History Is Lunch: Pip Gordon, "Gay Faulkner"

On July 1, 2020, Phillip Gordon presented “Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond," based on his book of the same name. His talk explored the intimate friendships Faulkner maintained with gay men, among them Ben Wasson, William Spratling, and Hubert Creekmore, and offered a consideration of his relationship to gay history and identity in the twentieth century.
“The biographical record of Faulkner’s life has yet to come to terms with the lifelong friendships he maintained with gay men, the extent to which he immersed himself into gay communities in Greenwich Village and New Orleans, and how profoundly this part of his life influenced his ‘apocryphal’ creation of Yoknapatawpha County,” said Gordon.
Gordon discussed the archival research he conducted while writing the book. “I’m looking forward to showing how historians and scholars can read beyond published records to find traces and clues of minority histories, even in places we assume it must not exist," Gordon said.
Phillip Gordon is associate professor of English and gay studies coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where he became the first faculty member to receive the P.B. Poorman Award for outstanding contributions to the UW-system on behalf of LGBTQ+ communities. Gordon was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up just north of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page, / mdahofficial .