Uncloseting the South

In Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, E. Patrick Johnson assembles a variety of oral histories that collectively explore the range of codes and practices that emerge from the intersection of southern, queer, and black identities, and examines how these seemingly conflicting ideological positions are mediated and negotiated within what he terms the "diverse (and perverse) social fabric of southern living" (1). Building on earlier groundbreaking work by John Howard and James T. Sears while more directly focusing on questions of race and masculinity, Johnson assertively challenges the myth that to be gay in the South is to live a life marked by silence, invisibility, and isolation.¹ The voices collected here not only dispute the idea that gay subcultures flourish primarily in northern, secular, urban areas but also attempt to deconstruct myths about black male sexuality and rework stereotypes about southern identity.

Johnson foregrounds this tripartite mission early on: "Not only does the history of southern black gay men demand a reconsideration of what constitutes a 'vital' subculture; it also necessitates a reconsideration of the South as 'backward' and 'repressive," when clearly gay community building and desire emerge simultaneously within and against southern culture" (3). Toward these ends, Johnson collected the oral histories of sixty-three men from fifteen different states across the South between August 2004 and October 2006. While he consciously attempts to represent a range of occupations and class backgrounds, he also acknowledges upfront that he has largely relied on his own networks of friends and acquaintances to provide sources. While this gives an intimacy to the project—and ensures Johnson's safety—it also, at times, provides too narrow a range of black gay experience. Most of the oral histories come primarily from men born in the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and those of the under-thirty set, who have had a radically different experience of both queer sexuality and southern identity, are noticeably underrepresented.

Over seven lengthy chapters organized by overarching themes and shared stories, Johnson tackles numerous aspects of gay black life in the South. Chapter 1 is about growing up; chapter 2 considers and challenges the "closet" as a model of black homosexuality in the South and explores the ambivalence of many of these men's identification with a politicized and public sexuality; chapter 3 centers on the role of religion and the black church in the expression of gay male sexuality; chapter 4 examines sexual activity; chapter 5 focuses on the extended narratives of four non-gender conforming men; chapter 6 concentrates on stories of love and loss; and chapter 7 examines queer identity across generations, comparing the lives of two men who are eighty-six and ninety-three years old with the youngest in the study, who were twenty-three and twenty-one years old at the time of the interviews. While this thematic framework emphasizes the shared stories that draw these men together, it ends up ultimately blurring the geographic and demographic diversity that Johnson carefully tried to cultivate, making it difficult to follow each recurring narrator.

As a black gay southerner himself, Johnson's study is also a negotiation of his own identity, and he foregrounds this quite consciously, framing his research as an act of "critical performance ethnography" (8) that relies on a "co-performance" whereby "both the researcher and the narrator are performing for one another" (8). Yet it is unclear how these statements in his introduction play out in the text itself: Johnson provides short framing sections within each of the text's seven chapters, but shies away from making these brief preludes adequately reflective. Likewise, he holds back from probing his subjects in the interviews, instead providing only occasional interjections into their stories.

Curiously, of all the facets of identity that he examines here, the role of regional belonging is the thorniest for Johnson to negotiate, and he frequently rehashes stereotypes about southern identity as he seeks to revise them, noting, for example that "southerners tend to be great bearers...