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E. Patrick Johnson's Honeypot opens with the fictional trickster character Miss B. barging into the home of Dr. EPJ, informing him that he has been chosen to collect and share the stories of her people. With little explanation, she whisks the reluctant Dr. EPJ away to the women-only world of Hymen, where she serves as his tour guide as he bears witness to the real-life stories of queer Black women throughout the American South. The women he meets come from all walks of life and recount their experiences on topics ranging from coming out and falling in love to mother/daughter relationships, religion, and political activism. As Dr. EPJ hears these stories, he must grapple with his privilege as a man and as an academic, and in the process he gains insights into patriarchy, class, sex, gender, and the challenges these women face. Combining oral history with magical realism and poetry, Honeypot is an engaging and moving book that reveals the complexity of identity while offering a creative method for scholarship to represent the lives of other people in a rich and dynamic way.

"Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities. At once transcendent and grounded in place and time, these narratives raise important questions about queer identity formation, community building, and power relations as they are negotiated within the context of southern history. Johnson uses individual stories to reveal the embedded political and cultural ideologies of the self but also of the listener and society as a whole. These breathtakingly rich life histories show afresh how black female sexuality is and always has been an integral part of the patchwork quilt that is southern culture."--

G.R.I.T.S.: stories of growing up black, female, and queer -- It's thick here: race, gender, and sexuality in the South -- Does your mama know?: motherhood and mother-daughter relationships -- Walk like a man, talk like a woman: gender nonconformity -- I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely: religion and spirituality -- A taste of honey: sex among women who love women -- I'm sweet on you: stories of love, courtship, and intimacy -- The work my soul was called to do: art and activism -- My soul looks back and wonders: stories of perseverance and hope -- Salsa soul sister: Aida Rentas -- Being human is a dangerous thing: Cherry Hussain -- I'm happy as hell: Gwen Cubit -- I'm just a black woman in America: Lori Wilson -- I'm alright with who I am: 'Ida Mae' -- Books saved my life: Mary Anne Adams -- A poet's response

"Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities. At once transcendent and grounded in place and time, these narratives raise important questions about queer identity formation, community building, and power relations as they are negotiated within the context of southern history. Johnson uses individual stories to reveal the embedded political and cultural ideologies of the self but also of the listener and society as a whole. These breathtakingly rich life histories show afresh how black female sexuality is and always has been an integral part of the patchwork quilt that is southern culture."--

G.R.I.T.S.: stories of growing up black, female, and queer -- It's thick here: race, gender, and sexuality in the South -- Does your mama know?: motherhood and mother-daughter relationships -- Walk like a man, talk like a woman: gender nonconformity -- I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely: religion and spirituality -- A taste of honey: sex among women who love women -- I'm sweet on you: stories of love, courtship, and intimacy -- The work my soul was called to do: art and activism -- My soul looks back and wonders: stories of perseverance and hope -- Salsa soul sister: Aida Rentas -- Being human is a dangerous thing: Cherry Hussain -- I'm happy as hell: Gwen Cubit -- I'm just a black woman in America: Lori Wilson -- I'm alright with who I am: 'Ida Mae' -- Books saved my life: Mary Anne Adams -- A poet's response

"Giving voice to a population rarely acknowledged in southern history, Sweet Tea collects life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the southern United States. E. Patrick Johnson challenges stereotypes of the South as 'backward' or 'repressive, ' suggesting that these men draw upon the performance of 'southernness'--politeness, coded speech, and religiosity, for example--to legitimate themselves as members of both southern and black cultures. At the same time, Johnson argues, they deploy those same codes to establish and build friendship networks and find sexual partners and life partners. Traveling to every southern state, Johnson conducted interviews with more than seventy black gay men between the ages of 19 and 93--lawyers, hairdressers, ministers, artists, doctors, architects, students, professors, and corporate executives, as well as the retired and unemployed. Sweet Tea is arranged according to themes echoed in their narratives. Chapters explore unique experiences as well as shared ones, from coming out stories and church life to homosex and love relationships. The voices collected here dispute the idea that gay subcultures flourish primarily in northern, secular, urban areas. In addition to filling in a gap in the sexual history of the South, Sweet Tea offers a window into the ways that black gay men negotiate their sexual and racial identities with their southern cultural and religious identities. The interviews also reveal how they build and maintain community in many spaces and activities, some of which may appear to be antigay. Through Johnson's use of critical performance ethnography, Sweet Tea validates the lives of these black gay men and reinforces the role of storytelling in both African American and southern cultures"--Publisher description

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction ''Blackness'' and Authenticity: What's Performance Got to Do with It? -- 1 The Pot Is Brewing -- 2 Manifest Faggotry -- 3 Mother Knows Best -- 4 ''Nevah Had uh Cross Word'' -- 5 Sounds of Blackness Down Under -- 6 Performance and/as Pedagogy -- Appendix A Mary Rhyne's Narrative -- Appendix B Interview with Mrs. Smith -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

This poetic meditation engages homosexuality as pathology and inherited "disease" as propagated by some factions of the Black church. Reinterpreting the notion of genealogical "inheritance" the author pays tribute to his queer ancestors, tracing a legacy of racial and sexual struggle and how the two are imbricated. At the same time, the meditation points to the hypocrisy of Black clergy who always already carry within them a part of the Black queer.