Sweet Tea - 9780807832097

Giving voice to a population rarely acknowledged in southern history, Sweet Tea collects life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the southern United States. E. Patrick Johnson challenges stereotypes of the South as "backward" or "repressive," suggesting that these men draw upon the performance of "southernness" - politeness, coded speech, and religiosity, for example - to legitimate themselves as members of both southern and black cultures. At the same time, Johnson argues, they deploy those same codes to establish and build friendship networks and find sexual partners and life partners.
Traveling to every southern state, Johnson conducted interviews with more than seventy black gay men between the ages of 19 and 93 - lawyers, hairdressers, ministers, artists, doctors, architects, students, professors, and corporate executives, as well as the retired and unemployed. Sweet Tea is arranged according to themes echoed in their narratives. Chapters explore unique experiences as well as shared ones, from coming out stories and church life to homosex and love relationships.
The voices collected here dispute the idea that gay subcultures flourish primarily in northern, secular, urban areas. In addition to filling in a gap in the sexual history of the South, Sweet Tea offers a window into the ways that black gay men negotiate their sexual and racial identities with their southern cultural and religious identities. The interviews also reveal how they build and maintain community in many spaces and activities, some of which may appear to be antigay. Through Johnson's use of critical performance ethnography, Sweet Tea validates the lives of these black gay men and reinforces the role of storytelling in both African American and southern cultures.