Lovers and Beloveds by Gary Richards

Gary Richards shows that sexuality, and same-sex desire in particular, was central to the Southern Renaissance. In the 1940s and 1950s the literary establishment tacitly treated the South as an acceptable setting for fictional 'deviancy,' giving Southern writers freedom to explore sexual otherness. Richards reads Truman Capote, William Goyen, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Lillian Smith and Richard Wright, pairing forgotten texts with canonical ones, to show how they reimagine gender roles, center homoeroticism and connect it to class, race, sex and Southern identity.