Go Carolina

Growing up in the 1960s South as a gay young man was perilous. Public sentiment was overwhelmingly negative, and the government often used the term “deviant” in referring to gay people, as Eric Cervini documented in his 2020 book The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual Versus the United States of America (a Pulitzer Prize finalist). Thousands of civil services and military personnel were dismissed due to rules against gay behavior. A “lavender scare” outed closeted gay people and increased discrimination. In the early 1950s, Congress passed an act “for the treatment of sexual psychopaths” in the nation’s capital, facilitating the arrest and punishment of people who acted on same-sex desires and labeling them mentally ill” (Adkins, Judith. “‘These People Are Frightened to Death’: Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare.” Prologue Magazine, vol. 48, no. 2, 2016). Further investigations into gay sexual orientation during that time forced gay men into both literal and figurative hiding. It was a tumultuous time for gay men, especially in the South, where prevailing attitudes held that men must be “men” and discouraged activities seen as “feminine.”

Laws targeting gay sexual orientation date back to colonial times and were often defined as sodomy laws, or laws making anal intercourse illegal. The emerging LGBTQ+ rights movement and human rights activism by groups such as the Mattachine Society (an early US gay rights organization founded in 1950 and based in Los Angeles, California) fought sodomy and other laws in the court system, sodomy laws were repealed during the 20th century, starting in 1962, though the conservative Southern states did not begin repealing these laws until the 1990s. In 1969, a police raid in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood sparked the Stonewall rebellion by the gay community, which was a defining moment in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the US.

Against this backdrop, Sedaris’s essay recalls his experience as a young boy, just 10 years old, realizing that he enjoys typical “girly things” and being afraid that the lisp will out him to his teachers and peers. While satirical to show the absurdity of the situation, the essay conveys the discomfort of daily life given the need for habitual masking of one’s identity. Gay men living in the highly conservative rural South in the 1960s typically hid their sexual orientation for fear of being persecuted. For that very reason, Sedaris hid who he was at heart: It was necessary in order to avoid persecution, retaliation, and extradition.