Mr. Tea

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Steven is told at an early age not to be a faggot. He learns to hide his sexual orientation, and at age 17, he has a child with his girlfriend before finally coming out. Steven is one of 63 men profiled in Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2008, $35), an oral-history collection by Northwestern professor of performance studies E. Patrick Johnson. On Friday 7, Johnson will debut a solo show based on the book.

Perhaps surprisingly, Steven wasn’t born pre-Stonewall; in fact, he’s only 22 years old. “That is one of the stories, when I perform it, that really registers with younger people,” Johnson says. “They say, ‘Oh, God, I can really relate to that.’” In his book and his new show, Johnson chronicles the experiences of black gay Southern men ranging in age from their twenties to their nineties.

“I was raised in a small town called Hickory, North Carolina, and there were no role models for black gay men,” recalls the 43-year-old, who grew up with eight family members in a one-bedroom apartment. “There are a lot of books about white gay history and even some books about the South and gayness, but none focusing on the black community.”

In the early aughties, Johnson began collecting stories for Sweet Tea (according to Johnson, Southerners use sweet to refer to gay men, while tea suggests tea dances or teatime, an hour when gossip and stories are shared). In 2005, about a year into the project, he decided a staged version would follow. “I met so many wonderful storytellers and characters that they couldn’t just live on the page; they needed to be performed,” he says. While working on the book, Johnson performed Pouring Tea, a staged reading of some of the oral histories.

In Sweet Tea—a coproduction by About Face Theatre and Jane M. Saks and the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago—Johnson not only becomes the subjects he interviewed, he also weaves into the performance his own experiences of growing up black, gay and Southern. Another figure from the book, nonagenarian Countess Vivian, a man born in New Orleans in 1912, appears as a sage figure accompanying Johnson throughout the play. “He is the voice that cuts through it all,” the author says. “You have Freddie, who has this ordeal with his mother and she wants to give him away. You have Ed, who is HIV positive and on the brink of death. You have DC, who’s had his heart broken and says he’ll never love another man again. Countess Vivian grounds us all.”

Johnson inhabits 13 characters representing a vast cross section of ages, experiences and dialects. “I have always been very good at picking up accents and the way people talk,” he says. “The challenge for me as an actor was finding them in my body.” For his ability to meet that challenge, Johnson credits director Daniel Alexander Jones: “He helped me realize that they were [there] all along.”

Johnson also had his own history to draw from, especially when channeling Southern customs and manners. “There is something very civilized about that way of dealing with other people,” he says. “It is also a form of passive-aggression. My grandmother used to say things like, ‘Oh, she is an ugly child, bless her heart.’ There is a certain gentility that is also a way of easing the blow.”

Sweet Tea opens Friday 7 at the Viaduct Theater.

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