Remembering Randall:Written Roundtable James A. Crank, Jaki Shelton Green, Trudier Harris, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Robert Fitzgerald Reid-Pharr, Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, and Daniel Wallace Shortly after Randall Kenan passed away in August of 2020, I reached out to those whom he loved and who loved him. We created a community of sorrow and light that ultimately culminated in the series of tributes below. We offer them in hopes that those whom Randall touched might find their grief comforted—even remotely—by the sharing of the burden of his loss. —JAC ________ We were all dear to Randall. "Have you met my dear sweet colleague?" "Do you know the dear poet from Missouri who writes villanelles?" "Oh, my dear, you are too kind to me." We were all dear to Randall. It was only a matter of weeks after we met when he called me a "dear comic nerd," and maybe a few more after that when I settled in as his "dear little brother." In an email I have from that time, Randall writes, "Oh, my dear little brother, I wish we had met under more pleasant circumstances." For Randall, having a book written about him was a bunch of needless fuss. Someone talking seriously about his place in American letters? Absurd. He was never more uncomfortable than when I would talk about his accomplishments or successes. When we would do speaking engagements to promote the book, he hated when I introduced him. He always warned me not to fanboy out or gush about his many awards. I did anyway. We were all dear to Randall. Randall was supremely humble. When I told him that I was hung up on twice by the publicist for Sam Shepard—the subject of my last book—he told me an anecdote about how Shepard had blown him off in a New York theater when all he wanted to do was express admiration for his plays. "One of the most humiliating moments of my life. I kid you not," he wrote. "What are you gonna do? Some boys just won't raised right." [End Page 267] Randall was raised right. When If I Had Two Wings was set to release last August, he sent me a text of the starred review by Kirkus. I responded with an emoji of a fist; he sent back a YouTube link to the LL Cool J song, "Mama Said Knock You Out," with its epic first line: "don't call it a comeback!" As I was composing a note congratulating him on the first time I had ever heard him take credit for his success or come remotely close to a boast, he had already written back a series of texts: "was that too much?I fear that was too much.I do apologize." We were all dear to Randall. Losing him last fall was devastating in so many ways, but perhaps the most tender was knowing I could not carry my grief to him. We had a habit of reaching out to each other when either of us experienced a loss, personal or public. When the writer Harlan Ellison passed, Randall wrote to me, "He had a major impact on me as an undergrad lover of SF. Later we developed a telephone relationship I treasure, short-lived as it was. There aren't a lot of writers in the canon like him. I will miss him." When Stan Lee died, Randall was the first person I looked to for solace. "This one hurts, bruv," I told him, "I don't know what to do." Randall responded, "These passages get rougher and rougher. The older you get, the deeper they strike." Losing Randall was rough. Not having him to share my grief with struck deep. If you wrote emails to Randall, you remember his changing postscripts at the end of the message—anything from book and movie quotations to witty sayings. The one I remember most is the Ancient Coptic proverb originally quoted by Beryl Markham in West with the Night: "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's O so quiet when the goldfish die." In the wake of...

The House that Race Built E. Patrick Johnson (bio) The year 1970 was spiteful. It was a year of the United States’ continued reckoning with its racist past, present (and future); its sexism and misogyny; its homophobia; its class wars; its jingoism and imperialism. It was the year that Angela Davis was fired from UCLA for being a communist; it was the year that race riots occurred in Augusta, GA, Miami and Daytona Beach, FL; it was the year that Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was released from jail. And the list goes on. The country needed a salve for the wound inflicted by white supremacy, though no amount of ointment would scab over centuries of the deeds of white men. As they always already had done, black women came to the rescue with their own form of root work on this more “imperfect” union. The sweat and toil of their labor in the fields and in white folks’ houses that would spill into the streets and on picket lines, was the historical context for what emerged as a black feminist consciousness made manifest materially and rhetorically. In the preface to her 1970 black feminist anthology, The Black Woman, for example, writer Toni Cade Bambara proclaims, “We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate society; liberation from the constrictive norms of ‘mainstream’ culture, from [End Page 678] the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly from without (reaction) rather than from within (creation)” (1970, 7). And as if singing a harmonic alto to Bambara’s soprano, the twin namesake Toni Morrison punctuates Bambara’s declaration with an exclamation mark: The Bluest Eye. Indeed, the story of Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye is exemplary of what happens when we fail to loosen the hold of the “synthetic myths” that are often internalized as a reaction to white supremacy: when we are seduced by the seeming “innocence” of language that formulates the “Dick and Jane” children’s book primer that opens the novel; when we, like Cholly Breedlove, buy the lie of what manhood should be and feels like, and get trapped in the pursuit of an ideal that leaves one forever wanting and ultimately, “a ratty nigger” (Morrison 2000, 17); when we, like Pauline Breed-love, become maimed by our obsession with an external “other” rather than the other within, which keeps us from living our best life; indeed, when we, like all our ancestors and the yet unborn yield to the temptation of racism it keeps us “distracted,” as Morrison, speaking in a different context, notes, from doing our work because “there will always be one more thing” (1975). Ultimately, like the entire Breedlove family, we sometimes drape around us a stunningly beautiful yet deceptively cheap cloak of ugly that does not belong to us—“a cloak of ugliness” we have accepted to wear without question (2000, 39). Given this “ugly” historical context, fifty years is an eye blink— or a mother’s side eye. We have been stuck in the changing same for over three centuries, and so it is the themes of Morrison’s first novel that call us to reckon with what it all means—this so-called black American life in which the election of a black president lulled us into a quietude that actually awoke a sleeping giant. And now we know that orange is definitely not the new black and there were no marigolds in the fall of 2016. Fifty years. The reckoning continues and the ante has been upped. How apropos, then, that we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest novels in the history of American arts and letters. Pecola’s tragic story is a necessary precautionary tale that has stood the test of the half century of its existence. It has done so not only because racism and our internalization of it persists, but also because Morrison provides us a language—a primer—to put a name to that process of internalization. But putting a name to it was only the first step. It actually may...

Camp Revival, or the Sissification of the Black Church E. Patrick Johnson (bio) This meditation engages a discussion of black spirituality vis-à-vis the black church and riffs on church revivals so common among southern black evangelicals; it also literally “revives,” enlivens anew, a discussion of “camp” performance as a sign of something more than the “social visibility of the white queer.”1 Therefore, my aim is to make three moves here regarding camp performance: first, to engage the discourse on camp that posits it as a “white gay male” aesthetic; second, to argue that it is always already a part of what I call the “sissification” of the black church; and finally, to suggest that it facilitates the transgression of hegemonic and prescribed gender and sexual identity in a place where such expression is taboo and, at least on the surface, policed. Ultimately, however, I want to demonstrate how performance rituals within the black church are imbued with the theatrical excess associated with camp such that the church becomes a site of non-normative performances of black masculinity such that all the men are queer, all the women are butch queens, but some of us are just “in the spirit.” In the introduction to his edited volume The Politics and Poetics of Camp, Moe Meyer posits that in her foundational 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag exorcized the political edge endemic to camp. But more importantly, he argues that Sontag’s essay dislodged camp from its “queer” origin, which Meyer traces back to the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 with Wilde as the image of the male homosexual “species” and the origin of Camp, therefore ontologically suturing camp to a (white) gay male subjectivity.2 While I believe there is some merit to Meyer’s critique of the ways in which camp is sometimes theorized as a “sensibility devoid of content” and thus apolitical, his essentializing of camp as necessarily an enactment of queer [End Page 30] social visibility, as Fabio Cleto has noted, instantiates a queer subject that is “all too gendered, all too raced, all too specific, while claiming to include that otherness which nevertheless excludes.”3 Lesbians and queers of color, for instance, do not produce camp under Meyer’s formulations. I wish to throw some shade, however, and argue that black queers, in this particular case, black church sissies, are camping it up in the choir stand and in the pews. Many scholars have noted the black church is built in “theatricality,” its improvisational components and its rituals of performance. Few have made the connection between these aesthetics of the black church—all of which I consider to be a part of its camp aesthetic—and the manifestation of the holy/unholy spirit as a vehicle for queer performativity. Just as the 4/4 time of house music on the gay dance floor generates a feeling of ecstasy, the syncopation of stomping feet and clapping hands, the drums, bass and lead guitars, and tambourine also transport one to the liminal space between the here and now and the beyond, where time is suspended and the body gives way to the hold of the spirit. When the spirit takes hold, the codes of decorum and strictures of bodily comportment become relaxed, exposing the slippage between spirituality and sexuality, heterosexuality and homosexuality, femininity and masculinity. One example of this spiritual “play” comes from Chaz/Chastity, a pre-operative transgender person who lives in my hometown in North Carolina as Chastity, Monday through Saturday, and as Chaz on Sunday. In his narrative in my book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, Chaz explains that they and other little boys in the children’s choir used catching the spirit as a guise to be flamboyant and that later catching the spirit became a way to signify one’s homosexuality. Chaz recalls: [Singing in the choir] was very nice, because I have a very creative nature, and singing in the choir allowed me to express my creativity. And I could be somewhat flamboyant with the guise of being spiritual. . . We made it fun. I mean you gotta remember that we were all Pentecostal children, so...

This essay takes up current debates about the problems that queer theory poses for conducting LGBT history. Drawing on the oral history research of Southern African American queer women, I argue that performance as method provides an alternative to traditional historiography that is more in keeping with the open-endedness of queer theory, while also highlighting the erotics of narration embedded within oral history research. The essay also engages the politics of a male researcher conducting research on queer women and whether or not the research constitutes feminist historiography.

Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History reveals how identity is made through race, gender, sexuality, class, and region. In particular, it centers the life stories of more than seventy Black, queer women from the U.S. South. With their lives and experiences as the focus, E. Patrick Johnson recasts a singular narrative of the South and illustrates the plurality of Black queer women’s identities. He also puts the complexity of Black female sexuality on display, drawing out multiple themes—childhood and adolescence; mother-daughter relationships; gender performances; religion and spirituality; sexual desires; dating and intimacy; and creative and political work. The interdisciplinary work blends oral history and performance ethnography methods to emphasize the rich tapestry of these women’s lives and give texture to their narratives.The book is divided into two parts. Part one, “G.R.I.T.S.: Stories of Growing Up Black, Female, and Queer,” is comprised of seven chapters and organized thematically, pulling out portions of women’s narratives that speak to each subject. Part two, “My Soul Looks Back and Wonders: Stories of Perseverance and Hope,” is comprised of six chapters, each of which delves into an individual woman’s narrative. Taken together, the sections reflect Johnson’s careful attention to the tension between history and biography; the structural and the interpersonal; the collective and the individual.

This chapter traces the historical roots of gospel music and emphasizes myriad contributions made by Black queer individuals throughout the genre’s history, including popular gospel music performers such as Rosetta Tharpe, James Cleveland, Clara Ward, and Sylvester. It also includes the voices of queer church members drawn from oral histories. In doing so, it sheds light on a willfully neglected aspect of the history of gospel music. Further, exposing gospel’s connection to blues and jazz, the discussion illustrates the connection between sacred and secular music. Closely reading how these singers use performance, it demonstrates how these individuals negotiated their sexuality and gender identity within the Black church—a space known for its disavowal of sin, especially homosexuality—in covert or tacit ways that enabled them to maintain their credibility and influence while also authentically engaging both their sexuality and spirituality.

This chapter considers the role that art and political organizing play in the lives of Black, queer, Southern women. Defining art broadly—as baking, playing instruments, or writing creatively—Johnson makes visible their contributions to Black, Southern culture. The narrators discuss their impetuses for creating art, how being queer in the South impacts their creations, and how their works have developed over time. The chapter is divided into two sections: in the first, the narrators theorize about how their art and sexuality are related, and in the second, they talk frankly about the various ways that they stay politically involved.

This chapter upends the myth that all queer women of color are butch, or masculine-presenting. Johnson’s interlocutors reveal that gender presentation and expression for women in the South have historically been much more fluid and malleable than is commonly assumed. Moreover, the women expose the inability of terms like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine” to fully capture how they play with gender.

In this chapter, Johnson converses with the book’s eldest narrator, Aida Rentas. She discusses her upbringing in Spanish Harlem, her time living in Atlanta, and her work with Black and Latina lesbian organizations in the city. She also recalls romantic and sexual experiences with women in her adolescence.

I thank Laura Fernandez for assistance with transcribing and editing this interview. Thanks also go to the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, especially José Limon and Timothy Matovina, for facilitating Ms. Fernandez’s help, to Charles E. Morris III and Thomas Nakayama for suggesting this queer conversation, and to E. Patrick Johnson for making it so much fun. –JR

This CSA plenary talk discusses a performance based on oral histories collected in the author's book, 'Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History'