Video clip of Berl Boykin, poet, playwright, journalist, and founding member of the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, reading selections of his poetry. Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, Great Speckled Bird Collection.

LGBTQ+ Georgians have written out their stories and selves, as well as those of other queer selves real and imagined, in every literary form and genre, from novels and nonfiction essays to lyric poetry and science fiction short stories. In the early twentieth century, Columbus’s Carson McCullers wrote Southern Gothics focused on characters who are outcast, disillusioned, and often beyond the fringes of heteronormativity. McCullers herself, twice married to fellow writer Reeves McCullers, is among those artists whose expressions of intense love for other women, like lesbian writer Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, have left shadows of an undefinable queerness in her archived papers. Atlanta-born Donald Windham and his then-partner writer and photographer Fred Melton migrated to the literary scene of New York City in 1939, but Windham’s first novel The Dog Star (1950) and his memoir Emblems of Conduct (1964) look back to a post-Depression Atlanta as seen through the eyes of adolescent boys. Authorial routes from Atlanta to other “gay meccas” like New York City and San Francisco were common throughout the twentieth century. Poet Alfred Corn, born in Bainbridge, attended Emory University and then conducted his graduate study at Columbia University in New York City, where his first book of poems, All Roads at Once, would be published in 1976. Savannah’s Perry Brass hitchhiked to San Francisco at age seventeen and made his way to New York, where his work was included in one of the first anthologies of gay male poetry, The Male Muse. E. Lynn Harris was living in Atlanta when he produced his first novel, Invisible Life, selling it himself out of his car trunk and city barbershops. When the book became a hit, it was heralded as one of the first mainstream representations of Black gay sexuality and bisexuality. Douglas A. Martin was born in Warner Robins and received his B.A. from the University of Georgia, a time that inspired his partially autobiographical Athens-based novel Outline of My Lover, which tells a love story between a lonely student and a local rock musician generally understood to be Michael Stipe. Among the most influential queer writers to emerge from Georgia is Alice Walker, born to sharecroppers in Eatonton, whose portrayal of Black trauma and healing bisexual love in The Color Purple told a story of rural Georgia life not often heard. Walker acknowledged the silence of queerness during her own upbringing in her 1987 essay “All the Bearded Irises of Life: Confessions of a Homospiritual,” while exploring the way her awareness of queer life changed as an adult woman and fearing the loss or suppression of queer communities. Writing those communities down, for Walker and other queer Georgia writers, is one way to see and retain them.

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