[Spoilers for all seven episodes of podcast S-Town included below.]

John B. McLemore—boisterous, brilliant, and utterly miserable polymath at the center of sensational 2017 podcast S-Town—stands at the entrance to the intricate hedge maze on his sprawling, ancestral property in Woodstock, Alabama. A middle-aged, self-described “semi-homosexual,” with a shock of bright red hair and a heavily-tattooed torso, John stands with his hands placed firmly on his hips, surveying his maze, its adjustable gates allowing for 64 possible solutions.

“You know, I designed this thing myself, so it was designed by a mad man,” John tells journalist Brian Reed, as the two stroll casually through the maze in 2015, John having convinced Reed to investigate a murderous rumor that had spread like wildfire through his small town. The men wind through the hedge maze, hitting dead end after dead end, caught in a predicament of John’s own making. 64 possible solutions, and McLemore stands baffled, with Reed wondering: has John intentionally gotten them lost, for literary flair, for dramatic effect? John curses, and then exclaims, “Actually lost in our own maze! Isn’t that exciting?” 64 possible solutions, but “It is possible to set it up where there is no solution, and I accidentally did that.”

Pacing the maze, searching for the way out, John B. McLemore eschews all possible solutions. And yet, like John, haven’t we all?

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The world is a shit town. By comparison, John’s hedge maze—which Reed later tells listeners will be destroyed, purchased by a man invested in the property’s yield of timber—is a beautiful problem. Unlike those problems that ultimately drive John B. McLemore to suicide, it would be solved, over and over again. The befuddlement, the meandering: these are elements that define the murder mystery and treasure hunt that ultimately give way to character study in S-Town, the sensational podcast that Reed hosts, produced by the creative team behind This American Life and Serial. But beyond a portrait of man and town, S-Town provides listeners with what John B. McLemore aptly calls “a cluster fuck of sorrow.”

Climate change:

The whole goddamned Arctic summer sea ice is going to be gone by 2017; we are fixin’ to have heat waves in Siberia this year.

A skirmish amongst self-proclaimed “white trash,” resulting in bloodshed at a party. As the police approach to evaluate the injuries, the majority of party-goers hide in the woods:

Hiding in the woods: that’s the Bibb County equivalent of having your afternoon tea in London.

Tyler Goodson: his struggles with law enforcement, steady employment, and raising his daughters:

Tyler almost embodies everything I hate about this shit town in one convenient package.

The number of convicted sex offenders per capita in Bibb County:

[Vance, AL] is now one child molester for every 192 citizens!

Typhoon Nock-Ten in the Philippines, a tsunami in Sri Lanka, floods in Pakistan, Chernobyl. The recruitment efforts of the KKK, the diminishment of affordable fossil fuels: to John, there is no distinction between the local, the global, and the corporeal. It is all “a cluster fuck of sorrow,” and one that he is eager to disclose, to anyone who will listen. This impulse toward exposure leads McLemore to contact Brian Reed, to invite him to Woodstock, aka “Shit Town,” Alabama, to shake the rest of us awake, from our collective shrug of shoulders.

S-Town documents John’s collapse, of both self and of scale. Reed and the rest of us—a podcast-listening, liberal populous fascinated by McLemore—represent a collective American obsession with understanding the “criminals and hillbillies” that populate shit towns across America. Millions of listeners have downloaded the series, and it has received glowing reviews. But ultimately, no matter how long he listened and recorded the complaints, philosophies, or racial epithets reverberating against the walls of Black Sheep Ink—a haven for “criminals, misfits, and hillbillies”—Reed separates “their tales of getting jerked around by cops and judges and clerks and bosses” from what plagues the rest of us, what plagued John B. McLemore until the night of his last breath. Reed separates himself from those Alabama “black sheep” as well. He recalls how he increased his social media privacy settings, fearful that these men who nonchalantly toss around racial slurs, will discover that he left his African American wife at home in New York to record them in the tattoo shop, where he took whiskey shots and smoked weed, not to feel a drug-induced release, but so that they didn’t suspect him as a “narc.”

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To be sure, Reed attends to John’s collapse of distinction, scale, and gravity: the interconnections between miseries we typically consider either large or small, which John implores us to re-consider. And yet, what do we make of a man who feels the world’s sorrows as his own? Who spends his days pouring over climate change, the destroying of land and sea, and his nights destroying his own body, begging for a “pain fix” to make the day’s findings fade toward quiet?

John B. McLemore had a thirst for knowledge, self-destruction, and the sado-masochistic. He also “had a little sugar in his tank.” He was a queer stuck in Alabama.

Queers—not “stuck” but rather thriving, in Alabama and other “shit” places across the US—were the subject of a theoretical trend in queer studies nearly a decade ago, when Scott Herring’s groundbreaking Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (2010) challenged the field to imagine queer rurality otherwise, beyond the recurring cultural nightmare of queers unable to leave, miserable and stuck in place, trying to survive amongst a not so “silent majority” of backward rednecks and evangelical Christians, eager to prevent them from gaining civil rights or basic human dignity. Queer cultural historians such as Herring assembled archives of queer rurality that drew attention to the artists, writers, and activists who used “rural stylistics” to critique what Jack Halberstam, in his In Queer Time and Place, termed the “metronormativity” of gay and lesbian communities. According to Halberstam, metronormativity is the spatial narrative that maps onto the coming out narrative. We imagine that gays and lesbians escape secrecy, persecution, and isolation in small towns and rural areas, finding community, health, and hospitality when they arrive, newly out and proud, in America’s cities, preferably New York or San Francisco.1 Not only does this metronormative narrative silence the forms of violence done to queers—particularly low-income queers, sex workers, disabled queers, and queers of color—in the supposed bastions of equality otherwise known as cities, but it also produces the backward “country homosexual” as a devalued and unenlightened segment of the population, out of touch with queer life. This depiction could very well apply to John B. McLemore, who we learn doesn’t even own a television to watch Brokeback Mountain in 2005—the year that Halberstam coined metronormativity—though he did eventually read Annie Proulx’s short story on which the film was based, referring to it as “the grief manual.”

By resisting Brokeback Mountain—the “grief manual” on rural gay romance—McLemore practices his own form of what Scott Herring terms “rural stylistics,” a “[refusal] to comply with the iconic geographics of compulsory U.S. metronormativity,” which “antagonizes the phantasmatic urban/rural divide” (2010: 23). John’s refusal to comply with an interest in Brokeback Mountain, amongst other acceptable gay male lifestyle choices such as a neat manner of dress, antagonized his would-be lover Olin Long, as well. Centerpiece of S-Town’s penultimate episode, Olin describes his anger at John’s refusal to care about Brokeback Mountain, driving him into his back yard, beating his frustration out into the damp night ground. “I wanted him to relate to it,” Olin tells Reed, in his recollection of the complicated friendship between the two men. Not participating in the compulsory narrative of metronormativity, not adequately mourning his inability or unwillingness to leave, to make the journey toward self-acceptance and love that Ennis Del Mar eventually makes (albeit too late) in “the grief manual,” John B. McLemore’s queer life lived in Alabama demonstrates a different type of queer rurality, one that exceeds metronormative narratives, narratives like S-Town, that attempt to discipline and contain it.

McLemore was more than a queer stuck in Alabama, and his life should not be reduced to that narrative. But he was a queer stuck in Alabama nonetheless. One who bemoaned, and yet rationalized, his decision to stay. Because what’s a shit town in a shit world, anyway?

While Reed gives voice to John’s distress over the lack of outrage aimed at the “clusterfuck of sorrow”—human and environmental—that dooms us all, Serial Productions presents S-Town as a story of local scale: “a man named John… despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it.” That “something” is not ultimately the demand for criminal justice in a covered-up murder, or even the saving of local outcast and petty criminal Tyler Goodson. Rather, John B. McLemore “does something” about our collective misfortune by committing suicide, by drinking potassium cyanide.

That relationship between man and world, citizen and town, figures John B. McLemore as a queer sort of melancholic. His attachment to the world, and all the pain and loss that attachment entails, positions him as a martyr, for shouldn’t we all lack the capacity to mourn that which we have undergone, and continue to undergo? His capacity for and openness to the pain of the world that surrounds him—from the residents of Shit Town to the inhabitants of Earth—demonstrates a queer relationality to our world, and an overwhelming vulnerability to our collective ruin (Freud, 1917).

Toward the end of the seven episodes, after we’ve accepted that we are not going to solve a murder mystery, nor are we going to find a pot of gold, listeners discover that John likely suffered from mercury poisoning, “mad hatter disease.” Mood swings, nervousness, irritability, emotional changes, insomnia, headache, abnormal sensations, muscle twitching, tremors. A lifelong horologist and gifted clock restorer who practiced the dangerous method of fire-gilding, John likely coated his lungs with elemental mercury. To preserve, to restore, John expired.

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And yet, at least a beautiful way to count the days, “tedious and brief,” was left in John’s wake.

Many of us are being poisoned in this shit world, in shit towns across America. Lead seepage into drinking water has caused a state of emergency in Flint, Michigan. High levels of lead in the blood, particularly of pregnant women and children, causes learning disabilities and behavioral problems. In West Virginia 300,000 residents of the state’s largest city couldn’t drink or bathe in their tap water for months. 10,000 gallons of “crude-MCHM,” a chemical with effects largely unknown, spilled into the water supply from crumbling storage tank. The chemical is used to wash coal.

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In March 2017, the Trump administration announced a sweeping executive order that effectively demolished Obama-era policies on climate change. Repealing climate regulations, such as emissions restrictions for coal-fired power plants, Trump has supposedly “unshackled” fossil fuels industries. Coal industry jobs can return to the country. Rural America, we are told, is ecstatic. Surrounded by coal industry workers, Mr. Trump signed the executive order he promised his rural voters during his campaign, the group of smiling men ready to get back to work, to “make America great again.” My mother, a factory laborer in West Virgina, recounts a co-worker’s excitement on the line, the day after this de-regulation was announced. With long, nasal vowels that connect the accents of hillbillies from West Virginia to Alabama, her co-worker exclaimed, “They’re bringin’ back the coal jobs, man! I’m gettin’ out of this plant.” Another shit town, in a shit world. It’s almost a blessing that John B. McLemore didn’t live to see this.

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During a night of whiskey shots in John’s workshop, McLemore lifts his shirt, flashing Reed his very own “expression of hopelessness,” the phrase John used to describe the practice of tattooing. “That’s your entire chest, John! And nipple piercings!” After John’s death, Tyler Goodson explains the role that piercing and tattooing played in the final years of John’s life: “We called it Church.” John began asking Tyler to tattoo over his existing tattoos, again and again, and to pierce his nipples, as Tyler describes, just for the “pain fix.” In regards to “Church,” Reed describes what it was like to be inside John’s mind:

you know what it’s like to get a song stuck in your head, where it’s just playing over and over and you just can’t get it out of there, even if it’s a terrible song? That’s what happened to him. Every day he would replay the eventualities of climate change, and resource depletion, and economic collapse. He couldn’t get them out of his head. So ‘Church,’ according to Tyler, morphed into what was essentially an elaborate form of cutting that helped John to relieve his mental anguish.

For his part, John described this ritualized form of tattooing and piercing—what those in urban queer subcultures would call BDSM play—as a time when he and Tyler could simply turn off the lights and be present to the “goddamned quiet.”

Serial Productions promotes S-Town as a story of a man who wants to make a change, who wishes to save a town: a familiar story, a hopeful one. But S-Town does not ultimately save an Alabama town, nor does it save John from having lived out his queer life within those few miles, in the dead center of “Trump Country,” which was still denying marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples at the time of recording, and was the last Alabama county to de-segregate. And while critiques of the podcast’s penetration of a gay man’s private life-after-death may seem warranted, McLemore did dedicate the last years of his life to exposure, if not the “uncloseting,” prideful type to which we are accustomed. Poisoned by mercury, spending his days feeling the weight of climate change and economic collapse, rubbing it raw, raving all night on the phone, and pissing in the sink, John B. McLemore wanted to be heard.

The concerns we typically circulate about storytelling and the South are not clearly applicable to S-Town. Coastal liberal hand-wringing at Reed’s “exploitation” or “misrepresentation” of Southern masculinity do not apply to this story, as there is little denial of its accuracy. Reed portrays Woodstockians as “a violent, sadomasochistic, racist, feral people,” but a vulnerable population as well (Teague). The Guardian’s, Matthew Teague garners local residents’ responses to Woodstock’s new image as Shit Town, and most seemed to be perfectly fine with it: “‘Seemed like a pretty accurate portrayal,’ said Woodstockian Clark Alexander, as he came in to pay for gas at the grocery.” Teague continues, “no collection of humans has ever cared less what the wider world thinks of their town.” Fuck it.

The “fuck it” philosophy. Reed describes this “way of moving, moment to moment, through the world,” which he sees as prevalent in Shit Town, as the “fuck it” philosophy. He contends that this is “a belief that there is no sense in worrying or thinking too much about any given decision because life is going to be difficult and unfair, regardless of what you do.”

The podcast portrays John B. McLemore as a staunch opponent of the “fuck it” philosophy, a man who detested resignation, “the numb acceptance that we can’t change things” (Reed). And yet, despite the mystery, beauty, and vulnerability he uncovers in John, Tyler, and Woodstock, Alabama, Reed misinterprets John’s relationship to the act of shrugging one’s shoulders and resigning, “fuck it.” He is correct, that John was a queer man who never found the kind of love you could write a country song about: “F-150 pickup truck love, denim hugging on your thighs love, azaleas love… kissing on your belly and all around your red hair love” (Reed). As far as Reed’s investigation carries us, John never found a love like that. But he did have love, queer love unrecognizable to genre standards of country music. John found tattoo gun to chest love, all night awake, going mad on the phone love, bourbon and spray painted initials under the bridge love. And still, he did finally shrug, “fuck it.”

John’s story is not one of a queer who could have lived otherwise, had he moved to a city, Birmingham with its likely vibrant gay community less than fifty miles down I-20. ­S-Town is not a story about a man who died in a shit town; it’s a story about a man who lived in a shit world.

An unabashed killjoy, John B. McLemore practiced a radical form of negativity, a queer relationship to the earth, marked by shame, madness, and rage (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995). Operating somewhere beyond the fight against apathy, he embodied the “fuck it” philosophy, killing himself to make room, in a world where there is little room left. This is a different story of being queer in the country, in Alabama, in what is now Trump’s America. With his melancholic attachment to the earth and its destruction, John wore our collective pain of environmental disaster on his body, slowly being damaged and poisoned, like the rest of us. For decades, this poisoning was “tedious and brief,” and then, at the end, it came fast. 

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Notes

[1] Judith Halberstam, In Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: NYUP, 2005. Since Halberstam’s explorations of metronormativity, examined through responses to the 1993 murder of Brandon Teena in Nebraska, various scholars have accounted for queer rurality. Among them, see Colin Johnson, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America, Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013; Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies, Ed. Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, Brian J. Gilley, New York: NYUP, 2016.

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References

Freud S (1917) Mourning and Melancholia. Collected Papers, Vol. IV, p. 152-70.

Halberstam J (2005) In Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: NYUP.

Herring S (2010) Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism, New York: NYUP.

Sedgwick EK and Frank A (1995) Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins. Critical Inquiry, 21(2): 496-522.