viz.

"In Search of Countess Part 1" Stephen J. Lewis H/T About Face Theatre

Tomorrow is Fat Tuesday, and what better way to celebrate than to listen to stories from a nearly 100-year-old resident of the French Quarter, George Eagerson, AKA Countess Vivian. The untold story here is life as African-American gay man in the south. In Part 1 of the 2010 interview, George recounts social realities of New Orleans, such as his initiation into gay sub-culture.  George is given the name Vivian and then Countess by older members of the gay community.  More on Part 2 when George tells about surviving Katrina after the break.

"In Search of Countess Part 2" By Stephen J. Lewis H/T About Face Theatre

George was one of the NOLA residents who stayed during the storm. The officials who told him to evacuate didn't give him money or tell him where to go.  "So you didn't board up any of your windows?" interviewer E. Patrick Johnson asks.  "I didn't have no money for no boards," George answers. "They say, 'The Lord will take care of you.'" George affirms many of his statements, saying "That's right, honey."

The interviewer, E. Patrick Johnson, is a Professor at Northwestern University and the author of Sweet Tea:  Black Gay Men of the South.  This important work of oral history includes George's story and many others. Johnson reads the stories in a performance called "Pouring Tea."  

Image Credit:  Book Cover for Sweet Tea UNC Press

Sweet Tea came to my attention when a former colleague, Professor Jennifer Tyburczy, produced Johnson's reading at Rice University. Tyburczy, once a student of Johnson, is now the post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice.  I'll leave with excerpt from Tyburczy's spoken remarks at the January 27 production, which she recently shared with viz:

Sweet Tea contains 63 narrators, men who range in age from 19 to 93 and hail from 15 southern states. Professor Johnson will perform some of these men tonight. From Countess Vivian in New Orleans to Chaz/Chastisty who grew up in Professor Johnson’s hometown of Hickory, North Carolina to the men who are no longer with us, men like Curt Blackman, an emerging performance studies scholar who was to join our graduate cohort at Northwestern in 2004 but whose life was brutally cut short by hatred and misunderstanding the summer before…“Pouring Tea” is dedicated to all of these men, and ultimately paints a complex landscape of the region we call the “South” where black gay men every day, and in every state, navigate its terrain with ingenuity.