TIE Talks with Jason Ezell

Jason Ezell discusses queer liberation, intersectionality, and solidarity through a study of radical communal gay households in the 1970s American South.

Posted on December 3, 2025 in Interviews

This TIE Talks features a poignant discussion with Jason Ezell, Head of Research and Learning Services at Cornell University’s Olin & Uris Libraries. The interview centers on Jason’s new book For a Spell: Sissie Collectivism and Radical Witchery in the Southeast, which explores themes of queer liberation, intersectionality, and solidarity through a study of radical communal gay households in the 1970s. The conversation highlights how these communities forged strategies for survival and collective resistance to push back against the burgeoning right-wing extremism in the South at the time. Through the course of the discussion, Jason also elaborates on the role of ritual and nature in sustaining this radical activist community and reflects on the archival challenges of documenting underground movements that are more difficult to pinpoint in the historical record. This dialogue is especially pertinent in light of contemporary political attacks on marginalized communities, particularly the LGBTQ+ community and their allies. Toward the end of the conversation, Jason considers how the insights gleaned from the book can be used to bolster social justice movements today.

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Your new book, For a Spell, examines the Southeast Network, “a regional network of radical communal gay households formed in the face of rising New Right terror.” As you describe in the book, those within the network (self-described “sissies”) were both gay and leftists, seeking to establish community spaces for both political organizing and community defense in order to challenge the explicitly homophobic, racist, sexist, and anti-communist agenda of the emerging New Right in the southeastern United States. In the process of documenting their story, you reveal “a little-known history of Southern gay liberation, nonbinary gender expression, and radical feminism and femininity.” When did you first encounter these communal households, and what about them inspired you to research them further for a full-length study?

I first visited the Tennessee Radical Faerie sanctuary at Short Mountain around the turn of the year 2000. One morning, before dawn, I woke to meet a bearded person in a dress rising to milk the goats. I later thumbed through politically charged issues of RFD stacked in the farmhouse library. It was thrilling to discover a rural queer community not far from the farm where I had grown up. I returned to Memphis to join a local Radical Faerie group working to create an urban sanctuary in the Rozelle Annesdale area. But, I still wanted to know how a sustained queer community got a toe-hold in Tennessee mountain country in the first place. So, later, in graduate school, I conducted online surveys and exploratory interviews with the community, finding competing origin stories. This led to my discovering archival records, mainly at Georgia State and Duke University. Georgia State archivist Morna Gerrard introduced me to poet and activist Franklin Abbott, who had just donated a trove of relevant historical materials. When I interviewed Abbott, he made mention of what he called the “great sissie archive,” and he introduced me to all his compatriots from the 1970s. Through oral interviews with these amazing people, the culture, which predated the Radical Faeries in the Southeast, came to life for me.

Can you elaborate more on the importance of intersectionality to the work of the Southeast Network, e.g., how they drew inspiration from or collaborated with other marginalized communities, as well as the importance of ritual and nature to members of the network and what it meant for their movement?

This is an important and complex topic. Historically speaking, the sissie culture grew out of New Left organizing. The traditional Left had often placed focus on the revolutionary potential of the white male industrial worker, but the New Left—often led by the example of the Black Panthers, but later, too, by women’s liberation and the Young Lords—formed parallel movements based on specific racial, ethnic, and gendered experiences of Western imperialism. This meant that separate radical movements were formed to address the unique oppressions of different groups. This situation could be challenging to people who belonged to multiple groups—for example, radical Black feminists—and also led to less diverse organizations. Out of this climate, women of color feminists would develop the concept of interlocking oppressions and, ultimately, in the late 1980s, intersectionality, as defined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. In the meantime, though, 1970s radicals would work toward solidarity: a revolutionary alliance across very different New Left groups. Solidarity depended on different movements coming together to fight diverse forms of oppression.

The sissies were most often politically inspired by regional lesbian feminists, many of whom had themselves been inspired by Black political movements. Because of this, liberationists like the Louisiana Sissies in Struggle (LaSIS) resisted single-cause gay rights movements and insisted instead on joining in solidarity, as openly queer activists, with the liberation projects of other marginalized groups. However, being mostly white gay liberationists shaped by New Left political cultures, they struggled with when and how they would be ready to more integrally join with Black and women’s movements.

Spiritually, the Southeastern Sissies were inspired by the rural gay magazine RFD and also by gay activist Arthur Evans’s book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. Evans felt that everyday life in the 1970s was manipulated by a host of interlocking institutions—churches, schools, hospitals, the military, the traditional family, journalists, psychiatry—all of which primarily operated to separate people from each other. This is why gay liberation was as much about coming together as coming out. Evans claimed that the practice of magic—especially group ritual—would re-connect people to each other and to nature. It would make more authentic revolutionary alliances possible, and it would help activists raise their most radical spirits at a time when others had proclaimed gay liberation dead.

Importantly, in tracing networks of gay liberationists across the Southeastern United States, you demonstrate that queer cultures and movements were not isolated nor relegated to small pockets alone, even in places presumed to be hostile to the gay community. What was the research process like for you? How did you find relevant sources, and how did you connect them? What were the biggest archival challenges in uncovering documents pertaining to the Southeast Network?

There is very little existing research on this subject. Because of that, I turned to print materials stored in archives and to interviews with living activists. This process often felt like connecting the dots. A reference to one collective, event, or person might appear as a mere footnote in one major academic publication, but then would take center stage in personal letters, an event flier, or even a regional scholarly book. I’d hold both sources side by side and ask, “Could these be about the same collectivists?”

Answering that question wasn’t always as easy as it sounds. In order to keep a low profile during a period of aggressive government surveillance, collectivists creatively changed their names and addresses, leaving mercurial records. Sometimes—as in the case of LaSIS—they used one name for their residential collective, another name for their political group, and still another in national media. Oral history interviews helped to confirm archival synchronicities, and I was slowly able to build coherent storylines. If the process was sometimes bewildering, it was also often full of strung-together “aha!” moments. So, the process of discovery was laced with little epiphanies. The most treasured of these was meeting the activists themselves to polish up my archival discoveries through such electric conversations.

Oral history interviews helped to confirm archival synchronicities, and I was slowly able to build coherent storylines. If the process was sometimes bewildering, it was also often full of strung-together “aha!” moments.

Were there any notable works you uncovered in the process that you could recommend to readers looking to learn more, or perhaps any surprises that readers may be interested to discover?

Because this topic hadn’t been widely researched, I was excited to find—from interviews, and from Dennis (Melba’son) Williams’s personal journals—that LaSIS had appeared as part of a TV docuseries: ABC Close-Up’s “Homosexuals” (1979). At the time of my research, the episode was only available to view at the Paley Center for Media. However, it has since been posted on YouTube. The New Orleans segments of the show not only offer brief video footage of LaSIS, but also feature important Crescent City contemporaries like Ann Toups, who was appointed to represent the gay community in the city’s search for a new police superintendent, and George Dureau, a notable gay photographer. This video allows us to peek in on late-’70s gay New Orleans. Not surprisingly, aggressive editing left very little of LaSIS’s radical message in the TV show that was broadcast; however, Melba’son’s journals reveal a complex strategy for how the collective participated in the filming.

In the book, you note how, by understanding how the Southeast Network operated, readers can in turn understand “strategies for sustaining liberation.” Given the current political climate—resurgent right‑wing movements, increased legislative attacks on gender and sexuality—what lessons or urgencies do you hope readers will draw from this history? How might the practices of collectivism, radical feminism, and underground sanctuary practiced by these gay households speak to or inform queer and trans organizing today, especially in more conservative or rural contexts?

First is a point that might be taken as obvious by some. As liberationists, sissie collectivists emphasized solidarity rather than single-issue gay rights alone. They showed up, as self-identified queers, at Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) marches, at anti-Klan rallies, and at teacher strikes, even as they sought to center the voices they saw as marginalized within the gay rights movement. And they invited allies to their gay liberation events, too.

Second, they recognized how disinformation and diseducation facilitated New Right violence. For example, they connected conservatives’ efforts to keep schools racially segregated and to outlaw homosexual teachers as part of a broader New Right purity campaign. Further, they witnessed how false, incendiary stories about Black or gay teachers triggered white supremacist attacks. Today, when “no woke” agendas similarly diseducate and disinform the public about Black, trans, and immigrant experience, solidarity-based information and education activism seems similarly crucial.

Of course, the Southeast Network also linked rural and urban collectives to form an underground, a more immediate defense against outright violence. However, it was moving for me to discover how these liberationists didn’t imagine revolution was ever complete. They planned for times “between revolutions.” They recorded the dreams they were unable to realize as blueprints for queerer futures yet to come. How they strategized for shorter and longer timelines of liberation seems useful for the current acute times.

Today, when “no woke” agendas similarly diseducate and disinform the public about Black, trans, and immigrant experience, solidarity-based information and education activism seems similarly crucial.

Do you have any advice for early-career scholars with similar interests in exploring harder-to-uncover histories of historically marginalized communities? How might they best begin exploring such research interests, and where might they turn to for support?

One approach is to dig into our own community networks to engage earlier generations. As someone who already moved in Radical Faerie circles, I routinely asked those I met to tell me stories of how Short Mountain came to be, or to introduce me to someone who might remember. This kind of tenacity pays off. For me, it led to my meeting Dimid Hayes, someone who had cared for storage tubs of letters and records for decades. This was the “great sissie archive” that Franklin Abbott had mentioned back in December 2015. In many ways, this book’s “sissystories” came from linking, weaving these long conversations. This also makes for inherently personal research.

Another course is to explore the histories not already on every shelf. Explore an area’s archives. Georgia State now houses the “sissie archive” and continues to collect related materials. Find out if there are community archives: those not affiliated with an educational or government institution. For example, I was honored to discover the Ohio Lesbian Archives in Cincinnati, and to meet co-founder Phebe Beiser. Community archives don’t often have the funds or staff to organize, describe, promote, and digitize their holdings, but they often contain unique local or regional materials. In the South, the Invisible Histories Project brings activists, archivists, and historians together to collaboratively craft archives out of those communities that institutional memory-keepers have not always served well. Finally, scour the catalogs of regional academic presses. Rich regional histories, written by smaller presses, before the ubiquity of the internet, are often less discoverable and, in some cases, virtually out of print. Look at their bibliographies; follow the breadcrumbs back. You’re sure to discover stories that deserve further context, another telling. That may be the voice of a witchy librarian coming through, so I’ll stop there. For now.

More about Jaszon Ezell

Jason Ezell (he / they) is an LGBTQ+ movement historian and academic librarian, now the Head of Research and Learning Services at Cornell University’s Olin & Uris Libraries.

This interview was conducted by Fatima Mohie-Eldin. She is one of the social science editors at Choice.

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Find more interviews, blog posts, and resource lists on Toward Inclusive Excellence.

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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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