Southern Backwardness: Metronormativity and Regional Visual Culture

Since the early 1980s, visual artist Michael Meads has photographed numerous white working-class males who reside in his rural hometown of Eastaboga, Alabama, often displaying these images under the installation title Eastaboga. In 2002, Meads gathered many of these photos together and reprinted them on his personal website, Alabama Souvenirs. As I have argued elsewhere, Meads presents these digital Eastoboga males in a series of seductive queer images that have sparked commentary from major urban-oriented gay newspapers and magazines such as Attitude and Blue, as well as from major metropolitan-oriented U.S. gay and lesbian websites such as The DataLounge (Herring, 217-19).

These urban-identified critics, I contended, have tried to normalize Meads's images by situating them into the ready-made sexual identity-categories of metropolitan middle-class gay males, or by placing them into an elitist canon of Western white "gay" male art—one dominated by artists such as Walter Pater and Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden. As I claimed: "Trained in photography and painting at SUNY–Albany and well-versed in Western (white) homoerotic art, Meads repeatedly invokes icons such as Caravaggio, the 'beefcake' nude, and other figures from 'gay' art history only to queer them. While the installation was briefly shown in a Chelsea gallery that specialized in postmodern art and has since closed, the photographs thus reproduce a rural space opposed to collective visual ideologies that often ground and give meaning to [what art historian Thomas Waugh terms] urban gay 'imaginary homelands' such as 'New York City' (54)" (Herring, 219).

I would now like to amplify these findings: Meads's critically rustic photographs often seem to come from another planet since their anachronism often challenges what Waugh calls "our erotic heritage" (xiv). To extend my recent arguments, I further focus on Meads's anachronistic incarnations as they undermine the thrust of what one queer of color critic has termed urban "sexual assimilation" in the late twentieth-century United States (Muñoz, 98). To do so, I first examine some of Meads's invocations of the gay male art canon in the opening windows of his website. Second, I read Alabama Souvenirs as an appropriative dialogue with earlier gay male art icons such as von Gloeden's turn-of-the-century pictorials of southern Mediterranean boys. Third, I address how his appropriations distort a canon of (white) visual art that affirms the presumed artistic "heritage" of many (white) metro-identified gay male cultures in the 1980s, the 1990s, and in the early twenty-first century.

Before I begin these tasks, however, I want to briefly explain how I deploy the term "rural" in this essay, and how I envision this term in a tense opposition with the term "urban" for U.S. queer studies and beyond. These two terms are, paradoxically, both loose and static. While they are difficult to empirically define, many scholars in various disciplines try to do so, as do political institutions such as U.S. governmental agencies. In fact, we could follow the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent guidelines and turn to its definition of "population density" to clarify our understanding of "rural" and "urban." According to the latest definitional parameters of "Rural and Urban Classification" published in 2000, an "urbanized area" consists of "core census block groups or blocks that have a population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile" ("Census"). Under this rubric, my current residence of Bloomington, Indiana, counts as "urban" as much as what the website curiously hyphenates as "New York City–Newark, NJ–NJ–CT" (and as much as Appleton, Wisconsin, or Dothan, Alabama, two other listings under the "urbanized area" file). The geographic pratfalls of such a numerical definition of what counts as "rural" or "urban" space should be obvious (particularly when we consider the logistics of those "core census blocks" that have, say, a population density of 999 people per square mile).

In my mind, it makes much more sense—and it allows for far more flexible readings of how rurality and urbanity structure any U.S. cultural text for scholars in American Studies...