GLR March-April 2026

with a younger man in a small Florida town. He felt happy to be desired, even if he kept his baseball cap on the whole time to hide his baldness. Michael met his last lover, Ramon, in Spain. After returning to the States, he called Ramon, only to hear from his mother that he was dead. Much later, hearing that Ramon was alive, he called again, demanding to speak to him, then rushed back to Spain to care for the dying man. Michael also recounted how Ramon had hit him during a car ride, while Michael was being overly dramatic. While telling Reigns not to share this story with anyone, he clearly enjoyed telling it, remarking that he never thought he would stay with a lover who hit him. In fact, he confessed that this was the incident that straightened him out. Reigns shares many stories about Michael’s sense of humor and rebellious spirit. Newly required to wear a tie for work, he put it on his forehead, as his employers had never specified where it was to be worn. At a Christmas party he tied mistletoe to the crotch of his jeans. Reigns once related to Michael, over the phone in an airport, that a man was touching himself while staring at Reigns. Michael’s remark and Reigns’ loud reaction caused the man to run away, to their delight. Michael had a small table in his home with photos of dead friends. When Reigns once showed up to his house late, he found that Michael had put his photo on that table. A fan of Judge Judy, Michael scheduled doctors’ appoint ments around episodes and dreamed of running into her, since they both lived in Naples. He also enjoyed Andrew Holleran’s work, giving Reigns a copy of Dancer from the Dance and re marking that “it was his memoir.” Six years after Michael’s death, Reigns got a copy of Holleran’s latest book, appropri ately titled Grief . In an early poem, “Sting,” Reigns remembers being terri fied of bees as a child, hearing stories of people dying from their stings. As a teenager he was both fascinated and frightened by older gay men, wary of the virus they might have but intrigued by their experience. This led him to clubs at fourteen and later to Michael, who helped ease his fears. Still, disease haunted him. He spent a day after a risky sexual encounter on the phone desperately trying to get medication—this is how he remem bers his young adulthood. After Michael’s death, Reigns thought of his friend as very old, but he realizes now that he’s older than Michael ever was. Issues of aging that he deals with, like glasses and back pain, are ones that Michael never had to worry about. _________________________________________________________________ Charles Green is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland.

P ETER M UISE Toil and Trouble

FORASPELL Sissie Collec ti vism and Radical Witchery in the Southeast by Jason Ezell Univ. of North Carolina Press. 278 pages, $29.95 I N HIS deeply researched chronicle ForaSpell , author Jason Ezell focuses on a subculture of self-proclaimed gay “sissies” who lived in the American South (particularly Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina) between 1976 and 1981. The sissies made up a small network of leftist gay men who lived in collective houses—an idea they borrowed from lesbian feminists—and practiced a modern, politically in formed style of witchcraft. The sixteen men that Ezell focuses on also participated in left-wing small-press publications and were active in various liberation movements. “Sissy” is not a term often used by gay men to describe themselves in the 21st century, and Ezell provides an enlight ening background showing how these men came to embrace that word. In the early 1970s, members of the New York Gay Liberation Front (GLF) wanted to reclaim the word “faggot” as a source of power. Members of a GLF group claimed that “fag got” originated as a slur for gay men because they were used as fuel for the fires that burned female witches in the Middle Ages. This etymology is false, but the more radical members of the GLF accepted it, in part because they felt it demonstrated that gay men were natural allies of feminist women. Other, even more radical members of the GLF went further and claimed that male homosexuality was “an early but woe fully incomplete step in the dismantling of the patriarchy.” Call ing themselves “effeminists” or “flaming faggots,” they wanted to destroy all traditional male roles in society, including those in gay culture. They were opposed to gay bars, bathhouses, the leather and BDSM scenes, and pornography featuring “beef cake.” They also disapproved of drag, which they considered a parody of women’s suffering, and instead opted for a more an drogynous, nonbinary way of dressing termed “genderfuck.” The effeminists and flaming faggots believed that women should lead the revolution, and men (including gay ones) should be followers. In September 1976, five self-proclaimed “angry faggots” who lived together in a collective called Mulberry House in Fayetteville, Arkansas, traveled to Oregon for the leftist Fag gots in Class Struggle Conference. They found it eye-opening in both positive and negative ways, and afterward they decided to refer to themselves as sissies in reaction to the faggot image presented at the conference, which they felt was too Eurocen tric, white, and masculine. As in the present day, descriptive ter minology for members of the queer community was quite fluid, and the five sissies sometimes also called themselves fairies. The Mulberry House sissies, along with others they met and inspired, went on to form several other collectives: the Louisiana Sissies in Struggle in New Orleans; Running Water

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