Queer Mississippi Histories Project

The Queer Mississippi Histories Project consists of interviews with lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, and/or queer people who were born, raised, or spent significant time in Mississippi. The project began in the spring semester of 2018 in Dr. Jessica Wilkerson’s (history and southern studies) Seminar, “Oral History of Southern Social Movements,” Southern Studies 560. Graduate and undergraduate students in that class conducted interviews with people in Oxford and on the campus of the University of Mississippi, focusing largely on recent changes in the social climate for LGBTQ people and LGBTQ activism in and around Oxford.

The project then expanded when Wilkerson and Dr. Amy McDowell (sociology) applied for and received an Isom Fellowship for the summer of 2019 and summer 2020. They worked with graduate students Hooper Schultz and Maddie Shappley to add interviews with people connected to queer communities in Tupelo, Mississippi. Simultaneously, McDowell donated the record collection of DJ Charles “Prince” Smith, who had worked at several gay bars in and around Tupelo. Students in Wilkerson’s fall 2019 oral history seminar again collected interviews for the Queer Mississippi project, further adding to the collection. Most, but not all, interviews collected between 2018 and 2020 were with individuals residing in and around Oxford or Tupelo, Mississippi and reflect the experiences of LGBTQ individuals—young and old, from the state and transplants, working-class and middle-class. In 2020, McDowell became the project director and worked with graduate student Danielle Buckingham to expand the collection during a global pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, Buckingham conducted interviews with LGBTQ Mississippians over zoom, and in the interim, started her own oral history project on Southern Black Queer Millennials, which will become part of the Queer Mississippi collection. Madeline Burdine, a graduate student in sociology, joined the project in 2022 and resumed face-to-face interviews with narrators from across the state up until 2023. Burdine, who helps organize Pride of Tupelo, conducted her MA thesis in sociology on LGBTQ+ allies in the state. That thesis, which examines how straight-presenting people in Mississippi express support for queer people, can be found in Burdine’s oral history folder in the archive.

McDowell served as a faculty mentor and researcher for the NSF REU (National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates) Site: “Interdisciplinary Study of the Politics of Place.” Through that NSF REU site, McDowell mentored three undergraduate students from Widener University, Yale University, and Vassar College in the summer of 2024 as they carried out research for the Queer Mississippi Histories Project at the University of Mississippi. Two of those students, Mae Buck and Sam Street, performed oral history interviews for the QMS project with narrators in person. Street also conducted independent research on LGBTQ+ life in Mississippi for their senior theses in American Studies and in the Department of Science, Medicine, and Public Health at Yale University. Alana Freimanis, who finished an MA in sociology in spring of 2026, did research for the project in the summer of 2025. In addition to collecting supplementary archival materials on several oral history narrators, Freimanis interviewed two drag performers for the archive.

NAVIGATING THE ARCHIVE: With the exception of one folder in the archive that focuses on LGBTQ+ history at the University of Mississippi, the Queer Mississippi collection is listed in chronological order. To browse the collection, click on the folder year (e.g., 2018) to see a list of interviews and related materials collected within that time frame. Each interview folder contains an interview abstract and audio recording of the interview, among other items such as photographs and/or field notes. If you would like access to the written transcripts, we are happy to provide those in a timely manner. Please contact egrove@olemiss.edu with those requests.

This project is also affiliated with the Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi to document and preserve LGBTQ history in Mississippi.

SEE ALSO:

• Photo Portraits of LGBTQ Mississippians, by Kevin Cozart
• Seeing Queer Joy in Mississippi: Pride Parades in Tupelo, Starkville, and Oxford, by Ellie Campbell
• Queer Subculture in the Conservative South: A Study of Drag Performers in Mississippi, by Christina Alison Huff
• Drag in Mississippi, photos by Christina Huff