Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (11 page)

14. Finding Voice

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1982

U.S. President
: Ronald Reagan

Best film
: Gandhi; Tootsie, E. T. Extra-Terrestrial, The Verdict

Best actors
: Ben Kingsley, Meryl Streep

Best TV shows
: Late Night with David Letterman; Cagney & Lacey; The $25,000 Pyramid; Family Ties; Silver Spoons; Cheers; St. Elsewhere; Newhart

Best songs
: Eye of the Tiger, I Love Rock N Roll, Truly, Up Where We Belong, Chariots of Fire, The Girl is Mine, Hold Me

Civics
: Equal Rights Amendment fails ratification; John Hinckley Jr. found not guilty in shooting of President Reagan by reason of insanity: MRI machines introduced;

Popular Culture
: Michael Jackson releases Thriller; Cats opens on Broadway; permanent artificial heart is implanted in a human; Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally and The Color Purple by Alice Walker published; Parents & Friends of Lesbians & Gays (PFLAG) founded; Wisconsin first state to enact gay civil rights legislation

Deaths
: John Belushi, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Satchel Paige

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After Jake and I divorced in 1979, I rented a two-bedroom apartment near the kids’ house. It was in a large family-type complex so that Berit and Erik could have their own room, a playground, and other children nearby when they were with me.

I worked at Burdines Department Store but got fired—for the first time but not the last in my work history—when the store manager learned I was a lesbian. He told me I just needed a good stiff dick—his, to be exact. Since I didn’t agree with him, I lost my job. (This was years prior to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case so sexual harassment was not yet in the law books.)

I was also fired from the gas station where I pumped gas, the wholesale sporting goods store where I stocked fishing lures, and the T-shirt company where I silk-screened Panama Jack shirts on the night shift. Being an open lesbian and staying employed appeared to be a diametrically oppositional proposition.

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After I lost custody of my children—which was shortly after I came out—I vowed never to return to the isolation of the closet I had inhabited for the previous 20 years of my life. I lost the most precious things in my life, my kids. There was nothing more to lose. The fear was gone. The pain, however, coupled with an intensely burning anger often overpowered me. I knew the risks of being so open, so vocal, or at least I learned the risks over time. I found my voice and started speaking truth to power. From the various NOW chapters with which I was involved (I co-founded the Sanford and Daytona chapters) to the Orlando Gay and Lesbian Community Services to the Florida Task Force, I became a loud, proud gay activist, a “militant homosexual,” my former mother-in-law often said. I was the first woman to direct (as a volunteer) the Orlando Gay Community Services. My first action was to add the word Lesbian to their name: Orlando Gay and Lesbian Community Services. I spoke on radio and at other public venues about the discrimination lesbian and gay people faced in Florida. That’s how I lost my jobs. My respective bosses heard me or heard about me. Fired. Back then—and still today—it’s not illegal in Florida to fire people because of their sexual orientation. I lost my jobs and had no recourse.

After being fired from Burdines, I needed to find a (much) less expensive place to live, the first of many moves over the next five years. I found a one-room shack in an African American neighborhood in Winter Park, near Orlando. I never felt unsafe there—white Jewish single woman that I was—just impoverished. When the children visited, I got food stamps so we could eat. I hated getting food stamps. I—and everyone else on food stamps, I observed—was treated like dirt by the food stamp workers who sat behind those barred windows. (Years later, as an employee of the Florida Health Department, I understood. Food stamp workers were very often treated disrespectfully by their supervisors, and many were on food stamps themselves because of their low wages.)

For Thanksgiving that year—it was 1980—I arranged my few still-unpacked boxes and draped them with a sheet. Voila! A multi-tiered table on the floor (I had no furniture other than my bed) beautifully set with my wedding silver just for my children and me in my little Winter Park shack. My wedding silver—a full set of service for twelve by the International Silver Company—was beautiful and expensive, given to me by my mother when I got married. “Every woman needs her silver, just in case,” she said. It was one of the very few items I took from my house when Jake and I divorced. Afraid it would be stolen, I kept it underneath my waterbed mattress, under hundreds of gallons of water. Safe for sure! But before I stowed it there that year, I kept it out for Thanksgiving with my children.

That silver saved me more than once. With a bachelors degree in music and little experience beyond some retail, and probably in a precarious though undiagnosed mental state, I began to sell pieces of my silver, one piece at a time and very judiciously, to keep myself afloat. I remember weighing each piece, learning from my pawn shop forays, deciding which piece would yield the most money depending on my needs that day. I could eat all day for a pawned teaspoon. A salad fork could fetch enough for a cup of coffee and a burger at McDonald’s and maybe a bottle of aspirin for my nasty migraines. Back then, in the early 1980s, silver was fairly high in value and the cost of quick-serve meals was low. I would be okay as long as my silver was sold or pawned carefully.

My family, 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles, was unaware of my dire financial and mental situation as well as any number of other issues in my life. I shared nothing with them. I could have gone to Los Angeles in my desperate times but I was just too embarrassed, too ashamed, and I felt I needed to stay in Florida to be near my children even though I saw them only intermittently. The power of my survival instinct continued to guide me though I was still unaware of it.

By early 1980 I had job-hopped and moved several times, trying to keep my head above water in a time of personal instability. I had heard about the Florida Task Force, Florida’s lesbian and gay civil rights organization in Tallahassee, Florida’s capitol. It was a new organization, the only state-wide gay-related lobbying group in the country with a full-time paid lobbyist. Patrick Land was its first executive director/lobbyist. I became the second. I was hired by the Florida Task Force in 1981. My qualifications? I was a jobless, fearless, penniless, angry lesbian. The Task Force gave me a job, a small salary, a car, and a target on which to focus my anger. Perfect!

Florida is notorious for its anti-gay laws, its Deep South mint-julep mentality, the 1970s serial killer Ted Bundy, hanging chads, and darned near every other stupid thing that ever happens in the news. Frankly, Floridians are just plain screwed by Florida government, which makes sense if you’ve seen the capitol complex. Picture this: both legislative houses—the Senate and the House of Representatives—are short squatty buildings with round-domed roofs. The capitol building itself is a very tall pointy structure situated right smack in-between the two smaller domed buildings. Balls and a dick. See for yourself:
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Kids/tour/index.html
             

I moved to Tallahassee in 1981 and began my work as the executive director and lobbyist of the Florida Task Force. Having no money to start, and being paid very little—though the job came with a car which I needed—I moved in with Karen who was an assistant superintendent of schools for Leon County and a semi-closeted lesbian. I met Karen through the outgoing Task Force director Patrick Land who knew Karen had an extra bedroom in her house. Her donation to the Task Force was to provide that space to me without charge. I was deeply appreciative though I felt like an itinerate activist.

The work of the Task Force was both important and powerful to me. The Task Force—well, I, really—was the voice of the lesbian and gay community in Florida government. I spent a great deal of time working with staffers of senators and representatives in Florida’s legislature, and often invited other lesbians and gay men to join me in the lobbying process though few ever did. It was a frightening proposition to be openly gay in Florida. I felt very alone in the spectrum of the work. Interestingly, though, lesbian and gay people around the state seemed to want my attention, so when the legislature was not in session, I went on the road like the elected folks, mostly to raise enough money to pay for my salary and the small office the Task Force occupied near the capitol. Despite the low pay, I loved the work. It was hard at times, and often lonely because few people wanted to be seen with an open lesbian, too afraid of “guilt by association.” But I was driven to right wrongs—to prevent others from losing their children—and I saw myself as a lone crusader of sorts. I often felt spread too thin between the work in Tallahassee, the fundraising in every major city in Florida, and my egotistical desire to be desired.

In between all of this work, or perhaps in spite of it, I made sure that I saw my children regularly, even if only for a few hours. I was wearing myself ragged with no personal time to just rest and reflect, which served me well as I kept my feelings buried. If I didn’t feel, there would be little pain. If I didn’t feel, I could move through the world at break-neck speed. People could—and did—come and go in my life. It was okay with me. I had neither time nor energy for relationships. It was all I could do to keep myself together enough to do my work and be with my children.

There was one critical piece of work during my time in Tallahassee, the Equal Rights Amendment notwithstanding. In 1981 the Florida Legislature passed a law—a line item in the budget, to be accurate—stating that any university which recognized or provided meeting space to groups advocating a “homosexual way of life or sexual relations between unmarried persons” would lose all state funding, including precious football money. The purpose of the law, of course, was to prohibit recognition of lesbian and gay students, faculty, and staff. The Florida Task Force joined with other organizations to fight this new law in the Florida Supreme Court. The Supremes unanimously declared the law unconstitutional and removed it. The Florida Task Force then filed suit against the two makers of the law, Tom Bush—no relation to the Bush dynasty—of Ft. Lauderdale, and Alan Trask of Winter Haven, for violating their oaths of office by deliberately creating unconstitutional legislation. We won. Trask resigned his seat, the first Florida Senator ever to do so, and Bush was not re-elected. This was a tremendous victory for the Florida Task Force and for lesbian and gay people in Florida. I was elated, and felt as if I had finally done something worthwhile to help create change in my home state.

In June of 1981 I was the keynote speaker at the Ft. Lauderdale gay pride celebration. As I spoke, I used the words lesbian and gay which was new to the ears of many people in the community. The word lesbian was just beginning to be included in our language and still sounded awkward to folks, including lesbians. After my speech a couple of gay men approached me.

“You’re just going to divide the community if you keep using the words gay AND lesbian. We should have just one word for all of us,” one of the men demanded.

“Great idea!” I said enthusiastically. “Let’s all be lesbians!” The collective groan could be heard throughout South Florida! Apparently, that wasn’t the word they had in mind.

Tallahassee was about a five-hour drive from Orlando. I had visitation with my children every other weekend—Friday after school to Saturday night, no Sundays—so I drove to Orlando on Friday, picked up the kids, and drove back to Tallahassee, then made the round trip again the next night to take them home. On some weekends I just rented a cheap motel in Orlando so I wouldn’t have to subject the children or myself to so many hours in the car.

I stayed with the Task Force for about two and a half years, loving the work but always struggling with my salary, or rather, the lack of it. The Board of Directors, made up mostly of white wealthy gay men, was charged with raising money to support the Task Force and my $12,000 a year salary. There were months when I didn’t get paid. My self-esteem was sinking lower and lower. By the end of 1982, not only had I not been paid for several months and therefore had no money to my name, I was expected to squire the executive director of the National Gay Task Force, Virginia Appuzzo, around the state. It was embarrassing and demoralizing. I quit the Task Force in January of 1983 but was asked to stay until March. I did.

During my time with the Florida Task Force I dated many women around the state, nearly all of whom were interested in going out with Ronni-Sanlo-the-Florida-Task-Force-executive-director, not Ronni Sanlo, the person. I didn’t care most of the time. One evening while in Orlando, at the Southern Nights bar, I met Susan. She was politically clueless, had no idea who I was, and knew nothing about the Task Force. Refreshing! We began dating.

In the meantime, a woman named Helen Schwartz—who became my mentor and is now my very dear friend, but who I didn’t know at the time—owned the Spindrift Motel on Simonton Street in Key West. Helen sent a letter to me in Tallahassee, thanking me for the work I was doing on behalf of the Florida lesbian and gay community, and invited myself and a guest to stay at her motel. I didn’t need much prompting. Susan and I headed for the Keys. When we arrived at the Spindrift, we found gift certificates to numerous restaurants in town along with a welcome note from Helen. I tried to thank Helen in person but she was nowhere to be found. It was a couple of years later before we finally met.