Down There: The Queer South and the Future of History Writing

Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. John Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xxiii + 395 pp. $27.50 cloth, $18.00 paper

It's been a long time comin'—a breakthrough book in modern U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer history. John Howard's Men Like That is that book: something exciting, something new, something so apparently modest in focus and understated in voice that it could almost be overlooked. It approaches you quietly, with charming reserve; begins to enthrall you; then takes your breath away. I haven't been so taken by a book in queer history in, well, much too long a time.

Since Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's astonishingly generative string of articles beginning with "The Female World of Love and Ritual," Jonathan Ned Katz's pioneering document collection Gay American History, John D'Emilio's foundational narrative Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and paradigm-setting "Capitalism and Gay Identity," Esther Newton's provocative challenge "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian," and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis's innovative, meticulous community study Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, modern U.S. historians and historical ethnographers have produced supplements, corrections, elaborations, and repetitions of earlier studies—but nothing one might call a breakthrough. ¹ Some of these histories have been politically or pedagogically significant and/or models of first-rate scholarship. Examples include community studies, such as George Chauncey's Gay New York and Marc Stein's City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves; synthetic national social and cultural history narratives like John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman's Intimate Matters and Leila J. Rupp's Desired Past; and the Foucault-influenced histories of modernity, especially Julian Carter's brilliant "Normality, Whiteness, Authorship," in Vernon A. Rosario's edited anthology Science and Homosexualities, and Jennifer Terry's American Obsession. ² But Men Like That exceeds the parameters of these excellent social, political, and cultural histories, promising to take us to an elsewhere that turns out to be our own backyard.

Howard frames Men Like That as a study of the backwater/backwoods of the "sophisticated" northern urban gay imaginary. But his Southern Queer History does not take us just to the South; it takes us to the state at the bottom of U.S. "progress" narratives, Mississippi (and environs), from 1945 to 1985. At first glance, most readers no doubt will expect a supplement, correction, repetition—in other words, a regionally specific version of the community study, to be integrated into the national narrative. However, Howard's focus on postwar Mississippi enables him to launch a critique of the temporal and spatial frames of historical writing and thereby to shift our focus away from identity and community formation toward the material institutions and sites that shape, and are shaped by, shifting queer desires.

Men Like That formulates these challenges to history as usual, first of all, because Mississippi doesn't fit the modern national story line for LGBT/Q histories; things didn't happen the same way there as in New York, San Francisco, or Philadelphia. The movement over time from oppressed desire, to minority identity formation, to community building, to political organizing documented by innumerable historians of the post-World War II United States didn't run in sequence in Mississippi. One way of interpreting this regional difference is the familiar one of describing this mostly rural and small-town context as premodern, stuck in a time lag behind the faster, more progressive cities up north. But taking a page from literary scholars like Valerie Traub and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Howard rejects this interpretive move, in which geographic differences are explained in terms of temporal ones. For Howard, Mississippi isn't backward, a place where time and progress have lagged, but is different in ways that challenge received notions of progress toward gay identity and urban...