Brock Thompson is the kind of person who can take a germ of an idea and run with it.
Upon coming out to his father at age 18, the 34-year-old Toad Suck, Ark., (it’s about 30 miles from Little Rock) native was told there were probably other gays in the family, it just wasn’t discussed in those terms.
His father told him his “Great Aunt Opal” was mostly likely a lesbian and had lived with a woman most of her life.
“I barely knew her as a child, but it was a different time in Arkansas and women could get away with living together as old maids or spinsters, and two men could be bachelors sharing a place,” Thompson says. “It was a different time and people had different ways of categorizing these relationships, but it encouraged me to look into Arkansas’s past and I found there was a very rich gay history there.”
Thompson, a historian and Ph.D. who works in the Library of Congress’s American Folk Life division, thus began an eight-year odyssey that came to fruition when the University of Arkansas Press published his 260-page book “The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South.” He’ll read from the book Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the D.C. Center (1318 U Street, N.W.) as part of its OUTWrite Author Series.
He found a surprising amount of drag, especially in hetero-normative gatherings, in Arkansas in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. “Womanless weddings,” would have men play all the roles in mock wedding ceremonies that were held as fundraisers for regional charities and guards in Japanese-American prison camps would conduct drag shows for the inmates. A lesbian commune flourished and still exists.
“So often with gay and lesbian history, we tend to focus on the cities and tend to not think much about these flyover states, but they have a rich and unique gay and lesbian history that you can’t discard,” Thompson says.
He did years of research and says a lot of his most interesting finds came about by knowing where to look — some of the gayest tidbits were filed under non-LGBT tags. He also conducted about 50 interviews with older residents of the state who remembered the era. Thompson also intentionally tried to make it a reader-friendly, accessible volume.
“If it’s too starchy and impenetrable for a general audience, then what’s the point,” he says.
Thompson still has family in Arkansas but has been in Washington for about five years. He previously lived in London for four years for a doctoral program at King’s College, University of London.
Thompson, who’s single, lives in Adams Morgan and enjoys cycling, cooking, wine tasting, sailing and working out in his free time. His book can be purchased on Amazon for about $20.
Chicago, too cold. New York, too pricey. Washington, just right.