E. Patrick Johnson Lecture "Going Home Ain't Always Easy..."

This afternoon I had the opportunity to attend E. Patrick Johnson’s lecture called "Going Home Ain't Always Easy: Southern (Dis) Comfort and the Politics of Performing History". The lecture was part of the El Kati Distinguished Lectureship in American Studies Series and was held in the Weyerhaeuser boardroom.

A good deal of the material presented in the lecture dealt with material from Johnson’s recently published book, “Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South”. The oral histories that Johnson lectured on are the heart of this book, as was it the heart of this afternoon’s lecture.

From what I could gather from the lecture, Johnson also has been performing the ethnographic interviews/oral histories that he gathered for “Sweet Tea”. I’m not entirely sure about the specifics on this, but I think the show is in a one man show format, which is really cool considering the awesomeness that I got to hear this afternoon.

In his lecture Johnson discussed the travails of conducting oral histories, which included issues of positionality, and what it means to perform (in essence reproduce in theater) the oral histories he has conducted.

Johnson also reflected on a type of passive aggressive stance displayed towards taboo issues and transgressions peculiar to the American South. Johnson concludes that this passive aggressive stance (best put in Johnson’s own words as “keeping things hidden in plain sight”) also helps to uphold the continued oppression of people who identify as LGBT in the black community.

The lecture as a whole was centered on the performance of one of the interviews conducted by Johnson with a transgender black man named Charles, Chaz or Chastity. By choosing not to go through with gender reassignment surgery, Chaz (who was explained by Johnson to be a woman Monday to Saturday, but wearing a suit to church on Sunday) was presented as breaking through the passive aggressive sort of containment that Johnson talked about as being peculiar to the American South.

I can’t realistically cover all of what was said by Professor Johnson, and my lack of knowledge about performance theory and ethnography left me kind of in the dark at times during the lecture, but it was a good lecture (and a great turnout).