“Going Home Ain’t Always Easy: Southern (Dis) Comfort and the Politics of Performing History.”

As part of the first annual El Kati Distinguished Lectureship in American Studies on Sunday, Professor E. Patrick Johnson from Northwestern University gave a lecture entitled “Going Home Ain’t Always Easy: Southern (Dis) Comfort and the Politics of Performing History.” It was phenomenal! In discussing the oral history he compiled – Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South – Professor Johnson discussed both the unique intersectionality of being gay/queer, black, and southern as well as the methodology he employed for his work.
Johnson began by discussing how southern culture views and treats “transgressions” – the main indiscretions being drinking, gambling, adultery, and homosexuality. As he put it, the southern codes of gentility and complicity take precedence over naming desire and “flaunting that transgression.” He acknowledged that he himself identifies his Achilles heel as a black southern responsibility to conceal and be respectable – as he noted, “I cannot go home as I am.”
Although I’ve heard professorial candidates and lecturers discuss their position and privilege in academic work before, Dr. Johnson’s candor and honesty with regard to his role as a researcher served as an important lesson in positioning oneself in academic research. He discussed both the divergence of experience between himself and the individuals in the book (the “not me”) as well as the shared experiences (“the not not me”). Johnson examined how a variety of factors – class, institutional affiliation, being a public figure, his personal politics, his desire to debunk public views of being a gay, black man, and his fears of homophobic violence shaped how he approached his work.
The lecture also dealt with the relationship between the ‘researcher’ and the ‘researched’; as Johnson noted, criticism has been issued to academics for the colonial gaze they impose on those individuals whose stories they attempt to tell. Although I haven’t worked with critical ethnography, I gained an understanding of how it serves as a responsible methodology for engaging the oral histories of the individuals included in Sweet Tea. Professor Johnson described this methodology – which he called dialogical performance or co-performative critical ethnography, as relational and emotional, a process by which the researcher can performatively engage with and to the other as a means of preserving their stories, highlighting their narratives’ complicated nuances and capture the performative nature of southern speech and African American culture in the south.
I found Johnson’s mention of the role of the women in the community fascinating. He acknowledged the importance of the contact information and gossip these women offered him in his research, joking that they were not afraid to be blunt about exactly which men had engaged in extramarital affairs with other men. I love the way that Johnson framed their role in this process; instead of characterizing their gossip as “hearsay,” Johnson employs John Howard’s term “twice-told stories” to describe this custom, a practice Johnson argued is essential to the recuperation of queer histories.