01/25/2021
Journalist Padgett (Hummer) frames this hodgepodge history of 1970s gay Atlanta around the stories of a drag queen and a gay rights activist. Central to the South’s role in the gay rights movement, Atlanta (a “city with just a single skyscraper” in 1969) was rife with police harassment and community hostility toward gays, but also ripe for transformation, thanks to white flight and the 1973 election of the city’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, who was determined to be “an ally of the gay community.” In 1971, 20-year-old John Greenwell left Huntsville, Ala., for Atlanta and quickly rose to drag stardom, performing as Rachel Wells at the Sweet Gum Head nightclub. Meanwhile, Bill Smith, the son of devout Baptists who never accepted his sexuality, led the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, worked as a city commissioner, and published the South’s leading gay newspaper before he “lost control” of his drug addictions. Padgett can be a little too on-the-nose (of drag, he writes, “Sometimes, to find out who we really are, we have to become someone else”), and his selection of profile subjects feels somewhat arbitrary. Still, LGBTQ history buffs will be thrilled to see the Deep South take a turn in the spotlight. (June)
"A fizzy tale of civil rights, quaaludes and music…When stories such as these get told, it is a cause for celebration."
"I loved this book from the first moment I heard about it: an excavation of a hidden world brimming with character and humor and panache and courage (a friend of the author names his last two T-cells 'Itsy and Bitsy'), with a backdrop of 'drag, drugs, and disco'—told by a man once closeted in Birmingham, for whom Atlanta’s gay bars turned out to be the gates to freedom and to lasting love. In 'quiet drinking bars, fancy fern bars, glamorous lesbian bars, hot disco bars, and seedy hustler bars,' the gay revolution raged on, post-Stonewall, in the South, in the closing decades of the 20th century. Martin Padgett reports on the legendary folks just before his time who created safe spaces, welcoming spaces, dazzling spaces. We all know the name Stonewall; it’s time for us to learn about its Southern sister: the Sweet Gum Head."
"This was my youth. I was there. I experienced it all. I was interviewed by Martin several times when he was writing the book. Bravo, Martin! You have captured it all beautifully!"
"A portrait of the wild and wooly Atlanta of the 1970s, when the crickets of a thousand back yards gave way to the pounding 4/4 beat of Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor."
"The 1970s was a decade of enormous consequence for queer communities across the nation. In A Night at the Sweet Gum Head, Martin Padgett brilliantly illuminates Atlanta as a microcosm of this social and sexual revolution. Conjuring a cavalcade of intimate personal portraits, deftly placed in vividly written panoramas of social change, he boldly brings to life the experiences of people in one night club in one city. A Night at the Sweet Gum Head captures the swirl and excitement of personal and community discovery that created the world in which we live today."
"Baroque and beautiful, celebratory and tragic, Martin Padgett has written a deeply-researched and profoundly-important dispatch from a hinge moment in the history of the American South, when a man named Hot Chocolate danced with a man named R.C. Cola, dressed in a 'cluster of grapes and not much more,' and Atlanta emerged as a citadel of drag and a beacon of possibilities."
2021-03-31
A history of gay culture in 1970s Atlanta.
Padgett revives a significant decade of the South’s queer history through the experiences of two pivotal figures: activist Bill Smith and drag performer John Greenwell. The author dutifully paints his home city as a place formerly seething with open hostility toward queer communities, with rampant homophobic harassment, bar raids, and arrests. But change was inevitable, and Padgett leads us through the revolution via archival research and interview material. Greenwell, who left his Huntsville, Alabama, home a couple years after high school, found strength, solidarity, and unique stardom at the Sweet Gum Head nightclub as stage persona Rachel Wells. Meanwhile, Smith, despite being raised by devout Baptists (“his mother had begged him, and his military father had ordered him, to change”), “lurched into politics” and protested against anti-gay legislation while organizing the Georgia Gay Liberation Front group. His efforts were greatly aided by the election of Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, who advocated for gay rights. Smith became a city commissioner and went on to oversee the region’s gay newspaper, the Atlanta Barb, often using its pages as an activist platform. Padgett sketches both profiles with evenhanded journalistic precision while grounding the book’s core at the Sweet Gum Head, a venue incorporating “an intoxicating blend of drag, drugs, disco, and revolution” until its closure in 1981. The author illustrates both the intimacy and the nasty melodrama of nightclub life, and he demonstrates the significant achievements of Smith’s activism, the scourge of Christian crusader Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaigns, and Smith’s eventual downfall due to his drug addiction. Padgett also acknowledges Sweet Gum owner Frank Powell, who made his club a mecca of self-expression. The author’s analysis also encompasses themes of identity and gender fluidity and creatively marks the progress made by Southern queer communities in terms of sexual freedom and equal rights.
A balanced, colorfully depicted portrait of a Southern LGBTQ+ movement.
