THE RURAL QUEER EXPERIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION by Eric Hughes A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University May 2021 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Will Brantley, Chair Dr. Allen Hibbard Dr. Mischa Renfroe ABSTRACT A common view of nonurban areas in the United States posits that rural communities and small towns are hegemonically heterosexual and gender conforming or inherently inhospitable to queer individuals. Queer studies have often reaffirmed these commonly held beliefs, as evident in a text such as David M. Halperin’s How to Be Gay (2012). With Kath Weston’s seminal “Get Thee to a Big City” (1995), a few commentators began to question this urban bias, or what J. Jack Halberstam labels “metronormativity.” Literary studies, however, have been late to take the “rural turn.” This dissertation thus examines the ways in which American writers from across the century and in diverse geographical areas have resisted queer urbanism through engagements with the urban/rural dichotomy. Chapter one focuses on Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, detailing Cather’s portrayal of queer cosmopolitanism and urbanity in short stories from The Troll Garden (1905), and pairing Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923) with Anderson’s Poor White (1920) to show how these writers challenged sexual norms in the modernizing Midwest. Chapter two examines Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943) and The Member of the Wedding (1946) along with Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and The Grass Harp (1951), centering on representations of gender and sexual nonconformity in small southern towns. McCullers’s Clock Without Hands (1961) is paired with James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), highlighting race as a sometimes key determinant in male same-sex relationships in the midcentury South. Chapter three considers Thomas Hal Phillips’s The Bitterweed Path (1950), Kangaroo Hollow (1954), The Loved and the ii Unloved (1955), and Red Midnight (2002), tracing the impact of socioeconomic class on the Mississippi author’s groundbreaking representations of same-sex intimacy. Chapter four looks at William Goyen’s The House of Breath (1950), Come, the Restorer (1974), and Arcadio (1983), delineating the author’s treatment of both queerness and environmental change in his native rural East Texas. The final chapter turns to two Carolina writers from the late twentieth century, Dorothy Allison and Randall Kenan. This chapter considers the interplay of regionalism, rurality, and queer identity— particularly as shaped by class and race—in Allison’s short story collection Trash (1988) and Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992). iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: “PERVERTED ACTS IN PASTURES”.………………………...….1 CHAPTER I: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE MODERN MIDWEST…………...14 CHAPTER II: QUEERING THE SMALL-TOWN SOUTH………………..…………..63 CHAPTER III: GOOD BEDFELLERS: SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIPS IN THOMAS HAL PHILLIPS’S NOVELS.…………………………………………………………..122 CHAPTER IV: WILLIAM GOYEN’S PECULIAR REGION…………………..…….165 CHAPTER V: RURALITY, REGIONALISM, AND QUEER IDENTITY IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY…………………………………….………………………..203 CONCLUSION: THE RURAL QUEER EXPERIENCE………………………………246 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………….……..263 iv Hughes 1 INTRODUCTION: “PERVERTED ACTS IN PASTURES” “I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with the nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes— I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency” In his poem “Meditations in an Emergency,” Frank O’Hara draws on many common images of the countryside. His reference to nostalgia and an “innocent past” evokes images of adolescent innocence and an idealized region that modernity has left behind. Despite the delightful possibility of “perverted acts in pastures,” the speaker has “never clogged” himself with these nostalgic pastoral visions. Significantly, the countryside is not devoid of queer sexuality; instead, the speaker alludes to a romanticized view of eroticism in the countryside. Such idylls, however, do not appeal to him. The city’s minimal, controlled greenery is sufficient. How could one enjoy even the smallest piece of nature without the conveniences of the city, without signs of culture, action, and movement? As the quintessential gay “city poet” in twentieth-century America, O’Hara dismisses the country with a flippant, campy cosmopolitanism that has come to exemplify contemporary gay culture. This poem reflects other assumptions about nonurban areas that have been perpetuated in the popular imagination and in queer studies. Nonurban areas, including rural communities and small towns, are the backwards Hughes 2 regions of the United States, places where people must “totally regret life.” Queer folks are either unwelcome there or, paradoxically, not there at all. In contrast, cities are thriving cultural and political centers that offer succor for provincial queers. There, one can “enjoy a blade of grass” within the safe confines of an urban gay enclave. This prominent image of gay life in the city is somewhat understandable. Julie Abraham contends that “homosexuals became, over the course of the past two centuries, simultaneously model citizens of the modern city and avatars of the urban; that is, models of the city itself” (xvii-xix). Recognizing the important connections between queerness and the city, however, does not mean that one can dismiss the countryside and the queers who live there. As William J. Spurlin concludes, “the prominence of such cities as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in queer political and cultural achievement is certainly justified, though it is not the case that there is something inherently urban, cosmopolitan, and [. .] coastal” about “queer experience” (191). This qualification about queer urbanity is crucial in challenging limited notions of the city, the country, and queers in either space while also recognizing the importance of urban centers to modern queer life. Metronormativity, Queer Studies, and the Popular Imagination The critique of the urban bias in queer studies and in the broader gay community was first articulated by Kath Weston in “Get Thee to a Big City” (1995). In this seminal essay, which has since become a touchstone in rural queer studies, Weston outlines the rural/urban binary that has shaped contemporary gay identity and community. She Hughes 3 focuses primarily on the “Great Gay Migration” of the 1970s and 1980s, when gays and lesbians migrated to the so-called urban gay ghettos, but her argument extends beyond this historical moment. The movement from rural to urban inspired a standard narrative whereby the country was perceived as “a locus of persecution and gay absence” and the city positioned as a “beacon of tolerance and gay community.” This narrative established a paradigm that “locates gay subjects in the city while putting their presence in the countryside under erasure” (262). Weston contends that gays and lesbians shape their sense of self and community through the migration narrative and the rural/urban dichotomy, most often at the expense of nonurban areas and queer people there who are marginalized or overlooked entirely. In Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (1999), John Howard sums up this narrative and its effects succinctly: “Persons of ambiguous sexuality, experiencing inchoate emotions (desire) out there in the hinterlands, move to the city [. .] There they find themselves (identity) and each other (community)” (12). The city thereby becomes the logical, inevitable space for queer people to express themselves, act on their desires, and find affirmation. Other scholars have expanded on this reassessment of the gay migration narrative and its attendant meanings. In a critique of the urban bias in queer studies, J. Jack Halberstam proposed the term “metronormativity.” Halberstam points to the migration pattern as a “spatial narrative within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring life in a place of suspicion, persecution, and secrecy” (In a Queer Time and Place 36-7). Hence, the city becomes a primary site for the “full expression of the sexual self” as opposed to the closet associated with nonmetropolitan areas (36). Donna Jo Smith makes a similar point in her discussion of southern queer historiography. She Hughes 4 argues that if queer studies have “mapped visibility and outness” onto urban cultures and communities, then “it has mapped the closet onto rural areas, small towns, and small cities.” Further, rural “sites [. .] are conceptualized as spaces of uniform, hegemonic oppression” and minimal visibility for queer people (381). This perceived metronormative bias also shapes—and limits—how gender and sexuality are perceived more broadly. Katherine Schweighofer points out that “the country-as-closet construct reinforces an urban definition of LGBTQ identity and visibility that may not be consistent with rural LGBTQ lifestyles,” thereby making those lives impossible (223). As Schweighofer observes, the experiences of rural queers are more dynamic than those dominant models of visibility, identity, and community allow. Relying on metronormative understandings