How to Love Your Local Homophobe: Southern Hospitality and the Unremarkable Queerness of Truman Capote's "The Thanksgiving Visitor"

This essay shows how Truman Capote's story about homophobic bullying opens rich avenues for reconsidering the structures of queerness and normativity. Instead of presenting queerness as an antirelational force opposed to sociality, Capote renders it as something unremarkable, even perversely mundane, deflecting attention away from questions of identity to more urgent concerns of ethics and justice. Writing against the homonormative militancy of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, Capote strategically redeploys the notion of southern hospitality to rearrange both regional and national normativities and reaffirm the queer's open inclusion within society.