Goddard, L. (2007). Jackie Kay and Valerie Mason-John’s Zamis, Lesbians and Queers. In: Staging Black Feminisms. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230801448_6

Fred Leemusician

Jackie Kay and Valerie Mason-John (aka Queenie) are Britain’s two key writers of black lesbian plays. Writing almost a decade apart in the 1980s (Kay) and the late 1990s (Mason-John) their plays reflect each respective era’s attitudes about black and lesbian identity. Both Kay’s and Mason-John’s personal biographies indicate distinctive perspectives from which to critique biologically deterministic ideas about identity. Kay is of mixed parentage (Nigerian father and white Scottish mother) and was brought up by white Scottish adoptive parents and much of her work reflects on being a mixed-race lesbian with multiple parentages.1 Mason-John was transracially raised in Barnado’s homes by white foster parents, with sporadic contact with her black biological mother. Like Kay, much of her creative work is informed by her experiences of being a black lesbian in Britain.