Forty-Three Septembers: Essays

These essays recall Gomez's 43 years as a black woman, writer, and lesbian-feminist and acclaim the integration of identities in a shifting world that often prefers the simplistic to the complex and authentic. "For me in my forties," Gomez writes," with no children, no property, no savings,

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embracing the nontraditional roles of lesbian, African-American writer, and the enigmatic gaze of my mother, I am frightened of middle age. If I reject the traditional perception of who I am, who I was supposed to be, with what do I replace it? . . . My mind says there's really no limit. I write, I work as an activist. . . . But to identify myself as only what I do is a mistake that men have made too often throughout history. So what do I make of myself?" She remembers her Catholicism and the power of its passion and ritual; the word bulldagger spoken acceptingly by her grandmother, thus giving the teenage girl a term for her identity; and the trials and exhilaration of learning to swim. These compelling meditations about identity, forebears, aging, and the costliness of silence constitute a story of faith. -- Whitney Scott

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