In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

TWELVE Creating Space, Separating the Self Y ou couldn’t miss it: two men walking down the winding streets of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, holding hands and nary a cross word or disapproving glance thrown in their direction. In fact, any negative comment or gesture toward them would have been seen not only as rude but as out of place in this quaint mountain village. What provided for such an understanding and acceptance of subtle queer acts and displays of affection in a small Arkansas town tucked away in the Ozark Mountains? It was the summer of 2004 when I sat down with Charlotte Downey, defendant in the successful Picado v. Jegley lawsuit, in the renovated cellar of the Mud Street Cafe in downtown Eureka Springs. There she told me the narrative of her life so far. I thought her story an extraordinary answer to the question of how a small mountain community became such a defined queer space outside of the urban. She told me this: she shot him. Just outside of a lesbian bar in downtown Tulsa, he charged and she fired. Almost twenty years before Charlotte Downey had found herself standing in the rotunda of the state capitol in Little Rock with her compatriots announcing their challenge to the Arkansas sodomy statute, she was on trial for her life. The charge was murder.1 Before finding herself in Tulsa, Downey and her family had moved around middle America from one military base to the next, never staying anywhere for more than a year. Thanks to a father in the military, she was always the new kid in public schools, something that she now credits for her strong, independent nature. The moving stopped at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, a place Downey described as typically “midwest.” In 1964, by the time she was eighteen and attending Central Oklahoma 131 College, Downeyactivelysought a queersocial networkamonghercoeds. She found three other women who told her of The Black Cat, a bar in Tulsatheyknew littleaboutexceptthat it had areputationlocallyforbeing a queer bar. Wondering exactly what queer meant or what indeed was so queer about this particular space, the four women entered in the midafternoon only to find the bar completely empty. They ordered sodas and waited as factories began to let out at the four o’clock whistle, reckoning that soon the bar would begin to fill with working-class lesbians from all over Tulsa’s industrial park, an area that sat alongside the Arkansas River on the blue-collar west side of town.2 The bar filled quickly, and Downey began to feel more comfortable, more and more at home with each casual smile, each effortless nod in her direction, as she sat in a space that grew more and more queer with each push of the door. She worked up the nerve to return by herself two weeks later. Soon, she was a regular, sitting at the bar at The Black Cat three and four nights a week. The eighteenyear -old Downey soon found herself “looked after” by the older lesbians who had been frequenting the bar for years. It was necessary. Across the street sat what Downey described as the area “redneck beer bar,” another blue-collar bar for factory workers but a space that was heterosexual male. Brawls at The Black Cat were commonplace as drunken men stumbled from across the street, from their space to the space of others, to pick fights with the queers, no matter that they were women. In a fierce defense of their own space, Black Cat lesbians tucked young Downey safely under the bar and took to rednecks with fists, pool queues, and bottles, whatever impromptu weapons they could find, to drive the belligerent men out of their bar. In 1965, less then a year after Downey had discovered The Black Cat, the bar closed its doors. At the same time, Downey moved to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. Higher education never really caught on with Downey. Using her family connections in the service, she left school and took a job at the air force base, working there until 1968 when she was asked to vacate her job so that a “family man” who had children to support could have it. Downey obliged her superiors at the base and took work as a clerk with the post office. By that time, though The Black Cat had closed, the Tulsa lesbian community formed around other bars and city league softball teams so common in...

Share