SOUTHERN COMFORT: Stereotypes: A Report from the Front Lines in VA

Published November 6, 2007

By Eric Hoke

There is a lot to love about the South: warm weather, barbeques involving entire animals, smoking inside bars and restaurants. These perks were the impetus my friends needed to stage an intervention over my unfair, stereotypical ideas about Southerners.

After all, they were right. No matter how many people down here tell me that the Civil War was actually the “war of northern aggression,” I have no right to categorically write off the South. After all, one of these friends is a native of Richmond, another Roanoke, and the last Kuwait (but she’s actually quite fond of the South).

If I had lived somewhere for longer than two years of my life, I might be able to understand how people don’t like hearing shit talked about where they’re from. And although here in Charlottesville, I am certainly in the South, it is a college town and filled with Northern Virginians, who are about as Southern as a Taco Bell.

But, as if God wanted to applaud me for being a stereotypical jackass, He sent us the most racist and homophobic slack-jawed yokels ever. The other day some wandered into the bar asking for directions to Mellow Mushroom, which has a nice beer selection and overpriced pizzas (”but there’s spring water in the dough, man”).

I told them I had some mellow mushrooms back at my apartment, but they aren’t cheap. Great joke, I know. My friends pointed them on their way. Southern hospitality, no doubt. The two men returned several minutes later.

One was fat, with a stupid goatee and lots of gel in his hair. The other was an older guy, who was scraggly and had a voice that told the story of 40 years of Marlboro Reds. The first thing the old guy did was yell across the bar, “Hey baby, bring us some Jagerbombs.” I was offended that he would call our server “baby,” but I was pleased that I was getting a free Jagerbomb.

What followed through the dribble of chewing tobacco was a racist diatribe about a black coworker, a story about how the younger guy sold two Mustangs to pay off a lawyer he hired to try to stop his girlfriend from having an abortion, and assertions that I was a “fag,” despite having given no indication of my sexual orientation.

A few free Jagerbombs later, the younger guy (the one who wasn’t busy explaining how “the N-word” was invented in the sixties as a friendly alternative to “negro”) confessed to me about the time he was in a three-way, although he “ain’t gay.” I assured him that he was right.

Eventually, the older guy started to catch on that my friends and I had been mocking them the entire time, so he convinced his nephew to roll out, probably in a Ford F-350 with a Confederate flag decal next to a “My other car is a terrorist steamroller” bumper sticker. Even though these were exactly the kind of guys I had been bashing moments before, my friends are still right; stereotypes aren’t nice.
I guess that’s the moral of the story.

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