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Citation: Solomon, Eric. August 10, I see those people on the news and they look like creatures out of a weird movie. I would never do that. The Gum Head was named after the little town where Powell grew up, from where he moved to Atlanta inand in which he would be buried following his death in Sweet Gum Head, Florida.

If the movement were to succeed in the South, it would have to succeed in Atlanta. In returning to the Sweet Gum Head, Padgett asks reflective questions of his readership: what would it mean if sites like the Sweet Gum Head remained in Atlanta today along a rapidly changing Cheshire Bridge strip? Gays must invent—write—themselves, drastically in order to hold jobs, rent apartments, be noticed in bars, etc.

Gay life is so theatricalized that we can do nothing but act out scenes, day and night.

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Aside from the professed beliefs of gay business owners like Frank Powell, Padgett understands that nightlife establishments like the Sweet Gum Head played an important role across the s as sites of connection and resistance that popularized drag and disco in Atlanta, launched the careers of performers like Rachel Wells photographed belowand complemented the more direct political efforts of gay activists like Bill Smith, Klaus Smith, Berl Boykin, and Charlie St.

Though once legion, Atlanta today has few exclusively gay and lesbian bars or clubs. And what do we make of the disappearance of such formative if temporary sites of potentiality? However, the text is far from complete. In centering the Sweet Gum Head, Padgett invites inquiry into other stages and sites.

This is not a matter of cultural isolation but of deliberate exclusion. The gay bars are atlanta and operated by whites and the policy is to keep blacks out. Padgett has made choices based upon the archival evidence and interlocuters available to him. He organizes each of his scenes around an important figure, and he proves gay skillful choreographer, adroitly connecting disparate strands between disparate figures.

Sometimes such scenes coalesce into linear narrative but more often they evoke snapshots within a panorama of experience. Did he really view his situation as similar to the incarceration of a gay Atlanta man convicted of murder, Robbie Llewellyn? Is it possible to know his mental black Is it fair to make that claim?

If we understand the gay bar to be a strip of potentiality in which queer subjects negotiate their identities and cruise for erotic encounter, a frustration of mine throughout the text was a lack of attention to the club and sexual lives of some of the central subjects. But their vastly undocumented history requires transcribing.

Atlanta, viewed from this direction, is less an Emerald horizon imbued with potentiality and more a succession of drab green road signs pointing wayward travelers toward home. It is up to the rest of us queer travelers to build upon the path making work Padgett has published. No one gives a share of a table to anyone, it must be taken with the dignity and pride of personhood.

Bill Smith may not have lived to see the oasis at the end of the road he envisioned, but his work created a blueprint for others to follow.