can galvanize queer (and) Black agency by reclaiming histories and historic icons as tools of affective change in the present. In creative work, Wes constitutes his identity from a traumatic history, demonstrating agency over his own future. As Patrick and Wes affirm in their lover's duet, "It's our story and the ending's ours to write."⁹⁶Vernon, The View UpStairs, 82.

Patrick and Wes's ethic mirrors the playwright's own. Perhaps the most important feature of The View's constitutive performance was Vernon's own goal in composing the musical. Vernon explains in our interview that writing The View was motivated by a need for mentorship from a lost LGBTQ+ generation, not only the Up Stairs victims but all who perished in the 1980s AIDS epidemic:

It was about wanting to understand my own history. Growing up I didn't have any queer mentors to help me figure out how to exist in this world. And, you could say maybe that's because of the AIDS epidemic: a link in the chain of mentorship might have been broken. I wanted to go back to the seventies to exist in a pre-AIDS world to kind of understand my lineage as an LGBTQ person and understand where I came from and if that could, at all, help me figure out how to navigate this time period that we're in [today in 2017], which is very fraught and bizarre.⁹⁷Vernon, interview by author.

For Vernon, composing The View fostered new relationship possibilities across impossible limits of time and space—as well as the ontological divide separating the living and the dead—which helped to constitute their "own history" and queer identity.⁹⁸Taraneh, "Pop-Culturalist Chats with Max Vernon," Pop-Culturalist, September 18, 2018, http://pop-culturalist.com/pop-culturalist-chats-with-max-vernon/?fbclid=IwAR2EbOmNg5fbr_MtK_sVsnrKuIWRH0_kSHncmNtBrhnxCw4_K6botNev9Dc. By reaching back into history through performance, their creative work taps into a very personal longing and loss.

On World AIDS Day 2018, Vernon posted a public Facebook memorial honoring their uncle who, if not for AIDS, might have been an LGBTQ+ mentor:

I do not know a whole lot about my uncle Robert, the only other queer person from my family history . . . He became addicted to Heroin- not sure if it was the needles or gay sex that caused him to seroconvert, but he became HIV positive and most of my memories of him growing up involve visiting him in hospitals.

Towards the end of his life I know he cleaned up, worked as a janitor, and had a solid community of friends around him in Minneapolis. My uncle Robert died of aids when I was around 10 years old. He left me a package of rainbow socks bc I think in the back of his mind he knew I was also queer. At this point I only have one pair left- the green socks, and they're full of holes. I can't bring myself to throw them out though... Anyway that's my #worldaidsday story. With Prep, etc it's a different era today (at least in this country) but I mourn the collective loss for our community, and I hope my many friends who are + know how much I love and appreciate them. ⁹⁹Max Vernon, "I do not know," Facebook, December 1, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/MaxVernonMusic/posts/101.

The absence of knowledge about their uncle Robert's life compounds Vernon's grief over his death and orients their relationship to a queer genealogy through the AIDS epidemic. Vernon begins with the pain of not knowing, and they conclude with a metaphor of incompleteness in the gifted "green socks . . . full of holes." Their need for connection underscores a lost intergenerational relationship with "the only other queer person in [their] family history." Denied inheritance of familial queer genealogy, Vernon created The View UpStairs, imitating a mentorship with their uncle's generation that works around the impossibility of time, space, and death.

Likewise, The View brings its cast- and audience-patrons into new modes of relationality with imagined subjectivities of LGBTQ+ people who lived pre-AIDS and were abandoned by their nation in the epidemic. It compels the audience to collectively face the epidemic's "impossible gender/political situation," to use Goldberg's phrase, of a pre-radicalized LGBTQ+ New Orleans alongside the enduring legacy of the Reagan administration's institutional abandonment (1981–1989)—a legacy that would doom the 1973 patrons' future and continue to shape the present for the 2017 cast- and audience-patrons.¹⁰⁰During Reagan's two-term presidency, nearly 253,000 new cases were diagnosed, and 230,000 or 91% of those diagnosed died as a result of the disease between 1981 and 1992, "HIV and AIDS---United States, 1981--2000," Morbid and Mortality Weekly Report 50, no. 21 (Atlanta, GA: Center for Disease Control and Prevention, June 1, 2001): 430–434.. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm. Wes explores this generational tension in "The Future Is Great," which voices queer millennial reflection to subvert belief in the teleological progression of LGBTQ+ rights. Talking to the 1973 patrons, Wes sings, "But I guess you're also lucky / living in the seventies. / There's no need for wearing condoms / you can slut it up guilt-free. / Nowadays we have fancy drugs / to help us all forget… / how the eighties came killed all your friends / you just don't know it yet."¹⁰¹Vernon, The View UpStairs, 58. Wes's simultaneous envy and fear for the Up Stairs generation demonstrates how LGBTQ+ millennials would come to experience HIV/AIDS under vastly less deadly conditions, many through secondhand history (e.g, "With Prep, etc. it's a different era today"). Having lost their uncle to that epidemic, Vernon, a millennial themself, feels the loss keenly and craves historical wisdom to constitute their own selfhood amid another hostile, anti-gay, transphobic, and racist recent presidential administration.

Throughout the musical, dialogue alludes to then recently inaugurated Donald Trump until the post-fire denouement when The View's contemporary intervention reaches fever pitch. Wes grieves the Lounge victims and traces its legacy through Pulse and the 2016 election. "This shit isn't better!" he shouts, "They're killing us. Fifty people just died in Orlando . . . Look at who's running this country! . . . OUR VICE PRESIDENT BELIEVES IN CONVERSION THERAPY!"¹⁰²Vernon, The View UpStairs, 92. Jeremy Pope's performance of Wes's climactic line is desperate and immediate; he manifests the very real fear that the cast- and audience-patrons feel intimately as we anticipated the first of what would be many racist, nationalist, and anti-LGBTQ+ policies that the Trump/Pence administration would eventually enact.¹⁰³The first directly anti-LGBTQ policy was announced that following July in 2017, when Trump tweet-announced the so-called "Trans Ban" in the US military that "the Administration began implementing . . . on April 12, 2019." "Transgender Military Service," Human Rights Campaign, last modified October 1, 2019, https://www.hrc.org/resources/transgender-military-service. In the immediacy of Wes's terror, the audience is brought to crisis and shared experience with the 1973 patrons. Wes reminds us that "this shit isn't better," a wake-up call against declining vigilance in a post-Obergefell political moment, and perhaps also a rebuke of guaranteed future betterment idealized in Dan Savage and Terry Miller's It Gets Better Project.¹⁰⁴The home page of the It Gets Better Project reads, "The It Gets Better Project inspires people across the globe to share their stories and remind the next generation of LGBTQ+ youth that hope is out there, and it will get better" (emphasis mine); It Gets Better Project, accessed June 25, 2020, https://itgetsbetter.org. In either or both contexts, historic-, cast-, and audience-patrons are experientially united, haunted by dangerous futures. We are compelled to recognize how we constitute an intersectional collective despite the (im)possibilities of time, space, and subjectivity by confronting a national genealogy of hostile anti-LGBTQ+ policy tracing back from Trump, through Clinton, Reagan, Eisenhower, and beyond.¹⁰⁵The homophobic policies of Trump and Reagan are outlined above. Importantly, anti-LGBTQ+ policy has been enacted by conservative and liberal administrations; President Bill Clinton instituted the discriminatory "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military policy in 1993 forcibly closeting LGBTQ+ service people and signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law in 1996, prohibiting federal recognition of gay marriage. Eisenhower famously authorized the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare that terrorized homosexual Americans under anti-communist pretenses.

The View's immersive melodramatic pathos as executed in Pope's captivating performance manifests Goldberg's claim that melodrama can "work[] the system against itself" to foster opposition without necessarily changing the structures that inhibit LGBTQ+ life.¹⁰⁶Goldberg, Melodrama, 160. The musical "open[s] a space of irresolution," and in that space, "[m]elodrama remediates [in the] double implication of the verb."¹⁰⁷Goldberg, Melodrama, 4, xv. That is, The View confronts the impasse of time-space possibility for LGBTQ+ mentorship, and it thereby enacts the primary and secondary definitions of the verb "remediate." It conceptually remedies, or fixes again, oppressive ideological structures that inhibit "human flourishing" by recovering the erased arson attack and calling for resistance in the present day. The production also acts as a continual intermediary, mediating between what is possible (i.e., intimacy between cast- and audience-patrons) and what is impossible (i.e., mentorship by deceased historic-patrons and AIDS victims). The melodramatic mode in Vernon's adaptation does not simply re-present: it constitutes new possibilities for coalition against impossibility, however limited they may be.

The View UpStairs's immersive, melodramatic adaptation of nellydrama and drag performances that animated the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge subverts potential toward national voyeurism that recoiled local arson survivors at the arrival of those "fairy carpetbaggers." Vernon refuses to stage the fire's carnage, exploit the individual bar patrons, or reduce the event to mere symbol. In adapting the Lounge's performance genres, The View constructs a collective that links the cast and audience back to the generation who drank, prayed, performed, and lived in so many 1970s gay bars around the United States, imagining future possibilities for limitlessly diverse forms of LGBTQ+ subjectivity, relationality, and resistance. Indeed, such possibilities resonate most clearly in the words of Vernon's adapted MCC Reverend Richard: "We have too many people against us to be against each other. Maybe we have different ideas on how to get there, but we all want the same thing."¹⁰⁸Vernon, The View UpStairs, 48.

About the Author

Stephanie Rountree is an assistant professor at the University of North Georgia. She is co-editor of Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South (Baton Rouge: LSU Press 2021) and Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2017).

Acknowledgements

This essay manifests years of discussions with Dr. Ryan Prechter on his doctoral research on gay New Orleans and The View UpStairs. He introduced me to both the historic Up Stairs Lounge fire and Vernon's musical. Without his collaboration, this article would not exist. Similarly, I am deeply grateful to the external reviewers and editorial team at Southern Spaces, whose generous feedback helped shape my argument in important ways.

Introduction

I remembered back to my coming-out days in San Antonio, Texas, in the early 1960s and realized that I had lived long enough and been out long enough to be historic.
— Carolyn Weathers

In October of 2015, I met with Carolyn Weathers in her condo in Long Beach, California. I had spent the past few weeks perusing her papers at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles mostly on a whim: she was one of the few individuals in the archive who hailed from the US South—Texas specifically—and as a queer southerner from Texas myself, I wondered what insights her collection might offer about LGBTQ+ experience in our home state. I never expected to come across photos of gay bars in pre-Stonewall San Antonio or a short story Weathers had written about her time in them. But as seasoned researchers already know and novices quickly learn, the archive is full of such surprises. Agreeing to an interview with me after an archivist put us in touch, Weathers and I spent a temperate, sunny southern California day together, lunching at a local café, walking the nearby boardwalk, and sitting down in her living room for a two-hour recorded interview. This essay combines information from that interview with the short story and photos from the Weathers Collection at ONE to develop a historical case study of LGBTQ+ experience in early 1960s San Antonio.

Structurally, I begin with a brief history of San Antonio to situate us in place before analyzing how Weathers narrativizes her experience in the city in her 1987 self-published short story "Cheers Everybody!" Next, I sketch four real historical bars that Weathers frequented: The Acme, Fernando's Hideaway, The Country, and Mary Ellen's Top Hat. I approach "Cheers" as a historical document that records how Weathers imaginatively used San Antonio to historicize and process her experience of the movement for LGBTQ+ rights. I develop the bar sketches primarily through my interview with Weathers—with occasional references to how she fictionalizes them in "Cheers"—and the archival photos from ONE. Together, these objects of analysis not only reveal the centrality of the gay bar to LGBTQ+ life in early 1960s San Antonio, but they also provide clues as to how the city's colonial and military history affected the formation of racialized gay space. In other words, although attentive to patron activities, demographics, and police encounters, the bar sketches investigate how these histories influenced the creation of gay space, which racialized subjects had access to gay space, and how that space was racialized or imbued with ideas about race as a consequence.¹I follow Michael Omi and Howard Winant's definition of racialization: "the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified social relationship, social practice or group." Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2014), 111. Few studies—most of them unpublished dissertations and theses—about LGBTQ+ life in Texas during this period currently exist.²Besides the studies of San Antonio cited later in the essay, some relevant theses and dissertations of interest include: Kyle Edelbrock, "Taking it to the Streets: The History of Gay Pride Parades in Dallas, Texas, 1972–1986" (master's thesis, University of North Texas, 2015); Carl J. Stoneham, "How Prophecy Got Her Queer Back: (Re)discovering the Prophetic at the Rainbow Lounge, 40 Years and Eight Minutes Later" (master's thesis, Texas Christian University, 2010); and John D. Goins, "Confronting Itself: The AIDS Crisis and the LGBT Community in Houston" (PhD diss., University of Houston, 2014). As such, this essay is both a call to expand and further develop such research, as well as an example of how to make archival materials speak to the imbrication of LGBTQ+ identity and community formation within the colonial and racial formations that are central to the production of modernity.

To Historicize the Gay Bar

The origins of San Antonio's two nicknames—Alamo City and Military City, USA—lie in the city's history as a contested colonial space and as home to one of the largest concentrations of military bases in the United States. Founded by Spanish explorers and missionaries on the lands of the Payaya Indians in 1718, San Antonio de Béxar was capital of the Spanish and later Mexican colonial province called Tejas. After its 1821 independence from Spain, the newly established Mexican government began offering free land grants to Anglo-American settlers, who primarily took up residence in lands northeast of San Antonio. These Anglo settlers, who identified as Texians, and Hispanic settlers, who identified as Tejanos, fought against the Mexican Army led by President General Antonio López de Santa Anna during the Texas Revolution: the conflict from which the phrase "Remember the Alamo!" comes.³The actions of those fallen at the Alamo were glorified in Texas history and culture, and today, the Alamo commemorative monument and museum helps attract around 37 million annual visitors to San Antonio, whose tourism and hospitality industry generated an estimated 15.2 billion dollars in 2017.

Sparked by the Battle of Gonzales on October 2, 1835, the Texas Revolution resulted from decades of rising tensions between Tejas residents and the Mexican government, ranging from the Mexican state's abolishment of slavery in 1829 to its prohibition of new Anglo settlers in 1830.⁴The newly independent Mexican government began as the First Empire of Mexico headed by Agustín de Iturbide (1822–1823) before transitioning into a federal republic, with the Constitution of 1824 officially establishing the First Mexican Republic (Primera República Federal), known as the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos). As the EUM sorted out its leadership and organizational structure, it failed to exert strong control and governance from Mexico City over the distant Tejas. Thus, the Mexican government's gradual steps towards abolishing slavery in 1829—which, in the eyes of many Anglo settlers, reneged on Iturbide's promise to let them practice chattel slavery in Tejas—and the prohibition of new Anglo settlers in the Law of April 6, 1830—which was precipitated by fears that the United States would annex Tejas and resulted in Mexican officials and troops being dispatched to enforce Mexican law in the province—encroached on the rights and privileges that settlers had grown accustomed to. The 1833 presidential election of Santa Anna only exacerbated these issues, as he threw out the Constitution of 1824, which allowed him to centralize control of the government by eradicating provincial or state governments, and also imprisoned Stephen F. Austin, the first empresario of Tejas and primary Texian representative, for a year. Less than a year later, on April 21, 1836, the Republic of Texas became official when Texians, Tejanos, and US volunteers defeated Santa Anna and his troops at the Battle of San Jacinto.⁵Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). But San Antonio remained a contested colonial space for decades after the Texas Revolution. By 1845, Mexico still did not officially recognize the Republic of Texas, and US Annexation that same year led to the Mexican–American War and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which forced Mexican cession of disputed Texas territory (see Figure 1) and its northern territories of Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo México (see Figure 2).⁶Campbell, Gone to Texas; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas. As part of these war efforts, the US Army established its initial presence in San Antonio at Camp Almus, later consolidated as part of Fort Sam Houston in 1890 (the first permanent US military installation in the city). During World War I (1914–1918), the US War Department expanded the fort, with the additions of Camp Bullis, Camp Travis, and Camp Stanley, while laying the foundations for its fledgling aviation program. When the US Air Force gained autonomy after World War II (1939–1945) in 1948, the aviation infrastructure was divided into the Kelly Air Force Base, the Randolph Air Force Base, and the Lackland Air Force Base.⁷John Manguso, "Fort Sam Houston," Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association, accessed April 1, 2019, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qbf43; Robert Wooster, "Military History," Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association, accessed April 1, 2019, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qzmtg. While Kelly AFB closed in 2001, the other two bases, along with Ft. Sam Houston, currently make up Joint Base San Antonio (JBSA), which contributes around 49 billion dollars annually to the city's local economy.⁸"2015 Military Economic Impact Study" (San Antonio, TX: Department of Government and Public Affairs, accessed July 1, 2021), https://www.sanantonio.gov/Portals/0/Files/OMA/EconImpact/2015SanAntonioMilitaryEconomicImpact.pdf?ver=2017-02-15-142835-893.

Although contemporary San Antonio's diversified economy (financial services, health care, energy, oil, and gas) attracts international and domestic job seekers, recently earning San Antonio the title of fastest growing city in the United States, population growth in recent decades pales in comparison to the boom between 1940 and 1960, when the city's population more than doubled, rising from 253,854 to 587,718, as a consequence of mass military mobilizations during WWII and a growing military job sector.⁹The United States Census Bureau designated San Antonio the fastest growing city in the United States in 2018: United States Census Bureau, "Census Bureau Reveals Fastest-Growing Large Cities," release number CB18-78, May 24, 2018, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimates-cities.html; "Texas Almanac: City Population History from 1850–2000," Texas Almanac, accessed April 5, 2019, https://texasalmanac.com/sites/default/files/images/CityPopHist%20web.pdf. These mobilizations, according to scholars such as John D'Emilio, Allan Bérubé, and George Chauncey, were part of a historical phenomenon that facilitated the formation of urban gay subcultures in US cities.¹⁰See Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Plume, 1991); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity" in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 467–476. "Millions of young men and women," D'Emilio notes, "whose sexual identities were just forming," were placed into "sex-segregated institutions," providing them opportunities to explore same-sex sexual desire.¹¹D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," 472. Post-WWII suburbanization, which caused property prices in urban cores to plummet, making it easier to purchase real estate and open gay bars and nightclubs, as well as the founding of homophile civil rights organizations, such as the Mattachine Society (1950–1969) and the Daughters of Bilitis (1955–1995), whose respective publications, the Mattachine Review (1955–1967) and the Ladder (1956–1972), reached readers across the United States, enabled the growth of gay and lesbian neighborhoods, reading publics, and social networks.

In San Antonio specifically, gay and lesbian culture "grew dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s," writes Amy L. Stone, "and built upon a tradition of local nightclubs that had attracted female impersonators . . . in the 1930s and 1940s."¹²Amy L. Stone, "Crowning King Anchovy: Cold War Gay Visibility in San Antonio's Urban Festival," Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 2 (2016): 300. Also, see Melissa Gohlke's blog post about these nightclubs and female impersonators: "San Antonio's Drag Culture of the 1930s and 40s," The Top Shelf, October 22, 2012, https://utsalibrariestopshelf.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/san-antonios-drag-culture/. According to Melissa Gohlke, "by the early 1950s, San Antonio led the five-state Fourth Army area" (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico) "in off-limits places with fifty-three establishments."¹³Melissa Gohlke, "Off-Limits and Out of Bounds, World War II and San Antonio's Queer Community," The Top Shelf, February 25, 2013, https://utsalibrariestopshelf.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/off-limits-and-out-of-bounds-world-war-ii-and-san-antonios-queer-community/. Products of the 1941 May Act, which gave military police the authority to surveil and restrict access to places associated with prostitution and homosexuality, these "off-limits" lists, composed and released by military officials, conversely resulted in giving gay bars more publicity and patronage. "All a GI or WAC need[ed] to do [was] read the list," notes Gohlke, "and head out for a night of same-sex recreation."¹⁴Gohlke, "Off-Limits." While the military did not standardize anti-homosexual policies until the creation of the Department of Defense in 1949, each branch prohibited and prosecuted homosexuality through psychological screenings and forms of military discharge prior to and throughout WWII.¹⁵For further specification on these procedures, see Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire; Chauncey, Gay New York; and Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). If discovered in such venues, military personnel faced certain punishment, if not discharge.¹⁶Gohlke, "Off-Limits."          

A native white Texan and self-identified lesbian born in 1941, Carolyn Weathers entered the San Antonio gay scene in her early twenties, at a time of increased scrutiny and persecution as a consequence of "antigay laws, the medicalization of homosexuality, nationwide panics about homosexuality as contagion, and anti-Communist organizing against homosexuality."¹⁷Stone, "Crowning King Anchovy," 299. Born in the central Texas town of Eastland to a middle-class Baptist family, Weathers spent her early childhood in Cleburne before moving to Brownfield in the Panhandle. The second daughter of an educator, Alida Nabors Weathers, and a Baptist preacher, Jones Weathers, Carolyn followed the geographical trajectory of her only sibling and older sister by two and a half years, Brenda, moving to Dallas, San Antonio, and ultimately Southern California. Kicked out of Texas Women's University in Denton for "lesbianism" in 1957 at the age of seventeen, Brenda introduced her sister to the queer worlds that she discovered in Dallas and San Antonio of the late fifties and early sixties. Carolyn came out in 1961 while living with Brenda in San Antonio. She later joined Brenda in Los Angeles, where they were initially drawn by the countercultural movement of the sixties, ultimately participating in feminist and LGBTQ+ activism during the seventies and eighties. As members of the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front (GLF-LA), Brenda founded the Alcoholism Center for Women (still in existence), and Carolyn was the first out lesbian on an Los Angeles television show, as well as a participant in the GLF raid of the American Psychiatric Association's 1970 convention in Los Angeles. Carolyn also contributed to the Women in Print Movement, creating Clothespin Fever Press in the mid-eighties with her partner at the time, Jenny Wrenn.¹⁸Weathers was featured on AM Los Angeles with Regis Philbin. In 1970, prior to the GLF raid of the APA's L.A. Convention, the GLF raided an APA convention in San Francisco. These raids were to protest the APA's classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. Having completed their post-secondary education in the late sixties, Brenda supported herself primarily through heading substance abuse centers and animal shelters, while Carolyn worked as a librarian for the Los Angeles Public Library. From the time Brenda and Carolyn came out throughout their years of activism, their parents remained supportive and maintained close relationships with each of them. Brenda passed from lung cancer in 2005, and Carolyn, a 2015 recipient of an LGBT Heritage Award by the City of Los Angeles, is currently retired in Long Beach.¹⁹Carolyn Weathers, interview by author, October 22, 2015, Long Beach, California, video recording. Biographical information is condensed from the interview.

Both my 2015 interview with Weathers and an analysis of how she narrativizes her experience in San Antonio in a 1987 self-published short story, "Cheers Everybody!" reveal how the city's colonial and military history affected the formation of racialized gay space as well as how Weathers imaginatively used San Antonio to historicize and process her personal experience of the movement for LGBTQ+ rights. When Carolyn wrote "Cheers Everybody!" in the mid-eighties, she wanted to document and comment on her lived experience. As she relates in the 1989 preface to the second edition of her collection of short stories, Shitkickers & Other Texas Stories, "I remembered back to my coming-out days in San Antonio, Texas, in the early 1960s and realized that I had lived long enough and been out long enough to be historic."²⁰Carolyn Weathers, Shitkickers & Other Texas Stories (Los Angeles: Clothespin Fever Press, 1989), 13. "Cheers," then, while a testament to Weathers's lived experience, is also a mid-eighties reflection on pre-Stonewall LGBTQ+ life that is inflected with historical analysis. Writing "Cheers" as a bildungsroman—or coming-of-age tale whose generic conventions and narrative structure consist of tracing a character's psychological growth from youth to young adulthood—allowed Weathers to depict the gay cultural milieu she experienced in pre-Stonewall San Antonio while offering didactic historical messages about LGBTQ+ community formation, substance and alcohol abuse, political organizing, writing, and representation. These messages—conveyed through the political awakening of the story's protagonist—ultimately culminate in the text's primary theme: while the gay bar should be celebrated as the foundation of gay sociality—in that it enables community, friendships, and intimate relationships—it should also be critiqued for its limited ability to psychologically and physically sustain community. Political organizations and influence, LGBTQ+ self-representation, and LGBTQ+-owned businesses and cultural spaces, among other forms of community building and cohesion, are needed to combat systemic oppression and enhance LGBTQ+ people's quality of life.   

Written from the third-person perspective of an unnamed narrator, the twenty-nine-page narrative mimics the experience of gay bar hopping, following the partying trail of Jane Jones (the protagonist and Weathers's fictional self) as she moves from The Acme to The Country to Fernando's Hideaway (all actual historical bars).²¹I originally accessed "Cheers Everybody!" in the Weathers Collection at ONE. However, the collection of short stories in which "Cheers" is included—Shitkickers & Other Texas Stories—can occasionally be found in used bookstores or on Amazon. Peopled with representations of Weathers's sister Brenda and friends, the story intersperses bar scenes with house parties, dinner dates, and downtime with lovers and friends. But the narrative's constant return to the bar suggests its centrality to gay life and community formation in early 1960s San Antonio. Although cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were home to the burgeoning homophile movement during this time, which offered alternative, if similarly clandestine, spaces to those of the bar, scholars have neither discovered organized political activity associated with or inspired by organizations like the Daughters of Bilitis or the Mattachine Society in San Antonio, nor have individuals who participated in the pre-Stonewall San Antonio gay scene reported such activity.²²As of publication, there are only two other academic studies of pre-Stonewall San Antonio: Melissa Gohlke's "Out in the Alamo City: Revealing San Antonio's Gay and Lesbian, World War II to the 1990s," (master's thesis, University of Texas at San Antonio, 2012); and Amy Stone's Cornyation: San Antonio's Outrageous Fiesta Tradition (San Antonio: Maverick Books, 2017)—from which her article, "Crowning King Anchovy," condenses information. While ONE, a monthly magazine published by ONE, Inc., a gay rights organization founded in Los Angeles in 1952, was available for purchase in San Antonio, Weathers remembers "coming out when there was absolutely nothing but the bars—no thought or hope that there would ever be anything else."²³Stone, "Crowning King Anchovy," 300; Amy Stone and Craig Lofton, personal email, August 21, 2013. Stone writes, "Bars, coffee shops, and newsstands that sold ONE Magazine sprang up on the edges of Travis Park, a downtown green space known as a meeting place for gay men"; Weathers, Shitkickers, 13. In short, the gay bar was then the only established subcultural space for gay people to meet other gay people in San Antonio. These gay bars, as Weathers told me, serviced a mixed-gender crowd of men and women on a daily basis and were the source of friendships, hook-ups, and committed relationships. Throughout this essay, I consciously deploy the terms gay and gay women rather than lesbian when referencing patrons of these bars because Weathers specified that lesbian was not used in the gay San Antonio scene when she was there.

"Cheers" opens with the narrator describing Jane's giddy investment in absorbing and understanding the new gay world that her older sister, Diane, has introduced her to, highlighting Weathers's understanding of the gay bar as an important source of visibility, sociality, and community building in San Antonio:

Jane Jones took everything in. The Acme Bar was packed. Everyone knew most everyone, and she was learning. The Acme Bar was no rathole to her. It was an enchanted room, the first gay bar Diane and Maria took her to when she arrived in the colorful, picturesque city of San Antonio from West Texas two weeks earlier.²⁴Weathers, Shitkickers, 19.

As Jane immerses herself in the gay bar scene, she experiences multiple complicated love affairs, establishes a network of friends, and transitions from the youthful exuberance of initially coming out—as depicted in this first scene—to a more critical and politicized approach towards gay life and experience.  She learns how everyday homophobia and institutions such as law enforcement and the military affect gay livelihood.

"Cheers" features military personnel in civilian life through two primary characters, Nan Grinder and Maria, based, respectively, on a mutual friend of the Weathers sisters known as Liz and a lover of Brenda Weathers named Anita Ornelas.²⁵Weathers, interview by author. Nan and Maria are enlisted as WACs (Women's Army Corps).²⁶Founded in 1942 as the women's branch of the US Army, the Women's Army Corps existed until 1978, when it was disbanded as the Army implemented gender-integrated units. The former is notorious for her paranoia and alcoholism while the latter is characterized as a hard-working soldier who exudes "patriotism and earnestness."²⁷Weathers, Shitkickers, 29. Weathers uses this character foiling to point to the precarious existence that all gay WACs, regardless of personalities or work ethic, faced in the homophobic armed forces. For instance, Maria's goal of attaining the Good Conduct Medal is quashed when she's late to guard duty after trying to cover for two gay women making out on base. The next day two gay WACs—Sergeant Rusty and Sergeant Scaggs—report Stacey, one of the women from the make out session, for homosexual activity. Rusty and Scaggs had been "fixtures at Nan Grinder's martini parties," which she would throw as a cover for herself each time she slept with a woman.²⁸Weathers, Shitkickers, 30. Their actions result in Nan's becoming a reclusive shut-in as she fears that anyone, regardless of sexual identity, will potentially out her to military authorities and end her career. All of these experiences paint the military as a dead end for solidarity or long-term community building among gay women. And Weathers's depiction is not unfounded, as oral histories of WACs recorded by Allan Bérubé in Coming Out Under Fire, along with studies of the climate of fear and vast purging of homosexuals in the government and military during this period, such as David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare, attest to the power dynamics and political tactics forced upon and performed by gay WACs as a means of survival.²⁹David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Alongside this bleak outlook on the possibility for gay women's community, Weathers includes descriptions of the WAC Shack, a bar for WACs only, to document historical experience while alluding to a future of lesbian bars that would fulfill desires for queer women's space.  In "Cheers" and in her interview, Weathers frames the WAC Shack as a source of speculation and fantasy among civilian women who wondered what it must be like to patronize a bar full of women. Although the homosociality of the WAC Shack enabled women to potentially recognize their same-sex desire and offered a place of female bonding, its idealization by gay civilians negated the reality of gay WACs who had to navigate the space. While a place of sociality, the WAC Shack, more so than civilian gay bars, was also a place where patrons would worry that any homosexual behavior would be reported to military officials.

Desire for a queer future also appears when Jane fantasizes about positive cultural representations and access to LGBTQ+ writing. As one friend proudly shows off a book that pathologizes homosexuality and sings the praises of The Children's Hour, Jane asks, "Wouldn't it be something . . . if there were gay bookstores?"³⁰Weathers, Shitkickers, 38. Based on Lillian Hellman's 1934 play of the same name, The Children's Hour (1961) was directed by William Wyler and featured Audrey Hepburn (Karen) and Shirley MacLaine (Martha). Falsely accused of lesbianism by a vindictive student, Karen and Martha, teachers at a private school for girls, get caught up in negative media coverage that isolates them. The film ends in Martha's suicide, as she realizes that she has loved Karen all along and feels responsible for their public humiliation and Karen's failed marriage engagement. "You mean," asks another friend, "bookstores with only gay books in them." "Yeah," Jane replies, "that said nice things."³¹Weathers, Shitkickers, 38. The group's response is partly cynical ("She wants the world"), partly optimistic ("You never know").³²Weathers, Shitkickers, 39. Here, in a story set in the 1960s but self-published in 1987, Weathers invokes the Women in Print Movement, in which she was involved as a publisher and writer. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, feminist and lesbian-feminist print cultures flourished in numerous small towns and cities, with women-run collectives and presses churning out journals, newspapers, newsletters, magazines, novels, poetry chapbooks, etc.  These artifacts, as well as their byways—or their sharing by word of mouth, conferences, meetings, feminist and lesbian-feminist bookstores, and the mail—make up what recent scholarship terms the Women in Print Movement (WIPM).³³Jaime Harker, The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 17. For more histories of the WIPM, see Agatha Beins, Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Victoria Hesford, Feeling Women's Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Kathryn Thoms Flannery, Feminist Literacies: 1968–75 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Julie R. Enszer, "A Fine Bind: Lesbian-Feminist Publishing from 1969 through 2009" (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2013); and Kristen Hogan, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). The WIPM provided spaces for women to hone their fiction, poetry, and nonfiction writing, as well as sociopolitical analyses; it also generated connections between nodes of the movement throughout the United States, creating a feminist network with stronger organizing capabilities at local, state, and national levels.

These moments of political awakening in "Cheers" further character development within the narrative arc of the bildungsroman and help codify the story's primary theme, both of which are fully rendered in the final scene. In contrast to the opening scene, which depicts an elated novice Jane responding to The Acme, the final scene is contemplative, featuring recognition among Jane and her friends that something needs to change. Trying to figure out what to do on a sweltering San Antonio day, one friend suggests a scored game of throwing pebbles at birds, and Jane replies:

Nan used to . . . only she used rocks; come home from work and right away, after mixing up martinis, go out to her back porch and chonk rocks at the little birds; busted their little heads, too; never winced, never smiled, never nothing; just grim, grim, grim.

No one spoke for a time, just looked at one another and down at the ground. Jane felt there was surely something hanging in the oppressive air. It did not seem to be rain, but no one was sure. It had to break soon. They still did not know what to do.³⁴Weathers, Shitkickers, 44.

This shared emotional response builds upon the story's central engagement with the day-to-day struggles of gay men and women and disenchantment that the story increasingly conveys through Nan, Jane, and her sister, Diane. By the story's end, Nan's mental and physical deterioration disturbs all of her former associates, particularly Jane, while Diane, bored and restless with the daily nine-to-five and happy hour at the bar, considers a move to California. Jane, aware of her own mortality while standing on a concrete ledge overlooking the San Antonio River, realizes that her reckless behavior—her cavalier tempting of death through hard drug abuse and an eating disorder—will eventually kill her. The sociality of the gay bar can neither change the homophobic military regulations that have impacted the mental and physical health of Nan Grinder, provide the environment Jane needs to get sober, nor give Diane the intellectual stimulation, political activism, and sense of purpose that she desires. But rather than gesture towards political organizations, therapy, or social networks beyond the gay bar, the group remains silent until Jane suggests that they go to the bar, which they do.³⁵Weathers, Shitkickers, 44.

In early 1960s San Antonio, the bar remains a necessary distraction and needed escape. Weathers's prefatory words to the story resonate here: "I remember coming out when there was absolutely nothing but the bars—no thought or hope that there would ever be anything else."³⁶Weathers, Shitkickers, 13. By the end of "Cheers," its narrator believes that "the something . . . hanging in the oppressive air" will "break soon."³⁷Weathers, Shitkickers, 44. While historiographical and cultural tendencies to narrativize LGBTQ+ liberation as beginning with the 1969 Stonewall riots³⁸This was a series of violent riots within the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City that was set off by a police raid of the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969. have come under critique for erasing previous LGBTQ+ activism or dismissing it as more assimilative than radical, Weathers's account in "Cheers" offers documentary testimony through the thin guise of fiction for how some queer people who did not have access to organized political groups understood their lived experience at one time (1960s) and place (San Antonio).³⁹See, for instance, Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage, "Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth," American Sociological Review 71, no. 5 (2006): 724–751; Craig A. Rimmerman, The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation? (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Although "Cheers" describes the centrality of bars to gay life in pre-Stonewall San Antonio, it reveals little about how issues of race and class inflected gay experience in the city at this time. Photographs of these gay bars that Weathers took as a patron hint at racial demographics, but further contextualization of these spaces provided by my interview with her shows that while fluid and mixed in terms of class demographics, these gay bars' racial demographics were very much pre- and over-determined by Jim Crow racial segregation. Of the bar sketches that follow, all of them but Mary Ellen's Top Hat—located at 210 South New Braunfels Avenue in Figure 3—appear in "Cheers," and each sketch will offer deeper insight (through the use of Weathers's personal reflections in our interview) into the racialization of San Antonio gay bars than is provided in Weathers's autobiographical short story. Figure 3 also notes locations for The Acme (505 Austin Street)—the first bar that Weathers entered when she moved to San Antonio and the bar "Jane" first encounters in "Cheers"—the River Walk, and Five Points. Fernando's Hideaway, as depicted in "Cheers" and told to me by Weathers, was located on the River Walk.⁴⁰Weathers, interview by author. In her thesis, Gohlke locates Fernando's Hideaway at 2100 Frio City Road, but she provides no information about the bar beyond that. It is unclear whether this is a discrepancy in information or Fernando's moved locations at some point. Besides Fernando's Hideaway and The Country II, Gohlke's study does not document the bars that I discuss here. See Gohlke, "Out in the Alamo City." Five Points serves as visual orientation for Fredericksburg Road (to its immediate northwest), which led out to The Country (address now lost).

The Acme

In "Cheers," the narrator describes the neighborhood where The Acme is located, at 505 Austin Street on the outskirts of downtown, as "an eerie area of locked warehouses and abandoned storefronts where life had left, as though an alien spaceship had beamed everyone else up during the night."⁴¹Weathers, Shitkickers, 15. A tiny little dive bar, or as Weathers called it, "a dump," The Acme was very popular, always "stuffed full of gay men and women." The co-owners, fictionalized as Ray Davis and Lila Tankersley in "Cheers," were an amiable white gay man and a white elderly woman who Weathers believes was asexual. "Lila" also owned a shop next door called The Acme Pharmacy and had a reputation for hassling patrons of the bar, insisting that they produce their IDs. Unsure of how these two became business partners, Weathers noted that the bar serviced a mixed crowd of civilian and military, working class and upper class, gay folk and occasionally heterosexual couples. For instance, a straight couple, the Rodriguezes, "would come in and join [them] for hamburgers and beers." When asked about the racial make up of the bars, specifically if they were interracial, Weathers specified that Mexican Americans and whites mingled in all San Antonio gay bars, but that this wasn't viewed as interracial mingling because Mexican American and Anglo cultures were heavily intertwined in San Antonio. The idea of race as something that marked Mexican Americans and Anglos as apart from or different from each other became more apparent to her when she moved to Los Angeles, where she was "surprised by how segregated Mexicans and whites were."⁴²Weathers, interview by author.

Given the long history of anti-Brown violence and political disenfranchisement in south, central, and west Texas, if my informant had been a Mexican American woman, then she would have likely told a different story about race. But Weathers's account offers insight into white experience of racial intimacy in San Antonio, while also alluding to potential Mexican American identification with whiteness as produced by San Antonio's colonial and military history. South, central, and west Texas—parts of which were included in the territory of the Republic of Texas and parts of which were considered contested territory between Mexico and Texas until US annexation and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (refer back to Figure 1)—have traditionally homed the majority of the state's Latino demographic. Latino populations in north and east Texas have increased in recent years, particularly in Houston and the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. However, because these areas were heavily settled post–Mexican Independence by Anglos practicing chattel slavery, they have been and continue to be home to most of Texas's Black demographic.⁴³See "The Changing Population of the Texas and the Tyler Region," (Tyler: Texas Demographic Center, 2017), https://demographics.texas.gov/Resources/Presentations/OSD/2017/
2017_03_21_TylerCatalyst100.pdf. Figure 4 presents a map of Texas's Black enslaved population in 1845, and Figure 5 a map of Black demographics by Texas county as of 2020–2021. Consequently, the establishment of white supremacy in Texas, in its republic and later state forms, required regionally specific racialized policing practices. Whereas east Texas followed the rest of the US South in contending with white over Black, south, central, and west Texas had to contend with white over Black and Brown.⁴⁴These regionally specific racialized policing practices are not transhistorical—although their afterlives or permutations of them are—and shift according to changing racial demographics. For instance, by the early 1970s, Houston had a significant Latino demographic in comparison to the rest of predominately rural east Texas. Consequently, as Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. documents in Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), Houston Independent School District tried to avoid integrating white and Black students by classifying Latinos as white. That is, Latino and Black students would be integrated, while white students would attend separate institutions.

While the legal practice of chattel slavery meant whites maintained control over Black individuals throughout Texas in its various iterations as province, republic, and state, shortly after the Texas Revolution, alliances between Texians and Tejanos unraveled. Whites in south, central, and west Texas removed Tejanos from positions in government and public office and committed rapes, lynchings, and massacres as a means to assert dominance and instill fear. Although Tejanos enlisted and served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, the emancipation of enslaved Black people and the white power grab post-Reconstruction to reassert social structures and hierarchies of old that enabled the monitoring and control of Black bodies necessitated the creation of Jim Crow laws, which in south, central, and west Texas were accompanied by Juan Crow laws. Not only intended to ensure Black and Brown disenfranchisement in such forms as voter suppression, racist housing policies, and underfunded educational institutions, Juan and Jim Crow instantiated tripartite racial segregation in an effort to explicitly convey white supremacy and racial difference from Mexican Americans and Black people while also deterring Black and Brown coalitions.⁴⁵For further information, consult the following: Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (London: Oxford University Press, 2017); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); and Nicholas Villanueva Jr., The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Analyzing Mexican American and Black civil rights movements from the early to mid-twentieth century in Texas, Brian D. Behnken argues that Juan and Jim Crow were, by and large, effective in encouraging Black and Mexican Americans to "work against each other" politically.⁴⁶Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 230. Political organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) "sought to include Mexican Americans on the white side of Jim Crow," and some Mexican Americans sought to prove their whiteness through anti-Black practices and violence, such as denying Black people service and setting off bombs in Black homes.⁴⁷Behnken, Fighting, 68. Specifically, Behnken references a 1950 bombing in South Dallas, in which 15 bombs were detonated at the homes of Black residents who had integrated a white neighborhood. While there were multiple vigilantes involved, many of whom were never apprehended, two suspects were Mexican American men who felt threatened by the presence of Black residents in white neighborhoods. As Behnken elaborates, this political strategy wasn't successful in gaining Mexican Americans long-term equal rights, but many whites, including Texas governors of the period, did "[recognize] Mexican American whiteness," thus demonstrating the malleability of whiteness or how false promises of inclusion within white racial identity were deployed to further anti-Black and Brown sentiment while shoring up white supremacy.⁴⁸Behnken, 40. Given these racial dynamics, Weathers's words about white and Mexican American mingling in San Antonio gay bars reflect Sharon Holland's thoughts on racial intimacy: rather than tamping down racist ideologies and practices, "proximity and familiarity" might actually "replicate the terms upon which difference is articulated and therefore maintained."⁴⁹Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 19.

Fernando's Hideaway

Inspired by the Mexican American bar owner's name and a popular song ("Hernando's Hideaway"), Fernando's Hideaway was in a historic building along the San Antonio River Walk. Construction on the River Walk began in the 1920s, when the city hired engineers to create a dam system that would address the frequent threats of disastrous flooding by the San Antonio River. Plans to convert the river and its banks into a storm sewer system resulted in the founding of the San Antonio Conservation Society, which successfully lobbied against this measure and was tasked with overseeing future development of the area. Delayed by the Great Depression, the River Project—plans to develop the river by adding restaurants, walkways, and shops—was initiated in 1939 through local tax and WPA (Works Progress Administration) funding. Initially headed by architect Robert H. Hugman and later J. Fred Buenz, construction on the River Project by WPA workers ended in 1940, with an opening dedication ceremony coinciding with the city's inaugural Fiesta River Parade in April of 1941. Throughout the forties and fifties, the River Walk featured a small sampling of restaurants, shops, and boating activities that drew in a fair number of locals and tourists alike but was generally considered an unsafe area at night due to crime. From the 1960s up until 2011, however, the face and reputation of the River Walk radically changed, as the city heavily invested in its further development and expansion in order to capitalize on tourism capabilities.⁵⁰Consult these sources for a more detailed history and timeline: Lewis F. Fisher, "San Antonio River Walk [Paseo del Rio]," Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association, accessed April 20, 2019, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hps02; "History of the River Walk," The San Antonio River Walk, accessed April 20, 2019, https://www.thesanantonioriverwalk.com/history/history-of-the-river-walk; City of San Antonio, "River Walk," accessed April 20, 2019, https://www.sanantonio.gov/CCDO/riverwalk.

Attentive to the River Walk milieu of Fernando's Hideaway, scenes of the bar in "Cheers" occur amid Fiesta San Antonio, an annual ten-day celebration of the city's history and culture, which started in 1891 to commemorate those fallen at the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto. According to Weathers, Fernando's was much "fancier" than the other bars and not as "secretive," given its location in an area with heavy foot traffic. The racial, gender, and class make-up of the bar was like The Acme, with straight people often patronizing it as well. The bar's balcony that overlooked the river was a popular spot, and Weathers laughingly recalled a Fiesta memory of Navy men floating in a boat down the river as gay men catcalled "sea food" from the balcony.⁵¹Weathers, interview by author. The fact that gay men and women weren't discouraged from patronizing Fernando's despite its public visibility speaks to the assimilative capabilities of white and Mexican American gay bars in the downtown San Antonio district during this period. As Amy L. Stone's work on Cornyation (a mock debutante pageant organized and performed by gay men during Fiesta from 1951 to 1964) reveals, spaces and events associated with Fiesta often allowed for gay visibility within certain limits. "Attended by a public audience of thousands and reviewed in local newspapers," Cornyation, Stone argues, "rendered gay culture visible to some heterosexual observers and implicated gay men as urban citizens worthy of integration into the city," but "this legibility ultimately led festival organizers to ban Cornyation."⁵²Stone, "Crowning King Anchovy," 298. Given Fernando's proximity to Fiesta activities held on and near the River Walk, as well as its accessibility to tourists, perhaps it's plausible to suggest that the general public did not necessarily recognize it as a gay bar and that its existence was contingent, in part, on it servicing a large heterosexual demographic.

The Country

The Country featured in "Cheers" was located outside the city limits on Fredericksburg Road. It is also referred to as Stein's Bar in the short story, but the actual name for it—when folks did not invoke its nickname, The Country—was Kline's Bar. Two white elderly lesbians, Maybelle and Bee, operated The Country and had probably been together since the 1930s. Weathers described The Country as much "nicer" than The Acme: it "sat in some thickets" off the road and had "long tables" and a jukebox in its "cavernous dance hall." Moreover, there was a separate lounge room with a bar at the front of The Country where customers could relax on chairs and sofas while purchasing drinks. The racial, gender, and class demographics of The Country mirrored The Acme's, with many people frequenting both of these bars. This shared patronage was not just because The Country had more room and was the site of "a lot of drunkenness and singing loud to Patsy Cline," but also because gay couples could dance at The Country. Unlike urban gay bars, which didn't allow same-sex dancing due to their close proximity to police stations, The Country permitted same-sex dancing because its distance from police stations gave the bar owners and patrons time to warn each other and switch into heterosexual pairs.⁵³Weathers, interview by author.

Military and Bexar County police occasionally raided The Country, and Weathers, having witnessed one of these raids, fictionalizes the method employed to alert patrons in a way that is very similar to the actual method she shared with me in person: Maybelle would walk around with her yellow bandana in her shirt pocket, which was a sign that cops were coming, and same-sex couples would immediately rearrange into heterosexual pairs. Another precaution included banning two people in the bathroom at once because if, for example, two women were in the ladies restroom during a raid, cops had probable cause to arrest them for homosexual behavior. When the cops entered the bar, "they would," according to Weathers, "go around the room looking for a woman's hand on another woman's knee" or any type of same-sex touching. I asked her if authorities persecuted gay men and women if they dressed in clothes typically associated with the opposite sex, as in, for example, Buffalo, New York, where butches were arrested for wearing less than three articles of women's clothing, and she said gay men and women in San Antonio wore the same casual dress clothes as heterosexuals: "jeans, t-shirts, Bermuda shorts."⁵⁴An informant recounts this in Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis's Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). By her account, there weren't butch–femme pairings in the gay scene, and people didn't use those terms; instead, the only term used was fluff, which referred to more feminine women. Outside of this specification, Weathers's remarks also suggest that drag was not a common feature in these bars, nor was there a significant presence of people presenting as gender variant.⁵⁵Weathers, interview by author.

For reasons that Weathers can't remember, Maybelle and Bee ended up closing The Country. A white gay man and white bisexual woman with an arranged heterosexual marriage opened a similar venue called The Country II in a different location not long after.⁵⁶Weathers, interview by author. In her study of San Antonio gay bars, Gohlke explains that like The Country, this bar was a queer gathering space that allowed for same-sex dancing and touching due to its location outside the city limits. The patrons and bar owners also employed their own technique for warning of incoming cops: flashing the lights on and off.⁵⁷Gohlke, "Out in the Alamo City." Gohlke and Weathers have been in contact with each other, and Weathers told me that The Country referred to in Gohlke's thesis is, in fact, The Country II. The Country's function as a queer space on the city's periphery that gay people fluctuated between in the process of creating queer community resonates with John Howard's idea of circulating, which he uses to account for how gay men in Cold War Mississippi engendered queer experience and space by remaining in a state of flux.⁵⁸John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 78.

Mary Ellen's Top Hat

Located at 210 South New Braunfels Avenue on the city's east side, a traditionally Black neighborhood since formerly enslaved people began establishing Freedmen's Towns there after the Civil War, Mary Ellen's Top Hat is the final bar that Weathers remembers from her time in San Antonio.⁵⁹For more information about Black history and experience in San Antonio, see Alwyn Barr, Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 1528–1995 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Bruce A. Glasrud, ed., African Americans in South Texas History (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011); Kenneth Mason, African Americans and Race Relations in San Antonio, Texas, 1867–1937 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). Owned by a heterosexual Black woman of the same name, Mary Ellen's was unique because it welcomed Black, Mexican American, and Anglo patrons. According to Weathers, during their revelry at the bar, Mary Ellen would sing Ray Charles songs and Weathers and her friends would act as Mary Ellen's chorus. The bar also had a beer-drinking club called UN CAPPA-FU—a play on "uncap a few." As an interracial space, Mary Ellen's heightened Weathers's awareness about Black experience in the United States through conversations she had with Mary Ellen, a Black male acquaintance nicknamed Mr. Elegance, and white and Mexican American friends and fellow patrons. Becoming noticeably emotional when discussing the racial dynamics of this bar, Weathers recalled that she, Mary Ellen, and Mr. Elegance decided to integrate The Country one night after a heated discussion over Black civil rights. However, they left in separate vehicles, and upon arriving at The Country, Weathers went in without waiting for them. She doesn't know if they were denied entrance or if they even showed up, and that lack of knowledge, as well as her failure to wait for them, is a source of strong regret today.⁶⁰Weathers, interview by author.

Although heavy media coverage of the civil rights movement brought images of violence and struggle into the everyday lives of white people across the country, when Weathers entered the San Antonio gay bar scene in her early twenties, she was still ignorant and indifferent due to her race, youth, and regional upbringing. Recall that west Texas has always had a significantly smaller Black population in comparison to other parts of the state, which has influenced how anti-Black practices and ideologies manifest and circulate there. West Texas officials did not always enforce Jim Crow laws to the extent that they were enforced in more eastern parts of the state, and anti-Mexican sentiment often predominated among locals given the region's colonial history and significant Latino demographic.⁶¹William S. Osborn, "Curtains for Jim Crow: Law, Race, and the Texas Railroads," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 105, no. 3 (2002): 395. The small, predominately white town that Weathers grew up in, Brownfield, was no exception. She struggled to remember incidents of anti-Black violence and racism in her childhood, quickly adding, however, that she did notice anti-Mexican sentiment, especially in relation to the presence of imported Mexican agricultural workers in Brownfield. Weathers's experiences in Mary Ellen's Top Hat reveal that, in facilitating cross-racial dialogue, racially integrated gay bars in San Antonio were potential sites of racial consciousness raising, however limited, among patrons.⁶²Weathers, interview by author.

Conclusion

Absent in these bar sketches are the voices of people of color such as Anita, or Fernando, or Mary Ellen, or Mr. Elegance. What might a Black-owned gay bar have meant to someone like Mr. Elegance? What were his and Mary Ellen's thoughts about gay bars like The Country upholding anti-Black Jim Crow laws? Was Mary Ellen's Top Hat racially integrated because under Jim Crow, white people actually had access to all spaces, or was it a political statement on Mary Ellen's behalf? What did it mean to a Mexican American bar owner like Fernando to deny services to Black gay people and Black people generally? As a Mexican American woman, what was Anita's experience of racism and racialization as she moved from Mexican American-owned bars to white-owned bars to Black-owned bars? The Weathers Collection at the ONE Archives cannot answer these questions, but they should prompt us to consider what research approaches and archival practices are needed to adequately represent a fuller and more inclusive queer history of pre-Stonewall San Antonio and Texas. Now is the time to gather oral histories and create cross-reference lists of Texas queer experience in LGBTQ+, Black, Latino, and Asian American archives so that the research process is streamlined for academics and non-academics invested in interpreting and preserving this history.

Beyond this call to further curate and study Texas queer history, my analysis here does open up other questions that could be more thoroughly explored in future work with the Weathers Collection. For instance, how did military history influence racial dynamics in San Antonio? How might sexual dynamics be understood through the city's colonial history? What were common or popular understandings of gender in the gay community at the time? These are just a few provocations that readers might find in this essay. From this work, I hope readers will notice the gap in racial awareness when considering Weathers's "Cheers" short story and our later interview. That is, the short story itself does not discuss Jim Crow segregation or the different racialized experiences of characters. In fact, none of the characters are openly racialized. If it were not for my interview with Weathers, I could not have provided an analysis of racialized gay space in San Antonio at this time. Both text and context, story and oral history, work together to tell a richer, if still incomplete, version of pre-Stonewall gay life in San Antonio. This essay, then, might serve as an object lesson in how to work with racial silences that are often common in the archival materials of white subjects. And considering that one of the problems of archives—LGBTQ+ and otherwise—is the over-predominance of collections from white subjects, this is not an object lesson to easily cast aside.

About the Author

Amanda Mixon is Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research on US social movements has appeared in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and received support from the American Association of University Women, Duke University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Irvine Humanities Center.

Blog Post

I recently bought a crumbling old house in a historically gay neighborhood in Roanoke, Virginia. I met my ex-lover in this house five years ago. At the time they lived with a coterie of other young people. They threw raucous queer parties and housed folks who didn't have anywhere else to go.

A few blocks down the street is another building. There, in 1971, a group of young men and women founded the Gay Alliance of the Roanoke Valley (GARV), the region's first gay liberation organization. This building is now a medical office. I come here once a year to see my endocrinologist. He prescribes spironolactone and estradiol to help my body transform into something approximating that of a woman.

The local neighborhood association puts up signs that read, "A Past with a Future." As I see it, the neighborhood's past is rich with gay history, and the future is my transitioning body and the pink, white, and blue flag I fly in the driveway.       

Queer history lives here. It's overlapping in the spaces of my neighborhood. It's in the bones of the buildings. Queer ghosts inhabit the walls. Archaeological troves are remnant in the yards. My dog June digs them up with her ready paws and pearl-white fangs. My gender transformation is hitched to the woodwork and to the water pipes of all the apartment buildings where I have lived. People have lived queerly in these spaces. I have bought a home that not only holds the past but makes space for the future—for my womanhood, my motherhood, and for the chosen family I will assemble underneath this roof. 

LGBTQ people have long known that our stories are not to be found in the so-called annals of history, and that we have to look in unexpected places to find our past. Lesbians in Roanoke in the 1980s devoted an entire issue of their newsletter, Skip Two Periods, to "Discovering Our Heritage." The writer, "B. F.," wrote about finding her heritage at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, in Jonathan Ned Katz's book Gay American History, through the National Women's History Project, and in the published letters shared among nineteenth-century women. She also suggested that lesbian history is found in our families. "Write to your grandmother and ask her about her grandmother," she pleaded. Indeed, queer history is present in the way my parents reacted when I first came out, as they referenced a family member who died of AIDS in 1989 and hinted that I might face a similar fate. We carry queer trauma in our bodies. All of us—straight, gay, cis, trans—live in a world shaped by the queer past.

We have the tools to probe this history on the local level. Since the 1970s, queer history projects have flourished across the United States. New archives are forged from the remains stowed away in activists' attics and closets. Oral history collections are assembled from the stories of our elders, talking about what it was like growing up as a trans person in Appalachia in the 1960s, for example. Doing queer history work provides us with the opportunity to bring LGBTQ people together across generations, to talk about what was and what can be, to find new meaning in the spaces of our lives.

Six years ago, I helped found the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, a community history project that has since engaged hundreds of local people in the process of researching and interpreting queer pasts. This has involved creating a permanent archive in partnership with the local public library system, developing an oral history collection through interviews with our elders, leading monthly walking tours, unveiling digital exhibits, releasing podcasts, and working with local youth on interactive theater and zine-making workshops. This project is how I ended up spending time in this house; it's where I fell in love with a project member who lived here. It's how we know the geography of bars and cruising spaces that once littered the neighborhood, and the all-queer and all-trans houses that still stand. It's how I discovered my gender. Interviewing trans women about their lives, I realized this was also my story. So I came out into the spaces of the project, into the spaces of our city, into a new relationship with queer history. A past with a future.

Every October we celebrate LGBTQ History Month. To me, this month is a reminder that we are still fighting, especially here in the South, for students' right to learn basic LGBTQ history in the classroom. But beyond the metanarrative of what should be taught in school, there are thousands of local queer histories still waiting to be uncovered. This work takes all of us—students, elders, volunteers, professionals. Do you know when the first gay organization was founded in your community? Have you met your trans elders? The work of doing queer history has the power to transform lives. It has the power to give new meaning to the places we call home.

About the Author

Gregory Samantha Rosenthal is the author of Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

Introducción

El dramaturgo Abel González Melo nació en 1980 en La Habana, Cuba, mismo año en que el Exodo del Mariel vio a aproximadamente 125,000 personas huir de su país, un evento que dramatiza en su obra de 2018 En ningún lugar del mundo. González Melo estudió Artes Teatrales en la Universidad de las Artes de Cuba. Ha recibido diversos premios y galardones por sus obras literarias y teatrales, entre ellos el Premio Primer Concurso de Dramaturgia de la Embajada de España (2005) por Chamaco, una de las obras más reconocidas de González Melo, y más reciente el prestigioso Premio Literario Casa de las Américas 2020 (enero).

Las obras de González Melo abarcan dos décadas y cubren múltiples temas sociales dentro de la vida cubana. Desde la complicada relación de Cuba con el Exodo del Mariel en En ningún lugar del mundo (2018) hasta la prostitución adolescente a principios de la década de 2000 en La Habana Vieja en su trilogía, Fuga de Invierno (2004–2009), sus obras sumergen al público en las calles que rodean el Capitolio de La Habana, en los parques, callejones y teatros que brindan espacios para la prostitución ilegal, en casas particulares que centran la importancia de la familia para los cubanos. La primera década de la escritura de González Melo problematiza la cultura juvenil cubana de principios de la década de 2000, una cultura a la vez gay y heterosexual, hambrienta y saciada, resistente y complaciente en un país donde la Revolución todavía se lucha a diario en las calles (aunque ahora rodeados por los "WiFi hotspots" aprobados). Mientras González Melo mantiene su identificación sexual privada, sus obras desafían la categorización, preguntan cuestiones de sexualidad y exploran la supervivencia, la mercantilización del cuerpo, el trauma mental intenso, el dolor de la historia y el amor profundo de la familia. Sus personajes se entretejen dentro y fuera de sus obras para demostrar esa complejidad: mientras algunas cosas han cambiado, otras siguen igual de siempre.

La obra más reciente de González Melo pasa a recuperar personajes literarios y episodios de la historia cubana con una perspectiva revisionista. Figuras históricas de la obra de González Melo incluyen la poeta feminista de principios del siglo XX María Luisa Milanés (de Bayamo, Cuba) en Bayamesa (2019), que ganó el premio Casa de las Américas de teatro en enero de 2020. En abordar el tema de la censura en el apogeo de la Revolución en Cuba, la obra más reciente de González Melo presenta personajes históricos cubanos. Fuera del juego dramatiza la experiencia de la figura cultural Heberto Padilla, un poeta venerado cuya obra criticó la Revolución y sus líderes en su momento, 1967–68, resultando en su arresto, tortura y exilio a los Estados Unidos en 1980. Padilla trabajó muchos años en varios puestos en el sistema universitario en los Estados Unidos, como Ohio State University, Bowdoin College y el Instituto de Humanidades de la NYU, antes de morir solo como poeta residente Auburn University en 2000. En su drama más reciente, Cádiz en José Martí (Festival de Teatro Iberoamericano de Cádiz, 2020), González Melo dramatiza al mítico héroe nacional de la isla, el revolucionario José Martí (1853–1895). González Melo lo sitúa en la ciudad española de Cádiz, el primer destino de Martí en su largo exilio y deportación política bajo el régimen colonial.

En esta conversación, González Melo explica su proceso creativo e inspiraciones, la experiencia de la migración cubana como material dramático y la idea de refundir la historia para nuevos públicos y tiempos. Habla de cómo se basó en la experiencia actual en La Habana para crear Fuga de invierno y cómo su obra reciente se sumerge profundamente en las preguntas de la comunidad y la familia durante algunos de los momentos más severos de Cuba. González Melo también reflexiona sobre las ligaduras singulares entre Estados Unidos y Cuba. Uno de estos vínculos es la conexión lingüística español-inglés, ya que muchos cubanoamericanos son bilingües. Por lo tanto, aunque esta conversación se llevó a cabo en español, hemos proporcionado traducciones al inglés. [Read the English translation of this interview here.]

Chamaco : El comienzo de todo, o el trabajo inicial de González Melo

Gunnels: ¿Por qué la dramaturgia? ¿Piensas que el teatro es el mejor vehículo para las historias que quieres contar?

González Melo: El teatro tiene algo maravilloso para un escritor: aleja a la literatura de la soledad. Propone la creación en equipo y el contacto directo con el espectador. Ambas cuestiones me resultan muy atractivas: la idea de que la escritura nunca cesa, siempre es reinterpretada en presente, necesita la comunión del director, los actores, los diseñadores, los técnicos, y precisa, indefectiblemente, la complicidad del público. Me deslumbra esa naturaleza inacabada de la escritura dramática, esa urgencia por impactar de modo inmediato. Disfruto escribir narrativa o ensayo, pero en ambos casos extraño el diálogo real con el ser humano. Será porque, cada vez más, la dramaturgia es en mí un proceso relacionado con un grupo humano concreto, una textura imaginada para gravitar sobre una cuerda floja.

Gunnels: ¿Sientes 'inacabada' esa naturaleza porque necesita de otros artistas para completarse, o porque, cada vez que se representa una obra, hay una nueva audiencia que tendrá reacciones distintas?

González Melo: El teatro lo hacemos entre todos, los artistas y el público. Basta recordar el origen griego de la palabra "teatro", que significa "mirar". Es decir, solo existimos porque alguien nos mira. Es uno de los mayores placeres de escribir dramaturgia: sentir que uno solo ofrece una guía de acotaciones y parlamentos sobre el papel, solo eso, pero que el personaje tendrá el cuerpo, la voz y el alma de quien lo encarne delante del espectador, que es quien terminará de construirlo en su proceso de recepción activa. ¿Por qué seguimos asistiendo una y otra vez a los estrenos de los clásicos? Pues porque su esencia, más que en el argumento, radica en cómo se cuenta hoy esa historia en el ágora pública: quiénes la ejecutan, por qué deciden hacerla, en qué contexto y ante quiénes, qué sentidos nacen de esa experiencia.

Gunnels: Quisiera pintar la escencia de la triología Fugas de invierno para la audiencia antes de que lo comentemos.

Chamaco (Kiddo, 2004, traducción al inglés de William Gregory) es la primera entrega de la trilogía.¹Hay dos traducciones publicadas. William Gregory tradujo los dos Chamaco y Nevada; Yael Prizant tradujo la triología en versión bi-lingual con prensa distinta. Chamaco se ha representado a nivel mundial, desde el Teatro Argos en La Habana hasta Manchester, el Teatro HOME de Inglaterra, hasta la traducción más reciente al checo, con la producción en Praga programada para el otoño de 2021. La trilogía, que incluye Nevada y Talco (la segunda y tercera entrega), cubre un lapso de tres meses en un invierno tropical del descontento, como escribe la crítica de teatro y académica titular Lillian Manzor "the trilogy addresses concerns that are dear to the author and his generation, namely: the complex and contradictory ways in which homosexuality, sex, and migration from the countryside to the capital becomes means of survival in a society that has lost all sense of value."²Lillian Manxor and Austin Webber, "Ground Down to Nothing but Still Fighting." Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Accessed March 25, 2021. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-82/manzor-webbert.html. Chamaco sumerge a los espectadores en la Nochebuena en La Habana, donde una hermana espera con inquietud que su hermano regrese a casa para una cena que nunca comerá, ya que sin saberlo ella, murió en una pelea con cuchillas. Nevada sigue a Lucía y su novio/chulo Rosnay cuando se encuentran con la realidad de vender sus cuerpos en el esfuerzo por salir o escapar, en este caso, al estado de Nevada, donde la prostitución es legal, y los "dulces vienen envueltos en papel de brillo". Talco, la última entrega, retrata una realidad cruda y sucia que se desarrolla principalmente en el baño de un antiguo cine utilizado para el tráfico y la prostitución, donde los caminos de cuatro personajes—Javi, Máshenka, Zuleidy y Álvaro—se entrecruzan en una batalla violenta y tensa de supervivencia. A la trilogía la siguen casi veinte obras más, muchas de las cuales han sido traducidas a varios idiomas y representadas tanto en Estados Unidos como en el extranjero. Abel, esta trilogía realmente centra la experiencia de la juventud cubana. Describe la importancia de dar voz a la gente joven cubana en las obras que has escrito.

González Melo: Ahora que lo comentas, pienso que los protagonistas de mis obras han ido teniendo mi edad en el momento de escritura, y en cada texto van siendo mayores estos personajes porque crecen conmigo. He querido llenarlos de mis dudas, mis afectos, mis dolores. Son la imagen sublimada de mí mismo en medio del mundo en que he crecido: la Cuba de entresiglos, y desde hace algo más de una década también la España del XXI. Vivo a caballo entre los dos países y los observo a ambos con una mezcla de pasión y extrañeza. No puedo hablar de todos los jóvenes como una masa, eso no sé hacerlo, pero sí de mí en el paso de la adolescencia a la juventud: esas pulsiones son las que habitan mi teatro. Ojalá tengan que ver con las de otras personas.

Gunnels: Dime más sobre eso que llamas 'pasión y entrañeza.'

González Melo: Recuerdo que a principios de los 2000, cuando atravesaba en la noche la Habana Vieja rumbo a mi casa, me despertaban enorme curiosidad las decenas de adolescentes que aguardaban apoyados en las columnas, frente al Capitolio, o rondando el Parque Central, en medio de la zona turística. ¿Qué hacía toda esta gente aquí? ¿Quiénes eran? Poco a poco fui acercándome a ellos, muchos vivían clandestinamente en La Habana, habían emigrado desde el Oriente de la isla. Todos se prostituían, o aspiraban a hacerlo.³Una nota de González Melo: "Aquí estamos hablando, si hay que aclararlo, solo de cisgender masculinos. Yo no soy expert en estudios y terminology de género, pero los trans y las chicas están, como explico, en otras zonas de la ciudad." Supe de historias fascinantes, terribles. Irlos descubriendo a fondo no fue sencillo, ninguno iba a darme una entrevista sin más y contarme su vida. Me convertí en discreto cliente, ahorraba dinero y me iba con alguno de ellos a un cuartico de alquiler. En la fugacidad de ese rato de extraño placer me mantenía alerta: los escuchaba hablar de sus vidas, de sus hijos pequeños a quienes tenían que alimentar, de sus mujeres conscientes de que ellos se dedicaban a la cacería de extranjeros o cubanos que pudieran pagar por sexo. Mi investigación fue ampliándose, una cosa me llevó a la otra, fui componiendo el mapa de la marginalidad nocturna de la Habana Vieja: la zona de las prostitutas estaba en el cruce de las calles Monte y Cienfuegos; los travestis y transexuales aguardaban a sus clientes en el Parque de la Fraternidad; la droga se vendía en un cine abandonado, etc. Me sumergí de lleno. Hice cosas impensables durante aquellos años, cosas que hoy no haría. Pero por suerte me atreví a hacerlo: quería conocer a fondo a estas personas, sus lugares, sus razones, todo ese ambiente que la prensa oficial no publicaba. Tres o cuatro años de inmersión. Tras concluir Chamaco, tenía aún tanto material acumulado que nacieron Nevada y Talco. También en obras como Por gusto y Adentro hay huellas de este universo.

Gunnels: Por mi parte, Lucía de Nevada y María Luisa de Bayamesa me conmuevan por su necesidad de enfrentarse al mundo, al exterior hostil, pero con persistencia y amor por la familia. Son fuertes ejemplos feministas para cualquier generación. Y Lucía, con su vestido rojo, es singular para mí. ¿Hay un ángel en tu obra, un personaje que realmente te conmociona?

González Melo: No suelo partir de la emoción en los procesos de escritura. Soy bastante técnico, algo que aprendí con mi maestra Raquel Carrió (gran autora nuestra, fundadora en 1976 de la carrera de Dramaturgia en la Universidad de las Artes de Cuba): la tríada estructura-personaje-lenguaje es la base de la preparación de mis proyectos. Creo que la emoción llega (o no) en paralelo a (o luego de) la apreciación de la experiencia. La emoción estará entonces en el receptor. Pero para que eso pueda suceder, la construcción misma del texto o del espectáculo ha de ser precisa, nítida, no puede partir del deseo de emocionar, porque se desfigura. A veces siento que la emoción enturbia la objetividad de lo que ocurre: sucede mucho con los actores que actúan "emocionados" y, entonces, sobreactúan; o con los dramaturgos que se sobreemocionan con lo que están haciendo y pierden el rumbo de la acción, pierden síntesis.

Sí es verdad que alguna vez he tenido experiencias singulares, yo diría que místicas, durante la escritura misma, como me sucedió con Chamaco, que sentí que alguien me la dictaba al oído. Estaba muy reciente la violenta muerte de mi padre y el monólogo de Silvia, cuando se entera de que han asesinado a su hermano, lo escribí deshecho en llanto. Siempre he creído que Chamaco es mi padre que se convirtió en ángel para dictarme esta obra y que me acompaña desde entonces.

La historia se repite

Sobre todo en sus dramas más recientes, Abel González Melo ha cambiado de describir experiencias personales en su trabajo a referenciar y dramatizar puntos de contacto históricos cubanos (como el Éxodo Mariel, los UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción), el Quinquenio Gris y el Período Especial. El Éxodo Mariel constituye la migración masiva más grande de Cuba en su historia. De abril a octubre de 1980, se estima que ~125.000 cubanos salieron del Puerto Mariel para los Estados Unidos. La historia fue bien cubierta en los medios de comunicación: un pequeño grupo de cubanos tropezó un autobús urbano hasta las puertas de la Embajada peruana en La Habana en un intento de pisar tierra allí y solicitar asilo político (y eventualmente salir de la isla). Se les concedió asilo y, después, más de 10,000 personas se acercaron a la embajada con las mismas esperanzas. Al ver esta situación desarrollarse desde los Estados Unidos, el presidente Jimmy Carter emitió una invitación abierta a cualquier persona de Cuba que huyera del régimen de Castro, evitando en parte la política y el procedimiento de inmigración de los Estados Unidos. Siguió un giro típico de Castro: después de un discurso muy público el primer de mayo, el Día del Trabajador, en la Plaza de la Revolución de La Habana, vació las cárceles y hospitales de Cuba de criminales condenados y enfermos y requirió cualquier embarcación estadounidense que fuera a recoger a familiares o seres queridos para llevar del Puerto Mariel también consigo un barco lleno de otros 'indeseables', en los que incluía hombres homosexuales y personas con problemas psiquiátricos. Como señala González Melo en nuestra conversación a continuación, la historia de Cuba con los hombres homosexuales está marcada por una trágica discriminación, tortura y muerte. Los históricos campos de trabajo de la UMAP (en español, Unidades Militares de Ayuda de la Producción) que sirvieron como un tipo de prisión laboral de 1965 a 1968 en Camagüey, Cuba, fueron politizados como campos agrícolas para "objetores de conciencia", pero fueron más una especie de "purga" social de cualquier persona que fuera considerada anticastrista o antirrevolucionaria, afirma el historiador Abel Sierra Madero.⁴Abel Sierra Madero, "Academies to Produce Macho-Men in Cuba." Translated by Alicia Barraqué Ellison. Translating Cuba. February 19, 2016. https://translatingcuba.com/academies-to-produce-macho-men-in-cuba-abel-sierra-madero/. Esto incluyó a los acusados ​​de homosexualidad.

Siguiente de los años de la UMAP hay un período de poco más de cinco años (1971–1977) conocido como el quinquenio gris en el que el gobierno cubano controlaba rígidamente las producciones culturales y artísticas de la isla. Esto período limitó severamente la expresión y la publicación artísticas. Varios de los dramaturgos más destacados de Cuba, como Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979), Abelardo Estorino (1925–2013) y Antón Arrufat (1935–), sufrieron tremendamente bajo esta censura, tanto por su insistencia en la libertad creativa como por su homosexualidad. Rodeados de un ambiente hostil, los tres utilizaron la metáfora como forma de expresión, siempre tratando de evitar la censura. La obra de Piñera preguntó en términos amplios conceptos de identidad nacional y la parte del escritor como resistor. Un prolífico escritor de ensayos, cuentos y teatro, las colecciones de Piñera como Cold Tales (1956) y Little Maneuvers (1963) fueron acreditadas por inspirar a generaciones de escritores que vendrán después, incluso el autor conocido del Mariel, Reinaldo Arenas. Abelardo Estorino, que antes fue censurado con su obra Los mangos de Caín (1965), solo escribió un texto en los años 70 y en cambio se dedicó a la dirección de clásicos en la Compañía Teatro Estudio. Antón Arrufat recibió altos honores de la UNEAC por Los siete contra Tebas en 1968, pero esa institución publicó el libro con una nota que acusaba al escritor de ser un contrarrevolucionario; Arrufat fue condenado, y no publicó más por una década.

Finalmente, la inmigración hacia y desde La Habana varió drásticamente desde la década de 1960 hasta la actualidad, y las leyes que prohíben el reingreso, así como la relación política y acre entre los Estados Unidos y el régimen de Castro, crearon una forma estratificada de entender el hogar, la comunidad, y exilio. A principios de la década de 1960 se produjo un éxodo de las clases media y alta, que en su mayor parte aterrizaron en el sur de Florida y se quedaron. Después del Éxodo Mariel, la política de inmigración estadounidense de mediados de la década 90 llevó a un aumento de la inmigración de la isla, ya que 'pie mojado, pie seco' permitió acelerar los procedimientos de inmigración de EE.UU. para cubanos. El aumento de balseros es notable durante este Período Especial. De estas grandes olas de inmigración, Mariel se distingue por la demografía de la población, así como por el giro politizado en ambos lados: ese grupo fue menos aceptado por los cubanos en la isla y experimentó una integración más dura en su nueva comunidad del sur de Florida.⁵Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 75.

González Melo es descendiente de estos primeros dramaturgos cubanos así como heredero de esta historia enredada. En la conversación que sigue, González Melo reflexiona sobre la realidad del hombre "gay" en Cuba antes y después de Mariel, y cómo esta faceta de la historia cubana encuentra su camino en sus obras dramáticas. En particular, su obra Fuera del juego revisa el Caso Padilla y la UMAP, destacando la censura subversiva y la tortura psicológica de los artistas en los primeros años de la Revolución. Su obra Bayamesa se remonta a lo más lejano de la historia cubana, para abordar temas de la tradición colonialista, los roles de género y el feminismo en Cuba.

Gunnels: Describe los cambios, si los hubiera, en la realidad del hombre gay en Cuba desde que escribiste Chamaco (2004) hasta En ningún lugar del mundo (2018).

González Melo: El lapso que dices comprende poco más de una década y no creo que los cambios hayan sido muy apreciables. La Revolución no se ha comportado de modo precisamente bondadoso con los homosexuales, quienes fueron considerados durante mucho tiempo lacras sociales y enviados entre 1965 y 1968 a campos de trabajo llamados UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). Todo ese proceso acrecentó el machismo y la homofobia en nuestra sociedad. En la obra de grandes dramaturgos cubanos, que además eran homosexuales (pienso en Virgilio Piñera, Abelardo Estorino o Antón Arrufat), el tema no aparece o aparece muy escamoteado, quizás a causa de la autocensura: después de las UMAP vinieron los terribles años 70 y sus políticas de marginación a homosexuales artistas. A mi generación le ha tocado una etapa un poco más amable, aunque la homofobia persiste y ha encontrado vías soterradas para manifestarse. En lo personal he podido abordar el tema gay en textos que se han publicado y estrenado dentro de la isla, han aparecido antologías de poesía y narrativa homoeróticas, etc. Se ha intentado incluir, en la enmienda a la Constitución, la noción del matrimonio igualitario que ya es una realidad en tantos países del mundo: pero durante demasiados años el propio gobierno ha sembrado el odio hacia los homosexuales, y la mentalidad del pueblo no puede cambiarse de un día para otro.

Gunnels: ¿Puede el teatro cambiar a un pueblo? ¿El poder del arte o interrogación?

González Melo: Ni el teatro ni ninguna otra manifestación artística pueden cambiar una sociedad. Sería demasiado pretencioso pensar que sí. He escuchado frases como "el arte cambia el mundo" y siempre siento que tienen un sentido figurado, metafórico. El teatro no es un partido político, no es un ejército, no es una bomba atómica ni una pandemia: no tiene ese poder de cambio brusco, inmediato, contundente. Lo que sí puede el teatro, confío en que sí, es tocar la mente y el corazón de una persona, de un espectador que asiste a una función y descubre otro modo de mirar, se identifica en ese espejo, encuentra algo que le lastima en lo profundo. El teatro transforma, en ese sentido, al individuo y no a la masa, aunque la experiencia de nuestro arte la tengamos en colectivo. El teatro trabaja siempre (en su ejecución, en su recepción) el comportamiento particular, no la generalidad. Tocamos a una persona, y esa persona tendrá en alguna ocasión, quizás, la oportunidad de tocar las cosas que mueven el mundo. Esa es la sencilla y hermosa condición de nuestro arte.

Gunnels: Su obra de 2018 En ningún lugar del mundo (Nowhere in the World) aborda el silencio en torno a la identidad sexual en Cuba (desde los años 80 hasta la actualidad), tanto como temas de visibilidad gay y el trauma del servicio militar, a través del protagonista Ángel se aprecia el dolor agudo del Mariel tanto para los que se fueron como para los que se quedaron. Cuba tiene una historia de trece años en África (1975–1988), con fuerzas militares cubanas sobre el terreno en nombre de la liberación de Sudáfrica durante ese tiempo. La asociación militar terminó con la independencia de Namibia y, según algunos, el comienzo de la retirada del apartheid en la zona. No obstante, las fuerzas cubanas regresaron con problemas psicológicos, y el drama de En ningún lugar del mundo vuelve a visitar esa época, así como el trauma inminente del Mariel. Ángel, como protagonista, sale de Cuba con el éxodo del 1980, y el drama comienza con su regreso a Cuba después del Mariel, solo para descubrir que el trauma entre familias es profundo e implacable. ¿Cómo entiendes el legado de la generación del Mariel a otros artistas cubanos que han escrito en exilio, forzado o no?

González Melo: El protagonista de En ningún lugar del mundo fue forzado a abandonar Cuba en 1980 por el Mariel, debido a problemas psiquiátricos (sí, algo despiadado: los enfermos mentales eran considerados directamente escoria), cuando en realidad la familia se lo quería "quitar de encima" por sus violentos testimonios de la dura experiencia de tres años como soldado en la Guerra de Angola. La historia de nuestros exilios está llena de gente anónima que no ha dado su testimonio porque aún sigue traumatizada. El Mariel es un entorno demasiado amplio y diverso que escapa a catalogaciones homogéneas. Lo más importante, pienso, es lo que significó como fenómeno, y los miles de cubanos que pudieron (que se vieron en la obligación de) integrarse a la cultura norteamericana y, al mismo tiempo, enriquecerla con su acción directa. No puede entenderse la cultura y la sociedad de Miami hoy sin sumar las capas de exilios que esa ciudad ha asumido. En lo personal admiro mucho la voluntad y la resistencia de las generaciones de cubanos exiliados que han reinventado el concepto de patria.

Gunnels: ¿Qué piensas sobre los dramaturgos que vivieron la época del éxodo del Mariel en Cuba pero permanecieron? Pienso particularmente en Ulises Rodríguez Febles y su obra Huevos. Ya hablamos sobre la idea de salir, ¿pero qué pasa con los que se quedan?

González Melo: El Mariel ha sido relatado brillantemente por dramaturgos que se mantienen creando en la isla, como el propio Ulises en Huevos o Carlos Celdrán en Diez millones. Los dos eran muy jóvenes en 1980 pero han logrado imprimir a sus textos, llenos de matices autobiográficos, un carácter que supera la reconstrucción histórica. Me gusta eso, que podamos sacudirnos el polvo de la cotidianidad, que tanta energía nos roba, y mirar nuestra historia y nuestro porvenir con altura. Ellos viven en Cuba, sí, pero poseen una reconocida carrera internacional: Ulises ha triunfado recientemente en México con una obra que curiosamente reconstruye la trayectoria de otro artista exiliado, Dámaso Pérez Prado, y Celdrán ha paseado sus Diez millones por importantes festivales del mundo. Cada vez la frontera entre el afuera y el adentro, entre irse y quedarse, es más permeable y menos estricta. Por suerte.

El teatro disecado: El proyecto persistente de González Melo

Gunnels: ¿Cómo afectó crecer durante el Período Especial a la trayectoria o temario de tu obra, y la influencia de otros poderes mundiales (como Rusia) en tu país?

González Melo: Es inevitable la influencia. Mi niñez estuvo colmada del imaginario ruso y soviético: esa huella es evidente, por ejemplo, en mi obra Talco, pero también en parte de mis cuentos y en mi pasión por esa cultura. Estudié el bachillerato en una escuela vocacional llamada precisamente "Lenin": fue entre los años 1994 y 1997, en régimen interno. Allí padecí la escasez (de alimentos, de luz eléctrica, de recursos sanitarios) pero también descubrí la solidaridad. Allí sufrí acoso escolar pero pude formarme como alguien independiente. De esa experiencia llena de contrastes nació mi primer libro: Memorias de cera. Y esa etapa, en pleno Período Especial, marcó mi interés por la paradoja en que hemos vivido los cubanos: gritar consignas heroicas en la Plaza de la Revolución durante los desfiles, y al mismo tiempo estar muriéndonos de hambre en casa y susurrando por los rincones nuestra miseria de vida. El Período Especial ajustó el nivel de vida de la sociedad y acrecentó las diferencias de clase, el clientelismo, el mercado negro, la corrupción en todos los ámbitos. Esa doble moral atraviesa mi literatura: personajes que precisan, a toda costa, ponerse máscaras para seguir sobreviviendo.

Gunnels: En Nevada, un tema primordial es el deseo de salir. ¿Cómo ves este sentimiento a través de otras obras que has escrito, y de dónde viene? ¿Puedes profundizar un poco en la naturaleza de la relación Cuba/Estados Unidos y este deseo de salir de la isla, especialmente en esta época de inestabilidad inmigratoria?

González Melo: Nacer en una isla condiciona el deseo de ir más allá de las fronteras inmediatas que el mar impone. Ya Virgilio Piñera lo resumía en una imagen: "La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes". La isla es encierro y anhelo de partir para, en mi caso, tener la oportunidad de volver. Ha sido una constante cubana la necesidad de huir de la isla, acrecentada por factores políticos y económicos en la etapa de la Revolución. Mi propio padre tuvo que exiliarse en México con el fin de garantizarnos una mejor vida: no hablo de lujos, sino de tener dinero para comer, para asearnos, para transportarnos… Como la mayor diáspora se ha dado hacia Estados Unidos, tenemos con ese país una relación muy estrecha. En mi tesis doctoral estudio precisamente los vínculos entre familia y exilio en la dramaturgia de la Gran Cuba, entendida como la generada tanto en la isla como en el extranjero: me gusta esa idea de patria expandida, no sujeta a límites físicos, sino más bien a sensaciones y ámbitos en común. Esa intención recorre gran parte de mi obra como elemento de nuestra idiosincrasia: partir y regresar. Nevada y Adentro hablan del viaje clandestino por mar y los riesgos que ello supone. En Sistema, la tensión se halla justamente en que el protagonista es atrapado en Miami y no puede volver. Epopeya, Intemperie o En ningún lugar del mundo diseñan el arco que va desde el destierro hasta el regreso al paso de los años, y todo lo que ese reencuentro comporta.

Gunnels: Pero para los Marielitos, a quienes se les aseguró que una vez salieran de Cuba no podrían volver a ella jamás, el exilio ha sido y es especialmente doloroso. ¿Te interesa con En ningún lugar del mundo diseccionar el impacto que ha tenido en esa comunidad el dolor ante el regreso a la isla, que finalmente fue posible?

González Melo: Por supuesto. El Mariel y la Guerra de Angola son asuntos que apenas hemos tratado en la escritura nacional pero sus huellas siguen ahí: son heridas no cerradas, y algo de ello he intentado tocar con En ningún lugar del mundo. La estructura familiar ha sido, en la tradición de la dramaturgia cubana, el núcleo a través del cual observar los grandes temas sociales y políticos. Esto tiene que ver con lo que antes te comentaba: el teatro solo funciona desde lo particular y no desde lo general. Los procesos históricos se analizan en libros, artículos, entrevistas, en amplios fondos bibliográficos y documentales. Una obra de teatro no puede contener todo ese proceso, todas las vidas malgastadas en el intento de construir determinado proyecto político-social. Lo que sí puede una obra es aguzar la mirada, focalizar un pequeño grupo humano y aplicarle el escalpelo. Utilizas el verbo adecuado: diseccionar. Como dramaturgo me siento exactamente así: Cuba es mi quirófano, esa familia destrozada es el cuerpo que yace sobre la camilla, y he de aplicar el bisturí con precaución, con suma responsabilidad, intentando llegar a la raíz del dolor.

Gunnels: Es verdad lo que antes decías, que hay una relación muy estrecha entre Cuba y Estados Unidos. ¿Dirías que las experiencias que has tenido en Estados Unidos como dramaturgo cubano hayan sido particularmente reveladores en cuanto a entender esta relación?

González Melo: Han sido experiencias muy diversas. En Chicago, por ejemplo, Aguijón Theater ha estrenado Adentro y Epopeya; a pesar de ser textos de marcadas referencias nacionales y de que un cubano (Sándor Menéndez) los dirigió, en ambos casos se produjo un rico diálogo con una comunidad latina más amplia, gracias también a las excelentes traducciones de Marcela Muñoz: actores, equipo artístico y espectadores asumían como suyos los temas del desarraigo y la frustración política. Algo similar sentí con el estreno de Por gusto en Repertorio Español de New York, y eso que también era cubana Leyma López, la directora: la desilusión incesante de la juventud y la monotonía de la existencia circular resultaban cuestiones afines a un elenco multinacional. Cuando Ohio Northern University produjo Nevada, recuerdo que les interesaba mucho el estudio minucioso del contexto: parte del equipo visitó la isla y el montaje contó con proyecciones documentales, que contrastaban deliciosamente con la dramatización del texto en inglés, a cargo del mexicano Otto Minera y con traducción de Yael Prizant. En Miami, donde la comunidad hispana es también amplia y variada, la confrontación esencial ha sido con el público cubano, que lógicamente resulta el más interesado, por experiencia directa o por referencia, en ficciones sobre La Habana marginal de Chamaco, Talco y Nevada, obras que Alberto Sarraín dirigió. Siento que el estreno de En ningún lugar del mundo en el XXXIII Festival Internacional de Teatro Hispano, en producción de Teatro Avante, dirigido por Mario Ernesto Sánchez y con traducción de Marian Prío, ha dimensionado aún más el debate sobre la tensión Cuba/Estados Unidos, que es el conflicto entre quienes se quedaron y quienes se fueron. Menciono siempre a las traductoras pues considero esencial su labor y su dedicación: ellas, y mi traductor británico William Gregory, han sido los responsables de que mis textos queden tan bien reescritos en esa lengua.

Gunnels: ¿Cómo escoges los motivos que vas a revisar en el teatro? En Bayamesa (2019) se ve la representación directa de la Cuba tradicional de principios del siglo XX, donde la protagonista María Milanés lucha por encajar a Cuba tradicional con sus propios sueños y ambiciones feministas. En ella, tú alteras tiempo y espacio en el escenario para generar en la obra un diálogo tenso entre el pasado y el presente, y con un suicidio desgarrador que deja a la audiencia destrozada. Nos encontramos a la mujer auténtica que nos anima a todos, pero también aflora la idea de suicidio como tema social, cuando hoy día hay más y más suicidios de gente joven. Como terminas Fuera del juego: "la historia se repite, y se repite".

González Melo: La motivación de la escritura es múltiple y cambia de un proyecto a otro. Lo esencial siempre es que el material de partida resuene en mí, que me parezca urgente compartirlo en escena. En el caso de Bayamesa le debo mucho a mi madre, que es filóloga y escritora, y que me habló por primera vez de María Luisa Milanés (1893–1919). Leí sus poemas. Leí su sorprendente autobiografía, que es posiblemente el primer manifiesto feminista escrito en Cuba y uno de los primeros de Latinoamérica. Me impactó su simbólico suicidio: un disparo en el vientre, con la pistola de su padre militar. Un alma libre como ella prefirió escapar de ese modo, antes que continuar sometida al machismo imperante. Supe que la obra debía ser un réquiem que la devolviera a la vida, mediante una ficción que intentase acompañarla, darle voz, siquiera durante la hora y media que dura la puesta en escena. Se cumplió en 2019 un siglo justo de su muerte y, como dices, sigue siendo por desgracia un drama tan vigente…

Gunnels: ¿En qué anda tu trabajo ahora, después del éxito tremendo de Bayamesa?

González Melo: Me estoy sumergiendo cada vez más en la historia de Cuba. Creo que nuestra historia se ha abordado muy poco en la dramaturgia, a veces con una mirada muy superficial, y confío en que el teatro tiene la posibilidad de arrojar una luz nítida sobre sucesos del pasado que nos permitan situarnos en la complejidad del presente. ¿Cómo podemos vivir, cómo podemos entender el país que somos si no analizamos lo que nos ha traído hasta aquí? Durante años trabajé temas y conflictos del presente inmediato, desde los ambientes marginales hasta el lujo de los nuevos ricos. Pero ahora mismo eso se me ha agotado. Imagínate un país cada vez más desabastecido, con un pésimo transporte público, un país donde la gente tiene que pasar horas y horas en horrorosas colas para conseguir una libra de carne de cerdo, una bolsita de detergente, un litro de aceite, todo ello a precios astronómicos. El panorama actual es desolador, no sabría en qué tono dramático abordarlo. Quizás únicamente desde la farsa o el esperpento. Por eso me refugio en el pasado, porque siento que sin memoria no hay densidad de tradición. Hay mucho donde escarbar. El teatro no ha entrado a fondo, por ejemplo, en los graves casos de censura propiciados por las políticas culturales de la Revolución. La censura me interesa mucho: la tenemos demasiado cerca, a menudo sin percatarnos. Me interesa mucho la revisión histórica, siempre que tenga un matiz particular que pueda hablar de una tensión global.

Gunnels: La censura sigue siendo, en efecto, un problema pernicioso en el mundo, ahora con 'caras' diferentes. Al abordar el caso Padilla en tu obra Fuera del juego, te preocupas por problematizar el rol del artista.⁶En esta obra, González Melo re-visualiza el infame Caso Padilla, en el que el célebre poeta Heberto Padilla es arrestado, encarcelado, tortuado y finalmente exiliado por su trabajo contrarrevolucionaria que cuestionaba la Revolución, el Comandante (Fidel Castro) y el papel de los escritores en general. Utilizada como ilustración clásica de la traumática censura de finales de los 60 y principios de los 70 en La Habana, González Melo cuenta la historia desde la voz del propio poeta como protagonista principal. ¿Es que te interesa "complicar la cosa", para decirlo con palabras de tu propio personaje de Heberto Padilla?

González Melo: Dicen que uno escribe la misma obra a lo largo de toda la vida. El tema de la censura y la autocensura me ha interesado siempre, quizá porque desde muy joven tuve que negociar con ella. Mi libro Memorias de cera por poco no ve la luz, ya que, aunque ganó un premio nacional que consistía en su publicación, contaba mi descubrimiento de la sexualidad en la escuela Lenin, y eso a los funcionarios de la editorial no les gustaba nada. Chamaco, de hecho, puede entenderse como una obra sobre el miedo a la libre expresión dentro de la familia Depás, donde cada uno teme sincerarse ante el otro y todos viven en una espiral de mentiras. Epopeya obtuvo en 2014 el Premio Nacional de Dramaturgia y se publicó por Ediciones Alarcos, pero tuvo una fugaz presentación de solo cincuenta ejemplares, no se distribuyó en librerías, el libro no puede encontrarse en ningún sitio y la obra no puede estrenarse en Cuba (es un texto donde utilizo la metáfora de la Guerra de Troya y el hipotexto de Hécuba de Eurípides para debatir, una vez más, sobre el regreso a la isla de los cubanos exiliados, una vez que Príamo ha caído en combate).

Es cierto que en años recientes me he acercado mucho a la relación entre arte y censura. En 2017 dirigí en Argos Teatro, en La Habana, Cartas de amor a Stalin del dramaturgo español Juan Mayorga, que para mí es una obra que habla sobre la misma situación que padecemos muchos artistas, periodistas y cubanos en general: el terror a decir la verdad, a hablar libremente. Es también uno de los temas de Bayamesa: la censura a la libertad creativa, la plasmación del dolor mediante la poesía, la necesidad de ser independiente. El padre, el marido y la madre de María Luisa Milanés no admitieron ese espíritu rebelde, y eso desencadenó el conflicto y trajo el fatal desenclace. Con Heberto Padilla ocurre lo mismo: fue un hombre muy cercano a la Revolución cubana a inicios de los años 60, incluso fue diplomático, pero lentamente se fue desencantando y su poesía fue haciéndose cada vez más inadmisible para un régimen que terminó asfixiándolo. No quiero "complicar la cosa", más bien intento lo contrario: visibilizar estos asuntos convirtiéndolos en dramaturgia y lenguaje.

Sobre la entrevistadora y el entrevistado

Bridgette W. Gunnels is Associate Professor of Spanish at Emory University and a scholar in Latin American literature from the twentieth century, in all forms, with special emphasis in the short story.

Abel González Melo is a Cuban dramatist, writer, teacher, and theater director. González Melo studied Theater Arts at the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba and is the recipient of various prizes and awards for his literary and theater works, including the Premio Primer Concurso de Dramaturgia de la Embajada de España (2005) for Chamaco [Kiddo]. Most recently, in January 2020, he won the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize for his work, Bayamesa.