Jewelle Gomez: before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, before “The Strain” and “The Passage”, there was the prescient novel The Gilda Stories, which is “vitally important for the development of a generation of dreamers engaged in radical imagination. The novel has filled the desires of oppressed and marginalized peoples for stories of the fantastic…breathe out visionary communities of resistance.” With a vampire who takes blood to live and in exchange gives humans dreams for the future, the novel fundamentally reimagines vampire mythology.

Jewelle Gomez: whose 3-play cycle starts with Waiting for Giovanni, which imagines James Baldwin in the late 50s when writing the gay novel he’s told will ruin his career. It continues with Leaving The Blues, “a wonderful gift…[that] introduced us to the incomparable Alberta Hunter” a lesbian blues singer who experienced a career resurgence in her 80s. These plays reclaim queer Black ancestors, artists who have shaped our understanding of the world and history, much like Jewelle Gomez herself.

Jewelle Gomez: Intersectional feminist of color long before the term was coined in legal, sociological, or movement contexts. Who had “the good fortune to grow up among many movements from the 1960s to today.”  Whose lush, sensuous prose and deeply ethical humanity anticipates and speaks to movements from Line 3 and Standing Rock, to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Who co-founded organizations like GLAAD, the national media monitoring organization that examines defamatory coverage and representation of LGBT people in media and the entertainment industry. From her co-founding of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice and leadership at the local San Francisco Horizons Foundation, Gomez has continued to fight for LGBT people. She and her wife, Dr. Diane Sabin, were among the lead the plaintiffs in the winning case against California’s Prop 8, leading to U.S. marriage equality.

Anonymous
A Sparks
Al Baum & Robert Holgate
Andrea Gillespie
Anne Dorman & Annette Tracy
Crystal Jang & Sydney Yeong
Diane Sabin
Elana Dykewomon
Elisa Durrette & Ruth McFarlane
Jamie Miller
Janis Medina
Jim Taul & Dave Hopmann
Luis Casillas & Crispin Hollings
Old Lesbians Organizing For Change (OLOC)