Summary Of ' Sheriff Bud Wendell Drove Patiently Down Route 41 '

In the novel Montana 1948, by Larry Watson, we witness this through the eyes of David a 12 year old narrator, the sickness and death of his beloved caretaker Marie Little Soldier by the doing of his Uncle Frank whom he has always looked up to. An important character central to the story is David’s father Wesley the sheriff of Bentrock who is brave, courageous, conflicted and, protective of his family. A message Wesley helps us understand a thought-provoking message that it is difficult to choose between family and doing the right thing.

Being a person that is neither a part of LGBT nor a rural community, the experiences talked about in the book were not normal to me. While Gray interviewed many people, the person that stood out to me the most was Mary Bird. Gray met with Bird in 2002, in search of more information about the rural communities. Bird was a 60 year old woman that was President of Grayson County Extension Homemakers Association (KEHA). Her association was in support of the LGBT community, to educate those in the rural area who do not understand and to also help the LGBT youth become more visible. Bird stood out to me the most because she sought to change the rural town where she lived. She believed her lesbian daughter to be “the most precious gift that she was ever given”(pg.42) and her passion to reach out to try to help parents or anyone accept the LGBT community, was heartwarming. She understood her rural community to be non-educated, very poor, and stereotypical. Being from an urban area, my first

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a homosexual subculture, uniquely Afro-American in substance, began to take shape in New York’s Harlem. Throughout the so- called Harlem Renaissance period, roughly 1920 to 1935, black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other [on] street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent parties, and worshiping in church on Sundays, creating a language, a social structure, and a complex network of institutions.” Richard Bruce Nugent, who was considered the “perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement” said, “You did what you wanted to. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.”

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, society wasn’t the most accepting of places for people who were different from the “social norms”. Now I know, people today still struggle with trying to fit in and be “normal” but it was different. Being a gay man living in San Fransisco at the time, which had a large gay population, Richard Rodriguez had a hard time dealing with the discrimination he faced. Richard Rodriguez was an American journalist who wrote and published a memoir about his life as a gay man. In October of 1990, Rodriguez published his memoir “Late Victorians” in Harper’s Magazine, a critically acclaimed publication of the time. In his memoir, Rodriguez describes what it was like to realize he was gay and watch as the country changed to become a more accepting place. He does this by setting up how things can change and then explaining the actual ways things change for the gay population.

Wesley was feared by just about everybody, “His name was Wesley Cobble, and nearly everybody in the school was afraid of him” (Lubar 41). He was known for stealing people’s

Life for most homosexuals during the first half of the Twentieth century was one of hiding, being ever so careful to not give away their true feelings and predilections. Although the 1920s saw a brief moment of openness in American society, that was quickly destroyed with the progress of the Cold War, and by default, that of McCarthyism. The homosexuals of the 50s “felt the heavy weight of medical prejudice, police harassment and church condemnation … [and] were not able to challenge these authorities.” They were constantly battered, both physically and emotionally, by the society that surrounded them. The very mention or rumor of one’s homosexuality could lead to the loss of their family, their livelihood and, in some cases, their

Virginia (1967) decision led to a shift during the era in which the Supreme Court prepared its decision. In doing so, Somerville theorizes that what is crucial about the intertwining of race and sexuality is not the analogical relation but rather the way in which the former depends on the latter for its normative values. It is evident that to some extent the juridical sphere in the Loving v. Virginia (1967) decision employs a universal sphere in the features and right of marriage for all people without restrictions of race, while on the other hand it is at the same time stigmatizing the features of homosexuality as an uncertain, poorly legitimatized foundation for the exclusion of those who are share this same sex love in the state, suggests that miscegenation analogies promote the omission of this heterosexualizing of race as well as the racial construction of homosexual practices that Loving v. Virginia in turn helped move

As a small child, I viewed several men get hung or whipped in the town square for doing things far less terrible than I.” He answered. After Alana left the scene of the punishment she went to the governor, Lewis Morris, to interview him about crime and punishment. His thoughts on the subject were “If you do the crime you should do the time in punishment.” Alana replied, “Are you the one in charge of the punishments or is it the Puritan church leader or as I’ve heard of them as “Blue Laws”.

In her book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture, Siobhan Somerville uses film and literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to demonstrate the ways in which early models of homosexuality were often embedded within discussions of race, specifically “the bifurcated constructions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies” (175). Somerville notes that discussions of sexual orientations emerged at the same time Plessy v. Ferguson, the supreme court case that affirmed the government’s right to determine an individual’s racial identity, was settled. She contends that the development of sexual classifications alongside the U.S. governments “aggressive policing of the boundary between ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies” was more than a coincidence in timing (3). Somerville argues that this new polarization of bodies and focus on sexual desires echoed a similar, simultaneous shift in racial thinking. During this shift, the cultural figure of the mulatto gave way to a new visualization of the races as natural opposites, and increasing numbers of legal and social devices were created to prevent people of different races from engaging in sexual activity with one another. Thus the materialization of new sexual categories paralleled, and was profoundly influenced by, the hardening of the "color line," the division of Americans into racially segregated categories.

Benway, a representation of the state’s control, relates Carl’s homosexuality to a disease, saying “We regard it as a misfortune… a sickness… certainly nothing to be censured or uh sanctioned any more than, say, tuberculosis.” By comparing the two, Benway is able to imply that homosexuality is life threatening and contagious. Benway tells Carl that the threat of illness requires the intervention of “authorities concerned with public health.” For this intervention of the state to occur, Carl must concede that he is abnormal, and that it is the state’s responsibility to rehabilitate him. In effect, Carl and other patients create a social stigma of their

Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. (hb). ISBN: 0-226-35471-7.

The lavender scare, as coined and explained by David Johnson, refers to the period of time during the 1950’s when a massive witch-hunt that targeted homosexual government employees was thriving in America’s social system. Johnson calls it the lavender scare in order to draw parallels with Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, which happened at the same time, and to echo the common association during the 1950s with gay men and what was commonly considered an effeminate color (Johnson 2004). Friedman also writes about the lavender scare, citing Joseph McCarthy as the main proponent of this political and social movement. During the scare, Friedman argues, McCarthy set the homophobic precedent that millions of Americans would adhere to in the following decades (Friedman 2005). During the lavender scare, Gregory Lewis and Louise Robbins detail how the attitudes of homophobia created harmful legislation that led to the mass firings of thousands of government employees (Lewis 1997; Lewis 2001; Robbins 1994). Dennis Altman and Ian Lekus both argued that the lavender scare caused widespread homophobia throughout the government that then transferred to the general population (Altman 1998; Lekus 2006). Kevin Leonard also brings up the important point that homosexual people of color, specifically African Americans, were subjected not only to the copious amounts of homophobia during the mid 20th century, but also the incredibly racist

This event is relevant to policies regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights such as same-sex marriage and discrimination against sexual orientation or gender. Jane Anderson’s great aunt, Edith who was a lesbian was living a life hidden from society in which being gay was not only prohibited, but it was also suppressed. This prejudice was apparent given the fact that she was judged by her family 's lawyer of being gay and it was easier for him to deceivingly institute her in an insane asylum. This specific example

In Siobhan Somerville’s essay, “Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces”, the tacit allusion to homosexuality within Hopkins’ story is argued to be a resource used to question the dominance or implicit strength of heterosexuality in the African-American community over Black women. While I do believe Hopkins may have intended for the novel to raise questions about the institution of marriage in relation to the African-American female, I do not believe the argument is as polarized as a difference between homosexual and heterosexual attraction in relation to politics between the sexes. Instead, I would argue that

Whittaker quickly became the subject of a number of financial stalkers, who would wait at his regular breakfast spot to give him suggestions for how to spend his money. They were mostly unemployed. No, an interview tomorrow morning wasn't good enough. They needed cash NOW. Perhaps they had a sure-fire business plan. Their daughter had cancer. A niece needed dialysis. Needless to say, Whittaker stopped going to his breakfast spot. Eventually, they began ringing his doorbell. Sometimes in the early morning. Before long he was paying off-duty deputies to protect his family. He was accused of being heartless, cold and