Queer Places:
616 Webster St, Jackson, MS 39202
Big Tygart Cemetery
Rockport, Wood County, West Virginia, USA
Frank Woodruff Hains, Jr. (July 7, 1926 - July 13, 1975) was a literary critic who was murdered in his home in Jackson. His homosexuality and love of the arts has been implicitly linked to his murder. His close friend Eudora Welty wrote an eulogy for him which appeared in the combined Sunday Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News (27 July 1975). Motivated to recuperate Hains' reputation, Welty refused to allow Hains' life to be foreclosed and diminished by bigoted perceptions of his homosexuality.
Frank Woodruff Hains, Jr. was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia. After graduating from Marietta College in Ohio and serving two years in the military, Hains began a radio career that took him to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he became active in both the Vicksburg Little Theater and the Jackson Little Theater. A few years later he moved to Jackson, beginning his twenty-year career with the Jackson Daily News as literary critic and champion of the arts. He remained active in the Jackson Little Theater and was one of the founders of New Stage Theater in 1966. In addition to his position at the Jackson Daily News, his work as actor, director, and set designer for the local theaters, and his contributions to the New York Times, Hains helped high schools and colleges in the area with their productions. In 1958 he received the National Pop Wagner Award for work with youth, and in 1970 the Mississippi Authority for Educational Television presented him with its Distinguished Public Service Award.
In Men Like That, a detailed history of queer life in Mississippi, John Howard cursorily acknowledges the positive tone of Eudora Welty's commemoration in comparison to that of Charles Gordon's more "dubious" one, an observation repeated more forcefully by Kevin Sessums in his 2009 memoir, Mississippi Sissy. Sessums, who was nineteen and temporarily lodging with Hains before he was murdered, discovered Hains' body on July 14, 1975, naked, bound, and gagged by his own silk neckties, his head bludgeoned with a crowbar. Sessums' memoir, published with the advantage of time and the benefit of a sea-change regarding the acceptance of homosexuality, offers the most complete and intimate deciption of Hains as both an intellectual and sexual being.
Welty's biographer Ann Waldron notes that "gossip in Jackson about Hains' lifestyle became hysterical and malevolent" after the details emerged of his murder and the scandalous past of the black man, Larry Bullock, accused of murdering him. Welty, Waldron argues, writes with the expressed intent of "salvaging Hains' reputation."
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