The Carolina Gay Association, the Southeastern Gay Conferences, and Gay Liberation in the 1970S South

This project explores how the successes and failures of local organizing networks in the South shaped national conversations on the rights of queer Americans. Its starting point is 1970 with the Triangle Gay Alliance’s formation in Raleigh, and it ends in 1978 with the third annual Southeastern Gay Conference and repeal of Miami-Dade County’s nondiscrimination ordinance. Paying close attention to the founding of the Carolina Gay Association in 1975 and the subsequent Southeastern Gay Conferences (SEGCs), the thesis connects the attendance at conferences to locally-organized activist groups from North Carolina to Florida to show that rather than being “lonely hunters” without political or social goals, queer Southerners were in fact developing tactics to extend their rights and stake their claim to their homes in the Southeast. Finally, the project looks to the various political actions, literary organizations, and other community groups that formed as direct results of the Southeastern Gay Conferences, pointing to their centrality in an increasingly active and aware queer South. The first chapter provides the backdrop of national gay liberation and the political climate that led to the formation of various queer groups as well as opposition to their formation, especially the Carolina Gay Association at UNC Chapel Hill. The middle chapter focuses on the Southeastern Gay Conferences of 1976, 1977 and 1978, and on the events that occurred during them specifically, as well as the issues that emerged from them. The final chapter begins to examine the outcomes of the organizing that coalesced at the SEGCs, specifically the Miami-Dade nondiscrimination ordinance, Womonwrites Conferences, and lesbian literary ventures such as Sinister Wisdom and Feminary

The Southern Front: Gay Liberation Activists In The U.S. South And Public History Through Audiovisual Exhibition

This project expands upon the historical work done in the master’s thesis “The Carolina Gay Association, The Southeastern Gay Conferences, and Gay Liberation in the 1970s South,” and builds on its work through an examination of public history’s impact for LGBTQ+ southerners. The audiovisual exhibit, both physically and online, investigates queer southern activism within the context of the Carolina Gay Association and its subsequent conferences, the Southeastern Gay Conferences. The public history work uncovers how activists remember their own involvement within the organization and how they were connected to national conversations surrounding gay liberation. The photography portion of the project represents the activists as they are today, some 50 years after the founding of the CGA, and places them within the present-day conversation on queer activism in the South, as well as the blurred line between public activism and domestic space. The paper stimulates conversation on how documentary processes can assist in historiography and archiving

Tupelo Pride 2019 Exhibit

The Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi launched during Tupelo Pride 2019\u27s opening event at the Link Centre. IHP-MS had an information table with two pop-up exhibits: a selection of record covers from the collection of DJ Prince Charles (Charles Smith), now housed in the University of Mississippi Libraries Archives and Special Collections, and a selection of ethno-poems , curated by graduate student oral history interviewers Maddie Shappley and Hooper Schultz

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

CMS physics technical design report : Addendum on high density QCD with heavy ions

Peer reviewe

Burchfield, Hays

In this interview, Hays Burchfield discusses his life as a gay man and lawyer living in the state of Mississippi. Burchfield talks about his childhood in Vicksburg and Eupora, MS, his time as a student at the University of Mississippi, and his experience coming out of the closet. He then talks about living in Washington, DC, his time as a reporter in Virginia and North Carolina, and his eventual choice to move back to Mississippi to attend law school at the University of Mississippi. Finally, Burchfield talks about his law practice in Eupora, his marriage to Josh Whitlock at the University of Mississippi’s Paris-Yates Chapel, and running for the county attorney of Webster County, which was ultimately unsuccessful. This interview was conducted as a part of the Queer Mississippi Oral History Project through a grant from the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, in partnership with the Invisible Histories Project, in 2019

Criss, Leslie

Leslie Criss is a lesbian woman who grew up in Grenada, MS. She is one of two children and grew up with her parents, around the corner from her paternal grandmother. Leslie is the wife of Cheryl Sproles. Leslie went to Mississippi College, studied English, and moved to Vicksburg, MS after college, where she began a career in newspaper journalism. Criss did not come out of the closet until she was 39 years old, by writing a letter to her pastor at the Episcopal Church in Tupelo, where she was living at the time. Although she had many gay friends throughout her life, she never had considered that she was a lesbian until she was relatively old. Leslie will soon retire from the Tupelo Daily Journal

Cozart, Kevin (part 1 of 2)

Cozart, who grew up in Serepta, Mississippi, has lived in North Mississippi his entire life, and in Oxford since 1999. He provides an overview of rural Mississippian life in the 1970s and 1980s, including his extended family and small-town church. He describes the place of the Mississippi School of Math and Science in his personal recognition of his identity as a gay man, and of the individuals there who were out as gay students in the 1990s. He discusses his upbringing in the Southern Baptist church, and his later disillusionment and break away from the church due to its regressive stances on homosexuality and women’s leadership. He discusses his memories of Oxford in the late nineties; joining St. Peter’s Episcopal church because of its acceptance of LGBTQ persons; discusses his family and how they navigated gender roles; the ways that the church is the most important community center in many rural areas; memories of the MSMS application process; his connection of education with social mobility; the extremely high numbers of churches versus total population in Mississippi; his memories of his junior prom weekend; his high school roommate coming out of the closet when they were in college; his memories of coming out his third year at University of Mississippi and his struggles with mental health related to the negative pressures of being gay. This interview was conducted as part of an assignment for the oral history seminar (SST560) taught by Jessie Wilkerson, in the spring semester of 2018. Listen to part 2 of the interview here