What was it like to be a queer child in South Carolina during the Great Depression? Guy Davenport, with his incomparable gift for re-creating lost pockets of time, offered one plausible glimpse in his short story “A Gingham Dress,” published in 1990. The scene is a roadside mart, where a hillbilly family is selling homegrown produce out of their car. The father keeps to himself in the front seat while the chatty mother engages with customers, who notice a child wearing a dress. “He's a caution, ain't he?” the mom beams. “Going on nine and still won't wear nothing but a dress and a bonnet. Says he's a girl, don't you, Lattimer? He's as cute as one.”â?©
Both parents are confident, of course, that Lattimer will “grow out of it,” but for now they're happy to indulge his fancy. This isn't, Davenport is careful to underscore, any sort of liberal tolerance, but rather the ornery Appalachian instinct to leave well enough alone, an attitude equally compatible with bigotry. “This Roosevelt is something else, ain't he?” Lattimer's mom complains. “They say he's a Jew.” The unanswered question the story raises is: What will happen when Lattimer is older and expected to give up the “phase” of being a girl?â?©
The author had personal reasons to ponder the tightrope walk of sexual minorities raised in a repressive and reactionary culture. Davenport was born in Anderson, South Carolina, in 1927, and grew up being attracted to boys and girls. His parents were loving, but Davenport felt straitjacketed by the pervasive Baptist prudery, which was anti-gay and, more profoundly, anti-body. Davenport remembered being taught in Sunday school “that Jesus' nudity on the cross was far more painful to him than the nails in his hands and feet.” Davenport was spanked once for uttering the phrase “political cartoon,” which sounded to adult ears like “pantaloon,” a verboten word in his household.â?©
Davenport spent much of his adulthood trying to deprogram himself from his South Carolina indoctrination. Although slow in learning how to read, Davenport quickly became a star pupil, excelling in English and the classics at Duke University and then, via a Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford, where he became the first student at that school to write a thesis on James Joyce. In his Oxford years, he became enthralled by the poetry of Ezra Pound, the subject of his doctoral thesis at Harvard. The classics and modernism were linked in Davenport's mind (he studied Pound's use of Greek myth), and both offered an alternative to the provincialism and puritanism in which he'd grown up.â?©
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