Jack MacCarthy:

Your lipstick looks great. Omi, could you start by saying and spelling your full name?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Sure. OMI and I'll use the English letter for the next part, OSUN JONI LEE JONES

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones.

Jack MacCarthy:

Thank you. What date and where were you born, Omi?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

October 25th, 1955 in Chicago, Illinois.

Jack MacCarthy:

Will you tell me a bit about growing up? I know you were in Chicago for a few years and then moved to the suburbs. Will you paint a little bit of a picture

Jack MacCarthy:

of suburban Chicago life?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Ooh, that was around 1960, maybe, that we moved to the suburbs from Chicago. It was a very particular kind of suburban life, not an established neighborhood. It was a new development. All of my neighbors, at least across one side of the highway, were black, as far as I knew, and

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

across the highway, they were white as far as I knew. It was a particular kind of suburban life. We had an ongoing relationship with the city, we would go there to go to the beach. We would go there to visit relatives. My great aunt and uncle who lived there and being in the suburbs was a very particular reality. I had

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

this sense, though nobody ever said this explicitly, that we were moving on up, this was an elevation of some sort, a social elevation. I didn't know at the start of it, what all of that meant, but then over time there were these certain protocols and expectations, and somehow, particularly with my family, we were the Jones girls. I have three older sisters

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and the sense that people were trying to keep up with us, even though there was nothing fancy about us, but there was some sense that we had -- I don't know, maybe a quality or something that many of our neighbors were drawn to even aspire to. All of that was really awkward.

Jack MacCarthy:

What was awkward about it?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Again, this is me talking at 66, trying to recall what that was like. There was a sense of certain kinds of constraints. I was a black girl and what I could and could not do, or should and should not do might even be the better language,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

was coded into everything, what to wear, what you do with your hair, how you talk to boys. People didn't talk in my home about queer at that time, at least not in direct ways. There were these constraints that came with being who I was, who my family was. Again, this is not fancy. It wasn't a fancy house. It was none of that,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

but it was a definite move from Chicago to something that was conceived of as "better."

Jack MacCarthy:

By the way, I just wanted to flag that we are hearing the bracelets a little bit. I don't know if that's a way to like push them up on your arms. They move around a little bit less.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yes, there is and I can be more aware of them.

Jack MacCarthy:

Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

Jack MacCarthy:

How much older than you were your sisters and what was your relationship with them?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Let me be more accommodating. I'm gonna take 'em off. I'm gonna put 'em right here. Gonna be right there. And maybe I'll just put on one, which won't make noise. Okay.

Jack MacCarthy:

I had just been asking about your sisters, how much older than you were they and what was your

Jack MacCarthy:

relationship with them?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

The next oldest is seven years. There's a seven year gap and seven years, nine years and eleven years. When you're little, those gaps are huge. That's a big distance, and I really looked up to them. I felt my father in particular had his favorites among them all, and I was not in that favorite group, so I imagined they were very smart. They did their elementary

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

school education in the city of Chicago. I did mine in the suburbs and they all skipped a grade because they were so smart. In the suburbs, there was no skipping grades. I didn't exactly feel like I had failed in some way, but it felt like they were doing better than I was.

Jack MacCarthy:

And how did

Jack MacCarthy:

that play into your relationship with your parents?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I think I did many things to try to make sure they really loved me and make sure that I stood out from my sisters. For my mom, it was cleaning the kitchen. I was down on my hands and knees scrubbing the wax off the floor,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

wiping up all that film. Then putting down a new coat of wax, wiping the top of the refrigerator. It was a lot of very detailed cleaning of the kitchen that I did for my mother. For my father, it was about the grades. It was making sure that I was always getting good grades. One of my friends has this story about me coming home with my report card in elementary school,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and it was like this grand presentation to my father to show him the report card, those things, that sense of seeking approval came to characterize a lot about how I moved in the world

Jack MacCarthy:

Something I should have set at the top of the interview that I'm remembering now is

Jack MacCarthy:

you've been mostly doing this anyway, but just to say it out loud to like restate my question in your answer so that if people don't hear me ask the question, they'll get the full context. Like if I asked you what you had for breakfast, say "I had oatmeal for breakfast," instead of "Oatmeal." Oh God.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Okay. Okay.

Jack MacCarthy:

Yeah. I'm moving on to your father dying.

Jack MacCarthy:

How old were you when your father died?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

13. 13. That was a big year. My father died when I was 13, and that's right at the time. I think many of us are getting an understanding of what gender -- I mean, gender is certainly encoded onto us well, and to the time or, well before 13, but 13 then becomes, I think

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

this age where gender is now more morphing into sexuality in an even more frankly rigid sort of way. It was a particularly challenging time to lose my father.

Jack MacCarthy:

How did that loss change things at home and where were your siblings at this time?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

The loss of my father had, I believe, a dramatic impact on my mother, no surprise. And in ways that I couldn't really respond to at the time because I was young. I see now that loss, she was in her -- Ooh, I don't know

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

how old for sure. But she was relatively young. I do know she was in her 40s because he was in his 40s when he passed. There was the youngness of him, of his age when he died. It was really challenging. What I remember, also, much after his death is that my mother had boy friends.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

And I don't remember feeling any kind of way about it. Like, oh, he's not daddy and all that stuff, and I was glad that she was finding some people that she was happy with. With my sisters, I'm less sure there are some ways in which that age gap between me and my sisters -- I'm less sure about how they internalized lots of things. For me, it was a curious loss

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

because I had pinned so much of my academic identity on my father, my schooling on him. I felt some disorientation then about who am I in school now? Or how do I move through that? All of this is a little clearer for me now than it was then for sure. I am in the process

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

of writing some short stories loosely about my growing up in this era and in the Chicago suburbs. I'm beginning to focus now on my father, and I think he held much more sway over how I see my myself then I realized,

Jack MacCarthy:

Being at that age, when awareness of gender and awareness of sexuality is kind of culminating or like poking its head up in a specific way. I'm curious what your experience of your queerness was as a kid, if it was on your radar at that point.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

It was on my

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

radar in some indirect rate ways, what being queer might be and how it kind of showed up in my home and so on. My mother used to have these parties with some of her women friends, and there was a comfort and ease that my mom had at those parties that she didn't have at the regular parties that she and my father would have in the basements, people were slow grinding and drinking and doing all kinds of things in the basement.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

But when she was in the kitchen playing bid whist with her women friends, there was a familiarity and comfort and ease and laughter -- She felt freer. I've written about that part. I've written about that a little bit. I have this dim memory and you know, his age, I don't know if this is a story I invented or if it's an actual memory, but I'll call it a memory.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I have this memory of my mother and father having an argument about one of the women and my father really didn't like this woman, again, my memory is he didn't want her in the house. We, today, might call her gender queer, and I knew that my mom had a particular closeness with this woman. There was all of that. That gives me a lot to think

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

about in my upcoming writing and how I want the nine year old protagonist of these short stories to begin to absorb those kinds of things. Queer made its way into my home in that particular way. Now, when I was little, I know that I used to have these masturbating parties with this

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

little girl and it just felt great. I didn't think anything else of it, except thinking about those protocols, I knew we weren't supposed to be doing it, and I knew we weren't supposed to on many levels that I couldn't articulate, so there was that. There was some early sense of having erotic relationships with

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

with at least with this little girl.

Jack MacCarthy:

The stories that you're writing now actually is a great segue because I'm so curious about your path as an artist and as a writer and all the other things you make and to do. When do you remember

Jack MacCarthy:

starting to explore that? Was it always in the picture? What was the path of knowing your artist self?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I think I'm really still discovering my artist self or selves, plural. I know that in elementary school I wrote a novel called A Rose Among the Thorns. There you go. There you go. About a misunderstood little black girl. See, I'm just gonna

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

keep writing about little black girls until I understand myself, because that's clearly part of what I'm up to. I remember the teacher appreciating it. I also remember in elementary school directing my classmates in something called the sixth grade version of the time tunnel. The time tunnel was this TV show where people traveled in time.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I don't even know how this came to be, why we were doing it, how I was the director. I don't think of myself as the director of performance at all these days, but there were those things. There was some writing, I used to draw a lot. I made paper dolls. There was this sense of making, of creating was very exciting to me. I even did some sewing when

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I was really little, it was much later that I decided to step inside of what I think of as a big identity, and that's the identity of an artist, a truth teller, someone who is more committed to what they know to be true than to being liked. Someone who is willing to go psychically,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

internally to many difficult and joyous places in the service of creation. So yeah, that was a lot. It was much after those elementary school relationships with art making that I began to say artist. In fact, when I started teaching at the university of Texas, I named myself artist scholar, and I had

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

no idea that by doing that, it would serve me well for promotion. In the department that I started out in at the university of Texas, it was a book field and I had not written a book, but I was allowed promotion based on my artistic work. Had I not just thought to call myself an artist scholar, they would not have had the evidence

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

that what I was doing as an artist was on par with scholarship, so a windy road.

Jack MacCarthy:

In your adulthood, what happens to lead you to be leaning into being only the artist scholar?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Wow.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

What had me leaning into being only the artist scholar in high school, I did competitive forensics. I don't even know if that term is used anymore, but it's public speaking, it's performing that you do competitively. I was a national champion, or not a national, a state champion for the state of Illinois. It's a big deal. I was

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

in high school doing some art making of a kind, but it was competitive. It was to win it wasn't because there's this thing that I need to say, I think it might be useful to others. It wasn't that, it was to win. So, things get really codified and there's gestures and all kinds of things that are predictable. I think the truth is, and you're having me think about this

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

for the first time in this way. I was gonna say it wasn't until I got to Austin, Texas, that's not true because before Austin, I had a vibrant life as a performing artist in Washington, DC. I was in the DC premiere of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls. I was a lady in green and there were

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

a number of other things. I did some training at what was then called Shakespeare Theater at the Folger. I can't identify what it was that made me step in those ways. But I do know that when I went to Austin is when I met a series of people who pushed me in so many

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

ways to be bold, to be courageous, which is not the absence of fear, to be fully myself. Sharon Bridgforth, Daniel Alexander Jones, Laurie Carlos. Those were the three that I circled around a lot when I first moved to Austin and they were just doing things, I didn't understand what they were doing. I didn't know what they were doing.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Is that theater? What is that? And who are they? That solidified my decision to continue walking as an artist and discovering what that means.

Jack MacCarthy:

Backing up a tiny bit. What prompted the move to Austin,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

A job, university of

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Texas at Austin. I had been teaching at a number of places at Howard university, university of Maryland at college park, college of William and Mary. I'd been at a number of places and was invited to participate in -- I don't even know if this language is used anymore -- but what was then called a target of opportunity hire which is a kind of

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

affirmative action hire. I said, well, okay, I'll give this a try. They made, what was at the time, a lot of nice gestures and offers to make it worth my while to come, me and my daughter Lee, a little one at the time.

Jack MacCarthy:

Will you just say what year that was, that you came to Austin?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I was gonna say I believe -- No, I'm sure it was 1990. I came to Austin, Texas in 1990.

Jack MacCarthy:

How did you start to get involved and circle around the artists that you were just talking about? How did you come to each other's orbits?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

When I got to Austin in 1990, because I had been doing theater in DC

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

prior to that, I was looking for theater companies, theater artists that I might be able to work with. Sharon Bridgforth had started her theater company Root Women, the Root Women Theater Company. She invited me to come and do some workshops, some exercises with the company members, and that then pulled me into

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

a world with Daniel Alexander Jones, which pulled me into a world with Laurir Carlos, all of them doing the bulk of their work at Frontera at Hyde park theater, as it was called then, under the guidance of Vicky Boone. It was kind of a word of mouth that then just started circling and circling and circling. I was glad

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

to have an active world outside of the academy. It created much needed balance.

Jack MacCarthy:

I know there's been this focus in your work over time of art as social change and theater activist theater. I'm curious

Jack MacCarthy:

if you were always aware of that being part of it for you, were they always inextricable or did your awareness of the relationship of art and activism evolve over time?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I was not always aware of the relationship between art and activism. It was long after

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I had begun performing professionally that I began to see. Perhaps in the classroom when I was teaching. I taught courses and performance, not theater courses, per se. Part of my background is in a field that now calls self performance studies. But at the time when I received my degrees it was Interpretation.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

What Interpretation as a field asked us to do was to understand that literature is an embodiment. It is a living thing so that when we take on the word of a narrator or the persona in a poem, there is an awareness and understanding of that piece of literature that comes, that would not be there in the same way if we hadn't used that as a tool,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

the embodiment as a tool. And we are changed when we take it in that fully. Some of that was graduate study and then really doing that with my students, seeing how they changed once they took on a perspective that they didn't have, that wasn't theirs. I now understand

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

that it does change the molecules. I mean, medical doctors and physicists who understand cells and molecular realities far better than I, they've been saying this for a long time. It was, I think, in the classroom and thank you. I had not tried to pinpoint when this was starting to happen. I think it was in the classroom seeing what those possibilities

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

were that I thought this is a powerful way to open people to their best selves and for us to move things along so that happy can be something we all are, and that liberation isn't just a word, but it's a deep, physical, psychic, spiritual aspiration

Jack MacCarthy:

That gives me chills. Yeah. When you started to see that in the classroom, how did you start to bring that into your art making?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Well, in really very specific ways, part of that union of art and activism led me to the work of Augusto Boal

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and Theater of the Oppressed. It also gave me a particular kinship with Robbie McCauley who has a number of principles around art making and social change. One is dialogue, that we can make art that is dialogic in the investigation of what will enliven us all. Not only

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

dialogue as we think of in a play, two characters talking, but it might be entities or beings expressing. Talking isn't the only kind of dialogue that Robbie McCauley was interested in; movement becomes its own dialogue, right? Its own storytelling. She and Laurie Carlos, man, what they understood about the body and the truths that it holds,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

my work with them was so important. I think I veered away from where the question was, but it was deep embraced with them. When I was doing work, when I was in a production of Sharon's -- Or in a production that Erik Ehn had written for Laurie Carlos, there was so much terror. There was so much,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

'I don't know what I'm doing'. There was so much, I couldn't scrub the kitchen floor. I couldn't bring a report card. I just had to kinda surrender and trust. I knew there was a truth in that. I knew there was a truth in it, so I kept going back and every time I thought, Omi, what are you doing? And that, I think, is precisely where

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

many of us need to go so that we can release into something bigger, more brazen and dynamic than the single self can even contain.

Jack MacCarthy:

I'm just like, just so many

Jack MacCarthy:

hallelujahs inside of me as you say this. What makes that brazen embodiment possible? What are the conditions that allow that to happen?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yes. What are the conditions that allow that to happen? Exactly, exactly. What are they? I think that there are some -- Sharon Bridgforth refers to this as the architecture sometimes.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I think inviting a range of people to come together is one condition, the invitation. What I've learned, people have told me it's not just the invitation. They come to the things because I invite them. Do you know what I mean? But

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

there's a relationship sort of already in place, it's not random people, not completely random, but a range of people so that different lineages, different realities and different possibilities are all gathered together in the room or in the grove or wherever it happens to be. I think the invitation to gather is important. I think, movement of some sort, whether you wanna call it

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

dance or not, so that your molecules get to line up with each other, even if you're not doing the so-called same dance. But in my evolving understanding of resonant frequencies in the field of physics, molecules do sync up. People have reminded me as I talk about this, that some of that syncing up can be really dangerous because then those molecules could be galvanized is to do things that bring deep harm.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I keep that in mind and try to lead with love and joy. Oh, respect and liberation in all things. So gathering, bodies moving, sweating together, doing. And that moving, it might mean building a house together or planting a garden together, but bodies moving.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

It's one of the things that was sometimes challenging about teaching. There's so much sitting, students do so much sitting. Getting the bodies moving, food, eating, meals, ingesting things together, and if you're cooking together, wow, wow. Because in those moments of making together, making a meal, making

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

a garden, making a mural, things happen that cannot always be articulated, but the body remembers it. The body takes it in, the body absorbs it. Those are some of the -- Oh, and maybe it's itself evident, and I'll say, this I usually wear ides, these bras, oh, let's

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

say bangles. But they make a lot of noise, so I'm not wearing them right now, but the Sonic is very important to whatever the gathering is. It could be some of that great music we were listening to before the interview. It could be the sound of the spade going into the ground. It could be a hammer, some

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Sonic awareness is also important. All of those things and we need to do all of them. We need to do every one of them.

Jack MacCarthy:

I'm enjoying watching as you're talking about movement, you are moving more and it's kind of a medicine. I'm watching it like

Jack MacCarthy:

play out in you as you describe it. Will you talk to me a little bit about theatrical jazz? What is it, how did you become aware of it?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Theatrical jazz is a term that I believe was coined first by Aishah Rahman, playwright

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and visionary. I came to encounter it in my own physical experience. First, I believe through Daniel Alexander Jones in Austin, Texas, he came out on stage Wearing only a silver lame

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

drape on half of his body and a kind of a spit curl for his hair. I was like, what in the world? Who is this? What is going on? I like to mention that moment because it was so disruptive. I think that's part of what happens with much theatrical jazz, it disrupts

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

our static understandings of what might be possible. The people who create theatrical jazz do it in a wide range of ways. Some are more connected to a look at what some people might call the environment or nature. Grisha Coleman and Walter Kitundu among them.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Some are doing work with a very direct, obvious spiritual component, that would be Sharon Bridgforth. Some are doing pieces that have the narrative to them, sometimes a linear narrative, and that would be some parts of Daniel Alexander Jones' work. It doesn't all look the same. What joins them is I think this notion of disruption

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and I hadn't fully thought about it until you've posed this question to me, that for all of those artists, I've named race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, physicality, intellectual acuity, all of that is fluid

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

like this. I know the truth of that. I don't always live it, which is another story, but I know the truth of that. It is the static that has gotten us, oh, into horrors all over the world about nation state, a ridiculous creation for competition.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

That's what the nation state does for us. Or into these dangerous quests for more and more and more and more money, without an understanding of how that quest reverberates around the planet, around the human beings and how

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

that quest can be so shallow. If you're not doing something to serve everybody with those resources. That work theatrical jazz, I believe is getting at all of that. Maybe this is what's clearest. I think many people, particularly with their first encounter with theatrical jazz may feel a little disoriented and feel some familiarity.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I do the work. I continue to do that. So that the work at its best nudges us toward a more full embrace of the world.

Jack MacCarthy:

I'm where my brain is going, is imagining like, what if we could get all these destructive leaders in this and experience this and embrace this? Like what would be possible?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Exactly. I've had that fantasy, so maybe my fantasy, maybe it's percolating somewhere. I even thought, wouldn't it be interesting, maybe it's a comedy, maybe it's a movie

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

that's a comedy, but you get all world leaders together, somehow, at some beautiful retreat center, you feed them food from different places. They're all these crystals all over the place. They don't need to know why those crystals are there, but there are all these crystals and then the lights go out, ah, then they gotta work together to figure out where's the fuse box. I mean, you could see that comedy. I have thought about that a lot. How could we get the people

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

who have so much control right now together in a room? Not with any of their national flags, not even with any of their translators across languages. If we could do it without their bodyguards, I know that maybe nobody would come, but let us be human again. Let us just be the body that we've been given this temporary thing, let us

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

be that, in a room together for a while. My word!

Jack MacCarthy:

May speaking it make it so.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yes.

Jack MacCarthy:

Yes, yes. Will you tell me a little bit about Allgo, how you got involved with them,

Jack MacCarthy:

who they are and, and what that opened up for you?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Oh yes. Allgo. Oh, my gosh. Allgo is the queer people of color Texas statewide organization that is based in Austin, Texas. It was instrumental in me stepping more fully into who I am before I

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

publicly identified, as queer was doing all kinds of work with Allgo. They were in communities doing outreach, health outreach. They had an arts branch of what they do. Sharon Bridgforth was the head of that for a time. They gave great parties. They gave great parties, lots of dancing. I had this incredible

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

family of people who "happened" to be queer. This was before I stepped into me in that way, so that by the time I declared publicly that I was queer, it was scary. I didn't know what kind of responses I would receive professionally or from

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

my family, whatever. I had Allgo already. I already had this deep I wanna find another word besides community, but deep, deep, deep kin that I could cleave to, and I did. I did. Anything Allgo wanted me to do, I was doing it. I was grateful that they are who they are.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

That's my journey with Allgo.

Jack MacCarthy:

When did you step into like acknowledging your queerness? It seems a lot of times that like the knowing and the declaring might happen separately or over time, but how did

Jack MacCarthy:

that start?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

In my first marriage, the man who was then my husband and I were in therapy, and we also had individual therapy sessions with the same therapist. There was a moment when I told her that I was attracted to women and I

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

just didn't know what to do with that information, with that truth. At the time, this was a good 30, 40 years ago, this good 40 years ago, she said, well, given the way women's bodies are so commodified, it's not surprising because we're all conditioned, I think she was saying, to think of women's bodies

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

as desirable. I think that there's truth in that, and yes, there was other stuff going on too. I mentioned that to say that there was a very particular awareness long before I decided to name myself queer in public,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

there were also these, I made some attempts to begin relationships with women, and none of those came about, none of those came to anything. Then there was Sharon Bridgforth, and what can I say? She's just amazing.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

In certain ways she walks with a kind of freedom that was sensual, erotic, it was intellectually engaging, it was spiritually grounded. It was just all the things. So that is to say, Sharon is the first woman that I've had a romantic relationship with,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

a sexual relationship with. And yeah, it's just sort of all the things, it's not coincidental, there are no coincidences, but in this instance, in particular, she's an artist, she has been an independent artist for -- I don't even know how long now, that's how she walks in the world.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

She's a community person, that's how she walks in the world. The things that were already really important to me, she's curious, and her mind goes in many different directions and things that had always been important to me were there. The arrows that is sexual just was an extension of all that was already there.

Jack MacCarthy:

How did you and Sharon get together?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

How did Sharon and I get together? Sharon and I tell this story somewhat differently. I'll just say quickly when she tells it, she says that she approached me at this event, and I just sort of snubbed her. I don't remember this approach. Okay. I don't remember that happening. I started

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

something called the Austin Project in -- Oh, I'm gonna get the year wrong, 2001, 2002, something like that. I started it and I invited Sharon to be what I came to call the anchor artist to guide the people who would be participating, all of whom, at time, identified as women, every Sunday for four hours for 11 weeks. Sharon would guide

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

all of us through personal excavation, the goal of which was to use art making to help us pull apart some of the stuff that's getting in the way of us being our most divine selves. She and I started working really closely. I'd done the work for her theater company some years prior, and then she and I started working very closely on the Austin Project, and people were nudging me, "Why don't you?"

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

And I'm like -- Then this is another place where the story would differ depending upon whether I'm telling it or she's telling it. I did while we were still working on the Austin project together, I did ask her if she wanted to go out. You can imagine it's like -- It's crazy, I'm asking this person, she said, "No."

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

And she says that she said no, because it would've been unethical since she was sort of guiding me through my creative process with the Austin Project. She felt that it would be unethical. Long story short, the instant we finished that year of the Austin Project, through many, many, many details and other things we began going out. So

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

it was that.

Jack MacCarthy:

I do wanna hear some of the details, but I also wanted to just flag that it's five till noon. Do you know when Sonya is coming in or --

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Would it disrupt things? I know she's

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

finishing a workout session.

Jack MacCarthy:

We can also just keep going until she comes in and just pause when that happens.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Would that be okay? I mean,

Jack MacCarthy:

That's absolutely fine.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Okay. Because I think that the only thing that would be really safe is if we stopped now, but didn't start again until 5 after 12. I don't know if that reduces our window too much.

Jack MacCarthy:

I think a 10 minute pause is totally fine. But if the timing isn't gonna be exact and she just comes in when she comes in, then I, I think it's okay to just pause then.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Okay. Well, maybe we should keep going because I don't know how exact it's gonna be.

Jack MacCarthy:

Yeah. But yeah, that's fine.

Jack MacCarthy:

I'm gonna drink some water, thanks for reminding you to do that.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Can ask a question. I tend to lean in a lot and back and stuff, is all of that okay?

Juan Raymundo Ramos:

That's okay. As long as it's not too forward.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Not too forward. Yeah. Okay. All right. Because then I kind of, yeah. Okay. I see.

Jack MacCarthy:

Yeah, yeah. That what you just did was a little too far it's mostly not been

Jack MacCarthy:

maybe before that far. But I'm just remembering that there was a party after the --

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

The Austin project?

Jack MacCarthy:

After the Austin project.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jack MacCarthy:

And about a shirt. Can we just hear that story?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Sure, sure.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Sharon and I, oh gosh, I'm trying to figure out what the entry point is. We come to the end of that particular year in the Austin Project, and as was customary, we had a kind of party celebration. We did this particular party at the like, you know how apartment complexes have rec centers or game rooms,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

some kind of gathering rooms. We did it at the apartment complex game room where Rogers Vinny Bhansali, one of the members of the Austin Project, who's now the director of Solidarity Network, where Vinny lived, and Vinny was one of the instigators, was one of the whole, if this happens, then the two of you should and all of this. So, hold that party and let me back up one

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

piece of the story to get us actually to the party because Sharon and I, we dance at the party, so fun things happened there, but okay. Prior to that, like maybe even just the night before several members of the Austin project, Sharon and I, we went to dinner together, again, part of the culminating activities of the work for that year, and another friend of ours, Virginia Grice, a playwright, who was also a part of the Austin Project,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Virginia Grice had on this guayabera that was just gorgeous. It was chocolate brown and it had this cream colored embroidery. It was amazing. I don't exactly know how all of this went down, but I told Sharon if she wore that guayabera and unbuttoned it

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

to here, then I would go out with her. She made Vicky get up at the restaurant, they exchanged shirts so that Sharon could walk out with the shirt and then at that party -- okay now we're at the party -- she had on the guayabera and I saw like, I ran to the bathroom, I just ran to the bathroom. I ran to the bathroom,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and we danced. I was shy and I'm like, what are you doing? Oh, but again, that question, "What are you doing?" that served me so well with theatrical jazz. I knew when you're off kilter, that's when the magic can happen. When the juice can come in. Then she walked me to my car. I think we maybe kissed, I don't remember. But then we started going out after that

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and there were one or two breakups along the way, and then in, what is this, what year are we? We got married in 2014. There's all of that.

Jack MacCarthy:

I know you mentioned in your questionnaire

Jack MacCarthy:

that marrying Sharon was something that was important to you to talk about. Do you wanna like -- Yeah, let's talk about that.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I wanna say two things about it. One, we were in San Francisco when gay people were allowed legally to marry

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and that I think is great in certain ways, but it can also obscure the ways in which marriage as it is most often conceived in the United States has not always served women well, in fact, it's not served women well, and so it was curious to me that so many gay people were

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

adamant about how it's almost as if getting the right to marry would make gay people more palatable to straight people. And part of what interests me in queer and gay is exactly not that, it's not trying to be palatable. It rubs me in that way. It's sort of like,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

am I simply yielding to social demands and seeking some kind of acceptability. Getting married was real important -- Sharon didn't share any of that. It was very important to her. She's very excited. Yes, yes, yes. She wanted to get married. I also recognize that in the current system, in the United States, there are benefits to being married there. The financial benefits it's --

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

That should not be, all of us on the planet should have equal access to resources. So, I did decide to get married. The other piece for me around this is that there are a lot of queer people who were so enthusiastic about the right

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

to marry. We were in San Francisco, people were partying in the street when this happened, where was the party? When the civil rights act, the voting act was once again enacted into law, as it has to be periodically that affects everybody of voting age. There was no partying in the streets, what I'm trying to get at here. It's something

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

that June Jordan pointed out beautifully in a documentary, White gay people are not as excited about the rights of people of color and they should be, it's all the same thing. It's all the same thing.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

My oppression is your oppression. I was really frustrated and didn't participate in any of the celebrations around gay marriage in San Francisco because those same bodies were not in the street, white bodies, were not in the streets when my right to vote, and theirs, of course, but it has a particular impact on my black body's ability

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

to vote. There's that tension around it too. There's all of that. I wear my wedding ring on the right hand. It's my protest. Sharon said fine, "You wear it on the right hand. Mine's on the left. I'm married, see, see. see."

Jack MacCarthy:

There's a lawyer who gave a Ted talk because she works specifically with getting access and getting rights for people whose families look all kinds of different ways. Sometimes that means queer families, and sometimes that means like a grandparent/ grandkid. Sometimes it means like three or four people who are all in relationship with each other

Jack MacCarthy:

and talking about how there's over a thousand rights like that you get as married people and just like those should be accessible to everyone and there should be support in place for people to make family however they make family.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Right. Right. Exactly.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Exactly. I hope that by being married, I don't silence that important voice commitment.

Jack MacCarthy:

Something that you brought up in our other conversation was

Jack MacCarthy:

you referred to it as the dance of identifying as black and seeing black as a term like queer and woman as a term of love to be challenged and expanded. I just wanted to hear more about that from you and what that means to you and how you've danced with that.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

All those terms

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

are signifiers that I embrace black, queer woman. And part of my embrace is so the people who walk in some inside of those terms can be fully seen, heard, respected, understood, all of that. I do embrace the terms, black, queer

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

woman, even as I recognize that that embrace might reinforce the visions around my humanity with others. Let me see if I can articulate that a little more clearly. In the current state of the world

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

in the United States, I just try to stay as local as I can, black, woman, queer, those are realities that have not been given the respect, support, freedom that they should have.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Which means then that those realities are not participating in the fullness of the world in ways that they might. It is important for me to be vocal, be clear, be energetic in my sense of what those identity markers mean for me

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and how they should be legally, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally recognized. What I also know is that in doing that, it can mute then that I am a human being. There's this complicated way in which asserting identity markers --

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

ooh, I wanna say this clearly -- may make it, oh, all the more challenging for us to be just humans. Now I'm gonna get raked over the coals for that one, because it's not coming out the way that I feel it to be true.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

But there's something in that, there's something in that. It's not an erasure, I'm not talking about erasing the identity markers. I'm saying, let them live vibrantly alongside other identity markers so that we can be human together. That is perhaps the clearest statement of what I'm trying to get at.

Jack MacCarthy:

I think what I'm hearing is that it's not in the embracing of these words that the barrier to being able to live in the world as just a human happens, it's the

Jack MacCarthy:

perception and the barriers, like the societal barriers or the barriers in people's minds about those identities. Is that sort of what you mean?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The social barriers and then the internalized barriers as a result of those social barriers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I'm gonna just leave that there. I should say one other thing about this, the dance. Thinking of the three identity markers that I have named woman, black, queer, there are certain spaces where I don't feel comfortable walking into a room fully inside of all of that, of who I am. There are black spaces where queer

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

is not accepted, respected. There are queer spaces where black is not accepted or respected. In some black spaces, and even some queer space, things are so patriarchal that my sense of woman

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

is not respected. So, that's the other dance, that's the other dance, and I'm committed to being all of who I am, all the time.

Jack MacCarthy:

It's my belief that that commitment to being all of who you are

Jack MacCarthy:

makes it more possible for more of us to keep doing that. Something else that you mentioned in your questionnaire was important to you to touch on was you and Sharon being verbally abused by a man passing by in San Francisco.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yeah. Yeah. We were,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

oh gosh, I've forgotten. It's so funny. You leave a place and then you can forget all of these key locations, but it's a very important Wharf in San Francisco. I cannot remember the name, but we were there. I think we had gotten something to eat and we were outside and the Seagull, it was all of this and it was lovely. We were not being

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

particularly affectionate. In fact, as I remember, one of us was on the phone and the other was standing somewhat apart, a man walked by, and since I've talked about issues of race, a black man walked by and started saying these antigay things to the two of us, we weren't holding hands.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Again, I'm not even sure how much close proximity we were because one of us was on the phone and the other may have been finishing her meal, I'm not sure. He was mumbling to himself and he was aggressive and he was loud. He may not have been a person who was mentally healthy, but it was terrifying, and we just moved,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

we just got our things and moved to another location. It was a reminder that just being who we are gives people permission to be violent, verbally violent. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. It wasn't physical violence. But have there been the physical --

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

It's all part of the same ugliness, the verbal violence and the physical, they are different, but part of the same impulse, and that was painful. I rarely have felt accosted because I'm queer, so that just a hard reminder, important reminder.

Jack MacCarthy:

That also reminds me of something you said in our other conversation about how after you got together with Sharon, that there was simultaneously, like you relaxed in some ways, and people noticed that you were happier. Also, there was an

Jack MacCarthy:

awareness of relinquishing some privilege. I would love to hear more about that. Like, how you noticed that happen.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yeah. It was interesting, even though I had Allgo already, this black, not black, people of color queer statewide organization, that was

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

a part of my world before I began to move in the world as queer person, even though Allgo was there, it was still scary to come on and now I have completely lost my train of thought. Woo. Will you ask that again?

Jack MacCarthy:

Both. People noticed you were different

Jack MacCarthy:

in a positive way and also relinquishing privilege that came with getting together with Sharon.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Thank you. Okay. Woo. Even though I already had this kin among the people at Allgo, the Texas statewide, queer people of color organization that I had association with for a long, long time,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I knew that I was letting go of a certain set of privileges, and I frankly didn't know how I felt about that. I had never even realized that I had straight privilege until that moment. What does straight privilege look like? As somebody who identifies as a woman, it means men greet you in a certain kind of way,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and men continue to have certain visible forms of power in the United States. That means that these people with power will relate to me differently. And boy, they did, it was deep. It was deep. At the university of Texas, there was the habit. I am sure this is no longer the habit, but when I arrived at the university of Texas,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

if a male administrator was greeting a woman professor, and I'm making all kinds of assumptions about the gender identifications here. But if a male administrator is greeting a female professor, he would often lean in and kind of sometimes kiss her on the cheek or kind of do a cheek to cheek thing, like one side and then the other. I always thought that was a little weird, but I didn't

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

stop it. One of the things I did when I began to move as a queer person in the world, I told many people at the university. In part because Sharon Bridgforth -- who is now my wife, but at the time was not -- was employed by the university through one of the units that I worked with so there could be accusations

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

of nepotism and all. I had to tell Dean, so that that trickles through. Well, child, there was no more hugs. I wasn't getting them hugs anymore, and I was grateful not to get the hugs. Great. But it was a sign that I had shifted in their understanding. And who knew, I didn't even know -- I guess I did know, on some level I did know that there was a gendered and sexualized mix that was in

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

that lean in gesture. But, boy, it got real clear to me when the fact of my queerness became more public. I'll throw this in too, one of my friends, a straight black male told me that he thought I was less angry now that I had

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

begun to walk publicly as a queer person, and I hadn't thought about it, but I see it. I was pissed off at men. I was pissed at them because I came to understand, and now this is taking me back to what I said earlier about bringing my report card to my father. But I knew that something about my worth was hooked up in whether or not they approved of me, which meant thinking that I'm attractive,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

which had something to do with sexuality too. It was all of that. I think I was pissed. I think I was frequently angry with men and I'm grateful that he said that. I don't know that he even knows how profound a realization he offered me was that, so all of that.

Jack MacCarthy:

Yeah. Yeah. That's profound. I wanted to make sure that we got time for you to talk about parenthood and your daughter Lee. Let's start with when and where Lee was born.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I always get her age wrong. She

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

teases me. Somewhere in the early eighties, she is 37. I think she's about to be 38. I think that's true. I think that's true. She was born in the part of Virginia that is just adjacent to Washington DC, so Northern Virginia. She was born in Northern

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Virginia. She now lives in Los Angeles. I'm happy to say, in fact, I'm going to see her later today and she's the light, she is the light. Perhaps I could say more about what that means to me when I say she is the light.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I love her dearly and feel love from her dearly. I have learned through my relationship with her a lot about autonomy and independence. Now that she is an adult, I have the opportunity to see her fully as herself,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

not merely some reflection of me. When our children are smaller I think it's easier to think of them as extensions of ourselves or reflections. There are many things about Lee that are similar to me, Ooh, and a lot that are different that are uniquely hers, as they should be. I'm learning to understand that what it also means is that I'm

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

learning to understand my own autonomy and my own individuality distinct from her. That's a huge gift that mothering has given me. There is a way that having Lee helps me to know what it means to be a person in the world, not just an individual, because I'm always

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

in relation to decisions that are made, truths that evolve come about in part, because I have been given a divine responsibility for another human being on the planet. To see myself as, even though I was talking about autonomy, to see myself as separate from all other beings,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

the sense of responsibility and love and care that I have as a mother reminds me that human beings are not separate. That this is not only because of birthing, because you can be a mother in many ways that give this sense too, sense of responsibility and care and love because that's the thing that's joint,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

that's the bind, that's the -- And you do that while you also do this and then, and this all at this same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mothering, particularly mothering Lee in all of her dynamism and beauty and power has shaped who I am.

Jack MacCarthy:

What has it been like to watch her make decisions that you would not make?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

That's been hard. That's been hard. I think my experience gives me some perspective.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I know that it gives me some perspective. It doesn't give me the perspective and that's the difference. I also know that she, like, everybody has to learn at some point on their own and what she may learn is maybe some version of, oh, that's what mama said, she was right.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Some version of that. Or maybe I was right, or some fluid thing in between all of that, but she has the right to make her decisions. Oh, it's so hard to let go of wanting to protect, thinking that I know. So, but this "I just wanna protect you from the --" I have to be sure to check myself. That is a genuine impulse,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I have to check myself on whether or not I want her to make choices that then shine a light on me as a parent. Do you know? I've gotta always check myself. Omi, is this about you or is this about Lee? And she gets to figure that out. She should figure that out. She has and is doing so. Yep.

Jack MacCarthy:

Is there anything else you want to say about Lee before I ask you about some other things?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Hmm. There's so much, I want to say she is now married. Lee's queer, she's married to a woman, she's married to a white woman.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

She is an artist. My shorthand is to also say she's a farmer. She is in her own, very particular way, an activist. There's a way in which each of those things -- I mean, she does each of those in her own way. She's defining dance, activism, farming in her own way. She's a designer.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I'm so glad she picked me, in my cosmology children choose their parents. I'm so glad she picked me. I'm better for it.

Jack MacCarthy:

That's so beautiful. Like I said, I waited until later on purpose to ask you about this, to make sure we left space for other things,

Jack MacCarthy:

but what do you want to share about your journey with academia? Like, what do you want to say about that?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I think I wanna say a lot of things. I'm not sure that I will say even a quarter of them here, but I'm doing some writing now which may make space for me to say more of what I'd like to say because I genuinely think some of it may be useful

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

to others. I have benefited from my academic career in countless ways and I have been challenged and constrained by that same career.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

My feeling is that institutions of all types have a vested interest in maintaining themselves. So, even a space that claims to be encouraging new ideas doesn't want any ideas that are going to disrupt

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

its ability to stay in power. When that gets clear, I began to feel like I was being used to do that, not to come up with the thing. All these years, academic institutions have not figured out how to feed people.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Why don't we know how to do that? What are we doing if we haven't figured out, because I know we have the knowledge to do it. Why aren't people being given scholarships for their four years in university study to do just figure -- You got a scholarship for four years, take these courses but we'd love your real job to be to figure that. You see what I'm

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

getting at, right? Academic institutions, I think, are only going to go so far in their ability to help us really address the power of humanity. They would fall apart. They would be undone or at a minimum, significantly, radically, reimagined if that

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

was what they were going to do to help humanity. When I retired, I did so because I wanted to know who I am without those constraints. I didn't have an upper administrative position, but I had enough power in a -- I don't know,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

mid-level administrative position that some of the things I said and did could cost somebody a promotion, could cost a graduate student getting their particular fellowship. I needed to be away from that kind of responsibility. I need to work my muscle around speaking the truth as I know it. I couldn't speak the truth up in there.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Oh my God. Yeah. I think that's what I wanna say about the academy. May I add one other thing? I love my students. I have some wonderful human beings as students, all human beings are wonderful in their own way, and I managed to have worked with some,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

man. If we left it up to some of them, the joint would be taken care of. We'd all be good. We'd all be good. So I say, thank you, grad students and undergrads, I say, thank you indeed. Of course, I've got friends who are academics as well. There's that, but what I wanna do is shine a light on the folk who are gonna be in greater positions of power. Some of the students

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

could turn it out and I hope they will. I hope they will.

Jack MacCarthy:

Again, may speaking make it so.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yes. Yes.

Jack MacCarthy:

There were three folks that you mentioned that were incredibly influential on you that

Jack MacCarthy:

I wanted to take the time to ask you about: those are Gwendolyn Brooks, E. Patrick Johnson and Lorraine Hansbury. I'm going to just say that we have about 17 minutes left and there's four questions that we ask every

Jack MacCarthy:

OUTWORDS interviewee at the end. This is the last thing I'm asking about before we get to those. Can we start with Gwendolyn Brooks?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Sure. Gwendolyn Brooks is my dear writer. She inspires me to see the power and beauty and necessity and the seemingly simple things.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I'll say that about, and she's a Chicago girl, so that for Gwendolyn Brooks. E. Patrick Johnson, a dear friend, Brooks wasn't a friend in a direct way. She's my friend, because I respect her literature and her life.

Jack MacCarthy:

Omi, froze for a second.

Jack MacCarthy:

I'm guessing that I see that zoom is telling me your internet is not that strong right now. You're coming through clearly again though.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Okay.

Jack MacCarthy:

The recording to OBS should be uninterrupt and should have gotten everything you said, but we did not hear it, sadly.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Okay. Should I do Gwendolyn Brooks again?

Jack MacCarthy:

You froze for me again.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yeah. And you're frozen for me, of course.

Jack MacCarthy:

You froze again. Okay.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Should we go to the four things so that we're sure to get them in the questions you said that you ask everybody?

Jack MacCarthy:

Sure. I'll go to those, and then if we have time at the end, I'll also ask you about the other two.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Okay. That sounds great.

Jack MacCarthy:

Okay. Omi, if you could tell your 15 year old self one thing, what would it be?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Everything you're doing now, the dolls, the writing, the dreaming, the drawing, oh,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

it's all going to come to beautiful manifestation in myriad ways. Just stick with it, stick with it. Be yourself.

Jack MacCarthy:

Do you believe in the notion of a queer superpower? So what is it?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I don't know if I actually believe in a queer superpower, but if there were such a thing, it would be

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

to understand the non-staticness of reality, the morphing and flowing of all things because if we could do that, it would be a superpower if human beings could figure that out. Woo. Yeah.

Jack MacCarthy:

Yeah. Makes me think of

Jack MacCarthy:

Octavia Butler and God is Change and all that.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Exactly.

Jack MacCarthy:

Yeah. Yeah. Why is it important to you to share your story?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

It just might help somebody else. Maybe there's something that I said, or even that I wear or that's in the background. I've been told many times about things that I didn't realize were having an impact, that were like something that I wore, that it might

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

give somebody else permission to be more themselves, whatever that might be. Frankly, I get a chance to get clearer about me, so that I can offer up even more so that I can be more peaceful with who I am and offer up even more.

Jack MacCarthy:

What do you see as the value of a project like OUTWORDS that records

Jack MacCarthy:

the stories of LGBTQIA 2S+ elders all across the United States, and please include OUTWORDS in your answer.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

I think OUTWORDS is vital in making space for the fact of our lives, to be a part of the fabric of everything else, rather than having it shunted off to the side. If we don't tell our stories, it's as if we don't exist. I mean, I know that it's

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

a bit of a cliche, but it is true. We have to tell our stories and OUTWORDS is doing that work, and I thank you.

Jack MacCarthy:

We thank you. I'm also so pleased that your internet seems to be stabilized again. I also wanted to ask about E. Patrick Johnson.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

E. Patrick Johnson is a dear friend in the flesh. Gwendolyn Brooks is a friend in that I admire her work. E. Patrick Johnson is a friend in the flesh who is 100% himself all of the time. He is somebody who has reshaped the academy to serve beyond academic walls.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

He is somebody who greeted the class ... He's a Dean now at Northwestern university in the school of communications. As a Dean, he made a video wearing pumps and his academic gown and doing voguing, okay, that's how he greeted. So, talk about disruption. Talk about deal with me as I am, with the countless books that he has written

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

and the respect that he has received. He did that thing in pumps and his academic gown. Patrick is an inspiration.

Jack MacCarthy:

I love that so much. It was amazing. Yeah. And Lorraine Hansberry.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Like Gwendolyn Brooks,

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

she's a Chicago girl, Chicago woman. Not out in the way that we think of being out with queer life, but many did know that she had relationships with women, intimate relationships with women, a formidable writer and thinker and activist. I take that as a model. I'm so grateful that

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

her labor gives me space to be more fully me. I honor her, she built a theater. It never really came to fruition, but the John Brown theater that she wanted to launch is an inspiration. Her desire to create work that would push people to have conversation.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yeah. Thank you, Lorraine.

Jack MacCarthy:

Is there anything that we didn't touch on today that you would like to talk about?

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

We covered a lot. You did good. That's excellent, Jack. Yeah. There were great questions. And you helped me to feel at ease. I can't think of anything else. I'm really just grateful

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

to be a part of this experience. Things live on in ways that we can't imagine in our lifetime. I feel that this work, that these stories are going to have a force that we may not know while we're on the earth plane, but they will be here. These stories will be here.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Yeah. Thanks so much.

Jack MacCarthy:

Yeah. Thank you. Oh, well I think that's it for me.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Wow. We did it. Oh,

Jack MacCarthy:

We did it.

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones:

Thank you, Juan.