Books exploring the history of American LGBTQ communities and the struggle for equality are commonly centered around New York and San Francisco, but there’s not a city in the country without tales worth telling. In 2004, Philadelphia got a well-deserved queer chronicle in Marc Stein’s City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love (Temple University Press, $27.95), the Windy City gets its due in St. Sukie de la Croix’s 2012 Chicago Whispers and just published Chicago After Stonewall (Rattling Good Yarns Press. $28.95). A best-in-breed exemplar of this city-centric subgenre is Martin Padgett’s A Night at the Sweet Gum Head: Drag, Drugs, Disco and Atlanta’s Gay Revolution (W.W. Norton. $20). It’s a compelling read, whether you’re from Atlanta or not: Padgett is a superb storyteller. One of his smartest strategies is honing in on a short time period—from 1969 to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and a dynamic duo of central characters—Bill Smith, the overextended political activist who published the city’s first gay newspaper, and John Greenwell, an old-school drag queen whose nom de plumage was Rachel Wells. Padgett weaves in threads of broader stories—Atlanta’s role as an escape hatch for gay men from all over the south, racial tensions in the city and its gay community, an unprecedented boom in urban development—but in keeping his central narrative compact, he’s able to make the book read more like a juicy novel than a dry survey. Studded with song titles from the 1970s, soap operatic romances and bright verbal snapshots of the highly competitive Miss Gay America circuit, the book never fails to entertain as it educates, capturing not just a history, but a spirit.
