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

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

Author: Martin Padgett

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1324007133

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An electric and intimate story of 1970s gay Atlanta through its bedazzling drag clubs and burgeoning rights activism. Coursing with a pumped-up beat, gay Atlanta was the South's mecca—a beacon for gays and lesbians growing up in its homophobic towns and cities. There, the Sweet Gum Head was the club for achieving drag stardom. Martin Padgett evokes the fantabulous disco decade by going deep into the lives of two men who shaped and were shaped by this city: John Greenwell, an Alabama runaway who found himself and his avocation performing as the exquisite Rachel Wells; and Bill Smith, who took to the streets and city hall to change antigay laws. Against this optimism for visibility and rights, gay people lived with daily police harassment and drug dealing and murder in their discos and drag clubs. Conducting interviews with many of the major figures and reading through deteriorating gay archives, Padgett expertly re-creates Atlanta from a time when a vibrant, new queer culture of drag and pride came into being.


Gay and Lesbian Atlanta

Gay and Lesbian Atlanta

Author: Wesley Chenault

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738553771

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Along the Union River weaves together more than two hundred images with intriguing and informative text to create an immensely enjoyable journey through the history of the towns along the banks of Maine's majestic Union River and its tributaries. The region comprising Hancock and Penobscot Counties was originally settled by soldiers who came to work in the woods and tanneries. Soon, supporting industries, stores, copper shops, lumber camps, and ladies millinery shops were established, but it was the shipbuilding industry that flourished most prominently. Here, we explore Bingham Millions,Mariaville's "Greenhouse Settlement," and Lucerne's "Little Switzerland," and experience the wild beauty of this world-famous countryside.


Nightclub

Nightclub

Author: George S. Rigakos

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2008-03-18

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0773578013

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People go to nightclubs to see and be seen - to view others as aesthetic objects and to present themselves as objects of desire. Rigakos argues that this activity fuses surveillance and aesthetic consumption - it fetishizes bodies and amplifies social capital, producing violence and crises fuelled by alcohol. At closing time, patrons flow out of the insular haze of the nightclub and onto city streets, moving from private spectacle to public nuisance. Bouncers are thus both policing agents in the nighttime economy and the gatekeepers of an urban risk market - a site of circumscribed transgression and consumption that begins at the nightclub door.


The South Never Plays Itself

The South Never Plays Itself

Author: Ben Beard

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1588384241

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Since Birth of a Nation became the first Hollywood blockbuster in 1915, movies have struggled to reckon with the American South—as both a place and an idea, a reality and a romance, a lived experience and a bitter legacy. Nearly every major American filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter has worked on a film about the South, from Gone with the Wind to 12 Years a Slave, from Deliveranceto Forrest Gump. In The South Never Plays Itself, author and film critic Ben Beard explores the history of the Deep South on screen, beginning with silent cinema and ending in the streaming era, from President Wilson to President Trump, from musical to comedy to horror to crime to melodrama. Beard’s idiosyncratic narrative—part cultural history, part film criticism, part memoir—journeys through genres and eras, issues and regions, smash blockbusters and microbudget indies to explore America’s past and troubled present, seen through Hollywood’s distorting lens. Opinionated, obsessive, sweeping, often combative, sometimes funny—a wild narrative tumble into culture both high and low—Beard attempts to answer the haunting question: what do movies know about the South that we don’t?


The Un-Natural State

The Un-Natural State

Author: Brock Thompson

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1557289433

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This is a study of gay and lesbian life in Arkansas in the twentieth century, a deft weaving together of Arkansas history, dozens of oral histories, and Brock Thompson's own story.


No Logo

No Logo

Author: Naomi Klein

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2000-01-15

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 9780312203436

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"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.


Submergence

Submergence

Author: J. M. Ledgard

Publisher: Coffee House Press

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1566893194

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Award-winning foreign correspondent’s cerebral spy novel-cum-love story exposes humanity’s tenuous hold on a vast and relentless world.


The Onion Book of Known Knowledge

The Onion Book of Known Knowledge

Author: The Onion

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2012-10-23

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 031613323X

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Are you a witless cretin with no reason to live? Would you like to know more about every piece of knowledge ever? Do you have cash? Then congratulations, because just in time for the death of the print industry as we know it comes the final book ever published, and the only one you will ever need: The Onion's compendium of all things known. Replete with an astonishing assemblage of facts, illustrations, maps, charts, threats, blood, and additional fees to edify even the most simple-minded book-buyer, The Onion Book of Known Knowledge is packed with valuable information -- such as the life stages of an Aunt; places to kill one's self in Utica, New York; and the dimensions of a female bucket, or "pail." With hundreds of entries for all 27 letters of the alphabet, The Onion Book of Known Knowledge must be purchased immediately to avoid the sting of eternal ignorance.


Crooked Letter i

Crooked Letter i

Author: Connie Griffin

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1603063625

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Crooked Letter i offers a collection of first-person nonfiction narratives that reflect the distinct 'coming out' experiences of a complex cross-section of gay, lesbian, and transgendered Southerners from all walks of life and at different stages in their lives. There is the Appalachian widower who, following the death of his wife, decides it's time to tell his church community. There is the young man who left his hometown as a girl, returning hesitant but hopeful for his grandmother's love. There is the adolescent girl who refuses to surrender her soul to Jesus because she is not yet certain of her own beliefs. There is the well-mannered Southern gentleman who hopes his blueberries and biscuits will help ease the awkwardness of coming out to his elderly neighbor. There are the ones who survived the frequent bar raids, arrests, and beatings. But, there is also the first kiss, and the first love. The experiences represented here pivot around a central theme -- finally finding language to understand one's identity, and then discovering we were never the only ones. Revealing a vibrant cross-section of Southerners, the writers of these narratives have in common the experience of being Southern and different, but determined against all odds.