Photo credit: Daniel Alexander Jones

How does a young, pretty Catholic schoolgirl from a close-knit community of black Southerners go from being married with a child to a well-known gender-bending butch artist? Ask Sharon Bridgforth.

For the Lambda Award-winning author, the hardest part of that journey was coming out to her mother.

"Once I came out, I had to fight with her," she said. "And after that, there is nobody that I feel concerned about around how they perceive me."

Growing up in the 1960s and '70s in South Central Los Angeles, Bridgforth said that words like gay, lesbian, queer and feminist were not a part of her lexicon. Yet "those things have always been in my world and a part of who I am."

The widely anthologized Bridgforth is known as the author of two cutting-edge performance novels, the bull-jean stories and love conjure/blues, and is the founder of the now defunct award-winning root wy'mn theatre company.

Her journey — from a being a "buck-wild" girl running the streets of her beloved Los Angeles with her mostly Latina homegirls to an artist who has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation — was a winding road that included a wedding, giving birth, alcoholism, cancer and her fair share of "pretty women."

Like many other black Americans who landed in California in the mid-20th century, her Southern roots "were very fresh and on the surface." And as a child, she often visited her extended family back in Memphis, Tenn. As the only daughter of a single mother, she learned to be self-sufficient in the metropolis, yet was still under the protective eye of her "little village."

"I felt very loved and very protected," she recalled, "and very aware of the sacrifices that had been made for generations past and by my own mother for me to be there. I was always aware of that."

Even though the city was beset with segregation, she relished the diversity of its population, riding the city bus to school.

"I was a little city rat," she said. "I could get anywhere in my city, and one of the things that was great was that I was going from South Central L.A. to Echo Park, so the cultural landscape of my bus ride was an education about the world."

Along the bus ride, "we went in and out of so many ethnic neighborhoods, so the languages, the sounds, the sensibilities, the people, the spaces changed a thousand times."

She was a "reading son-of-gun" as a youngster and devoured many books on those long rides. During her teenage years, she discovered Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.

"Of course that just changed my life," she said of discovering those writers. "I hadn't been exposed to them before, and it was like falling in love hard, like over and over and over every time I found one of these young black writers. It made living seem possible. It made my life seem valid, but it never occurred to me that I could be a writer, an artist."

Her family encouraged her to enter a more practical profession with security and benefits like teaching. "My mother wanted to be a dancer when she was growing up and they squished that so thoroughly," Bridgforth said, "and what I now understand is that they were afraid for her."

Becoming an artist "was never anything that was talked about or encouraged." Nevertheless, she began writing when she was 15, tucking her creations away in a suitcase. "I just kind of wrote 'cause it was a way of surviving, it was a way of breathing, it was a way of making sense of my emotions."

It took the self-described late bloomer several years — until she was around 30 — to even show her work to others. In the meantime, she did the things good girls are supposed to do: She went to college and got married. Shortly after her wedding at 22, she became pregnant with her daughter, and that event changed her perspective on life.

"I was like, I really have to figure out what my life is about and who I am and what the heck I'm here for," she said.

And she began coming out to herself.

"That was when without real language I realized that I loved women and wanted to be with a woman, and got a divorce and ended up eventually going to the Catch." The Catch is Jewel's Catch One, a legendary black queer club that opened in Los Angeles in 1972.

"That was like finding Jesus," said Bridgforth. "Everything changed after that."

At the Catch, she met "this fine-ass poet named Michelle Clinton." So Bridgforth started going to poetry readings: "I started going to poetry events, started calling myself a poet, started asking her to help me with my poems."

But all the while, she was battling alcoholism. She had started drinking at 10 years old, and the fast-paced life of Los Angeles was taking its toll.

"L.A. was just killing me and I was killing myself in retrospect, and I just needed a change. I had a little girl and I just felt like I couldn't keep doing what I was doing. And I didn't know how to do anything different."

Some of her friends had moved to Austin, Texas, and after hearing so many positive things about the city and seeing how her friends had "chilled out completely" after moving there, she decided to leave Los Angeles.

She had never been to Texas, but she just got in the car with a friend and drove. "I don't know what would've happened if I would've stayed home," she admitted.