Tag Archives: Alice Walker

5 Must-Read Authors and Must-Read Lesbian Books – #OutWriters

5 Must-Read Authors and Must-Read Lesbian Books – #OutWriters


Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

A modernist classic that explores the timeless themes of memory and reality. While planning a lavish party, Clarissa Dalloway reminisces about her charmed youth and her love for the beautiful Sally Seton…

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Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952)

Better known to the world as a mystery and crime writer, Patricia Highsmith switched genre to deal with forbidden same-sex romance in stuffy post-war Britain. The price of Therese and Carol’s love is judgment by family and society…

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Natalie Diaz, When My Brother was an Aztec (2013)

A powerful collection of poems by acclaimed Mohave Native American author Natalie Diaz. While mainly focusing on her brother’s drug addiction, she also examines her own sexual identity in a deeply eloquent and touching style…

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Emily Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012)

A dramatic and fast-paced yarn that highlights the horrors of so-called “conversion therapy” which is becoming disturbingly popular in the United States. Cameron’s reactionary family cannot accept her lesbianism and so send her to the sinister Camp Promise…

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Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

Breaking all the strictures of race, class and gender as they apply to the southern states of the 1930s, Celie falls in love with the charismatic chanteuse Shrug Avery and her life changes irrevocably…

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I *Heart* Whoopi Goldberg

Born Caryn Elaine Johnson, she took on the stage name Whoopi after a joke shop toy, a whoopee cushion. Her single mother, who was supportive of her daughter’s dreams of stardom, encouraged the stage surname Goldberg instead of the plain and ordinary Johnson. Goldberg went on to take acting classes, then improvisation classes, which led her to stand-up comedy routines for which Mike Nichols, a film director, took notice and offered to help Goldberg break into Broadway on her comedy routine (then named The Spook Show).

Goldberg’s star-making role was for a serious drama. She played Celie Harris, the main character in the 1985 film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Colour Purple, which traces the life of a black girl in America as she is abused by her father, forced into marriage, and separated from her beloved sister.

With a renowned director as Steven Spielberg on the project, and Oprah Winfrey playing the free-spirited housewife Sofia, the relatively unknown Goldberg held her own in terms of performance and became the Walker’s own choice for the starring role.

Celie Harris’ life took a turn for the better upon making the acquaintance of Shug Avery, a beautiful lounge singer who proceeded to seduce Celie. Their lesbian relationship was explicit in the book but only implied in the film adaptation.

Since then, Goldberg went on to bring to life such memorable roles as the barkeep Guinan in the science fiction space opera Star Trek: The Next Generation, and returned to comedy in the film Sister Act where she played Deloris Van Cartier, a lounge singer who takes refuge at a convent after she witnesses her mobster boyfriend commit a murder.

Goldberg has been a staunch advocate and activist for gay rights, and received the Ally for Equality Award from the Human Rights Campaign in February 2, 2013.