by Jason Ezell
University of North Carolina Press
10/14/2025, paperback
SKU: 9781469690445
In the Southeastern United States of the late 1970s, a regional network of radical communal gay households formed in the face of rising New Right terror. Consisting of primarily white, self-described sissies, the Southeast Network, as it came to be known, spanned from the Ozarks, to New Orleans, to Appalachian Tennessee. Though this network was short-lived, its legacy lives on today through Short Mountain Sanctuary, a thriving member of the international Radical Faerie movement. Jason Ezell's intimate account of the formation and dissolution of these sissie houses reveals a little-known history of Southern gay liberation, nonbinary gender expression, and radical feminism and femininity.
Drawing on journals, letters, oral histories, collective manifestos, and newsletters, Ezell illustrates how these gay households nurtured their community through lesbian feminist practices such as collectivism, consciousness-raising, witchcraft rituals, and rural gatherings. As people and practices traveled from one house to another, these linked houses attempted to conjure underground sanctuaries for queer Southerners. Preserving their moving stories, Ezell details the visions, experiments, and shortfalls of these radical households in their attempts to build solidarity, resist mounting right-wing violence, and sustain their revolutionary dreams for queer movements yet to come.
Reviews:
"A passionate life's work on queer countercultural organizing, joy, and pain in the US Southeast."--La Shonda Mims, author of Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists: Queer Women in the Urban South
"An enlightening . . . history of radical queer communal groups across the Southeastern U.S. in the 1970s and their adoption of feminist witchcraft practice. . . . [A]n eye-opening revelation of the fairly extensive reach--including widely circulated newsletters and regional conferences--of a little remembered network of rural queer communes."--Publishers Weekly
"Ezell illuminates hidden histories of queer life and activism in the 1970s US South, challenging readers to reexamine their conceptions of male femininities, queer femme politics, queer religiosity, and the course of the gay liberation movement."--G. Samantha Rosenthal, author of Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City
About the Author:
Jason Ezell is head of research and learning services at Olin & Uris Libraries at Cornell University.