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Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones |
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Interview by GayToday
My own early history was ably captured by Sears in the final chapters of his Lonely Hunters. Now, in Rebels Rubyfruit and Rhinestones, the historian's focus includes, among other fine Southerners, two extraordinary pioneers who were the greatest loves of my life, Lige Clarke and Logan Carter. Logan Carter's photo, showing him on stage, appears on the book's cover in the lower-right hand corner. In the chapters that describe both Lige's and Logan's lives, I'm simply a background figure. But seeing my loves so carefully remembered, often using their own words, is, I am happy to say, one of the great satisfactions of my life. I've read the entirety of Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones in galley-proofs. Its stark honesty and Sears' uninhibited telling of true-life tales create what pioneer Barbara Gittings calls "a rich tapestry of human stories." Frank Kameny, the father of gay activist militancy, advises in his enthusiastic preface to this book that it deserves a wide audience. John Loughery, author of the best-selling history, The Other Side of Silence, writes: "No one is better at this undertaking than James T. Sears. He has first rate investigative skills, wide-ranging curiosity and an accessible style. His deft portraits, strong narrative, and clear-sighted analysis make Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones a classic of the genre." --Jack Nichols, Senior Editor, GayToday
James T. Sears: This book chronicles the mostly unheralded efforts among gay liberation rebels, rhinestone drag queens, and rubyfruit lesbians who struggled-sometimes with one another-and against great odds to transform New South cities like Houston and Atlanta and uproot traditional towns such as Richmond and Birmingham. Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones is a story of how lesbian feminists, gay male politicos, drag queens, softball players, back-to-the land hippies, MCC ministers, leather-clad motorcyclists formed communities of desire and of the heart in an era bracketed by Stonewall and the first March on Washington. GayToday: For readers who may not be familiar with the event, what exactly happened at Stonewall and why do you consider it such a significant event-particularly for southern gays and lesbians? James T. Sears: Stonewall-the three nights of rioting against police near a seedy Greenwich Village bar in June of 1969-was both cause and effect. During the 1950s and '60s, homophile activists-including many Southerners (mostly men) such as Richard Inman, Eddie Sandifer, Rita Wanstrom, Jack Nichols, Jim Kepner, Dick Leitsch, Randy Wicker, Phil Johnson-organized groups, attended conferences, and published magazines and newsletters. Their efforts certainly laid the groundwork for a more radical generation who seized upon the Stonewall rebellion (one of several spontaneous outbursts against police) to mobilize. As news of Stonewall moved from the inside pages of the New York Times to the front pages of newly formed gay liberation newsletters, this homophile generation, marked by gradualism and civility, gave way to the rubyfruit generation, characterized by immediacy and confrontation. Within a couple of years there were literally hundreds of student groups and small publications throughout the country, including the Charlotte Gay Liberation Front and Austin's Gay Liberation League, Knoxville's Mother Jones and Gay Times in Lexington, as well as separatists groups like the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance.
Meanwhile, queer social space opened out as hundreds showed up for weekend parties at huge bars like the Bayous Landing in Dallas, Badlands Disco in Louisivlle, and George's in Memphis or were entertained by drag divas at Palace Club in Orlando, Atlanta's Sweet Gum Head or the Carousel Club in Knoxville. MCC congregations also formed as well as motorcycle clubs such as Knights D'Orleans and the D.C. Spartans. GayToday: What resulted from this early organizing during the early 1970s? James T. Sears: Well, organizing beyond social life proved difficult in southern towns that lacked a critical mass of politically-minded folks. Not surprisingly, those involved with more radical Gay Liberation Front-type groups had disappeared by the mid-seventies. In their place was a more disparate (and generally more conservative) group of activists who tried to forge a community out of a hodge-podge of disco revelers, closet-case cruisers, drag divas, lip-stick lesbians, and cloistered middle age couples occupying common space with softball teams, motorcycle clubs, and church goers. Their challenge was mobilizing these mostly social groups in a region that prized propriety, and within a culture based on denial. But, on a June day eight years after the first Greenwich Village rioting the second American Stonewall occurred in Dade County. South Florida activists had successfully lobbied county commissioners to approve a gay rights ordinance only to be challenged by conservatives led by citrus queen Anita Bryant. "Save our Children" forced a public referendum on the ordinance and unleashed forces of biblical proportion! If Stonewall was the match that ignited gay power, then Hurricane Anita fanned gay rights' fires from the Carolinas to California. GayToday: The playwright Edward Albee praises your book as "deeply moving and disturbing, at time hilarious and always essential." The novelist Rita Mae Brown simply declares it a "good read!" It, too, has garnered praise from scholars and activists. What makes this book so compelling?
They learn about FBI busts in Lexington and busted Tarheel lesbians in a greasy Georgia diner. They meet transgender warriors and country sissies, homophobic politicians and racist bar owners; and they read of unsolved murders and murderers acquitted. Maimed characters who are sometimes triumphant, Tobacco Road and Southern Living childhoods, steamy interracial relationships, as well as eccentricity, honor, small-mindedness, romanticism, violence, stoicism, self-reliance, religious fanaticism--it's all very southern. GayToday: This book is the second volume in a projected multi-volume work (the first volume was the critically acclaimed Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968). What inspired you to undertake such an ambitious project? James T. Sears: In the South, perhaps more so than in other regions, we learn our history through the stories told as we lay our head on grandmother's lap or listen to uncles talk while fishing in a pond or crabbing in a saltwater marsh. But for those of us who are queer, we hear no stories; we have no community of memory. When I began work on this project in 1995, there we no books on southern queer history. In fact, scanning down the rows of books in stores like Lambda Rising you would have likely reached one of two conclusions. There simply aren't many queer folks in a land where thousands of Christian fortresses guard against perversions. This I call the Jesse Helms hypothesis. Or, among my northern activist friends-those who still view the South as a primeval land of moonshine and magnolias, and Southerners as an unhealthy mixture of debutantes and bubbas-the belief that the South has contributed little if anything to gay history. Both of these, of course, are wrong-headed, but it wasn't until the publication of Lonely Hunters followed by several other books that we have begun to remember our past. GayToday: What differences did you find from the 1950s to the 1970s? James T. Sears: During the Lonely Hunters era, southern homosexuals existed along the margins, lived in the cracks of the heterosexual world, spoke between the lines, and queered space on the softball diamonds, in hotel mixed bars, or along darkened park pathways. Institutional places were few compared to the gay and women's centers, churches and synagogues as well as newspapers, bookstores, and discos that came to define the 1970s. Aside from the one-man organizing efforts of the Atheneum Society in Miami and the work of Eddie Sandifer in Jackson, the tiny Circle of Friends in Dallas and the slightly larger Mattachine chapter in D.C., there was little political activity even by the mid-sixties. There certainly were no political communities. Neither was there a web of bars and baths, newspapers and newsletters, sports teams and motorcycle clubs, MCC congregations and chapters of Dignity or Integrity that materialized later. GayToday: So things improved?
It would be naïve, of course, to romanticize this era of routine harassment by local vice where the publication of names, addresses, and places of employment of arrested homosexuals often led to divorces, suicides, and overnight departures. And, although those lesbians and gay men who ventured from their magnolia closets experienced a sense of community, many more never crossed over this lavender threshold. But, it was this homosexual discretion and heterosexual disregard that enabled lesbians and gay men to queer heterosexual space. Not surprisingly, when gay liberation front chapters formed in the South and when queers started marching, protesting, and demanding equal treatment the veneer of southern tolerance and polite silence vanished. GayToday: In this book, you continue the stories of some of the people you profiled in Lonely Hunters. Can you talk a bit about that? James T. Sears: I pick up the stories of several folks, including Merril Mushroom and her adolescent girlfriend, Julia Stanley Penelope. We follow them as their paths diverge but continue to cross. One enters academia, inspires a generation of queer students, and moves into the forefront of lesbian-feminist writing; the other marries, moves to the country, and raises adopted children. Both are committed to social change and embrace their sexuality; each experiences the impact of the feminist movement, the counter-culture scene, and lesbian nationhood differently. In the process, the reader meets a variety of other southern characters: Milo Pyne, a faggot revolutionary who helped form Short Mountain collective which became a site for the radical faeries and the magazine, RFD; rubyfruit separatist Catherine Nicholson, who, with her partner Harriet Desmoines, published the most important lesbian literary magazine of the day, Sinister Wisdom; Louie Crew, the founder of the religious group, Integrity. Socialist-feminist Margo George, who formed Dykes for the Second American Revolution, and lesbian singer-songwriters Meg Christian and Teresa Trull. We enter Paranoia, a four-room head shop Merril and her gay husband, Gabby, opened in the East Village, and join them in their pink, red-striped school bus as they travel across the country, landing in middle Tennessee. And we set off with Julia as she helps organize the Southeastern Gay Coalition and later tries to build a lesbian culture. We follow Julia and Merril's relationship across a decade punctured by philosophical differences, long silences, and tearful reunions. Through these and other interwoven stories, I create what the southern writer and publisher, June Arnold, once described as "experience weaving in upon itself, commenting on itself, inclusive, not ending in final victory/defeat but ending with the sense that the community continues." GayToday: What can readers, within and beyond the South, learn from examining queer life in the 1970s? James T. Sears: First, there is more to our history than Stonewall, Harvey Milk, and the Village People. History is made by people-ordinary people who occasionally engage in extraordinary deeds. Also, I hope that readers rethink the meaning of "community." In mapping out queer space there has been a tendency to ascribe community to a diverse set of loosely clustered individuals or groups who simply occupy a common territory. A community, however, is not synonymous with a neighborhood, where shared spaced does not necessarily result in social bonds. Third, a cost has been exacted from us for defining ourselves as a political minority. As we sought a seat at the table of political power, sex was commodified and sexuality essentialized. From marketing a thirteen-inch Gay Bob doll (with a penis) and fabricating the Village People to marginalizing those central to the Stonewall rebellion (working class, transgender folks, persons of color) and proclaiming our only differences is with whom we sleep, I think we need to at least pause to ponder the observation of one old activist: "When we fought back at the Stonewall ten years ago, we didn't think the benefits would be seven hundred leather bars and the right to join the army." In many ways, the decade of seventies was the gateway into a more conservative era. This book chronicles that transition within queer communities. GayToday: Your scholarship over the years has inspired a lot of praise and controversy-in fact, you've been called "the Satan of the university" by Pat Robertson of the 700 Club and awarded an Academic Freedom Award by the ACLU. What inspires or motivates? James T. Sears: I've long been working on a novel. One of the protagonist's writes in his diary: "Death breathes meaning into life." I am motivated by the certain knowledge of my mortality and inspired by the desire that I can make a difference. GayToday: What are your next projects?
GayToday: Will the next book in this series pick up after the 1979 March on Washington? James T. Sears: No. I am going back to chronicle the period from the Roaring Twenties through World War II. There will be stories of homosexual writers and artists, lovers in combat, hobos riding southern rails, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men in the very early civil rights movement, queers in vaudeville and female impersonators, and much more. I want to transport readers back to the South that few of us remember and into a world of sexuality that has disappeared along with the jitterbug, zoot suits, and flagpole sitting. |
Gay Historian and Author James T. Sears 
GayToday: Why did you title your book Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South?
Activists in Atlanta march for gay rights 
Miss P of the Pariament House in Orlando 
Activist Hal Call 
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