You Can’t Stop the Queer South is Them’s series spotlighting LGBTQ+ voices of resistance and resilience in the American South, created with guest editor adrienne maree brown. In the time since producing these stories, Hurricane Helene has devastated areas across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia, with nearly 200 dead, a million without power, and countless homes destroyed or displaced. We ask readers to support on-the-ground relief efforts however possible. See our Hurricane Helene relief resource guide to learn how you can help.
For historians Maigen Sullivan and Josh Burford, archiving queer Southern history is a form of resisting oppression.
Working in academia, they noticed a significant lack of resources documenting the South’s vibrant queer past. Places like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago were well-represented, Sullivan says, but they even saw a dearth of documentation about Atlanta, one of the South’s biggest cities. As Southerners themselves, Sullivan and Burford wanted to offer generations past and present a resource for understanding their roots, showing them queer Southerners have always existed and can’t be ignored. In 2015, Sullivan and Burford founded Invisible Histories, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the queer history of the South. As the organization says, “History leads to liberation.”
Since then, Invisible Histories has accumulated an archive of nearly 200 collections, 150 of which are available for viewing. Many are digitized and available for exploration online, which Sullivan, who is now co-executive Director with Burford, notes as a great resource for casual perusal.
By offering queer people an accessible way to engage with their past, Sullivan hopes to empower them for the future, specifically to counteract the narrative of “Look how hard it is to be in the South and be queer or trans,” she says. “When we tell ourselves that and we don't see accurate representations of diversity and the progress and the communities that have existed despite all of that — sometimes because of all of that — then we start to internalize all those deficit ideals about who we are and who we can be.”
One of the best ways to engage with Southern queer history is through the media of its past, like magazines, newsletters, and zines. “If you look back at publications from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s... it’s not just the news articles, it’s not just the calendar events. It’s also local businesses, not just bars. Maybe it’s a hairstylist that’s advertising in there, or a cleaning service that is advertising. It’s ways to see how we were everywhere and engaged in so much of public life,” Sullivan says. “It gives a good, well-rounded view of the past in ways that one picture or one flyer can’t necessarily do.”
These publications featured not just culture and style, but politics and what would later become history. The 1970s-80s queer magazine This Month in Mississippi, for example, exposed the scandals of anti-queer Senator Jon Hinson, who was later discovered to be gay. Gayseed, a queer magazine from Huntsville, Alabama, chronicled its thriving queer arts and culture scene. The list goes on and on, and every item on it shows there have always been Southern queers dedicated to documenting their lives, making history along the way.
Read on for a brief history of seven publications from the Invisible Histories archives that reflect and exhibit the power of queer Southern memory.
All the Beautiful People: North Carolina, 1990s
All the Beautiful People ran for three to four years and arose from a group called the Carolina Transexual Society, whose members were predominantly transgender women, Burford says. The Carolina Transexual Society was started by a group of supporters, who ended up calling themselves the Carolina Trans-Sensual Alliance, he continues. “The whole purpose of this particular publication was to offer support, love and connection for trans people in North Carolina, more specifically Charlotte and the surrounding counties,” he says, citing that it’s unique because it both celebrated trans identity and the people who love and support transgender individuals; it also featured a personals section.
For Burford, it’s a wonder the organization even has a copy of the newsletter in the archives: it was part of the archives of Sue Henry, who owned a queer bookstore in Charlotte, North Carolina with her partner Barbara Park. “They were sort of a de facto community center as well as a bookstore, and they became a hub for people who wanted not just national magazines, but also local publications,” Burford says. Henry was also the first openly queer woman to run for mayor of Charlotte.
Gayseed: Alabama, 1970s
“As far as we can tell, [Gayseed is] either the first queer publication in the state of Alabama, or very close, it’s either one or two,” says Burford. Only two issues of the queer arts and culture magazine were ever published, but Invisible Histories has both. “There was just this real drive in Huntsville in the early ’70s to publish a magazine that would represent the queer community as it related to arts and culture,” he says. Gayseed featured articles, but also poetry, art, drawing, and painting. In progressive, arts-forward Huntsville, there was a desire for queer-affirming spaces, Burford says, and one of these became the bookstore Booklegger, which disseminated Gayseed. Booklegger became a “home of punks and queer people and outsider artists,” Burford tells Them. “The idea of having this publication that could be put out into the world was such a crucial part of their infrastructure.”
Lesbian Front: Washington D.C. & Mississippi, 1970s
Lesbian Front was founded in 1972 by former partners Yvonne Stevenson and Chris Lundberg, who started the publication after an amicable breakup and lived in Jackson, Mississippi and Washington, D.C. respectively. Published as both a zine and a newsletter, Lesbian Front is “to date, the oldest queer publication out of Mississippi,” Burford says. It ran for two years, publishing seven issues, highlighting “ways that lesbians can thrive,” Burford says, and have successful relationships. Lesbian Front and featured local, national, and international current events, political organizing, lesbian life (“ways that lesbians can thrive,” Burford says, and have successful relationships), local news, poetry, and even a gossip column. What’s really special about publications like Lesbian Front is that they prove how proactive queer Mississippians were about gay liberation. “Mississippi queer organizing was always a statewide effort. It was never just in one location,” he says.
This Month in Mississippi, Mississippi, 1970s-1990s
This Month in Mississippi was the official publication of the Mississippi Gay Alliance queer rights organization. It ran from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, and became one of the longest running queer periodicals in the state. This Month in Mississippi chronicled all the work the Alliance was doing in the state, providing resources and education, especially in terms of HIV/AIDS outreach, Pride festivals, and state-level political action. The publication also engaged in what was known at the time as “political outing,” a process started by ACT UP in the 1980s in which anti-LGBTQ+ politicians would have their secretly queer personal lives exposed. This is where the aforementioned history of Jon Hinson is preserved. “Truthfully, if you want to get a primer on what queer history was like in the South, [This Month in Mississippi is] the one to read,” Burford says. “Mississippi has got the best queer history. It is so unexpected and so delicious and delightful and so chaotic, so many political scandals,” Sullivan laughs. “If you're a Mississippi elected official, I'm looking at you twice because [of] this history alone.”
Upfront: Florida, 1970s
Some publications were more chaotic, but in a wonderful way. Upfront was a Pensacola, Florida-based, full-color magazine published in the early 1970s. It only published five issues, and featured content about “how to be openly gay, or adjacently gay in the Florida Panhandle,” Burford says, from parties to nightlife to general lifestyle. It was likely “an epic flop,” to use Burford’s words, because it tried to cater to gay men and lesbians at the same time, with partial or full-frontal nudity throughout. “When you open it up, you get Surprise Penis, which is fun, but also Surprise Boobies, and it's all on the same page! And I was just like, I don’t think you understood your market,” Sullivan laughs.
“Gay men and lesbians just wanted different things from their publications,” Burford says. “When you look at the Christmas issue, which is the one you should look at, there’s a half naked boy on the cover, and then like a half naked lady… the attempt to try to include both gay men and lesbians is so unique and just didn’t work.” Still, Burford says, “it’s a beautiful, weird read.”
WimminSpace: Mississippi, 1980s-1990s
WimminSpace, based out of Jackson, Mississippi, was a newsletter for lesbian social gatherings that ran for about 10 years. “They got together once or twice a month for board games and hanging out and reading books and stuff like that. And WimminSpace [became] a newsletter, and it only really circulated within that very small niche community of lesbians in the Jackson area,” Burford says. “It was passed around within this very small group, and it had just as many issues of it as they had interest in reading it, and so we’re still gathering copies at this point. I’m not even sure how many issues of WimminSpace there were, because we keep finding them,” he says. Sullivan mentions there’s more content covering gender politics than some of the other publications, which are more based on sexuality, “also lots of potluck dinners, lots of camping!” she quips. The name itself is representational of 1990s, second-wave feminism, Sullivan says, “changing [the spelling to ‘wimmin’] from this male-centered vocabulary was really, really hot in Second-Wave feminism, and that is incredibly reflected in these. They feel very, very 90s.”
Wonderful Women: Charlotte, North Carolina, 1990s
Wonderful Women is a publication that’s close to Burford’s heart, as it was started by his late friend Lynnsy Logue, who passed away last year. The magazine emerged from a group Logue started in 1988. Burford says she wanted to have a lesbian community, but knew it couldn’t just exist in bars, so she organized lesbian group outings in nature. “They camped and they hiked, and they did whitewater rafting and canoeing. And then the publication Wonderful Women is a chronicle of not just the trips they were taking, but also the communities that they were building,” Burford says. The group started with about 40 people. A decade later, there were over 300. “[Logue] said by the end, it was lesbian women bringing their daughters with them, or their mothers with them on these trips, sometimes their co-workers, and it became this really powerful space for women to feel safe in nature, to have their own space, their own communities. She had told me several times that it was one of the most important things she ever did.”
Editor's Note: The term 'wimmin' is used contemporarily in trans exclusionary circles and discourse with the intent to remove trans women from feminist spaces and movements. We've reviewed as many issues of WimminSpace available to us and have found no such trans-exclusionary sentiment, likely because the term had a more general use when it was popularized during second-wave feminism of the ‘60s and ’70s.
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