sweet tea: black queerness and the south

so part of my academic work is thinking about the relationship between black queerness and the south and lately i've been thinking a lot about the current debate in the black gay community on the in/appropriateness of muscle, homothug, gym culture, shorthanded in personal ads as simply, "no fems! no fats!". check out kevin bynes's blog on this.

i really started thinking about this last night at my most recent visit to cc's in raleigh (a gay club that turns hip hop/house on thursday nights. it's the only night that actually packs the club on a regular basis but cc's owners still insist on making more whitewashed techno the regular fare the rest of the week). while standing at the bar getting a beer a guy came up to me asking about my hair. he then proceeded to tell me that with hair like mine (a locked fauxhawk) i was in the wrong city and should relocate to his hometown of houston, tx (where apparently the "girls would eat me up"). now this was a very "masculine" guy, if black masculinity in this case is associated with what hip hop deems masculine: platinum grill and jewelry, wavecap, big white t, etc. after throwing up the "x" in an attempt to convince me just how great texas is (?!), he confides that he just moved to the triangle area and was pretty distressed at how "feminine" he found the guys around here. "they're too feminine here," he lamented. "the guys at home are like me. ya know...gay thugs. it's all that sweet tea y'all be drinkin'." i immediately thought about the general ban on "fems" lately and began to really take notice of cc's. so in this particular space, in this particular south, the "no fems, no fats" logic seemed not to apply. in fact, "fems" and "fats" dominated (overwhelmingly) the space, apparently in ways that made this particular "gay thug" as he called himself (or homothug) uncomfortable.

so i'm most interested in this guy's immediate need to pinpoint the difference in the black gay community here in north carolina. so he blames it on the abundance of sweet tea...obviously said as a joke, but interesting that he associates an almost celebratory flaunting of queer femininity at cc's and the triangle more generally, with the iconicity of southernness. and although he himself hails from texas, he made a clear distinction between texas as south and nc as south.

so how does this particular sweet tea south disrupt the possible generalizations about the lack of desire for "fats" and "fems"? how does this moment help us to think through how to define the south(s): as a psychic space, as a place associated with slavery, a temporal space, a geographic space, or a cultural one defined by foodways, let's say? what is the south's relationship to femininity? black femininity? queer femininity? and what about fatness/thickness and the south? (particularly in light of houston baker's claim that the south is defined by and through it's very "thickness" (in heat/humidity, in tangled racial histories, in violence, and possibly in bodies??)