Homosexuals in Unexpected Places?: A Comment

Laying foundations for future historians and theorists of gender and sexuality beyond the metropolis, these rising scholars demonstrate that the rural is complex physical and intellectual terrain, immensely productive, brimming with queer possibilities. I'll begin my comments by addressing Scott Herring's provocative paper, which employs theoretical concepts of use to all. Then, I'll comparatively assess aspects of Nicholas Syrett's and Colin Johnson's historical studies. I'll close with an attempt to put Mary Gray's vitally important contemporary study into conversation with these earlier treatments of gender transgressive, homoeroticized spheres—as well as a recent problematic series in the Washington Post, which suggests we must remain ever alert to the need to deconstruct urbanist accounts of queer life in the countryside.

In his stimulating and very smart readings of the photographs of Michael Meads, Scott Herring offers countless insights into the complex dialectics of the country and the city, rural and metro, the normative (both gay and straight) and the queer (hetero and homo), the here-and-now and the there-and-then. He productively theorizes anachronistic time. And he positions Meads's work as a crucial intervention into or perhaps against one clearly-discernible trajectory of representation. It "agitates a visual tradition of urban gay male spectatorship," "wrecking" it, scrambling it, muddling it. He concludes that the "anachronism" of Michael Meads's work challenges. Now, in hopes of enhancing Herring's incredibly helpful interpretations, I must say that I think both the anachronism and thus the challenge are just a bit overstated.

Certainly Meads, but I fear even Herring, may participate in a classic spatial and temporal othering of the South, equating the rural with the pre-modern. In an earlier version of his essay, Herring leaves "backwardness" outside of quotation marks and refers to the Confederate battle flag as a "dated icon of racial hatred." Still incorporated within the state flag of Mississippi, still inciting controversy as far north as Gettysburg, and still appearing on thousands of bedroom walls, lawns, and automobiles, including those driven by Meads's subjects, the symbol remains a red-hot issue in contemporary politics. And when rainbow-colored Confederate flags turn up at gay events from Atlanta to Pensacola, I'm not convinced that the white boys waving them are engaged in anti-racist activism. While Herring "acknowledges outright" what he previously has referred to as "the suspect trans-historicism that supports" Meads's project, he still seems to endorse Meads's contention that Allen and Justin had a rare bond that defies "analysis or classification"—i.e., that is not gay. I find this perhaps counterproductive, and I find myself much more interested in the way this disavowal is echoed in Herring's assertion that Meads "pitches his photographs out of a discernable gay art history," which in turn is echoed in critic John Paul Ricco's writerly attempts, cited elsewhere, to exist on "the Outside of art history."¹

I'm troubled by Meads's sometimes sentimental, uncritical relationship to, and depiction of, the rural. In addition to these images of people he refers to as "friends"—some "of the most intelligent, charismatic people I ha[ve] ever known"—Meads displays on his website color photographs shot in a straightforward, direct style, of unpeopled landscapes of "beautiful" northeast Alabama as he laments "development": "fertilized lawns, gated subdivisions, strips malls and . . . multi-million dollar churches." Disavowing nostalgia, he nonetheless says he misses the studio he once had in Eastaboga, and another in Auburn. All this he does from his home in New Orleans. Just as critics have asked, to whom does the Virginia-born, New York-based lesbian documentarian Ellen Spiro send her Southern filmic Greetings from Out Here, I would ask of Meads, for whom does he construct these Alabama Souvenirs? Herring has said they have "little interest in any narrative of . . . sexual identity," but I would assert they have a critical stake, a financial interest, in perhaps the most well-developed of gay meta-narratives: the rural-to-urban migration tale. For who are these Chelsea boys—lately viewing Meads's work alongside...