It was something of a truism that queers had to move north or west to “the city” (imagined as New York or San Francisco) and adopt “citified ways” (metronormativity) to be queer because the American South was hostile to sexual difference. Staying in closets or smaller towns (imagined as a kind of closet) or holding tightly to Southernness after moving to the city marked one as inappropriately or insufficiently queer. In the late 1990s scholars challenged this with the publication of Carryin’ On In the Lesbian and Gay South that showed queerness in the South was present, appropriate, and sufficient. In the 21^st century, scholars Jack Halberstam and Scott Herring critiqued metronormativity for eliding Southern/rural, invalidating Southern queer experience, and dominating LGBTQ+ politics. Just watch the 2019 video for Taylor Swift’s song “You Need to Calm Down” to see the continued use of Southern/rural/poor as metronormative shorthand for bigoted and queer-phobic.

Nevertheless, this commonsensical notion of queer movement was the experience for many. The migration of queers from rural and southern geographies to the urban coasts during the mid-to-late twentieth century resulted in a “queer Southern diaspora.” Many defiantly held on to their Southernness as they remembered “home” and worked for change. Others flitted between “queer capital” and “hinterland” such as Virginian Bobbi Weinstock who was on the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force board in 1974. In 1988, Mab Segrest told an audience at the 12^th annual Southeastern Lesbian and Gay festival that “what I want from a Southern freedom movement is not to create more refugee centers.” There are countless other challenges to “refugee center” normativity that reveal a queer South that existed in—and against—quintessentially queer urban locales such as New York City and San Francisco.

New Orleans overflows with signification for the Southern queer diaspora and is the perfect backdrop for our panel. The papers explore some of the ways that Southernness cuts across, enhances, complicates, and conflicts with other identity markers. Jay Watkins examines occasional New York resident Cal Yeomans’ 1981 play Sunsets: 3 Acts on a Beach and the use of barely-fictionalized, poor, “inarticulate, ordinary” Southerners that “you don’t like...nobody does” to prod New York audiences to grapple with those queers that could not or would not leave the South. Matt Kowal uses the first multi-character AIDS play, Rebecca Ranson’s 1984 Warren that conjured a little piece of Tennessee in San Francisco’s Ward 5B, to critique responses to the AIDS epidemic. Joe Hatfield shows us how in the early 1990s, Dave Gilbert and his NYC-based group the Southerners critiqued the “backwardness” of the South whilst relying on notions of a shared Southern culture to enact their politics. This period was a critical point in the development of assimilationist LGBT identity politics that prioritized civil rights through the state over liberation. Our work uses the queer Southern diaspora as a lens to interrogate this evolution and explore alternate modes of existence and resistance within homonationalist U.S. LGBT politics.