Queering the Archive

When I began collecting the oral histories for my book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South —An Oral History, a performance was the last thing on my mind. I was more interested in creating a written archive of life stories heretofore undocumented. It was not until after a year into the research and after meeting so many great storytellers that I realized that a performance was in order. For the page could not capture the vocal cadence, verbal ticks, non-verbal cues, and intimacy created through oral history performance. Initially, I considered adapting a script from the oral histories and casting a show of eight to twelve actors. After more thought, however, I decided not to stage a production with multiple cast members and instead make the show a solo piece with me performing excerpts from various narratives. I also made this decision because I saw it as an opportunity to use performance to ask larger questions about how to stage ethnographic fieldwork. For instance, how does moving the narratives from the printed page and the mostly private space of a reader to the stage with a public audience alter their meaning? What does the dramatization of the researcher's relationship to the subjects and to the audience reveal that the book version only implies? What are the ethics of performing these narratives in the absence of the narrators? These were somewhat different questions I pursued when analyzing a poem or piece of fiction. The stakes were different because the narratives are those of living people and, as Dwight Conquergood so aptly noted, “opening and interpreting lives and is not the same as opening and closing books.” And yet, the attention to details of a text that literary analysis requires is a skill that is actually grounded in ethics—an ethics of care that propels one to “pay attention” to what the text is telling you. And it was this sense of detail that propelled me to think about performing the narratives of Sweet Tea in such a way that their complexity was communicated and my role as co-performative witness would be highlighted.