I'll first be heading to the city called Shannon in Lee County, Mississippi to explore the potential existence of the bar "Rumors" that was highlighted in the film Small Town Gay Bar, which explores the persecution, struggles, and the creation of different communities in Mississippi, and also highlights a hate crime murder that happened in Alabama.
Rumors seems to be the only bar in the film that may potentially be still running, although the bar Different Seasons was making an apparent comeback and re-opening, so I'll attempt to explore that bar as well.
The bar Rumors created a simulated and very real community of "others" in the tiny tow of Shannon. The regulars are all friends, friendly, and all know each other's names. I'll cite myself from my previous paper:
The people who refuse to go to Rumors retain a mentality similar to those in Stuck Rubber Baby. One
man says, “if the queers don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with them. If they fuck with me I’m’a bust their head open” (5:30). The novel makes a connection between gay rights and civil rights, and this person in the film makes a connection as well. He insists that “I don’t like niggers” and that “blacks opened the gay bar,” although that is simply false. For the people of Rumors, the bar is the “only place you can come and be yourself.”
Rumors seems to be the only bar in the film that may potentially be still running, although the bar Different Seasons was making an apparent comeback and re-opening, so I'll attempt to explore that bar as well.
The bar Rumors created a simulated and very real community of "others" in the tiny tow of Shannon. The regulars are all friends, friendly, and all know each other's names. I'll cite myself from my previous paper:
The people who refuse to go to Rumors retain a mentality similar to those in Stuck Rubber Baby. One
man says, “if the queers don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with them. If they fuck with me I’m’a bust their head open” (5:30). The novel makes a connection between gay rights and civil rights, and this person in the film makes a connection as well. He insists that “I don’t like niggers” and that “blacks opened the gay bar,” although that is simply false. For the people of Rumors, the bar is the “only place you can come and be yourself.”
These anecdotes are familiar to Cruse's text, in that he creates, or highlights the similarities and overlapping of the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement. I want to explore the air of the city, the ideology of the people, and what of it allows the potential disenfranchisement of a group of people. I also want to see how things are changing in the South and in this city for the queer community.
What to listen to in Shannon? I'll go with some Delta Blues, the famous Mississippi style of blues. I'll play some John Lee Hooker, who was a son of a sharecropper, and truly connects the past with the present as he was born in 1917 and died in 2001
If I have time to make it, I'll travel the two hours it takes to get to Meridian. This is where the second gay bar that was highlighted in the film is located, Different Seasons. Although it had a troubled past of being burned and shut down, the end of the film gives light to a potential future with new owners, a lesbian couple.
Hopefully they'll be jamming the song "Boom Boom" by John Lee Hooker. Note how the video shows black people and white people both playing music together and dancing together.
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