Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History by E. Patrick Johnson (review)

“I think everybody should be black lesbians. I love being a black lesbian. I love being a black lesbian in the South” (p. 375). These are the words of forty-four-year-old “Mary” from Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. Her statement, like many others in E. Patrick Johnson’s oral history, illuminates the powerful, vibrant, and beautiful lives of black queer women in the South. As Johnson notes, the book consists of “oral histories of African American women who express same-sex desire and who were born, reared, and continue to reside in the US South” (p. 5). Despite state policies that ignore and invalidate his subjects’ gender and sexual orientation as it intersects with class and race, Johnson’s oral history provides a welcome and necessary lens into how black women persevere and create the communities they need to live in the South.

Author of the award-winning Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill, 2008), Johnson spends much of the introduction of the new book foregrounding and answering questions or concerns that he intuitively knows will be asked of it: What is the connection with his first oral history about black gay men? Why choose to use queer over lesbian in the title? And what role does gender difference play in his research and methodology? Johnson indicates early in Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History (BQSW) that, in the time between his first oral history and this one, he thought other queer and feminist scholars might focus specifically on women in a larger and more indepth way than he could have had he included women in Sweet Tea. Since that was not the case, he took on the task, and his decision to focus on women pays off. BQSW is significantly different from Sweet Tea for an obvious reason—it focuses on women—but also because, as Johnson notes in the introduction and epilogue, BQSW is a deliberately feminist scholarly work and ethnography. Though he does not say it, BQSW allows Johnson, and readers of both texts, to reckon with voids of the first black GBTQ southern oral history he provided.

In many of the prefatory remarks of each section and chapter, Johnson provides a black feminist perspective to ground the recorded oral histories. In Part 1, chapters on mother-daughter relationships, gender nonconformity, and other subjects are definitively shaped by debates in black feminist studies about social justice, respectability politics, cisgender-transgender tensions, and intergenerational conflicts. In this part of the book, we hear about women in nontraditional relationships (mixed gendered, same-gendered expression, and non-monogamous thruples) that conflict with conservative ideas of what it means to be a “real” lesbian. These testimonies validate Johnson’s decision to use terms like same-sex desire, as opposed to lesbian.

In Part 2 of the collection, Johnson moves away from excerpted conversations organized around a theme to in-depth engagement with six individual women. The strategy allows him to tackle intersections of themes and issues within one person’s life. For instance, the focus on Puerto Rico resident Aida Rentas allows Johnson to engage feminist politics and the Global South in ways that pay attention to tensions of nationality and race in black and brown lesbian communities. Additionally, for those familiar with Pat Hussain, cofounder of Southerners on New Ground, Johnson’s inclusion of Cherry Hussain (Pat’s partner) provides insights on “Miss Cherry’s” historical significance to LGBTQ communities in the South (p. 417). Aptly titled “My Soul Looks Back and Wonders,” this part of the book provides a sustained examination of failures, mistakes, pain, trauma, survival, and triumph that details the toll of physical and sexual violence, drug abuse, HIV/AIDS, and closet politics, not only on these women’s lives but also on the lives of those with whom they...