“I jumped at the chance to get involved.” student, John sent an email to the CAMRA listserv saying the film was getting underway,” she says. “Sometime in May or June, right after my first year as a Ph.D. Gross has been part of the project for nearly six years. It also involved at least three undergrads and seven graduate students from Annenberg, the Graduate School of Education, and the School of Arts and Sciences. It’s the first such feature-length project completed in association with Penn’s Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA) and included a score from Penn Music professor Guthrie Ramsey and singer-songwriter Vince Anthony.
Recently, the culmination of those early conversations and many more premiered as a 90-minute, full-length feature documentary, “Making Sweet Tea.” The film, co-produced by Jackson and Penn doctoral student Nora Gross, describes life through the eyes of seven African American gay men, including Johnson, who have spent their lives in the South.
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“These men have given me a different perspective on my own life,” Johnson says at the end of the film, “about how to live, about how to love, about how to just be in the world, loving yourself, especially for who you are.” Johnson asks each person to make his individual version of sweet tea, then they taste the classic drink together. “We filed it away for a couple years, but it kept coming up.” “I told him, ‘We should try to create the film adaptation of the process and your relationship to the men, of the experiences and interactions that help define black, gay life in the South,’” Jackson says. That seemed really interesting and powerful to me.” Patrick was doing a classic ethnographic portrait of a particular portion of the American community, but I also felt there was a story to be told about him, about what he’s doing, and how we define what knowledge looks like in the academy. “I’m an ethnographer who always tries to write from a perspective that doesn’t pretend away the researcher,” says Jackson, dean of Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. saw an early version of the one-man play that followed he immediately thought that Johnson should incorporate his own story, too. At first, the voices came from Harold and Freddie and many others who shared their stories with Johnson for his 2008 academic book “Sweet Tea.” Then John L. Patrick Johnson has been talking about life as a gay, black man in the southern United States for more than a decade.