Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist. She is the author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, and currently at work on a book

The Devil Went Down to Georgia - The Atavist Magazine

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-27 01:30:03

Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist. She is the author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, and currently at work on a book about gigolos. Her writing has appeared in BuzzFeed News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, and other publications. Her first story for The Atavist Magazine, “The Trigger Effect” (issue no. 82), was a finalist for the 2019 Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma. Editor: Seyward Darby Art Director: Ed Johnson Copy Editor: Sean Cooper Fact Checker: Kyla Jones Published in March 2024.

In May 1991, Michael Jordan visited Atlanta, Georgia, to revel in the city’s social scene. Jordan, who was 21 and lived in Florida, came on vacation and ended up in a neighborhood called Midtown. If the Deep South had a gay mecca, Midtown was it. The bars there were legendary; among the busiest were the Phoenix, a brick-walled dive, and the Gallus, a sprawling three-floor property transformed from a private home into a piano bar, restaurant, and hustler haunt. Piedmont Park, situated in Midtown’s northeast, was a popular cruising spot, thanks to the privacy offered by its dense vegetation. Cars lined up in droves there, bearing license plates from as far away as California and Michigan. Local residents complained about the traffic, and arborists put up fences to “protect” the trees. A cop once told a reporter that the park was “so busy” with gay men, “you’d think they were having a drive-in movie.”

But Midtown’s freedoms and pleasures had limits. Sodomy was illegal in Georgia, and cops routinely detained gay men, sometimes by going undercover and posing as hustlers. “One of the television stations would scroll the names of all the people who had been arrested for soliciting sodomy,” recalled Cliff Bostock, a longtime journalist in Atlanta. The HIV/AIDS crisis was approaching its zenith, and testing positive was a near certain death sentence that some Americans, especially in the South, believed gay men deserved. Prominent Atlanta preacher Charles Stanley had made national headlines in 1986 when he declared that the epidemic was a way of “God indicating his displeasure” with homosexuality.