Gabrielle Bellot

Octavia “Butler called out bigotry unflinchingly; she also imagined futures in which we have so thoroughly dismissed the crude prejudices of racism, sexism, and anti-queerness that we can learn to embrace that which seems Other, such that it ceases to be Other at all.”

“On transphobia and growing up in the Harry Potter universe.”

“I wonder why I wonder, and then I remember why: I am still mourning him, in part because I am mourning all the relationships I never got to have with the people who never knew me as a woman.”

For anyone that does creative work, Gabrielle Bellot’s poetic piece at LithHub is a salve for the times when we’re plagued by artistic self-doubt. In relaying her own struggles and in deconstructing the work of W.B. Yeats and Derek Walcott, Bellot finds solace and inspiration in two other writers who also sought to shed the “thick coats of impostors.”

Gabrielle Bellot on James Baldwin’s children’s book, Little Man, Little Man, written for his nephew, Tejan: “[It] brings to life many of Baldwin’s arguments as it dissolves rigidly drawn lines between children’s and adult literature.”

After being rejected by a flirtatious acquaintance, Gabrielle Bellot examines her pain and trepidations, realizing that years after transitioning, she needs to stop allowing others to define her and dictate what’s considered worthy of love.

The author of Wide Sargasso Sea was an eternal exile, but that otherness, and the Caribbean, deeply influenced her writing.

The comic character Betty Boop is enjoying a renaissance, with new cartoons, a new trademark red lipstick, and women’s fashions on offer. Gabrielle Bellot explores the original inspiration for Betty Boop — a black jazz singer named Baby Esther Jones — whose signature voice and scat-inspired patter inspired not only Betty’s look, but her signature phrase, “Boop-oop-a-doop.” As Bellot says, Boop was far more than just a cartoon character — quite the opposite — as the first feminist depicted in animated film.