Black Lesbian Literary Legacies: Jewelle Gomez

The second installment of Black Lesbian Literary Legacies features novelist, essayist, and playwright Jewelle Gomez. I had the honor of speaking with her recently, and we talked about her prolific writing career, her work as a playwright, and her legacy as the “Aunt” of Afro-Futurism.

Jewelle Gomez (Cape Verdean/Ioway/Wampanoag) is a writer and activist and author of the double Lambda Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories from Firebrand Books. Her other publications include three collections of poetry: The Lipstick Papers (1980) and Flamingoes and Bears (1986), both self published, and Oral Tradition, (Firebrand Books 1995). She edited (with Eric Garber) a fantasy fiction anthology entitled Swords of the Rainbow (Alyson Publications 1996); and selected the fiction for The Best Lesbian Erotica in 1997 (Cleis). She is also the author a book of personal and political essays entitled Forty-Three Septembers (Firebrand Books 1993), and a collection of short fiction, Don’t Explain (Firebrand Books 1997). 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.

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.

Stephanie (SAA): You are a novelist, playwright, and essayist with a career spanning decades. Can you tell us a little about how your writing career got started?

Jewelle (JG): I’ve wanted to write since I was a kid; at nine or ten I used to line up a stack of clean paper and sharp pencils my great grandmother gave me and wait to see what would come. I had no idea how to write or what to write. I loved watching documentaries by journalist Edward R. Murrow and thought I should follow in his footsteps—dramatic documentaries about war and curing injustices. I was in my twenties before I understood writing about myself and people I cared about was the key. In 1968 at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. television stations started to produce TV shows for the African American community. I was in undergraduate school and assigned to WGBH’s weekly show “Say Brother.” I began to learn about how to write and later went to grad school for journalism. Later seeing the first productions of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf” broke open my writing. I started to understand that even if there was little to reflect me in the mainstream media writing about my world was key to finding my career. So, I started writing vampire stories.

SAA: Were you ever a part of any writing communities? And if so, can you describe them?

JG: I was briefly part of two writing circles: the first was a kind of feminist activist gathering of writers: Cherie Moraga, Amber Hollibaugh, and Dorothy Alison. We shared our work and talked political activism. But there were so many feminist actions going on we didn’t have time to continue very long.

Later I was part of a group started as a writing workshop lead by writer Alexis DeVeaux—Gap Tooth Girlfriends. We worked with Alexis for probably a year. It was a wonderful moment for us as women of color—most of us lesbians—to explore our feminist roots and see how those political convictions would shape our creative writing. We were strongly connected and when the workshop ended, we then produced a journal of poetry, fiction and essays which was a big hit in NYC in the 1981. It created a strong sense of sisterhood that was very important to my development as a writer.

SAA: I met you a few years ago at a conference for lesbian writers, and I was so excited to meet the person who’s work animated my research. I know at one point I was blabbering like an idiot! I read your collection of short stories, Don’t Explain in one of my graduate courses and it literally changed my life. Would you tell what inspired this collection of fiction?

JG: My collection of short stories, Don’t Explain, emerged from a post reading discussion on a college campus in which an audience member commented that she thought a lesbian vampire novel (The Gilda Stories) would have more sex in it.  I’d thought about that quite a bit as I was writing the novel and I wanted to be circumspect so the novel would appeal to a broad spectrum of readers as well as to professors teaching literature and history.  So, I decided to pull together stories I’d written and see what I might add to create a full collection.  I wrote some new pieces to deliberately address erotic desire and found that by the time I published Don’t Explain readers were much more open to eroticism in literature than previously.

SAA: Recently, your play “Leaving the Blues” has been staged or read in cities like San Francisco and New York, and I’m very interested in your work as a playwright, particularly since you’ve focused on the real lives of some of our Black queer artists. Can you tell us more about your transition from fiction writer to playwright? How has your writing process changed, if at all?

JG: I actually minored in Theatre in undergraduate school and then taught theatre production and playwrighting at an arts center when I finished journalism school at Columbia.  And I was a stage manager Off and Off Off Broadway in the late 1970s.  Later I wrote an adaptation of my vampire novel in 1996 for the Urban Bush Women company which toured 13 US cities.  When a friend asked me to write something about James Baldwin I began to think about the possibility of several plays set a time in our country when people of color still had hope.  It felt to me as if in the first part of the 20th century we still felt it was possible to turn the country around to face its evil past and reconcile with its multi-ethnic future.

As I was writing the Baldwin piece the next plays in the trilogy began to form in my mind and I started on each just as I finished the one before.  I’m especially drawn to historical periods, I think, because I was raised by my great grandmother and re-lived her memories with her. I have a similar process for whatever I’m writing. A great deal of my work is grounded in earlier time periods—fiction and dramatic—so I generally begin with character ideas and then research into the period.  This is how I wrote The Gilda Stories--except I had a character so I usually began with a location and its history. It’s how I’ve continued—I keep researching as I write and revise.  Using the two actual, historical figures (Baldwin and Alberta Hunter) was intriguing for me—how much to make historically accurate versus how much to embroider.  The third play isn’t based in the life of a real celebrity although my grandmother who was a chorus girl in the 1930s, is in it. So, this takes a slightly different approach.  Not being bound by historical facts is both freeing and anxiety provoking.  And I’m still working on the next GILDA novel.

SAA: I am so excited to hear that Cheryl Dunye has purchased the rights to The Gilda Stories and is planning a multi-part series for television. How does it feel to know that your Black lesbian vampire novel might be viewed by millions of folks on television?

JG: I’m totally thrilled that Cheryl Dunye wants to do a mini-series based on The Gilda Stories! She’s been interested for a long time and I just hope she can raise the funds to do a pilot and then sell it to TV producers. It’s a complex process so I haven’t started to get excited yet. There are so many discreet elements involved: cost, casting, script, locations! And those are just the things I think I know. It’s hard to imagine how all those things can come together to create a meaningful show for our times. But it’s said that imagination is more important than knowledge so I’m focused on imagining it possible.

SAA: In the Publisher’s Weekly review of Black From the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing, the reviewer referred to you as the “Godmother of queer Black vampire fiction.” What are your thoughts on that moniker?

JG: I thought it was quite funny to refer to me as the “godmother of queer Black vampire fiction.” I actually think I’m the mother of that and the ‘aunt’ of Afro Futurism! But I’m amused that there are any generative references at all given how unwelcoming critics and some Black readers were when GILDA was first published in 1991. At my age I mostly wonder that anyone remembers my work at all. Lesbian (not to mention Black lesbian writers) writers have a fairly circumscribed arena of influence. Writers in the literary mainstream or those creating the so called ‘canon’ have no idea where lesbians fit. I owe the continued life of my vampire novel to the emergence of speculative fiction as a college course of study. There were so few people of color in the field—Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany really being the parents—and vampires remain one of the most popular genres, so my novel gave instructors two for one.

SAA: What advice do you have for aspiring Black women writers?

JG: For women of color writers I’d pass along what I learned from Ntozake Shange: write about the women you care about, don’t be afraid to dig deeply into their lives whether happy or sad. Don’t allow society, family or critics to tell you what’s appropriate to reveal or discuss.  Learn to love language and its uses so that the work doesn’t just sprawl flat on the page but lifts and flies. Make appointments w/yourself to write so there’s always time in your schedule.  Write something everyday no matter how short.  Observe everything around you not just the surfaces but what potentially lies beneath actions, words and ideas and use all of your senses to describe things. Write because you have to, not because you’re hoping to win a Pulitzer prize.