The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, Speculative Fiction
Representation: Black lesbian MC, F/F, Lakota lesbian love interest, Black gay and sapphic characters, secondary M/M
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
ISBN: B01F1G67OK
Goodreads

Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler's Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez's sexy vampire novel.

"The Gilda Stories is groundbreaking not just for the wild lives it portrays, but for how it portrays them--communally, unapologetically, roaming fiercely over space and time."--Emma Donoghue, author of Room

"Jewelle Gomez sees right into the heart. This is a book to give to those you want most to find their own strength."—Dorothy Allison

This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.

Jewelle Gomez is a writer, activist, and the author of many books including Forty-Three Septembers, Don't Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards, and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen United States cities.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs was named one of UTNE Reader's 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, a Black Woman Rising nominee, and was awarded one of the first-ever "Too Sexy for 501c3" trophies. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

More praise for The Gilda Stories:

"Jewelle's big-hearted novel pulls old rhythms out of the earth, the beauty shops and living rooms of black lesbian herstory, expressed by the dazzling vampire Gilda. Her resilience is a testament to black queer women’s love, power, and creativity. Brilliant!"--Joan Steinau Lester, author of Black, White, Other

"In sensuous prose, Jewelle Gomez uses the vampire story as a vehicle for a re-telling of American history in which the disenfranchised finally get their say. Her take on queerness, community, and the vampire legend is as radical and relevant as ever."--Michael Nava, author of The City of Palaces

"I devoured the 25th anniversary edition of Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories with the same venal hunger as I did when I first read it. I still feel a connection to Gilda: her tenacity, her desire for community, her insistence on living among humanity with all its flaws and danger. The Gilda Stories are both classic and timely. Gilda emphasizes the import of tenets at the crux of black feminism while her stories ring with the urgency of problems that desperately need to be resolved in our current moment."--Theri A. Pickens, author of New Body Politics

"This revolutionary classic by a pioneer in black speculative fiction will delight and inspire generations to come."--Tananarive Due, author of Ghost Summer

"The Gilda Stories was ahead of its time when it was first published in 1991, and this anniversary edition reminds us why it's still an important novel. Gomez's characters are rooted in historical reality yet lift seductively out of it, to trouble traditional models of family, identity, and literary genre and imagine for us bold new patterns. A lush, exciting, inspiring read."--Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet

" . . . its focus on a black lesbian who possesses considerable agency throughout the centuries, and its commentary on gender and race, remain significant and powerful."--Publishers Weekly

Trigger warning for brief mentions of suicide in this review.

Good gods, I hated this so much.

I’m open to the idea that I’m just not smart enough, and/or educated enough, to Get It – I’ve been seeing praise for this book for decades, heard so much about what it does with/says about race and sexuality, how clever the vampirism-as-metaphor is in this incarnation (because of course many other storytellers have used it as a metaphor too), its wisdom and insight re Life, The Universe, And Everything. Until I deliberately went looking (less than an hour after closing this book for the last time, and words cannot express how grateful I am that I never have to pick this up again) I had never seen or heard anyone say a bad word about this book.

With the caveat that perhaps I am just too stupid – thanks, I despised it.

This is so fucking BORING. How you can take the premise of ‘Black lesbian vampire vampiring through time’ and make it a yawn fest I do not know, but it has been accomplished! Gilda is unbelievably passive, with next to no personality – she collects books but we never see her read or feeling passionate about reading, she starts a hair salon that becomes central to the community but we only glimpse it minutes before it burns down, she writes songs but off-page, she becomes a best-selling romance author but OFF-PAGE. Gomez tells us all sorts of things (she tells us everything, brace for pretentious but awkward info-dumps on every other page) that Gilda gets up to, but we never get to see it, experience it. The existence of vampires becomes known to humans and we don’t see that happen either, we just hear about it after the fact. Every other vampire who gets mentioned travels and Experiences things, but Gilda is inexplicably afraid of the ocean or something so she does not, and like – what is the point of immortality if you’re going to be a homebody??? (You could curl up somewhere comfy and read All The Books, that would be an extremely valid approach to immortality, but Gilda doesn’t do that, either.) Also, you could still travel to Central and South America (she’s in the USA), you don’t have to cross water to get there! I think it’s even mentioned that she has in fact been to South America, but we don’t see it and if it meant anything to her I can’t tell.

She never changes, she doesn’t GROW, she’s allegedly learning all these languages but new art forms, sciences, technology??? Nope. There is zero sense of embracing the limitless potential of either humanity or knowledge/learning, there’s no sense of JOY, of GLADNESS to have the opportunity and ability to experience so much she never would have had she remained human. We’re told she feels these things, but the prose is dry as dust and so it rings extremely hollow.

The most change we see in her is her inexplicable flip-flopping over a) making new vampires and b) her relationship to humanity, both of which go back and forth with no explanation. I don’t know if I’m supposed to believe she’s impulsive or just stupid: she turns one man THAT SHE KNOWS IS IN LOVE WITH HER (way to send the wrong signal, this still makes no freaking sense to me) and she turns a woman who is mid-suicide for no apparent reason (later Gilda claims she sensed the woman didn’t actually want to die: why this was not made clear in the scene instead of being told to us after I cannot fathom). With humanity, she tries to be part of the communities she’s in sometimes and other times she’s extremely withdrawn and interacts very little with mortals, and I have no idea why it’s sometimes one and sometimes the other. She’s lectured by another vampire that they and mortals are Different, but I don’t see how: these vampires aren’t the least bit unhuman, they’re just humans who drink blood with bonus superpowers. They don’t think or feel or want differently from how humans think and feel and want; they don’t have their own culture (except for how they feed, and I’ll get to that); they still form relationships in exactly the same ways we do. They even eat and drink!

Speaking of, let’s talk about the feeding. Gilda drinks blood, but she was taught that the only way to be a Good Vampire^TM is to give in exchange – use her psychic powers to fill someone with joy or good dreams, that sort of thing. To not do this is to be a Bad Vampire^TM, and it’s unforgivable. (As is killing the people you feed on, which I appreciate as a rule.) At first, I really liked this – it’s an idea I haven’t seen before, and I thought it was fascinating. But not only do we never really dig into it (all the vampires just take it for granted that this is good, no one ever explains why it’s good, or questions it at all) as the book goes on, the psychic stuff gets creepier and creepier. Gilda and the other vampires unhesitatingly alter people’s desires, rewire their personalities, and it’s always For Their Own Good, but – what the hells gives you the right to so drastically change someone? Without their consent? At one point, Gilda is shocked to discover the sex worker she’s feeding on has no dreams, no inner world – she doesn’t want things, doesn’t dream about the future. So Gilda gives her a burning desire for a future, for Something Different, and like – what if that was a coping mechanism, Gilda? What if that’s how she survives? What if you’ve filled her with the want for something she can’t have or accomplish, and you’ve just doomed her to being miserable forever? Why do you get to decide for her? Why are you better qualified than any of your victims to decide what their lives ought to be like? And this is NEVER QUESTIONED. It’s drummed into us over and over that this is Super Ethical, that Gilda is a saint, that everyone she mindfucks is better off for it. That a person’s mind is their last sanctuary, the most private part of their selves, never comes up; that a person’s free will is of any concern at all is laughable; that there is no evil any human has ever accomplished that can go into someone’s mind and forcibly change them – that the vampires do this EVERY NIGHT – never occurs to any of them. And this is very clearly not a case of, we’re supposed to disagree with the vampires – we’re not. The narrative completely validates and supports them. It’s disgusting.

Gilda’s origin story is also pretty gross, and deeply bizarre; for years after running away from the plantation where she was a slave, she’s known only as The Girl, by the text and by her ‘found family’. The white vampire who gives her a home, and eventually turns her into a vampire, is the one who is called Gilda! Gilda the First then joyfully ends her existence (she’s very tired after a very long vampiric life, sure, I get that that could happen) after bestowing HER OWN name on the Black girl (now woman) she rescued. Gilda the Second is intended to be a replacement for Gilda the First, not only in the world but also as the lover/companion of Gilda the First’s lover/companion, the Lakota vampire called Bird. At no point is Gilda the First’s reasoning for any of this explained, and besides being several kinds of ick it’s just so damn weird. I don’t know if the author intended it to mean something, represent something, profound, but if so I didn’t understand it. It felt so extremely strange – a series of very weird choices – to have this Black girl nameless for so many years (why couldn’t she choose her own name???) and then give her the name and girlfriend of her maker. Why on earth would you…?

But the primary issue with this book is that it is boring. Boring boring boring. Even when Gilda and Bird have to fight off a murderous Bad Vampire, it manages to be boring. This is so many pages of nothing happening, of being told things instead of experiencing them, lectured instead of entertained. Gilda is a paper-thin character whose motivations I never understood (because they never seemed to exist, she did what she did Because Plot – though I use the term ‘plot’ extremely loosely) and so her actions were just random. I don’t understand the writerly decision to have all the interesting bits of Gilda’s life happen off-page (the book is really a collection of short stories/novelettes, each set in a different time period, rather than a typical novel). On-page, Gilda just sort of drifted through time, doing nothing of note, leaving no mark, changing nothing. She pines for Bird, but they spend more time apart than together, and when they’re together, they have no chemistry, no real connection that was evident to me.

And as for the big themes – I didn’t pick up on anything at all. At one point, very briefly, Gilda thinks to herself that she wants to stay connected to humanity because of her Blackness, and this is in contrast to the white vampire who is telling her vampires are Different, who clearly doesn’t feel the same way, but we don’t explore this! We’re told Gilda gets involved with projects and organisations working to help Black people and fight for equality, but we don’t see that and Gilda doesn’t think about that in more than the abstract. She comments exactly once that chattel slavery was not the only evil that needed ending, that no one is free while Puerto Ricans and queer people and so on are not free; it never comes up again. She is a lesbian, though I’m not sure she ever uses that word; we see her interact with a few queer mortal men, and she sleeps with other vampires, but we don’t see her as part of any queer community; I never understood what, if anything, her sexuality meant to her. (It doesn’t have to mean anything, of course, but after seeing so many people sing this book’s praises re how it talks about sexuality, I was expecting something.) That being said, I think Gomez gets points for making her characters unambiguously, on-the-page queer, which is a lot more than Anne Rice accomplished writing at the same time (don’t @ me, queer subtext is vitally important to the history of queer art, I get it! Gomez still had her lady vampires be functionally married and have sex right there on the page. Lestat and Louis were too subtle for my autistic self to Get It, but no one can miss the queerness of Gomez’s vampires). That would probably count for a lot more were I reading The Gilda Stories when it was first published; in 2025, it gets you an extra half-star from me.

The last two stories are very severely environmentalist, in a clunky, lecture-y way; I disliked how the author and Gilda both seem to blame normal people for climate change rather than governments and corporations, but I think that was the predominant thinking at the time The Gilda Stories was first published so I can ignore it. Again, though, I didn’t feel like anything important was being said; certainly I never felt any love for the natural world coming off these pages.

The prose is blunt, dry, often awkward (though the meaning of each sentence is always clear, unlike some authors I’ve critiqued for awkward prose!) It’s so heavy-feeling that I had to take breaks, and naps, constantly; it put me to sleep so many times. (I’m fully capable of reading a 500-page novel in a day; 24 hours if I have other stuff to do too. After DNFing it many times before, I started The Gilda Stories in February and finished in July. That’s how much trouble I had keeping my eyes open while reading it!) There’s little description and even less sensory description, which doesn’t help the numbness I felt throughout the book, the incredible disconnect between me and the characters and story. We’re lectured a lot; we’re told things constantly, via info-dumps or dialogue; almost everything feels vague and pointless and why-not, with Gilda drifting from place to place, time to time, with no urgency or passion for anything (that we can see/feel for ourselves, anyway, instead of being informed of its existence).

I hate it. I have no idea why it’s so beloved. Perhaps I am dumb. Perhaps I’m even dumber for forcing myself to finish The Gilda Stories, instead of doing the sensible thing and DNFing it (again).

Either way, I do not recommend it.

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