Interracial Homosexuality and the White Southern Phallus in Kevin Sessums’s Mississippi Sissy

In its stinging critique of the U.S. South’s rigid ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality, Kevin Sessums’s memoir Mississippi Sissy depicts interracial gay relationships as a profound subversion of the region’s conservative ethos. At the same time, this memoir succumbs to phallic posturing that imagines white and black gay masculinities within regressive and patriarchal terms, which thus ironically reinstitutes the binaries of race and desire it otherwise subverts. The intransigence of Southern codes of masculinity troubles Sessums’s otherwise progressive portrayal of queer sexuality, thereby displaying the force of regionalisms in that ostensibly universal construct, the phallus.