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This book will be great for someone looking to research Georgia queer history. Featuring a decade of the stories of the drag performers, local and National queer history, politics, and so much more all in 300 pages. I also think that it will help continue to change the perception of Atlan As a Georgia historian I knew I was going to love this book! This book, written in an oral history type style, chronicles the rise and fall of disco and drag at “The Showplace of the South,” The Sweet Gum Head. For an extra enjoyable read, spill some poppers on your bookmark.moreĪs a Georgia historian I knew I was going to love this book! This book, written in an oral history type style, chronicles the rise and fall of disco and drag at “The Showplace of the South,” The Sweet Gum Head. The research shows – he has written an essential elegy to a significant bygone era of Gay America with a southern flair. (The best I can figure it is that the Sweet Gum Head is where the Onyx Dance and Night Club Bar is now, which itself was featured in an episode of FX’s ATL.) Padgett pays the proper respect. The Sweet Gum Head, the bar on Cheshire where Wells performed, is the centerpiece of the novel, a nationally known attraction that featured some of the drag community's most polished and talented lights. Rachel Wells, a beautiful 1970s queen, is the center of the story, along with City Commissioner Billy Wilson, who fights internal – and external – squabbles in building a gay political community, all under the auspices of the political eye of Mayor Maynard Jackson. At the same time, the dance movement took over the gay community. Intersected with these fantastic stories is the birth, growth, and explosion of disco, which eventually painted the drag community into small back rooms. These individuals still have lucid memories to share about the days when Cheshire Bridge Road was a mecca for homosexuals of all stripes, ran by a cadre of characters. Padgett, who arrived in gay Atlanta around the same time I did (1996), performed tremendous research and legwork in interviewing the scene players. Padgett wisely intercrosses the drag community with the burgeoning gay pride movement happening in midtown. These individuals still have lucid memories to share about the days when Cheshire Bridge Road was a mecca for homo Martin Padgett’s A Night at the Sweet Gum Head is a sometimes funny, sometimes sobering account of gay Atlanta from 1970 to 1981.
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Martin Padgett’s A Night at the Sweet Gum Head is a sometimes funny, sometimes sobering account of gay Atlanta from 1970 to 1981. Conducting interviews with many of the major figures and reading through deteriorating gay archives, Padgett expertly re-creates Atlanta from a time when a vibrant, new queer culture of drag and pride came into being.more Against this optimism for visibility and rights, gay people lived with daily police harassment and drug dealing and murder in their discos and drag clubs. Martin Padgett evokes the fantabulous disco decade by going deep into the lives of two men who shaped and were shaped by this city: John Greenwell, an Alabama runaway who found himself and his avocation performing as the exquisite Rachel Wells and Bill Smith, who took to the streets and city hall to change antigay laws. There, the Sweet Gum Head was the club for achieving drag stardom. Martin Padgett evokes the fantabulous disco decade by going deep into the lives of two men who shaped and were shaped by this city: John Greenwell, an Alabama runawa Coursing with a pumped-up beat, gay Atlanta was the South's mecca-a beacon for gays and lesbians growing up in its homophobic towns and cities. Coursing with a pumped-up beat, gay Atlanta was the South's mecca-a beacon for gays and lesbians growing up in its homophobic towns and cities.