Janelle Speaks

I was a little startled to the amount of histories pouring forth from people on this list. I had been thinking of how so many young lesbians find these stories had to believe and cannot quite comprehend how closeted we all were growing up. I am alo aware that the generation of lesbian before us almost now never have opportunites to tell their stories. These lesbians are difficult to track down even. i would love to see asn oral history project that coaxed them to tell their stories.

My story of coming out has one small but important difference-I know the word lesbian" by age 12 or so. I lived in small towns usually but my father was an Episcopal minister and he and my mother wanted us to understand the world we lived in and define it. So I was taught these words and what they meant and introduced to people who were Black-Negro was the word in those days and the word was carefully enumciated. however I was still deep in the closet. I was taught the word lesbian but I was also taught that nice people were not lesbian, taught that very firmly. I should have known when I was 12 when I became attracted to a classmate. I spent all four years of high school in a boarding school in Salt Lake City. There were rumours about a couple of the teachers but I ignored them. I didn't want to be lesbian. I fell in love any number of times there, still remember some of those women with deep fondness but I was damned careful never to let myself understand why. That would have spoiled my sense of pleasure. This boarding school was a church school and I should not be surprised that I ended up in Northwest Nazarene in
Nampa but I still shake my head over it. I was in my third year of college when one day my feelings for a classmate became too specific and too physical anymore for me to ignore the truth about myself. I was horrified. At that minute all I could think of was that I was going to get this degree and get a good job and find the best Psychistrist I could and get rid of whatever I was feeling.

However I struggled job wise after graduation and spent a couple of years in Twin Falls, where my best friends were a lesbian couple-not that I knew that. I was willfully blind. However there were long discusssions of homosexuality at work. When I moved to Boise, I found myself in love with an incredible woman, a woman who at age 84 who is still to me one of the most sensual people I know. "Age cannot stale or custom wither...." Byron I believe. i figured that if I could fall in love with someone of her caliber, this love could not be too bad. So I set out to find what there was of the Lesbian community in Boise. Boise was quite closeted at that time. Lesbians stayed closed groups, people divided themselves into "butch" and "femme", and there was a lot of discussion when I appeared as to whether or not I was really lesbian. Plus no one read books and everyone but me drank copious amount of beer-I cannot to this day tolerate the taste of beer. I was getting a couple of lesbian publications from faraway cities(Anyone else remember the first lesbian publication out of Boston-one of the editors had fled eastern Idaho?) most lesbians I met them thought I was dangerously radical. I was horrified and pretty well cut of all ties with the lesbian community as I found it then. As members of a minority, we can be judgemental of one another.

I was a member of the Unitarian Universalist church which prides itself on being radical. So I concentratd on slowly but surely coming out there and at work. As a person i was much more accepted by these two groups. At church, no one thought it a problem if I taught RE{sunday school} which I knew would utterly horrify the lesbian women I first met. Then a straight friend asked me if the reason i had no lesbian friends was because none of them were feminists and I said yes. Two days later she brought 4 bright, open women, lesbians who had inquiring minds who had not been terrified into closets and into role playing, down into my basement apartment. I was in seventh heaven. We formed one of the first lesbian organizarions there.

This was maybe the winter of 74-75. I had graduated from high school in 1966 and college in 1970. i found my first Feminist book in a grocery store in Twin Falls and my first lesbian one in some back heap in Salt Lake City. That first novel was a retelling someone wrote of the infamous Anne Perry story, of her and her lover when they were 15 and 16. It was well after i met the first Lesbian feminists in Boise that someone lent me the novel by Radcliffe Hall I had been hearing about. ASt that time too I found the Price of Salt in a used bookstore along with the Ann Barron books.

So I knew the word lesbian at an early age but let me tell you all, knowing did not keep from being very, very much in denial for years.