Book Review

Southern historians have hardly rushed to do lesbian and gay history, nor queer historians to examine the South. John Howard's splendid Men like That addresses that gap. Not the comprehensive Southern Queer History his subtitle implies, his book examines queer men—both those who identified as gay and those who did not but nonetheless engaged "in homosexual activity or gender nonconformity"—in Mississippi from 1945 to 1985.

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Men like That bogs down when Howard lets the problems he encountered in understanding this history impede his telling of it, and his complex organizational scheme generates repetition and disrupts narrative flow, creating "a fragmented text," he acknowledges. His loyal resistance to notions of Mississippi as a backward and wretched place seems sometimes undercut by his depictions of a backward and wretched place. But Howard can write, precisely and sometimes elegantly. "Hardly an exodus to the cities, queer movement [in Mississippi] more often consisted of circulation rather than congregation." Accounts of various crimes and scandals are straightforward but shrewd and fascinating. Surprises abound: the odd tale of the soft-porn writer and artist Carl Corley; the transparently queer life and work of the Jackson Daily News arts editor Frank Hains, whose widely read, explicit, and sympathetic "de-Coding" of Production Code–era movies and plays contrasts to the homophobic bile cultural critics at supposedly cosmopolitan media outlets often spewed.

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