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Amos Lassen wrote on 10/07/2010:

Thompson, Brock. “The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South”,
University of Arkansas Press, 2010.
Kudos to Brock Thompson
Amos Lassen
I met Brock Thompson shortly after I came to Arkansas after Hurricane Katrina and we were both members of the Oscar Wilde Reading Group, a group of gay men who met monthly to discuss a book of concern to gay life. However, shortly after my second meeting, Brock moved to England to do his doctorate and I took over his reading group which became known as Literary Pride and it was in this group that I began reviewing GLBT literature some three or four years ago. I lost contact with Brock until one day while checking on new titles at Amazon. Com, I found the listing for his book which grew out of his doctoral dissertation. I owe Brock for two things—first for making me realize what a wasteland we have in Arkansas in regard to GLBT literature and because of that I began my reviews to bring the gay community up to date and secondly for writing this book about the GLBT community here in Arkansas. I am still new to Arkansas so I cannot criticize Brock about his research or his historical data. Besides, I have no reason to do so. Looking at the amount of research that was done to write this book, I am completely in awe of what he has done. A more interesting fact is that in the five years I have been in Arkansas, I have seen no evidence of a gay community per se. However, reading “The Un-natural State”, I was surprised to find that has been one here before and we can only hope that there will be again.
Brock Thompson’s book is quite simply a history of gay and lesbian community building in Arkansas and the only problem that I have with this statement is the word community. There are gays and lesbians here but, unfortunately, as I stated before, there is no sense of community—so much so that there has not been a gay pride celebration in Little Rock for the past three years and the participants in the annual AIDS walk are primarily straight people.
Be that as it may, I see Thompson’s book as very important not only for what is in it but for what it can hopefully do and that is encourage other places to protect and write about their history. I have read through the book twice now and I find it not only wonderfully readable but totally amazing. I never would have thought Arkansas could have such a large and important GLBT history and I was glad to find out that it does. In my mind, the book is important not only as a history of Arkansas but also as a history of sexuality. Especially important is a look at rural communities that are so often written off in other studies of gay life.
Thompson has managed to bring together the history of the state of Arkansas with other oral histories and his own personal story about being gay in the buckle of America’s Bible belt. He spends a great deal of time on drag and shows how they concept of drag and drag shows were how people pictures gays in the 1920’s and 30’s and to some extent even today. When there were finally gay bars in Arkansas, drag was a staple and in fact, today, in 2010, there is still a bar here that was once a gay bar and is now considered to be straight and it has drag shows on the night that it is open. Interesting that as drag shows became popular in the rural towns of the state, the state was rewriting its sodomy laws and condemned sexual practices between members of the same sex.
A few decades later lesbian women were establishing communities in the Ozark Mountains and the town of Eureka Springs in northwest Arkansas is one of the few places in the South with a domestic partner registry and the town not only recognizes gay unions but several are performed there.
There is a great deal in the book and it cries out to be read. I cannot say enough about the research that Thompson did as well as the clarity with which the book is written. At times it is a somewhat academic study but I did not find that to be a minus. Brock Thompson has done a wonderful job here and all of us GLBT Arkansans owe him a debt of gratitude.