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  • Caravaggio's Rednecks
  • Scott Herring (bio)

I don't fit into gay culture, period. I don't get it.

—Michael Meads, personal interview

Nothing, apparently, unsettles metropolitan gay men more than the sight of "white trash" boys cloaked in Confederate flags. In fall 2002 New York City's Nikolai Fine Art Gallery exhibited Michael Meads's Eastaboga, a series of photographs that had previously been shown in Nashville, Tennessee; Albany, New York; and La Grange, Georgia. The title refers to a small, predominantly white, blue-collar town in northeast Alabama where Meads was born and raised, and the installation featured chrome color pictorials of Eastaboga residents taken from his extensive personal archive, one that spans from the early 1980s to the present. Most of the exhibition displayed documentary and studio portraits of the town's "redneck" boys that Meads took with a 35 mm camera—many close friends, almost all in their late teens to early twenties. Eastaboga's subjects play cards, piss together, chug beers, hold cockfights, share porn in the cramped quarters of a trailer home, embrace each other in the nude, brand each other with their initials, drape themselves in rebel flags, mill about an art studio, and sit shirtless to eye the camera in poses that index homoerotic desire, if not its actualization. Save for their first names, Eastaboga revealed little else about these males, who are shown in intimate acts that suggest and surpass homosocial bonding.

Though neither the Alabama press nor any other southern journalism has yet to comment on this archive, a variety of urban-based electronic and print media—the New Yorker, Gay City News, Attitude, and the Village Voice, to name several—did make mention of Eastaboga, and Meads soon reproduced much of the installation in a digital gallery of his own making titled Alabama Souvenirs (www.michaelmeads.com). I detail the mainstream media responses to these photographs later in this essay. For now, I note that the metropolitan spectacle of [End Page 217] what Meads has described as Eastaboga's "weird area" generated a fair amount of online buzz in the DataLounge, a popular gay and lesbian chat room.1 During one November 2003 forum, more than fifty men and several women—many metro-identified—discussed the pleasures and the frustrations that Eastaboga and Alabama Souvenirs induced. Almost all of their responses fell under the subject heading "SO HOT!!!" and many agreed that the photographs were "disturbing," "amazing," and "vividly expressive."2

A few were titillated by the sight of scantily clad southern ruralism and cast the photographs as urban performances of trailer trash twinkdom. "They look like imported Chelsea boys with a photographer in the background going 'come on give me your best bubba,'" states one respondent. Several others identified Alabama Souvenirs's sexual preferences as similar to their own and saw the images as exemplars of queer metropolitan sex codes: "I think that Justin (my namesake) is totally hot, and . . . he is the top in the pair." Many, however, were far less certain and were so distressed by the images that they affirmed their metropolitan identities by denigrating the "redneck" males. "Ew," one respondent writes, "makes me glad I don't live in the redneck states. Those guys have nasty beer bellies by the time they hit 23. Sad."

Running alongside these aesthetic judgments was social commentary obsessed with making sense of Meads's origins, his sexual relations to these images, his racial and class politics, and, most frequently, the sexual identity of his photographic subjects. Uncertain as to what, exactly, these images might sexually denote, forum participants used a slew of urban-oriented interpretive strategies to crack Alabama Souvenirs. Building on the assumption that the series was rural soft pornography, one puzzled viewer asks, "Did these fellas know they were doing gay jack-off pictures for their buddy?"3 Another likens them to hustlers: "Jeez all these guys posing for dollars. SPAM [the luncheon meat] must be getting expensive." Yet another wonders, "Is he married to a woman so that these guys couldn't imagine he was queer despite the way he was asking them to pose? Or are these guys actually gay? Is this a glimpse...

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