administrative positions, she directed the literature
program and the New York State Council on the
Arts as well as the Poetry Center and American Po-
etry Archives at San Francisco State University.
Gomez’s best-known work, the double Lambda
Award–winning The Gilda Stories: A Novel (1991),
is a rich and complex gumbo of science fiction,
historical romance, vampire story, and picaresque
novel. In the years spanning 1850 to 2050, Gilda,
a young woman fleeing slavery in Louisiana, lives
through 200 years of significant historical mo-
ments, including the internalized colorism that
privileges “creamy-colored quadroons” over their
darker sisters in antebellum New Orleans and the
prison rebellion in Attica (“she’d seen the pictures
of inmates killing and being killed, lined up in the
prison yard, and the image was always the same as
her memories of the slave quarters: dark men with
eyes full of submission and rage”), as well as an
apocalyptic 21st-century ecological tragedy. This
remarkable genre-stretching work explores the
notion of profound spiritual reciprocity; friend-
ship and love across gender, generation, class, and
race; the power of female sexual desire, and the
liberating possibilities of transgressing sexual ta-
boos. Most of all, it imaginatively reconstructs the
way “one takes on others as family and continually
reshapes that meaning” through the lesbian/gay
ethos of chosen family and the idea of African-
American community as family that is implicit in
the vampire family that Gilda embraces. Asked by
Gilda if Anthony believes that he and Sorel will
“be together forever,” Anthony replies, “Of course.
Either in each other’s company, as we are now,
or separate and in each other’s world. One takes
on others as family and continually reshapes that
meaning—family—but you do not break blood
ties. We may not wish to live together at all times,
but we will always be with each other.” In con-
trast to patriarchal conventions of passing on the
family name through birth of sons, in The Gilda
Stories, the original Gilda passes on her name as
well as her legacy to the young woman whom she
embraces as chosen family.
Gomez recasts the popular culture genre of a
vampire novel into a vehicle for serious, culturally
significant literature. Structurally, the frame of the
novel is a story inside a story, as if Gomez, like her
character Gilda, were writing in a foreign language
(in this case, in the language of science fiction and
vampires) in order to conceal the historical and
spiritual importance of her tale. Gilda remembers
when Bird gave her a journal and encouraged her
to “write in one of the other languages in the event
someone should stumble upon the book,” adding
that she “sometimes even wrote as though it were
a fiction.” The novel is filled with extraordinary in-
cidents, such as the moment when Gilda, tenderly
holding the body of a girl from whom she is taking
blood and reciprocating by infusing the girl with
dreams of passion and possibilities, looks at the
leaking blood and is reminded “of the wounds she
and her sisters suffered on their tiny hands as they
wrenched the cotton from its stiff branches.”
Editor of two anthologies, Swords of the Rain-
bow (1996) and The Best Lesbian Erotica of 1997,
Gomez is also the author of Don’t Explain: Short
Fiction (1998), whose title story borrows from a
Billie Holiday song to celebrate Letty, an isolated
waitress in 1959 Boston who finds both solace
and lesbian community and who identifies with
the famous BLUES singer whose “big hungers, and
some secret that she couldn’t tell anyone” resem-
ble her own.
Gomez is also the author of three collections of
poetry, including The Lipstick Papers (1980) and
Flamingoes and Bears (1986), whose title poem cel-
ebrates (in a meter that seems like a delightful riff
on Dr. Seuss) the rightness of the odd coupling of
flamingo and bear, whosleep forever entwined
in all sorts of climes
be it rainy or sunny,
happy to know
there’s room in this world
for a bear who likes palm trees
and a bird who loves honey.The title poem of her collection Oral Tradition:
Selected Poems Old and New (1995) is not only a
tribute to African-American literature and culture208 Gomez, Jewelle