Getting the Story Straight – Panel Debrief from the 2024 OAH Conference on American History

The Journal of American History

This special panel debrief edition of the Journal of American History Podcast features a conversation on "Getting the Story Straight: Queering Regional Identities," held at the 2024 OAH Conference on American History.

In this episode, La Shonda Mims and Wesley Phelps have a conversation with Marina about the importance of regionality in histories of queerness and HIV/AIDS, and how the dearth of attention to areas of the United States beyond east coast cities incorrectly homogenizes and erases queer experiences. This conversation came from Mims's and Phelps's panel session, which locates queerness in regions typically depicted as bastions of straightness. Together, they argue that queerness not only occurs everywhere, but has lasting implications that emanate outward to the national scale. Phelps’s paper interrogates the depiction of AIDS activist Ron Woodroof in the film Dallas Buyers Club and argues that the movie’s historical inaccuracies reveal an attempt to straight-wash what should be a queer narrative of regional identity. Katie Batza was unable to join the conversation, but their work is still present in this conversation. Batza’s paper queers the heartland region by examining the radical potential of religious institutions, which are often associated with the region’s straightness and political conservatism.

Read more about the session here: https://www.oah.org/conferences/oah24/sessions/session/?id=5395

Music: King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band's Mabel's Dream, 1923

X: @theJAMhistory Facebook: The Journal of American History