Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea: Oral History as Quare Performance

This essay takes up current debates about the problems that queer theory poses for conducting LGBT history. Drawing on the oral history research of Southern African American queer women, I argue that performance as method provides an alternative to traditional historiography that is more in keeping with the open-endedness of queer theory, while also highlighting the erotics of narration embedded within oral history research. The essay also engages the politics of a male researcher conducting research on queer women and whether or not the research constitutes feminist historiography.