A review by dtpsweeney
Crooked Letter i: Coming Out in the South by Thom Koch, Merril Mushroom, B. Andrew Plant, Beth Richards, Connie Griffin, Jeff Mann, Dorothy Allison, Elizabeth Craven, Christina Holzhauser, Logan Knight
3.0
A moving (if uneven, and incomplete) anthology of autobiographical coming out stories from LGBTQ Southerners. I’d been meaning to read this for ages and am glad that I finally did.
Not every story in this collection resonated with me, but the ones that hit home did so beautifully. I think coming up & out as an LGBTQ person in the Deep South is a distinct experience, and it was really gratifying to feel recognition & kinship with many of the writers included here. I especially appreciated the many stories from queer Southern elders. From their accounts, I learned a lot about how much more dangerous it was for us to be us in the recent past of this region.
Nonetheless: I’m really disappointed that this book featured almost only white contributors. This is not necessarily the fault of the writers so much as the editor, who glosses over this fact with a blithe parenthetical (literally one sentence in parenthesis) acknowledgement. On the one hand, I want to honor and evaluate this collection on the merits of what it is rather than on what it is not. On the other hand, the near-exclusion of Southern people of color from such a project is not just conspicuous and unrepresentative, but damaging. While I appreciate and honor the deeply personal stories shared by the people included in the collection, it is ultimately incomplete and, in my view, wasn’t ready for print as a result. It really tainted and diminished my reaction to the project, if not to the individual stories themselves.
So in sum: a hit-or-miss, incomplete, homogenous anthology where the hits are powerful, the misses are so-so, and the silences are noticeable.
Not every story in this collection resonated with me, but the ones that hit home did so beautifully. I think coming up & out as an LGBTQ person in the Deep South is a distinct experience, and it was really gratifying to feel recognition & kinship with many of the writers included here. I especially appreciated the many stories from queer Southern elders. From their accounts, I learned a lot about how much more dangerous it was for us to be us in the recent past of this region.
Nonetheless: I’m really disappointed that this book featured almost only white contributors. This is not necessarily the fault of the writers so much as the editor, who glosses over this fact with a blithe parenthetical (literally one sentence in parenthesis) acknowledgement. On the one hand, I want to honor and evaluate this collection on the merits of what it is rather than on what it is not. On the other hand, the near-exclusion of Southern people of color from such a project is not just conspicuous and unrepresentative, but damaging. While I appreciate and honor the deeply personal stories shared by the people included in the collection, it is ultimately incomplete and, in my view, wasn’t ready for print as a result. It really tainted and diminished my reaction to the project, if not to the individual stories themselves.
So in sum: a hit-or-miss, incomplete, homogenous anthology where the hits are powerful, the misses are so-so, and the silences are noticeable.