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In the best-selling book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues detail the importance of community and commitment in everyday life. A critical element of any community is its history, or “community of memory.”
Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones is the second volume of a multivolume work telling the stories of queer southern life through characters who shaped and were shaped by the events following the tsunami of Stonewall. In the decade following the 1969 clashes with police at this Greenwich Village bar, the emergence of communities among southern lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, and transgender persons acquired new vibrancy. Where isolation and accommodation characterized homosexual southern life after World War II, the seventies were marked by networks and activism, immediacy and confrontation, openness and revelry. This book bridges the generation of lonely hunters who surreptitiously frequented mixed hotel bars, silently read newspaper headlines about perverts, participated in secretive social clubs, and viewed with unease the quixotic efforts of a handful of homophile activists to a rubyfruit generation that danced wildly inside megadiscos, produced rebellious publications like Pointblank Times, organized lesbian and gay conferences, and marched in daylight to the Washington Monument by the tens of thousands.
Here, I continue the stories of Merril Mushroom, Jack Nichols, Julia Stanley Penelope, and Lige Clarke from my first book, Lonely Hunters. Others characters who crossed the Stonewall divide from the homophile movement to gay rights are also introduced: Rita Wanstrom, Miss P, Ray Hill, and Bob Basker. From the cascading events of the sixties—the Vietnam War, the countercultural movement, civil rights, feminism—come stories of organizing from Margo George, Elizabeth Knowlton, and Lorraine Fontana of the Atlanta Feminist Lesbian Alliance, Bob Bland of the Triangle Gay Alliance, Peter Lee of the Lambda Alliance, Pokey Anderson of the Lesberadas, Jesse Monteagudo of the Latinos por Derechos, and Mel Boozer of the Gay Activist Alliance.
Written as a spiral of individual narratives of characters whose lives variously intersect, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones uses an oral tradition, creating what June Arnold once described as “experience weaving in upon itself, commenting on itself, inclusive, not ending in final victory/defeat but ending with the sense that the community continues.”2 These interwoven stories tell of particular events through the eyes of individuals who travel through an era of change. From the Tumblebugs of Houston and Gay Freedom Movement in Norfolk, from Trash in Louisville to the Front Page of Raleigh, from Miss Gay Florida pageants to the faerie gatherings at Running Water, from gay motorcycle clubs to MCC churches, from out lesbian softball teams to gay political coalitions, communities emerged that had not been apparent during the era of Lonely Hunters. But rebel activists like Phyllis Randolph Frye and Milo Pyne unknowingly stood on the shoulders of homophile leaders such as Phyllis Lyon, Frank Kameny, Del Martin, Tony Segura, Barbara Gittings, and Richard Inman. Rhinestone revolutionaries like Logan Carter and Sam Hunter followed the stage exits of Ray Bourbon and Tony Midnite, while rubyfruit lesbians as different as Mab Segrest, Bobbi Weinstock, and Vicki Gabriner acknowledged a debt of gratitude to earlier generations of lesbians working in the South that included Lillian Smith, Laura Towne, Barbara Deming, and Laura Bragg.
Faggot revolutionaries and blue-denim reformers are the bookends of the seventies South. Beginning with the countercultural, antiwar, women’s rights, and civil rights movements, Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones explores the queering of southern space and the emergence of queer communities. From Birmingham to Gainesville, from Austin to Charlotte, as news of Stonewall moved from the inside pages of the New York Times to the front pages of newly formed gay newspapers, the homophile generation marked by gradualism, civility, and accommodation gave way to the rubyfruit generation characterized by immediacy, confrontation, and resoluteness. In the span of a generation we went from long lines to view Boys in the Band to picket lines for those viewing Cruising, from lonely voices seeking political support to powerful voices wielding political clout, from women’s auxiliaries in gay male organizations to the radicalesbians of the Furies, Feminary, and Sinister Wisdom.
During this era, the South was also changing, and southerners were changing history. In light of the industrial collapse of the steel and automobile industries of the “rust belt” and the demise of New Deal liberalism, the South rose again—fueled by Sun Belt economies of aerospace, oil, and technology. From the ashes of the radical sixties slowly arose the phoenix of conservatism that shadowed the remainder of the century. Led by religious conservatives buoyed by their success in defeating the gay rights ordinance in Dade County, the self-proclaimed “moral majority” decried abortion-on-demand, defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, and elected thousands to local and state offices. The Fighting South led the counterrevolutionary charge that would eventually redefine the American political landscape.3
As the once Democratic South turned solidly Republican, the New Frontier and the Great Society of the sixties waned. With the “fall” of Saigon and the “sell-out” of SALT II, America held hostage by Iran and OPEC, and an economy corroded by double-digit inflation and recessions, this generation of homosexual southerners witnessed the southernization of American politics and culture as they sought social and political recognition for the “love that dared not speak its name.” By the decade’s end, mostly white gay men—blue-denim politicos—transformed gay power into gay rights. From the battlefield to the voting booth, southern activists such as Leonard Matlovich and Gary Van Ooteghem pressed for admission into the corridors of heterosexual power and privilege. The second American Stonewall occurred on a June day eight years after the first riots at the seedy Greenwich Village bar. The Dade County referendum, repealing gay rights in Miami, lit the fuse for mainstream political activism in the South and the country. However, had it not been for these honeycombed pre-Stonewall communities on the ball field, the stage, and the bar, as well as unheralded efforts among gay liberationist rebels, rhinestone drag queens, and rubyfruit lesbian-feminists, there would have been little infrastructure within communities to harness this energy unleashed by singer Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children crusade.
This was a turning point in the modern gay movement, which became evident to all two years later when tens of thousands gathered on a chilly Sunday morning in October 1979 to march on Washington. Southern history is never simple and seldom straight. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones tells stories of several dozen women and men who struggled—sometimes with one another—against great odds to develop communities of desire and of the heart, culminating in the March on Washington. The March, however, belied the cacophony of southern voices and experiences evidenced in queer communities separated by gender, social class, and race; in the unheard demands and unmet expectations of bisexuals and transgender persons; and in the racist and sexist practices found in some bars, pageants, and gay organizations.
In this book, you’ll learn how early writings such as The Price of Salt and Strange Fruit influenced North Carolina lesbians publishing Sinister Wisdom and Feminary. Here, you’ll explore how motley bands of gay liberationists in cities such as Louisville and Houston evolved into political coalitions. Here are chronicled the evolution of southern drag from the hills of South Carolina to the Fontainebleau Hotel, intimidation by FBI agents and grand juries, an unsolved murder in Mexico and a tragic fire in New Orleans. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones follows the softball lesbians in the summer of 1974, gay prisoners in Ramsey Unit II, and those who challenged the military’s homophobia. In these pages you will get to know southern lesbian poets, writers, singers, and publishers who shaped the emerging lesbian consciousness of this generation. Here, too, you will learn of the emergence of the gay spirit among southerners who founded churches and synagogues as well as others who celebrated the solstices and equinoxes. These stories are our “communities of memory” that not only connect us to the past but “turn us toward the future as communities of hope.”4