B. Leaf Cronewrite: Teacher, Author, and Seeker of Lesbians
- See biography
- Interview with Leaf on YouTube
Merril Mushroom interviewed B.Leaf Cronewrite via Zoom on July 15, 2025. This interview preceded a joint interview with Leafâs wife, Drea Firewalker aka Andrea Nedelsky.
Biographical Summary
B. Leaf Cronewrite (Mary Ann Hopper) was born in 1947 in Detroit, the only child of older parents, and lived in a working-class neighborhood. In the late 1950s, the family moved to Mississippi where her political awareness was increased by the explosive activism around integration. She went on to college in Mississippi, and although she tended to fall in love with her girlfriends, marriage to a man âseemed like the thing to do,â so she married one of her college professors with whom she had a comfortable relationship. Then, although she didn’t know anything about lesbian lifestyles or community, she had an affair with a woman.
After she completed her degree and was teaching at Memphis State University in Tennessee, one of her older students became her friend and invited her to a lesbian party, After that, Leaf was out, and she and her husband divorced. She joined the Lesbian Task Force of NOW, got involved in Women Against Violence, and became aware of the landyke movement.
Leaf moved to Nashville, found lesbian bookstores, immersed herself in lesbian literature, and became a regular attendee at the Michigan Music Festival. Then she moved to south Georgia to teach and spent a lonely couple of years isolated from lesbian community. When she got another position teaching in a small Missouri town near Kansas City area, where went to the lesbian bar where Drea was the bouncer. After thirty years of living based on traditional normal social expectations, her life was about to change.
Merril Mushroom (MM): Take it away, Leaf!
Leaf: I was born on July 25, 1947, in Detroit, Michigan. My parents were older parents at the time, and they had lived very independent lives for their early years. My mother was Lucille McPhee, born in Michigan. My dad, was Harris Hopper, born in Mississippi. They had quite different backgrounds and families. They were both working class. Neither had gone past the eighth grade. They had difficult early lives.
Early History
My motherâs dad died when she was nine, and they lived on a farm in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan. She had a disabled brother and two other brothers, and so they had a struggle early on. She never really talked a lot until I just kind of pulled it out of her. She left her family as a teenager and was a nanny in Illinois for a number of years before she eventually went to Detroit and worked as Rosie the Riveter, really, in the defense industry during the second world war. Then she worked as a hostess in a restaurant and thatâs where she met my dad. [Rosie the Riveter is an icon representing the women who worked traditionally male jobs in World War II defense industries, a role that began with the patriotic 1942 song “Rosie the Riveter.”]
My father was from Mississippi, the oldest male of eleven children. His dad was a circuit Methodist minister who was assigned to different small Mississippi towns, so all of his siblings were born in different places. Their final home, and where my parents and I visited them, was in Biggersville, a small farming area not far from Corinth, Mississippi. That farm was idyllic to me as a child. I dreamed of moving there and having lots of cousins to play with.
Daddy left home at sixteen to go to Detroit to work in the automobile industry with other guys from the South. He pretty much liked his independence and stayed there until his fifties. He met my mom in Detroit and they lived there for ten years before we moved to the South.
In Detroit we lived in a working-class neighborhood. There were two taverns at the ends of the street. I was fearful of the drunk folks from the tavern who walked up and down the sidewalks in front of our place. My parents didnât drink and were kind of guarded about always keeping the door locked and being worried about that environment, even though I could still walk up the block to Lillibridge Elementary School. My mom helped me a lot with reading, because it was an overcrowded elementary school so I wasnât doing very well in school for a while. She helped me with my reading every day at lunch when I came home from school. We grew very close. She always encouraged me in school. She was always sorry that she didnât get to go to business school.
I was a latch-key kid. My mom worked from four in the afternoon to midnight at a Fred Sanders candy company across from Belle Isle and rode the city bus down to work every afternoon. We lived in an older part of the city. My dad walked home in the afternoon from the automobile company. He was working for American Motors then. He and I were together in the evenings; we had a great relationship. He was very playful; we played games together and he taught me to ride a two-wheel bike. He cooked supper. We took rides in the car in the neighborhood so he could go buy a cigar, or go out to the movie, or go to new car showrooms because he always liked cars. We had a lot of fun together. He was a very good daddy.
My dad was a storyteller. He always talked about the adventures he had, riding freight trains and going out West to work on ranches with his buddies in his twenties and thirties. That love of travel was something that he talked about a lot around the supper table. I think thatâs how I got the love for the adventurous part of travel. I really started hearing that very early in my life.
MM: Maybe your storytelling abilities started then too, you think?
L: I think they might have! I wrote down a lot of my thoughts in little notebooks early on. Being from the South, Daddy was fairly prejudiced against Black people, and I started being aware of that early in life. At school, my friends were mostly girls. Since I was an only child, I didnât really know how to get along with mean boys. I didnât have any sibling rivalry or anything to work off of, so I mostly had girlfriends.
One of my girlfriends was a Black girl named Lorraine. I still remember her. She was just a friend along with the other white girls and a Greek girl that were in the school. I invited Lorraine home to come and play one day. My mother met us at the door and said âDaddy wouldnât approve of you playing with Lorraine.â She just politely told Lorraine that she couldnât ever come back and play with me. I was so shocked at that. I think that was the beginning of really trying to pay attention to beliefs that my parents might have had that I did not agree with.
Mom and Dad would talk about the folks that they worked with, and Daddy would often use a lot of racial slurs to talk about them. I was always so curious: âWell, how do you know that person is Italian or Jewish or whatever? How do you know? Theyâre not wearing a label!â It was always because they were different than us. In school, it didnât occur to me that the other kids were different than me. We were all just there being kids together.
The Move South
Daddy was laid off a lot. Auto workers could work a while and then they would be laid off from different shift changes for months at a time. In his fifties, the company was going to move to Wisconsin and he didnât want to move there. One of his cousins in Mississippi owned a Continental Piston Ring company, and Daddy got a job there as a machinist.
Mom was very reluctant to go because she had worked her way up to night manager in the Sanders company. That was probably the best position she had ever had. She was not eager to go because she also liked living in the city. But she agreed to go. It was kind of a turning point for me at eleven years old to realize that mother wasnât as independent as I had thought early on because she was always saying how much she liked working. She didnât really want to be a housewife. She was a good cook and seamstress, and she kept a very nice house, but she always liked to work outside the home and have her own money. She liked to keep busy.
When we moved to Mississippi, Mom ended up working in the factory with my dad. He was making piston rings and she was packing them. She got along with the other workers, mostly women, that she worked with at the factory, but she wasnât happy living in a small town, dealing with Southern culture and living around more racial prejudice than she was used to.
We spent a lot of time in Corinth, Mississippi, visiting Daddyâs siblings and their families. His sister, Claudia, was my favorite aunt. She wasnât married, worked for the Red Cross, and traveled on her own on tours to Canada and other independent vacations. Being an only child, I was happy to have so many cousins to hang out with in the summer at Pickwick Lake, on the holidays, and at yearly reunions. Some lived on a farm and had horses.
I was closest to my cousin Crystine, who was also an only child and two years older than I was. She loved all kinds of animals, always had a horse, and we rode together with the others. As teens we loved to drive around town, she, looking for boys; me, just glad to ride along. All of our lives weâve been as close as sisters. She died this past spring, and I miss her not being in my life anymore.
Progressive Thinking
MM: Iâd like to go back to where you talked about your early becoming aware of prejudice. How did that affect you as you grew, and how did it affect you when you were in Mississippi?
L: When we moved there, it was an all-white school. It was 1958 or â59, and it seemed different from segregated Lillibridge Elementary. We moved to Hernando, Mississippi, which was a very small town, just 2,000 people. I enjoyed the freedom of living in that town, but it was obvious that Black people lived in a certain part of town. Some of my friends had Black maids, but we never had a maid. My parents always painted our own houses and did our own work. When we were learning to drive, my friend would drive the maid home and we would go to the Black part of town, and the maid would sit in the back seat. It always felt so uncomfortable, but of course, they were in that culture. The maid would always try to placate us and say, âIâm used to it, Iâm used to it. Itâs okay. Just drive me home.â
When they were having civil rights marches in the South, of course, many adults in town
were still talking so much about not wanting to integrate the schools
even though Brown vs the Board of Education had already happened.
It was always troublesome. I think my rebellion started in school in seventh grade because I was very fascinated by Kennedyâs presidential campaign back in 1960. In our history class, weâd have a current events day, and I would often be the one who knew all the answers to what people were shown on the slides and who the people running for office were. After JFK [John F. Kennedy] was elected, I was the one who was always the Democrat, saying what progressive programs were happening with Kennedy. Even my teacher was saying that what Nixon was doing was what was supposed to be right. I would even bring Kennedyâs Profiles in Courage and other books of Kennedyâs that I was reading to class and say, âWell, you should read about these people and what they cared about.â
MM: What was it about them that appealed to you so much?
L: Kennedy? I think it was that he just seemed to be talking and including everyone. When they were having civil rights marches in the South, of course, many adults in town were still talking so much about not wanting to integrate the schools even though Brown vs the Board of Education had already happened. That kind of talk seemed to be frightening to people around me. I would say, âBut this is the law.â I was impressed with the law. I had an uncle that was a lawyer, one of Daddyâs brothers, and I wanted to be a lawyer and go to court and be Perry Mason and make things right and solve things! The way to change things was to speak out about them. The resistance even in the classroom didnât phase me, really, because I thought, well, I will still speak out and be aware of current events. Iâd listen to all the Kennedy press conferences and then come to school and announce what questions he had answered that seemed to disagree with what the teacher was saying about it.
MM: I think you had an innate sense of justice. I wonder where it came from?
L: Well, I guess I was thinking of the changes, like I saw that only boys could be pages in the Capitol. I wanted to figure out how to participate in government. The only vacation we ever took that was not to visit a relative was to go to Washington, D.C., when Kennedy was President. I asked my parents to take me to D.C. so I could tour the White House and go to the Capitol. I knew a lot of the Senators in the Capitol. I could recognize them from the gallery. I wanted to see the Supreme Court. I wanted to see upfront government working, and I wanted to figure out how I could be a part of that.
I was hurt by the hypocrisy of those in the church who pretended to be religious. As a result, it was pretty easy from then on for me to dismiss the meaning of religion and the teachings of religion.
When I found out that you could be a page in the Capitol, I was told that only boys did that then. Then I wanted to go to a leadership camp, a Methodist leadership camp, and I had to have recommendations, but my parents didnât have any connections to get me a recommendation. I wasnât able to go to the leadership camp. I just saw those inequities.
We went to the city churchâa Methodist church. There were country churches where poorer people were supposed to go. Well, a poor family came to our church, and our minister welcomed them. They were not dressed up in suits, and the ladies didnât have high heels and Sunday dresses. Then the board met and said that those people shouldnât be welcomed at our church, that they could find another church. They were white people, even. (Of course, Black people definitely had their own church.) As a result, that minister, who I liked very much (I was friends with his daughter), was asked to leave and go to another church because he was encouraging social change that the church really didnât want to embrace. I was very hurt by that. Besides that, they had to leave. I was hurt by the hypocrisy of those in the church who pretended to be religious.
As a result, it was pretty easy from then on for me to dismiss the meaning of religion and the teachings of religion. In small towns, you go to church every Sunday, or most of us did. From then on, it was mostly a social gathering in my mind. The few friends I had there would go, but afterward we would get in the car and go to the ice cream stand. Church was something I thought I could dismiss from early on. Daddy wasnât religious, even though his family was because his father was a minister. He saw that religion tended to abuse people and keep them down. He was disturbed that his mother kept having so many children. He even told me that he asked his dad why. He was told that it was none of his business, that he should just help support the family.
I saw from these conflicts that supposed family religious values were not all written in stone. There were conflicts early on. The proper small town living and going to revivals were not anything that actually threatened or worried me. I didnât feel oppressed by religion after a while. A lot of my friends did feel oppressed. Baptists couldnât dance at the school dances, and they couldnât play cards. I just saw very early that all those rules were ridiculous. Mother and daddy attended church once a week, trying to be good people, but not wanting to get involved in any church activities.
School Years
A favorite thing that I enjoyed a lot at school was playing basketball. We had girlsâ basketball back then, junior high and high school. We had teams and uniforms and played schools in other towns and got to ride the school bus to other schools and play. Of course, the basketball girls became good friends of mine. I think thatâs where my first crushes were. I had crushes on the older girls that had skill as good players; I wanted to sit next to them on the bus. That camaraderie was between the girls, even though a lot of them ended up wanting to sit in the back with the boys, because the boysâ team was on the same bus. I was always hoping I could sit next to a few of the girls who werenât going with anybody.
The other thing about moving from the city to the small town, from Detroit to Hernando, was that there were other kinds of clubs and things I could join. Our school was small; my class had 48 kids. We knew each other very well. I still go to reunions all these years later.
One of my best friends was Suzy. She was a leader in whatever club she was in. She wanted to be the president and drag me along. We joined the 4-H Club and the FHA (Future Homemakers of America) Club. By joining those, you could get out of school and go to the Mid-South Fair. If you baked biscuits or cornbread and entered it in the fair, you could get out of school. I joined and figured out how to cook the cornbread. Even though mother wasnât very good at it, she tried to learn Southern cooking, though Daddy didnât really care. He was happy with whatever she cooked.
It was just an awareness from moving from the city to being introduced
to such an inequity of living standards.
I had nerd friends in high school: Suzy and Pauline and Wanda and several other nerd girls who really werenât dating anybody. We hung out the most together. Suzy and I played a lot of tennis and were on the school team. Pauline and Wanda had a lot of siblings, so they learned to drive early and got the car to go to Memphis to the movies all the time.
I learned a different rural living standard. Some of my friends on the basketball team were poor. I learned this when we would drop them off after school from the bus or coming back from a game. I realized some of them lived in very poor conditions, in clapboard shacks with dirt yards in the front. I began to realize the inequities even in our small school. Some kids missed school to work on their farms, and others struggled to have money for our team travels. I could think of ways that that should be changed, and laws that should help. We would go to the community health clinic to get vaccinations, and very poor people would be there. I would hate to be in line and take their place, or be ahead of them. It was just an awareness from moving from the city to being introduced to such an inequity of living standards.
About that time, 1962, James Meredith was trying to integrate Ole Miss [the University of Mississippi, about an hour south of Hernando]. A few years later, in 1966, Meredith was shot on Highway 51 in my home town as he was marching to bring attention to civil rights issues. The shooting got Life Magazine coverage [he was not killed]. My motherâs friends from Michigan would be fearful: âWhat are you doing living in that kind of environment?â Daddy would say, âWell, heâs trying to change things, and itâs not a good thing. Heâs causing trouble. Outsiders causing trouble.â [Meredith was a native of Mississippi.] I heard the two different views of that, even at that time.
The Civil Rights Movement
After high school, a lot of us went to Northwest Junior College, which was just fifteen miles down the road. Highway 51 ran right in front of Northwest Junior College. It was a highway that both James Meredith and Martin Luther King, Jr., marched on. A number of my college friends were very interested in that; we were listening to protest songs and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the dorm. When we knew that King was coming by, we went out and cheered them on and thought we should join. Then we thought, well, our parents are going to see us on TV, so we canât join, but we will just cheer them on. Not too long after that, Robert Kennedy went to Ole Miss to give a talk. I had managed to join the Newman Club [a Catholic campus ministry at secular universities, named after Cardinal John Henry Newman], even though I wasnât Catholic, so I could go down there and hear him, because thatâs the group he was addressing. He was saying that integration was going to happen at Ole Miss and it was the right thing to do. Seeing him up close, being so sincere, made me really realize there was a much bigger movement than the conflict of people in small towns saying it wasnât going to change and they were going to resist. That made a difference.
My best friends from high school went to other schools. Suzy went to Mississippi State. My friend Pauline went to Ole Miss. Suzy and I didnât correspond much through the years. Then, when I moved to Atlanta in 1993, we reconnected. She never married and was okay, not judgmental, about me being a lesbian. Sadly, I sat with her at a nursing home just before she died a few years ago.
Falling in Love
At Northwest, Wanda and I decided we could be roommates. She was easy to get along with. I didnât have a crush on her so I felt she was a good choice for rooming together. When we got there, the dorms were so crowded we got a third roommate assigned to our room: Ruthie, from another town.
âYou want to know about sex? Iâll tell you how it all works, even though I havenât really done it yet.â
I really fell in love with Ruthie. She was dynamic and had a smart mouth. She said, âYou want to know about sex? Iâll tell you how it all works, even though I havenât really done it yet.â She was very direct about everything. She said, âWe donât really need boys right now, so weâll just hang out.â Instantly, I thought, âOh, some feeling that I had for girls is really going to be fulfilled,â but in the end she got a boyfriend and started hanging out with him. I was disappointed. But we always were friends and weâre friends to this day.
The Birth of Inspiration
Our relationship was mostly based on sharing English class together. We had a young, really dynamic English teacher who was very rebellious and drove a Volkswagen, which was very controversial, driving those âforeign carsâ in 1965. Our English teacherâs name is Becky Jernigan now. She was Becky Bell at the time, and all of us were quite enamored of her because she loved literature. She taught comp [English composition], and let us write our feelings about any topic that we wanted to write on. Some of us could even publish protest poems and articles because we listened to the protest singers. She would let us publish them in the college newspaper. She would go up against the administration if they thought some of us were writing pieces that were too radical for the college newspaper.
Ruthie and I read a lot of literature together. We read romantic poets that I always wanted to assume meant more, but she just liked Byron, Shelley and Keats, not in the way that I wanted her to. We both ended up being English teachers, and we credit our love of literature to Becky. Becky is in her eighties now, still a storyteller and a fun person that we still communicate with. Sheâs down in Oxford near Ole Miss now. She was an inspiration; sheâs what kind of turned us toward writing.
In high school, I wrote, I journaled, because I worried about the injustices of things, and I also worried about my crushes on girls, so I had to journal a lot about that. Thatâs where my writing really became more constant. At Northwest, in the English class, I was able to write more creative things, creative compositions, because I didnât really care much for grammar and diagramming sentences in high school, but in college literature was something more interesting to me.
A Line You Shouldnât Cross?
MM: I want to go back to your crushes on the girls. How did you feel about having crushes on the girls? Did you think it was unusual or abnormal, or did you just kind of take it as a matter of fact?
L: No, I thought it was unusual because other people didnât feel that way. I would have all these really emotional feelings when I saw girls. Iâd see them at church, or Iâd see some of them when we practiced basketball. I thought it was worrisome. Other girls would always be calling me to chat about dating. They never would say, âWell, youâre not dating,â or âDonât you want to date?â I just always knew that not wanting to date boys was something that I probably shouldnât talk about, and felt I couldnât express my feelings about any friends, even my best friend Suzy. I mean, weâd do things together, but we never really expressed any kind of caring feelings about each other.
Some of yâall got to practice kissingâyou know, with other girlsâ
and I didnât even get to do that. I felt very disappointed in that.
It seemed like there was just a line that you couldnât cross. It was worrisome, and thatâs where I would just write about it, and it would make me feel good to write about it. âOh, I got to see this girl today, and I had these feelings, and wasnât that fun!â But we didnât get to fulfill anything. Even when spending the night with other friends or having slumber parties, everybody just stayed on their own sleeping pad and talked about school and other things but didnât talk about feelings for each other.
Some of yâall got to practice kissingâyou know, with other girlsâand I didnât even get to do that. I felt very disappointed in that. Nobody brought it up, so I thought, well, Iâd better not either. It wasnât good. Even in college with Ruthie, we were just learning how to drink alcohol. We would go out and ride around and buy beer and drink with two or three others. But then when friends would get drunk and emotional and hang on each other, Iâd stay back, not embarrass myself. Weâre just kidding around here! Even when I was letting my guard down, I felt like I had to be careful of those feelings, that there was some kind of invisible line there that I couldnât cross.
MM: Well, Iâm eager to hear how all that changed.
L: Well, strangely enough, [I married a man.] My history teacher at Northwest was a guy named Arch Griffin. He was about four years older than I was, and was dating the English teacher, Becky, for a while. Because it was a small college, he also decided he could be the tennis coach. I had played tennis in high school. There was no womenâs basketball in college so, I went out for the tennis team. After a while, he quit going with Becky and wanted to date me. He was a nerd, and fun. He was from a poor family in Arkansas. He had bought a T-bird [Ford Thunderbird sportscar] that I thought was very cool, so I wanted to ride in that car
As a result of riding in that car, we ended up dating and going to Memphis more. He was kind of like my first relationship. Everybody was impressed at school. We had to sneak around because I was dating the college professor. That had to be kind of an underground, down-low thing, too. Because that was his very first job, he was nervous about dating his student. He said, âWell, Iâm going to have to leave here and get another job.â I thought, well okay then, weâll just date from afar, and then it will probably just drop off.
The next year I stayed at Northwest and he got another job at Arkansas Tech. He just kept being persistent and calling and coming over. Ruthie and other friends were dating then, so I was thinking, well, if Iâm ever going to have a real relationship with somebody I guess itâs going to have to be this nerd guy, because thereâs no other prospects here. Ruthie and the rest of them werenât interested in me either.
In the end, he convinced me to go over to Arkansas where he was teaching. If we were engaged, he could tell the faculty members that we were a legitimate couple. After I graduated from Northwest Junior College, I didnât want to go to Arkansas immediately, so I went down to Millsaps College because that was the Methodist college some of Daddyâs family attended. A lot of the family had encouraged me to do it. I thought, okay, Iâll go down there just for a while and decide if I really want to do this marriage thing.
At Millsaps, I met a woman named Pat, who was in the dorm. She always wanted to hang out together, and we became really close. But every time Arch would call, he would say, âAre you still hanging out with her? Why donât you come over here?â Eventually, during the holidays, he came to Hernando and proposed. I felt like thatâs got to be the right thing to do. Everybody has to be married. These feelings about these other women are probably just not the right thing to be doing. Not that anybody told me that, but it was just the social environment that I felt I had to deal with.
Marriage and an English Degree
Halfway through my junior year, I went over to Arkansas Tech [University]. That spring I married Arch at the Hernando Methodist Church. I was a political science major before I went over there, but I didnât like all the political science teachers there. We didnât get along and I didnât like their courses. I went back to the English Department; I liked all the teachers there better. I took five English courses every term so I could get enough to graduate with a degree in English from Arkansas Tech.
MM: What was it about the political science that you didnât like?
L: I think it was really just the teachers. There were two older guys, and one of them taught an international relations class. He was just dry and uninteresting. The textbook wasnât interesting, so it wasnât really his views as much as his presentation. He didnât really care much for my views on worldwide political situations at the time. I thought, well, Iâll just switch my major. The English teachers and students, of course, were much more liberal. There were a couple of different professors teaching Thoreau and Emerson, Transcendentalism, and all kinds of more free thought. American authors like Hemingway, Dickinson, and Mark Twain made it all more fun.
Thatâs the first time I had more concentrated literature classes. It was kind of an escape, really. Even though Arch was there teaching history, I didnât have to take any of his courses. I felt like I was in their world, in the literary world, as much as possible. But even there, I lived in the dorm one term before we got married.
In the dorm, I met another woman, named Jean, who was studying Buddhism and was very mystical. She had a room that she had decorated with all kinds of exotic pictures, and had incense burning, and candles. âCome over and sit in my room together and weâll talk,â she said. I had a big crush on her even when I was engaged to Arch. Jean and I went camping together and spent a lot of time talking mystical stuff. She was much more fun, but again, she was going with guys that were into Buddhism. No religion was of interest to me at that time, after my other foray with hypocrisy and religion.
MM: Did your English classes focus any or much on women?
L: Very little. At the time, and this was in the late â60s, there was no feminist there saying what was missing. There was nobodyâit wasnât there! But the thinkers and the philosophers were the ones that attracted me: Thoreau and Emerson, people who had more thoughts of integrating spiritual beliefs and nature and that kind of thing. There was never any emphasis that women were also participating and had a whole other goddess spirituality, another whole basis of identity.
MM: There were so many wonderful women writers from the South, too!
L: Yeah! Yeah! Eudora Welty was the writer in residence when I was at Millsaps for that one term. I would go and listen to her when she gave talks there. She was an inspiring local writer. But again, I was not connecting any dots or wondering where all the other women were. She was a local person, and she was famous, and that was cool. But I was a political science major when I was at that school, so I was looking at things differently. Again, just political philosophers, thatâs all I was looking at. They were men too: Machiavelli, Aristotle, and Plato, and philosophy. But no, I wasnât asking that question because nobody had posed it to me, and it didnât occur to me. It was still social norms then, I thought, that had to be followed, like getting married.
MM: Sorry for the digression, but women were not part of things then.
L: No! No, youâre right! After I graduated from Tech, Arch wanted to get a PhD, so he said, âYou might as well get a masterâs degree.â I didnât even know what masterâs degrees were. I just thought, Iâll get this degree in English, and I donât know what Iâm going to do with it. He said, âWell, youâll have to teach high school if you donât get a masterâs degree,â and I didnât want to do that! I didnât even want to teach. But since he liked teaching, we both applied for assistantships at a lot of different graduate schools, and we both got an assistantship at North Texas State in Denton, Texas. Thatâs where we went.
I taught English there as a graduate assistant and took a bunch of English courses. Again, whole courses in Mark Twain, Hemingway, and existentialist philosophy. It was amazing that, again, in the late â60s and early â70s, none of that [women authors and feminism] was pointed out. I was just being the traditional scholar, after thinking, well, if I have to teach, I have to follow some kind of scholarly path and learn academic standards and memorize the grammar book so I can learn how to teach English.
MM: When did the lesbians enter your life?
L: The lesbians entered years later. But at North Texas, even after we were married, I hung out with one of my fellow graduate students, Jan, who taught English and had an office right next to mine. Arch would be doing all his research, and I was, too, for a while. I only stayed there a year. Then I thought I needed to quit after five years of going to college straight through. I just hung out with Jan in my free time.
At that time, I knew nothing about a lesbian lifestyle or lesbian community.
We thought we were the only two who felt this way.
That was one of the first times that I was really intimate with any woman. I was in Texas, and I didnât really want to be there. I was doing something I wasnât sure I really wanted to do. Jan was trying to say, âItâll work out, but in the meantime, we will have fun, and youâll figure it out later. But, right now, we could have this little affair on the side.â My really strong feelings for women were expressed more with her, because she was the first one who was willing to be intimate and to talk about our real feelings for each other, but she couldnât perceive being together either. We didnât know how any of that was going to work.
We thought we were together at this point; then when we both graduated, weâd go off into the world to work. We couldnât conceive of a possibility of having a long-term relationship. At that time, I knew nothing about a lesbian lifestyle or lesbian community. We thought we were the only two who felt this way. The only indication of that [lesbianism] was studying Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. Golly! We realized there were two women who were together and were in this artistic setting with other people; it was obvious that they were a couple.
I think knowing some women lived as lesbians was fascinating then. I only became aware of it there in Texas. After a few years of living there, Arch and I ended up getting a job back in Memphis, near my hometown. My philosophy professor at North Texas was helping create a community college in Memphis. He wrote the whole catalogue. He was very creative and wanted to have a lot of free-flowing, thoughtful classes. That was when âFree Universityâ was going on, create your own classes. He wanted to create a catalogue with some requirements, but you could kind of create your own curriculum, too. Since he was my philosophy professor at North Texas, he asked to go there and teach, and I agreed, if he took Arch too. So, he hired both of us.
MM: How did the girlfriend fit in with that? I want to go back to the girlfriend for a minute. How did you feel about having an affair with her? Did you feel transgressive?
L: Oh, yeah! I felt very guilty!
MM: Did you talk about it with anyone?
L: There was no one to talk about it with but her.
MM: You never told Arch?
L: No! No. He was very busy with all of his research, so he was gone a lot. He never knew. I would feel elated to be with her for a day, or an afternoon, or an evening. But when we got the job offer, I remember Jan and I had a very sad farewell. We met and hugged and said we have to go on with our lives; weâre not going to tell anyone anything about this relationship. I never knew if she had any other relationships at all. She never wanted to try to get together again. After I was in Memphis, I would call her but she was distant. She got very involved with the Mexican community in Texas. I eventually heard through the grapevine that she ended up marrying a Mexican guy. She became very religious, an evangelical Catholic. She must have repented a lot, I guess. (Laughter)
MM: Did you repent any?
L: I didnât repent, no, not at all. I knew my feelings were genuine and true. Remembering our times together were happy memories, but just limited, and could never have been fulfilled. By the time I got to Memphis, it was a lot of hard work and figuring out how to create a curriculum. I didnât finish my degree at North Texas, so I had to teach and simultaneously finish my masterâs degree at Memphis State. They hired me anyway as full-time faculty, but I needed the final credential. After I got that, I taught a number of years there.
Meeting the Lesbians and Coming Out
One of my students is the real coming out story. Teaching English at Shelby State Community College, I had a lot of adult students in the evenings. Peggy was a musician in the Navy band, stationed at Millington base near Memphis. She was in my class, working on some college credits.
Once I met all these women it was like a light bulb. They were like, âOh yeah, weâve heard all about you!
We wondered when you were going to come out!â
She would often hang out after class, at my teacherâs desk up front. âWhat are you doing later?â she would say, trying to be friendly. She had sparkly brown eyes and an infectious laugh. I certainly felt unsettled by her. Then finally she said, âMaybe we could have coffee sometime?â There was a little coffee shop across the street. Mostly, I just hung out with the faculty. Because of my early experience with Arch and with faculty spending time with students being discouraged, I was kind of wary of showing favoritism, so I was trying to really keep a distance with her. But she was very persistent, saying things like, âI think we would have a good time togetherâ and âLetâs go have coffee.â
I was so fascinated by her that eventually I did have coffee with her. Then she said, âWell, maybe youâd like to meet some of my other friends, because I have parties and stuff.â She was going with another woman, so she invited me over to her house to go to this party. Arch was always busy. I think he was coaching tennis, and he was very busy with teaching all his history classes, so we werenât always hanging out together. I thought, well, hereâs a new group of people.
Once I met all these women it was like a light bulb. They were like, âOh yeah, weâve heard all about you! We wondered when you were going to come out!â There was all this community. After the house parties, women said, âLetâs go to the bar!â (There was a lesbian bar in town.) âWeâll do that afterward.â And Iâm going to these placesâexcited to have a night life- and with only women!
MM: Were you comfortable with that? You felt okay with that?
L: I just fell happily into it. âWell, this is where Iâm supposed to be! All this time, you know? This is a whole other world.â Peggy said, âPeople can just go out with each other. Christy and I are nonmonogamous, so we can go out together some, and you can go with Christy, and everybody is all okay with going with whoever.â And I thought, âWow! This is like a totally free-flowing community.â
Peggy and I spent a lot of time together. Weâd take long rides around town and just talk, sometimes more. I could tell my feelings for her were very strong. I met a lot of dykes in Memphis, and came out there, and joined the NOW [National Organization for Women] Lesbian Task Force. Thatâs where I really became much more aware of protests. There was Women Against Violence Against Women back then and the music. One of my friends, Donetta, was very, very concerned about violence against women in music and movies. There were snuff movies downtown, films showing actual harm to women. She got the Lesbian Task Force to picket those and for us to start being aware of violence against women and the whole different focus against women.
MM: Is that where you met Gail and Gwen?
L: Yeah.
MM: They introduced me to you; I met you through them. I think you were living in Nashville at the time, or anyway, you were going to, probably.
L: Yeah, I met Gail (Atkins) and Gwen (Demeter), I guess, at one of the NOW meetings, or at the bar. They were talking about buying their land at Silver Circle, and then I became more aware of the whole landyke community. There was a big womenâs gathering in Houston, that national womenâs gathering. [The National Womenâs Conference, a federally funded conference in 1977.] Donetta and a number of the NOW women went to that. I became much more aware of the whole feminist movement, and the lesbian movement within it, there in Memphis in the â70s.
On to the Women!
Hanging out with Peggy, I remember feeling that, after a point, it didnât matter if I came home or not. Or if I did come home, and I came home late, what was Arch going to say? Finally, he said, âWell, I realize that you must be hanging out a lot more with them than wanting to be here.â We pretty much mutually realized I was acting on my feelings for women. I said, âYes, it is obvious that I am a lesbian and choosing them over you.â By then, he was pretty much aware of my close friendships with women.
During most of our marriage, he was always kind of jealous over my sending cards and buying books for my women friends. He was keeping track of my time with Ruthie, even though she got married. We even hung out together as two couples, but I was still more interested in talking with her and being with her. I think he could always sense that.
When I was around any of the women friends, I was paying more attention to them than being a married couple and playing that role together. Of course, he was hurt but was not surprised. He was quite willing to get a divorce. He didnât want any kind of open marriage. I was relieved and glad that eventually heâd buy his red sports car and start dating other women and getting a couple of more wives along the way. I wished him well. (Laughter)
MM: And you went on to the women!
L: And I went on to the women, yes! Arch and I always put off the idea of having children. We had to do grad school, then do careers, not like some of our friends who had children and juggled their careers. We adjusted to divorcing pretty quickly once we spoke the words. Then we were free to go do our lives, and we never really connected again or even kept track of each other. That choice was really, for both of us, probably, because we didnât want to remember or figure out how to integrate our early years of trying to figure out a life together and mostly bonding over just career aspirations in the end. We were ready to go on very different paths. There was not a bond like children to keep us in contact.
I liked his dad, mom, grandmother, and his sister, but again, they were very poor working class people in Arkansas who could not relate to our lives as college teachers in Memphis. His parents even thought that he shouldnât be with me. They were really hoping he would marry a local woman, have children, and stay in the local community and not be even as rebellious as he was about not wanting to embrace small-town life and have a family. Interesting though, divorce is a stigma in society, an admission of a mistake or a failure. That took a while for me to deal with emotionally.
I had already been teaching at Shelby State for six years. Arch was going to stay there, and he stayed there the rest of his life. Ruthie kept up with him over the years. I learned of his death a few years ago from Ruthie.
But I was ready to get out of that environment because we had all these mutual friends. I was ready to go. Then I met Ariel at one of the womenâs parties in Memphis. She was a librarian, and I was fascinated with her wit and charm. I visited her in Nashville and we started going together. She said, âMove in with me.â One of those lesbian U-Haul things, you know?
MM: (Laughs) We kiss and so weâre married!
L: Thatâs how it works! That got me to Nashville. I started teaching part-time at Volunteer State Community College and I stayed there for a while.
MM: How long did you stay there?
L: Really, just about a year and a half. I had a little black cockerpoo, Heidi, and Ariel was fine with my dog moving in, too. One of the cool things that Ariel introduced me to was the lesbian bookstore there in Nashville [Womankind Books] and the lesbian community there. That was really the first time that I was coming in with a partner and going to lesbian dances and social occasions there. I remember bowling with Susan Gorrell and her talking about going to Womonwrites. I hoped to get to go some day. It certainly took me a while, moving around and all. Ariel and I went to Michigan Womynâs Music Festival (Michfest) together, and that was the first Michfest that I went to, probably late 1970s. She liked camping and we made a lot of nice vacation trips.
By then it became so obvious to me that I had had six college years of traditional male indoctrination
of what the world was supposed to be and that religion was not of any sustenance,
so womenâs spirituality and womenâs community became a sustenance.
Once I went to Michfest, it was like, âThis totally IS lesbian community. Itâs not just local. It is national, it is international.â After that trip to Michfest, the whole lesbian community became even bigger. I subscribed to Lesbian Connection. Then I wondered where was all the literary stuff? I just wanted to read womenâs work, and what women were doing, and what women were creating.
The Big Turning Point
The big turning point was coming out and reading LC, discovering Sinister Wisdom, Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, all these different things that I could find at the bookstore and then subscribe to the journals. All the organizations that I joined were women-focused from then on. By then it became so obvious to me that I had had six college years of traditional male indoctrination of what the world was supposed to be and that religion was not of any sustenance, so womenâs spirituality and womenâs community became a sustenance.
I was with Ariel for that period of time, and we had a lot of fun in Nashville, but it was her town and mostly her friends. My biggest problem, though, was that I never could get hired full-time at Vol State Community College, because it was such a great college and all the permanent faculty wanted to keep their own job. I was not making enough money being just part-time, even teaching four or five classes each term.
A former English professor at Vol State was hired at South Georgia College to create a developmental English program, and colleagues at Vol State recommended me to go to South Georgia to work with her. I really needed a job, and Ariel was very seated in Nashville; there was no way she was going to move. I thought I couldnât really sustain staying there, so we would just have a long-distance relationship. Of course, after moving away, our relationship never really worked very well. She visited a couple times, but in my summer off I didnât stay long with her in Nashville. I visited my parents, even left my dog Heidi with Ruthie for a while, hung out with friends around Memphis.
At South Georgia, my best colleague was Margaret-Rose. She was very flamboyant, a Polish woman from Chicago, who was bisexual. She was telling me about all the guys in town that she was after. In the meantime, she loved to go to the beach at Fernandina, and we took day trips over there and would hang out together in town. She adopted cats, and I still had my pup, Heidi. She was such an animal lover, too. We rescued puppies and kittens and found homes for them with all of our students.
Margaret-Rose was a good friend, very bright, and we exchanged a lot of creative ideas about teaching. She was the first bi person Iâd met. âCome over to my apartment tonight and we will have strawberries and champagne and whipped cream and play. But tomorrow night I have to go with the handsome guy that I lured downtown.â I had to learn to share, ha ha. I figured that she was my fun friend but that this was not going to be any kind of relationship. She left after a year of teaching at South Georgia and eventually got a job at Texas Christian University. We only taught together for a year, and we became friends for the rest of her life. I visited her in Texas during several summers and when she and a new husband lived on a ranch in Oklahoma. Sadly enough, she only lived a few years longer.
South Georgia College is in Douglas, Georgia, a very small town. I made a little more money but could only afford to rent a trailer for my pup, Heidi, and me. There was no gay community there to speak of. There were two or three gay guys teaching at South Georgia, so I was kind of in their gay guy community for a year. Weâd go to Savannah, and go to bars, and do things together. It was a lonely time, though, after Margaret-Rose left and being isolated from any kind of real womenâs community. I took a photography class and spent a lot of weekends just roaming the sandy backroads with my dog, Heidi, and taking pictures.
Finding Love in Missouri
I stayed just that year after Margaret-Rose left, then got a teaching job in Tarkio, Missouri, in another English program there. It was kind of my ideal job, finally getting to teach at a four-year college. But again, it was in a small town in the middle of nowhere. The head of the department, a woman, hired me. We became fascinated with each other very quickly. She supposedly was bi too, but eventually she decided she was lesbian, even though I was just her first lover. She stayed at Tarkio College only a year. There were political issues with the administration about making decisions on how to help students and where to spend money. Susan got another position at Missouri Valley College [in Marshall, Missouri] and I drove over many weekends, about two hundred miles each way. I loved her very much. We had a lot in common: literature, our love of dogs, and some traveling together to conferences. We had the same working class family roots in common.
She had a daughter. When she would visit her parents, or go visit other friends, I would stay at the house with her daughter and their dogs and cats. The whole idea of even thinking about having a family or a child was beginning to seem real. I mean, she was a kid that was really fun to be around. Her daughter always had to be first in any relationship. I understood that, but our relationship just couldnât grow, especially as Laura was getting to be a teenager. Once her daughter understood the kind of lesbian relationship we had, she had difficulty accepting us. Living apart, though Iâd spend time with them in the summer, was beginning to take its toll, too.
After several years at Tarkio College, I was beginning to get discouraged with teaching and questioned the administration more about how they really wanted to help some of the underprivileged students. They recruited a lot of students and got them heavily in debt by local banks financing their tuition. It didnât seem like it was a good idea to stay there too much longer. Plus, my salary barely increased each year; I could still just barely afford to rent a trailer in a park outside of town. The winters there were brutally cold. With Susan so far away, my only pastime was riding my motorcycle on backroads and photographing that wide-open landscape, so different from south Georgia.
Moving On and Meeting Drea
When I was telling Susan that I was tired of teaching, she said, âWell, maybe you could do business writing. Figure out how to teach it instead of just comp and lit at Tarkio for a term and then youâll have some kind of credentials to go into the business world.â I only had degrees in English literature. I took a computer course at Tarkio so Iâd know the language of what software and coding meant. Then I taught a business writing course, doing business plans, so I would have some corporate language to use. Months later Susan sent me an ad from the Kansas City Star for a technical writer job. That was 1984, I thought I could talk myself into getting hired as a tech writer at this software company, Tallgrass Technologies, in Lenexa, Kansas.
When I applied for that job, I had to find a skirt somewhere (laughter) because up till then I wore casual clothes, khakis and pinstripe shirts, to teach class. I interviewed with Jan Tanzer. We hit it off pretty well, even though I didnât look quite as professional as she had hoped. She had been a high school English teacher herself, and said, âI learned how to do this technical writing, and so I think that we would get along.â
I was fortunate that Jan decided to take a risk and teach me all about tech writing and using a computer. We had fun for a few years. Because it was a small company, I knew folks in Quality Assurance, programming, manufacturing, and marketing, so I could get access to all the information I needed to write. Jan was a little older, and kind of a disciplinarian, but she got me organized enough to be able to write technical manuals and learn the technical language for the operation of tape backup units that Tallgrass made.
MM: Were you in a relationship with her?
L: No, no. We were friends. Her husband was an accountant for Walmart. She threw a lot of fun parties andâno, she was more upper class, lived in a very expensive condo with all kinds of fancy furniture. She was trying to make a lot of us, the young nerds at Tallgrass, more elegant and more professional all the time. But language-wise and work-wise, we always got along very well. But no hopes for a relationship there.
After I moved out to Shawnee, Kansas, near to my work at Tallgrass, I didnât drive over to Susanâs very often. She was one hundred miles away. I had more free time since I wasnât grading tons of comp papers in the evenings. I wanted to explore the lesbian community in nearby Kansas City. We still talked occasionally but our worlds were changing. It was my idea to break up.
In 1984 I moved near Kansas City, Missouri. I went to the New Earth Bookstore to find out where the lesbians were. Then I went to Peteâs Pub, and Andrea [Drea Firewalker] was the bouncer there. Thatâs how we first met.