| The
Un-Natural State
Arkansas and the Queer South
Brock Thompson
A history of gay and lesbian
community building in a southern state
“Brock Thompson not only adds Arkansas to the list of
places with a fascinating queer history but also contributes
to our understanding of gay and lesbian history in the South
and in rural communities more generally.”
—Leila Rupp, author of A Desired Past: A Short History
of Same-Sex Love in America
“A valuable and unique contribution to the history of
sexuality as well as to cultural and historical studies of
the American South.”
—Pippa Holloway, author of Sexuality, Politics,
and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945
The Un-Natural State is a one-of-a-kind study of
gay and lesbian life in Arkansas in the twentieth century,
a deft weaving together of Arkansas history, dozens of oral
histories, and Brock Thompson’s own story. Thompson
analyzes the meaning of rural drag shows, including a compelling
description of a 1930s seasonal beauty pageant in Wilson,
Arkansas, where white men in drag shared the stage with other
white men in blackface, a suggestive mingling that went to
the core of both racial transgression and sexual disobedience.
These small town entertainments put on in churches and schools
emerged decades later in gay bars across the state as a lucrative
business practice and a larger means of community expression,
while in the same period the state’s sodomy law was
rewritten to condemn sexual acts between those of the same
sex in language similar to what was once used to denounce
interracial sex. Thompson goes on to describe several lesbian
communities established in the Ozark Mountains during the
sixties and seventies and offers a substantial account of
Eureka Springs’s informal status as the “gay capital
of the Ozarks.”
Through this exploration of identity formation, group articulation,
political mobilization, and cultural visibility within the
context of historical episodes such as the Second World War,
the civil rights movement, and the AIDS epidemic, The
Un-Natural State contributes not only to our understanding
of gay and lesbian history but also to our understanding of
the South.
Brock Thompson
received his PhD in American studies at King’s College,
University of London. A native Arkansan, he now lives in Washington,
DC, and works at the Library of Congress.
October
6 x 9, 275 pages, 21 photographs, index
$29.95 cloth
ISBN 978-1-55728-943-8
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