Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History is a 2008 ethnographic oral history of the lives of Black gay men in the Southern United States by scholar and performer E. Patrick Johnson, who himself grew up in rural North Carolina, and is openly gay. Sweet Tea received a 2009 Stonewall Book Award, for Stonewall Honor Books in Non-Fiction, from the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association. Lambda Literary Foundation noted the book reported a "previously untold sexual history of the South". Gender & Society's review asserts Johnson's research bears out that Black gay men are indeed in the South, and they do not always face hostility. Johnson recorded the audio book in 2009. He has adapted many of the stories from Sweet Tea into a one-man performance based on the narratives, Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales. In 2009 Johnson adapted the stories into a full play, Sweet Tea—The Play. Background Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. As a performance ethnographer, he researches his subjects and their cultures by empathizing with their point of view, and attempts to share the results through performance. In 1995 Johnson was in a black, gay, HIV/AIDS outreach event by US Helping US, People Into Living, Inc., in Washington, D.C., when he got to hear a group of older men tell stories of their lives. He lamented that if he had heard them when he was young it would have eased his alienation and isolation of growing up gay. He vowed to return to the south and preserve the stories of black, gay men if he ever had the opportunity. Johnson's states "the paradox of the South is 'the gentility, civility and general "good manners"' that complement 'the region's long history of grotesque racial violence'". Johnson also notes, "the South is frequently associated with a virulent and unrelenting fundamentalism" that is hostile to homosexuality. Research Johnson took a two-year sabbatical from his university job to collect the stories. Johnson originally intended to include women in his research but the overwhelming response from men delayed including their stories. In 2012, he started oral history interviews with women that would become Black. Queer. Southern. Women. He edited the stories gathered from 2004 to 2006 from black gay men born and raised in the South, and still lived