Archives preserve Atlanta through Rebecca Ranson’s plays, writings

Oli Turner received her bachelor’s degree in English & Creative Writing from Emory University in May 2025. She was awarded Highest Honors for her undergraduate honors thesis ‘I Begin Again’: Witnessing Rebecca Ranson’s Atlanta, which relied primarily on the Rose Library’s Rebecca Ranson Papers. She currently works as a podcast intern at WABE 90.1 FM.

Oli Turner

On the 10th floor of Emory University’s Woodruff Library, 63 gray file boxes contain parts of the playwright and activist Rebecca Ranson’s life. Other traces of her can be found in Atlanta’s fringe arts scene, shimmering in the corners of theaters and warehouses, visible only to a specific type of observer: perhaps female, artistic, queer, or all three. Few Atlantans remain to tell the story of the first AIDS play to emerge from the gay mecca of the South and the dynamic playwright who wrote it.

I first found Rebecca Ranson by searching for myself. I know that my experience is far from singular. Queer kids look for versions of ourselves all the time, searching in databases and between the lines of texts that weren’t explicitly written for us. As I reflect now on Rebecca’s archives and the flurry of emotions that drew me to her life, it’s hard to remember what the world looked like before I began to see her in it—before I began to see myself in her world.

Rebecca Ranson, undated. From the Rebecca Ranson papers.

The young research librarian filling in to teach my Southern Literature class told us to write a research paper drawing on any material in Emory University’s special collections that pertained to literature and the U.S. South. It was only my third year living in the South, having grown up in Massachusetts, and I needed to branch out from Flannery O’Connor, a prolific yet antiquated touchstone for Southern literature. I opened my laptop, navigated to the Emory Libraries website, and searched the archival database for “southern writing lgbt.” If I was going to spend weeks on this paper, I wanted the topic to hold my interest, to be somewhat personal. The query returned a single result: the Rebecca Ranson papers. That’s how I first met Rebecca—one keyword search that wasn’t really a coincidence because it sprouted from my own identity, a quick skim of her collection’s description, and a Google search that returned more questions than answers. Several pages, including the local arts publication ArtsATL and LGBTQ+ news outlet The Georgia Voice, published memorials for Ranson after her death in 2017. Missing from Ranson’s digital footprint, however, was a way to access her life’s work. Her plays, poems, articles, and activism were, for the most part, lost to time.

Ranson died at the age of 73, which meant her most active years as a playwright overlapped with the decades before the internet. Most of her plays were performed and faded without a trace, undocumented by social media and scarcely recorded on VHS for future viewing. Her plays were her most passionate form of activism, with the goal of making queer, working-class, Black, disabled, and incarcerated communities visible and human. Atlantans today might be surprised to know that Ranson’s legacy endures in the annual Out on Film Festival—her nonprofit, the Southeastern Arts, Media, and Education Program (SAME) founded the festival to showcase LGBTQ+ film in 1993—and the LGBTQ+ publication The Georgia Voice, which is a surviving vestige of the SAME publication Southern Voice. She wrote and directed plays that were performed at the Little Five Points fixture 7 Stages Theatre, whose gleaming marquee still advertises eccentric local productions.

When people ask me to tell them about Rebecca Ranson, I often mention the story of her friend Warren Johnston who died of AIDS and inspired her play Warren, the first Southern play about the epidemic. I tell them about the entries in Ranson’s faded, fabric-bound diaries, the preserved love notes written on scraps of paper, passed between women once upon a time. I try to describe the parts of her that an internet search won’t conjure. I try to explain the rawness of her artistry, her complicated relationships, her intense way of living, and the fingerprints she left on Atlanta that most people just accept as part of the scenery.

Warren Johnston, 1983. From the Rebecca Ranson papers

Warren’s passing marked the start of Ranson’s AIDS interviews with patients at San Francisco General Hospital. The interviews would inform her future AIDS plays and were the basis of a book manuscript entitled Ward 5B that was under contract to Viking Penguin but was never published. The manuscript can be found in her Rose Library papers today. From her intimate interviews with people with AIDS (PWA) and their loved ones, Ranson spun plays, translating their true stories to the stage. I understand Ranson’s AIDS plays to be a kind of guerilla journalism, putting the stories of PWA in the spotlight, onstage, as the mass media ignored them.

Soon after writing about Ranson for the first time for that Southern Literature class, I knew I had to keep writing about her. I’d come home from a day of research in the Rose Library and recount tales of what I’d read in her diaries that day, carrying on that old tradition of Southern storytelling, passing on dramatic yarns from her life and many loves. A year and a half later, I completed my undergraduate honors thesis in English & Creative Writing, ‘I Begin Again’: Witnessing Rebecca Ranson’s Atlanta, an unconventional biography of Ranson’s life infused with my own experience discovering her. I emerged from that year and a half having developed a close relationship with her son Charlie Engle and his wife Astacciana, her former husband Coke Ariail, and several of her former friends and lovers. From my seat in the Rose Library reading room, opposite floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the treetops in the direction of Decatur, I learned Rebecca’s life from different angles. I turned the pages of her diaries and manuscripts on a foam book cradle—a pillowy support system for the spines of old books—deciphering her impassioned cursive scrawl. I watched digitized VHS recordings of her plays on a library iPad, inserting myself into her audience like a time-traveler. In her diaries, I saw her “begin again”—a phrase she often repeated—at the start of each year with resolutions, later changing her mind with the same conviction. In some ways, Ranson is the ideal biography subject: an individual intensely aware of her own changes, new beginnings, short-comings, strengths; and a writer who wrote them all down.

Rebecca Ranson at Atlanta Pride, circa 1990s. From the Rebecca Ranson papers

The biography is not yet done, but I intend to finish it so that more readers can meet Rebecca and carry her history with them as I have, Ranson’s implanted memories from Kirkwood to Virginia Highlands, her vibrant community who once loved the city as I do now.