Sunday in the Park with Neva

Neva B. Flat and the Dreaming Out Loud Steppers blocked my way. Their drag-act name belied the fact they were Gospel singers performing at the annual Gospel Celebration staged right beneath the larger-than-Mount-Rushmore carving of the shoguns of the Confederacy: Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. I had walked into Stone Mountain Park to photograph inscriptions around a smaller monument that now stood in an area cordoned-off as backstage for the performers.

Conceived a hundred years ago, Stone Mountain Park was meant to be the great monument to The Lost Cause and reliquary of its documents. But by the time it opened in the late 1950s, while it contained historical displays of the War in Georgia and monuments to the bravery of Confederate soldiers; The Glorious Cause—certainly not forgotten by many 1950s Georgians, white and black—was not portrayed. The park focused on the natural beauty of the site and outdoor recreation, a focus that has grown so that today, it all but obscures the park’s original purpose.

There, beneath the outsized leaders of the Confederacy, Gospel choirs sang their hearts out. Across the lawn at the reconstructed Antebellum Plantation, a celebration of Juneteenth, the traditional African-American holiday commemorating the passage of the 13the Amendment, was in full swing.

But I wasn’t there for the party—I had only stumbled upon it. Without explaining the whys and wherefores, I talked the security guards into letting me pass through to photograph the inscriptions. Now in the middle of writing my Adventures-of-a-Psychotic-Giant memoir (I'm 6' 11"), I am in the thick of reconstructing how in high mania in 1990, blazing a trail that stretched from Atlanta to Charleston (birthplace of the Confederacy), I had gathered evidence proving the real cause of the Civil War: Under the guise of preserving slavery and “states rights,” the South had actually fought to protect the barely undercover, homosexual lifestyle of its upper classes. I was in the park to photograph evidence I had found there.

You see, there’s a reason “psychotic” is in my title.

And to take those pictures, I had to wade into the gospel singers’ refreshment area. As I bantered with them about my height while snapping pictures, I was swept with gratitude for deliverance from psychosis—not just from my own, but for all of us from the Sin of the South.