E. Patrick Johnson, Ph.D.
Reviewer: B.I. Laureano
Having grown up in the South, I know how important oral narratives are to transmitting culture, values, and as a pastime. Dr. E. Patrick Johnson, a professor of performance studies at Northwestern University has taken almost ten years to go to every southern country in the US and capture the oral histories shared to him by black gay men. Johnson who also identifies as a black gay man from the south, recognized the absence of the stories and histories that we have and know from his community. He has begun work that will alter the way we collect narratives and how we tell history.
Because Johnson is not a historian, but a performance studies scholar, he was very interested in how the narratives were delivered, what memories were shared, and why each man has chosen to stay in their home states. Although employing the same techniques for capturing oral histories, he does not use them in the same way as traditional historians. Instead, Johnson uses his interdisciplinary background to demonstrate the reality of black gay mean living in the south. Shattering many myths about the southern US, such as the south being more homophobic than the north, religion playing a huge role in the lives of people living in the south (which plays a role in the homophobia), and an acceptance of many single parent families, Johnson’s interviews presents a new and different perspective on black family life, gay identity, and masculinity.
The book is organized by themes each man interviewed brought up. These include: family, gayness and the Black church, love and relationships, and transgender blacks in the south. The men interviewed were two to three degrees away from acquaintances Johnson had, which made his sample intimate and added a level of comfort often not provided in random sampling. A celebrity interview is with Lady Chablis, of Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil fame and Tim’m of the Deep Dick Collective, a queer hip-hop group from Washington, DC. Some of the men have been generous and have offered their childhood photographs to be reproduced as well as their present image.
With his performance background, Johnson began to perform some of the interviews as a part of the marketing for the book. This was greeted with mixed reactions: people loved hearing the original men on the recording prior to Johnson’s performance of parts of their interview. Others are disappointed in his decision to perform their narratives and question the validity and ethics in such performance. Some are torn and see Johnson’s works as moving the disciplines of performance and history in a new way yet are concerned regarding other aspects of representation for the participants. Regardless of where you stand on the performances, this is a new format and approach to marketing an academic book of this kind.
My favorite part of the book is the glossary of terms in the back of the text. Here Johnson has provided his readers with a list of terms that the people he has interviewed used. He’s provided each term along with which participant used the term so readers can go back and reread their interviews. Johnson’s work is an essential part of African-American and LGBTQ studies that allows the voices of men who are often marginalized, to be heard. SweetTea:BlackGayMenoftheSouth
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