Carryin' On in the Lesbian and Gay South, and: Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968 (review)

Both John Howard’s Carryin’ On and James Sears’s Lonely Hunters address a topic overdue for analysis. The idea of the South, especially for many Southerners, forms a fundamental component of individual and national identity. Entire enterprises—college courses, advanced degrees, societies, journals, and more—dedicate themselves to investigating “the South.” A more recent, though hardly nascent, topic is gay and lesbian culture. Jonathan Katz tracked Gay American History two decades ago, and a quick perusal through any gay and lesbian bookstore (or even through the gay and lesbian shelves in behemoth bookstore chains) yields evidence of a virtual explosion of gay histories written since the 1980s: John D’Emilio, Martin B. Duberman, Lillian Faderman, and Elizabeth Kennedy, and Madeline Davis are only a few oft-cited gay and lesbian historians. The South’s intersection with gay and lesbian culture, then, is ripe for analysis. Until Sears’s and Howard’s volumes, however, gay and lesbian historical roles in the South (and the South’s role in gay and lesbian history) have garnered little attention. Sears’s and Howard’s works, therefore, are some of the first to acknowledge gay and lesbian contributions to the South, and both authors articulate at least the implicit hope that their volumes will change the academic profession specifically and “American culture broadly” (Howard, xi).

Sears’s work spans Cold War America from the end of World War II to the year before the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. An “oral history,” Lonely Hunters showcases narrative from Richard Inman (a Florida activist), Merril Mushroom (a Jewish lesbian Floridian), Quinton Baker (a North Carolina African American civil rights organizer), Rose Levinson (a Miami lesbian lawyer from New York), Dawn Langley Simmons (an intersexed Brit living in Charleston), and Jack Nichols (a Washington, D.C., activist). Sears details the chilling Johns Committee purge ( around 1958–1963) of Florida state employees suspected of being homosexuals: in McCarthyesque fashion, the committee staked out university and courtroom bathrooms, entrapped gay men (mostly state university professors), subjected them to intimidating and repeated interrogation, demanded names of other homosexuals and finally, after forcing many professors to quit or to be fired, began searching for gay students. Chapter four addresses North Carolina African Americans’ difficulties integrating local establishments; Quinton Baker’s account reveals that homosexuality was tolerated, if not accepted, within civil rights groups because all energy was devoted to ending Jim Crow laws. Chapter five on Gordon Langley Hall, later Dawn Langley Simmons, details the difficulties of being an intersexed person in an interracial relationship in South Carolina.

Carryin’ On arranges its articles chronologically from the early-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century. The topics are varied: historical southern same-sex relationships, major southern authors, oppressive legislation, localized communities, and theories of place. Sears has contributed a version of his chapter on Hall/Simmons. Elizabeth Knowlton’s and Margaret Rose Gladney’s essays explore contested definitions of “lesbian” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, respectively. The essays of Gladney, William Armstrong Percy, and Martin Duberman narrate difficulties securing permission for primary sources: Gladney details her successful publication of Lillian Smith’s and Paula Snelling’s love letters to each other, despite Smith’s family’s initial resistance; Percy chronicles his “outing” of William Alexander Percy despite his family’s and scholars’ objections; and Duberman suggests that his use of historical letters from Jeff Withers to James Hammond might have been easier had he not sought official permission. Katy Coyle and Nadiene Van Dyke’s, Howard’s, and Meredith Raimondo’s essays analyze place and politics: Coyle and Van Dyke contrast the upper class, Newcomb women’s college campus with the nearby...