Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (review)

Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. By John Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. xxiii + 395. $27.50 (cloth).

Given the currency of views that connect the Deep South with the Bible Belt and gays with a preference for city life far away from Southern evangelism, you might be inclined to assume that a history of male homosexuality in Mississippi would have nowhere to go. John Howard's Men Like That will convince you otherwise. Relying on oral history as well as extensive rereading of cultural materials such as gay pulp fiction and Bobbie Gentry's 1967 country-music hit, "Ode to Billy Joe," Howard demonstrates that same-sex desire found expression in post-World War II Mississippi. In the process, his analysis broadens the framework of queer history by cutting it loose from both its traditional urban context and focus on those who identified as gay, turning instead to the less visible but equally relevant rural and small-town experience of all men who desired sex with other men. The final result is a book that has much to add to the history of sexuality and the history of the South.

Howard contends that "southern indirection"--a reluctance to speak explicitly about topics that might distress polite company--created a space for young boys and mature men to pursue opportunities for homosex. Thus, when Mississippians ignored men who transgressed sexual boundaries or referred to them obliquely as "men like that," their silence often (inadvertently) allowed such men and boys to follow their desires, much as the absence of medical discourse on the "problem" of homosexuality functioned to permit a wider range of sexual behavior before the nineteenth century. Howard's narrators remembered that while growing up in Mississippi in the 1940s and '50s, they were never a part of an organized homosexual community, but found plenty of places where queer desire could be met. The play of adolescent boys at the local waterhole regularly turned to sexual experimentation, and in private homes cousins and friends literally claimed closets for assignations while parents feigned innocence.

In "reconceiving silence," Howard surmises that silence was not necessarily repressive (p. 31)--which is not to say that boys and young men who engaged in transgressive behavior had an easy time. They fought off physical and verbal abuse from those who were frightened by the choices they made, and they moved often in search of safe meeting places. In addition to meeting in homes, cars, and secluded woods, "men like that" blurred public and private by appropriating roadside rest areas, public restrooms, and even church recreation rooms for sex.

Howard carefully reminds us that the boundaries of who was included in the group he studies are fluid--including both those who identified as gay and those who did not--and that opportunities for developing a queer network altered within even the relatively small state of Mississippi in this forty-year period. The most notable divisions centered, not surprisingly, on race and the 1960s. Though these watersheds are not unexpected, Howard offers new insights into their meaning. White elites responded to the growing social disorder produced by protests against racial injustice by tarring civil rights activists with the brush of sexual perversion. Contending that conservatives' linkage of civil rights activism with gays was not necessarily spurious, Howard believes that the era indeed "energized a queer insurgency" (p. 173). But while allegations of homosexuality quieted white activists (and, in a trend counter to current assumptions about the liberalizing sixties, actually squelched queer organizing), they were not successful in stopping African Americans' activism. Because charges initiated in the white community were suspect, and because the black community needed proven leadership, men such as Aaron Henry weathered several scandals involving homosexual charges to lead the state NAACP for three decades.

Howard's discussion of representations of Mississippi queers by themselves and by others in the second half of the book...