Queer of the Month, December 2008 | Alice Walker

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Alice Walker earned the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her multimillion-selling novel “The Color Purple” (1982) which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film (1985) and a Tony-nominated musical (2005).  Self-described  as “a Renegade, an Outlaw, a Pagan,” she has written dozens of novels, collections of short stories, non-fiction, and poetry.

Photo by Virginia DeBolt

When she was 8, Walker lost the sight of one eye after her brother shot her with a BB gun while playing “Cowboys and Indians.”   She was ostracized by other children who were frightened by her scarred eye, and she became shy, introverted, and bookish.  Her self-identification as an outsider informs her literary work.

Walker has long been an activist in both her personal and public lives.  Born to African-American sharecroppers in rural Georgia, she fought for civil rights in Mississippi, where in 1965 she began a relationship with a white Jewish civil rights activist, Mel Leventhal.  Interracial marriages were illegal there at that time.  As she said, “In order to be able to live in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose.”  After the US Supreme Court overturned the anti-miscegnation laws in 1967, Walker and Leventhal became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi.  They divorced in 1977 and Walker moved to California.

In the mid-1990s she enjoyed a relatively quiet affair with singer/songwriter Tracy Chapman, noting in a 2005 interview with “The Guardian” that “it was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.”

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