Vienners at Odum’s: Deaundra Peek and the Atlanta Televisual Drag Scene

• In Event: Queerness and Race in Atlanta

Abstract

With her signature exclamation of “Yeaaaaaa!,” the forever-sixteen-year-old DeAundra Peek served as an enthusiastic emcee for several variety shows on Atlanta’s public access channel from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. With curly blonde locks affixed with a large glittery D barrette, bright blue eye shadow reaching far above the natural brow line, patches of heavily applied rouge on her cheekbones, dark eyeliner, pink lips outlined in black, empire-waist polyester gowns and flouncy bows at the neckline, purses seemingly constructed out of a child’s stuffed animals, improper grammar and a rural Georgia drawl, the loveable DeAundra broadcasted Friday and Saturday evenings from Odum’s trailer park in Palmetto, Georgia (in actuality, from the Atlanta home of producer Dick Richards). In each episode, she engaged her sidekicks—Dusty Odum and Candi Suntop—in humorous banter; she offered cooking demonstrations featuring her favorite ingredient of canned Vienna Sausages (aka, “vienners”); and she showcased her singing talent.

It may come as no surprise that very little scholarly attention has been paid to DeAundra Peek or to Atlanta’s televisual drag programming of the late-twentieth century, the one exception being Tara McPherson’s astute analysis in her work, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003). McPherson contends that DeAundra Peek offers a different South to viewers as she challenges tropes of southern white femininity—namely, the figure of the southern belle. Peek, she claims, symbolizes a “move toward an expansive southernness in Atlanta (and beyond)” as her performance “unmoors southern identity from a fixed relation to certain icons of southern history and tradition” (195, 203, emphasis mine). McPherson’s analysis is spot on, for DeAundra Peek certainly challenges “iconic southern femininity.” However, in examining DeAundra Peek’s “shows” within a broader context of LGBTQ entertainment, social life, activism, and politics in Atlanta during the late 1980s to early 2000s—which McPherson alludes to but does not spend a great deal of time unpacking—it becomes clear that DeAundra Peek (as well as other Atlanta-based drag queens) did not so much “expand southernness” as expand queerness—more particularly, increase gay visibility—in the United States to include LGBTQ populations within Atlanta. That, in effect, “unmoor[s]” Atlanta from its associations with typical understandings of “southernness” (e.g., conservatism, whiteness, elitism, heteronormativity, and more) and essentially un-does the construction of “southernness” (along with race, gender, class) in the process. Emerging on public access television in a southern city, as well as in New York and Minneapolis and in clubs around the country, during the emergence of the AIDS crisis, DeAundra Peek used camp to make known and give voice and vitality to gay identities within an urban center in the South, all the while signaling to her audience that Atlanta was a great place to be gay.

Author

• Margaret T McGehee, Emory University