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TISON PUGH University of Central Florida Florence King’s Queer Conservatism and the Gender Politics of Southern Humor A LONGTIME COLUMNIST FOR WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.’S CONSERVATIVE journal National Review, Florence King is also the author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, a memoir detailing her Southern upbringing and her bisexual affairs, in which she outs herself with her pointed wisecrack, “No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street” (2). With this admission threading the needle between bisexual passion and Southern propriety, King assures readers that she satisfied her ostensibly errant sexual desires while simultaneously respecting her grandmother’s admonitions about Southern womanhood. King’s ferocious humor links her disparate literary endeavors, in that her voice—caustic, precise, unmercifully funny, and emphatically conservative—unites them into a unique canon of queer Southern humor. Her comic musings span the 1970s through the early 2000s and include the mock sociological studies Southern Ladies and Gentlemen; WASP, Where Is Thy Sting?.; and He: An Irreverent Look at the American Male, which collectively satirize the various personalities and gendersofSouthernandWASP(white,Anglo-SaxonProtestant)culture. King’s novel When Sisterhood Was in Flower charts an unlikely alliance of conservative and progressive women forming a California commune and their ensuing shenanigans. The essay collections Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, Lump It or Leave It, and With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy sport King’s suffer-no-fools dismissals of American culture and its excesses. STET, Damnit! compiles her “Misanthrope’sCorner”columnspublishedinNationalReview,andDeja Reviews reprints her literary criticism and book reviews. Blossoming from this multiplicity of form, King’s writings teem with contradictions: she is a groundbreaking feminist who expresses starkly anti-feminist sentiments; she is a bisexual evincing little sympathy for gay and lesbian rights; and she proudly trumpets her conservative politics while lambasting leading conservative figures. Her humor provides ample explanation for many of these contradictions—after all, a joke is just a 584 Tison Pugh joke—but King entwines her wit with questions concerning both the social value accorded to women’s humor and to the very meaning of conservatism in queer culture. To put it mildly, gay conservatives perplex many queers, who often seek to explain away political views diverging from the left while also diagnosing the conditions that would lead otherwise normative homosexuals into the ostensible perversion of conservatism. Kenneth Cimino, in his sociological analysis of gay conservatives, ponders, “why don’t LGBT conservatives use sexual identity as the main group identification?” (6). Cimino’s corollary assumption appears to be that queer conservatives should connect their sexualities seamlessly to their political views, and if they did so, they would liberate themselves from their conservatism. By framing the question as why some gays become conservative, scholars tacitly naturalize liberal as the de facto, if not proper, political identity for queers, with conservatism serving as an aberration needing correction. Given the prejudices the gay community has endured over the years, such an interpretive formulation is ironic, for it reasserts the type of binary of identity that queer liberation otherwise dismantles.1 Yet the effort to explain queer conservatism suffers from a similar intrinsic bias, as it pathologizes a political worldview, often with flippant assertions decrying greed as a primary motivation for gay conservatives apparently more concerned about their pocketbooks than the advancement of queer equality.2 Still, it appears thatroughlyone-fifthofgaysandlesbiansidentifyasconservatives;thus, 1 For example, many queers have pointed out the bias latent in scientific attempts to discover the root causes of homosexuality: because few complementary efforts seek to pinpoint heterosexuality’s origins, studies of homosexuality’s roots, in effect, stigmatize queernessasunnatural,asanaberrationfromnormativesexuality.SeeTimothyMurphy, Gay Science. 2 Because gay conservatives desire the tax cuts invariably promised by the political right, this line of thinking proposes, they vote for their pocketbooks rather than for sexual equality. Even commentators who rebut this “filthy lucre” hypothesis of queer conservatism indulge in other ad hominem attacks. Paul Robinson, in discussing the conservatism of various gay cultural commentators, concludes, “If they are guilty of any sin, it is not grubby materialism but a perhaps understandable historical shortsightedness and ingratitude toward the achievements of the men and women of...

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