Cozart, Kevin (part 1 of 2)

Authors

Kevin Cozart, University of Mississippi
David Hooper Schultz, University of Mississippi

Document Type

Audio

Publication Date

3-16-2018

City

Oxford (Miss.)

Abstract

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.

Relational Format

audio recording

Extent

1:31:47

Comments

Additional files include: abstract, field notes, audio file. Transcript is available on request.

Rights

In copyright. For permission to duplicate, repost, or otherwise re-use these images, please contact the Invisible Histories Project: Mississippi.

Recommended Citation

Cozart, Kevin and Schultz, David Hooper, "Cozart, Kevin (part 1 of 2)" (2018). Queer Mississippi (Complete Collection). 26.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/queerms/26