Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America

With a thesis that homosexuality existed in rural America in the first half of the 20th century, this slight volume breaks little new ground. “Innuendo is a notoriously frustrating brand of evidence,” Indiana University gender studies professor Johnson writes. The author provides a strained interpretation of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which suggests that Lenny’s relationship with George went beyond the bounds of friendship. Along with an obscure section from Erskine Caldwell’s In the Shadow of the Steeple, he cites Steinbeck’s work as evidence that rural communities dealt with homosexuality in a balanced way. Johnson posits that hetero-normalization was an early-20th-century phenomenon rooted in the discredited eugenics movement of its time and was a middle-class morality handed down from urban elites. Despite previous research by Will Fellows, Jonathan D. Katz, and others exploring stories of rural gay life in the 19th and 20th centuries, Johnson doggedly decodes contrasting versions of “Big Rock Candy Mountain” that hint at gay sex, and pores over pages of the journal of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and 1940s to breathlessly report that gay people did, in fact, exist in rural areas. The book concludes with an account of a sting operation in 1960s Ohio that rooted out men having sex in a public restroom, complete with explicit photographs, ending the book on prurient note. 18 halftones. (July)