Propriety & Perversion

New Orleans Film Society
10 min readMay 10, 2023

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by Hanna Lane Miller for South Summit 2023

It was the summer of 2012, and it was either mini skirts or carburetors. A new set of choices sat ahead that, if played right, led to my one goal: getting out of Mississippi.

From the time I could read, I knew other lands, better lands, awaited. A poor person in a poor place, I knew even my dreams were limited by the scant inspiration available. I wanted to see the worlds I read about. Born into a will to survive, I wanted to thrive. I wanted abundance and access to what my family couldn’t afford. A preteen, I felt bigger than where I came from.

The dilemma was this — as a young person in a rural town, I had to have an extracurricular, or else I’d die of drugs or teen pregnancy or boredom. Would I go for the unconventional choice, the hobby I’d developed as a child, racing enduro motocross? Or, would I take the path of the pretty girls before me, the ones who I wanted to be like and who I was attracted to? Would I become a cheerleader? The gender roles and their accouterments were prime in this discernment.

If I rode motocross, I could keep being crass, tomboy-ish. Maybe I could still walk around in jorts, chewing tobacco and spitting into dirty styrofoam cups. In a way, it’d confirm the community’s concern that I might be at least sort of gay, and that transparency could be nice.

Conversely, if I went the cheer route, I’d have to start shaving my legs. Perhaps I’d need to look into a heeled shoe at some point. The opposite end of the spectrum from the racetrack, being a cheerleader meant leaning into a clearer, more acceptable feminine role, and as my own identity was forming, what was and wasn’t a misrepresentation was unclear. Could I be all of it? Could I be boyish in bloomers and padded bras?

I went with the cheer squad. It didn’t take much for me to gather that acting or looking a certain way would afford me attention and interest, as well as safety. So, I put on the golden handcuffs that were hair straighteners, make up, and pompoms, and in that, I took a step closer to the state line. But in the years between somersaults and putting Mississippi in the rearview, rather than resist curiosities or deny relationships, I did a funny thing: I accepted it all, I gave in as much as I was relentless, and my Southern, queer sanctuary formed.

We sold my dirt bike, but the trails I’d made through the woods weren’t expendable. I still knew where it was quietest and most secret. In a nook there, I had my first kiss: My best friend and fellow girly athlete. In a hidden cranny, I’d sit for hours and write love songs about long hair, pretty smiles, and Victoria’s Secret’s Love Spell body spray. In those woods, dirtbike or not, no one knew whether I wore a shirt with my jean cut offs. In a world governed by visibility and identity politics, the invisibility of the woods was a necessary reprieve for my forming queer identity.

Eventually, the secret smiles shared between my friends and me grew into conversations and community. When the star football players snuck around on their girlfriends with the token “gay kid,” we nodded our heads. That made sense. In lone pastures with bottles of Andre, stepping over cow patties in work boots and high heels, we traded clothes and walked the dirt road runway, car radios blaring Britney to give us courage. We put words to what we could and shrugged at what we couldn’t. My queer sanctuary accepted answers in any form of expression.

When I was 16, I moved a few counties away to attend a boarding school, the Mississippi School of the Arts. It was a special, rare place where country teens tried on new identities daily, and we had all the support and love we could ask for in developing and accepting our hopes and desires.

In turn, my teenage years were filled with angst-y drag and poorly rhyming, completely embarrassing poetry. From the visual artists who wore dog collars to the High School Musical re-enactors to the polyamorous goth group, my imperfect, queer sanctuary was a patchwork of outcasts. We were hardly one cohesive group.

Across experiences, our queer sanctuary only asked one thing of us: Don’t hold back. Because we at least share being different, we encourage one another to be as bizarre as needed in order to dare to try on genders, sexualities, preferences, and dreams.

On the other hand, I have to acknowledge: Predominant Southern culture demands all of us to jump through hoops. We fearless, experimental teens also knew the measuring stick. Live up to an expectation, good or bad, and a path is formed. As a young person, clarity of any type was a relief, so we very quickly gave into this idea of measuring up and having worth that could be achieved or granted.

The reality is, acceptance is survival in a place with few resources. It’s not as easy as choosing another person or place or gas station or grocery store. Usually, there’s only one of anything, so there must be many versions of you.

It’s this scarcity mindset I know and love that irritated me and everyone I knew. I was a cheerleader. I could change brake pads. I was country. I shared love notes with the girls’ basketball team’s starting point guard. We all contained multitudes like this, even — especially — the queer kids.

I have never been able to distance myself from holding these two truths, contradictory as they are, at the same time with equal weight. Today, I am as much looking for a measuring stick as I am holding space for the wiliest, most boundless ideas and people.

When I finally left Mississippi, my first stop was Tennessee. Ironically, in my tizzy to escape home, I landed across only one state line — at the University of the South, nonetheless. The cheerleader in me would call that a fumble. The southerner in me knew that was not good enough. The queer in me, all too certain I could find a feminist punk movement to join anywhere, thought moving abroad to Russia would be a good idea. Of course, none of this makes any sense, now or then.

Russia was a lot like Mississippi. There was a measuring stick there, too. There were issues of visibility within queer culture, and there were identity politics at play that carried great risk. I think because of the physical distance and the new language and spaces, in that faraway land, I was able to remove myself from judgment — of pious Southern culture, of homophobia, of myself.

One afternoon, I was screening American Beauty for a film class I was teaching. I was screening the film in my apartment, only proving to my students and friends I was far too transparent to really make it in this city known as the “Detroit of Russia.” Halfway through the screening, I went into my cramped kitchen. The smallest room in this apartment, it always held the most people.

One of my students sat down at the table. She told me about her forbidden love for another woman. I don’t know if it was the American naivete or the fact that last week’s film had been Paris is Burning, but somehow, I was trusted as a safe place to store this woman’s questions, desires, and concerns. As happens in these vibrant but silenced communities, once I made an initial connection, at seemingly every turn, I found a new queer Russian confidante.

Love, community, and acceptance afforded me safety and happiness abroad. I earned my keep with kindness and openness, and with that, I found a queer community in a city as familiar as it was another world. With distance as a tool for clarity, that community confirmed what was so special to me in my Mississippi: Expansiveness. I found it in Russia, and I was honored to share in it while there; but, I knew it wasn’t a version that was wholly mine or truthfully part or all of me. I missed home.

Nevertheless, I continued to run from where I came from, despite missing its richness everyday. It took years for me to put on my big girl helmet and rev the motor right back to Collins, Mississippi. The thing was — I had to return home on my own terms. I had to find a place that’d fit me and every contradictory identity choice I’d made throughout the years, which was hard, as I’d found too much comfort in extremes.

In this consideration, the second trademark of my queer, Southern sanctuary became apparent: Choice. From the preteen dilemma of visibility to the young adult admittance into another culture, I had been exercising choice, vehemently pushing for more options, in search of a place for my own agency, not just a stage for my performative surrender.

The queer South taught me how to try things on for size, to examine and ponder, and to say yes or no — or, more often, an in between yes-no that afforded some type of leverage for some type of access or resource at some great, but vague, price.

One day, I came home for a visit. I could not will myself to leave. It was early spring, and the blackberries were starting to grow by the train tracks. The community pool was about to open. The mosquitoes were getting ready for another year of flying us all away. The humidity was just about to set in, and I wanted to be there for all of it.

I missed walking back and forth down the same dirt roads, going over to the softball fields to see who was there, riding up to Sonic for some ice cream and a little gossip, if I was lucky.

I missed dropping lines about abortion, praising my favorite drag queens, saying “partner” in reference to my romantic interests to see if I could raise any eyebrows or — better yet — questions.

The choices I’d made about my own visibility as a queer Southerner had created a paradox of propriety and perversion. I had grown comfortable being one way and looking another. I even felt joy in heels and earrings, wiggling my way into laced up groups, watching reactions when the most exclusive of folks realized they were friends with a queer, un-Christian white girl who had tattoos and an accent.

Wearing the jersey of the opposing team, making a mockery of convention by being the epitome of a flawed system felt honest — and hilarious. As an adult, I was able to settle into the massive gray area between the binaries I’d been bouncing between. Somehow, within each compromise and opposing reality, I had been able to realize my full self. The queer South has always let me be everything that I am, and because of that, I feel emboldened to accept who I am — and that, at any point, I could become even more.

The queer South, my home, isn’t a perfect place. It’s messy, and it’s peaceful the way the last day of revival week is peaceful; there’s a whole journey to landing on a saving grace.

The people who compose this culture aren’t all alike. What we share is that we have a story. This amalgam of rambunctious, contemplative, colorful, binary, non-binary, and completely zany folks is where I learned to take on too many things, to want to be everything I am.

Finally, over a decade after leaving, I returned to Mississippi and stayed in my tiny hometown for almost a year. Now in New Orleans, and being so close to family and memories, every wound has reopened, every dropped conversation has come right back up, every hardship distance muffled now blares.

I am right back in Mrs. Jones’ biology class, passing notes filled with cheap internet homoerotica and new vocabulary. I am telling secrets about what we found in a friend’s parents’ bathroom. I am offering an ear to a friend; it’s her second marriage to an abusive man and third child — and just another time she’s cheated with a woman. “Wasn’t that just a phase?”

Certainly, there’s plenty here that’s hard to return to, and there’s no defense for the relentless, compounded miseries. There’s nothing redeeming about a silenced group. There’s nothing acceptable about never accepting another human being as anything but full.

Knowing who I am and where I stand, though, gives me clear purpose and direction. My home and my sanctuary are the earth that grounds me. I didn’t return and I don’t stay in acknowledgement of the burdens and pain. Having been gifted expansiveness and choice, I want to be here in gratitude of what you never hear: The South is queer, the South is bigger than you can imagine, there is and always will be space for us all because you can’t stop dirt bikes from clearing a path or cheerleaders from kissing in the woods.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hanna Lane Miller is a documentary filmmaker from Collins, Mississippi who has partnered with the New York Times, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Rolling Stone, POV, Independent Lens, and more. Her Op-Doc “We Became Fragments” was IDA-nominated and won Best Documentary at an Oscar-qualifying festival. In 2020, Hanna won the Best Cinematography Award at Georgia Shorts Film Festival, and in 2021, she won an Edward R. Murrow Award. She is working on her first feature documentary, a film set in a small Mississippi town.

Hanna has a BA in Russian and a Masters of Journalism from UC Berkeley. She is also a Fulbright Scholar.

This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2023. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms Ford Foundation, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Council New Orleans.

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