Too frail and puny to play with the other boys, Caldwell spends his solitary days sitting high up in his favorite tree. There, hidden behind a veil of Spanish moss, he takes from his pocket an old Bull Durham sack in which he keeps the mementos of rural Southern boyhood/sensitive division: a frog’s skull, a cameo with half the face sliced off, and the pennies that closed his grandfather’s eyes.

Caldwell would be content to spend the rest of the book thumbing through these talismans, and Gonad Manque, who has no sense of plot, would be equally content to go on writing about them. But it’s That Summer, a season unique to the South, when Something Terrible Happens.

Suddenly Caldwell’s woodsy retreat is invaded by inhabitants of the outside world. When “they” come, his sensitivity receives a jolt. Perched in his tree, he watches copulating couples, escaped prisoners committing sodomy, a seven-foot black named Raoul staring at a dead fish, an old crone burying a jewelry box containing the other half of the cameo, a weeping stranger castrating himself, and the town idiot masturbating over a crushed flamingo.
–Florence King, “The Gay Confederation,” Southern Ladies and Gentlemen