Author Description

This book is the stage version of E. Patrick Johnson’s <i>Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History</i>, a groundbreaking text for the fields of Black studies, queer studies, and southern oral history and ethnography. Between 2004 and 2006, Johnson edited a series of narratives from Black gay men who were born and raised in the South and have continued to live there. While the scholarly text of <i>Sweet Tea</i> has enjoyed wide circulation, Johnson knew that the stories of these individuals weren’t able to come fully alive on the page. He transformed the text into a theatrical performance, which originally toured the country as <i>Pouring Tea</i>; the oral history has also been adapted into a feature-length documentary, <i>Making Sweet Tea</i>.<br> <br> Based on several tours and individual stagings, <i>Sweet Tea: A Play</i> invites readers, students, theater practitioners, and audiences from different backgrounds to engage with the lives of eleven men and one gender-nonconforming person—incredible characters all originally played by the author in a one-man show.