Credit: Photo by Shalor/CC BY-SA 4.0 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Barbara Smith at the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association conference, November 17, 2017. We had a memorably far-ranging conversation about her lifetime of activism and scholarship-all accompanied by plenty of laughter, although some of the laughter you’ll hear is my incredulous response to the shocking things Barbara shared with me. It was Barbara’s founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and her involvement in the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights that caught my interest, but those topics were only the jumping-off point. (The other interviewees included Al Gore and Ellen DeGeneres, among others.)
We first met in my living room in upstate New York nearly two decades ago for one of a dozen new interviews that I conducted for the second edition of Making Gay History.
That’s the power of her unapologetic truth-telling, passion, and open-hearted joy for life. From Eric Marcus: Barbara Smith inspires me to sit up straight, pay attention, and strive to do better.
