A Night at the Sweet Gum Head: Drag, Drugs, Disco, and Atlanta’s Gay Revolution

Journalist Padgett (Hummer) frames this hodgepodge history of 1970s gay Atlanta around the stories of a drag queen and a gay rights activist. Central to the South’s role in the gay rights movement, Atlanta (a “city with just a single skyscraper” in 1969) was rife with police harassment and community hostility toward gays, but also ripe for transformation, thanks to white flight and the 1973 election of the city’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, who was determined to be “an ally of the gay community.” In 1971, 20-year-old John Greenwell left Huntsville, Ala., for Atlanta and quickly rose to drag stardom, performing as Rachel Wells at the Sweet Gum Head nightclub. Meanwhile, Bill Smith, the son of devout Baptists who never accepted his sexuality, led the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, worked as a city commissioner, and published the South’s leading gay newspaper before he “lost control” of his drug addictions. Padgett can be a little too on-the-nose (of drag, he writes, “Sometimes, to find out who we really are, we have to become someone else”), and his selection of profile subjects feels somewhat arbitrary. Still, LGBTQ history buffs will be thrilled to see the Deep South take a turn in the spotlight. (June)