Just got in from Louisiana, and man, there's got to be a special reward in heaven for parents who survive a nine-hour car trip with three small children and a wet smelly dog. After coming through a 50-mile or so stretch of s-u-p-e-r-s-l-o-w traffic that started just east of Kilgore, all of us started screaming bloody murder to break the tension and make ourselves laugh.
While I was in my hometown this weekend, I dropped by to see some friends, and picked up a copy of the local weekly. There was on the cover a big color photograph of a chubby young black woman dressed to the nines, wearing high heels and walking in the grass carrying a handbag elegantly. She looked extremely self-possessed, even haughty. Her name, said the caption, was Ginger Snap. Except that's not her real name. She is a he -- he's a very polite young waiter at a local restaurant -- and he was participating in a local "Dude Looks Like a Lady" contest to raise money for charity. Apparently they've been doing this for a while now, as a big joke, getting he-men to put on women's clothes as a har-de-har-har exercise, all in good fun, and for a good cause. But Ginger Snap ain't laughin'. He-she means it.
I sat there trying to figure out quite what to make of the fact that my hometown now has its own Lady Chablis. I must have smirked, because my friend remarked reprovingly, "Hey, Ginger Snap raised $5,000 for St. Jude's." That meant a lot to my friend's family, because they're close to a little girl in town who is alive today because of St. Jude's hospital.
I was thinking later, on the drive back, how that exchange revealed a lot about my hometown. I don't know whether it's a St. Francisville thing, or a south Louisiana thing, or a Southern thing, or just what. But it is not what most people, I think, would expect out of a small town in the Deep South. My friend is white, and a very conservative churchgoer -- not the sort of person you'd expect to feel instinctively protective of a young black drag queen. But there it was. I thought back to all the gay folks we had around when I was growing up, and how everybody knew who they were, and didn't really care. It was funny: as long as you didn't make an issue of it, people were more or less inclined to leave you alone. And as a general matter, you certainly weren't a social outcast -- or if you were, it wasn't because of your homosexuality, but because of your social class. Now, if you'd done a poll of local people back then, I bet most of them would have said they certainly didn't approve of homosexuality (the numbers have no doubt shifted somewhat since my childhood), but, well, hell, that's just ol' Ginger Snap (or whoever). He may be a drag queen, but he's our drag queen. You know?
Even stranger, I told my wife that when I was a kid, it would have been far easier to live in town as an open homosexual than as part of a heterosexual interracial couple. Again, I'm sure things have shifted a lot toward tolerance since I was a kid, though I haven't lived there since 1983, so I don't know. But it was diverting, at least to me, to reflect on how everybody knew who the gay men and lesbians were in town, and were more or less inclined to be tolerant -- but the idea of an interracial couple was just unthinkably taboo back in the day.
The South is an interesting place.
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Laughable,
What a simplistic moral universe you seem to live in! Must be nice. Uniquely evil? I guess none of your ancestors had anything to do with, say, any exploited underclass working for next to nothing in factories. You yourself aren't benefitting from a world that features sweat-shop labor to this day. All civilisations that have risen above subsistence farming involve exploitation and violence. Singling out the South is just about the weakest bit of scapegoating around. And please, after you attack someone else, you can't pull that "I don't care" business. Grow up.
I think with a lot of the comments here there is an inability to distinguish different modes of discourse. Rod is telling a story. He is making a valid observation of his own experience. He is not making a global claim. Yes, it is important and valuable to indicate some of the limits of the "tolerance" that he remembers gay people recieving. That doesn't mean what he has to say is untrue or worthless.
For what it's worth, a friend of mine came from one of the most conservative parts of South Carolina, and said that his high school English teacher was openly gay and flamboyant and, as far as he saw, never had a problem with it.
My Southern, homophobic (can I say that without being accused of reverse-bigotry? he's not a bad guy, just afraid of "the gay") father in law would probably chuckle and feel protective of a sweet, eccentric drag queen who put on a show to benefit his yacht club's favorite charity. He thinks mother-in-law's over-the-top gay hairdresser is a hoot. But the idea of ordinary gay folks—people who don’t wear their “difference” or sexuality on their sleeves and who are financially successful, community-minded, unashamed of who they are, and feel that as hard-working, tax-paying Americans they have the right to both civic equality and to walk down the street of a Sunday morning holding hands with their loved ones...well, THAT variety of gay people for some reason makes smoke come out of father-in-law’s ears. God forbid that one of these financially stable and committed families might want to adopt and raise a troubled and needy kid who would otherwise be tumbled around in the foster-care system!!
Ah well, the times are changing... Rod, I hope you don't feel persecuted. I've certainly thought that some of your posts were unnecessarily demeaning toward gay people, but this one was not one of them--I'm surprised at the reaction it's getting. From my perspective it mainly just reinforces my preexisting opinion that Southerners have over the years mastered the art of acting affable and polite to all, while simultaneously holding views that can be breathtakingly condescending. (I think I've done enough time as a Yankee married into a Southern family that I might make that claim).
laughable,
I'm so glad you "couldn't care less" if I'm black or if I'm white.
Leave it to a good Northern liberal like you to act like an *sshole to *everyone* you meet, regardless of the color of their skin.
Rod's colleague at National Review, Florence King, made a similar observation about the South and homosexuality in her book "Southern Ladies and Gentlemen". While acknowledging the reality of gay bashing, Ms. King also pointed out the one could find a surprising local tolerance for the "town fairy", the "maiden ladies" living together, or the professor with paintings of male nudes adorning his study, tieing this in with her observation that the Old South tolerated eccentricity because it was as a whole so eccentric a place. As for what Southern gays thought of this, in her youth, before she settled down to misanthropic spinsterhood, Ms King was as openly lesbian as anyone could be in the 1950s, and she recalled she and the girls getting toegther with some local redneck bubbas to drink beer and listen to ballgames with no threat or insult uttered against them.
"some of you take that as an opportunity to trash the South as unregenerately evil. Says more about you than it does about the South"
TR: Sing it!
I haven't lived in the South since I was five, but I still have connections there and I read about it a good deal. One thing I notice is that the gays who were more accepted in the South seem to have often been drag-queens. I found this perplexing, at first, but reading about other cultures it made a bit more sense.
In some ways a drag-queen is, maybe paradoxically, less threatening in some cultures than a gay Man. He is a male attracted to a man, but it's not like he's "really a man." He is something "other", something exotic and strange. You see this in other societies that are, in many respects, highly conservative. For example the Chinese and the Thai.
In much of the South there's also, judging from family stories, a strong vein of thinking you are either damned or saved with little in between. If love is going to make you "smoke and drink and gamble" then maybe it's not that big a deal if it also makes you put on a dress or do some kinky stuff.
The South is perplexing and intriguing. This isn't really a wistful "la la la" statement. My family was victims of great intolerance in Arkansas for being Catholic. I could not get an education there because my area had nothing for the physically disabled. Indeed some people felt I was a "punishment from God" for some sin of my parents. (Probably Dad marrying a Catholic girl was raised on welfare) Still there's much in the culture that I find richer and more interesting than I've found up where I've lived most of my life.
On another matter if another gay person compares their situation to blacks I think I'm going to scream. Your situation is different, with unique hardships and deficits, so stop with the stupid analogies already. Sheesh. I'm a dwarfish person with strong same-sex attractions, but I know my situation is not like the black situation. There were no ships of gay people sent here to work in planations. Nor were you ever banned from voting, going to Princeton, or what have you. Just as blacks were not deemed mentally diseased by being black. It's totally different situations so get over yourselves.
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