Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South.

By James T. Sears. (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, c. 2001. Pp. xvi, 420. $28.00, ISBN 0-8135-2964-6.) Continuing the story he spun in Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968 (Boulder, Colo., 1997), James T. Sears, in Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones, shapes the history of same-sex sexuality in the South in the decade following the Stonewall riots of 1969 around a varied group of individuals, some of whom were part of the earlier story. We meet Merril Mushroom, who kicks off the book as a hippie bride marrying her gay friend John and whose story weaves in and out of the narrative, ending on a rural commune. Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols, southern-born writers and activists, we first encounter in Greenwich Village, but then we follow them to Florida and to Clarke's mysterious murder in Mexico. And there are so many more: drag queens, lesbian separatists, gay activists, politicians, underground revolutionaries, writers, dyke softball players, prisoners, bar owners, radical faeries. Historical context comes in the form of both major political events and popular cultural references: "In February 1976, as cartoonist Garry Trudeau drew the sensitive gay character, Andy Lippincott, into his Doonesbury comic strip, Bob Basker unveiled a proposed amendment to the Metro Code of Dade County [Florida] at the Democratic county convention" (p. 231).

These diverse stories unfold piece by piece, in short novelistic chapters that intrigue but also confuse. I appreciate Sears's southern storytelling style, but I could not always keep track of the characters and the twists and turns of the stories. Transitions within chapters are sometimes so abrupt that I had to reread a page to figure out where we were headed. In a chapter that begins with the story of Sam Hunter, an African American drag queen in South Carolina, we suddenly encounter Jack Nichols kissing a boy with hazel eyes and driving to Cocoa Beach, Florida, and the next paragraph begins, "In this midsummer night adventure, Bobby [a drag queen] shared his dreams" (p. 156).

Sears has uncovered an amazing amount of information--in archives, through interviews, in newspapers--about places that the story of gay/lesbian liberation in the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s tends to overlook. Like the magisterial work of John Howard in Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago, 1999), Sears's book makes it impossible to think of the South in quite the same way. For example, he tells the tale of Tracy Knight and Marjorie Ruth Jones, who went to court in Kentucky in 1970 for the right to marry. We meet "divas with attitude" who resisted arrest on the streets and in the courts of North Carolina and Georgia (p. 159). And we encounter lesbian feminists successfully applying principles of consensus, equity, and task-sharing on the softball diamond!

At the same time, I wanted more analysis of what is distinctively southern about all of this. Although Sears pays attention to race, religion, and rural life, and also comments on southernness along the way ("In a world where people are connected by six degrees of separation, the distance in the South is measured fractionally" [p. 105]), he leaves us not knowing how much of what we learn is different from what went on elsewhere. His analytical framework is spelled out only in the introduction and conclusion, where he applies Robert Bellah's concept of "communities of memory" to critique the notion of a unified community that ignores differences of race, sex, gender, and class.

If that critique of a monolithic community is hardly surprising, nevertheless Sears has immeasurably enriched the portrait of what gay/lesbian life was like in the decade of the 1970s.

LEILA J. RUPP
Ohio State University