To date, lesbian and gay history has focused largely on the East and West coasts and on urban settings such as New York and San Francisco. The American South, on the other hand, identified as it is with religion, traditional gender roles, and cultural conservatism, has escaped attention. Southerners wrestle with their past, lesbians and gays wrestle for visibility, historians wrestle over the South - yet rarely have the three crossed paths.

John Howard's ground-breaking anthology casts its net broadly, examining lesbian and gay experiences in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, Memphis, and Louisville. Rigorous in its approach, the book does not shy away from thorny, self-critical questions: What allows us to label a historical figure with the relatively recent category of "lesbian" or "gay"? Further, exactly who is a Southerner? And what is Southern?

Moving chronologically through America's past, from the antebellum and postbellum periods, through the Jim Crow era and the Cold War, to the present, this volume introduces an important new framework to the field of lesbian and gay history - that of the region.