ABSTRACT
Contemporary Black British lesbian writer and performer whose work has done much to produce a Black lesbian history in/of Britain. Born in Cambridge she lived with a singleparent white foster mother until the latter retired when Mason-John was four years old. She was then placed in a Barnardo’s home in Essex, disastrously re-united for a time with her mother whom she describes as treating her sadistically, resulting in Mason-John being taken back into care at the age of twelve, and then being fostered again from the age of thirteen. Educated at Ilford County High School for Girls and Leeds University, where she read Politics and Philosophy, she also completed a postgraduate course in Journalism with Business Press International. Since then she has written for the black national newspaper, the Voice, and has been a staff reporter on the lesbian and gay national newspaper, the Pink Paper. She has also contributed articles to various other newspapers like the Guardian and Social Work Today. Her book Making Black Waves (1993) was the first to record the experiences of black lesbians in Britain. It was followed by Talking Black (1995), a collection of texts by lesbians of African and Asian descent. Her volume Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) introduces her creative writing, including autobiogra-phy, poetry, and performance pieces. In it she records the importance Barbara BURFORD’S collection The Threshing Floor had on her work. The texts engage with the sexual and racial politics in lesbian circles of the 1980s and 1990s, raising complex questions about black women’s sexual relationships with white women, the politics of queer and sado-masochism, and the history of black lesbian experiences in Britain. Mason-John is also known as Queenie, a name apparently given to her by San Francisco gays who thought she was a bigger queen than any of them.
