4

Women’s Space, Queer Space

Communes, Landykes, and Queer Contact Zones in the Lesbian Feminist South

The middle-aged man sitting in the row in front of me shoved his wife’s arm and pointed at two women. “See?!” he said, conspiratorially, derisively. I looked at my friend Cheryl and raised an eyebrow. Where did he think he was, anyway? The Southeastern Conference (SEC) Women’s Basketball Tournament audience is filled with lesbians—butches, femmes, sportsdykes, some distinguished by a modified mullet, others by their no-makeup, tennis shoes, and jeans uniform, but all united in their obsession with women’s basketball.

Of course, the tournament audience includes others besides lesbians; like most queer spaces in the South, lesbians share the space with many other groups—retirees, parents and their tween daughters, and random diehard SEC fans who love their team or really hate their rivals. Yet the SEC Women’s Basketball Tournament is a roving capital of the southern sisterhood, and it is anything but subtle, but if you ask the fathers and the busloads of white-haired retirees about all the lesbians they will look at you blankly, whether they noticed them or not.

This is because “the South” has always been an imagined community, based in wish fulfillment and aspiration, that depends upon deliberate unlooking. It excludes populations that, collectively, comprise a majority of the population. It excludes black southerners, who understandably have a more ambivalent relationship to the “sense of place” invested in their subordination. It excludes the many immigrant groups that have made the South their home over the generations—Chinese, Lebanese, Italians, and more recently, Indians, Vietnamese, Africans, Hispanics. It ignores queer southern communities in towns both small and large. In other words, the “sense of place” so beloved by traditional southern literary critics overlooks the actual people in that place.

This tendency to disavow the full complexity of diverse communities in the South has a long, shameful history. The Confederacy imagined a southern aristocracy based on honor and culture, obscuring a white supremacy dependent on stolen slave labor. Post-Reconstruction politics did more than rewrite the cause of the Civil War—it also remade the space of the South: Confederate memorial statues were erected, often in town squares or in prominent public locations, as Jim Crow laws limited the spaces and places African Americans could live, work, and recreate.1 The fact that these public Confederate monuments still dominate southern spaces, and that their removals provoke intense debate and outcry, suggests how effectively this southern space made inequity seem natural.

The ubiquitous notion of a static, conservative South has led to many unwarranted assumptions about LGBTQ communities and their incompatibility in the South. Gay liberation was framed as an urban phenomenon; gay people leave their inhospitable small towns and regions and build a critical mass in major cities like New York and San Francisco, where their visibility and numbers result in political clout and political influence. Greenwich Village in New York and the Castro in San Francisco were two models; pioneer Harvey Milk encouraged queers across the country to join him in paradise.

This metronormativity has been questioned in studies of rural and southern queer spaces like John Howard’s Men Like That, Mary Gray’s Out in the Country, and Scott Herring’s Another Country. Howard’s groundbreaking book challenged the linking of gay identity and urban life, insisting that this bias “at times has denied agency to rural folk, [and] has assumed that nonurban dwellers can’t attach meanings to, can’t find useful ways of framing, their nonconforming attractions and behaviors.”2 He argues that “in Mississippi, spatial configurations—the unique characteristics of a rural landscape—forged distinct human interactions, movements, and sites,” and that the urban model “incompletely and inadequately gets at the shape and scope of queer life.”3 He suggests new models for understanding that queer life, decoupled from both identity and a fixed sense of place.

Scott Herring concurs. He provides a detailed overview of the growing scholarship on queer rural communities, concluding that “these artists and authors pay heed to the ‘non-metropolitan’ as a dynamic space of inquiry and sexual vitality. Complicating geophobic claims that ruralized spaces are always and only hotbeds of hostility, cultural and socioeconomic poverty, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, racism, urbanoia, and social conservatism, their works question knee-jerk assumptions that the “rural” is a hate-filled space for queers as they archive the complex desires that contribute to any non-metropolitan identification.”4 Herring’s own work focuses on contemporary artistic portrayals of the rural queer in periodicals, photography, memoirs, and graphic novels.

This work on rural queerness is enhanced by feminist and queer geography, which has provided new paradigms to theorize how ideologies order and impede our understandings of space and how different configurations can remake that sense of space. Jack Geiseking explains that “space is not absolute or fixed in the Kantian sense but constantly produced in how it is all at once created, conceived, and lived.”5 Our “natural” notions of space, in other words, are not innocent; instead, as the Women and Geography Study Group argues, “dominant senses of place reflect, in both their form and their content, the meanings given to places by the powerful.”6 They continue, “A consequence of the way in which very specific senses of place are constructed through the particular images and values attached to them by the socially and culturally powerful, is that senses of place are often highly controversial. Other groups may challenge the senses of place produced by the powerful, and cultural geographers therefore argue that senses of place are often also sites of contestation.”7 This focus on space as a site of contestation serves as a dominant focus of feminist and queer geography. “Space” isn’t natural, and it isn’t neutral.

Doreen Massey lays out the terms for understanding space beyond the fixed narrative of the powerful. She argues that space is heterogeneous, inhabited by diverse groups of people who often disagree about its functions and purpose. Multiple and relational, space is also open-ended and unfixed. As she explains,

What is special about place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or of the eternity of the hills. Rather, what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now.… There can be no assumption of pre-given coherence, or of community or collective identity.… In sharp contrast to the view of place as settled and pre-given, with a coherence only to be disturbed by “external” forces, places as presented here in a sense necessitate invention; they pose a challenge.… They require that, in one way or another, we confront the challenge of the negotiation of multiplicity.8

Massey’s insistence that there is no “pre-given coherence” to a space challenges a fundamental assumption about the fixity of the South and rejects the idea that there is some coherent essence of southernness. It constructs space that is always being created in the present moment, negotiating often contradictory perspectives.

Indeed, Massey’s notion of “throwntogetherness” allows for radical reimaginations of space: “What I’m interested in is how we might imagine spaces for these times; how we might pursue an alternative imagination. What is needed, I think, is to uproot ‘space’ from that constellation of concepts in which it has so unquestioningly so often been embedded (stasis; closure; representation) and to settle it among another set of ideas (heterogeneity; relationality; coevalness … liveliness indeed) where it releases a more challenging political landscape.”9 The idea of “alternative imagination” of space is a dominant theme in feminist and queer geography. Geiseking privileges the “action of queering: refusing the normative and upsetting privilege for more radical, just worlds, even those not yet imagined,”10 to “uproariously alter the everyday spatialities of heterosexuality.”11 These disruptions include interventions in “the built environment” and the “landscapes” we construct to represent “nature.”

Though studies of this utopian “act of queering” tend to focus on contemporary, urban interventions, the act of queering was central to utopian reimaginations of rural space in early women’s liberation. Creating autonomous women’s space and queer space was a central focus of women’s communes and the landyke movement, which had particular resonance in the archive of southern lesbian feminism.

Landykes, Communes, and Lesbian Idealization of the Rural

Early women’s liberation was long engaged with challenging the patriarchal hierarchies of space, both public and private. Many early protests—the sit-in at Ladies Home Journal, for example, and the burning of undergarments at the Miss America pageant—were forms of performance art that sought to make visible the seemingly “natural” public spaces allowed to women. These demonstrations intended to smash the public/private distinction that had isolated women and made their concerns a personal failing rather than a structural injustice. The creation of temporary spaces of freedom within a larger heteropatriarchal society—like gay bars and women’s music festivals—were another strategy to reconfigure space.

Some lesbian feminists opted for more permanent means of escape that involved experiments in living that were, fundamentally, experiments of spatiality. Grete Rensenbrink explains that “separatist communities emerged in urban areas, especially San Francisco and New York, and increasingly on rural land communes across the United States.”12 These separatist communities often functioned as “collectives” in urban areas; some of the most important manifestos of the early women’s movement emerged from collectives, which formed and reformed with alacrity in the early 1970s. Women lived and worked in the same space, breaking down the notions of public and private, masculine and feminine. Collectives broke down hierarchies within private and public lives, as well. Members often rejected the distinction between intellectual labor and physical labor; in press collectives, for example, women both wrote articles, short stories, and poems and physically printed these pieces—sometimes on mimeograph machines and later on letterpresses they bought and taught themselves how to use. There was deep suspicion about “leaders” of these groups; decisions were collectively and democratically reached. Cooking, cleaning, home repair—all were burdens to be shared equally in the collective. Collective members tried to remake space to construct new revolutionary models. They also tried to remake economic models. Frequently, only a few of the members of these collectives had “straight” jobs, which were used to support the entire community. Collectives experimented with different models for self-sufficiency to free themselves from the obligations of capitalist patriarchy. Very few women stayed in these collectives for long; manifestos often had more staying power than the intentional communities that produced them.

Some collective experiments sought physical separation from mainstream society. Research has shown the “the country was an ‘ideal’ or ‘fantasy’ place for lesbians to live,”13 because it seemed to allow for a reinvention of space from the ground up. Sine Anahita explains, “In the early 1970s, the landdyke movement was created when a radical branch of second-wave feminism converged with ideas from the hippie back-to-the-land and other social movements.… From the outset, landykes articulated the connections between ecological and feminist principles. Early activists sought to create a network of land-based communities where ecofeminist principles could manifest in everyday acts to prefigure a lesbian feminist, nature-centered, postpatriarchal future.”14 This geographical experiment allowed for more democratic and communal constructions of space to teach, inspire, provide refuge, and influence the larger culture with guerrilla-type actions. Rose Norman, Merril Mushroom, and Kate Ellison, editors of a special issue of Sinister Wisdom on the landyke movement in the South, explain that “landykes were creating something larger, beyond a couple or a family. They attempted to live out egalitarian and ecological principles, which they saw as the core of female culture. They attempted this within sometimes stark financial, cultural, and psychological limitations.”15 While the landyke movement was national, the editors suggested that the South has always contained a large share of these experimental communities.16

Such movements are controversial and have been denounced as essentialist, white-identified, privileged, and unrealistic, but participants portray them differently. Some are unapologetic in their insistence on a women-only space and cling to essentialist notions of women’s innate difference and superiority, but others see the landyke movement as an essential part of their development that allowed for creative rethinking of what is possible in culture, politics, and living. Sarah Shanbaum explained: “We created a closed and separatist environment, and in that closed and separatist environment, we learned and we became strong, and then we broke that like an egg, and went out into the world, and did what it was we wanted to do.”17 Seeing separatism as a necessary phase that led to a broader inclusiveness is common for participants, and it is a pattern that we see in the archive of southern lesbian feminism as well.

Women’s space and women’s land were essential for the utopian possibilities they fostered. Greta Resenbrink argues that “separatists embraced prefigurative politics, seeking to live the future in the present and working to create communities and local cultures that anticipated a utopian dream.”18 As one landyke participant explained in the documentary Lesbiana:

We were actively rethinking the world. Each time I walked out of the bar, I felt like I was crossing a zone from a fictional world—the life in the bar—into reality—life in the city. And that is how I developed this notion of reality versus fiction. Meaning that women’s reality was perceived as fiction by men, and what we called reality, was in fact the accumulation of masculine subjectivity that has been working for centuries establishing laws, traditions, etc. And we called that “reality,” but it was nothing more than the male version of reality carried through the centuries. During that time, I was writing two pages. On one page I was trying to figure out the male system, a horrible system, detrimental to women: patriarchy. I was trying to figure out its strategies and its tactics, and how it evolved and was persistent to this day. And on the other page, I was writing about desire, utopia, beauty, pleasure, and everything I was discovering with other women. This is how I stayed in touch with the reality of patriarchy and still I could take flight, into love, lust, sisterhood, and all the discoveries I was making at that time.19

The creation of a utopian, liberated space, both actual and imagined, was a key part of early women’s liberation. It is why the arts were so enmeshed with political activism; why “consciousness-raising” moved from physical gatherings to novels; why women’s press collectives were seen as political activism. Physical and imaginative space were mutually interdependent, and a compelling imagined space might end up having more impact than a physical space.

Many writers in the southern lesbian feminist archive were invested in communes and collectives. Bertha Harris went with a group of lesbian friends (including anthropologist Esther Newton and her then-lover Louise Fishman, the painter) to an upstate New York property owned by Jill Johnston,20 which served as a weekend getaway and part-time retreat that Harris would later memorialize in Lover. Blanche McCrary Boyd joined a commune in Vermont (not an exclusively lesbian commune, though she transforms it into one in Terminal Velocity); Rita Mae Brown was part of a women’s collective, the Furies, in Washington, D.C., and when she eventually moved to Virginia (after the sale of Rubyfruit Jungle to Bantam Books) she didn’t establish a commune, but she did buy land.

In Rebels, Rubyfruits, and Rhinestones, James T. Sears describes a seamless transition of southern queers from their small southern towns to New York City and back to intentional communities in the South—a fluid circulation that negated neither urban gay communities nor southern identities.21 The Pagoda community in St. Augustine, Florida, was one of the most famous,22 but many smaller ones thrived under the radar across the South. Dorothy Allison belonged to a women’s collective in Tallahassee, Florida. Catherine Nicholson lived in a collective in Charlotte, North Carolina, but was kicked out for her intergenerational romance with Harriet Desmoines; photographs of the Sinister Wisdom group, taken at Nicholson’s house on Country Club Drive (with many of the women topless), suggest a faux commune had formed there. And Catherine Ennis, who was so cautious that she wouldn’t do readings of her lesbian novels too close to her hometown, appeared in the Ponchatoula Times in the mid-1980s with her “artisans” collective; the photograph suggests a lesbian commune flying under the radar.23 In smaller communities this sort of caution wasn’t uncommon. Other communes—usually those in urban centers or college towns in the South—were more open and combative, though often no more visible. The Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA), which operated for two decades in the largest urban center in the South and hosted a number of lesbian writers, including southern lesbian feminist writers, was largely unknown in Atlanta proper. The Feminary collective in Durham, North Carolina, was well known within lesbian feminist circles but fairly anonymous inside the Research Triangle. More recent communes include one in Alabama and Camp Sister Spirit in Mississippi.24

Despite their many differences in locations, visibility, and intentions, all these communes and collectives served an important function in the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Southern lesbian feminists were deeply invested in the spaces and places of the South. Whether they stayed in the South or fled to New York or San Francisco, they engaged imaginatively and combatively in the remaking of southern place to create a South they did not have to leave. Southern lesbian feminists—white, Latina, and African American—reconsidered their own “sense of place” in regard to their sexual identities and regional inheritance.

Southern lesbian feminist writers reinvent southern space as an imagined kingdom of racial impurities, sexual perversity, and political radicalism. In their imaginary sites of southern space, they include utopian imaginings, communes and collectives, and queer contact zones within the larger communities.

Utopian Imaginings, Speculative Fiction

Joanna Russ was the patron saint of the 1970s feminist speculative novel—a science fiction genre that posited an all-female world free of the patriarchy. A successful science fiction writer before the feminist movement began, Russ was an early critic of misogyny in science fiction, and she wrote one of the most famous feminist speculative novels of the 1970s. Her 1975 The Female Man featured women in four parallel universes; one of them, Whileaway, had a complex all-female society. Other novels in this genre included Daughters, Inc.’s Riverfinger Women by Elena Nachmann (later Dykewomon) and, arguably, Lover by Bertha Harris, whose all-female alternative universe was more aesthetic than otherworldly. All imagine women’s worlds as less violent, more equitable, more diverse, and more in tune with the wider natural world than the patriarchy.

Sally Gearhart’s 1978 novel The Wanderground is part of this tradition, though its insistence on the natural affinity of women and Mother Nature has led to its characterization as an early text of ecofeminism. A southern expatriate, Gearhart grew up in Virginia, attended Sweet Briar College as an undergraduate, and received a master’s degree from Bowling Green State before getting her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. She is one of the few academics in the archive of southern lesbian feminism; at San Francisco State University, she became the first openly lesbian woman to be tenured at a major university and helped to establish one of the first women’s studies programs in the country.25

The Wanderground was published by the feminist Persephone Press; Rita Mae Brown blurbed it approvingly. The novel’s focus on nature reflects Gearhart’s southern roots and her queer reinvention of neo-Agrarianism. In connected sketches/stories, Gearhart describes a world in which the misogyny of “the city” led to extreme restrictions on women’s freedom, profession, and dress; some women escaped the cities to establish female-only communities. Each story features one woman; sometimes the characters reappear but generally they do not, emphasizing collective rather than individual agency. Communes have a symbiosis with nature that verges on the mystical, and women can communicate telepathically—“mindstretch”—across great distances in groups of two or more. Mindstretch is described thus: “Always open, ever enfolding one another, the channels came together, joined in knowing, making a third entity between the two, yet one at home with them both. The holdings lengthened. Voki felt a familiar center: Artilidea’s point of absolute balance, the source from which the old women’s life energy seemed to come. As she sought her own balance in her own source she knew already Artilidea’s center to be for that time her own and her own for that time to be Artilidea’s. The knowing of that knowledge was the earthtouch, the strength-giver, the doubt-dispeller, the lover-loved.”26 A belief in the communion of women, which creates a different energy and a nurturing communication, circulates throughout the novel. Gearhart emphasizes differences between women; she allows them to be prickly, possessive, stubborn, and even wrong, but those differences can always be transcended.

Communion extends beyond women to the natural world. The “hill women” can communicate with animals, asking for their help and even singing together. Some can “windsurf,” or fly. They possess a host of magical powers that the men in the city do not, because they live in harmony with nature and don’t try to dominate, kill, or control. As one of the guides says to a young woman learning the history of the hill women: “You can do this too, when you learn to separate and see. We can do anything that the old machines could do. And with a good deal less effort.… That’s the mistake the men made, sisterlove, and made over and over again. Just because it was possible they thought it had to be done. They came near to destroying the earth—and may yet—with that notion. Most of us like to think that even long-ago women could have built what’s been called ‘western civilization’; we knew how to do all of it but rejected most such ideas as unnecessary or destructive” (145). The queer feminist perspective here is consonant with the landyke movement, but there are also traces of the Agrarians’ rejection of capitalism and the gospel of “progress.” Harmony with nature is paramount. Where Gearhart differs is in her indictment of both capitalism and patriarchy as impediments to harmony with the land.

The hill women’s union with nature is absolute, so much so that nature embraces and protects them. In one mindstretch, women, pine trees, and a panther (Huntsblood) sing a mythic story of love together, creating a distinctive artistic experience:

Gently, with bare suggestions, Troja shifted the beat to another subtle plane. As she slowed the poundings and directed the rhythms, she began her humming—a steady single tone. A chorus joined her in thirds and sixths—simple things at first for ones so young in singing.… Now the pine tree joined in the singing. Far away from the voices she rustled her needles and swayed her passengers under the downpour of sounds. Huntsblood was in ecstasy. His head was erect, his eyes closed, his voice an amazing soft obligato. His paws pumped on Blasé’s breasts in alternate half-time pressures.… The chorus filled the air, one none had ever heard before or would ever hear again, the blending of those particular voices above those particular rhythms, with those particular variations, each with the other. (74–75)

That harmony, in which women, animals, plants, and the earth itself exist in cooperation, is expressed through aesthetic as well as practical means. Their communion creates art that includes all living beings in partnership. Nowhere is the dream of “women’s culture” better symbolized.

The earth itself protects the hill women from the aggression of men in the cities. A hill woman explains: “ ‘Once upon a time,’ began Bessie, ‘there was one rape too many. Once upon a time … the earth finally said ‘no.’ There was no storm, no earthquake, no tidal wave or volcanic eruption, no specific moment to mark its happening. It only became apparent that it had happened, and that it had happened everywhere’ ” (158). What happened is simple—men could no longer have erections outside the cities, and so could no longer rape in the countryside. One harrowing flashback describes groups of men in trucks hunting women to assault. After chasing down two women, a rapist is thwarted because he can’t get an erection, and the men are then chased back to their vehicles by women united in support of their sisters. Rape is an ongoing horror in the novel, its threat a constant of patriarchy.

The Wanderground often constructs its utopia through essentialism; one character, Bertha, muses on an “essential fundamental knowledge: women and men cannot yet, may not ever, love one another without violence; they are no longer of the same species” (115). It also contains some of the prejudices of lesbian feminist separatists, particularly in its rejection of hyperfeminine gender performance as oppressive. Ijeme’s description of a “city woman” teeters on disgust: “a thickly painted face, lacquerstiffened hair, her body encased in a low-cut tight-fitting dress that terminated at mid-thigh; on her legs the thinnest of stockings, and the shoes—were they shoes?—Ijeme could not believe they fit the same part of the anatomy that her own boots covered. How could she walk in these spindly things? And with the flimsy straps that fastened them to her ankles and feet? The dangles that hung from the woman’s ears jangled in tune with her bracelets. She clutched a cloth-covered purse to her side” (63). The high femme look—makeup, minidress, heels, jewelry—is rejected as “unnatural” in favor of the androgynous gender performance favored by separatist lesbian feminists. With regard to clothing and culture, The Wanderground demonstrates the essentialism that was becoming axiomatic in lesbian feminism.

But the novel complicates that essentialism as the queer erupts in the role of gay men. When hill women go undercover in the cities they are assisted at every step by “the gentles,” gay men who give them information and support them in a hostile environment. Indeed, Bertha’s rumination about men being a “different species” is prompted by her successful telepathic communication with a gentle. At the end of the novel, the hill women discover that the gentles have created a masculine version of mindstretch to communicate with animals. This knowledge shakes the hill women, prompting one of the gentles to respond, “Does it occur to you that we might have some humanity too? That as a special breed of men we may be on the brink of discovering our own nonviolent psychic powers?” (179). The Wanderground isn’t willing to accept men in women’s communities, but it does contain fierce debates about separatism and concludes that the hill women cannot withdraw completely from other communities and contexts. When the number of hill women in the cities drops, men are able to commit rapes outside the cities. The ecological balance requires that some women engage with the patriarchal system, even if only as undercover agents.

Gearhart’s conclusion, that women’s communes must have broader coalitions and goals, resonates throughout most of the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Utopian spaces cannot be fully autonomous; they must interact with the outside world in order to transform it, even as communes function as sanctuaries. This theme continues in novels that explicitly discuss women’s collectives and communes.

Separatist Communes

Several novels in the archive of southern lesbian feminism are set in separatist communes, making queer space central to the characters’ evolution. One of the earliest and most celebratory is June Arnold’s 1973 novel about the Fifth Street Women’s Building takeover, The Cook and the Carpenter; she relocates the action to a small town in Texas. It begins with a long rumination about the landscape of Texas—a framing of the heteropatriarchal status quo that the novel directly challenges. The carpenter, who lived from ages nine to eighteen in Houston, reflects:

Nine years for Texas is a quarter-hour for every square mile. The carpenter knew na had foolishly wasted most quarter-hours on the same quarter-acres, not even counting the disproportionate time allotted to the milli-mile, nan bed.… Na could say only that na knew quarter-acres of Houston, Galveston, Fort Worth; Sugarland and Sweetwater; Kemah, Corsicana, Amarillo; Edith, Alice, Beulah; etc. etc.—separate squares inside which na knew certain repeated figures of the patchwork quilt of unrelated pieces that was Texas: an expanse which agreed to act as a whole only where specific issues needed covering.

The land lay flat and silent, melted down from the few distant hills by a fierce August sun. The carpenter walked around to the east side of the porch and started the sander up again. I don’t know Texas, but if “it” has the denier of violence, it probably is true. That thread joins cotton to calico in every state of the world.27

Arnold situates her story within the imagined geography of Texas, a site that is really a “patchwork quilt of unrelated pieces that was Texas.” “Texas” is an ideology rather than a real place, a coalition of local communities that seem to have little in common but “act as a whole” under particular circumstances, which enforcing an inequitable status quo and uniting against outsiders.

Arnold’s provocative last sentence places Texas within another imagined community—the global plantation system. Cotton and calico are symbols of the system of terror, slave labor, and systematic violence that governed plantations “in every state in the world.” Recent scholarship connects the U.S. system of slavery to a system across the Americas, including South America and the Caribbean, and one with global colonial reach in Asia and Africa.28 “Cotton and calico” continue to inform that system of heteropatriarchy that dominates the lives of people in the South.

Arnold shows us that system in glimpses, in the men who threaten to break into the commune, and in the men in the bar who play a practical joke that causes the carpenter to fall and get their second black eye in Texas (8). The carpenter reflects on the complicated workings of power, what we might call, in contemporary parlance, microaggressions: “Na knew Texas too well to expect its people to be open except to each one’s own class, race, sex, national and business equal. Others had to translate their own meanings from the doubletalk, flattery or sarcasm which was the rule. Straight language and level guns were no longer around when the carpenter had been young; now Texans had civilized themselves up to the practical joke, taken from animated cartoons” (7–8). The “doubletalk” later erupts into actual violence, but these early, circuitous warnings help create a climate a fear to control the subordinate. Violence unveils itself systemically, in the drunken misogynist who attacks the members of the commune at their carnival and has to be subdued by the carpenter, and in the police who beat them and arrest them, call them “perverts,” and strip-search them in cells. Only at the end of the novel do we see the full violence of “cotton and calico,” but the landscape of imagined violence haunts the members of the commune.

In such a landscape, actual and superimposed with patriarchal ideology, how can one fight back? The opening pages of the novel uncover existing networks of resistance. A community member, whom we learn from context is African American, has learned of a planned attack on the commune because their husband overheard the white men they were serving. Pretending to sell eggs, they warn the commune members and “walked then back down the driveway, carelessly holding nan empty basket, having stayed no longer than five minutes, just the right amount of time to make a usual delivery of eggs” (6). This dodge hides resistance within the safe shape of servitude, allowing for counternetworks of knowledge to thrive covertly under the dominant system.

The opening pages thus present dominant, imperialist Texas and then shift to describe alternative spaces and knowledge—or more precisely, overlooked presences and camouflaged spaces. The servants, usually overlooked, evade the surveillance of the violent racist patriarchal state; in this way, Arnold suggests that subordinates—African Americans, females, queers—negotiate space to create alternative networks of potential resistance, sometimes through strategic coalitions.

That coalition is threatened not just by white men but also by an African American man: “When Will come home na told me what the men had said and all, and I told na there was nothing right about it and I was going to warn you folks over here. Na liked to have jumped out of nan skin. ‘You say one word, girl, and I’ll lay you upside the house lopsided,’ and na come at me like a crazy man. I said, ‘The side of this house is big enough for both of us, Mr. Williams, and I ain’t afraid of you and I ain’t afraid of those men neither.’ Well, na hollered and cried and begged and called me baby and I said na was the baby and na didn’t need to know every move I made noways and I come over here on my way to work” (5). The language identifies the subordinate African American man within the networks of patriarchal disciplinary violence. Even covert resistance is dangerous and risks punishment, from both dominant and subordinate subjects. Thus, in one layered opening scene, Arnold represents subordinate and queer space, infused with the complicated dynamics of race and gender, and suggests both the desperate need in “Texas” for a radical remaking of hierarchical space and the dangers of such a revolutionary project.

The underground warnings continue when the black press shows up to warn of the raid and especially encourages Leslie (an African American member of the commune) to leave before the white policemen arrive. When Stubby loses custody of their children and then steals them back, the commune hides the children in the black community, counting on its invisibility to the police. There are already fissures within the Texas community, sites of difference and resistance underneath the “deep in the heart of Texas” lore. Indeed, at the end of the novel, the commune members mock this nostalgic view of Texas by ironically singing patriotic songs: “Oh beautiful, beautiful Texas … The most beautiful land that I know / The land where our forefathers / Fought in the Alamo … You can live on the plains or the prairie / Or down where the sea breezes blow / And still be in beautiful Texas/ The most beautiful land I know” (141). And then they end with a statement on the surveillance state, in a Texas jail: “The eyes of Texas are upon you / All the livelong day / the eyes of Texas are upon you / You can not get away” (141). Underground networks continue to influence the work of the carpenter; open rebellion is punished, and always threatened with violence. But the commune seeks to transform the violent hierarchies of “beautiful Texas” to create a free state, liberated from patriarchy.

It is apparent from the opening passage of the novel that the first strategy to remaking space is linguistic. Arnold uses the gender-neutral pronouns na and nan to open up an imaginative space in which characters are not defined by gender.29 Adults do not use their given names; instead, they are identified by the work they do. One gets a sense of their gendered and racial identities only from how outsiders interact with them.

All members of the community consciously and constantly question the assumptions that guide their interactions with each other and the world. The carpenter sees all their work—even the menial labor of woodworking—as part of a larger cultural reimagining: “Reporting, observing, recording, detached—the carpenter in nan earlier work had felt isolated most of the time, even though na had not clearly understood how isolated. Na had become a carpenter to become involved, to break away from detachment, not understanding at all how privileged being a carpenter was, or how the structures which were built by nan hands paralleled the structures previously set up in nan mind” (9). The carpenter’s desire to break existing structures and create new ones in which they are central fuel much of their own experience on the commune. They seek freedom through reconstructing space, both metaphorically and materially. “It was the carpenter’s fantasy about naself, the one thing na most wanted to be—a non-be, in a sense, completely fluid.… The reason na had become a carpenter was the lust of nan hands to touch, grasp, caress, move or change the shape of whatever was accessible. To see what structures could be dissolved but also to restructure in wood and nails—geometrically, to organize space, interrupt air” (86). We might refer to the carpenter’s ideal identity as nonbinary, and indeed, the use of the gender-neutral pronoun “na” is an attempt to imagine a world outside the gender binary. Yet even this utopian and “separatist” political commune is never completely apart from the larger Texas landscape, nor does it want to be. The commune is constantly looking for ways to connect with the larger community—creating a public resource for the whole community in the school takeover; meeting with Hispanic groups; connecting with women in different classes and ethnic communities; reaching out to other potential allies. Its utopian thrust is not insular but revolutionary.

In the linguistic and physical space of the novel, living spaces are communal. Children do not stay with their biological parents, and the hierarchies between children and parents are challenged. Children are allowed their own autonomy and must interact with parents as independent beings, with the right to their own sexuality. Even falling in love is a communal event; when the cook reveals the carpenter’s private declaration to the group, the carpenter feels exposed and betrayed but must keep pushing against her discomfort with groups.

Then the cook spoke. “Something really beautiful happened to me this afternoon, something I want to share with the group. A person I’ve known and loved as a friend for two years did something that took more courage than I have—we all know how afraid we all are of being rejected. This person came up to me and said, ‘I love you,’ meaning ‘in love.’ Because na had the courage to grow.”

The carpenter’s ears felt boxed with echoes. Na heard nan own sacred urgent embrace coupled with the story of the child who cried to announce that nan need was to win, and both things described by the phrase, “guts to take a new step.” A hundred miniature alarms ringed the carpenter’s brain.…

Then through the ringing one word came clearly, “mind.” The carpenter shook nan brain to dismantle the clocks and listen; the cook’s voice was pointing at the carpenter’s head and was hoping that the other person did not mind na (the cook) saying this, that na (the cook) was sure the other person (now clearly the carpenter) did not—“none of us came all the way to Texas to protect our privacy, the one thing we all know kept us locked up in the hope chests of the system back there.” (22)

The cook’s characterization of privacy as the thing that kept them locked in the “hope chests of the system” insists on a fundamental reinvention of societal structures. Seemingly, private acts have serious cultural and political consequences; saying “I love you” becomes a model of revolutionary potential. Later, when Three (the cook’s ex-lover) arrives and takes up with the carpenter, even that shift is seen publicly and no one can complain or denounce it, because rejecting privacy involves rejecting marriage as a form of ownership. When Three says to the carpenter, “Our most serious revolutionary is into possessing nan lover? You want to own me!” (108), it is the most devastating accusation they can make in the liberated space of the commune.

In Arnold’s vision, transforming the commune, the larger culture, and the consciousness of the participants are inseparable aims. “The two things we are trying to do—set up a counterculture and make a revolution … it’s hard to do at the same time” (49), the carpenter explains. The process continues experimentally. The carnival that the commune memebers host on the day of the planned attack confounds community members’ expectations. When one woman visits the “women’s health” booth, she objects to its lack of support for “family values”:

“Well, I think you’re in the wrong town. Our young people still get married, thank heavens.” The voice recited this indignation as a matter of form; above, the eyes were green with curiosity. “You mean you examine people—girls—you give medical examinations and things like that?”

“We have classes to teach people how to examine themselves, too.” Carter smiled deliberately, exaggerating naself. “Why, I bet you couldn’t draw an accurate picture of female genitals with everything in the right place—clitoris, vagina, urethra, both sets of lips—they call them labia, you know.” (33–34)

Sex keeps appearing as a disciplinary tool; the eyes “green with curiosity” frame the experiment of the commune in purely sexual terms. When Tiny insists on seeing the carpenter’s drawing of female genitalia and they refuse, the encounter erupts into violence.

The focus on transgressive sexuality comes to the fore when the commune challenges patriarchy by taking over an abandoned school and claiming it as a community center on behalf of the people of the town. This is their most public defiance of the status quo, but in their planning they struggle with how to make sexuality a centerpiece of their work:

“Whatever we call this center, I know what it is: it’s a revolution against the slave-family, the slave-house, the slave-bed and the whole copulating system.”

“Leslie?”

“I think we should think about it first before we come out strong against marriage and the family. The black people in town … marriage is a kind of status thing with us because we’ve always been put down for not getting married and not having stable families and all.” (92)

The different contexts in which sexuality functions become central to the debate, but so too does the question of intersectionality; members of the community are not just white, and the community as a whole works to include race, ethnicity, and class in its understanding of gender. They fail, as the experiment itself inevitably fails, but the struggle is central to the utopian remaking of space. When Leslie says, “Right now I feel like a tangle of bits of string. Now am I supposed to identify with the oppressed gay people or the oppressed black people.… I could divide myself up by race or class or sex or money or age or past or future. Shit, man, I’m a fucking rat’s nest of oppressed parts” (100), that struggle is central to the remaking of space.

The commune members issue a press release as part of their action in an attempt to protect themselves through publicness; with this, Arnold presents a case study in the dangers of using the media for revolutionary purposes. From the commune’s long list of demands, all the media focuses on is the gay and lesbian community center; the commune is only queer in the mainstream imagination. The violent takeover of the commune—described in excruciating detail—is grounded in homophobic slurs that justify the violent suppression of women’s rights.

Despite the action’s failure to transform the broader culture, however, the commune does make a difference. The effort to construct different patterns for living defies the system they resist; in jail, the unified consciousness they have been working toward finally coalesces: “They were joined to each other like the petals of a five-point flower, dependent upon the joining for any life at all. An extreme consciousness of physical self was the center of their flower, awareness of individual body outlines which exaggerated the previous absence of such a separation into forms of flesh.… The space they had created (up until now) for themselves had formed a vacuum wherein they could scatter and diverge, where shape was unnecessary; a totally safe, conflictless space within which all tensions, attacks, storms were between/among their own members” (140). The utopian remaking of space and place the commune in The Cook and the Carpenter works toward isn’t just impractical dream making; it has concrete value as a site of resistance in the “act of queering.” Though the cook and the carpenter leave the commune at the end of the novel, it is clear that what they learned in the commune will continue to inform their revolutionary practices, wherever they settle.

Arnold’s novel, the most direct celebration of landyke space set in the South, was published in 1973, when Arnold and women’s liberationists still believed that communes could transform the wider culture. Other commune novels in the archive of lesbian feminism are set outside the South and range from satire to nostalgia. Florence King’s 1982 novel When Sisterhood Was in Flower has been largely forgotten, even by fans of her 1975 Southern Ladies and Gentlemen and 1985 Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. The book is out of print, which is unfortunate because it is a fascinating and revealing cultural artifact that combines the writer’s witty hostility toward the feminist movement with quirky commitment to equality and liberated space.

When Sisterhood Was in Flower was framed as a satire of the women’s liberation movement. A note in the 1982 Viking edition says that “a portion of this book originally appeared in Penthouse in slightly different form.”30 At a time when the lesbian sex wars were raging, Dorothy Allison was being publicly pilloried, and Barbara Grier would soon be denounced for selling an excerpt of Lesbian Nuns to Penthouse, King’s decision to publish in Penthouse is telling. The opening of the novel establishes her literary bona fides. After an epigraph from Henry James’s The Bostonians, King writes “Call me Isabel. The story of how I was shanghaied into the feminist movement begins in Boston in the politically pulsating year of 1971” (1). “Call me Isabel” is a send-up of the opening sentence of Moby-Dick, suggesting another epic journey in largely uncharted territory and a dramatic self-reinvention of the narrator; the name Isabel suggests Henry James’s heroine Isabel Archer from Portrait of a Lady, a naïve woman abroad who is exploited by seeming friends in an unfamiliar culture. The novel’s setting and epigraph suggest it is an updated version of The Bostonians, which critiqued the nineteenth-century feminist movement and included southern expatriates. Finally, the verb shanghaied equates feminism with white slavery, titillating the reader with sexual innuendos (“pulsating”).

King circulates some of the most common stereotypes of the women’s movement—that is it humorless, collectivist, focused on absurd causes and politically correct prescriptions—and spoofs the trends Arnold considers so earnestly. Feminist Polly Bradshaw first appears on her talk show advocating a birthing bucket filled with elephant dung; the other feminist causes that continue to surface throughout the novel are equally ridiculous. Polly’s anti-intellectualism and utter lack of a sense of humor lead to painful group planning sessions. A trial of a manufacturer of female blow-up dolls accused of sexism generates double entendres and the dismissal of the spectator gallery, the clerk, and the bailiff for raucous laughter. And a collective approach to producing scrapple ends with an entire birthing bucket of scrapple rolling down the street and smashing into a police car.

King mocks feminist print culture with equal verve. Isabel is irked by the large book contracts feminists are receiving in 1971, so she joins a women’s commune to gather material for her own prospective advance. When she is invited to edit The Enchanted Clitoris, a feminist periodical, Isabel discovers feminists’ crimes against good writing. Isabel is not permitted to reject anything or improve anyone’s writing: “Everyone has a right to his or her own English.… If you correct someone else’s writing, you set up a structured relationship” (125). The sex toy advertisements that appear in The Enchanted Clitoris seem to undermine its feminist ideals. King’s satire of feminism—especially its radical, collectivist wing—is wicked, and her “royalist” narrator embraces both individualism and intellectualism.

But despite her disdain for the collectivist impulses of the women’s commune, King does explore her own version of women’s land and queer space. Isabel meets Polly Bradshaw through a violent remaking of space: the flimsy particleboard wall that separates their apartments is torn in two by a wayward bomb-making operation in the basement: “What really riveted my attention was the fiberboard wall that separated me from my next-door neighbor. It was starting to take on all the elements of a Regency novel: a ripping noise like the heroine’s bodice, a corner-to-corner slit like the villain’s grin, a buckling like the old baronet’s knees, and a waft of powder filling the air as though from a dowager’s dusted bosom. And of course, since no Regency is complete without the collapse of an olde English sea wall, the two-by-four studs snapped in half and Gioppi’s chintzy room-divider gave up the ghost” (14). Space is fragile and malleable; the disruptions of 1960s radicalism suddenly brings a southern conservative and a New England reformer together—now as roommates. No matter much Isabel disdains the era’s social movements, she embraces these egalitarian juxtapositions.

When Polly Bradshaw, WASP scion, inherits a house, a migration and another transformation of space occurs, to great comic effect. Though the house is in California, it evokes the southern gothic:

It was the biggest house I had ever seen, with all sorts of Queen Anneish things dripping and hanging and thrusting all over it. There were three full stories, plus an attic, veranda, turret, and widow’s walk. The back practically hung out over the sea.

We all got out and said “Well, here we are” several times. Then a silence fell, which Gloria promptly filled.

“It looks like the house in Psycho.” (85)

The size of the house—“eight bedrooms, drawing room, parlor, dining room, cellar, attic, eat-in kitchen, walk-in pantry, wrap-around veranda, three-car garage, and a detached workshop” (91)—places it within a southern plantation imaginary, and the cast of eccentric characters would not be out of place in a Capote novel: Gloria, the druggie/medievalist (whom they found on a beach in Massachusetts and brought with them to California); Agnes, an escaped survivalist wife who steals more than 6,000 cigarette coupons (who saw Polly on the news in California and ran to their motel room, tapping “SOS” in morse code on the door); Martha, the southern wife of a man who divorced her in favor of a blow-up doll named Delilah, whom he named as his heir in his will (who was brought to the commune by the feminist lawyer who handled her case); Edna, Isabel’s aunt who has had a decades-long affair with her boss, an Episcopal priest (and came to visit her niece). The comic touch of the novel makes these characters lovable.

King satirizes the remaking of the space as the “Don’t Tread on Me” women’s commune. The pigpen, the garden, the group cooking projects—all are depicted ridiculously. But later, the safe space of the commune is violated by Agnes’s violent husband; he takes her hostage in a scene that doesn’t mince words about his misogyny or his violence. As the television news reports:

“The terrorist’s name is Boomer Mulligan, president of a group that calls itself ‘Stop Women’s Lip.’ I have a copy of their latest newsletter, The Wife Beater, which contains an interview with Mr. Mulligan telling of his plan to capture his runaway wife, Agnes, who fled to the commune. Mr. Mulligan, who is a survivalist, is armed and dangerous and has told WNLA that he has placed explosives around the house and yard.…

“Can you tell us how your wife feels?”

“She’s okay, dumb as ever. Never mind her.… This is my wife and I’m gonna fuck her.” (175, 177–178)

Boomer embodies violent patriarchy, raping his wife to exert his dominance. Though King’s novel is a satire, it still critiques the misygony endemic in patriarchal culture.

In the end, the house’s very gothic qualities allow the women to save themselves—Gloria crawls through the attic, gets the drop on the survivalist, and subjects him to the fate of Edward II, using a hot curling iron instead of a poker. Boomer’s scream “was an unearthly sound, like something coming out of a misty bog, so shrill and full of agony that it was impossible to tell whether it was the voice of a man or a woman” (179). Gloria’s protection of their commune unmans the misogynist, and his inability to control the women’s space leads to a queer spectacle: “Naked except for his Australian hat, Boomer lay on his stomach groaning and coughing at once. His eyes were open in an expression of dumb shock, as though he could not believe what had happened to him. Neither could the horrified newsmen. It took a seasoned Edward II scholar to remain blasé at the sight of Gloria’s curling iron sticking out of his ass” (180). Gloria’s revenge against a rapist and an abuser is radical, and it is celebrated in the novel. As much as Isabel loathes feminism, by the end of the novel, feminism is resurgent and relevant. The case of Agnes, a battered wife who escapes her husband with two black eyes, only to be recaptured and raped by him, suggests that feminism is more than the hysterical rantings of frigid women.

Feminism provides the solution to a number of the commune members’ woes: Isabel’s aunt Edna can marry her minister paramour because his wife leaves him for a lesbian lover; Gloria, a drug addict medievalist, trains to be an Episcopal minister, a job that is possible only because of feminism; Agnes is free from her abusive husband and finds work as the minister’s secretary; and Polly and Martha start a business together. Collectivism and leftist slogans are rejected, but the characters of individual women are fostered through women’s liberation. In the end, Isabel invites all members of the commune to return with her to Virginia and set up a southern version of their commune that presumably will be more decadent and less collective than the California version, but feminist nonetheless. Like Arnold, King returns imaginatively to the South, but for King’s characters, the South is the solution to their collective problems rather than the site of their defeat. Her vision of liberation is more individual than communal, but it allows her to imagine a space within the South that can embrace the misfits and outsiders of the feminist commune.

King’s satire of lesbian communes is hilariously sharp but ultimately kindhearted. Blanche McCrary Boyd’s 1998 novel Terminal Velocity, by contrast, is both serious and melancholy. It takes a nostalgic look at the commune: its experimentation with drugs and sex, its radical remaking of relationships, and the danger it posed to established mores. Boyd introduces the commune in the opening pages of the novel as an enterprise already doomed, depicting the dissolution of paradise before discussing its function and purpose.

In 1970 I realized that the Sixties were passing me by. I had never even smoked a joint, or slept with anyone besides my husband. A year later I had left Nicky, changed my name from Ellen to Rain, and moved to a radical lesbian commune in California named Red Moon Rising, where I was playing the Ten of Hearts in an outdoor production of Alice in Wonderland when two FBI agents arrived to arrest the Red Queen.

The Red Queen was my lover, and her name, I thought, was Jordan Wallace. It turned out that she was Nancy Jordan, and a flyer about her was hanging in post offices all over the country.31

This passage is a model of concision. It also takes all the drama out of the plot of the novel. We already know who Jordan really is, and we also know that the radical experiment of Red Moon Rising is a failure, because Boyd begins with its invasion by “the Man.” It is as if June Arnold began The Cook and the Carpenter with the raid on the school and never used na at all. Even Florence King, whose sarcastic opening lets us know that the “kidnapping” of Isabel is temporary, doesn’t give away the most dramatic parts of her plot in the opening paragraphs; as a writer of genre fiction, she knew that the curling iron needed to be a surprise.

So why does Boyd take the suspense out of her plot? Possibly it is because of her own ambivalence about women’s liberation, and the landyke movement specifically. When The Revolution of Little Girls was published in 1992, it was marketed as if it were a newcomer’s debut, with no reference to Boyd’s previous publications. Revolution was my first introduction to Boyd; I had no idea that she had published two novels in the 1970s, because she will not allow them to be reprinted. (She did agree to republish her 1978 collection of essays, The Redneck Way of Knowledge, with an introduction by Dorothy Allison.) Boyd spent most of the 1970s in an alcohol- and drug-induced haze, and she associates her early novels with an addiction she struggled very hard to overcome; I suspect that she connects her embrace of extremes to the radicalism of early women’s liberation as well. The radical reimagining of the commune, including its rejection of all conventions and rules, led Boyd into risky behavior that she seems to regret.

As much as Terminal Velocity is a memorial of the utopianism of women’s communes, it is also a dirge. In Boyd’s telling, the transgression of boundaries was idealistic but doomed, and it leaves the novel’s narrator, Ellen Burns, with years of regret. The structure of the novel sustains this vision; only part one focuses on the experimentation of the commune, and that is framed by the imminent loss of paradise. Part two follows the two lovers as fugitives from the FBI and depicts Ellen’s total breakdown; part three skips ahead years to Ellen’s meeting with Jordan’s daughter. Less than half of the novel focuses on the communal experiment, which is seen mainly in flashbacks. Boyd never wants the reader to get caught up in the idealism of the commune.

Only within those parameters, safe in the knowledge of its imminent demise, does Boyd present the theory and practice of the lesbian feminist commune, which is countercultural, not explicitly political. Two members of the commune, Jordan and Ross, leave the California commune for a political action in Boston, but such explicit political activism is rare. Mainly, they stay at the California commune and get high on “a mixture of acid, psilocybin, marijuana, nitrous oxide, and white wine.”32 Though their experiments with drugs are depicted as consciousness raising, it becomes clear that for Ellen, drug use is part of a loss of control. The remaking of space here is mainly internal, not external; the commune pretends to be a collective endeavor but it is actually an expensive retreat made possible by a large inheritance.

But it is sex that becomes the main focus of Red Moon Rising’s radicalism. Sex was part of the communal remaking of space and place in The Cook and the Carpenter but not the primary focus. Here, making a revolution is the same as making a counterculture:

“The Western Revolution will not be economic,” Ross said. “We’re postscarcity in the West. One upheaval will be social and sexual, aimed at the very root of the patriarchy, which is, inarguably, sexism.”

“I suppose you’ve heard,” Amethyst said, “that the personal is political. Which means everything is political. Who you sleep with is political.”

He seemed to hear part of this. “Vat? Who I am sleeping?”33

That final bewildered response—“Vat?”—is typical of how Terminal Velocity treats women’s liberation theory as nonsensical, overblown jargon that doesn’t explain the experiment actually going on. It was not politics but sex that radicalized a former Duke sorority girl and made her an outlaw and fugitive.

Artemis Foote and Jordan Wallace induce Ellen’s transformation through their sexual charge, their playful engagement with the mainstream, and their awakening of uncontrollable sexual urges. Sex, in a very real sense, causes a psychic split in Ellen. She loses her public, conventional persona—Ellen Sommers—to the suppressed parts of herself and becomes the anarchic and reckless “Rain Burns.” When Rain describes sex with Jordan as an out-of-body experience, it is threatening, not liberating: “I was making a growling sound from deep in my chest. The floor and the walls were growling too, and the earth seemed to be rising through the floor. Then light shot through me, light split me up the center, shrieked through my mouth, and I seemed to be hurtling through space. Great shudders racked me as I reentered the atmosphere, don’t let me break apart. . . . The earth spread itself out before me, and I saw the ridges of the Sierra Nevada covered with snow, the ocean in Mendocino, a house in a clearing, the tiny sliver that was two naked women lying in a bed.”34 Sex is shattering, a notion the queer theorist Leo Bersani would endorse. But the larger framing of the novel shows that this dissolution of a grounded identity and grounded space is madness, not only for Ellen/Rain but also for Jordan and Artemis. Indeed, the association of radical feminism with mental illness was made in the notorious New Yorker profile of Shulamith Firestone that used her mental breakdown as a metaphor for the breakdown radical feminism as a whole.35 To imagine a radical transformation of the heteropatriarchy, Boyd suggests, is to court madness.

The self-smashing sex of Terminal Velocity is not only ungrounding but also antithetical to the grounded space of the South. Ellen’s southernness is framed in opposition to her newfound radicalness. California is the radical place, as far from southern tradition and landscape as one can imagine. Her southernness is opposed to her lesbianism—nowhere does Ellen/Rain imagine that these two poles can be merged. After her mind-blowing sex, Ellen feels homesick, not for her husband or for Boston, but for the South of her childhood: “So I told her about Charleston, about smells as earthy and salty as cemeteries and the ocean, where the air is heavy and moist, pressing down, and mosses drape the shaggy oaks like scenes in horror movies. I told her I’d grown up in a bad Southern movie, a B movie with characters too weird to believe. I told her I still thought of myself as a person from another country, a defeated, annexed country, and that if I spoke with my real accent she wouldn’t even understand what I was saying.”36 Note the Fugitive-like commitment to place in this description that draws on stereotypes of the South—cemeteries, moss, an annexed nation—and yet contrasts this imaginary South with the falsity of her California sojourn; only her southern accent is real. The commune, by contrast, is a dream that quickly becomes a nightmare.

The commune can provide no permanent haven; indeed, it seems to hasten the narrator’s fractured breakdown. The commune and the South are binaries in the novel. This may be why, even in the section on the commune, so much of the exposition is framed by Ellen’s immanent departure. The very structure of Terminal Velocity suggests that a utopian reinvention of space is impossible. When on the run with Jordan, Ellen is caught shoplifting, and she asks the store owner: “Am I in Denver?” “I guess it’s hard not to know where you are,” he said. “I’m from South Carolina.”37 Ellen doesn’t know where she is, and though her response “I’m from South Carolina” seems like it doesn’t follow, it is an attempt to reground herself by claiming her identity as a southerner. She is institutionalized by force, and upon her release she moves to Los Angeles and writes for a Confederate sitcom called Rise Again in an ironic attempt to remake her southern identity. After witnessing the suicide of her lover Jordan, Ellen returns to South Carolina to try to ground herself in the space of the South. But it is clearly not a radical South; communes do not thrive in the South that Boyd imagines.

Boyd is invested in making sense of communes and the radical feminist movement. She draws many of the same type of characters and situations that appear in the novels of Arnold and King—the dogmatic Marxists, the group meetings where one character criticizes another, the evangelical belief in the power of sex to transform the community. Bertha Harris, too, looms over the novel; when Ellen takes drugs and has a sexual experience with the earth in the garden, Boyd references the famous scene from Harris’s Confessions of Cherubino. The commune’s staging of a musical, Alice Does Wonderland, a delightful reworking of the famous porn movie Debbie Does Dallas, is also an homage to Harris, whose all-women’s commune in Lover performs Hamlet outdoors. Even the smoked glasses Ellen wears at the end of the novel reference Harris, who was famous for wearing these glasses in New York in the 1970s.38 I suspect that the super-rich Artemis Foote, from a well-to-do Texas family, bears more than a passing resemblance to June Arnold. The attraction and hatred Ellen feels toward her, and the sexual revenge she takes on her, may relate to Boyd’s own resentment of Arnold, who refused to let Boyd republish her first novel Nerves with a mainstream press in the 1970s, but Boyd creates a reconciliation between the two characters at the end of the novel.

The novel’s final scene—eight years later, when Ellen takes Jordan’s daughter to meet Artemis Foote in England—attempts to make sense of the legacy of communes. It recognizes the potent emotional forces that communal experiments unleashed and suggests that they could not contain such power. Ellen, finally sober, needs to keep the anarchic power of utopian communes at a safe remove. In her telling, the last scene is a melancholic, regretful benediction to a movement that is over.

Beyond Communes: Queer Contact Zones in the Lesbian Feminist South

Pensacola, Florida, is part of what’s known in the South as the “redneck Riviera.” It caters largely to inhabitants of the deep South, who can make it to Florida’s white sand in six hours from Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Add to that a major Navy base in Pensacola, and you know what kind of place Pensacola is—conservative, patriotic, defiantly southern.

Unless you arrive in Pensacola on Memorial Day. Then you see something unexpected: a “tent city” with rainbow flags, SEC flags, and national flags of other countries (like Australia). Alumni from different schools share pleasantries (we heard many “Hotty Toddys” by our tent, which flew the only Ole Miss/pride flag combination we saw on our part of the beach). Strangers wander by offering jello shots, and sometimes just shots directly into your mouth. Queers young and old drag huge coolers of beer down the beach to their tents, just as they would at football tailgates in the fall. It is a defiantly queer version of southern decadence. For those who live in gay neighborhoods in New Orleans or Memphis or Atlanta or Miami, this is simply an extension of a gay party scene; at night, circuit parties dominate at bars and on the beach. For others, those who live in small towns or rural outposts, Pensacola Pride is a magical occurrence, not unlike the discovery of Oz. During the last week of May, queer southerners take over the city of Pensacola and hold the beach for a week, marking their territory. When the week ends it disappears, and the redneck Riviera reasserts itself. Most straight southerners, even the progressives, have never heard of Pensacola Pride. But almost every queer southerner I know has.

______

Though women’s communes still exist, they are no longer the potent cultural force they once were. But queer space continues to thrive, in spaces that aren’t visibly queer. We are still developing the language and the methodology to recognize and analyze a more fluid notion of queer space; to do so, we need to rethink some of our bedrock assumptions about queer communities. The metronormative narrative focuses on “gay ghettos” in cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, but even urban areas with a concentration of queer voters were never solely gay spaces. Greenwich Village was known as a haven for anarchists, radicals, and other outsiders long before it became a center of gay life (indeed, that is one reason it became such a center). The Castro was an Italian neighborhood before it became a refuge for hippies and queers, and though it has maintained its reputation as a gay neighborhood, gentrification has transformed it significantly. This is true of every gay neighborhood in every major city.

Considering lesbian spaces complicates the metronormative model even more. Lesbian spaces in urban areas have always been visibly heterogeneous. Manuel Castells’s classic study of urban life argues that lesbians tend to be less territorial in their constructions of queer space, building coalitions with other groups and considering issues beyond queer identity; “Lesbians,” he explains, “tend to be politically much more radical and willing to make the connection of personal issues to the transformation of society, to be the marching wing of the women’s liberation movement.”39 Other geographers have challenged this idea, arguing that “lesbians do create spatially concentrated communities but that ‘the neighbourhood has a quasi-underground character; it is enfolded in a broader countercultural milieu.’ ”40 Despite these differences, both arguments get at a similar idea: lesbian space tends to be shared, in coalition or in tandem with other groups. The Mission District in San Francisco, long a Hispanic neighborhood, was simultaneously, from the 1970s until the 1990s, also a radical lesbian neighborhood. The Squirrel Hill District in Pittsburgh was a lesbian neighborhood in the early 2000s, but it was also a long-standing Jewish neighborhood that included Orthodox communities. Perhaps because they lacked the financial clout of upper-crust gay men, lesbian communities have been more intersectional in their creation of queer space—their own spaces do not preempt or exclude other uses of space.

In rural areas, simultaneous use of space is mandatory for all queers, who can rarely construct a critical mass to exert political clout. Mary Gray explores this idea in Out in the Country, as a queer youth group “do some drag at Wal-Mart,” transforming “Wal-Mart into a meeting space, drag revue, and shopping excursion all rolled into one.”41 Gray terms such use of space “boundary publics: iterative, ephemeral experiences of belonging that circulate across the outskirts and through the center(s) of a more recognized and validated public sphere.”42 For Gray, the space of Wal-Mart, or a Methodist youth group, “is not definably or definitely queer, but its open-endedness allows for queer definitions and understandings to be written into the space.”43 Such boundary publics are adaptable, flexible, and ephemeral: “These worlds nest and intersect, but they also layer and enmesh multiple publics in indissoluble ways. Rural queer youth recycle the spaces around them, then occupy them for as long as they can. It is temp work at best.”44 Gray’s boundary publics make visible the creation of queer spaces in the South, which are generally invisible to the mainstream, temporary or fluid, and hiding in plain sight. Like Pensacola Pride, they are permanent fixtures that last for only one week every year in cities otherwise known for their conservativism; or, like Ajax Diner in Oxford, Mississippi, they emerge only at a certain time of night, and go unnoticed by the Republican southerners who walk right past; or, like the Code Pink queer parties in Oxford, they erupt for one night only. Southern queer space is rarely permanent, but it is still potentially transformative.

In a presentation at the 2007 Faulkner conference (a lesbian reading of Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!), I called these contested spaces “queer contact zones.” Contact zone is a term invented by Mary Louise Pratt to discuss cultural encounters between different cultures, in an attempt to move beyond the notion of the frontier (and its hierarchy of civilization and savagery).45 I used the term to discuss eruptions that exist within and in opposition to hierarchical southern space, arguing that Judith and Clytie created a subversively queer space on Sutpen’s Hundred in Absalom, Absalom! Judith and Clytie, marked as a couple by Rosa’s lesbian panic, create a society counter to white supremacy by recognizing illegitimate, mixed-race siblings as part of the family:

Fragile and transitory, these … contact zones construct refuges from the South’s hegemonic metanarrative.… Male narrators … see this dynamic queer refuge as a symbol of the South’s decay, an apocalypse in which “the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere,” until “I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings” (302). For Judith, though, who gave her life to save Charles Bon’s descendants, Jim Bond’s eventual triumph would simply extend the logic of the queer contact zone across the Southern landscape. She considered her dead fiancé’s mixed-race grandson as not only family but legitimate heir, the proper representative of the mulattas, queers, spinsters, and maroons of her family tree. Judith’s Hundred, and the other lesbian contact zones of Southern literary traditions, are integrated into the larger Southern community, providing a refuge from heteronormative restrictions for gay and straight alike.46

This queering of the plantation space is a direct challenge to the hazy glow of nostalgia that undergirds so much mainstream southern myth making. And while it doesn’t transform the larger society, it does provide an alternative from which other challenges might potentially grow (as I discuss in chapter 2). I suggest that the dream of women’s land and queer land in the South continues, both in actual spaces and in the literary imagination. Unlike communes, which are meant to be permanent outposts, these spaces are often transitory, frequently invisible, and usually a contact zone for all kinds of cultural outsiders, who discover their strength in coalition.

Dorothy Allison never completed her novel about her own experience in a lesbian commune, but the legacy of communes and utopian spaces is seen in her writing. In Bastard out of Carolina, Bone’s aunt Raylene creates a commune of one. She lives in a rented house, but unlike her siblings, she stays in the same place. Her home was “easy to get to on the Eustis Highway but set off by itself on a little rise of land.… From the porch that went around three sides, you could watch the river and the highway that skirted it. Raylene kept the trees cut back and the shrubs low to the ground. ‘I don’t like surprises,’ she always said. ‘I like to see who’s coming up on me.’ ”47 Raylene’s home suggests a strategic outpost—one she can defend, if necessary. It is significant that Bone’s rape takes place not at Raylene’s, as the movie version suggests, but at another aunt’s house that had been the site of another horrifying scene of domestic violence. Raylene’s home is a communal space to escape from, and heal from, the violence of the dominant culture.

Raylene “kept her gray hair cut short, and wore trousers as often as skirts,” and her friends were “the widowed choir director and two of the local schoolteachers” (179). The queer encoding of these details is clear; for those paying attention, her queer identity, revealed at the end of the novel, is not a surprise. But her way of surviving in a hostile climate is distinctive: she supplements her small pension with gardening and scavenging: “Aunt Raylene’s house was scrubbed clean, but her walls were lines with shelves full of oddities, old tools and bird nests, rare dishes and peculiarly shaped rocks. An amazing collection of things accumulated on the river bank below her house. People from Greenville tossed their garbage off the highway a few miles up the river. There it would sink out of sight in the mud and eventually work its way down to Aunt Raylene’s, where the river turned, then rise to get caught in the roots of the big trees” (181). Employed by Raylene, Bone “dragged stuff up from the river—baby-carriage covers, tricycle wheels, shoes, plastic dishes, jump-rope handles, ragged clothes, and once the headlight off a Harley-Davidson motorcycle” (182). Raylene is delighted by her work: “I can clean and patch the clothes up. We’ll just soak the dishes in bleach and give the rest of it a scrubbing. Saturday morning we’ll put out blankets and sell it off the side of the road” (182).

Raylene creates a new version of the independent yeoman farmer, whom Jefferson thought was the backbone of democracy. Only in this case, she earned independence by making value out of the detritus of capitalism. Like the trash of the river, Allison’s people are seen as throwaway lives, and none more so than a gender nonconforming white trash queer like Raylene. Yet she has made an autonomous space on the margins, transforming the discarded refuse of the society into an independent life. She has also created a hidden queer space on the margins, providing Bone with the only refuge from the cycle of abuse she witnesses and experiences. Raylene’s house is a Southern prototype of the lesbian commune, a commune anchored by lesbians but not exclusive to them. That queer contact zone is a legacy of the landyke movement, enacting a more inclusive version of alternative space. Queer contact zones appear in a number of southern lesbian feminist texts, inviting cultural outsiders to create a more inclusive South.

The queer contact zone is also central to Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes. Idgie Threadgoode is the youngest member of a large, prosperous southern family in Whistle Stop, Alabama, whose refusal to wear a dress to her sister’s wedding marks her as a butch—though she is never identified as such. Indeed, the normalization of Idgie is one of the most notable, and even radical, things about Fried Green Tomatoes. Idgie’s brother Buddy supports her when she refuses to wear a dress to her sister’s wedding. As an adult, Idgie is accepted as a man in the town—hanging out at the brothel on the river, going on hunting trips, appearing in the “womanless beauty pageant,” and teaching her son, Buddy Junior, to be tough and respectful.

Idgie and Ruth are depicted, unambiguously, as in love. It is Idgie’s mother who tells her, “Go and get that girl. You won’t be any use to anyone until you do.”48 When she returns to Whistle Stop, Ruth essentially asks for Idgie’s hand in marriage.

Ruth went into the parlor with Momma and Poppa and closed the door. She sat across from them with her hands in her lap, and began, “I don’t have any money, I really don’t have anything but my clothes. But I can work. I want you both to know that I’ll never leave again. I should never have left her four years ago, I know that now. But I’m going to try and make it up to her and never hurt her again. You have my word on that.”

Poppa, who was embarrassed at any sort of sentiment, shifted in his chair. “Well I hope you’re aware of what you’re in for. Idgie’s a handful, you know.”

Momma shushed him. “Oh Poppa, Ruth knows that. Don’t you dear? It’s just that she has a wild streak.… Poppa and I just want you to know that we think of you as one of the family now, and we couldn’t be happier for our little girl to have such a sweet companion as you.”

Ruth got up and kissed both of them. (199)

Flagg queers the most private traditional spaces—the home, the parlor—in which the femme Ruth asks for their daughter’s hand in marriage. It is typical of the novel that Idgie and Ruth are accepted as a married couple without ever being named as such. When Buddy Junior is born, Idgie’s mother exclaims, “Oh look, Idgie, he’s got your hair!” (192). And it is Idgie’s father who told her she had a family to support and gave her the money to start the Whistle Stop Café. Flagg constructs an imaginative space in which being gay simply is not an issue; nothing inhibits the integration of a lesbian couple into this small southern community.

Indeed, Idgie and Ruth create a queer space that unites the larger community and mitigates (but doesn’t solve) community injustices. The Whistle Stop Café provides a home for Idgie, Ruth, and Buddy Junior; it also provides a boundary public in which all kinds of community members can interact. Sipsey, an African American friend who worked for Idgie’s mother, cooks for the café, and her adopted son Big George kills the hogs and prepares the barbecue. Sipsey, George, and George’s wife and children are part of a larger familial/communal unit that includes Ruth and Idgie, related not by blood but by affiliation. Buddy Junior “belongs” to his racist, misogynist father by law, but to Idgie by love; George is given away by an anonymous woman at the train stop to Sipsey, who takes him home and becomes his mother. The devotion of this communal unit is at the center of the novel. Though the “they’re part of the family” dodge was a common way for well-to-do white families to describe their black “help,” this communal unit goes well beyond genteel fictions. George’s family has autonomy and cultural agency, and is not simply subordinate to the white family; we see the generations of Sipsey’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren operating within predominantly African American communities—especially church—without the mediating force of white patronage. The relationship between Sipsey, George, Ruth, and Idgie is mutually supportive, and they take considerable risks to their own safety in order to protect each other. Flagg reveals at the end of Fried Green Tomatoes that Sipsey killed Frank, Ruth’s ex-husband, to prevent him from taking Ruth and Idgie’s son. The fact that Sipsey took such a risk—which certainly could have provoked her lynching, had it been discovered—suggests the depth of her devotion to Ruth and Idgie; that she and George covered up the murder with a cannibalistic barbecue of Frank—a symbolic skewering of the racist, sexist southern patriarch—and told no one, not even Ruth and Idgie, suggests the limits of this communal relationship. But Idgie also takes risks, in turn, to protect them. When George and Idgie are accused, decades later, of Frank Bennet’s murder (after the discovery of his car), Idgie refuses to run away or establish an alibi because she knows what will happen to George if he is accused, as a black man, of murdering a white man. She risks her own safety to try and protect George from a racist, murderous justice system.

Both George and Idgie are saved by the preposterous lies of another outsider community—the drunks, gamblers, and whores of the river camp community—and this suggests the potential power of resistance of alternative spaces in a hegemonic South. The river community—run by Eva Bates, whom Idgie’s brother Buddy loved and who initiated both Idgie and Buddy Junior into sex—connects respectable and unrespectable Whistle Stop. The Whistle Stop Café is another distinctively queer contact zone in Whistle Stop. It operates within the South’s Jim Crow strictures, which inhibit its democratic functioning, so it must, by necessity, struggle against both racial and sexual hierarchies. Idgie and Ruth insist on serving the African American community (across the tracks in Troutville). When African Americans come for barbecue, Idgie reveals the delicate balance the café must maintain to succeed as a public space of interaction.

Idgie sighed and shook her head. “Let me tell you something, Ocie. You know that if it was up to me, I’d have you come on in the front door and sit at a table, but you know I cain’t do that.… There’s a bunch in town that would burn me down in a minute, and I’ve got to make a living.… But I want you to go back over to the yard and tell your friends, anytime they want anything, just to come around to the kitchen door.” …

Sipsey mumbled under her breath, “You gonna get yourself in a whole lot of trouble wid them Ku Kluxes, and I’m gonna be gone. You ain’t twine see me aroun’ no more, no ma’am.” (53)

Sipsey’s warning is prescient; Grady, the town sheriff, warns Idgie against breaking Jim Crow laws: “Nobody wants to eat in the same place that niggers come, it’s not right and you just ought not be doin’ it” (53). That’s when Idgie breaks one of the cardinal rules of southern obfuscation by calling out Grady as a Klan member:

She continued, “Yeah, Grady, it’s funny how people do things they ought not to do. Take yourself, for instance. I guess a lot of people might think that after church on Sunday you ought not to go over to the river and see Eva Bates. I reckon Gladys might think you ought not be doing that.” …

“Oh come on, Idgie, that’s not funny.”

“I think it is. Just like I think a bunch of grown men getting liquored up and putting sheets on their heads is pretty damn funny.… The next time those ‘some people’ come in here, like Jack Butts and Wilbur Weems and Pete Tidwell, I’ll ask ’em if they don’t want anybody to know who they are when they go marching around in one of those stupid parades you boys have, why don’t they have enough sense to change their shoes.… Oh hell, Grady, y’all ain’t fooling anybody. Why, I’d recognize those size-fourteen clodhoppers you got on anywhere.” (54)

Speaking the unspeakable, Idgie challenges one of the key constraints that allow the “natural” system of the South to continue. Defeated, Grady says, “I’ll talk to the boys.… You keep them out back now.” This leads to one of the few moments in her nostalgic, affectionate portrait of small-town southern life when Flagg critiques the doublespeak and hypocrisy of the South.

“Ruth, I wish you could have seen that big ox, down at the river for three days, drunk as a dog, crying like a baby, ’cause Joe, that old colored man that raised him, died. I swear, I don’t know what people are using for brains anymore. Imagine those boys: They’re terrified to sit next to a nigger and have a meal, but they’ll eat eggs that came right out of a chicken’s ass.… It just makes me so mad sometimes.”

“I know honey, but you shouldn’t get yourself so upset. That’s just the way people are and there’s not a thing in the world you can do to change them. That’s just how it is.”

Idgie smiled at her and wondered what would happen if she didn’t have Ruth to let off steam with.…

After that day, the only thing that changed was on the menu that hung on the back door; everything was a nickel or a dime cheaper. They figured fair was fair. (55)

Ruth’s repetition of that deadly justification of the status quo—“that’s just how it is”—prevents a direct and dangerous challenge to segregation. They stop right at the line, and their lowering of prices for coming to the back door is a symbolic protest that in no way changes the system. That is the price for the boundary public they establish, which is carefully contained by the larger power structure.

It could be argued that Idgie is too accommodating—that her defiance of Jim Crow should have been more direct—but given the violence that met civil rights activists a couple of decades later, direct defiance probably would have led to the burning of the café. The mystifying fact that Idgie’s best friend is a Klan leader is likely what saved it from arson in the 1930s; when Klan members, prompted by Frank Bennet, visit the Whistle Stop Café with torches, it is only Grady’s intervention that saves both George and the café: “Quietly, two black pickup trucks had parked in front of the café and about twelve members of the Klan, dressed in full regalia, had slowly but deliberately gotten out and lined up outside the café.… One had a sign that had written on it, in bloodred letters, BEWARE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE. . . . THE TORCH AND THE ROPE ARE HUNGRY. Grady Kilgore stood up and went over, looked out and picked his teeth with a toothpick while he scrutinized the men in the pointed hoods.… [Grady] said with certainty, ‘Thems not our boys’ ” (203–4). The menace in this encounter is unmistakable, and it is a surprising eruption of violence, but this is how Flagg’s fiction works—it circulates common nostalgic stereotypes about the South’s “sense of place” and then slips in scenes that suggest a darker complexity. Grady’s handling of the situation isn’t particularly comforting, since it suggests a similarly repressive control of space by the Klan/police. He explained:

“They was just a bunch of old boys out to throw a little scare in you, that’s all. One of them was over here the other day for something or another and saw you was selling to niggers out the back door and thought he’d try to shake you up a little bit.… I just told them that these are our niggers and we sure as hell don’t need a bunch from Georgia coming over her telling us what we can and cain’t do.”

He looked Idgie right in the eye. “And I’ll guaran-damn-tee you they won’t be back,” and he put his hat on and left.… What Idgie and Ruth didn’t know was that although these Georgia boys were mean, they were not stupid enough ever to fool around with the Klan in Alabama and were smart enough to leave in a hurry and stay gone. (204–5)

There is a strange element of bragging here—our Klan is tougher than your Klan—but even more surprising is that Flagg acknowledges the influence of the Klan at all. Of course, this is a kinder, gentler, Whistle Stop Klan—one in which Grady, the Klansman sheriff, takes care of “our niggers.” He gets Big George’s son out of jail; he helps Idgie give food to Troutville during the Depression, stealing food and throwing it out of the train; he is part of the Dill Pickle Club with Sipsey, the only African American member. Such imaginative depictions of queer contact zones are both utopian and realistic—one never totally escapes the specter of violence in these fictional reimaginings of southern space.

It is the liminal places like the Whistle Stop Café that inspire Flagg’s affection and nostalgia, and she recognizes how temporary and essential such places can be. Dot Weems wrotes the obituary for the Whistle Stop Café in the final issue of Weems Weekly in 1969: “Now that I look back, it seems to me that after the café closed, the heart of the town just stopped beating. Funny how a little knockabout like that brought so many people together” (385–86). In that construction the Whistle Stop Café becomes a free(r) zone where more egalitarian interaction of outsiders is possible, but within carefully circumscribed limits in which queerness is tacit and unspoken.

In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, queer space evolves. Early in the novel, space is a matter of dispossession. Celie is denied privacy and agency; her bedroom, a room connected to the larger house by a walkway, is invaded by her (step)father, repeatedly, when he rapes her. Danielle Russell explains that “the precarious situation of the sisters is exacerbated by, and reflected in, their position within the house.… Physically detached from the family dwelling, what should be a sheltering space becomes a site of exploitation; bedroom as private sanctuary is obliterated by the stepfather’s intrusion.”49 When Celie is married off to Albert without her consent, she works in a new space, in the fields and the kitchen, with no control over that space. Her person, her labor, all are controlled by her husband, who makes it clear that she has no say about anything, including whether his mistress can share their home. Celie’s situation is extreme but not unique. African American women in the novel are denied agency and control of space, and this is especially true for women who violate sexual taboos such as Celie (because of her multiple unmarried pregnancies) and Harpo’s mother (because she had an affair and was killed by her boyfriend). When Sofia’s parents won’t let her marry Harpo because of his mother’s reputation, he has a nightmare: “Harpo be trouble with nightmares.… She got Harpo by the hand. They both running and running. He grab hold of her shoulder, say, You can’t quit me now. You mine. She say, No I ain’t. My place is with my children. He say, Whore, you ain’t got no place. He shoot her in the stomach.”50 The haunting refrain “Whore, you ain’t got no place” describes the fate of most of the women in The Color Purple, forced by violence from their homes into other spaces equally dangerous.

The novel also makes it clear that the wider culture in which African Americans live is even more constrained and dispossessing. Encounters in the public space of the South, which range from rudeness to utter brutality, include the beating of Sofia in the town square (for sassing the mayor’s wife) and her enslavement as a further punishment, and the lynching of Celie’s father because of the success of his farm and store. The white men who commit these acts are not the kindly Klan members of Flagg’s imagination, but killers of extraordinary depravity, epitomized by the white sheriff who rapes his own niece, Mary Agnes. In this Jim Crow space, any zone of black freedom must be purchased at a high cost. As Celie’s stepfather explains, “The key to all of ‘em is money. The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give ‘em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass. So what I did was just right off offer to give ‘em money. Before I planted a seed, I made sure this one and that one knowed one seed out of three was planted for him. Before I ground up a grain of wheat, the same thing” (188; emphasis in the original). This colonization—of space, down to the last seed—was the conscious intention of Jim Crow, to construct African Americans as subordinate subjects of a white-controlled space. In such an environment, a liberatory queer contact zone might seem impossible, yet over the course of the novel, Walker delineates how such pockets of resistance are constructed and sustained. Just as relationships between characters evolve and change over the course of the novel, so, too, do spaces. Sofia and Harpo’s house is the site of their epic battles and of Harpo’s attempts to break his wife through violence. After Sofia leaves him, it becomes a juke joint, a sinful alternative to the local church and a space where Mister, Celie, and Shug appear in public, where Harpo and Sofia bring their lovers. But the origin of the space is telling, as we learn from the announcement of Shug’s performance: “Harpo and Swain got Mr. ____ to give ’em some of Shug old announcements from out the trunk. Crossed out The Lucky Star of Coalman Road, put in Harpo’s of _______ plantation. Stuck ’em on trees tween the turn off to our road and town” (76). The land that both Harpo and Albert work was originally a plantation, suggesting a liberation of the land (Albert’s father owns it) and the ongoing legacy of plantation violence.

Once Celie discovers that Nettie is alive, more liberatory uses of space emerge. African uses of space suggest ongoing legacies of Africa in African American experiences and provide a model for subversive queer contact zones. Nettie’s immersion in Africa provides proud models of spatiality: “Did you know there were great cities in Africa, greater than Milledgeville, or even Atlanta, thousands of years ago? That the Egyptians who built the pyramids and enslaved the Israelites were colored? That Egypt is in Africa? That the Ethiopia we read about in the Bible meant all of Africa?” (138). She also finds the different patterns of living in Africa more sympathetic. Her “hut is round, walled, with a round roofleaf roof. It is twenty steps across the middle and fits me to a T. Over the mud walls I have hung Olinka platters and mats and pieces of tribal cloth” (164). Closer to the natural world, Nettie’s hut is a space of independence and growth.

The ongoing relevance of these African patterns in the African American South is clear when Shug reveals that she too wanted a round house: “Her bed round! I wanted to build me a round house, say Shug, but everybody act like that’s backward. You can’t put windows in a round house, they say. But I made me up some plans, anyway. One of these days … she say, showing me the papers. It a big round pink house, look sort of like some kind of fruit. It got windows and doors and a lot of trees round it. What it made of? I ast. Mud, she say. But I wouldn’t mind concrete. I figure you could make the molds for each section, pour the concrete in, let it get hard, knock off the mold, glue the parts together somehow and you’d have your house” (215–16). Shug’s desire for a round house suggests an archetypal memory of African patterns of living, and her longing for more harmonious living connects her creation of space to her pantheistic religious belief: “Us talk about houses a lot. How they built, what kind of wood people use. Talk about how to make the outside around your house something you can use. I sit down on the bed and start to draw a kind of wood skirt around her concrete house. You can sit on this, I say, when you get tired of being in the house. Yeah, she say, and let’s put awning over it.… By the time us finish our house look like it can swim or fly” (209). Though, as Danielle Russell argues, “the blueprint for Shug’s dream house remains a mere vision,” it prepares the reader for the “spirit of accommodation, cooperation, and creativity [that] will be sheltered in the home Celie prepares for her long-lost family.”51 These domestic reconstructions of space, harmonious and “natural,” without servitude or hierarchy, inspire the regeneration of queer space in The Color Purple.

Celie’s childhood home undergoes the most dramatic transformation in the novel. It is first the site of her abuse, and then finally becomes a refuge in which her lover, her ex-husband, her ex-husband’s son and wife and son’s ex-lover, and at last her own children can live free of Jim Crow discrimination. When Celie returns to that home with Shug, she discovers a space that resembles the Garden of Eden in its beauty:

Well, it was a bright spring day, sort of chill at first, like it be round Easter, and the first thing us notice soon as we turn into the lane is how green everything is, like even though the ground everywhere else not warmed up good, Pa’s land is warm and ready to go. Then all along the road there’s Easter lilies and jonquils and daffodils and all kinds of little early wildflowers. Then us notice all the birds singing they little cans off, all up and down the hedge, that itself is putting out little yellow flowers smell like Virginia creeper. It all so different from the rest of the country us drive through, it make us real quiet.… All round the house, all in back of it, nothing but blooming trees. Then more lilies and jonquils and roses clamming over everything. And all the time the little birds from all over the rest of the country sit up in these trees just going to town. (184–85)

Celie’s land creates an oasis within an otherwise oppressive Jim Crow South, a queer contact zone which is “different from the rest of the country.” The power of Celie’s queer contact zone, liberated from man-made oppressions and man-made ideologies, sets up her triumphant reclaiming of the space after her stepfather’s death. She is shocked by her sudden inheritance, in a space that had defined dispossession: “I never had no house, I say. Just to think about having my own house enough to scare me” (251). But after Shug smudges the house—“She took some cedar sticks out of her bag and lit them and gave one of them to me. Us started at the very top of the house in the attic, and us smoked it all the way down to the basement, chasing out all the evil and making a place for good” (252–53)—Celie remakes her land as a queer contact zone, a reprieve from the oppression of the South. All the queer extended family is welcome, and the final vision of unity—her sister and the sisters’ southern/African blended family—suggests a fluid remaking of the Jim Crow South by the African American community. In The Color Purple, that lesbian contact zone isn’t cross-racial. It also isn’t separatist; it includes men and women, polyandrous unions, and ex-lovers and friends. Though white southern lesbian feminists imagine a cross-racial utopia in their southern spaces, African American lesbian feminists are more skeptical about transcending that line.

Many queer contact zones, as depicted in the archive of southern lesbian feminism, manage to survive because of secrecy. They aren’t solely queer; they incorporate others, even those hostile to their greater purpose, which shields them from attack and destruction. These sorts of flexible queer spaces—which survive through camouflage—are diametrically opposed to the metronormative gay urban ghettos that tend to dominate queer literature. Such secrecy may be a necessity in rural spaces because of a lack of critical mass of gay political power.

But there are also more direct challenges in the archive of southern lesbian feminism, queer contact zones that are out and proud. In Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s 2006 novel Outrageous, a belated conclusion to the trilogy she began with Naiad Press in 1982 with Faultine and a homage to her own southern rebirth, lesbian Chicana poet Arden Benbow arrives at Midway College in 1973 (just as Ortiz Taylor herself did at Florida State). Arden and Topaz, her African American best friend and nanny, arrive in a blue hearse pulling a U-Haul trailer to find a house for Arden’s lover, Alice, and their six children. Arden is smitten by the landscape: “Along either side of the highway, waist-high grass of an improbable green defined each curve, a green she had never known in the seared southern California rolling hills she had always adored, in the land of her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother. She perhaps felt, despite her Californio lineage, her devotion begin to waver, to wander toward this new, lovely one, she who shimmered in moist heat and seductive promise: La Florida.”52 Ortiz Taylor is playing with a common trope here—the feminization of landscape, to be possessed and conquered by male explorers. Arden’s embrace of Florida as a “new green world,” a Garden of Eden curved like a woman’s body, in “moist heat and seductive promise,” sets up the novel’s queering of space. Arden “allow[s] herself the innocence of falling in love with a state, a geography, a demography” (3), an attraction that initially makes her feel unfaithful to her lover. The erotics of landscape continue to inform her encounters with the South (even as that attraction is sorely tested over the course of the novel). Arden’s decision to embrace the “fecund Florida soil” encourages a fanciful gesture: “She gazed up into an old live oak tree draped in Spanish moss, through which morning sun streamed, steamed and shimmered. How could she possibly resist stretching high into the blue Florida sky to pull down a strand of the moss and wind it into her long California hair?” (33). The fact that she gets chiggers from the moss and has to cut her hair into a short, dykey hairdo only emphasizes the lesbian body of Florida.

The climax of this paragraph presents the most radical queering of southern space: La Florida. Though Arden is consistently framed by white southerners as an alien invader, La Florida reminds us that the white Confederate version of “cotton and calico” is a relatively new invention. Long before that version took hold, all of the South was La Florida, colonized under Spanish rule and inhabited by mestizo subjects who looked like Arden Benbow, not Scarlett O’Hara. Whatever the colonial, racist, and sexist legacies of La Florida, it represents a queered geography that could embrace Arden Benbow like a lover.

But the space Arden soon encounters is considerably less welcoming. Arden and Topaz, a Latina and an African American man, violate the disciplinary rules around racial segregation that still govern public spaces in the South. As Topaz puts it, when he is being eyeballed by a trucker in a diner, “He thinks you’re a white woman—or should I say lady—and he knows I’m a black man, and he assumes that everybody is heterosexual, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. Now he’s wondering exactly where his responsibilities lie” (6; emphasis in the original). Only the timely intervention of the waitress—who “caught the gaze of the truck driver and gave her beehive an almost imperceptible shake, transmitting the ancient coded warning from the southern female to the southern male that meant: Now you behave yourself, hear?” (6; emphasis in the original)—saves them from a public and possibly violent altercation.

Ortiz Taylor emphasizes the comic possibilities of this misrecognition even as she highlights the threat of violence beneath the dominant culture’s policing of diversity. When Bobbi June, a realtor and the wife of the dean, takes them to breakfast, she is able to handle the cross-racial relationship but is thrown by Arden’s “ring finger, that carefully pared, colorless and totally naked ring finger” (16). The shock of their “living in sin” causes her to feel “something like fear for them. She thought of the gazelles in last night’s TV nature film just before the lion broke through the grass and chased them out into the open” (16). The ghosts of racial violence continue to structure the Floridians’ responses to Arden, who remains optimistic and willfully innocent of these complicated disciplinary strains. Bobbi June’s misinterpretation sets her up for an even graver revelation:

“So Bobbi June, I might save us all some time by saying I really think the children would be better off living in the country somewhere.… And of course there’s Alice,” said Arden.

“Alice is your girl,” added Bobbi June, dabbing at her imperiled eyeliner with a paper napkin.

“Alice is an adult.” Dr. Benbow set down the pepper and looked offended.

“I meant Alice is your maid, honey. That’s what I meant. That’s what we mean when we say ‘your girl.’ It’s just our way of talking.” …

“Actually,” said Mr. Wilson, “I’m the maid.”

“Alice is my lover,” said Dr. Benbow. (17; emphasis in the original)

Bobbi June is pummeled by her assumptions. The disclosure that the black man is the “maid,” not the live-in partner, reasserts racial hierarchies (even as it flips gender hierarchies), but the large family plus lesbian lover places Arden in an opaque category for which the realtor has no name. When Arden assures her “our concept of family is exactly the same, yours and mine” (18), Bobbi June cannot process it.

The incredulous response to this out lesbian who willfully violates the “tacit understanding” that often functions for queers in southern communities continues as Arden meets her colleagues. At the college opening reception the faculty are treated to a “mauve apparition”: “Arden Benbow in a mauve tuxedo, trimmed, if Bobbi June was not mistaken, in pearl gray velvet piping with tie and matching cummerbund, the whole set off by gray patent leather opera pumps. On her arm came Mr. Topaz Wilson in a black tuxedo and looking very distinguished with a paisley gray, navy and crimson tie and cummerbund. Arden’s hair was of course still sticking straight up from where she got bit by the chiggers last week, but somehow the crown of it seems soft and inviting and part of her stunning outfit itself” (52). The mauve apparition is an ongoing joke in the first part of the novel—the queer outside agitator naively entering a world she doesn’t understand. Arden is often flummoxed by “these strange codes and customs and assumptions. If only she had a map to these, a guide to the South that identified and translated signs, gestures, glyphs, tropes, metaphors and other curious habits of being. She felt like a blind creature set down in a strange world” (71). This motif of “mapping” a purposely opaque geography of “the South” suggests that Outrageous itself is a queer map of the South, not only for this lesbian Californian Latina but also for many other kinds of outsiders.

Arden sets out to adapt this existing southern space to her own ends. Her first attempt involves the purchase of an old plantation on the outskirts of town. Topaz is horrified.

“You mean this house which was raised up by black slaves and possibly Indians as well, to whom—who knows? You might even have been related. You mean you want to live with your innocent babes and your devoted spouse in this dilapidated monument to the most vicious impulses of European patriarchy?”

“And what better place!” declared Arden, as if Topaz had proved her very point. “We’ll take back this monument and claim it in the name of La Malinche.” (21)

Arden’s insistence that she has moved to La Florida, not the Confederacy, writes Midway into a global, multicultural, and multiracial South. La Malinche, the native interpreter who served Cortes, was denounced by generations of nationalists as a whore and a traitor; in Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldua reclaimed La Malinche as a patron saint of the mestizo, a subversive figure who inhabits the spaces in between.

Arden’s encounter with the plantation rewrites one of the most ubiquitous tropes in southern literature. Nowhere is southern nostalgia more disingenuous than in its romanticizing of the plantation. Plantations were anything but natural—they grew large amounts of one crop intended for the factories of the North; they displaced native populations, and depended on the stolen labor of slaves who were terrorized, sexually and physically, by overseers and other white members of the planter class. Yet the “idyllic” plantation remains a key part of southern nostalgia that still circulates through southern spaces; even Blanche McCrary Boyd, whose book The Revolution of Little Girls is set on a former plantation, was not immune to its attraction. Well-ordered, hierarchical, “gracious,” the plantation creates a landscape that seems to epitomize the truth of the southern sense of place. It is for that reason that restaurants, condos, housing developments, wedding venues, and resorts across the South continue to refer to Tara, or “High Cotton,” or other markers of Gone with the Wind exuberance.

So when Sheila Ortiz Taylor has Arden buy a plantation in Outrageous, it is a clear shot across the bow, and how she does it says a lot about the southern lesbian feminist campaign to queer southern spaces. Witness, for example, the exchange that occurs after Arden invokes La Malinche:

“Who’s Malinchey?” asked Bobbi June. “Is she from around here? Who are her people?”

Topaz knew in his bones Arden was going to answer this question, that for her no question was negligible. “Malinche is dead,” he offered, hoping to put an end to it but not expecting to.

“Dead?” said Bobbi June. “Oh I am so sorry for your loss.”

“History is not dead,” said Arden, a little circle of pink appearing in each of her brown cheeks. “Malinche was the Aztec princess who interpreted for Cortes. She’s the goddess of language and patron saint to all women poets, the first activist, sometimes called La Chingada, which in English translates as—”

“Malinche’d want screens on her damn windows and Alice will too,” Topaz interrupted. “Trust me.” (22)

Ortiz Taylor contrasts Arden’s teacherly zeal with Bobbi June’s conventionality and Topaz’s practicality, for humorous effect. But Bobbi June isn’t simply a foil here; she becomes Arden’s friend and ally.

Besides, Bobbi June’s questions—Is she from around here? Who are her people?—are surprisingly prescient. In place of neo-Confederate hegemony and nostalgia, Ortiz Taylor constructs a geography in which queer La Florida will rise again. Arden remakes the landscape of the South into a mythic land, using indigenous mythologies that place her own identity at the center. Contemplating the plantation, “She dreamed of Aztlan, the mythic lost land of the Aztecs, her people, their dear homeland that might be in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah or.… some people—respectable scholars, as she recalled—had even placed it somewhere in Florida. Had they not? Yes, she was almost positive, quite positive, they had. One crack-brained theory put it in Wisconsin. Clearly that was absurd. But Florida. Now that was really quite plausible. Likely, even. Aztlan. And she, Arden Benbow, had returned to claim on behalf of all the earth’s dispossessed the archetypal homeland for her people” (30–31). Arden writes another genealogy onto the South. By placing Aztlan, the legendary home of the Aztec people, in Florida, Arden places herself at the center, then invokes mythic female heroines and goddesses from that tradition: La Malinche, Tonantzin, Coatlique. In a land obsessed with history, Arden trumps them all by reaching to an older tradition that is actually indigenous to the landscape.

Yet, Arden doesn’t entirely discard the neo-Agrarian fantasy of the South, either. When she visits the land, she muses, “We could raise all our own food right here, be self-sustaining” (22). She has a rapturous vision of the landscape: “Arden studied admiringly the three live oaks and stand of pines running along the western property line. A hawk high up in the blank afternoon sky lazily caught updrafts. Arden had found, just this side of that first oak tree, a perfect spot for her windmill. In her poet’s mind the blades already revolved slowly, pumping fresh spring water toward the tender plants of her garden. Children, her own and dozens she had yet to meet, bent to the joyous labor, the sound of their garden tools working through the earth symphonic, their voices bright with expectation” (23). The idyllic images of plantation life at the beginning of Gone with the Wind might have inspired this agrarian idyll. Of course, Arden’s imagined free labor, communal work, and community garden free that idyll from the legacy of servitude.

Ortiz Taylor doesn’t let the reader forget the real history of the plantation and its forced labor. Inside the property is a “peninsula” owned by Miss Hattie. As Bobbi June explains: “Hattie White. Children are all grown and scattered to the winds. Got their college, then nothing could hold them back.…’Course mostly she eats straight from that garden of hers.… That little house of hers was part of the original plantation, Daddy says, slave cabin most likely. But after the war Mrs. Faircloth, she up and give Miss Hattie’s mama that house free and clear, to stay in her family right along. Now it belongs to Miss Hattie” (24). The history of slavery is explicit, but it is Hattie, the descendent of slaves, who has inherited the legacy of the independent yeoman farmer; like Raylene, she eats from her garden and lives self-sufficiently. She also watches, recognizing Topaz as a “lady boy” (93) and observing the happenings at the big house with great amusement. An alliance with Arden develops after Arden sees a fire and puts it out, saving Hattie’s house. Hattie returns the favor when she takes the rap for the Midway students’ marijuana. When Arden encourages her student athletes to garden on her land, they take advantage of her by planting marijuana. On a tip, the white sheriff comes to take Arden away and rid the college of a troublemaker, but Hattie steps up, claiming that the land the marijuana is on belongs to her, and insists on being arrested. Defeated, the sheriff leaves, and an alliance of black and mestiza have defeated the white power elite.

Arden changes the name of the plantation to Crossroads Gardens, and it becomes a place for new counteralliances to combat the white southern patriarchy. Arden discovers that she and the diverse others who inhabit her town are able to create a more open and flexible space. As she says after the fallout from her mauve apparition episode: “I’m going out to find our people tomorrow.… If they’re here, I’ll find them” (55). One key ally comes through the WIP movement. Arden visits the “alternative” bookstore, where she is told about Full Court Press, overseen by the cynical but lovable Boss Granny. Arden is “searching her map for Sumatra, then County Road 7 … territory Butch fondly referred to as East Jesus” (71). The lesbian press is difficult to find—another example of the complicated and hidden geography of queer La Florida. But Arden prevails: “Finally, eureka, Arden found herself on the map. In an eighth of an inch more she’d run into County Road 7. She eased the hearse back onto the road and soon passed a country church with a battered electric sign saying in red plastic letters, ‘Fearing God is the beginning of wisdom.’ On the opposite side of the road, another sign, this one professionally lettered on wood, said FULL COURT PRESS AND WRITERS RETREAT, PRIVATE PROPERTY, POSTED” (71). Here, Ortiz Taylor contrasts the conventional Bible Belt of “East Jesus” with the queer South, both found on the same road. At Full Court Press, Boss Granny is a loveable tyrant, boss of her own queer domain. She rules Sumatra as well: “They don’t mess with me in Sumatra because I help prop up their sorry ass little town. I’m the greatest single user of UPS. I donate to the library, such as it is, and I employ construction workers, plumbers, electricians, you name it, all local. When Boss Granny roars, Sumatra listens” (74). Even her knowledge of prevailing southern gun culture protects her lesbian empire; when Arden asks what “posted” means on her sign, Boss Granny replies, “Posted means if you’re on my property, then I can damn well shoot you dead, no questions asked. That’s the South for you. Don’t you just love it!” (75). Boss Granny’s embrace of the gun serves as a warning to her neighbors—this is not a pacifist lesbian nation.

Boss Granny provides a key moment of support at the end of the novel when she funds an endowed professorship. But individuals linked to the more mainstream South are also allies in La Florida. Many are involved with Arden’s first reconfiguring of space in Crossroads Plantation, including Bobbi June, who sells her the property; Butch, who oversees the construction; and Altron, the drywaller who transforms the sewing room into a Spanish-style bathroom with elegant arches. Altron, like Arden, is an artist, and he inspires her ruminations on space: “And as she feathered the compound over the tape with her joint finishing knife, she thought about sheetrock, about the way it shaped and defined space for the inhabitants, how it could be both ephemeral and lasting, like poetry itself. Next thing she knew she was writing a poem about sheetrock and poetry right up there on the sheetrock itself, using Altron’s thick, red pencil and it was coming like crazy, straight out, the way she liked it” (114).

An unexpected alliance occurs midway through the novel when Arden, homesick for Mexican food, tries to make tortillas at home and fails miserably. Butch says casually,

“I was fixin’ to say, Miss Arden, that if your heart is dead set on tortillas tonight then you might just pick you up a dozen or so from the Menudo Palace. They don’t close weekdays till three, and I think you could just about make it if you leave now.”

“Menudo Palace? Here? In Midway? Where I live?”

“Between the dry cleaners and the food stamp store. You know, catty corner to the Unocal? We got a lot of migrant workers hereabouts.”

“Butch, Butch,” she said, reaching for her wallet and her keys, “what other reservoirs of knowledge are you keeping from me?” (144)

The owner of the Menudo Palace is from her grandfather’s home in Mexico; Arden discovers a hidden community and a cause. She supports a demonstration by migrant workers, and although the photograph of her riding on a motorcycle at the head of the union march might be the final straw for the university administration, her participation extends Arden’s La Florida alliances to include her own mestiza background. The fact that it is a white gallant southern man, Butch, who connects her to this community suggests that the counteralliances of La Florida are flexible, unexpected, and inclusive.

There is, without question, a conservative hegemony against which Arden must struggle; Dean Billy Wayne Kilgore and English chair Booth Hazard, who can’t fire a minority hire, try to sabotage her career, first by requiring all athletes to take a poetry class with Benbow, then by more pernicious means that involve the local sheriff. But La Florida undermines the notion of outside agitators and true southerners, because Arden discovers a host of local allies; even the athletes who are forced into a poetry class with Arden in an attempt to break her spirit become converts and troublemaker allies. Ortiz Taylor portrays a coalition of old-time residents, migrants, and outsiders that successfully counteracts the hegemonic controls of a patriarchal southern order. The plantation ethos is thoroughly decimated by the end of the novel, on the very ground of the original southern hegemony. With lover, nanny/best friend, and six children reunited, Arden remembers the flag still flying in front of Crossroads Gardens (the red flag she carried at the front the of the migrant workers’ march), and she awakens to lower it for the night:

Outside on the front porch, she stood in her pajamas, yielding to the moist embrace of the night, the bright, nearly full moon. There was wind up there tonight. Dark clouds streaked past the luminous face, while here below everything remained still. The flag hung in the silence, as if about to speak. Then off in the woods she heard an owl call. A moment passed, and then a second owl answered. The hunters were out tonight, she knew, working the clearings in pairs, vigilant for carelessness or need.

Arden reached up to release the rope, lowered the flag into her arms, folded it carefully, musing all the while on time and work and geography and on love, that strange foreign language. (187)

Ortiz Taylor depicts a queer Garden of Eden, always at risk of predators “vigilant for carelessness or need.” But Arden’s own vigilance that night—the care with which she protects the emblem of her queer space—makes the reader trust in the survival of Crossroads Gardens.

______

The B.T.C. Old-Fashioned Grocery is the cornerstone of Water Valley, Mississippi’s revival: featured in Garden and Gun, Southern Living, O, the Oprah Magazine, and a host of other regional and national publications, the B.T.C. is an exemplary local-foodie destination. It also serves as a crossroads for that other South. Started by Virginia transplant Alexe van Beuren, the B.T.C. contains a café overseen by Mississippi native and lesbian Dixie Grimes, the Dixie Belle Café, which welcomes cross-dressing construction workers, professors, indie-rock vegan bassists, activists, artists, and writers, who interact with retired insurance agents, garden club members, local teachers, and Bible school leaders over Miss Vetra’s fried chicken. It is a queer contact zone that provides a haven for local youth who don’t fit in the Bible Belt South, connecting them with all kinds of expatriates and outsiders—Democrats, academics, queers, scalawags, carpetbaggers, and townabouts. Many longtime Water Valley residents hate the B.T.C. for these very reasons, but it continues to thrive on business from locals, overflow from Oxford, Mississippi, and tourists who view it—rightly—as the legitimate heir of that most famous southern intersectional restaurant, the Whistle Stop Café.

Chef Dixie Grimes grew up in Oxford, Mississippi; she has a Mississippi lilt that is unmistakable—her name is Dixie, for goodness’ sake. Her southern credentials are unassailable, and she has a gay pride flag on her workstation in the kitchen. Not everyone likes that, but they all want her hand-cut fries and onion rings, her creative sandwiches and delectable plate lunches. The Mississippi legislature may try to turn back the clock and send queers back into the closet; HB 1523 would make queers and other sexual dissidents second-class citizens. But Dixie is undaunted. In May 2016 she led Oxford’s first gay pride parade, throwing Mardi Gras beads and gay pride flags to the crowd. Queer contact zones are not hidden—not anymore. We plant our flags and claim our southern space. In the name of Dixie.