Space and Time

I was feeling nostalgic last month, as we celebrated LGBTQIA month. I remembered a lunch I had with an old friend awhile back. Cherl and I have been friends for 39 years. We met not long after I had come out as a lesbian at the age of 16. I’d heard about a group called TLC--Topeka Lesbian Community. They met weekly and I would often drive by, longing to go inside, but I was a minor. The week I turned 18, I showed up and attended every meeting until I joined the USAF.

Cherl and I talked about those days; what a special time it was to be lesbian in the late 1970s in Topeka, KS. We wore flannel shirts and jeans; most had short-cropped hair.

There was a sense of radicalism; alternative insemination was virtually unheard of, marriage not even on the radar. There were no social networks outside of the TLC and The Lambda (the one gay bar in town: seedy, run-down with exotic drag shows on Friday nights). Feminism, women's rights, pro-choice were front and center, and we members of TLC did our part.

There were no vehicles with rainbow bumper stickers, no "out" singers or entertainers. Women's music was shared with the lesbian community via a small record company called Olivia. Singers like Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, Tret Fure, Deirdre McCalla, Teresa Trull and the Berkeley Women's Music Collective would travel across the country playing on college campuses and in small venues. 

AIDS was a gathering storm of which we were ignorant.

Everyone smoked.
It was a magical time, and a historic time, too, I think. We felt we were on the verge of something big, and yet we were also a small enclave of women creating community. I remember those days like a crisp autumn: the air brisk , the colors vibrant; both life and death crackling in the trees of possibilities. It made me reflect on my life's journey since then, the autumns I've lived through, the lives and deaths I've experienced, the many changes I've undergone.
In some ways I'm much different than that 16, 17, 18 year old young woman I was back then and yet, in other ways, I am still her; she is still me: radical and bold, timid and tentative, longing to change the world and striving to find her place in it.

I feel a little sorry for those coming out as queer today, having achieved the right to marry, considering children in their future as a right, not as battle to be won. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad for youth support services and for laws protecting queer employees. I'm glad Melissa came out, and the Indigo Girls, and Greg Louganis.

I had none of that when I came out at 16, in 1978. But I gained something in those lean years when the only affirmation we had was given by one another, when the only role models were the ones we were creating. It was a sisterhood, a family, it truly was a community of TLC-- tender, loving care.
As we left the restaurant, Cherl hugged me, and said, a little sheepishly, "I don't know if I ever told you, but I had the biggest crush on you in those days." I laughed, remembering how much in awe I was of the women of TLC when I first joined. They were all at least 9 years older than me and I had thought them so wise and powerful and wonderful.

"That's funny," I replied, smiling. "I had crushes on all of you."