Biography

I am a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, competitive athlete and galactic practitioner. Born on the South side of Chicago in 1963, I consider myself to be a disenchanted baby boomer. I went from being a “latch key kid” to
now unlocking doors with a “dumb phone!” 

When I was six years old, my mother took me to a theater in the park production of the King And I featuring Yul Brynner. I was so captivated by
the lights, costumes and acting that I immediately declared myself an actress. This is also around the same time, I politely informed my mother that girls clothes no longer suited me. Was a baby dyke in training or what?

My early creative pursuits encompassed photography, theater, dance and television while my passion for sports, had me laser focused on being a ranked Jr. tennis player. I’ve always had a passion for nature. I fondly remember fishing everyday with my gang of friends and long walks in the swamp. When I was eleven years old, I began to study astrology and metaphysics with the manager of our apartment complex.

Always a bit different then the rest, the “black sheep” with my head to the heavens… I didn’t take the traditional Baby Boomer path of college, job, husband, house. Naw, I put that programming in a blender. Poured in a brief Army stint. Added a pinch of college. Mixed in pounds of lesbian consciousness. Then folded in pearls of wisdom from my mentors Audre Lorde, Andrea Hairston, Joi Gresham and Pearl Primus. This alchemic formula is the secret sauce I’m dipped in, cemented in.

I came of age as a butch lesbian in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980’s, the glory days of lesbian visibility. There were a plethora of lesbian businesses. Bars, bookstores and coffee houses are where we found each other. Women’s recreation leagues were popular. I played flag football and was a regular cheerleader at softball games. I gave up tennis and pursued basketball. I played one season in the ProAm league.

During this time the HIV & AIDS pandemic was also consuming so many lives. I was a young social worker working in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. I was consumed with questions and rage. How do I address all of this passion? It was the amalgamation of my art, activism and spirituality that set me on my next life-long journey.

In 1989 I co-founded Ache magazine, a Black lesbian publication and launched my company DaddiGirl Productions. I produced events, lesbian clubs, films, radio shows, was a DJ and danced professionally. Thirty- seven years later, Ache magazine and DaddiGirl Productions are influencing new generations of lesbians and queer folks who want to know more about their cultural his/her/they/stories, social influence and creative process.

Yeah, I’ve lived around the world and collaborated with famous people but this isn’t a “keeping up with the Jone’s” type of bio. You can search Google for that intel. This a window with a view… an opportunity to gain just a little insight into my calling. 

So what has a girl been up to lately? I gotta take you back, in order to go forward. I interviewed poet Pat Parker just a few weeks before her death from breast cancer. Cross my heart and hope to die she shared this. “I didn’t get as many opportunities as Audre Lorde did to lecture, teach or speak because I was butch.” She spit this truth when I was twenty-six. A young baby dyke. I didn’t fully understand what she meant. Now, in my sixties, this female identified black butch is fully tapped in to the consequences of “feeling like a woman and looking like a man!” Preach Grace Jones.

Around 2007, I really began feeling the weight of the divide around who’s a woman, what’s a man and why can’t a bitch just be her ole dyke self that I began to understand how much danger I was in. “What you talkin about Willis?” I refused to get with the program. I wasn’t willing to give up my lesbian identity in exchange for a queer one. I knew what queer meant and I didn’t identify as queer. By 2023, after years of just trying to do me, fighting for my own sovereignty… I was a deplatformed artist, cancelled and living in a city funded homeless shelter. I was too much of a risk to be associated with publicly. “Queer McCarthyism” is how I dub our current state of cultural and political affairs. So, how is a warrior queen pushing back, fighting the good fight?

I’m creating new visual works that address home, invisibility and triumph. I’m reviving my one woman show that premiered at the African-American museum in San Francisco in 2007. I’m producing new music. I’ve been somewhat pulled into academia. My recent lectures at Mt. Holyoke College and Bay Path University focused on my experiences being an artist, a second wave feminist, a homeless veteran and social worker. My love of sport still abounds. I’m a professional Pickleball coach and tournament player. I host Prideful Pickleball an LGBTQ gathering where the physical, mental and artistic commingle.

Enough said…Peace out humans! Go to my contact page if you want to book a sister.