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Artist and Activist Sharon Bridgforth

Photo credit: Daniel Alexander Jones

How does a young, pretty Catholic schoolgirl from a close-knit community of black Southerners go from being married with a child to a well-known gender-bending butch artist? Ask Sharon Bridgforth.

For the Lambda Award-winning author, the hardest part of that journey was coming out to her mother.

“Once I came out, I had to fight with her,” she said. “And after that, there is nobody that I feel concerned about around how they perceive me.”

Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in South Central Los Angeles, Bridgforth said that words like gay, lesbian, queer and feminist were not a part of her lexicon. Yet “those things have always been in my world and a part of who I am.”

The widely anthologized Bridgforth is known as the author of two cutting-edge performance novels, the bull-jean stories and love conjure/blues, and is the founder of the now defunct award-winning root wy’mn theatre company.

Her journey — from a being a “buck-wild” girl running the streets of her beloved Los Angeles with her mostly Latina homegirls to an artist who has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation — was a winding road that included a wedding, giving birth, alcoholism, cancer and her fair share of “pretty women.”

Like many other black Americans who landed in California in the mid-20th century, her Southern roots “were very fresh and on the surface.” And as a child, she often visited her extended family back in Memphis, Tenn. As the only daughter of a single mother, she learned to be self-sufficient in the metropolis, yet was still under the protective eye of her “little village.”

“I felt very loved and very protected,” she recalled, “and very aware of the sacrifices that had been made for generations past and by my own mother for me to be there. I was always aware of that.”

Even though the city was beset with segregation, she relished the diversity of its population, riding the city bus to school.

“I was a little city rat,” she said. “I could get anywhere in my city, and one of the things that was great was that I was going from South Central L.A. to Echo Park, so the cultural landscape of my bus ride was an education about the world.”

Along the bus ride, “we went in and out of so many ethnic neighborhoods, so the languages, the sounds, the sensibilities, the people, the spaces changed a thousand times.”

She was a “reading son-of-gun” as a youngster and devoured many books on those long rides. During her teenage years, she discovered Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.

“Of course that just changed my life,” she said of discovering those writers. “I hadn’t been exposed to them before, and it was like falling in love hard, like over and over and over every time I found one of these young black writers. It made living seem possible. It made my life seem valid, but it never occurred to me that I could be a writer, an artist.”

Her family encouraged her to enter a more practical profession with security and benefits like teaching. “My mother wanted to be a dancer when she was growing up and they squished that so thoroughly,” Bridgforth said, “and what I now understand is that they were afraid for her.”

Becoming an artist “was never anything that was talked about or encouraged.” Nevertheless, she began writing when she was 15, tucking her creations away in a suitcase. “I just kind of wrote ’cause it was a way of surviving, it was a way of breathing, it was a way of making sense of my emotions.”

It took the self-described late bloomer several years – until she was around 30 – to even show her work to others. In the meantime, she did the things good girls are supposed to do: She went to college and got married. Shortly after her wedding at 22, she became pregnant with her daughter, and that event changed her perspective on life.

“I was like, I really have to figure out what my life is about and who I am and what the heck I’m here for,” she said.

And she began coming out to herself.

“That was when without real language I realized that I loved women and wanted to be with a woman, and got a divorce and ended up eventually going to the Catch.” The Catch is Jewel’s Catch One, a legendary black queer club that opened in Los Angeles in 1972.

“That was like finding Jesus,” said Bridgforth. “Everything changed after that.”

At the Catch, she met “this fine-ass poet named Michelle Clinton.” So Bridgforth started going to poetry readings: “I started going to poetry events, started calling myself a poet, started asking her to help me with my poems.”

But all the while, she was battling alcoholism. She had started drinking at 10 years old, and the fast-paced life of Los Angeles was taking its toll.

“L.A. was just killing me and I was killing myself in retrospect, and I just needed a change. I had a little girl and I just felt like I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing. And I didn’t know how to do anything different.”

Some of her friends had moved to Austin, Texas, and after hearing so many positive things about the city and seeing how her friends had “chilled out completely” after moving there, she decided to leave Los Angeles.

She had never been to Texas, but she just got in the car with a friend and drove. “I don’t know what would’ve happened if I would’ve stayed home,” she admitted.

It was in Austin that she started performing her work publicly, and once again, the impetus for her to get out into the community as an artist came because of “a pretty woman” she met at a bar.

“I can’t even remember her name,” she said of the woman she met. “She told me she was a drummer and I said, ‘Well, I’m a poet.'” The woman told Bridgforth to give her work to the women who ran Word of Mouth Theatre Company.

“I thought I was giving them poems,” Bridgforth said. “They read them and they called me and they said, ‘We’re going to produce your one-woman show,’ and I said, ‘Whaaaaat?'” The show, called sonnata blue, featured Starla Benford, who is now a Broadway and television actor. The late Marsha Anne Gomez, a co-founder of the Indigenous Women’s Network, came to one of the performances and was so moved that she took Bridgforth under her wing and introduced her to the other artists and activists in the community.

Even as Bridgforth held day jobs, her artistic output flourished in Austin. She started the root wy’mn theatre company, a groundbreaking theater troupe that toured the country from 1993—98, presenting work that combined poetry, dance and music to tell the stories of African-American women. And in 1998, after years of getting her work rejected by publishers, RedBone Press published her book the bull-jean stories, which chronicles “the course of love returning in the lifetimes of one woman-loving-woman named bull-dog-jean.” The book won a Lambda Literary Award in 1998.

In between that book and her next work, love conjure/blues (2004), she became deeply immersed in community activism, working with allgo, a Texas organization for queer people of color. She also began mentoring young artists and facilitating workshops. Giving back to the community is important to Bridgforth – she calls it a black American tradition.

But like many artists/activists, she overdid it. Bridgforth had been maintaining a heavy-duty schedule of performing, working in the community and lecturing around the country, on top of being in a seven-year relationship. And then in 2005, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

“I do believe that part of what happened was that I was exhausted for a very long time,” she said. “I was holding things that did not serve me, like resentment, fear, hurt, shame and sadness. I was also kind of holding back my own work, and I think that stuff eats you from the inside out.”

She is now cancer-free, and urges younger artists and activists to take care of their health and their art.

“We start doing a lot of things,” she said, “but you don’t have to do everything that you are able to do. You have to do what you’re supposed to do, and what you’re supposed to do is take your deepest desire, expand it and gift it and know that that is important.”

Community organizing, she acknowledged, can cause fatigue. “The thing that I always think about is what if James Baldwin or Langston Hughes or Toni Morrison or any of our great artists – what if they hadn’t done their work? What if they had got caught up in some organization and never came out?”

These days, the 50-year-old, single Bridgforth is honing her craft with a new work, delta dandi. It follows in the tradition of the jazz aesthetic, in which making art is an improvisational and communal process encompassing different forms of expression.

She explained: “delta dandi is a multimedia theater piece that looks at the life of a conjure woman named delta dandi as a vehicle to speak on and document black American history. The piece itself lives in the tradition that Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams innovated back in the day – what they called sacred concerts.

“And also I’m working with the idea that some jazz artists like Ellington and Charles Mingus worked with, called tone poems. So I will conduct, using the text as the score, a choir, a jazz quartet and a core group of actors in this concert. We might also have dancers.”

She has moved to New York for a playwriting residency where she will plan laboratory workshops of the performance. It will premiere in Austin in January 2009, and it is the culmination of years of striving to get to a point where she can fully concentrate on her own work while still being a part of the community.

“I am in a time in my own personal career where I’m coming out of doing a lot of community work where I facilitate other people’s work,” she said, “and I’m now focusing very much on my work as an individual artist.”

For her, delta dandi is the perfect project.

“I get to use my facilitation skills,” said Bridgforth. “I get to go in and meet people in different communities, which I love to do. And I get to experience the diamonds that are everywhere, and have all of that be a part of the whole process of seeing my own vision come to life.”

For more on Sharon Bridgforth, visit her official website.

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