Oklahomo: Lessons in Unqueering America by Carol Mason (review)

Oklahomo charts the lives of four Oklahomans, two men and two women, whose lives and careers intersected with antigay political movements. Bruce Goff was a queer professor of architecture forced to resign from the University of Oklahoma in 1955 during the Lavender Scare, a period during the 1950s when key Republican politicians successfully combined anti-Communism with rhetoric against homosexuality, leading to mass firings from government positions. Bill James Hargis was a nationally known Christian evangelist who rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1974 he was accused of having sexual relations with male and female students at a small Oklahoma college over which he presided. Anita Bryant, the best known of the four, was an iconic antigay crusader in the 1970s. She is traditionally associated with the state of Florida due to her campaign against gay rights in Dade County, where she resided, but she began life and cultivated her values and image in Oklahoma. Sally Kern, a “modern-day Anita Bryant,” is a Republican legislator in Oklahoma who is also a prominent antigay crusader (4).

Although these four individuals are at its center, this book is not simply a collection of character sketches from the Sooner state (Oklahoma). This highly ambitious narrative seeks to examine key episodes in the development and strategy of the antigay political agenda at the national level by honing in on detailed stories at the local level. Mason makes a solid case for contemplating the importance of Oklahoma in order to understand this national story. Oklahoma’s history is “American history writ small” because the state encapsulates the national story of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, racial violence, and economic stratification (8).

The book opens with the 2014 suicide in Ohio of a transwoman named Leelah Alcorn who had been a victim of Christian conversion therapy. While such therapy has long been rejected by medical professionals, it is still practiced in some places, including the southern Ohio clinic that claimed to have treated Alcorn. The ensuing outcry against this so-called treatment and its consequences led to retrenchment among those who supported it. Here is where Oklahoma comes in. An Oklahoma legislator named Sally Kern proposed a raft of anti-LGBT legislation in response, including the Freedom to Obtain Conversion Therapy Act (2). This move was part of Kern’s long career as a self-styled icon of antigay politics during which she has linked homosexuality to terrorism and cast herself as a martyr to political correctness.

From here, Mason moves backward in time, which is a risky but mostly successful strategy. Why does Kern’s evocation of white feminine vulnerability resonate so well in Oklahoma and the nation? Because she was following the well-worn footsteps of Anita Bryant, who is discussed in chapter 2. Where does Anita Bryant’s linkage of evangelical Christianity, homophobia, and white racial purity come from? The evangelist Hargis. And how did the Lavender Scare and Cold War anti-Communism connect to the New Right in the 1970s? Through the stories of those like Bruce Goff.

Mason explains her decision to move backward rather than forward in time as an effort to make history seem relevant to undergraduates. As others who teach LGBT classes have also observed, many students today seem primarily interested in contemporary events and personal issues and are sometimes reluctant to dig into the historical context of either the early LGBT movement or reactions to it. Mason hopes that her book will underscore how the present is rooted in the past, and that it will show how tragedies like that of Leelah Alcorn’s suicide are best understood as part of long-standing historical developments.

Overall, the argument is well crafted. Most historians are familiar with how Anita Bryant leveraged what might have been only fifteen minutes of fame as a beauty pageant runner-up into a career selling orange juice and homophobia, but Mason pushes us to ask where her public persona came...