Jewelle Gomez: the Black lesbian writer who changed vampire fiction – and the world

Her first novel was turned down by several publishers, then embraced by a feminist press. As an author, poet, playwright and activist, she has continued to claim space for queer storytellers

Ridley Scott’s Alien holds a special place in the heart of Jewelle Gomez, but not simply because Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley was just her type. “If you were going to come out, that was the movie to come out to,” she says with a chuckle over video call from her home office in San Francisco. The year was 1979, Gomez was 31, and her mother, Dolores, and grandmother, Lydia, were in New York City for a visit when they went to see the sci-fi horror at a cinema near Times Square. “We were in the bathroom after and my mother started reading graffiti on the bathroom stall,” Gomez says. “My mother says: ‘Oh, here’s one. It says Dykes unite!’ And I was like, should I speak? Should I not speak? What do I say?” Her grandmother didn’t give her a chance to answer: “She says: ‘Oh, that’s nothing. Jewelle has an ink stamp on her desk at home and it says Lesbian money!’ All three of us cracked up and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was lovely.”

Forty-four years later, Gomez, feminist author, poet, playwright and activist, continues to claim space for queer storytellers in the realm of speculative fiction and beyond. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Bram Stoker award for Lifetime achievement, cementing her status as a literary trailblazer whose work has long championed those whose identity intersects across gender, queer and racial lines. Her most famous work, The Gilda Stories, is a groundbreaking work of Afrofuturism before the term was even coined. The 1991 book deconstructed and rebuilt the vampire myth in the shape of its Black lesbian protagonist – the first novel in the US to be published with such a lead.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2I0xA94