Down n’ Dirty

Rubbish is something people look at all the time without onus or shame or desire, whereas waste is something that must be secreted away, hidden, a matter of attraction and shame.

—Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire

QUEER SILENCE

In his Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, E. Patrick Johnson interviews “Joe,” a student at Nicholls State University in Thibodeaux, Louisiana. Joe is one of the “young’uns” that Johnson documents in the section “Across Generations.” Born in 1984, the young man is out and engaged in his community; he is an active member of the “gay and lesbian student organizations on his campus” (Johnson 528). When Johnson asks Joe to “describe the influence of [his] southern upbringing on [his] ability to come to terms with or even recognize [his] sexual orientation,” he answers,

I do think it made me a little bit more afraid. It made me feel dirty, feeling, like having cooking oil dripped all over you and that nastiness, because … I’ve always felt like I’ve had to keep something a secret then—or I should say the things in my neighborhood that were kept secret were bad things.

(Johnson 536–537)

Reading Joe’s description of his sexual identity as a “dirty” little secret strongly resonated with me. As a young, queer-identified scholar of southern culture who remained closeted during graduate school, I connected easily with the young man’s anxiety over belonging to a community that actively contested his value, and I sympathized with his feelings of nastiness, trashiness, shame, and secrecy. Joe describes a society that judges desires and identities through a hierarchy legitimized by an ethos of whiteness, heteronormativity, paternalism, and patriarchy—social structures that have remained fairly static over the last century. I recognized the truth in Joe’s story because I shared the same anxiety over my place within southern studies, the academic field I had adopted, but in which never felt fully comfortable. Stories like Joe’s were not taught in southern literature classes, and the field never seemed to acknowledge or validate queer narratives. Southern studies’ primary concerns—lost causes, regional authenticity, and cults of masculinity—appeared grievously disconnected from issues that mattered to the economic, political, and cultural concerns of southerners.

It wasn’t until 2007 when I got my first job (just a little over 200 miles away from Joe) that I started to see the field opening up. I valued scholarship that was interested in the truths of queer marginalities—some of them I discovered late, like John Howard’s Men Like That (1999) and his edited collection Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South (1997) and Mab Segrest’s My Mama’s Dead Squirrel (1985), but others were emerging at that moment: E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea (2008), Michael P. Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations (2009), and Brock Thompson’s The Un-Natural State (2010) actively pushed me from the closet to the page and signaled to a generation of us that queer projects were valuable, even if—especially if—they resisted the tropes and traditions of conventional cultural and literary analyses of the South.

As I started my professional life, I meditated on my identity and value within the framework of both my culture and my field; I was naturally curious about how southern culture creates epistemologies of shame and secrecy to buttress its entrenched hierarchies. In my readings, I came back again and again to a single book published in 2000, the year I first started graduate school. Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 was one of the few books of scholarship that broke through the dense echo chamber of my discipline and forged a new trajectory for the field. One of Yaeger’s purposes in Dirt and Desire was to “dynamite the rails” (56) of southern literary studies’ predictably narrow introspection, and her book opened the territory through which scholars like Johnson, Bibler, and Thompson embarked. In Dirt and Desire, Yaeger writes passionately about what gets pushed to the margins of a rigid epistemology of southern...