Lambda Literary Award

Novelist

b. September 11, 1948

“No one of us should feel we can leave someone behind in the struggle for liberation.”

Jewelle Gomez is an author and activist whose writing centers on the experiences of LGBTQ women of color. Her books include the double Lambda Award-winning novel “The Gilda Stories.” Gomez was a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Gomez was raised by her great-grandmother, a woman of African and Native American descent. Gomez attended Northeastern University on a full scholarship. As one of the university’s few black students, she began her lifetime of activism participating in protests over campus inequality. She received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study at Columbia University School of Journalism and worked as a production assistant on “Say Brother,” one of the first black weekly television shows in the United States.

Gomez’s feminist and intersectional activism shapes her creative voice. After several of her poetry collections were published, the first of her many novels, “The Gilda Stories,” was released in 1991. The story, which spans 200 years in the life of Gilda, a vampire who escapes slavery, reframes traditional vampire mythology from a black lesbian feminist perspective. After winning the Lambda Award, Gomez adapted the book into a theatrical production, “Bone and Ash,” which was performed in 13 U.S. cities. More than a hundred anthologies include Gomez’s fiction and poetry, and numerous publications, such as The New York Times, The Village Voice and Essence Magazine, have published her work.

On behalf of LGBTQ rights, Gomez’s activism is “grounded in the history of race and gender in America.” She wrote, “No one of us should feel we can leave someone behind in the struggle for liberation.” From 1985 to 1987, she served as a founding member of GLAAD. She has since served on the boards of numerous women’s and LGBTQ philanthropic and cultural organizations and as a commencement speaker for multiple educational institutions. She and her partner were among the litigants who sued the state of California for the right to legal same-sex marriage, and several of her articles were quoted extensively during the case.

Gomez received a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the California Arts Council. She has served on literature panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council and the California Arts Council.

She lives in San Francisco with her partner, Dr. Diane Sabin.

LGBT Historian

b. July 18, 1940

“My writing has been my activism.”

Commonly known as the mother of LGBT history, Lillian Faderman is an internationally recognized pioneering lesbian scholar and historian. Her award-winning books have been translated into numerous languages.

Faderman was born in New York during World War II and raised by her mother and aunt, Latvian Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry. The remainder of her family died in Europe during the Holocaust.
 
After moving with her mother and aunt to Los Angeles in her teens, Faderman began acting and modeling and discovered the underground gay bar scene. She bravely came out as a lesbian in 1956 during the Lavender Scare, a challenging period for gay Americans that was closely tied to McCarthyism.

Faderman went on to study at UC Berkeley, where she paid for her education working as a stripper. She then attended UCLA. She became an English professor at California State University Fresno, where she sought to address long-ignored populations. Toward that end, she co-edited her first published work, an anthology of multi-ethnic literature for the college classroom. Released in 1969, it was one of the first anthologies of its kind.

Although Faderman longed to write about sexual minorities, homophobia in the 1960s made such work difficult. In the 1970s, however, as feminism entered serious academic discourse, Faderman became one of the first academics to publish books about female same-sex relationships.
 
A pioneering authority on LGBT history and literature, Faderman has written 11 books. Among other recognition, she has received six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards and several prestigious lifetime achievement awards for her scholarship, including the James Brudner Award from Yale University. The New York Times honored her books “Surpassing the Love of Men” (1981),“Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” (1991) and “The Gay Revolution” (2015) on its list of Notable Books of the Year. The Guardian named “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers,” about lesbian life in the 20th century, one of the Top 10 Books of Radical History and “The Gay Revolution” one of the Six Top Books of LGBT Life. “Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death,” her book about the slain gay San Francisco politician, was named Most Valuable Biography of 2018 by The Nation. In addition to her scholarly work, Faderman has published creative nonfiction, including her own memoir and a reconstructed memoir of her mother’s life.

Faderman retired in 2007 and serves as historian in residence for the Lambda Archives of San Diego. She has a son, Avrom, and lives with her partner of more than 45 years, Phyllis Irwin.

Transgender Activist & Author

b. March 15, 1948

“Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living, just don’t be mean.”

Kate (née Albert) Bornstein is an internationally renowned American transgender performer, author, theorist and activist. Her acting portfolio comprises performance art, theater, television and film. Her award-winning books have been translated into five languages and are studied in schools and universities worldwide.

Born in Neptune City, New Jersey, into a conservative middle-class Jewish family, Bornstein attended Brown University and became the first person to graduate with a degree in theater arts. Although Bornstein transitioned to female and underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1986, she now identifies as nonbinary and is attracted to women.

In Bornstein’s early career, she wrote art reviews for San Francisco’s LGBT newspaper, The Bay Area Reporter. She subsequently became a prolific performer, creating one-person shows, performance art and theater productions. In 1989, at the age of 41, she created “Hidden: A Gender,” a theater production exploring the parallels between her own life and the life of Herculine Barbin, an intersex person.

Bornstein’s groundbreaking books challenge preconceptions about gender binaries and help advance understanding of LGBT issues. Her 2009 book, “Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws,” received a Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award. Her 2013 book, “My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity,” won a 2014 Rainbow Project Book List award from the American Library Association. In 2015 Lambda Literary presented her with its Pioneer Award.

Bornstein appeared as a regular cast member on “I Am Cait,” the E! reality television program featuring Caitlyn Jenner, and has provided commentary on news-and-opinion programs, such as MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show. She is the subject of the acclaimed 2014 documentary “Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger,” produced by Sam Feder. The Advocate magazine named it one of the best LGBT documentaries of the year, and it received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Bornstein appeared the 2017 film “Saturday Church,” and in 2018 she made her Broadway debut in “Straight White Men.”

A dedicated activist, Bornstein travels extensively giving lectures and workshops at colleges and other venues. She recently started personal gender-identity counseling she calls Heart to Heart Coaching With Kate. The New York City Council has twice honored her for outstanding citizenship for her advocacy for marginalized and suicide-prone youth.

Bornstein lives in Manhattan with her partner, Barbara Carrellas, an artist and sex educator.

Award-Winning Country Music Star

b. October 25, 1970

“I hear the word "tolerance"… I am gay, and I am not seeking to be ‘tolerated.’ One tolerates a toothache, rush-hour traffic, an annoying neighbor with a cluttered yard. I am not a negative to be tolerated.”

Chely Wright is an award-winning country singer-songwriter and LGBT activist. She is widely regarded as the first major American country music artist to come out publicly.

Raised in a musical family in Wellsville, Kansas, Wright started piano lessons at age 4. She knew she was a lesbian by age 9. Growing up Christian in a small farming town, she believed her feelings were “sinful” and kept her sexuality secret long into adulthood. 

Wright always dreamed of becoming a country star. She started to sing professionally when she was 11. In her senior year of high school, she began performing in the Ozark Jubilee, a music show in Branson, Missouri. After graduation, Wright sang as part of a production in Opryland USA, a theme park outside of Nashville. 

Wright’s career took off in her mid 20s. In 1995 she earned the Academy of Country Music Award for Top New Female Vocalist on the merits of her debut album, “Woman in the Moon.” Some of her most famous hits include “Shut Up and Drive” (1997), “I Already Do” (1998) and “Single White Female” (1999), which reached No. 1 on the country music charts. The song earned her several award nominations, most notably for top female artist and best music video. 

Wright’s 2001 album, “Never Love You Enough,” reached the Top 5. Her 2005 ballad “The Bumper of My SUV” was nominated for Best Patriotic Song by the Country Weekly Awards. She performed it while entertaining U.S. troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Germany. 

By 2006 Wright had grown severely depressed and suicidal. No longer able to hide her sexuality, she poured her soul into a memoir, “Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer.” When the book was published in May 2010, Wright came out on NBC’s “The Today Show” and in People.com. Her widely publicized coming out was chronicled in the award-winning documentary, “Wish Me Away.”

Wright founded the LIKEME® Organization to promote LGBT equality and prevent bullying in classrooms. The organization expanded to offer college scholarships to young LGBT advocates, and in 2012 opened the LIKEME Lighthouse, a community center for LGBT youth in Kansas City, Missouri.

Wright has released eight studio albums and more than 19 singles. She continues to perform and advocate for LGBT rights. Among other honors, she has received a Lambda Literary Award for her autobiography; the Family Equality Council’s award for Outstanding Work as an LGBT Activist; and the Black Tie Media Award.

Wright married  Lauren Blitzer in 2011. They are the parents of identical twins.

Poet and Activist

b. April 16, 1957
d. November 4, 1995

“It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference.”

Essex Hemphill was an American poet who wrote about race and identity in the 1980s. He was also an important voice during the AIDS crisis. His work has been described as fiercely political and lyrical. 

Born in Chicago and raised in Washington, D.C., Hemphill said that poetry became his refuge against the poverty and “otherness” he experienced as a young black man growing up in the nation’s capital. 

After briefly attending the University of Maryland to study journalism, Hemphill became immersed in the Washington art scene and regularly read at open-mic nights and coffeehouses. To showcase his work and that of other modern black artists and writers, he cofounded the Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature in 1979. In 1982 he cofounded the spoken word group Cinque. 

Hemphill began publishing his poetry as chapbooks in 1985, including “Earth Life and Conditions.” In 1986 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He gained national attention in 1989, when his work was published in the anthology “In the Life,” an important collection of writing by black gay men. 

Hemphill edited the acclaimed 1991 anthology “Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men,” for which he won a Lambda Literary Award. His first full-length poetry collection, “Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry,” won the National Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual New Author Award in 1992. His work is also included in “Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time” and “Life Sentences: Writers, Artists and AIDS,” and in the award-winning documentaries “Tongues Untied” and “Looking for Langston.”  

Hemphill has read his poetry to audiences of all sizes, from alternative theaters to the Kennedy Center and from New York to London. He received a grant from the Washington Arts Project to perform an experimental drama of poetry called “Murder on Glass,” and he has contributed to publications including Obsidian, Black Scholar, CALLALOO and Essence. 

E. Ethelbert Miller, director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, said Hemphill’s words “put an end to silence” in the black LGBT community. 

“He was mesmerizing,” said Martin Duberman, Hemphill’s biographer. “He had these wonderful sort of alive eyes, and a beautiful speaking voice. It was electric.”

Hemphill died from complications of AIDS in 1995. He wrote about his experience with the disease in his most famous poem, “Vital Signs.” His published and unpublished works are collected at George Washington University’s Gelman Library.

Historian

b. August 6, 1930

“I’m overwhelmed at the great distance that we have all traveled.”

Martin Duberman is a historian, a playwright, an LGBT activist and the founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School. He is an acclaimed author of more than 20 books. 

Duberman was born in New York City. He graduated with honors from Yale and received his Ph.D. in American history from Harvard. In 1961, Duberman won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American history, and was subsequently named a full professor at Princeton. In 1971, he left Princeton and joined the faculty at CUNY as a Distinguished Professor of History. 

Duberman recounts questioning his sexuality in his 30s. He sought therapy to be “cured.” When he accepted his sexual orientation, Duberman began exploring gay activism. He challenged homophobia in academia and society. When he came out in the early ’70s, he was one of the few openly gay academics. 

A renowned essayist and playwright, Duberman is known for literature on African-American history and abolitionism, and for his biography of Paul Robeson. Critics have described his work as “refreshing and inspiring” (The New York Times) and “magnificent” (USA Today). He co-edited and contributed to the anthology “Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past,” a standard reference in the field of LGBT studies. Duberman’s biography “James Russell Lowell” was a finalist for the 1966 National Book Award.

Duberman wrote plays that deal with gender issues and the construction of male identity. In 1963, his play “In White America” won the Vernon Rice/Drama Desk Award for Best Off-Broadway Production.

In 1991, Duberman founded CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) to further LGBT scholarship and curriculum. CLAGS, one of the first organizations of its kind, hosts conferences and awards research grants.

His most recent publication, “The Martin Duberman Reader,” was published in May 2013. 

Cartoonist

b. September 10, 1960

“The [comic] strip is about all kinds of things, not just gay and lesbian issues—births, deaths and everything in-between happen to everyone."

Alison Bechdel is a celebrated cartoonist and author of the long-running comic strip, “Dykes To Watch Out For.” Her groundbreaking graphic memoir, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” was awarded the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book.

A native of central Pennsylvania, Bechdel and her siblings grew up in a small town. Her parents both taught at the local high school and her father, the subject of her first memoir, was the town’s mortician. Bechdel attended Oberlin College, where she graduated with a B.A. in 1981.

“Dykes to Watch Out For” was published in 1983 and became a syndicated comic strip in 1985. With her signature subtle wit, Bechdel took on the complex and often stereotyped world of lesbian relationships through her comic alter ego, Mo. The strip has become a cult classic.

In the late 1990’s, Bechdel began work on her first graphic memoir about her family, “Fun Home.” The memoir focuses on her relationship with her father and his death. Time Magazine honored “Fun Home” as No. 1 of the 10 Best Books of 2006, calling it “a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” The book won a Lambda Book Award, an Eisner Award and the 2006 Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Dykes to Watch Out For” continued production for 25 years. In 2008, Bechdel suspended work on the award-winning comic strip to create a graphic memoir about relationships. The same year, Houghton Mifflin published a complete collection of her work, “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.”

Bechdel resides outside of Burlington, Vermont.

Gay Pioneer

b. October 31, 1940
d. June 18, 1993

“There was no one thing that happened or one person. There was just … mass anger.”

Craig Rodwell was a Gay Pioneer and the leading New York activist of the 1960s. He founded the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the nation’s first gay bookstore, and the New York Pride Parade.

Born in Chicago, Rodwell attended an all-male Christian Science boarding school, where he experimented with same-sex relationships. After graduating from a public high school, he accepted a scholarship in 1958 to the American Ballet School in New York City. In New York he volunteered for The Mattachine Society, one of the nation’s first gay organizations.

In 1962 Rodwell developed a relationship with Harvey Milk. It was his first serious romance.

In 1964 Rodwell protested against the exclusion of gays from the military. It was the first gay rights demonstration in New York City. The same year, he and fellow Gay Pioneer Frank Kameny conceived the first organized public demonstrations for gay and lesbian equality. Known as Annual Reminders, the protests took place in Philadelphia each Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969 in front of Independence Hall. Demonstrators participated from Philadelphia, New York and Washington.

During those seminal years, Rodwell was involved in numerous gay rights organizations. He was an early member of East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) and started the Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods, which held rallies and published the periodical HYMNAL.

In 1965 Rodwell led a protest at the United Nations Plaza against the detention of gay Cubans in work camps. The following year, he participated in a “sip in” at Julius, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, to protest a State Liquor Authority rule prohibiting homosexuals from congregating in places that served alcohol. Continuing protests ended the rule in New York State.

Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in 1967. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, it became a mecca for gay activists.

In 1969 Rodwell took part in the Stonewall Rebellion and was the first to shout “Gay Power!” At an ECHO meeting thereafter, he proposed a resolution to suspend the Annual Reminders in favor of an event commemorating the anniversary of Stonewall. Rodwell, Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings and other pioneering activists organized a march. Held on June 28, 1970, it is remembered as the first New York Gay Pride Parade.

Rodwell remained a consequential figure in the gay liberation movement of the ’70s and ’80s. He was honored with the Lambda Literary Award for Publisher’s Service in 1992. He sold his bookstore the following year. It remained open until 2009.

Rodwell died of stomach cancer at age 52.