Multimodal Methodologies: The Case of Making Sweet Tea

E. Patrick Johnson is Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University. He is a 2020 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003); Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (2018); and Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), in addition to several edited and co-edited collections, essays, and plays.

Johnson’s written and performance work dovetail intimately. His staged reading, “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales,” has toured to over 100 college campuses since 2006. The full-length stage play, Sweet Tea—The Play, premiered in Chicago, toured across 8 other cities, and to the National Black Theater Festival. Guided by an excerpt from his documentary film, Making Sweet Tea (2019), Johnson asks us to think about how we might push at the boundaries of what scholarship is and how it can be shared; how stories impact us as researchers and viewers; and how we might transgress conventions of established genres, blurring the boundaries between art/narrative/social science, inviting a reflection and open discussion on what’s to be gained from doing so.

Johnson is also among the subjects and co-executive producer of the film, Making Sweet Tea, which has received several awards, including Best LGBTQ Film at the San Diego Film Festival, Best Documentary Audience at the Out on Film Festival, and the Silver Image Award from the Association of American Retired Persons (AARP) for Positive Representation of LGBTQ People Over Fifty at the Chicago Reeling LGBTQ Film Festival.