Southerners and the City: Queer Southern Diaspora amid the First Decade of HIV/AIDS in New York City

David Gilbert died too soon after succumbing to AIDS-related complications. Born in Virginia, and a resident of New York City during the first decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Gilbert established an organization he called the Southerners: Lesbians and Gay Men in New York, Inc. The group included queer folk like himself who had migrated from the U.S. South to New York City in order to escape the oppressive conditions of what Gilbert derided as “Jerry Falwell country.” By hosting Southern-themed social events, the Southerners formed community and sought to fight the rapid, interrelated rise of homophobia and HIV/AIDS cases in the South from afar. Sadly, their advocacy was short lived. Lasting only two years (1990-1992), the group effectively dissolved upon the death of Gilbert. Today, what remains of the Southerners lies in “Collection 16,” a chronological assortment of flyers, images, letters, and other materials, now stored in manila folders in a tattered cardboard box in the LGBT Community Center National History Archive in Greenwich Village. This paper analyzes the archival ephemera left in the wake of the Southerners’ disbandment, showing how the group’s activism relied on a contradictory disidentification with Southern culture. The Southerners forcefully critiqued the homophobic “backwardness” of the South, yet simultaneously, embodiments of Southern culture were the chief modes through which the group forged a common identity and enacted their politics. I contextualize the Southerners as representative of what I call “queer Southern diaspora,” or the mass migration of queers from rural Southern geographies to the urban coasts during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Studies of queer Southern diaspora challenge metronormative histories of queer life by revealing that the queer South existed in—and against—quintessentially queer urban locales in the North such as New York City.