Jewelle Gomez

Jewelle Gomez (born September 11, 1948) is an author, poet, critic and playwright who lives in the USA. Her art centers on women's experiences, particularly those of LGBTQ women of color.

"Less Than a Mile from Here" speech (October 10, 1993)
Anthologized in OutWrite: The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture edited by Julie R. Enszer, Elena Gross (2022)

their everyday life, surviving the routine discouragement and deliberate oppression that faces the working class and that faces people of color in this culture. They are heroic.
 * Gentrification has put a new face on the neighborhood; upper-middle-class lesbians and gay men now cruise the streets, looking disdainfully at the house I grew up in because it doesn't fit their standards of elegance. But inside that house are the people who made me who I am. They're the people I write about in my books. And I write about them because they are heroic in


 * One of the elements in visionary force for me is anger-anger at injustice, not just anger that you specifically did not get what you wanted, but anger at the ramifications for others like yourself who may not have gotten what they wanted.


 * Not one of us is out here by ourselves


 * anger is constantly the fuel that feeds the work that I do, keeps me thinking of myself as an activist, and keeps me writing.


 * Being bitter does not help me. Being bitter just gives me frown lines


 * It's important to support small presses and feminist presses, and now the gay presses that have really begun to blossom, because there will never be room for all of us in the central marketplace.


 * Another element I feel contributes to seeing ourselves as a visionary force is our capacity for joy...We must continue to see that potential for joy as we become old and jaded. And that's one of the things that conferences like this can do: make you feel old and jaded.


 * a lot of people want to be just artists, not politicians-just want to write. But I will say this quite frankly: whether you click off right now or not, as long as you are a human being, you are a part of a political interaction. You cannot get away from it...As writers and editors and publishers and readers, we are in a position to use that political awareness to postulate a more inclusive, more just world.


 * our society is not monochromatic. There is nothing in this society, there is no book on any bestseller list, there is no painting in the museum of modern art, there is no statuary in any museum in this country created by a U.S. citizen that was not informed by the multicultural nature of this society.


 * when we forget that the media lies, we forget ourselves, we forget the realities that we know. Our presses, the feminist presses, the small presses, taught us: they will lie to us. They lied to us in every book that they published that didn't bother to mention the gay character who we knew was embedded in the text-or created a Black character who sounded exactly like the white characters in the interest of cosmopolitanism, as if the thoughts in their heads were exactly the same as the white characters.


 * if they can start defining us, why shouldn't we define ourselves? It is a feminist vision that helped bring us here today as lesbian and writers and editors and publishers-we must not forget that. It was all the movements that came before the lesbian-feminist move ment that brought us here today. And we should not forget that. And not only should we not forget it; we should learn to use it. It's one thing to just simply quote it and say, "Yes, I know that," but what is it that you learned? What is it that you do differently now? Because you understand the oppression of women in this society and the exclusion of women and people of color and poor people from this society. What is it that you learned that makes you do things differently?

Quotes about Jewelle Gomez

 * We realized we were on our own and started bonding together, Latina women writers like Cherrie Moraga, Jewelle Gómez, black writers like Audre Lorde and Ntozake Shange, we understood we had to support each other or nobody would.
 * Luz María Umpierre I'm Still Standing: Treinta años de poesía/30 Years of Poetry (2011)