The title of this book pays homage to the various ways in which ‘sweet tea’ signifies in gay and straight cultures – whether in its most derisive manifestations in phrases like “sugar in his blood,” “sugar in his tank,” and “he’s a little sweet” to indicate someone’s homosexuality or in its more positive connotations related to desire, as in “he’s sweet on you.” The slippage between gay/straight, masculine/feminine, and out/closeted is precisely the site where the narrators in this book negotiate such multiple meanings and relationships.
– E. Patrick Johnson (Sweet Tea, p19)
By: Menna Teshome, Brenna Cowardin & Zeynep Turk
This video is a trailer for the live-performance version of Sweet Tea. E. Patrick Johnson wrote and performed this one-man show, interpreting the stories of 13 of the 63 men he interviewed for his book. We wanted to include this trailer because it brings to life the oral histories told in Johnson’s compilation and gives the viewer a sense of where Johnson came from when he decided to investigate the stories of black, gay men in the South – as a black gay man himself and a performer.
Johnson first became interested in performance through the documentation of oral history. In an interview with Jason Ruiz, he stated, “I’ve always been interested in how people perform their identity in everyday life and how—through storytelling, personal narratives, oral histories—people convey meaning, not only to another person but to themselves… I’m interested in those everyday moments of performance” (Ruiz and Johnson, 163). Sweet Tea was not his first performance piece, and certainly will not be his last. The impact performance had on his life is visible even in his career. E. Patrick Johnson currently serves as the chair of African American Studies, Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. We feel it is crucial to include this information about the author because his identity plays such a big role in the stories he is telling.
Johnson’s work reveals the experiences of black gay men in the South through oral histories with men ranging from 19 to 93. He often stresses that “there is no master narrative of the southern black gay experience. And yet, there is a note of commonality that rings through these narratives that exemplify the roots and routes of the South” (547). In this work, he hopes to probe these narratives for both their commonalities and their differences so the reader will gain a better understanding of what it means to be a black gay man in the South.
Johnson groups the stories of his narrators around a few common themes: growing up in the South (in mostly segregated communities), coming out to their families (or not), the role of the African American church in their lives, discussions about sex and HIV/AIDS, transgender identities, experiences across generations (interviews with the oldest and youngest men in Johnson’s book) and of course, romance and relationships. The narrators all come from different backgrounds, and have different experiences, but also some things in common, like Johnson emphasized. Some hold stereotypically “feminine” jobs such as hairdresser or artist, while others were football players in college. Some were married and had children, while others never married and are still dating casually or simply not interested in relationships. Overall, every man had stories to share about his own interpretation of what it means to be a black gay man in the South.
In the individual portions of our blog, we discuss three different aspects of the inconsistencies found within narrator’s personal histories and in contrast to the traditional, Eurocentric historical discourse.
The “Uncovering a Silenced Past” blog provides a more in-depth discussion about the role that oral history plays for marginalized communities. Johnson uses this form of historical discourse to put the stories of black gay men in the South in conversation with the traditional historical discourse that often ignores their existence. In the blog, the reader learns about the controversies over the use of oral history (because it is often presenting history through the subjective lens of a biased narrator), but the emphasis will be placed on the exciting ways that oral histories directly argue against Eurocentric theories of history and how “[o]ral histories have proven to be an invaluable resource for documenting and theorizing the cultural norms practices, beliefs, and attitudes of a particular historical period” (Johnson, 3).
The “Gayness and the Church” blog explores religion in the South and the narrators’ struggles to balance spirituality and sexuality. There is a specific focus on the contradictory nature of the black church, which condemns homosexuality yet simultaneously provides a sense of community and belonging.
Historically speaking, the boundary between a gay man and a trans woman is often blurred, hence their inclusion in this book. The “Trannies, Transvestites, and Drag Queens, Oh My!” blog looks at the stories of the four transgender/gender-questioning narrators in Johnson’s book, and then broadly looks at what it means to black and transgender in the United States.
This theme of contrast and challenging Eurocentric viewpoints also directly relates to our class, especially readings about the significance of Africana Studies from early in the semester. In “Rethinking Africana Studies and the Africana Experience: What are the Multidisciplinary Perspectives,” Marc Prou argues that “Afrocentrism is important for the distinct and oppositional consciousness it provides against the tradition of racism in America,” and that is exactly what Johnson hopes to do in Sweet Tea.
Works Cited
Johnson, E. Patrick . Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Prou, Marc E. “Rethinking Africana Studies and the Africana Experience: What are the Multidisciplinary Perspectives.” Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the African Experience. Cognella Academic Publishing, 2013, pp. 1-29.
Ruiz, Jason and E. Patrick Johnson. “Pleasure and Pain in Black Queer Oral History and Performance: E. Patrick Johnson and Jason Ruiz in Conversation.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, vol. 1 no. 2, 2014, pp. 160-180. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/547798.
Video:
“E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South.” Youtube, uploaded by Stephen Lewis, 7 May 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LYx8lZEsck&t=3s.
Image:
Yoshi. Digital image of rainbow flag with Black Power fist. n.d. https://www.thisismorpheus.com/2017/07/new-gay-pride-flag/.
Sweet Tea by E. Patrick Johnson 