Making Our Way

The traditional and often tortured nature of the South is so ingrained that even canonical lesbian and gay Southern writers (Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote, among them) exist somehow outside or in spite of the broader tradition of Southern letters. In her ground-breaking Making Our Way: A Southern Lesbian and Gay Reader, writer and critic Amanda Gable proves through research both broad in scope and finely detailed what no other anthologist has acknowledged so forcefully -- that lesbian and gay writers have contributed immeasurably to the history of Southern letters and their work is key to our understanding of this literature-rich region. Gable's broad period of interest involves changing homosexual identities and, through over 45 selections, she divides her collection of fiction, poetry, letters, diaries, essays, reportage, drama, and lyrics into three periods: the early period (mid-1800s-early 1900s) where same-sex sexuality was most commonly exhibited in homoerotic and romantic friendships, the modern period (1920s-1968) exemplified by innuendo, codes, and individual daring, and the post-Stonewall period (1968-today) in which a strong, sometimes political same-sex or queer identity is shown.