Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: In the Kitchens and on the Verandas -- 1 Nation and Plantation between Gone with the Wind and Black Power: The Example of Ernest J. Gaines's Of Love and Dust -- PART ONE: Planters and Lovers -- 2 Intraracial Homoeroticism and the Loopholes of Taboo in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! -- 3 Homo-ness and Fluidity in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof -- PART TWO: The Southern Kitchen Romance -- 4 A Queer Sense of Justice in Lillian Hellman's Dramas of the Hubbard Family -- 5 Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, and the Uncomfortable Compromise of Black Women's Autonomy -- PART THREE: The Queer Black Fraternity -- 6 Sex, Community, and Rebellion in William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner -- 7 Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder: Between Masculine Politics and Feminine Difference -- Conclusion: On the Southern Plantation, Real Love Is Always Ambivalent -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.