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Artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson raises radical questions about the representation of black gay men in the staging of his book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (2008). This collection of interviews suggests the invention of a new identity category while deploying a critical framework to thwart its reification. By focusing on the coming out trope and the issues of presentness both on the stage and page, this essay intends to suggest how Johnson’s ethnographic solo performance can help produce the embodiment of invisibilized black queerness. It further explores the challenges of Johnson’s representational strategies which rely on a co-creative performance between witness, performer, and audience. In order to eschew the normative traps of visibility Johnson’s work highlights queer instabilities enmeshed in race, class, gender and sexuality through oscillation between presence and absence. As a result, Sweet Tea offers hybrid political and poetical perceptions so as to grasp more fully the fluid processes of subjectivation at the heart of a specular society.