January 28, 2008
Contact: Caroline Jenkins Hanna
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—E. Patrick Johnson, professor, chair and director of graduate studies in the Department of Performance Studies and professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, will deliver a lecture titled “Pouring Tea: Gay Black Men of the South Tell their Tales,” based on excerpts from his forthcoming book, Sweet Tea: An Oral History of Gay Black Men of the South, at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 2, at Amherst College. The gathering, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the Friedmann Room in the school’s Keefe Campus Center.

Johnson’s oral history of Southern gay black men explores the relationship between blackness, sexuality and southern culture. Johnson himself traveled throughout the South, interviewing men from three generations for the book, and he brings together the stories of approximately 70 individuals from Maryland to Texas. He organized the interviews into thematic sections on a variety of topics: family, coming out, church, drag, HIV/AIDS, etc. The result is a mosaic of the varieties in experiences of gay black men in the south, offering a better understanding of men’s social and private lives in the region.

A scholar/artist, Johnson has performed nationally and internationally and has published widely in the area of race, gender, sexuality and performance. His book Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003) has won several awards, including the Lilla A. Heston Award and the Errol Hill Book Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His next projects include a book of auto-ethnographic essays on race, class and gender and an anthology on black and Latina/o queer performance. 

Johnson’s talk is sponsored by Amherst’s Pride Alliance, Black Student Union, English and Women’s and Gender Studies departments, Keefe Campus Center, Dean of Students and Office of Diversity & Inclusion, as well as the African & African American Studies department of Mount Holyoke College.

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