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99 3 Southern Backwardness Your Best Bubba Online or off, nothing rattles metronormative gays more than the sight of “white trash” southerners cloaked in Confederate flags. In fall 2002 New York City’s Nikolai Fine Art Gallery exhibited Michael Meads’s Eastaboga , a series of photographs that had previously been shown in Paris; Rotterdam; Ghent; Albany; New Orleans; LaGrange, Georgia; and at a Sotheby’s AIDS benefit. The title refers to a small, predominantly white, northeastern Alabama town of four thousand where Meads was born and raised, and the installation featured chrome color pictorials of Eastaboga residents taken from his extensive personal archive, one that spans from the early 1980s to the present. Most of the exhibition displayed documentary and studio portraits of the town’s “redneck” boys that Meads took with a 35 mm camera—some former close friends, almost all in their late teens and early twenties.1 Eastaboga’s subjects play cards, piss together, chug beers, hold cockfights, share pornography in the cramped quarters of a trailer home, embrace each other in the nude, brand each other with their initials, drape themselves in Confederate battle flags, mill about an art studio, and sit shirtless to eye the camera in poses that possibly index homoerotic desire, if not its actualization. Save for their first names, Eastaboga ’s complex glorification and critique of these bodies revealed little else about these young white men, who are shown in intimate acts that suggest and surpass homosocial bonding. Though the Alabama press has yet to comment on this archive, a variety of electronic and print media—coastal-based weeklies such as the New Yorker, Gay City News, and the Village Voice, to name a few—did make mention of Eastaboga, and Meads soon reproduced much of the installation in a digital gallery of his own making titled Alabama Souvenirs. I detail the mainstream media responses to these Web-based photographs later in this chapter. For now, I note that the spectacle of what Meads has described as Eastaboga’s “weird area” generated a fair amount of online 100 Southern Backwardness buzz in the DataLounge, a popular and somewhat standardizing lesbian and gay chat room devoted to arts, leisure, politics, and yammer run by a Manhattan-based software service company that calls itself, no joke, Mediapolis .2 During one November 2003 forum, more than fifty men and several women—many metropolitan self-identified—discussed the pleasures and the frustrations that Eastaboga and Alabama Souvenirs induced, and many approached the images like a slumming venture below the MasonDixon line. Almost all of these responses fell under the subject heading “SO HOT!!!” to agree that the photographs were “disturbing,” “amazing,” and “vividly expressive.”3 Unfamiliar with Meads’s biography, a few were titillated by the sight of scantily clad southern ruralism and cast the photographs as urbanized performances of “trailer trash” twinkdom. “They look like imported Chelsea boys with a photographer in the background going ‘come on give me your best bubba,’” states one respondent. Several others identified Alabama Souvenirs’s sexual preferences as similar to their own: “I think that Justin (my namesake) is totally hot, and . . . he is the top in the pair.” Others, however, were far less certain, and were so affronted by the images that they denigrated the “redneck” males. “Ew,” one respondent writes, “makes me glad I don’t live in the redneck states. Those guys have nasty beer bellies by the time they hit 23. Sad.” Running alongside these aesthetic and corporeal judgments was social commentary obsessed with making sense of Meads’s origins, his sexual relations to these images, his racial and class politics, and, most frequently, the sexual identity of his photographic subjects. Uncertain as to what these images might sexually denote, forum participants used a slew of metronormative interpretive strategies to crack open Alabama Souvenirs. Building on the assumption that the series was rural soft pornography, one puzzled viewer asks, “Did these fellas know they were doing gay jackoff pictures for their buddy?”4 Another likens them to hustlers: “Jeez all these guys posing for dollars. SPAM [the luncheon meat] must be getting expensive.” Yet another wonders, “Is he married to a woman so that these guys couldn’t imagine he was queer despite the way he was asking them to pose? Or are these guys actually gay? Is this a glimpse into gay life in the rural south? The guys get heavier and heavier, turn into bears and radical fairy types and suck each other...

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