More Lesbian Activism posing as my life

Yet another piece of the soon to be famous Questionnaire about Gay & Lesbian Life and Activism in the seventies and on into the eighties. Someone wants to have this information, and I want the copyright to be my own, so it is all going here first.

17) If you are not GLBT, describe how you came to be an ally of this

community.

Before I recognized my own lesbianism, I saw my elder sister in a mature, committed love relationship with a woman who has now been her partner for almost fifty years. I respected these women, and their friends, a great deal. Unlike the men I knew, these women did not paw at my body or hump my leg like dogs,(Why DO men do that?) but rather, talked to me as the intelligent human being I was. That made a good impression on me.

18) Did you have mentors in the Chicago GLBT community; if so, who are/were they?

Irene Lee, Penny Pope, Jody Lynch, Michael Bergeron, Ron Anderson, Rich Pfeiffer, Rita Mae Brown, Gary Chichester, Caroline Presnell of PFLAG. Among the dead: Bev Wright, Richard Chinn, Larry West, Dr. Ron Sable, Valerie Taylor (aka Velma Tate), Diana Wilkins, Rico Flores, Leah Snet, Larry Gulian, John Cantrall, Bev Dunham, Jim Dohr. Others, too numerous to name

here.

19) List organizations (GLBT or mainstream) you have been involved in as a

a) key volunteer: My involvement in many Chicago gay organizations, spread over many years, was simultaneous. In Chicago in 1968, a small group of gay men and the occasional woman began discussion group meetings at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. I was always the only woman there. I kept hearing that a woman lived in that apartment, but never saw her. Meanwhile, on the north side of Chicago, about four miles from the loop, there was an organization eventually named the Chicago Gay Alliance.

In 1968, that group opened a community center on Elm Street. The Women's Caucus of CGA became Chicago Lesbian Liberation, from which sprung forth Lavender

Woman. I was involved briefly in Chicago Gay Alliance, then in Chicago Lesbian Liberation. My then partner, D, and I went to hear Jill Johnston speak on procreating without men. That made no sense to me at the time. It's becoming possible now. Jill Johnston was way ahead of our time in her thinking.

I was a volunteer for The Lavender Woman Newspaper Collective, and Artemis Players Theater Company. I ghost wrote book reviews for lesbian writer Claudia Scott at two Chicago Lesbian Writers' conferences.

At GayLife Newspaper, I started as someone who answered the phones, and progressed to be editorial assistant to Ron Anderson, the then Publisher. Grant Ford had withdrawn from the newspaper to run for political office.

As a staffer for GayLife, I covered, among other things, Anita Bryant's campaign to Save their Children; the California Briggs Initiative; Leonard Matlovich's struggle for recognition as a human being by the U.S. Military; and Dan White's assassinations, in San Francisco, of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk; including the later street riot and San Francisco Police riots-in-retaliation stories.

During that time the John Gacy Story broke in Chicago. Stevie Kulieke, thankfully, had a city hall press pass by then, so he covered that story. We were all relieved to let him.

I wrote a bi-weekly column for GayLife, spotlighting groups and organizations within the gay and lesbian communities. I wrote about groups I might never have met, otherwise. I watched and brain-picked Duane Sawyer, our typesetter, and with his help, learned computer typesetting to use at GayLife in emergencies.

Later I was employed to do proofreading, typography, and editing for Holland Type, a woman-owned business, using and building on the skills I learned at GayLife Newspaper.

I worked in the Chicago Gay & Lesbian Pride Week Planning Committee for more than 13 years, and did public speaking with the Chicago Gay & Lesbian Speakers' Bureau. I worked on the Gay Switchboard, volunteered at the Barbara Beckman Community Center, a project of Oscar Wilde's Children, Inc., first as a volunteer, later as House Staff Director.

When Gay Horizons took over Oscar Wilde's Children, I was their first female board member by virtue of being the House Staff Director of the Community Center.

The Barbara Beckman House Community Center, at 3519 N. Halsted St. in Chicago, was founded by Michael Bergeron in 1973. It began as a gay hotline that was call-forwarded to different people's homes, to be answered every evening. It grew into a store front, named to honor an early Chicago Lesbian Activist who had died in a car crash in Iowa. The phone number was 312-929-HELP (4357). I was called in to open the center on a Tuesday - Women's Night, when my sister and her partner were scheduled to work and couldn't.

Women came. Women from the Bradbury and other popular lesbian bars dropped by, that night and other nights. It became a habit for us all, eventually a home away from home. It was an alternative to the bars, and a good place to be. There were regulars, there were people new to the community. Women who had never known other lesbians came to talk about their lives and ours. It was a shabby little storefront, and it amazed me later, remembering how shabby it had been, that we were willing to endure it. It was too hot in summer and too cold in winter. All community centers are, in the beginning. It comes with the cheap rent. We were a warm-hearted crowd of volunteers, though, and our friendship kept us warm. Fitting in felt good, and in addition to coffee and tea there was hot chocolate!

Sometime in there, we spent months handing out questionnaires for a Karla Jay, Allen Young book about gay people in their lives and relationships. They were distributed at the center and throughout our lives.

I was one of three women on staff at the beginning, the other two being my sister and her partner. That improved with time. We got a lot of grief from the separatist members of the women's community, for working with gay men. I worked with anybody who was working for the same things I was. I have no quarrel with separatists, and identify with a lot of their beliefs. The Lesbian Community Center was three doors north, and very separatist-oriented. I believed in their work as well. I also believe there have to be women at Gay Community Centers because just getting referred to someplace else isn't enough once a person has worked up the courage to come in, without having to declare internal political sides before being talked to.

I was a tough kid then, we joked that I was probably the most butch member of the entire house staff. When the heater died, I brought my pipe wrenches in, and installed a new one. The work there was an adventure, and we all learned as we went along. We painted the place once when a sweet man who wasn't even a regular just brought lots of white paint in one day, as a donation.

There were nights that were everybody's nightmare, when we got the people who were being discharged at lightening speed from closing Illinois State Long Term Mental Health Facilities. We did what we could for them, too. There were nights that were stultifying in their dullness, with someone calling every twenty minutes for the address of a men's bar near the airport. There were nights that were incredibly rewarding. Example: A woman who had been married for years, and wanted to talk to another lesbian, after years of pretending not to be herself, would call and talk. Many times, nights when someone who had walked past the center every night for months finally got the courage to come in. It was exciting, boring, learning and fulfilling work. It wasn't just a party, it was human services work.

I was in the first Gay March in Chicago, with my long time friend Carole Townsend and her lover Mary Beth, and had always been in it or watching it, so it seemed logical to join the committee. Claudia and I went to the organizing meeting of the Gay Pride Week Committee. It was clear from the start that Richard Pfeiffer, whom I knew from the Gay Speakers' Bureau gigs we did together, was the fellow doing the major part of the work, keeping the records, making the connections with media people, getting the City permits and press releases taken care of. I wanted to work with him. It was rewarding.

There was a lot of tension around issues of class and color. The fact is, everybody wanted to criticize, but nobody wanted to take on the actual work except a small core group. I became even more involved in that core group after Claudia and I split up. Michael Bergeron and I had beenfriends for years, and when I had some free time one fall, he insisted Ire-join the Pride Week Committee. The actual work was always more interesting than the meetings. I will do any amount of work to avoid meetings. This was a task-oriented group. There were very specific things to be done, at specific times, and we got together to do the work, and had food and social time afterward. We shared most of the tasks.

I love the drag concept, as theater and as life. In the sixties, I was required to wear dresses and makeup to work. That was drag. I think genderf*ck drag is as silly fun as it gets, and have had great fun dressed as a man or a woman, or posing as a man passing as a woman. Drag is fun, yet drag isn't a definitive statement of who I am. It is playtime, slipping the cultural bonds that hold us in check. During the seventies I wore dyke uniform: jeans, t-shirt, plaid flannel shirt. It is all street theater, as well as whatever else it might be interpreted to be. Much of the experience exists in the mind of the beholder.

I have been a leather woman. Drag queens and butch dykes are the front lines against gay oppression. We are the ones at whom the gay bashers throw rocks and bottles. It continues to amaze me, though, that at Gay Pride events, all the media wants to film is us at our most outrageous. It presents just one stereotypical image of our community, and we are a community of many types and stereotypes. This is less true today than in the past, but nevertheless, turn on your television to the ten P.M. News on the last Sunday of June, and what do you see? Men in skimpy dresses and Victorian Gowns.

In the early days, as now, the media loved drag queens and men and women in leather. They ignore the groups of gay professionals even as the numbers of those groups increase. Gay Doctors, Gay Lawyers, Gay Social Workers, Gay Teachers, Gay Librarians? All invisible. Ignore the gay IRS and Postal workers too. Put the tackiest drag queen you see on the television screen to show America who gay people are! This is not representative of the makeup of the gay and lesbian communities, but a commentary on the media presentation of images of gay men and lesbians to the rest of the community and country.

I facilitated gay youth groups, first at Gay Horizons and later at the Rogers Park Gay Community Center, where I became the training and volunteer coordinator, and later, house staff director. It wasn't difficult to get these positions, one just had to be willing to do the work! I survived attacks by thugs on the community center, and have lived long enough to tell this story. Oh, yes, and I worked for a living too.

I was briefly a layout and paste-up consultant to the short-lived "SisterSource Lesbian Newspaper", and finally, I burned out, and I retired, and Gay and Lesbian Liberation went on.

I was relieved. I went to the Michigan Women's Music Festival with my mom! (She was more popular than I! She was surrounded everywhere we went by women whose moms had not received them happily for their loving lesbian lives.)

I got a life! I started singing again. I played drums and assorted percussion, and the autoharp. I got friends who were not interested in politics. I moved away from Chicago to Madison Wisconsin, for a year, and volunteered for Women's Transit Authority, a Safe Rides Co-op for Women in Madison. I would like to mention that I have met my best friends volunteering, as well as most of my lovers. I have never moved back to Chicago completely, living in the North suburbs and commuting to the city.

b) Volunteer, Gay Speakers' Bureau

Collective Member: Lavender Woman Newspaper. (See "Are We There Yet? a continuing History of Lavender Woman, a Chicago Lesbian Newspaper1971-1976" by Michal Brody ©1985 ISBN0-918040-07-8)

As House Staff Director of Beckman House, I was the first Dyke on the Gay Horizons board. Years later I read in one of the Gay weeklies that Gay Horizons had elected its first lesbian board member, and felt confirmed in my belief that the reason things took so long to accomplish in the gay community was that nobody read the minutes of the previous meetings. This is not sarcasm, it's a simple statement of fact.

I worked for the Gay Pride Committee for probably thirteen years.

I was the Volunteer Training Coordinator at Rogers Park Gay Community Center, which grew into Rogers Park Edgewater Gay Alliance. Eventually I became House Staff Director Rogers Park/Edgewater Gay Alliance. I did speaking all over North Eastern Illinois. This was not about anything but Community Service, ever. We did not proselytize, we offered support to people like us, people not welcome in the broader community. We offered alternatives to the bar scene, and people came in small groups, then larger numbers. We were providing human services to a largely invisible community. And in general, the more common culture did not seem to miss us.

c) donor:

I never had much money. I gave of my time, labor, and essence.
For example:
I started the Rogers Park Gay & Lesbian Community Center Library by donating my private Gay & Lesbian Library collection to be the Center's circulating collection. It included everything from Beebo Brinker to invitations to boat launching parties to notes about meetings of gay groups. Serious political tomes, social and theoretical books, Fiction and minutes of meetings,
Fun Books, Bless Librarian Ed Ashcroft for accessioning all those books!

Other people donated books too. Then RPEGA closed down, poverty killed it. (Actually, the guys' fascination with Rabbi Ira Birholz killed it. Ugly history,
Don't go there. Lots of folks trusted him, and got ripped off financially.)
Ed Ashcroft kept the library open and the books safe, then placed them with
Greg Sprague, who housed the collection. Greg's real interest was Gay & Lesbian History, though. He guarded the books and passed them along to
people who wanted a community library, as I had envisioned. Eventually this collection grew, into Chicago's Gerber-Hart Library. What matters is the books are still available to the community. Many of those books have been out of print for decades now.

d) founder: Gay Horizons Youth Group. When Horizons changed its youth policy, and kicked the kids out because the Board Members were afraid to have anyone under 18 in the building, the group merged with the Gay Youth Group at the Rogers Park/Edgewater Gay Alliance, which I then co-facilitated with J.E.B. Stewart. We took the kids on camping trips, had alcohol-free parties for them, made meetings into consciousness-raising groups for them, and gave them a safe place to be who they were and to talk about their parents and lives and feelings. Our kids did peer counseling, and made a big difference in one another's lives.

I opened my home to homeless women and girls. I housed, chastely and possibly illegally, underage lesbians whose parents had disowned them, including one whose parents declared her dead to them and sat shiva for her, another whose parents moved away while she was at school, leaving no forwarding address; she was devastated. There were a few others. A couple of young woman lived with me until they finished high school. There was nothing sexual between any of us. I knew who I was. They didn't know yet who they were. My home was a safe, accepting place for them.

A.I.D.S. Came along, and I learned quickly how to be a caregiver to the sick, sicker, and dying. I learned to cajole a couple of bites of food into someone, how to change a bed with someone in it, to change adult diapers, to feed someone too sick to lift a spoon or fork, and to sit quietly, lovingly, with someone while he died. eventually most of the people I knew were dead from AIDS or Breast Cancer.

At the age of 50, I started a North Suburban Chicago Lesbians' Brunch Group. We had no political agenda, except coming together. It evolved into Rainbow Brunch and later into at least three other groups, including groups in other states, some of which continue on. We numbered anywhere from 12 to 55, including lesbians and gay men and their children, families and friends. I wanted to see other brunch groups for lesbians and gay men and other activists across the country. I hope the new generation knows how to operate group e-mailing, and regular old phones in consideration of those of us with no desire to be "wired". I still spend most of my discretionary time with women.