Welcome to Seattle Transgender

 

                                        Literary movement Authors

                      take spotlight during Black Gay Pride

 

                     We are committed to serving the Transgender community

                   Transgender author Daphany Williams-Dubois shares her life story

                 alongside other notable authors at the Black Gay Pride Literary Café

AUG. 31, 2007
                                        
  Daphany Williams-Dubois can relate to just about anything. Still under age 30, the transgender author says that in her short time on earth she’s suffered through enough troubles and overcome enough obstacles that she earned the right to sing the blues. But she’s still looking for a happy ending, as evidenced in her book “Emotionally Scarred: Monologues for the Soul in Us.”

  Of course, not everybody shares Williams-Dubois’ background. She was born male — alongside a twin sister — into a devoutly religious family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Niagara Falls, N.Y. She secretly began the gender transition process in her teens but faced constant pressure from her family to put away her make-up and act masculine — and straight — instead.

  “When I did come out about my sexuality and being transgender, I was disowned and I was ex-communicated from the church I was raised in,” she says.

  She was a teenager just out of high school then. Today, she is a Decatur resident with a hard-won college degree and a newly self-published book that focuses on happy endings.

  “I wanted to show people that even though that was my situation, I’ve done something good,” she says.

  “Emotionally Scarred” is meant to be read aloud, according to the author, who divided the book’s stories into monologues.

  “That’s so people can actually feel a little bit about what I was going through, even if it wasn’t something that was part of their own experience,” she explains.

  When Williams-Dubois reads from her book during the Black Gay Pride Literary Café, she’ll give listeners the feelings of an 80-year-old woman — a character Williams-Dubois introduces in “The Victim of Unending Prejudice.”

  “You wonder — just in the way she tells it — if she’s telling the truth about some of the things she’s seen,” Williams-Dubois says.

  Telling the truth about black gay experience is largely the focus of the literary arts portion of Black Gay Pride. And as much as that experience includes phenomena like the down low — which “The Down Low Diaries” author Eric Ware is scheduled to discuss — or the alienation black gay men and lesbians can face as “Not In My Family” author Gil Robertson can attest, there are also sweet triumphs.

  Author and publisher Lisa C. Moore is scheduled to read from her “Voices Rising” anthology during the Literary Cafe, and local lesbian erotica author Fiona Zedde will share her “Every Dark Desire.”

  Moore also appears at Charis Books & More's Sept. 2 "Voices Rising:

  Celebrating 20 Years of Black, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing." That event also includes Atlanta contributors like Duncan Teague and Malik M.L. Williams, as well as contributor Reginald Harris and editor G. Winston James.

  At Outright Bookstore & Coffeehouse, more authors are scheduled to appear in conjunction with Black Gay Pride. Shonia Brown, editor of "Longing, Lust, and Love: Black Lesbian Stories," appears Aug. 31 with contributors Tanaine Jenkins, Ranair Amin and Claudia Moss. On Sept. 1, Outright hosts Stanley Bennett Clay and his steamy new novel "Looker."