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

E. Patrick Johnson

Abstract: 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 historiog-
raphy 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 research-
er conducting research on queer women and whether or not the research
constitutes feminist historiography.

In her 2008 essay, “Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral His-
tory,” historian Nan Alamilla Boyd raises important questions about the
challenges that queer theory poses for gay and lesbian history. In her sur-
vey of key texts in what she names as a “fledgling” subfield of U.S. history,
Boyd rightly questions whether oral history as a method can ultimately
escape the trappings of subjectivity “because it is through coherent and
intelligible subject positions that we learn to speak, even nonverbally,
about desire,” which sometimes reifies notions of sexual identity rather
than sexual desire (2008, 189). She summarizes John D’Emilio’s Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire
(1990), Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis’s Boots of Leather, Slip-
pers of Gold (1993), Esther Newton’s Cherry Grove, Fire Island (1993),
George Chauncey’s Gay New York (1994), and John Howard’s Men Like
That (1999), and finds that only Howard’s text represents a truly queer ex-
ample of how historians might chronicle same-sex desire by moving “be-
yond the limits of intelligible speech, that is, racially coded articulations

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 44: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2016) © 2016 by E. Patrick Johnson. All rights reserved.

51
52 E. Patrick Johnson

of desire, in order to produce a more complex accounting of the history of

sexuality and sexual communities” (2008, 186). While I agree with Boyd’s
assessment, I believe the “challenges” to oral history posed by queer the-
ory are less about oral history as a method, per se, and more about the
disciplinary protocols of history as a field. In other words, history as a field
trains researchers, including oral historians, to capture a narrative that pro-
vides insight about a particular time and place—training that Boyd notes
sometimes gets in the way of tracking a libidinal economy of desire outside
of identity politics.
Coincidentally, my book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An
Oral History, appeared in the same year as Boyd’s essay. In the introduction
I, too, laud Howard’s intervention in queer historiography, while also mark-
ing the difference between my approach to oral history as a performance
theorist as opposed to a historian. Unlike historians who, according to Nell
Irvin Painter, are invested in creating “historical narrative” (2005, iv), I am
committed to attending to the storytelling act itself by “co-performatively
bearing witness” (Conquergood 2002, 149) to the story. Oral history in
conjunction with performance, then, calls attention to the fictive nature of
oral history, but not necessarily as a methodological “problem,” as it were.
Rather, it situates oral history as an index of the meaning-making process
of history itself, what Allen Feldman calls “historicity” (1991, 2). In other
words, the narration is not only a recollection of historical events and facts
in relation to an “authentic” self or “identity”; it is also a phenomenolog-
ical experience—the moment of storytelling itself is an epistemological
and embodied experience of the self as same, the self as other, and the
intersubjectivity between teller and listener. The performance frame also
exposes not only the erotics in/of narration, but also the erotic tension
between the researcher and the teller, which has enormous implications
for queer history. Rather than a “transhistorical and cross-cultural inter-
pretation of history that conflates same-sex behavior with the ipso facto
existence of sexual identities” (Boyd 2008, 1), the performance approach
to oral history resists linear, progressive, or stable renderings of any one
“history” by what Della Pollock calls “making history go” (1998, 1).
Since I have responded in my earlier work to some of the anxieties
about queer historiography that Boyd expresses, in this essay I wish to
engage a different set of methodological conundrums based on my cur-
rent research. Tentatively titled “Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who
Love Women,” this work focuses on the oral histories of African American
 Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea 53

women who express same-sex desire who were born, reared, and continue
to reside in the American South. It is meant as a companion text to Sweet
Tea. As with Sweet Tea, my desire in “Honeypot” is that the oral histories
collected account for not only the way the narrators embody and relay his-
torical material about race, region, class, sexuality, and gender, but also for
how storytelling as a mode of communication is simultaneously a quo-
tidian form of self-fashioning and theorizing. While they do not always
overcome the challenges of being black quare Southern women,1 their oral
narratives stand as testaments to the power of voicehood, self-determina-
tion, and tenacity in how one simultaneously navigates and mediates the
conflicting, complicated, and confounding ideologies of the South while
at the same time indexing a quare history of same-sex desire.
Because I am a cisgender black gay man conducting research on most-
ly cisgender black quare women, the performative frame of oral history
I employed in Sweet Tea became even more prescient. Issues of power,
difference, and self-disclosure all came to the fore. In what follows, I re-
count how I navigated these methodological hurdles in collaboration with
the narrators. Specifically, I situate my approach as decidedly quare and
feminist, while also highlighting again how framing oral history as perfor-
mance elides some of the challenges to queer historiography. One of the
ways I do this is by engaging performative writing in an attempt to evoke
the sensuousness of the oral history encounter. Thus, I employ the trope of
honey and the honeybee not only to trouble my own gender performance
in the field, but also to reflect the similarities between the life of bees and
black Southern women who love women.

Quare Beginnings

I started collecting oral histories of these women because I actually wanted

to learn more about the interior lives of Southern black lesbians and their
journey toward selfhood in the South. As a child, the concept of “lesbian”
was not in my consciousness, nor necessarily in the lexicon of my western
North Carolina black community. The typical slang of “funny,” “that way,”
and “sissy” were certainly common but were mostly spoken in reference
to men who were thought to be gay. I sometimes heard at the barbershop
the oblique reference to a woman as a “bulldagger” but had no idea the
meaning of that term, only that it was negative. In hindsight, I realize that
I actually grew up with quite a few black lesbians, one of whom is Anita,
54 E. Patrick Johnson

whose narrative I include in my book. In fact, it was not until I was much
older that I realized just how many women in my community were “sweet”
on other women. Thus, I was curious to hear the stories about same-sex
desire from these women’s early childhoods to see if there were overlaps
with black Southern gay men with whom I have spoken, and my own story,
or if there are significant differences based on gender. For example, a few
of the young girls with whom I was friends growing up were what many
would refer to as “tomboys,” girls who were more interested in climbing
trees, building hot rods, and playing basketball than they were in playing
with dolls, playing house, or making mud pies, as I so loved to do. I don’t
recall them being teased about being tomboys, however. I, on the other
hand, was often called “sissy” because of my soft, soprano voice, big butt,
noticeable lisp, and interest in art and “girly” things. What explains this
difference in treatment based on gender expression and play interests?
Conducting these interviews gave me some insight and perspective on
that question, as many of the women in “Honeypot” revealed that they
believe that tomboyish girls are generally tolerated—at least until they are
a certain age and expected to become Southern “ladies.”
And even after adulthood, some women—at least in my community
growing up—were not bound by a narrow sexual “identity” when they
engaged in nonnormative sexual behavior or expressed same-sex desire.
While folks may have whispered about them, their dalliances with the
same gender did not necessarily make them “lesbian” as much as it did just
another eccentric whose membership in and contributions to the commu-
nity outweighed their sexual behavior.
One humorous story in this regard involves my now deceased uncle,
Johnny “Shaw Man” McHaney. For all intents and purposes, Uncle Johnny
would have been considered a “dirty old man.” He never seemed to dis-
criminate in his attraction to the other sex, but he definitely had a quare
sensibility about him—both in his attraction to nonnormative women
(i.e., women who did not fit within or even aspire to traditional standards
of beauty within white or black communities) and his linguistic play with
gender (e.g., he often called me “Baby Doll”).
Uncle Johnny was always taking pictures at family gatherings and hol-
idays with his Polaroid camera. Unsurprisingly, many of the photos were
of women guests at our family events or of women whom he had met at
his favorite barbershop where he hung out every day after work and on the
weekends. Several years ago my mother asked him to bring some of his
 Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea 55

pictures over to our house so that she could look through them and find
ones that she could possibly use as part of a photo collage for an upcoming
family reunion. Mixed in with the photos from past family reunions were
pictures of various women—some in compromising positions, scantily
clad, or nude. Aunt Mary Lee stumbled across a picture of Sylvia, a woman
who I remembered lived up the road from us when I was a child and who
was the mother of two daughters close to my age. Trying to needle Uncle
Johnny, Aunt Mary Lee asked in a voice almost as shrill as her sister’s,
“Johnny, ain’t this a picture of Sylvia?” Uncle Johnny slipped the picture
out of Aunt Mary Lee’s hand, studied it as if lost in an erotic reverie: “Yeah,
that’s Syp. You know she’s half and half,” he replied. “Well, if she half and
half, what YOU doin’ wit’ ’er then?” Aunt Mary Lee responded incredu-
lously. “I was with the half I could be wit’,” Uncle Johnny quipped with-
out missing a beat. Although totally scandalized and clutching her pearls,2
even my mother joined the rest of the family in the room in the uproar of
laughter.
It was my memory of Aunt Mary Lee and Uncle Johnny’s repartee and
description of Sylvia as “half and half,” meaning that she had sex with both
men and women, that brought into clarity the ways in which black South-
ern women’s sexual desire, sexual practice, and sexual identity are not al-
ways one and the same. As a scholar of gender and sexuality, of course I
know intellectually that this is not the case, but I had not thought about
it experientially in the context of my own upbringing and family history
until now. “Half and half ” in this context signifies quare sexual desire rath-
er than “bisexual” or “lesbian” identity, per se, for the phrase exemplifies
the verbal play of black folk vernacular that eschews fixed meanings. Aunt
Mary Lee already knew that Uncle Johnny did not discriminate when it
came to women. Thus, she already assumed what he was “doing” with
Sylvia, and especially given some of the other photos of women sprawled
across my mother’s kitchen table (e.g., a picture of Uncle Johnny and a
woman with one breast and another of a naked woman with a very large
behind standing in front of Uncle Johnny’s television). And Uncle John-
ny’s coy response about being with only one “half ” of Sylvia also cannot
be read literally in terms of him denying a “lesbian” side of Sylvia in order
to be with a “straight” side. More likely, the “half ” to which Uncle Johnny
refers is nonnormative sex given his proclivities for kink. The point here is
that Sylvia did not refer to herself as a lesbian and the community did not
project that identity onto her; they only knew that she engaged in quare
56 E. Patrick Johnson

sex without the encumbrance of a label or identity onto accompany this

behavior or desire. This was common among many of the women that I
interviewed. While the same phenomenon was true for some of the men
I interviewed for Sweet Tea, it certainly was not the dominant narrative,
as many of the men typically did identify under some label or category.
This phenomenon made me think differently about the particularly vexing
problem of how to conduct research on sexuality beyond identity “in order
to produce a more complex accounting of the history of sexuality and sex-
ual communities” (Boyd 2008, 178). Ultimately, this is why I changed the
subtitle of the book from “Black Lesbians of the South” to “Black Southern
Women Who Love Women.”3

“Outsider Within”: On Quaring Positionality

Unlike my experience with the men in Sweet Tea, I was never asked to
“do” anything during the visit like help cook dinner or run errands. This
may have been due to the gendered ways in which women in the South
are socialized to “serve” men, particularly with some of the older women
I interviewed who treated me like one of their own children or nephews.
Nonetheless, a few of the women prepared dinner in anticipation of my
visit, like Lenore Stackhouse, one of the last few women I interviewed, and
who unfortunately passed away unexpectedly just three months after I in-
terviewed her. She prepared a lovely “Sunday dinner” for me, comprised of
potato salad, collard greens, baked chicken, rolls, and—of course—sweet-
ened iced tea.
In general, my interactions with these women—most of whom I was
meeting for the first time—were familial and familiar, not in the sense
that I knew them but in the sense that we were kin based on our Southern
roots, our queerness, and, I believe, my “soft” masculinity. In fact, during
some of the exchanges a few women would refer to me as “girl” or “honey,”
when responding to a question, and then become embarrassed by the slip
of tongue. I was heartened by these easy interactions, given the warnings
from friends and colleagues that I might not be able to secure women
to talk to me for the book and, if I did, they would not be forthcoming
about the intimate details of their lives because I am a man. I did have a
few women cancel at the last minute or stand me up altogether, but this
only happened in Tallahassee, Florida. I have no explanation for this, for it
was the only city where this happened. There were a total of four women
 Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea 57

who failed to follow through with the interview there after agreeing to be
a part of the book. They have yet to respond to my follow-up calls to find
out what happened or to reschedule.
Before embarking on this research, I understood that the stakes were
different because of the gender difference between the researcher and the
subjects. Rather than view this as an obstacle, however, I viewed it as an
opportunity to engage questions of gender, sexuality, and region across the
gender divide. Moreover, I grew up in a single-parent home with a moth-
er who instilled in her children Southern manners, grace, and respect for
others. And, it was lesbian of color feminism that brought me into my
consciousness around my own sexuality. So, it was not a matter of me not
knowing how to act around these women. It was more about me under-
standing how my male privilege—despite my upbringing and personal
politics—might influence not only how I collected these oral histories, but
also how my gender might reinscribe some of the very structures and insti-
tutions that these women critique in their narratives. Thus, I want to take
some time here to walk through my process of collecting these narratives
as a way of engaging what Bryant Keith Alexander calls “critical reflexivity,”
which he defines as “both a demonstration and a call for a greater sense of
implicating and complicating how we are always already complicit in the
scholarly productions of our labor, and the effects of our positions and
positionalities with the diverse communities in which we circulate” (2006,
xviii–xix).
In this respect I am an “outsider/within,” to borrow Patricia Hill Col-
lins’s phrase (1991, 11), since my interlocutors and I share many of the
same identity markers (e.g., queerness, Southernness) and not others (e.g.,
gender, class position). This experience of conducting research within a
community to which I belong, albeit across gender boundaries, was not
new to me, as I conducted an oral history of my grandmother’s life as a
live-in domestic worker for my doctoral dissertation research. The power
dynamic between the two of us shifted variously as I negotiated being
“scholar-in-charge” and “deferential grandson” and she negotiated being
“subject-of-study” and “grandmother-in-charge.” These power dynam-
ics are inescapable within the context of oral history and ethnographic
research. It is a matter of the researcher being aware of such dynamics,
approaching and working through them with a sense of ethics and moral
responsibility. Alexander perhaps sums it up best when he writes: “These
are the moral issues of avoiding egoism and promoting cultural knowledge
58 E. Patrick Johnson

as a mechanism for generating critical reflexive processes in/for audiences.

And the moral issues of dealing with voice as cultures of thought” (2006,
xix). Thus, my methodology for collecting these oral histories was guided
by a sense of ethics and a moral obligation to render these women’s lives
in a way that acknowledges my male privilege—not just in the interview
setting but also in the world. This latter point, however, is again one of the
reasons why I chose to do this work in the first place: as an act of male
feminist praxis.
Indeed, much of my work as a scholar has been about the celebration
and promotion of women’s lives—from the research on my grandmother’s
life as a domestic worker to drawing on her black folk feminism to critique
the field of queer studies,4 to providing a platform for black women solo
artists to showcase their work, to collaborating with black feminist col-
leagues to team teach courses on feminism and queer studies.5 My scholar-
ly and political praxis, therefore, is decidedly feminist. But not in the sense
that Joy James critiques when she uses the term “opportunistic feminism”
for “profeminists,” (straight) male scholars of color who are seemingly (in
James’s estimation) down with the female cause but who nonetheless “see
most women as supporting helpmates or damsels to be succored” (2002,
157). James’s suspiciousness about the motivations of male academics
that identify as feminist is well warranted based on the usurpation of black
women scholars’ control over their own work by their male colleagues.
And while all of James’s examples of such poaching are by self-identified
heterosexual men, I know, too, that gay men also engage in sexist and mi-
sogynist behavior—even those who presume to be in solidarity with their
lesbian sisters. In fact, I remember a gay male couple, both friends of mine,
sharing a story about socializing on another friend’s sailboat, in which a
lesbian guest got into a discussion with them about the AIDS epidemic.
She suggested that if the disease had infected and affected lesbians more
disproportionately than gay men, that gay men would have “stepped over
women’s diseased bodies to get to the club instead of helping them.” My
friends thought her comment was appalling and an exaggeration, but I
don’t know that she was too far off the mark, for the gay male community
benefits from patriarchy and doesn’t always work to dismantle it—even in
solidarity with those with whom they share a common sexual identity or
affinity and despite the fact that patriarchy and misogyny undergird ho-
mophobia. Nonetheless, this does not mean that all men—straight, gay,
or queer—are beyond doing ethical, self-reflexive, antisexist work. I can
 Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea 59

never totally “undo” my male privilege—a privilege, I might add, that is

never absolute, as it is contingent in various contexts in relation to my race,
class, and sexuality. But what I can do is the work that my soul was called
to do, and that is to work to destroy oppressive institutions of power, in-
cluding patriarchy.
Within the context of the oral history interviews for “Honeypot,” my
disavowal of patriarchy consisted of me taking a feminist approach. An
example of this was eschewing what Kristina Minister calls the “standard
oral history frame,” which “denies women the communication form that
supports the topics women value” (1991, 35). Although Minister recom-
mends that only women should conduct interviews of other women to
truly honor women’s communication patterns (a point that I think has an
essentialist component), I believe that the ways in which I conducted the
interviews with the women of “Honeypot” allowed for more flexibility in
terms of having a set of questions but not necessarily privileging getting
through the questions as the most important aspect of the interview. There
were many times when I only got to ask a question every fifteen or twenty
minutes, such as when I interviewed Iris in Atlanta. I might have asked Iris
a total of ten questions, despite the interview lasting five hours over two
meetings! Further, Minister argues that male oral historians focus more on
“activities and facts” than on “feelings and attitudes,” which women value
more. This was definitely not the case with this research. In fact, many of
the questions asked the women to describe how they felt about a particu-
lar event in their lives or their beliefs about something. For example, one
of the questions I asked was, “How do you feel about the life choices that
you have made in light of being a black lesbian?” Another was, “Do you feel
a sense of community among black lesbians here in your town?” These,
among other questions that asked the women about their thoughts, actu-
ally privileged the women as feeling and thinking subjects rather than as
objects from which “facts” and information are extracted and abstracted.
Moreover, I believe the fact that I express a soft, quiet masculinity that
is sometimes read as effeminacy allowed me to connect with these women
in ways that I would not have otherwise been able to do. I am soft-spoken,
polite, and a good listener—all self-effacing attributes that helped to set
a tone of openness and vulnerability. Paradoxically, my being a man with
these attributes provided a space for some of the women to be even more
open about their experiences. “Lisa” told me when I shared with her that
a few of my academic colleagues were skeptical about women opening up
60 E. Patrick Johnson

to me because of my gender that the opposite was true for her. She re-
vealed that she agreed to the interview because I am a man, for she felt that
a woman interviewer would judge some of the decisions she had made in
her life, like having an abortion or being sexually promiscuous with men.
I also suspect that women shared certain things with me because they
would assume that women would already know some of these experiences
because they are women. This was one advantage to being an “outsider/
within.”
Similar to performance scholar Della Pollock, who theorizes the power
dynamic between researcher and researched in her work on birthing nar-
ratives, I entered each interview with a sense of humility and vulnerability.
Pollock writes:

I made myself . . . vulnerable to being moved. Listening and writing,

I saw myself as the register of someone else’s power. Against the grain
of current obsessions with the power of the researcher to shape, tame,
appropriate, and control the worlds he or she investigates . . . I more
often than not felt unnerved and overwhelmed, “othered,” interrogated,
propelled into landscapes of knowing and not knowing I would not oth-
erwise have dared enter. (1999, 23)

This vulnerability that Pollock describes was key to the empathetic con-
nection I had with many of my interlocutors. Indeed, there were moments
when I was so enraptured by a powerful story being told that time seemed
to be suspended as I entered the lifeworld being created before my eyes. I
can think of two instances in which I became so emotional due to the in-
tensity of the story—both about sexual trauma—that the narrator actually
began to comfort me: “It’s all right, Baby. I’m okay. I done worked through
this”—all the while rubbing my back and handing me a tissue. In another
instance, the narrator and I just sat in silence for what seemed an eternity,
while we both sobbed and comforted each other. These are examples of a
feminist practice of oral history and ethnography in which the researcher
emphasizes empathy, collaboration, intersubjectivity, and a sharing of the
emotional labor to tell the story. As Karen Olson and Linda Shopes remind
us, “The peculiar intimacy available to strangers who share an important
experience seems to create in at least some interviews a social space where
normal power relations perhaps get blunted” (1991, 195–96).
Feminist sociologist Judith Stacey questions, “Can there be a feminist
ethnography?” While she is dubious about a “fully” feminist ethnography,
 Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea 61

she concedes: “[T]here can be (indeed there are) ethnographies that are
partially feminist, accounts of culture enhanced by the application of fem-
inist perspectives. There also can and should be feminist research that is
rigorously self-aware and therefore humble about the partiality of its eth-
nographic vision and its capacity to represent self and other” (1991, 117).
Given my position as a male oral historian and ethnographer, and keeping
in mind the critique of male scholars who do research on women as posed
by Joy James (2002) and others, I, too, concede that “Honeypot” is a “par-
tially feminist” ethnography. Yet, despite its feminist partiality, I believe
that the benefits of the research far outweigh the potential pitfalls, for to
not conduct this research based simply on the fact that I am a man would
be to fall prey to what the late performance ethnographer, Dwight Con-
quergood, called the “skeptic’s cop out,” a pitfall of ethnographic research
that retreats to quietism, paralysis, and cynicism based on “difference.” Ac-
cording to Conquergood, this position is the most morally reprehensible
on his moral map of performative stances toward the other—which also
includes the “custodian’s rip-off,” “curator’s exhibitionism,” and “enthusi-
ast’s infatuation”—because the “skeptic’s cop out” forecloses dialogue alto-
gether (2013, 71–75). On the contrary, I engaged this research and these
women’s narratives to initiate more than just a dialogue; I also wanted to
create a living archive of black women’s sexual desire in the South.

On Quare Methods

I wish now to pivot from my role as a male oral historian and ethnographer
to discussing oral history and performance as key methods for collecting
the oral history of black Southern women who love women.6 I could have
chosen from a number of methods to chronicle the history of black lesbi-
ans from and living in the Southern part of the country, including a more
traditional archival project whereby I spent time poring over ephemera,
newspaper articles, diaries, and other historical documents to piece to-
gether a historical narrative of Southern black same-sex-loving women.
My desire to use oral history, however, was undergirded by my investment
and training in performance studies, which privileges the body and regards
it necessarily as archive.7 In the act of performing one’s life history, the self
is affirmed through the interaction with another who bears witness to the
story being told. As Madison suggests in her summary of Kristin Langelli-
er and Eric Peterson’s theorization of embodiment in oral history, “Narra-
62 E. Patrick Johnson

tive as embodied emphasizes the living presence of bodily contact. Bodies

are within touch, not simply representing, displaying, or portraying a past
moment” (2012, 37; emphasis in original). I think here of a colony of bees
wherein there may be tens of thousands of bees where touch is not only in-
evitable but also necessary. In fact, in order to “speak” to tell of where there
is a great source of nectar, a worker bee must do her waggle dance, body
to body with her sisters. The honeybee’s waggle dance is not just a conve-
nient metaphor for oral history as an embodied process; rather, it actually
reflects the material importance of bodily presence, witnessing, and affir-
mation in the midst of one’s self-narration. Zora Neale Hurston’s character
Janie in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God comes into voice through
the telling of her story to her best friend, Phoeby. In her description of
Janie and Phoeby on Janie’s back porch, Hurston makes note of the two
women’s proximity—their closeness—that provides a safe space for Janie
to share her tale: “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close togeth-
er, Phoeby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest
for fear it might be thought mere curiosity. Janie full of that oldest human
longing—self revelation” (1990, 6). I played Phoeby to many of my in-
terlocutors’ Janie, as I bore witness to their affirmation of self, their trials,
tribulations, and trivialities, their reveries, repulsions, and recollections.
Through laughter, tears, and contemplation, I witnessed these women re-
veal themselves to me and to themselves—sometimes for the first time.
For black women, this is an important feature of finding their own voice, as
historically they have been silenced. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis argues, “It is
oral narrative that is ideally suited to revealing the ‘multilayered texture of
black women’s lives’” (1991, 43). And if this is true for heterosexual black
women, it is especially true for black women with same-sex desire. There
exists a tradition of heterosexual black women’s storytelling, but that has
not been the case for black lesbians outside of fiction.8
I do not wish to overstate or romanticize oral history as a method for
archiving Southern black lesbian history. I am keenly aware of the paradox
of oral histories since their transmission occurs through text. As Claudia
Salazar points out: “[O]nce discourse becomes text, its openness as dia-
logue, together with its evocative and performance elements, are lost: the
punctuation and silences of speech are gone; the life events in the life of
the narrator often follow a chronological pattern, partly induced by the
questions the ethnographer imposes; it is edited, translated, and, finally,
given a title” (1991, 98). Despite this conundrum I am not only interest-
 Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea 63

ed in translation of these women’s words from oral to written text, I am

also interested in the value of what the oral history does for the storyteller
herself, as well as detailing the ethnographic process—the relationship be-
tween teller and listener. This is not to say that I am not interested in the
actual historical content of what the narrator shares. Nonetheless, I also
am not invested in an uncontested “truth,” so much as I am in the valida-
tion of the narrator’s subjectivity. Madison suggests that:

Oral history performances . . . do not function as factual reports or as

objective evidence, nor are they pure fictions of history. Instead, they
present to us one moment of history and how that moment in history
is remembered through a particular subjectivity. . . . It is at the matrix of
materiality, memory, subjectivity, performance, imagination, and expe-
rience that memory culminates in oral history performance, a culmina-
tion of layers that are all mutually formed by each other. (2012, 34–35;
emphasis in original)

Thus, unlike some oral historians, I am more invested in “what the nar-
rator remembers and values and how . . . she expresses memory” than
the validity of the narrative itself (Madison 2012, 35). This is why I do
not offer an analysis of the narratives, for I want them to stand as quotid-
ian forms of theorizing. As black feminist critic Barbara Christian writes,
“[O]ur [people of color] theorizing is often in narrative forms, in the sto-
ries we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because
dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking” (1988, 68). The
dynamism of these black same-sex-loving women’s narratives, therefore,
offers insight into ways of knowing that legitimize not only their own lives,
but also help us understand the complexities and contradictions of race,
sexuality, region, gender, and class more generally. What I offer by way of
analysis, then, is more of the ethnographic encounter, the sight, sound,
smell, taste, and touch of the interview scene, to amplify context and “re-
figure the small details and the taken for granted” (Madison 2012, 36).
As historians and anthropologists of queer culture have demonstrated
for decades, no method of documenting queer desire is without its chal-
lenges. My research on black quare women of the South is no different.
Repeatedly, however, I have called on my own interdisciplinary home of
performance studies to bring a different perspective to traditional disci-
plinary approaches to queer culture making and history. While perfor-
mance is certainly not without its own theoretical and methodological
64 E. Patrick Johnson

quagmires—for it, like history writ large, cannot escape the politics of
representation—it does in the instance of oral history carefully traverse
several minefields through its capacity to view history as processual. It
thereby holds in tension the discursive and the material, while exposing
the trappings of teleological approaches to everyday life, which cannot al-
ways be rendered through the gaze of “objectivity.” Ultimately, no matter
the method(s) of documentation, it is important that the lives of queers
and the stories we tell—about ourselves and about others—remain a pri-
ority for scholars in various fields who are invested in queering (and quar-
ing) the archival record.

E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and Afri-
can American Studies at Northwestern University.

Notes

1. I use the term “quare” as opposed to “queer” to register the specific black
vernacular reference to nonnormative sexuality. See Johnson 2005.
2. “Clutching pearls” in black gay vernacular means to express surprise.
3. Throughout this essay, I use various terms to indicate same-sex desire, in-
cluding “same-sex-loving,” “queer,” “quare,” “gay,” and “lesbian” because
the women I interviewed identify variously among these or disavow labels
altogether.
4. See Johnson 2005.
5. See Johnson 1996 and Johnson and Rivera-Servera 2013. I codeveloped and
team-taught a course with Sandra Richards on black feminism and black
queer theory for eight years, a course I now teach by myself.
6. I conducted over eighty interviews between May 2012 and September
2014. The women ranged in age from eighteen to seventy-four and hailed
from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia,
South Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Washington,
DC, and Maryland. They ranged in occupation from factory workers, local
government administrators, entrepreneurs, counselors, professors, librari-
ans, schoolteachers, musicians, writers, community organizers, DJs, truck
drivers, and housewives to unemployed. Educational background also dif-
fered, but the majority of the women had completed high school, many had
had some college education, and a few had postgraduate and professional
degrees. The criteria for being interviewed required that the woman be born
in a Southern state (meaning a state below the Mason-Dixon Line or a state
that had previously been a slave-holding state, such as Missouri and Oklaho-
 Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea 65

ma), be primarily reared in the South for a significant portion of her life, and
be currently living in the South. I made a few exceptions to these criteria if
a woman had not been born in the South as I have defined it, but had been
reared there as an infant to toddler onward. I also made one exception about
what constitutes the South and expanded the boundaries of “blackness” by
including the narrative of a woman born in Puerto Rico who identifies as
black.
7. See, for example, Taylor 2003.
8. For more on black (heterosexual) women’s storytelling traditions, see Dance
1998, Hill 1991, Brown and Fauk 2010, and Vaz 1997.

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