Second, I examine the ways Percy participated in an international intellectual tradition centered on the idea of ancient Greece as a kind of spiritual "home" for men with gay desire. Will Percy's heterodox views of sexuality and what it meant to be a man-namely, his belief that love between men was not only legitimate but a superior form of love-can only be understood by studying the ways he experienced reality in different cultural contexts. First, I examine the ways the experience, performance, and construction of gender and sexuality were connected to the concept of place. I engage the paradox of Percy's life and personality to make three main arguments. Will Percy's life story invites consideration of how one man became a sexual liberationist, cultural relativist, white supremacist in late Victorian Mississippi. Cosmopolitan Southerner maps connections between the American South and the broader world by tracing Will Percy's travels across the globe: from Mississippi to the Mediterranean, to such places as Paris and Japan and Samoa, back to Mississippi. Percy left the South regularly and traveled across the world, and his encounters abroad informed his views about gender, sexuality, and race at home. Although scholars have traditionally portrayed Percy as an iconic provincial, he maintained an ambivalence towards his region-particularly towards local values regarding masculinity and sexuality. The Mississippi planter and poet William Alexander Percy (1885-1942) is best remembered for his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (1941), which was a bestseller and remains a seminal book in the study of the American South.
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