Jewelle Gomez WGBH 'Say Brother' studio, 1968. Photo courtesy of Jewelle Gomez.

By emerald faith

Writer emerald faith interviews radical author, poet, critic, playwright and “foremother of Afrofuturism”, Jewelle Gomez.

Jewelle “The Duchess” Gomez (Cape Verdean/Ioway/Wampanoag) is a writer, activist, and author of the double Lambda Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories, published in 1991 through Firebrand Books. Her adaptation of the book for the stage “Bones & Ash: A Gilda Story,” was performed by the Urban Bush Women company in 13 U.S. cities. The script was published as a Triangle Classic by the Paperback Book Club. She is the recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; two California Arts Council fellowships and an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Her fiction, essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals. Among them: The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The Village Voice; Ms. Magazine, ESSENCE Magazine, The Advocate, Callaloo and Black Scholar. Her work has appeared in such anthologies as Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Dark Matter, and the Oxford World Treasury of Love Stories.

She has served on literature panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the California Arts Council. She was on the original staff of “Say Brother,” one of the first weekly, Black television shows in the U.S. (WGBH-TV, Boston) and “The Electric Company” (Children’s Television Workshop, NYC) as well as on the founding board of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). She was an original member of the boards of the Astraea Foundation and the Open Meadows Foundation.

Her other publications include three collections of poetry: The Lipstick Papers (1980) and Flamingoes and Bears (1986), both self-published, and Oral Tradition (1995) published through Firebrand Books. She edited (with Eric Garber) a fantasy fiction anthology entitled Swords of the Rainbow (1996, Alyson Publications) and selected the fiction for The Best Lesbian Erotica of 1997 (Cleis Press). She is also the author of a book of personal and political essays entitled Forty-Three Septembers (1993, Firebrand Books) and a collection of short fiction Don’t Explain (1997, Firebrand Books).

She has presented lectures and taught at numerous institutions of higher learning including San Francisco State University, Hunter College, Rutgers University, New College of California, Grinnell College, San Diego City College, The Ohio State University, and the University of Washington (Seattle).

Formerly the executive director of the Poetry Center and the American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University, she has also worked in philanthropy for many years. She is the former director of the Literature program at the New York State Council on the Arts and the director of Cultural Equity Grants for the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is also the former Director of Grants and Community Initiatives for Horizons Foundation as well as the former President of the San Francisco Public Library Commission. She is currently Playwright in Residence at New Conservatory Theatre Center.

Jewelle Gomez w/ her great-grandmother and brother, 1971. Photo courtesy of Jewelle Gomez’s personal archives.

ef: For the beginning of the interview, I want to set the stage by building a bridge between two essays that you've written – one in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983) and one in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005). With nearly 20 years between their publication, the conditions remained such that you could make a similar argument about the peripherality of Black lesbian literature in the African American literary canon more broadly and within Black and Gender & Women’s studies departments. Further, in the 2005 essay you write about the disappearance of Black lesbian writers due to the closing down of independent feminist publishers. Could you talk a bit more about this and how the landscape changed within that time.

JG: One of the rejections that I got for The Gilda Stories, more than 30 years ago now, said “we already have a Black woman.” And, I got lots of different, interesting rejections – they actually wrote them in letters. I would think, I can’t believe you actually put that on a piece of paper for me to have and go into my papers in the library archives forever and ever. And I thought, okay, you have one and you think that's sufficient? Within the last couple of months, I was talking to a young Black writer, and she said she had gotten the same rejection just recently. “We already have a Black writer.” It confirmed for me what I think often happens with mainstream publishers – people pick and choose from people they already know, and they're unable to see anything other than this is the Black writer, or this is the Latinx writer, or the Native American writer. They don't think about themes or style. They don't think about that when they're thinking of writers of color – when they're thinking of other writers, they often do. However, when they're thinking about writers of color, all they're thinking about is, oh yeah, you're writing about being a person of color.

“People pick and choose from people they already know, and they’re unable to see anything other than this is the Black writer, or this is the Latinx writer, or the Native American writer. They don’t think about themes or style. They don’t think about that when they’re thinking of writers of color.”

With regard to the change in publishing outlets between the 80s and the early 2000s, through the 70s and 80s, there was a Women in Print Movement – there were conferences, an enormous number of literary magazines, from Conditions Magazine (of which I was part of the editorial collective at one time), Sinister Wisdom, Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, Icon Magazine; there were so many magazines that you could send your stories to and have them published. There was also Firebrand Books, which published The Gilda Stories and many other women of color. There was Feminist Press, Daughter’s Inc., Naiad Press, Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press – and each press had its own particular focus, Naiad did romances and detective novels, for example. There was Spinsters Inc. and Aunt Lute’s Books. There were at least a dozen presses that focused on women and most of them published women of color. One of my favorite novels ever written came from Aunt Lute’s Books, and it’s called HER.

Jewelle Gomez w/ her mother and Firebrand Books founder, Nancy Bereano. Photo courtesy of Jewelle Gomez’s personal archives.

ef: Oh my god, by Cherry Muhanji!

JG: Cherry Muhanji, yes! It’s a brilliant book, and I keep thinking, one day, I’m going to make that book into a play. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years, but she came to one of my plays about Alberta Hunter when it was up in California.

ef: It’s so exciting that you bring her up because she’s someone who often isn’t present in the broader discourse and conversations about Black lesbian and queer literature. HER was one of the first Black queer novels I ever read, and I was so moved by her work. It was actually reissued in 2006, and I believe Matt Richardson was part of that endeavor.

JG: I was thinking of her recently because I feel like it’s time for me to re-read it. It’s been about 10 years since I’ve last read it. There was someone else whose work I loved and was published by Firebrand Books – she was a Black British woman, and her name was Barbara Burford. She wrote this book called The Threshing Floor (1986). It was a collection of short stories, and when I read her book, I thought she had such a fabulous style and part of it was speculative. It was fascinating. There were also a lot of Black women writers in Canada who were part of the Women in Print movement whose careers were impacted by the dissipation of these independent feminist presses. If or when their work didn’t get picked up by commercial presses, we didn’t see much more of their work. Oftentimes, the disappearance of these presses meant the end of people’s careers.

Jewelle Gomez with Cherry Muhanji. Photo courtesy of Jewelle Gomez’s personal archives.

And because of this, I think the representation of lesbians of color within the publishing landscape is significantly lower now.

When I started to really write and publish in the early 80s, there were a lot of us. I think about someone like Cheryl Clarke – Firebrand Books did her (Living as a Lesbian, 1986, Humid Pitch, 1989, and Experimental Love, 1993) then Sinister Women republished her first poetry collection. Next year, she’s going to have her first publication by a mainstream publisher, an academic press. Cheryl Clarke is one of the best poets in this country, and her books have been published for the last 40 years. She kept churning them out, but the mainstream presses weren’t picking her up.

“Oftentimes, the disappearance of these [independent, feminist] presses meant the end of people’s careers.”

ef: Thank you for sharing about the significance of literary magazines and print culture because lately I’ve been thinking about the Black queer magazines and the broader Black queer print culture network that was forming in the early 80s as well. Recently, I was in the Venus Magazine archives at the Auburn Avenue Research Library, and it was fascinating to see how these magazines became integral to the sharing of Black queer fiction and poetry of that time.

JG: Yes! There was also Azalea, which was based in Brooklyn. Two of my best friends were on the Azalea collective. I did an anthology with a group of women – we took a class with Alexis De Veaux. Alexis and her partner at that time, Gwendolyn Hardwick, had a very large Brooklyn apartment across from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens where they hosted these monthly salons called The Flamboyant Ladies. Everybody who was anybody was there. This is the first place I ever heard June Jordan read. I heard the drummer Madeleine Nelson play there. People would come and do their thing. It was the first place I ever read a chapter from The Gilda Stories.

So, Alexis said she was going to do this writing workshop called Gap Tooth Girlfriends because she’s a gap tooth girlfriend. There were ten of us who took the workshop. We were having so much fun that we decided to do the anthology when the class was over. And this was pre-computer – Did you ever get a chance to see the magazine? I'll make a photocopy and send it to you.

“Everybody who was anybody was there. The Flamboyant Ladies salon is the first place I ever heard June Jordan read. I heard the drummer Madeleine Nelson play there. People would come and do their thing. It was the first place I ever read a chapter from The Gilda Stories.”

What you'll see is we all typed our pages. I mean, this is how I published my first self-published poetry collection. We each typed our pages, got together, and put them all together. And one of the writers, Shirley Steele, had a partner who was a photographer, and she agreed to take our picture. So, we went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and her girlfriend Ann Chapman came on over, and she snapped this picture. That was a dream. I had her take my picture for the first copy of the first edition of The Gilda Stories as well. She was a beautiful photographer. So, when you look at it (the anthology), it really looks homemade. We took it to somebody to photocopy and staple it. It really does look like we made it at home because we did.

We would have these readings all around Brooklyn, and we told people, if you want to buy a copy of the book now, or more than one, you're paying for the printing, and when it comes out, we’ll send you your book. And that's what we did. I don't even remember how much we charged. It wasn't a whole lot, but that's how we funded it. Then we sent it to the printer, and I think we used this lesbian printer, if I recall correctly. We got these beautiful books back and delivered them to everybody. In the end, we didn't owe any money. We paid the printer. Everybody who invested got their books. And it was a really lovely adventure. We were really committed to doing it ourselves.

There's this young woman whose picture is in the front – Chandelle Markman was one of our girls, and she passed away. When the book came out, we sent her father a book. It was the sweetest thing; he was so moved. He was so surprised that we included her. You just don't know how things will affect people.

During this time, Jewelle flips through the book, pointing out and naming each of the contributors on the cover of the anthology.

There's a blurb in there about why it's called Gap Tooth Girlfriends. Alexis wrote something like, “A river of women, consensus of breathing, used to explore the continents of dreams.” I mean, she gets really poetic. I love Alexis.

ef: Thank you so much for sharing this with me.

JG: It’s emblematic of a different part of our life. It was a time when there was a very active Black lesbian social community. I mean, in addition to Alexis and Gwen's monthly Flamboyant Ladies salons, other people were having parties all the time. There were clubs we could go to. There were readings all the time. At the time, I lived in Manhattan and worked with this bookstore, Woman Books, which was two blocks from my house. We programmed mostly poets, and people would pack the place out to hear queer and lesbian writers. The Salsa Soul Sisters gave parties, dances, and picnics. There was so much social interaction; I think the sense of community was very strong. And the practice of making art was a communal and deeply personal experience – it wasn’t about the individual people.

This is how personal it was. Cheryl Clarke and I were lovers for five years. We met in 1980 or 1981 when we were both part of the Conditions collective. It started because she would drive me home from the collective meetings, and it was so exciting to meet other women who were intellectual and curious. And then we broke up. And it was quite weird because, we did a reading together shortly after, and it was like, Cheryl’s people had to sit on this side, and Jewelle’s people had to sit on that side. We were all just really close, and people were invested in their writers, their friends. Their writers were their people.

Jewelle Gomez and Cheryl Clarke outside their Jersey City, New Jersey home, 1988. Photo Credit: Bob Giard.

I had very long dreadlocks at that time. After Cheryl and I broke up, I went a little bit crazy. I cut my dreadlocks very short, and I had to move out of our house. I found a place in Brooklyn, and two of my friends were on a softball team – another way we used to socialize. So, I went with them. One was the umpire; one was a coach. I went with them to the women's softball game in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bombers. Several people said to me, “Damn Jewelle, you broke up with Cheryl, and you cut your hair off.” I said, “These are life changes.”

There was community in many ways. On the one hand, it’s annoying; almost like living in a small town. On the other hand, you had your support. People were checking in, wanted to know if you're okay, invited you out to things. But all of that to say, Cheryl and I are still very close. We spent five years where we really didn't talk to each other. But there's something about going through that level of community where it's not that easy to let each other go. So, to me, Cheryl is like my sister now. And I think many lesbians, certainly of our age, years later down the road, they remain connected.

Jewelle Gomez with Mabel Hampton, 1987. Photo courtesy of Jewelle Gomez’s personal archives.

ef: Thank you so much for this beautiful literary history. My next question stays with the theme of publishing. You have a newer poetry collection out entitled Still Water: Poems published by Black Lesbian Feminist (BLF) Press – and independent Black feminist publisher, where Stephanie Allen is the Editor-in-Chief. Could you talk about your choice to publish your work there?

JG: I was at the Golden Crown Literary Society Annual Conference, and I walked through the room that has all the tables with the books and jewelry and everything, and I saw the BLF logo. I saw Stephanie and some women behind the table, and I did a double take because I was not expecting that I would ever see those three words together, Black, lesbian, feminist press forward. So, I stopped at the table, and I asked about the press. I bought a couple of books.

I told them I wanted to be supportive in whatever ways they thought would be helpful. She was publishing a woman, a Black lesbian that I know – Penny Mickelbury – who has a Black detective mystery series. At the time, she had a new book that was a little speculative, different from her Black female detective series. Stephanie asked if I’d blurb the book. I said, of course. Then there was a call for poetry out, and I emailed her and expressed interest in sending her some poems that I had been sitting on for quite a while. She accepted the poems and was a great editor.

So, Still Water came out of this relationship. First, I collected the poems in a chapbook – I think I was going to a conference, and I hadn’t published a book of poetry in a long time, so I just wanted to have something with me. The selection of poems was mostly about the Native American side of my family. When I put the book together for Stephanie, I didn’t know what to call it. But, Still Water is the Wampanoag name that I was given when I had a naming ceremony, and I landed on that for the title. So, I was very pleased to actually have those poems collected, and I feel proud to be at BLF Press.

I think BLF press is in the tradition of those early feminist presses of the eighties, certainly following in the footsteps, to some degree, of Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press, although Kitchen Table had a full collective that put it together.

“Black Lesbian Feminist (BLF) press is in the tradition of those early feminist presses of the eighties, certainly following in the footsteps, to some degree, of Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press.”

Jewelle Gomez with Audre Lorde while filming *Before Stonewall*; Photo Credit: courtesy of Jewelle Gomez’s personal archives.

emerald faith: You said that you’re working on a sequel to The Gilda Stories; how did that come about?

Jewelle Gomez: Yes, technically it’s not a sequel because each of the new chapters takes place between the chapters of the original story. But, yes, I miss Gilda. When I wrote The Gilda Stories, I didn't anticipate that it would stay in print forever. Although, a vampire novel, perhaps one should expect forever. Because it ended up being done by an independent feminist press, they don't have the same priorities as commercial presses – like if you don't sell 500,000 copies in your first year, they ditch you. But with an independent feminist press, they will just keep you in print as long as people are buying it. Coupled with that, a lot of colleges now do speculative fiction classes. For a long time, I was the only African American lesbian, so I think that kept my book in print. And, only within the last couple of years is it now available as an audiobook.

It has been my good fortune. And in the meantime, I've been writing these other plays, and I’ve been intermittently writing a chapter here and a chapter there. Now I'm trying to finish it so I can start sending it out before the end of the year.

ef: I want to shift gears a bit – you compiled the short stories and poetry that were featured in the Best Lesbian Erotica 1997 edition published through Cleis Press. In the introduction, you talked a bit about the sex wars and conservative feminism of the 1980s. Could you talk about the role that desire and pleasure played in your own conceptualization of a Black lesbian feminist politic from a literary perspective?

JG: Yes, there was Catharine MacKinnon and another woman whose name is escaping me. It was very, very disturbing because as soon as the protest about sexuality happened in the public sphere, the first thing that got cracked down on was queer people – that happened immediately. Queer magazines were barred from entering the country. Queer bookstores were attacked for having pornography. And these two women didn't really care. They conflated what was happening in mainstream pornography, like Playboy and Forum with any and everything else. They would show horrible visuals that mainstream magazines were publishing of women being shoved into a grinding machine and things like that [referenced here is a 1978 cover of Hustler magazine, which many argued Playboy recreated in 2013].

And it's like, why don't you go and attack those mainstream magazines? They sent people to readings of folks like Dorothy Allison and Amber Hollibaugh. They had identified them and other writers as pornographers because of things they wrote – Dorothy wrote about BDSM, and Amber wrote about sex positivity. Women would come to the readings and harass them, follow them to their cars. It was really horrific. This one woman, not MacKinnon, but the other one basically said, if you were not anti-porn, you were a Nazi [research indicates this was likely expressed by Andrea Dworkin].

A group of women and myself went into the Meese Commission hearing in 1986 in New York with signs under our clothes. And when that woman started talking, we pulled out these big signs and put them in front of our faces, and they said “silenced.” And, the erotic magazine, On Our Backs, came out as a response to that backlash and the conservative feminist movement. We felt that women had struggled hard enough to claim our sexuality. We had been repressed by the dominant culture and told we had no right to sexuality, that nothing about sex had to do with our pleasure. It was about pleasuring men. In fact, the books that were about the sexual pleasure of women were primarily found in women’s bookstores. So, no, we weren’t willing to give up what we had struggled for.

I wrote my first erotica story for On Our Backs; then there was a public conversation with Cherrie Moraga, Dorothy Allison, myself, along with some other writers in the West Village of New York about pornography and the anti-porn movement and how it misrepresented women’s erotica. Interestingly, this other magazine reported on our conversation and dismissed Cherrie and me as just following the white women. And I thought, “how racist do you really want to be?”

Sexuality and sex are a part of our nature as human beings – perhaps it was good to have people think about the sexist and abusive nature of some of the pornographic images that were being shared at the time, like the one I mentioned earlier. But, you can't stop people from enjoying sex the way they want to have it. If somebody feels like they want to have their arms tied above their heads or hands handcuffed to their bed, I don’t care what you think about it. Accepting this doesn’t prevent us from having conversations about the abuse that women suffer.

With Gilda it was interesting because, when I would read from the novel, people would say it was very sensual, but they thought there’d be more sex. And I said, well, did you think there would be more sex because I’m a lesbian? But I knew it was sensual. Now, in doing the sequel, I’m very conscious of the kind of sexuality she experiences. She has some crushes – in fact, in one of the stories, she meets a woman who’s a 100-year-old witch. They're attracted to each other, and she decides she really wants to make love with this woman because her body is the body of a 100-year-old woman, and the woman is definitely into it. Gilda knows she's never going to reach that because her body is not aging. So, she's fascinated by the quality of aging that she can feel when she's making love to this woman.

And, personally, as a woman who's about to be 75, I thought, let’s think about what it means to have a different kind of body because mainstream and commercial voices have said that we’re ugly and disgusting. It’s been fun.

Collage of Jewelle Gomez by Doriana Diaz.

ef: Thank you for this; I’m sure we’re all looking forward to reuniting with Gilda! My next question is about Black lesbian and queer homemaking. Your fictional iteration of this seems to be represented partly through Gilda collecting dirt from each place that she travels throughout her journey – that dirt is what sustains her, keeps her alive. What have you come to understand are defining aspects of Black lesbian and queer feminist homemaking?

JG: Well, first I'll say the idea of lining your coffin with the soil from your homeland was borrowed from vampire lore, and as I was writing, it became clear to me that the soil could mean so many additional things for an African American being taken from your land and being forced to put your roots down in another continent. The question was how do you maintain your rootedness, and one of the answers was to take the soil.

When I was editing The Gilda Stories with Nancy Bereano, the way the novel originally ended was that the planet was dying, and Gilda secured passage off the planet. Nancy Bereano asked me a bunch of good questions. One of them was, you really want your main character to be a serial killer? That’s how I came to the whole idea of her not killing, and, instead, exchanging something. The other thing she asked me was, you've got a Native American and an African American. Would a Native American give up her land? It started as her land. And would an African American who survived in this land after being kidnapped, would they give that land up to go elsewhere? After thinking about it, I decided to end it with Gilda not leaving the planet, and it meant a lot to me. As I'm writing and configuring the mythology that I’m creating, the soil comes to mean a lot. It means the rootedness that one must have both in the land, but in the people that you're growing up with.

Jewelle Gomez with her partner, Diane Sabin. Photo courtesy of Jewelle Gomez’s personal archives.

Through their unique way of choosing and making family – Gilda and Bird who raised Gilda, and then the two men, Sorel and Anthony, who give Gilda her “postdoc” education – we watch them make mistakes and grow together. For example, Gilda learns from Sorel’s mistakes when he turned Eleanor into a vampire because he was afraid of losing her. Eleanor was such a sweet child at first, but he did it without thinking, “oh yeah, she’s not very nice.” You actually don’t want her to have that kind of power. He was unable to see it, which is, of course often true of parents. They don’t see the faults of their children sometimes. Gilda learns from that how to be a vampire and not just turn someone into a vampire because she loves them. In the sequel, she meets her great-great granddaughter who looks a lot like her, and she almost makes the same mistake.

Jewelle Gomez with Sandra Lara and Marianne Brown, 1991. Photo courtesy of Jewelle Gomez’s personal archives.

So, we watch them build this family. I think we do the same thing in our daily lives as queer people – we see what works, we see what friends stick with us, we see what friends support us, we see how we can support our friends. It’s through those trial and error learnings that we develop a family. It must be a deliberate thing – It is a conscious choice to create your family. If you have a friend and you really care about them, there are going to be times when that friend disappoints you, pisses you off, hurt your feelings, and you get to decide, do I care enough about this person to move through that? Are we going to sit down at the same table no matter what has happened? And I think that's important. I think that is a quality of being a lesbian of color, particularly because we have been so abandoned and demeaned by the dominant culture – we have to take each other in and hold each other. When Cheryl Clarke and I broke up, I was heartbroken. I mean, so heartbroken. But ultimately, I knew we were meant to be together as sisters.

“It’s through those trial and error learnings that we develop a family. It must be a deliberate thing – it is a conscious choice to create your family.”

And I feel really fortunate that we both felt that. When it came time for us to circle back and reconnect, we both were really eager and excited to do that. And the same with a number of friends. I'm still best friends with my first lover in high school.

ef: Thank you so much for that! My final question is about your playwrighting because you mentioned before that you put up a play version of The Gilda Stories with Urban Bush Women.

JG: My playwriting is very connected to The Gilda Stories having been raised by my great-grandmother in Boston, which is one of the oldest cities and is steeped in history. Growing up, I learned how significant history is, how much of an effect it has on us, and how much we can learn from it. It’s a texture. It’s a context for who we are. The Gilda Stories gives you the context for this character from slavery into the future. We get to see the history of one individual that’s 200 years old, whereas white people and the general population often think that Black people somehow appeared here in the 1960s when we started doing demonstrations – they don’t want us to talk about slavery. My plays thus far focus on our histories.

Jewelle Gomez tap recital, 1957. Photo courtesy of Jewelle Gomez’s personal archives.

With the Urban Bush Women, the director/choreographer wanted a play that had Black women in history. Someone recommended The Gilda Stories. She read it, and she came to me, and I said, well, I could write you a play, but we can’t do the whole novel. So, we did the first and third chapters – the slavery section and the 1950s. And the members of her company, which is a dance company, were the actors.

Toshi Reagon did all the music. It was a three-year process. We would go places and stay for a week and work on it, and then come home and then go someplace else. It had slides for the background. It had amazing dances. Music was brilliant. Then we traveled around to all these cities because dance companies, the way they usually work is different. University dance programs engage them, so they show up, and they're in residence. That’s what we did for three years, prepping the show. When it was ready, we went to different universities and did a public performance or two or three all around the country. And that was pretty extraordinary.

That was in 1997, I think. My newer plays are also historical documents in a way. The first one's about James Baldwin, called Waiting for Giovanni, where I imagine a moment in which Baldwin wasn’t sure whether he should publish Giovanni’s Room because he got a lot of flak about that novel. So, that was the premise, and I was commissioned by the Queer Theater in San Francisco, new Conservatory Theater Center, and I was their playwright in residence for 10 years.

It premiered here in 2011, and then it premiered in New York a couple of years later. Then I did the Alberta Hunter play, called Leaving the Blues, because I'd always admired Alberta Hunter. She was a singer in the 1940s. She wrote Bessie Smith's first big hit. She wrote a lot of her own songs. I went to see her in the West Village. She retired, became a nurse, and then she got rediscovered. And this restaurant in the West Village had her come and sing, and she was in her eighties. I took my grandmother to see her. My grandmother had been a dancer on the stage in Vaudeville, and so she knew who she was. And I said, “Nana, you see all these young women in here, know why they're in here?” She said, “no, why?” I said, “Well, they heard a rumor that Alberta Hunter was a lesbian.” And my grandma said, “Oh, shit. Everybody knew that.” So that was in the mid 1980s, and I thought, I'm going to write a play about this woman. I did all my research, and I wrote the play about Alberta. She was very tough. She kept the rights to all her songs. She was darker brown skin than the popular singers. She got a lot of flak for being dark-skinned, and people called her a bitch. To me, that translated as she was tough and didn't let anybody run over her. She had a lover for many, many years. Toshi Reagon wrote the closing song for that play as well.

That play premiered in 2015 in San Francisco and then went to New York. The third play is called Unpacking in P-Town. It’s about my grandmother and her gay friends in their cottages in Provincetown after they retire from Vaudeville, which is in fact, based on truth. My grandmother was friends with this gay Scottish guy and his boyfriend and these other people who all went to Provincetown in the summer. And it's about, what do you do when you're getting old, and you're no longer on stage and you're not famous and everybody thinks you should just be quiet? And in Provincetown, they weren't sure they wanted any more gay people. They had Tennessee Williams. They were done with gay people. That play will open this coming March here in San Francisco. Those are my plays. And they are really dealing with creative African Americans in the early part of the 20th century and how they survived and maintained their queerness, essentially.

ef: Thank you so much for a rich conversation!

About the author: emerald faith (they/them) is an English PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where they also received their master’s degrees in English and Afro-American studies. Their research interests include 20th century African American literature, Black queer literatures, Black queer theory, and Black feminisms. They are currently an editorial fellow at JSTOR Daily. You can follow them on Twitter at @emeraldfaith. You can follow them on Twitter at @emeraldfaith.

A Cauldron of Creativity: An Interview with Jewelle “The Duchess” Gomez