Down n’ Dirty

Queer silence In his Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, E. Patrick Johnson interviews “Joe,” a student at Nicholls State University in Thibodeaux, Louisiana. Joe is one of the “young’uns” that Johnson documents in the section “Across Generations.” Born in 1984, the young man is out and engaged in his community; he is an active member of the “gay and lesbian student organizations on his campus” (Johnson 528). When Johnson asks Joe to “describe the infl uence of [his] southern upbringing on [his] ability to come to terms with or even recognize [his] sexual orientation,” he answers,