Jewelle Gomez: The Gilda Stories

Show #147 | Guest: Jewelle Gomez is a writer, activist, and the author of many books including Forty-Three Septembers, Don’t Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards, and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen United States cities | Show Summary: Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez’s sexy vampire novel. This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who “shares the blood” by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story. The winner of two Lambda Literary Awards (fiction and science fiction) THE GILDA STORIES is a very American odyssey. The 2016 anniversary edition has a new forward by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, a Black Woman Rising nominee, and winner of one of the first-ever “Too Sexy for 501c3” trophies.