The challenge in documenting LGBTQ+ history in the South, said Maigen Sullivan, co-founder of the Invisible Histories Project, is that much of it has been purposely destroyed.
In her work with the project, a nonprofit based out of Birmingham, she once went to archive items of a recently deceased man who was gay. But a family member rid his house of his belongings.
“The biggest thing is it’s not that we’ve hidden all this, or we forgot about it,” she said during a talk at the Alabama Department of Archives and History on June 15. “It’s that it has been intentionally erased.”
About 32-34% of LGBTQ+ people in the country live in the South, Sullivan said. In the talk, Sullivan focused less on themes than what most interested her about Alabama’s queer history, particularly individuals and events.
“Should I look for some things that really represent, like, certain communities or issues that we’re currently facing?” she said. “And that all would have been a really great idea, but I just picked random things that I wanted to talk about.”
Sullivan said after the talk that she believes that looking towards LGBTQ+ history is important because much of what is happening now has happened in the past. She said that she thinks history is empowering.
Sullivan said that a lot of the current rhetoric is verbatim with the documents and publications of the past.
“We’ve been here,” she said. “We’ve done great things, and we can do them again. We’ve just kind of forgotten how we got here.”
She thinks a lot of the current backlash against the LGBTQ+ community is a “dying craw.”
“If you see our mainstream media, you know that representation is there, you know, the attitudes have changed, and that there is a huge climate shift in this country,” she said. “So, I firmly believe that the violence, the rhetoric is just the dying craw because they know they’re losing. They wanted a culture war, well you lost it, hon.”
Some of the figures Sullivan discussed included:
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey
A singer born in Alabama who brought in diverse crowds to hear her perform. She signed a contract with Paramount Records in 1923 and is regarded as one of the first Blues singers. Sullivan said that while it’s difficult to assign modern words to people in the past, Rainey is likely what would now be considered bisexual. She was married to a man when she was younger but was later arrested for throwing an indecent party with young women. Sullivan also pointed to her song “Prove It On Me,” which includes the lyric “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends/ They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.”
Radical Auburn
Sullivan said that while some LGBTQ+ history in the South is acknowledged, it’s often more centered around large cities like Atlanta or Birmingham, and focused on the difficulties LGBTQ+ individuals face.
“But we want to focus on joy because if all we hear about ourselves is negative, then all we can be is negative,” she said.
In her talk, Sullivan gave a brief overview of the history of Pride movements in the country, beginning with the police raid on the mafia-owned Stonewall Inn in New York City. Stormie DeLarverie, a central figure in the Stonewall riots, was from New Orleans.
“So, she actually starts throwing some punches at folks,” she said.
From there, advocacy organizations grew in the South. One of those organizations was Auburn Plains Gay Liberation Front in 1971. Sullivan said it’s unclear if the group was formally recognized by the university. The group also had a publication called Praxis, which Auburn has made available online.
Sullivan said the groups at this time were extremely political about things beyond LGBTQ+ topics. On one screen, she showed an advertisement printed in a publication on how to get an abortion. Abortion was illegal in Alabama but not in New York and California, so the advertisement showed how to access funds for an abortion.
“And if this does not feel timely, then you have not been on Google,” she said.
Lambda Inc.
Lambda, Inc., Sullivan said, was Alabama’s first LGBTQ+ resource center. Despite working on LGBTQ+ history for several years, Sullivan said she hadn’t heard of them until she began working with Invisible Histories Project.
Sullivan said the group provided social groups for people, including conferences and softball teams.
“So, it was a really huge network throughout the Southeast, coalition building that we don’t have anymore,” she said. “So we were really organized back in the 70s and 80s in ways that we really haven’t done in quite a while.”
In 1977, Lambda had begun the “Shout” newsletter, which grew into the Alabama Forum. The Alabama Forum lasted until the early 2000s and is Alabama’s longest-running LGBTQ+ newspaper. The University of Alabama has an archive.
Sullivan also said that when Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington Jr. gave a welcome to the community, there was immense blowback.
By the early 1980s, the AIDS epidemic began and local governments were not acknowledging the events. She said Montgomery funeral homes were not taking bodies, and many people had to take bodies to Black funeral homes an hour away in their personal vehicles.
Lambda fell apart in a dispute over whether to shift all of their advocacy to AIDS, Sullivan said. She said that all current AIDS organizations in Birmingham still owe their legacy to them.
“So, that is all happening in the 80s,” she said. “So, you can imagine the efforts, the resources, everything switches to keeping people alive. People who were never prepared to take care of bodies to be funeral directors to be nurses are doing that because they love their folks, right? And they don’t have any support for it.”
Nell Carter
Nell Carter graduated from Parker High School in Birmingham and performed in a band there. She also performed at bars and lounges that many considered to be unofficial gay bars at the time.
She went on to perform at similar places in other states, including North Carolina.
Her brother was an early AIDS victim, and she married a man with substance abuse and mental health issues. They divorced, and Carter died in 2003 after disappearing from the public eye for a while.
After her death, people learned that she left everything to a female partner she had been with since the mid-1990s. Much like Rainey, Carter would be someone that could be thought of as bisexual, but she did not identify as such.
“It’s very difficult to talk about sexual identities in the past because identities are what you tell me they are, not what I ascribe to you, right?” she said. “So, she never said that, but she did have at least one woman lover who she ended her life with who was with her for the longest amount of time.”
Pete Smith
Pete Smith was a transgender man who was born in Birmingham. He attended Birmingham Southern and was ordained as a minister. He moved away for some time, but he came back. In 1981, he came out as transgender. He was public about his gender-affirming care.
“He’s so important to our state’s history, and I never heard anybody talk about it ever,” she said.
In 1963, the FBI approached Smith after a series of bombings, including the attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four girls. The FBI suspected his uncle Robert Chambliss– nicknamed “Dynamite Bob”– but the Bureau didn’t have anything certain. Smith began working with them, including doing espionage work.
Smith’s testimony convicted him. Smith went on to other types of activism, such as civil rights and anti-racist work.
Smith wrote a book that included his former name as a co-author.
Cracker Barrel
In 1991, a lesbian in Georgia was fired from Cracker Barrell for being gay, which led to groups across the country protesting Cracker Barrel.
Some of those protests took place in Alabama. In Mobile, protestors would each take one table and drink coffee all day. At one point, 17 police cars showed up for eight protestors.
Sullivan said that while the protests did not have much impact on Cracker Barrel directly, states began passing equal protection laws in response to the protestors.
A man named Carl Owens, a member of the activist group Queen Nation Atlanta, encouraged people to buy one stock in Cracker Barrel with hopes of overturning the policy. Affirming churches were very involved and bought lots of shares.
At first, the SEC blocked them, but, by 2002, 58% of shareholders opposed the policy and it was overturned.
Sullivan also said that she spoke about this in Nashville near where Cracker Barrel is based. At the same time, Cracker Barrel released their rainbow rocking chairs.
“So, I just want us to just sit in that for a moment because all the time to think what we’re doing don’t matter,” she said. “But these folks fought so hard they went from being fired to rainbow rocking chairs at the Cracker Barrel.”
This article was published by Alabama Reflector.
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