Formal #4: Gay in the Deep South

In the fourth grade, young Dorothy Allison had a class project to do. She was to gather information to form a Family Tree. This was a completely foreign concept to the family elders, all raised in the Deep South of South Carolina. She begins by asking her mother and grandmother if she can see the family Bible, only to be told that they don’t own one. “We don’t have a family Bible?” young Dorothy asks. “Child,” her grandmother replies, “Some days we don’t even have a family!” The humor that Allison is able to convey to the reader while describing her horrid upbringing is refreshing and amazing. Painful and mean, but never bitter. It is amazing to read what the young Allison endured and to see the final product in her 40’s emerge assured and confident of who she is and where she is going. Dorothy Allison is full of piss and vinegar. She’s got a lot to say and she’s certainly not afraid to say it. This is the attitude that literally jumps off the pages of her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure.
Allison says that the early Feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change." However, she admits, she would never have begun to publish her stories if she hadn't gotten over her prejudices, and started talking to her mother and sisters again. (http://www.dorothyallison.net/) The caption under her photograph on her website says: “Understand me. What I am here for is to tell you stories you may not want to hear. What I am here for is to rescue my dead. And to scare the hell out of you now and then. I was raised Baptist, I know how to do that.” Allison is a storyteller, as is Tony Kushner.
It is interesting to note that Two Things I Know For Sure and Angels in America, by Tony Kushner, both deal with the prominent topic of homosexuality. Allison gives us the details of some of her early relationships in which she explores her sexuality in the context of her upbringing, education and the time in which she is discovering herself (1970’s). Free love abounds and free expression of the sexual self is widespread and somewhat accepted in the looser 70’s. Angels, however, deals with the onslaught of HIV/AIDS in the homosexual community in the early 1980’s and the stigma that this creates in society. In the early years of the epidemic, ignorance and fear resulted in widespread discrimination against AIDS patients, in the early days mostly gay males, fueled by the sensationalistic manner in which the media reported it. Kushner, himself a gay Jew who grew up in the Deep South, chose to tell his story in the form of a play, a 'Gay Fantasia on National Themes', where Allison chose to tell her story in memoir form.
The phrase “a gay Jew who grew up in the Deep South” makes me wish Kushner would write a memoir.