- Pleasure and Pain in Black Queer Oral History and Performance:E. Patrick Johnson and Jason Ruiz in Conversation
In the past two decades, scholars have shown a remarkable interest in exploring queer worldmaking through oral historical methodologies. Following in the footsteps of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis’s exhaustive and influential history of the lesbian community in Buffalo, researchers have drawn on oral history to reconstruct local queer community formations in, for example, San Francisco (Boyd), Los Angeles (Hurewitz), New York (Chauncey), and, more broadly, the U.S. South (Howard).1 And, of course, community-based projects have emerged to record and communicate GLBT history in places ranging from Newark to Dallas and to capture the stories of subgroups within the broad categories included in “GLBT,” including, for example, specific activist groups like ACT UP. San Francisco alone has several oral projects dedicated to particular neighborhoods, churches, and scenes. At the same time that these projects have taken up the important task of uncovering the previously hidden histories of queer communities through interview-based methodologies, some scholars have also interrogated the theoretical matters and problems related to oral historical work, such as the systems of power that course through the oral historical encounter, the limits of “community” as a framework for understanding queer worldmaking, and the narratological problems that arise when participants remember their personal and sexual lives.2 [End Page 160]
When Kevin P. Murphy and I founded the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project in 2004—a project that grew in membership and which led to the publication of Queer Twin Cities, an anthology rooted in our interviews and more broadly interested in sex and community formation in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and environs—these questions were certainly on our minds.3 We questioned especially how oral historical research might transcend its reputation as something divorced from the more rigorous theoretical work of queer studies. We hoped to find something new to say, not only about the GLBT communities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, but about queer identity in general, as well as more nuanced matters like the politics of what Lisa Duggan has dubbed “homonor-mativity” to describe the transformation of queer identities from wholly marginal subjectivities into ones that reside closer to the center of American political and social life (which, in the Twin Cities, seemed to be the case, as evidenced by the massive push for same-sex marriage rights that accelerated in the years following the release of Queer Twin Cities).4 Our book brought together writers and oral historians who probed these questions with great critical prowess, but, in the end, I still wonder if we went far enough in exploring what oral history can be and how it might intervene in the communities we studied. Does a community-based research model demand that we utilize grassroots methods of communicating our findings? Furthermore, I wonder if oral history methods can take us beyond simple understandings of community and toward Berlant and Warner’s idea of worldmaking, the creation of a sexual imaginary that “includes more people that can be identified, more spaces than can be mapped beyond a few reference points….”5
Enter E. Patrick Johnson, a scholar and artist who deftly utilizes oral history methodologies to explore the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, region, and other dimensions of African American identity. Johnson had already emerged as a major voice in black performance studies when he embarked on a large-scale oral historical inquiry into the lives of African American gay men living in the South. The resulting book, Sweet Tea, consists of more than seventy interviews with a diverse set of narrators who give voice to the African American experience.6 This alone is an important counter to the dominant narratives of both GLBT history and African American studies. But Johnson takes his drive to tell the stories of the black gay South a step further through Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Stories, a much lauded one-man show based on his research, and Sweet Tea—The Play, which, to further acclaim, staged the stories in more formally theatrical...