Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. (Book Reviews).

Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. By John Howard (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxiv, 395. $27.50, ISBN 0-226-35471-7.)

In 1967 Bobbie Gentry's hit song "Ode to Billy Joe" captured the imagination of American listeners, who wondered why the young man leaped to his death off the Tallahatchie Bridge in Mississippi. In Men Like That John Howard explores the homosexual suicide mythology that gave rise to this song and the ways that this narrative reflected, influenced, and contradicted the experiences of queer Mississippians during the forty years after World War II. Combining oral histories, pop songs, physique art, and pulp fiction with more conventional sources such as newspapers, court records, and government documents, Howard provides a fascinating and cogent analysis of homosexual activity and gender nonconformity in the Deep South.

Although not the sweeping account of southern queer history that the subtitle promises, Men Like That raises important new questions about social change in the South during the second half of the twentieth century. Challenging entrenched stereotypes regarding Mississippi's backwardness, Howard shows how a laissez-faire climate in the 1950s made it possible for a dynamic, although relatively discreet, gay network to emerge. In contrast to most accounts of the modern gay movement that emphasize its urban character, Howard's book examines same-sex desire among men in rural and small-town communities, where traditional institutions such as church, school, and family predominated. Despite the conservative nature of these institutions, queer Mississippians found ways to create space within them for "insurgent conceptions of sex and everyday life" (p. 36).

As in so many other areas of southern life, race had a major impact on the experience of homosexuals. Remaining "on either side of the color line" before the 1960s, "black men and white men participated in markedly similar worlds of desire that rarely overlapped" (p. xiv). With the rise of the civil rights movement and the crumbling of the old order, however, greater intermingling of black and white queer men took place. Authorities linked homosexuality to racial agitation, unleashing a widespread crackdown on both activities in the state. In response, queer Mississippians became increasingly politicized and moved into the public arena. The dissolution of the laissez-faire sensibilities of the fifties thus gave way to hatred, on the one hand, and to a strengthened collective identity, on the other.

Documenting the experiences of men who identified themselves as gay as well as men who did not but nonetheless engaged in queer sex, Howard demonstrates the virtues of being highly attuned to the complexity and ambiguity of human behavior and identity. His astuteness about such matters makes Howard a particularly fine storyteller; he recounts in compelling fashion, among other incidents, the murder of a gay interior decorator in 1955, a congressman caught in a sex scandal in 1980, and a gubernatorial race disrupted only a few years later by queer rumors. In the process Men Like That sometimes loses the thread of its argument, making one wish that the editor had exercised a greater hand in shaping the book's organization. Nevertheless, as the first detailed study of queer culture in the South, this book offers a unique perspective on the region's past, one that clearly deserves closer attention.