Josh Adair
I traveled to Natchez, Mississippi recently, motivated by my insatiable personal and professional lust for old houses, especially those cultivated by queer men. As one of the former busiest markets for selling enslaved humans, and therefore one of the United States’ richest towns per capita, Natchez boasts an appalling and consequential history that we have yet fully to confront. Further, as it did not support secession, most of its original architecture endures (and has featured in town-wide annual tours called “pilgrimages” since 1932) as do the Lost Cause ideologies that form its foundations. But thanks to Richard Grant’s The Deepest South of All (2020) and Suzannah Herbert’s Natchez (2026), I arrived quite aware that this town was not a usual, or even easily predictable, site of U.S. Civil War history regarding gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, I was still surprised to find Natchez crawling with queers, many of whom, much to my chagrin, continue to prop up remnants of the Confederacy in various ways, whether defiantly, out of economic need, or just outright indifference.
I was not surprised, however, to encounter the Lost Cause, especially after watching this 1940s Spring Pilgrimage promotional/propaganda film in advance. After all, the drag extravaganza that is Gone with the Wind (1939) underpins and overshadows so much of how hordes of apologists conceive the slaveholding South. In fact, as I toured Stanton Hall, one of Natchez’s largest Greek Revival mansions, the octogenarian guide rhapsodized along those lines as she also lamented the death of Patrick Swayze, who had filmed scenes from the escapist, sentimentalist North and South (1985) in its library. Curiously, she made sure to note his sex appeal before also quickly announcing her longing to waltz through its double parlors with the fictional Rhett Butler. Throughout the tour, she refused to acknowledge human enslavement and delivered endless pro-South talking points. She then punctuated her retrograde remarks by requesting that we not post on social media about our experience at the site. Clearly, she understood the problematic nature of her narrative and was, presumably, keen to avoid more of the bad press that is readily available about the site’s tours (and the group that owns it) on Reddit and YouTube.
Defensive sex-positive elderly docents aside, what also caught my attention at Stanton Hall was a handsome queer florist skirting the grand dining room’s perimeter building lavish floral arrangements for that evening’s fundraiser, the “Save the Hall Ball.”
As he intrepidly swept past me and my partner, he broke character just long enough to quip that he hoped we would be attending the ball and that he would somehow survive till then. We laughed, displeasing the docent, as I added him to the surprisingly high tally of queer men we had encountered and engaged since arriving in Natchez. His over-the-top performance alone was worth the extra cost of admission since the property is owned and operated by the Natchez Garden Club, whose defiantly regressive tours we had planned to avoid once we had experienced one firsthand.
Instead, we had booked our tours with its newly formed and purportedly more progressive rival, Living History Natchez, a group with a robust social media presence and an apparent appetite for change. This new group is not the first to take on the Natchez Garden Club and fail, so the stakes are high. We started LHN’s tour circuit at an eighteenth-century farmhouse, Propinquity, recently restored by a queer couple who were, indeed, willing to discuss topics silenced and/or refused at Stanton Hall and, until the formation of this new group, in Natchez as a whole.
From Propinquity, we headed to an antiques sale recommended to us by that couple. As we pulled up to the dealers’ mansion, I could tell we were surrounded by queer customers and antiques dealers. Disco blared as a sixty-ish queer man offered us homemade gumbo, a cocktail, and a tour of antique merchandies. It was ten AM, and the day was only getting gayer. The dealers, a couple, could not have been more hospitable, as they gossiped about people we didn’t know. They offered long provenances of storied pieces of furniture and art; they dished the dirt on Natchez’s extensive queer scene and their seemingly countless straight allies. I left feeling just like I did departing my first gay club: disoriented, disbelieving, and delighted.
As we entered subsequent mansions, “find the queer” became our favorite pastime. The effort required was minimal and the payoff priceless. Each household, with few exceptions, showcased an older queer character (not unlike a butler or some other factotum) who kept the straights in line and their taste on point. They knew who made the hand-blocked wallpaper (usually Zuber) and the porcelain (always Old Paris); they explained the purpose of a punkah and the dangers of a gasolier. One wore oddly fascistic riding boots; another a softball-sized diamond. They were queer, quirky, and incomparably knowledgeable. In each case I couldn’t quite tell if they considered themselves “the help” or the rightful heirs to the aesthetic splendor that human enslavement afforded them – indeed, they seemed to operate outside easily identifiable boundaries.
One such queer interpreter stood in the precise spot where Varina Howell married Jefferson Davis at The Briars while mocking the current owner’s taste, including his penchant for over-re-decorating. His confidence and contempt were equally compelling; he clearly considered himself the ultimate arbiter of good taste. Furthermore, the owner’s wife reacted as though he played the part perfectly. Perhaps he did, as he jested and jeered campily, reveling in the final word always being his own.
In other mansions, queer men were actively rebuilding and restoring Natchez’s oldest and finest structures. I marveled as queer artisans created trompe l’oeil faux marble mop boards, wainscoting, and faux bois doors in the nineteenth-century fashion. They too seemed to possess a kind of outsized power to captivate audiences and their employers. One such woman referred to the artisans as “her sons” despite the lack of any shared connection beyond their deep love of antebellum aesthetics.
As someone who has always sought such a queer colony of aesthetes, artisans, and domophiles, I found much to admire in that aspect of Natchez. Its queer men all appear to love antiques, art, and, above all, ambience. They don’t care that it’s no longer fashionable to be cultivated and curated in those ways; they know that you either return Varina’s parlor to what it was or leave it alone altogether. But they are also enmeshed in a place at war with itself over whether to promote a pernicious, but often very pretty, fantasy past or to face the present with all its accumulated problems and possibilities. In Natchez, it seems, substance frequently subsumes style, telling a story that favors fiction over facts, a major problem for many prominent Civil War public history sites in the American South—and for these queer men who often play a similarly problematic part in the production of “history.”
In conversation, most of these men appeared acutely aware of the Civil War’s ongoing aftermath that manifests everywhere in Natchez as racism, sexism, and/or poverty – not to mention substance abuse, violence, and despair. They also understand that it’s a place that doesn’t command the crowds it did in the heyday of heritage tourism. And yet, they seek a new vitality by way of restoration and preservation—not to mention social media self-promotion—with vague glimmers of a potential paradigm shift afoot at certain properties. At those places, and nearly everywhere else, we kept hearing about Natchez and its power to seduce, as outsiders, often queer, continue to relocate there hoping to make change even as they ultimately discover that its truest characteristic continues to be recalcitrance. As this latest seduction has only just started this spring, those of us with a particular interest in the evolving nature of public history should pay close attention to which side—the fantasists or the realists—will triumph in this, the latest version of Natchez’s endlessly ongoing civil war.
Joshua G. Adair is Professor of English at Murray State University, where he also serves as the Humanities+ coordinator. Adair’s work, published widely across literary, cultural, or museum studies, interrogates the ways we narrate – and silence – gender, sexuality, race, and class. His most recent book, edited with Amy K. Levin, is Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism (Routledge 2020).
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