QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

Kevin Sessums, famed in publishing circles as the executive editor of Interview and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, depicts his growing dissatisfaction with Southern life and its hidebound segregation in his memoir Mississippi Sissy. This narrative ends with his eventual escape to the gay mecca of New York City, long recognized as the progressive antithesis to the backwoods South, and such a narrative arc from the rural backwoods to the urban North is central to many queer, Southern novels and autobiographies (e.g., Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs).¹ Key to Sessums’s maturation, and therefore key to his memoir’s plotline, is his growing awareness of the South’s entrenched racism and his various attempts [End Page 33] to cross the color line, most notably through his erotic relationship with Frank Dowsing. On the surface, a black man and a white man enjoying sex together would appear a rather blatant rejection of the normative racial and erotic codes of the conservative, mid-century American South, and in a utopian bent, one can imagine sodomy as the ultimate resignification of the region’s stifling mores of gendered propriety. But the shadow of the phallus as a signifier of male privilege—traditionally of white male privilege—looms over Sessums’s depiction of interracial gay sex as a transcendent coupling. When a black man and a white man come together in a sexual act, the exchange and trade of desire can nonetheless bolster whiteness and its myriad privileges. This potential for racism to be reinforced through same-sex intimacy exposes the ways in which the phallus, ostensibly a universal psychological construct, reflects patterns of regionalism and temporality—in this instance, those of the U.S. South.

As a memoir, Mississippi Sissy tells the true story of Sessums’s traumatic childhood, notably the deaths of his parents during his early childhood and his molestation by an esteemed minister, but memoirs inevitably function within the realm of narrative and the shifting politics of representation. As Diane Bjorklund cautions, “The story told in an autobiography . . . is not a simple excavation of events from the past since persons determine the meaning of their lives in light of later events.”² Indeed, Sessums acknowledges what every memoirist should: that his story, although true in its essence, cannot be considered purely factual. “This book is a re-creation of my childhood and teenage years,” he proclaims (“Author’s Note”).³ Likewise, in recalling his creation, as a young boy, of his imaginary friend Epiphany, he declares, “Epiphany was the first character I would make up before I ever tried my hand at writing fiction or magazine profiles or fashioning a memoir into a fable” (102). With these words, Sessums acknowledges that he is not simply retelling the story of his life but orchestrating its events to communicate a deeper moral. His narrative serves as a fable for adult readers, one that enlightens them to the searing pain of Mississippi’s racist and homophobic history, yet as Eve Sedgwick cautions, “‘Representation’ is no straightforward matter, especially in the vicinity of sex; . . . Probably any sexuality is a matter of sorting, displacing, reassigning singleness or plurality, literality or figurativeness to a very limited number of sites and signifiers.”⁴ Memoirs detailing their authors’ sex lives, including such works as Anaïs Nin’s Diary, Gary Fisher’s Gary in Your Pocket, and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, frequently generate controversy, for their candid representations of sexually controversial subject matter reveal the fault lines between pleasure and abuse, between desire and compulsion, between agency and domination.

Sexual encounters typically involve sexual organs, and within much psychoanalytic criticism the phallus stands as the chief signifier of difference. A man has [End Page 34] a penis, a woman does not, and from this biological distinction emerges a litany of privileges and erasures that cohere in the imaginary figure of the phallus. As Houston Baker summarizes, “The PHALLUS is, of course, to be distinguished from the penis. The PHALLUS is not a material object but a signifier of the Father, or, better, of the Father’s LAW.”⁵ For Jacques Lacan, the phallus signifies the desire for the (m)other, but this desire, stymied by the presence and power of the Father, therefore crucially signifies a lack that can never be fulfilled. As Lacan argues, “the fact that the phallus is a signifier requires that it be in the place of the Other that the subject have access to it.”⁶ Of central importance to the construction of queer desire, Lacan sees a fundamental equivalency of desire in gay men, positing that “male homosexuality, in accordance with the phallic mark that constitutes desire, is constituted along the axis of desire.”⁷ The premise of such equivalency nonetheless founders when desire’s lack is constituted differently due to the functions of the black father/white Father in a Southern culture historically and contemporarily founded on racial difference.

The intersection of autobiography and psychoanalytic criticism opens various avenues for considering the ways in which erotic self-representations reveal fissures in memoirists’ selves and in their construction of their selves for readers. In this regard, Robert Folkenflik, applying Lacanian thought to memoir, suggests that “one can think of autobiography itself as a mirror stage in life, an extended moment that enables one to reflect on oneself by presenting an image of the self for contemplation.”⁸ And so the question emerges of whether autobiographers, through the privileges of self-representation, uphold or subvert the ideological order in which they were raised. The Father’s Law—white, Western, authoritarian—has historically defended patriarchal and masculine privilege at the expense of the Other, including Others so defined due to their gender, race, and ethnicity. As Julia Kristeva memorably opines, “Domination and servitude, possession and deprivation, exploitation and allurement, all cavort in the shadow of phallic attraction,”⁹ for from the phallus irrupt the numerous binaries of identity and subjugation that valorize the masculine over the feminine, the straight over the gay, the white over the black, with these binaries defining much of the brute ideological force of the U.S. South.

Countless traumas and erasures descend from the assumption and defense of white phallic authority, notably, as Charles Nero notes in his critique of white gay men’s superficial engagements with black culture, in the ability of whites to disseminate “controlling images” of black gay men. Such depictions of blackness, he notes, “are far from humanizing representations,” for they construct a vision of blackness in the service of whiteness.¹⁰ This legacy haunts the South and its cultural artifacts, as it strips the phallus of any pretension of (male) universality within psychoanalytical thought, revealing it instead to be a construct acting [End Page 35] in and reacting to historical moments. Various scholars have criticized Lacanian psychoanalysis for largely overlooking the significance of race—notably in Kalpana Sesahdri-Crooks’s astute observation that “Whiteness holds out to the subject of race . . . the fantasy of wholeness as the obliteration of difference.”¹¹ Likewise, Mikko Tuhkanen observes, “race functions as the object-cause of the symbolic order,” therefore declaring the necessity of recognizing the vision of “the white symbolic order” inherent to Lacanian thought.¹² Differences of race, gender, and sexuality can never be fully obliterated, and this article extends the critiques of Sesahdri-Crooks and Tuhkanen by theorizing the significance of regionalism in the queer South to the depiction of encounters both phallic and erotic.

Although the phallus wields much power throughout Western culture, it is both real in its effects yet intangible in its functioning, for it is an imaginary construct. One can point out penises throughout art, literature, and society, but to point to a phallus is to inscribe patriarchal meaning onto the empty vessel of a particular biological mass. Numerous theorists have questioned the primacy and enduring power of phallologocentric logic, notably in Judith Butler’s groundbreaking conception of the lesbian phallus. Women, with the exception of some transgender women, do not have penises, but this biological feature should not debar any woman from phallic privilege, as Butler hypothesizes: “In this sense to speak of the lesbian phallus as a possible site of desire is not to refer to an imaginary identification and/or desire that can be measured against a real one; on the contrary, it is simply to promote an alternative imaginary to a hegemonic imaginary and to show, through that assertion, the ways in which the hegemonic imaginary constitutes itself through the naturalization of an exclusionary heterosexual morphology.”¹³ Butler’s provocative reimagination of the phallus denudes its brutal effects as the result of countless choices registered over the centuries rather than of inherent differences, and it offers the various Others of Western culture a means of resisting their construction as Other. A lesbian phallus, a gay phallus, a black phallus, a transgender phallus—all are as real and as imaginary as the (white, heteronormative) phallus, and all bear the potential to restructure the prevailing rhythms of normativity in desire. Furthermore, all bear the additional potential to undermine the universality of the white phallus in Southern culture, to expose its de facto status as the “natural” order against which all others are measured.

Within the particularly charged and troubled history of the U.S. South, phallic logic has long subjugated black people and stifled queer desire, among various other discriminations and erasures. Within the realm of Southern literature to which Sessums contributes, phallic symbols appear regularly as a trope bespeaking white authority, and they often symbolically attest to the unvanquishable [End Page 36] masculinity of a given character, thus linking him to his heteronormative counterpart, the belle.¹⁴ In particular, Confederate swords often metonymically signify Southern masculinity.¹⁵ In a telling example from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara reacts in horror when Union soldiers steal her son Wade’s sword: “That sword was Wade’s. It had been his father’s and his grandfather’s sword and Scarlett had given it to the little boy on his last birthday. . . . Wade was very proud of it and often climbed upon the table beneath where it hung to pat it. Scarlett could endure seeing her own possessions going out of the house in hateful alien hands but not this—not her little boy’s pride.”¹⁶ Aghast at the thought of her son’s emasculation and symbolic castration, Scarlett defends his phallic prerogatives as evident through his lineage and its authority. Even the vague hints of masturbation—“ patting” a sword appears a gentle euphemism for childhood sexual exploration—do not undercut the weapon’s import as a sign of Wade’s white heritage, a symbol that his mother seeks desperately to uphold. Even the irony of this scene—it is Scarlett’s maternal actions that seek to maintain masculine privilege—bespeak the universality of the white phallus in much Southern culture.

In complementary contrast, numerous Southern writers—particularly those who explore the region’s pained history of racism—employ the tenuous connection between the phallus and the penis to underscore the inherent fragility of masculinity, whether white or black. In Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To, protagonist Jed Tewksbury recalls his father’s defiant yet flagging boast of his phallic puissance: “Got the biggest dong in Claxford County—and what the hell good does it do me!”¹⁷ As Ann duCille states of black women writers and their depictions of penises, “Like [Zora Neale] Hurston and [Alice] Walker, [Toni] Morrison places the penis under scrutiny, at once acknowledging and problematizing its power. If dominative male power, as these writers suggest, is indeed located below the belt, disempowering men means not simply placing the penis under scrutiny, but under erasure.”¹⁸ DuCille provides the example of Janie in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, who dismisses masculine privilege built on the myth of the penis that she strips bare: “You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice. . . . When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life.”¹⁹ In her mock sociological assessment of Southern cultural mores, humorist Florence King satirically outlines white Southern men’s fascination with black penises: “Perhaps because he wants to be sodomized by the black man, whom he looks upon as the archetype of maleness, since blacks were the only Southern men who won the Civil War. He sees the black penis as Excalibur, whence all male power and excellence spring.”²⁰ Counterbalancing King’s cheeky appraisal of white men’s penis anxiety, Gary Richards details the force of compulsory heterosexuality for [End Page 37] black male characters in mid–twentieth- century Southern fiction, demonstrating the limits of personal agency in a world rigidly structured by the color line.²¹

From these brief examples, it is clear both that the penis/phallus signifies meaningfully in Southern culture and that various authors have contested its signification as their characters struggle to define themselves and their social positions. Congruent with Butler’s theorization of the lesbian phallus, myriad alternate phalluses function in these texts. Robert Penn Warren reframes traditional white phallic authority as undermining his protagonist’s sense of self, as it has crippled his father, the source from which phallic power should spring. Zora Neale Hurston depicts a black woman resisting patriarchal power, constructing a woman’s phallus refusing to cower before a roomful of men. Florence King, a bisexual white woman, reinscribes phallic authority for black men, casting white men as whimpering in its wake. In these various narratives and others of their ilk, readers engage with the variability of the phallus and thereby observe its phantastic construction, its enduring power, and its inherent plasticity. In Southern literature and the many subregionalisms contained within it, these various depictions of the phallus (qua penis) require the raced bodies of the South to communicate their deeper meanings. Sessums’s contribution to this cultural conversation would, at first glance, appear to be likewise deconstructive in its approach in its forthright depiction of queer sexuality, yet by his memoir’s end the white phallus reemerges as a stronger signifier than any of its alternatives.

Perhaps surprisingly for a book entitled Mississippi Sissy, with its titular subversion of Southern masculinity, Sessums’s depictions of penises convey phallic authority rather straightforwardly, with little evidence of its subversion along the lines of Warren, Hurston, and King. Sessums’s father Howard certainly sees a large penis as an authoritative sign of his manhood, as evident in a conversation between his father and a friend: “‘How big you think Frank Sinatra’s dick is?’ I remember him once asking. ‘He acts like it’s big as mine, but I bet it’s no bigger’n Kevinator’s here’” (9).²² Howard’s phallocentric logic undermines his relationship with his son, as evident in Sessums’s re-creation of his thoughts, in which Howard sees young Kevin as the Other: “What kind of creature is this? This is a part of me? Flesh of my flesh? Why don’t you want to go out and play with the rest of the boys? Shit—go shoot some hoops, son. Get into some trouble. Why do you want to sit inside laughing with the women all the time?” (7; emphasis in original). As much as young Kevin struggles against his father’s limited view of gender, Sessums echoes such traditionally masculinist sentiments about large penises as well, such as when he recalls espying his father’s member: “he kicked off that heavy pile of bedcovers during a rambunctious dream and exposed the bulge of his immense erection” (58). By allowing readers this telling glimpse of [End Page 38] the patriarchal penis, Sessums proves correct his father’s grandiose statements of manhood, formerly deployed to puncture the masculinity of a movie star.

Like father, like son, and Sessums divulges that his schoolmates found his penis quite impressive: “By the time I reached sixth grade, my nickname among my male classmates was ‘BD’ for ‘Big Dick.’ I was bigger than many of the boys around me and they had noticed how hair had begun to sprout under my arms and on my legs” (184). The key difference between Howard’s and Kevin’s penises and their phallic connotations arises in the sexual orientation of the men wielding them: Howard is straight and Kevin is gay, and so to some degree Sessums recodes the heterosexual Southern masculinity ostensibly encoded in a large penis. At the same time, by articulating this revisioning of phallic meaning within the wearied parameters of “bigger is better,” outmoded conceptions of masculinity are reified rather than subverted: the possibility that this memoir will put forth an imaginative alternative to the heternornomative phallus, à la Butler’s lesbian phallus, is repeatedly denied. By foregrounding the size of his penis in his memoir—a detail numerous male autobiographers have simply withheld from their readers—Sessums asks his readers to see it and to assess its meaning in the construction of his character, which aligns him with the type of Southern, heteronormative, patriarchal authority he otherwise rejects.

Complementing Mississippi Sissy’s interest in traditional phallic authority, and therefore undercutting its reframing of phallic regionalism, Sessums redefines sissy as a symbol of physical strength. His mother, guarding her son against the South’s masculinist bias, instructs him to alter the word’s denotation: “You be your own special word, Kevin. I know people call you a sissy. . . . Write it down. Write down that word. S-I-S- S- Y. . . . Look at the muscles those S’s have. Look at the arms on that Y. Look at the backbone that lone I has. What posture. What presence” (87, cf. 238). This scene, touching in its depiction of maternal warmth, nonetheless envisions masculinity through staid tropes of physical puissance: muscles, arms, backbone. That is to say, although conservative visions of Southern manhood would certainly benefit from incorporating sissies into their framework, sissies risk being coopted into a virulent form of masculinity that stresses physical strength as a determinant factor of one’s manhood, and therefore bolstering the ideological constructions that render them Othered. ²³ Sessums’s sissy, in other words, perpetuates the masculine myths (and tyranny) of queer gym culture.

Further along these lines, Sessums’s white narcissism troubles his self-construction as the South’s internal Other, for it raises the vexing issue of how Others, denigrated as insufficiently human within their cultures, may nonetheless see themselves as inherently superior and thus reproduce the social marginalization of various people. It should be noted, however, that narcissism is [End Page 39] not inherently destructive: as Craig Malkin points out, narcissism “exists on a spectrum” and the issue of whether “narcissism hurts or helps, is healthy or unhealthy . . . depends entirely on the degree to which we feel special.”²⁴ The question of whether a psychiatrist would diagnose Sessums as a narcissistic is beyond the purview of this article, but the generally recognized qualities of narcissism “including an excessive sense of self—self-admiration, self-centeredness, selfishness, and self-importance,” shine forth in Sessums’s pages.²⁵ Judith Butler outlines the dangers of narcissism as similar to those of the phallus, for the narcissist’s self-image becomes the defining reality through which Others are known and experienced: “This narcissistically invested anatomy becomes the structure, the principle, the grid of all epistemic relations. In other words, it is the narcissistically imbued organ which is then elevated to a structuring principle which forms and gives access to all knowable objects.”²⁶ At the very least, Sessums continually celebrates his attractiveness, which positions him not merely as the focal point of his memoir but as virtually incapable of sharing its spotlight. “I was at the height of my surly, shaggy-haired teenage beauty back then” (33), he asserts matter-of-factly. He also recalls his rapturous, Peter Pan-inspired fantasy of being kidnapped to a land of beauty, longing for Captain Hook “to come through my window and take me away to an island of boys who were, like me, lost and stagestruck and a little too lovely” (57). Sessums participated in numerous theatrical productions during his adolescence, for which he applauds himself: “I looked like a young Nureyev on stage” (172). Notably, in these celebrations of young male beauty, whiteness registers as the default skin tone.

Indeed, even when Sessums admits the attractiveness of others, a bit of narcissistic preening undermines his egalitarian impulse, such as when he remembers the adulation showered upon him following his theatrical performances: “And young men—many more beautiful than I—waited around after the show each night to tell me how good I was in the part” (243). Again, this textual evidence cannot conclusively demonstrate that Sessums himself should be diagnosed as a narcissist but that, in recounting his teen years, he presents himself narcissistically, which then colors how readers must assess his various efforts to combat Southern racism. Indeed, the very act of telling his story allows a narcissistic flair to emerge, in his unsubtle comparison between authors and divinity: “All creative spirits are Godlike in our belief that we can imbue life with the shape of art” (197). When a white memoirist trumpets his big dick, inescapable allure, and deific mission, such self-aggrandizement undercuts the purported egalitarian impulses of his narrative, particularly in his depiction of characters constructed as Other due to their race, who cannot avail themselves of white standards of attractiveness. Claudia Tate denudes the force of the Law of the Father for black characters, exposing it as “an arbitrary system of social fantasies and master plots [End Page 40] of hegemonic desire that categorically compound the adversity” that they face, and Sessums’s narcissistic tendencies collude with his white phallic authority to undercut the moral of his memoir.²⁷

At numerous points, Sessums links homosexuality with race, positing their core similarity within Mississippi’s miasma of intolerance. When Kevin picks cotton with African Americans, his Uncle Benny first points out that Kevin must follow the standard protocols of this grueling work—“ Nigger rules is your rules. No stoppin’ till lunch. Then no stoppin’ till them sacks is full” (165)—as he then compares Kevin to a gay relative who also experimented with cotton picking: “Jim did the same thing. Turned on his little Miss Priss heels just like you did. Far as I can tell, he’s been playin’ by nigger rules ever since” (166). The term “nigger rules” conveys the South’s virulent construction of any deviation from white normativity—whether racial, sexual, or otherwise—as meriting social condemnation, yet the fact that racist Southerners construe any transgression of white normativity with this opprobrious term does not therefore mean that race and gayness were (and are) experienced equally in the region. That is to say, phallic, white, Southern authority constructs both blacks and gays as Others, yet the experience of these discriminations vary widely, notably because it is much easier for gays to pass as sexually normative than for most blacks to pass as white.

Although Sessums’s progressive attitudes toward race relations surely reflect his core beliefs, given his narcissistic preening and the authority encoded in whiteness, it is sometimes difficult to discern if they are also intended to build his anti-Southern ethos, and therefore to enhance his appeal for his audience. Early in the narrative, Sessums mentions his “love of Ella Fitzgerald” (4) as a sign of his appreciation for black culture. He also cites his distaste for that most opprobrious of racial epithets even at a very young age, as if he were perpetually untainted by the ideology surrounding him: “I frowned at the latest use of the N-word in front of me, although as far as I could tell it was uttered as often around these parts as the phrase ‘Jesus is your Lord and Savior’ and ‘Would you please pass that plate of biscuits’” (14). Sessums’s family members contribute to the region’s racial oppression, even when expressing ostensibly kind sentiments, as evident in his grandmother’s words and his reaction: “‘Oh, honey, that’s just a pretty name for a little nigger girl,’ showing no compunction at all for using the N-word in a house of worship since the preacher himself often used the word from the pulpit when railing against the civil rights movement” (99). Along with his sexual orientation, Sessums establishes his racial sensitivity to indicate his alienation from white Southern culture. “I, on the other hand, no longer used the N-word myself ” (99), he declares, after explaining how he unintentionally offended Matty May, his family’s housekeeper, by asking her after Sidney Poitier’s triumph at the 1964 Academy Awards, “Can you believe a nigger [End Page 41] won Best Actor?” (100; emphasis in original). In this pivotal moment in his life, young Kevin realizes his cruel mistake and, in a Southern variation of the primal scene that dramatizes the discovery not of the parents’ sex lives but of the culture’s racism, Kevin will seek to absolve himself of his transgression through his sexual relationship with Frank Dowsing. While still a child, Kevin drinks from Matty May’s glass to align himself with her, thereby “defying my grandparents’ admonition never to get a colored person’s germs” (101). Although demonstrating his childhood concern for racial justice, Sessums overwrites key distinctions between his painful childhood and virulent discrimination against blacks, such as when he curiously links his personal tragedy—the loss of his parents—to acts of racial violence: “Different sorts of headlines followed the death of my mother, my siblings and I being the subject of ‘human interest’ features located next to a bunch of Ladies Club columns in weekly county newspapers, nestled among the stories about high school football, pork futures, and fire-bombed churches” (4). The trauma of his lost parents—to an automobile accident and cancer—is weaved in with a casual reference to fire-bombed churches, thus overlooking the vast difference between the untimely but blameless deaths of two white people and the systematic degradation of a race.

Also in this vein, Sessums’s narrative voice and use of colloquial diction both align him with the black characters of his memoir and complicate his portrayal of racial transcendence, for in parroting black dialect, he performs his narrative in a manner that the black characters within this memoir find painful. In several scenes, Sessums depicts his imaginary black, female friend Epiphany, who explains to young Kevin that they are one and the same: “Chiiild, ain’t you figured that out yet? That’s what I am—I’m you” (111; emphasis in original). Epiphany is Kevin, and in this role, she fills the lack constituted by the phallic quest for unity: Kevin can be male and female, white and black, privileged and unprivileged. But whiteness again controls the terms of creation in the South dedicated to preserving the very visibility of whiteness through its invisibility as the defining norm. It is apparent in these scenes that Sessums is trying to communicate the common humanity of people of different races, yet their voices differ between Kevin’s standard (white) English and Epiphany’s black dialect, which further constructs blacks as the Other—even when they are quite literally him. When Sessums includes the “N-word” in Mississippi Sissy, it mostly comes from the mouths of other characters (except for the traumatic scene with Matty May from which he long seeks to absolve himself), but Epiphany, as Kevin’s alter ego, uses the term “darkie” without any compunction: “‘That old darkie was wrong,’ she said. ‘But you was, too. Yo’ mama loves yo’ dead daddy different’n you. She don’t love him no more’n you. That’s the firstest thing Epiphany’s here to tell you. But you just keep a’listenin’. I got—Lawd be—a lot more to say’” [End Page 42] (99). Such ventriloquizing of black dialect through his performance as Epiphany allows Sessums the freedom to code-switch between races and voices, and so he may thus speak the shibboleths of racial animosity while not merely crossing the color line but inhabiting its contradictions.

Sessums’s performance as Epiphany recalls the similar performances of white actors playing in blackface and their long legacy of racial discrimination, which highlights the difficulties inherent in white authors playing with black voices. Of course, Sessums is aware of the pain caused to black people when whites deride their speech, as he recalls when Kevin approaches Matty May in the cotton fields: “I decided I would have to be the first to speak. ‘So, how y’dwine?’ I asked, mimicking her old greeting, the dialect tripping off my tongue with a practiced ease since I had begun to use just such expressions when I wanted to make Mom laugh as we washed dishes together” (163). Employing a joke among whites to greet his beloved housekeeper, Kevin learns that, much like his use of the “N-word” earlier, he has hurt her once again: “It was the first time I had ever seen Matty May’s old stooped shoulders straighten all the way up. She had never heard me use my dialectal expertise, and the authentic sound of it—a child’s taunt, but a taunt nonetheless—seemed to strike her right in her sternum” (163). Young Kevin realizes the interpersonal repercussions of his linguistic jibes, yet Sessums employs the same dialect to depict Epiphany and other black voices, apparently overlooking the similarity of these rhetorical situations, for surely Sessums imagined black readers constituting part of his readership. Furthermore, Sessums’s white characters, for the most part, speak standard English, aside from occasional colloquialisms such as contractions and dropped g’s in participles and gerunds—further casting the black characters as Others both linguistically and performatively.

White, Southern, gay men, because of the privileges of whiteness, can treat black people just as poorly as white, Southern, straight men can, and Sessums highlights this possibility while eliding the ways in which his narrative voice contributes to such bias. For a memoir detailing Mississippi life in the 1960s and 1970s, Sessums addresses the region’s virulent racism and enforced segregation directly, deriding such institutions as the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission as “sort of a cracker KGB—set up within the state government to rat-out its citizens and intimidate civil rights workers, sometimes violently, in an attempt to safeguard segregation” (17). Given Mississippi Sissy’s interest in interracial homosexuality transcending the color line, it is then startlingly ironic to see that the state’s gay community adheres to the proscriptions of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission: “Although up those rickety stairs Mae’s [a local gay bar] was for all the gays and lesbians who wanted to congregate in Jackson, once inside we all self-segregated. The blacks had their tables on one side of the bar. The [End Page 43] whites had ours on the other. Seldom did we mingle” (250). Sessums establishes himself as the primary exception to this rule of racial segregation by crossing the color line to sleep with Frank Dowsing, yet the power of whiteness constructs black gays as doubly marginalized, even within the queer community.

Interracial gay relationships in Mississippi Sissy invariably convey more about the white characters than the black ones, pointing to the marginalization of blackness in a storyline in which black men are of paramount importance for constructing the narcissistic desirability of whiteness. In sketching his friendship with Frank Hains, the art critic for the Jackson newspaper and one of teen Kevin’s closest allies, Sessums stresses the asexual nature of their friendship, thereby cleansing Hains of any taint of pederastic desires: “Frank Hains was my first true mentor for he did not have any ulterior motive except, maybe, in nurturing me, to expand his already generous spirit” (260). Sessums notes as well that “Frank himself had always had an appreciation for young boys, but, according to him, he had never crossed the line into pedophiliac scandal” (260). Given these statements, Sessums’s admission that Hains pursues sexual relationships with young black men points to the ultimate invisibility of black lives and ironically raises the specter of Hains’s pederastic attractions that Sessums so forcefully denies. He candidly records Hains’s interest in young black men, although he does not specify how young they might be: “Frank would often allude to his ‘dusky endeavors,’ as they had come to refer politely to his interest in young African Americans, some of whom had touched him deeply with their aspirations and narratives of maternal love” (30). It is a striking statement of white arrogance—as if young black men with aspirations and loving mothers were somehow remarkable. Sessums later reiterates Hains’s predilection for young blacks—“ Frank Hains was exclusively into black guys, but his interest tended mostly toward younger, lither, more ladylike boys” (252)—with the slippage between “guys” and “boys” hinting at the pedophilic nature of Hains’s desire while Sessums refuses to condemn his white friend for any predatory behavior. In light of the cultural baggage accompanying references to African American men as “boys,” in this passage Sessums either refers to black men as boys, and therefore degrades them, or he reveals the pederastic behavior of his friend. Either way, this white presentation of blackness bespeaks the need to preserve whiteness from potential aspersions, therefore revealing the racial narcissism behind whiteness’s phallic posturing during erotic encounters.

In presenting Hains’s interracial relationships, Sessums shields his friend and mentor from aspersions of predatory behavior or pederasty toward whites yet simultaneously provides glimpses of pederastic behavior toward blacks. Furthermore, because Sessums does not depict a moment when a young black man “touched [Frank] deeply with [his] aspirations,” these relationships are relegated [End Page 44] to the shadows of the text, ironically so in a memoir dedicated to shining a bright light on Mississippi’s tortured racial and sexual politics. Instead, readers must confront such racist bromides as when Sessums recalls a conversation with Hains: “At dinner that night, it was the first time I ever heard the expression, ‘Once you go black, you never go back,’ when Frank Hains began to regale me with how such men tasted in an epidermal sense. ‘Maybe it’s the chocolate connotation, but they are quite literally more delicious’” (252). In another such statement that plays on his desire to consume delicious young African Americans, Hains compares black men to coffee: “‘Want some coffee?’ he asked and poured me a cup, having taught me to like it ‘strong and black,’ he said once, ‘like that dashing Mr. Dowsing. I wish you two had worked out’” (278). The offhand, dehumanizing comparison of black men to coffee is somewhat tempered by Hains’s sincere hope for Kevin’s relationship with Dowsing to prosper, yet the metaphor nonetheless constructs African Americans as created for white consumption. Complimentary racial stereotypes—the sexual prowess and desirability of African Americans in this instance, but also such tropes as the genius of Asian Americans and the exuberant, outgoing personalities of Hispanic Americans—may not strike with the same bitter edge as negative racial images, yet they testify in this memoir to the authority of the white voice—who holds the power, and in this book, who wields the pen—to craft minority characters in relation to Southern codes of white desire and its inherent narcissism. The phallic alignment between pen and penis has long been noted, and Sessums further entrenches white authority as Hains and Kevin discuss black sexuality through whites’ stereotypes and desires.

It is further apparent that, although many of Hains’s friends knew of his relationships with young black men, he was unlikely to introduce his lovers to them, thus suggesting the fetishization of black bodies but the dismissal of black minds. When Kevin begins dating Dowsing, Hains encourages Kevin to invite his boyfriend—a local celebrity for his gridiron successes at Mississippi State University—to a party for the entertainment of the other guests: “It’ll be a hoot. They’ll get a kick out of meeting him. It’ll liven up the evening” (259). The invitation of a black guest would impart an air of bohemian whimsy to the evening’s festivities, and Kevin, although he hesitates momentarily, accedes to Hains’s wishes: “Would he feel as if he were being put on display? Hell, he had played football in the SEC. He was on display every Saturday, in front of thousands of appreciative white people. Five more wouldn’t hurt him” (259). Kevin realizes that his lover will be “put on display” yet excuses the white liberal bohemianism behind the gesture, grasping at the flimsy excuse that his lover is accustomed to performing for white people’s pleasure. Dowsing’s blackness, not his character nor his personality, motivates Hains’s invitation, with Sessums facilitating the [End Page 45] evening in deference to a narcissistic white desire to transgress the color line for its playful whimsy rather than to disrupt the region’s racist status quo.

Likewise, Sessums’s portrayal of his sexual relationship with Dowsing showcases the utility of black men for white men to narcissistically construct their attractiveness and their moral character. As discussed above, Sessums emphasizes his beauty at several points in his memoir, and he grants Dowsing a similar level of allure. When Hains asks, “Any cute boys at Mae’s last night?” Kevin replies, “Just me . . . And the dashing Mr. Dowsing” (284). Despite their shared beauty and their mutual attraction, Kevin views Dowsing as a political, as well as sexual, conquest, and also as a means to absolve himself for his childhood mistreatment of Matty May:

But Frank Dowsing’s allure for me was bigger than just his beauty. I had to admit to myself that sleeping with Frank Dowsing would be a way of doing penance for insulting Matty May so deeply with my use of the N-word that she left my grandparents’ employ and, in turn, my life. If I truly were not bigoted—my whole life, since Matty walked away from me in Uncle Benny’s cotton field, had been spent proving that point to myself—then I would suck Frank Dowsing’s dick and anything else he wanted me to do. It would be more than a sexual act on my part; it would be a political one.

(252)

Throughout the scope of Southern history and literature, interracial sexual relationships may indeed indicate white open-mindedness and progressive politics, yet they frequently testify to the vicious legacy of white power as well: simply put, many a slave owner raped his slaves. To look briefly at a literary example, in her novel Southern Discomfort, which tells a story of race relations and sexual desire in early twentieth-century Alabama, Rita Mae Brown refers to “what Southerners used to call ‘our special problem’”—mixed race children unacknowledged by their fathers, who in numerous instances raped their mothers.²⁸ Overlooking the South’s history of interracial sexual violence and resignifying himself as exonerated from aspersions of bigotry, Sessums employs homosexual desire as a means of individual transcendence for his past transgressions. But a blowjob is just a blowjob; in itself it hardly qualifies as a revolutionary act, and it does little to reconceive the South’s phallic preconceptions of the racialized Other.

Given the homosexual nature of this encounter, penises must be involved, and the shadow of the signifying phallus appears as well. As Sessums recounts, “Then, suddenly, he wanted to fuck me. I had never been fucked before. I told him so, and that I didn’t think I was ready for it, especially from a cock the size of his” (253). Within the South’s phallic logic that Sessums endorses in his depiction of large penises, Dowsing’s member signifies his masculinity, particularly in relation to the approaching consummation of their desire. Yet much like [End Page 46] Sessums’s celebration of his own impressive penis, Dowsing’s member does not overwrite Southern constructions of phallic meaning as much as support them. Furthermore, although the sexual positions of penetrator and penetrated (ostensibly yet erroneously) establish an erotic hierarchy, it is important to realize that even when acceding to the position of sexual bottom, Kevin directs the ensuing phallic action:

I put his hard dick along the crack of my ass and told him all about Matty May and how much she loved Sidney Poitier, too. I told him how I had offended her on the morning after the Academy Awards, when I was in second grade, by calling him a nigger. . . . I told him, in a way, that being in bed with him was a way of making up to her. Frank Dowsing said nothing as he lay beneath me and I told him all of that. He then pushed me off his crotch where his cock, becoming softer and softer, still lay inside my crack.

(256)

Within Sessums’s memoir as fable, this scene appears to flirt with fantasy, for it is difficult to imagine this lengthy discourse of penitence and regret occurring during the precise moment when Dowsing’s erect penis is preparing to penetrate Kevin’s anus. As Dowsing’s ardor deflates, Kevin turns sexual congress into a scene of personal apotheosis: he is no longer the child who blithely spouted the “N-word,” but a grown man willing to be penetrated by a black man in an act simultaneously of penance, absolution, and desire. Dowsing’s detumescence, as this erotic encounter is transformed into his lover’s site of political consciousness raising, testifies to the ways in which the white man’s interpretation of their sexual encounter shifts its import into new, unwelcome territory. His narcissistic desires of self-aggrandizement deflate Dowsing’s penis and thus metaphorically his phallic authority as well. In the tension between Sessums’s story as both memoir and fable, the fable of racial reconciliation falters in light of the memoir’s phallic posturing that bolsters white authority at the very moment it would seem to shed its power.

Few people are ignorant to their objectification, and Frantz Fanon’s account of white fascination with black sexuality details this process: “The white man is convinced that the Negro is a beast; if it is not the length of the penis, then it is the sexual potency that impresses him. Face to face with this man who is ‘different from himself,’ he needs to defend himself. In other words, to personify The Other. The Other will become the mainstay of his preoccupations and his desires.”²⁹ Fanon writes of interracial coding within a heterosexual matrix in this passage, yet it is striking that such constructions of race transcend any divide between straight and gay encounters as well. In Sessums’s recollection of this encounter, Dowsing reacts angrily to the metamorphosis of their sex act and his Othering during a moment of intimacy: “‘That’s all I am to you?’ he asked. [End Page 47] ‘I’m the buck who makes you feel better about yourself?’ His flared nostrils flared even more. ‘Fuck you, man. Fuck you’” (256). The “fuck you” that ironically suggests that the erotic frisson has evaporated and that Dowsing will not copulate with Kevin gives way to their passion, and Kevin, throughout the pleasure of intercourse, compares himself to Matty May picking cotton: “With each of his thrusts into me, I kept repeating silently to myself, ‘Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er,’ trying to approximate the dignity, threadbare, though still not thwarted, with which Matty May had ended up grunting out the name when she was picking that cotton for Uncle Benny” (257). It is a ludicrously odd and off-balanced comparison: Sessums portrays himself, when finding pleasure from a black man’s penis, as equivalent to a black woman performing back-breaking labor for menial pay and reminding herself of her and her people’s dignity through the totemic repetition of Sidney Poitier’s name. Absolution becomes the goal of the erotic encounter, further erasing the need even for Dowsing’s presence.

Even in the scene’s finale, as Kevin believes he has completed his racial rehabilitation, he directs the sexual act: “‘Stay inside me,’ I heard myself say. ‘Stay,’ I said aloud. ‘Stay. Stay’” (257; emphasis in original). Directing the actions of Dowsing’s penis, Kevin asserts his authority, and so atoning for his racist transgressions allows him to bolster his self-portrayal. At this point, Kevin’s phallic privilege blinds him—and possibly Sessums as well—to the impossibility of his memoir functioning as a fable, for, as Lawrence Thornton summarizes of narcissism’s force, it blinds him to the Other with whom he has just experienced intercourse: “For the lover and the narcissist, there is always a wild misperception of the relationship between fantasy and reality, between the hope of the passionate discourse and the vacancy it signifies. Thus, the narcissist’s quest, his hope, finally appears as a nothingness which is synonymous with his essence.”³⁰ Notably, too, this scene proves the false equivalency between the phallus and the penis: Dowsing’s penis appears actively present in this encounter, whereas the presence of Sessums’s is mostly overlooked, yet the phallic authority coded in Southern whiteness is sufficient to ensure Sessums’s pleasures are sated.

In many ways, the black characters—the black people—of Sessums’s memoir are depicted in a manner to allow the white characters to show their dedication to undermining longstanding racist codes, and therefore to enhance their own appeal. The act of narrative construction—Sessums’s telling of his story as purportedly a fable of overcoming racial difference—becomes intertwined with his construction of himself for his viewers such that the phallic authority of Southern authorship ironically subverts this mission. In a telling appraisal of his motives for joining Matty May and other African Americans picking cotton, adolescent Kevin admits: “I knew even then it had the makings of a story I could always recall to shock the friends I planned to have in New York City [End Page 48] when I grew up” (156). Thus, the crux of Sessums’s memoir is that his authorial voice, suffused with the privileges of a lifetime of whiteness, confesses the utility of black people for his narcissistic objectives. As a teen he planned to shock his future Northern friends with evidence of his racial blindness, and likewise his erotic relationship with Dowsing takes on a similar patina of privilege for Kevin as a college-aged man and Sessums as the author who tells of the event: what a great fable of personal growth sleeping with a black man will make!

Despite the fact that Mississippi Sissy validates and valorizes gay, liberal, whiteness through interracial erotic encounters, it would be remiss to overlook that Sessums does allow Dowsing to point out the white blindness that cannot fully discern the true racial conditions of Southern life. At a party with Hains, Dowsing, and Eudora Welty in attendance, Hains recalls an interview between Welty and conservative commentator William F. Buckley, in which he asked her, “How can you as a person of sensitivity have lived in Mississippi during the time you’ve lived here?” to which Welty pointedly parried, “How could one not have?” (271; emphasis in original). Hains offers this narrative as evidence of Welty’s and other white persons’ liberal commitment to racial equality, yet Dowsing qualifies this prevailing viewpoint: “I think . . . you have to be a privileged white person to have the luxury of a reply like that” (271–72). In pointing out the socioeconomic presumptions behind Welty’s response, Dowsing adumbrates the key difference between white liberals’ individual decisions to remain in Mississippi and many black citizens’ straitened financial circumstances that precluded the possibility of relocation. Only a privileged white person could reply like that, as Dowsing suggests, and only a privileged white person could write a memoir like Sessums’s. Matty May also speaks back to young Kevin’s unintended cruelty through tears (100), pointing to the limits of language in a Southern landscape awash in racism.

In criticizing Sessums’s depiction of Southern interracial relationships, I should like to conclude by stating unequivocally that I am not, of course, criticizing interracial relationships. Rather, in this telling of the fable of his childhood and adolescence, Sessums’s rhetorical choices undercut the overarching message of interracial, Southern brotherhood that his memoir otherwise promotes. Mississippi Sissy reinforces various constructions of white privilege and desire that, intentionally or not, cast African Americans as the Other in a story devoted to erasing racial and sexual Otherness. In an ironic moment of metanarrative cross-commentary, Sessums notes the ways in which the very act of telling a story can create meanings unintended and, indeed, unwelcome. In a humorous incident from his early childhood, he recalls “playing doctor” with a neighbor, whom his mother disparages as “that little eight-year- old Huck Finn hussy” (68). The girl explains to young Kevin that their parents will misinterpret their sexual [End Page 49] exploration: “‘We ain’t been bad,’ she said. ‘It’s tellin’ that makes it bad. As long as mamas and daddies don’t know something, then it ain’t bad. They the ones that make things bad and good. We just kids. We just do stuff’” (50; emphasis in original). The way in which a story is told affects, even effects, its reception, and the white phallic shadows that overhang Mississippi Sissy impart unwelcome meanings to a life story dedicated to exorcising the South of its racism and homophobia. Of course, it was not “bad” that Sessums and Dowsing crossed the color line and had sex, but in Sessums’s telling of the story, it becomes narcissistically fraught with significations that reinforce the authority and legibility of whiteness at the expense of blackness.

For in the end, white penises signify under the logic of the phallus, such that at times they preclude the emotional cathexis one might seek through their pleasures. As Slavoj Žižek admonishes, “if we are to achieve fulfillment through phallic enjoyment, we must renounce it as our explicit goal.”³¹ The phallus may be envisioned as a universal construct, yet it is always mired in moments of geographical, temporal, and cultural specificity, united to ideological paradigms antithetical to numerous individuals’ pursuit of autonomy and desire. Mississippi Sissy details the utility of the penis to sate desires, but also the intransigence of the white Southern phallus in hindering individuals from transcending the racial lines that whiteness and Southern codes have established. If gay white men truly want to break down the South’s racial borders, it is essential to realize the ways in which the phallus impedes progress in this regard, whereas the penis is, for the most part, rather negligible. In Matty May’s most memorable line, she sighs to Kevin, “Child, love ain’t enough in a place like Mississippi” (169)—and neither is a penis.