Idgie And Ruth In Fried Green Tomatoes

Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes features a subtle representation of a lesbian couple living in the rural South in the 1920s. Some readers have condemned the subtlety as dismissive of the relationship between Idgie and Ruth, while others applaud the story nonetheless. As a reader, I applaud the subtlety because the portrayal is of a positive and healthy relationship, even though there are extreme tribulations and ultimately a death that end the relationship. Readers could easily see themselves in Idgie and Ruth or know people who have shared a love like theirs. The fact that Idgie loses Ruth to illness is an experience countless people of the LGBT community would have known all too well due to the AIDs crisis around the time of the novel’s publication.
This enduring love and dedication is exactly the type of behavior that would have subverted norms during the AIDs epidemic. Countless people who suffered that fate were abandoned by partners who couldn’t bare to see their significant other suffer, or by family who didn’t want to be associated with the “gay disease,” an all-too-common phenomenon astutely demonstrated by the play Lonely Planet by Steven Dietz. By being there for each other, Ruth and Idgie show that it is absolutely possible to stand by a loved one no matter what, at a time when stereotypes that LGBT people are sex-crazed and unfaithful to an extreme (thus causing AIDs) is rampant and even sometimes seems to be reinforced by other LGBT texts such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance. Ruth and Idgie give hope that meaningful and faithful relationships are possible for the countless LGBT people who worry that they don’t deserve love because they are different from the dominant heterosexual