The Art of Activism: Creative Queer Resistance in the South

Against popular belief, the American South is home to more queers than any other region in the country: nearly one-third of all estimated 8 million “out” LGBTQ adults live in the 14 Southern states. At the same time, since minimal domestic LGBTQ funding goes to the South, queer activists have been forced to be creative and develop innovative organizational strategies that rely on strong intersectional relationships across marginalized communities. This paper shows that although the South exists in our popular imagination as one of the most homophobic and racist regions in the United States, it is also home to some of the most creative and successful acts of social justice activism. I will discuss the South as it has been historically imagined in mainstream and LGBTQ culture, and put those ideas in conversation with the oral histories I conducted with Southerners on New Ground (SONG). SONG is multi-gender, multi-cultural queer liberation organization founded in 1993. Unlike bicoastally based mainstream LGBTQ advocacy platforms, SONG challenges homonormative and metronormative narratives by connecting queer issues with race, disability, immigration, livability in rural places, food and economic justice. This means not necessarily focusing on marriage equality or street violence but looking at where social, cultural, and physical landscape converge to perpetuate deep-rooted structural violence. Ultimately, this paper argues that creative solutions to current crisis in social justice activism cannot be found in the mainstream but on the physical and psychological borderlands of society where conventional ideas about identity, place, and culture are constantly challenged.