Bonnie Netherton

Bonnie Netherton

Interviewed in 2013, 2017, and 2023

Bonnie Netherton (born Gail Frances Richter) was born in 1945 in New York City, New York, where both of her parents grew up. Her father was a Coast Guard officer, and the family moved every two years or so, always near the ocean. That pattern of frequent moves characterized her life until she moved to Sugarloaf Women’s Village, Sugarloaf Key, Florida, in 2006.

After graduating from high school, Bonnie moved to Chicago, married a man, and moved with him to New Orleans, San Francisco, and then Atlanta. They had two young sons when she came out in Atlanta, left the marriage and joined Atlanta NOW, the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA), Red Dyke Theatre, and the Tower Hot Shots, one of several ALFA-sponsored non-competitive lesbian softball teams. She lost custody of her sons because of her lesbian identity, but remained in Atlanta for seven years after the divorce to be near them.

Over a very short time in 1980, her partner was killed in a car wreck, and both of her parents died suddenly, first her father of a heart attack at age sixty-one, then three days later, her mother of an asthma attack. Bonnie moved with friends to St. Simons Island, Georgia, where she lived for three years, then to Key West, seeking warmer winters.

She has lived in Florida ever since, sometimes in Key West, other times in Gainesville, and for four years in Fort Lauderdale, where she and her partner Nancy ran the Mermaid Inn, a hotel for women. She left Florida for a couple of years in the 1980s when she bought a retired school bus that she and her lover, Skyler, outfitted for RVing. They drove the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico, from Key West, Florida, to Merida, Mexico. Skyler traveled with her for the first year, including three months in Guatemala. During the next year, sometimes her friend Star or others joined her, and sometimes she traveled alone.

Bonnie says that the best years of her life were the seven years (1998-2005) when she lived on Ming Meng, a Chinese junk [boat], which means “enlightened dream” in Chinese. She moored it half a mile offshore of Key West. “After a lifetime of living at the water’s edge,” she recalls, “swimming, scuba diving, windsurfing, etc., it was a dream fulfilled to live aboard, intimately experiencing the ocean in another way every day and night.” That sojourn ended when Hurricane Wilma destroyed Ming Meng, at the same time that Sugarloaf Women’s Village was badly damaged by storm surge.

Bonnie had been friends with Sugarloaf women since moving to Key West in 1983, and had lived there for the last three months of Barbara Deming’s life in 1984. Then in 1999, with Barbara Vogel, the artist who had been living at Sugarloaf for about ten or twelve years, she sailed Ming Meng around 1,000 miles, from northern Florida to the Keys to help care for Blue Lunden, who was dying from lung cancer. Again she stayed for a few months, helping Blue’s daughter by sorting through Blue’s papers, photos, etc., getting all ready to send to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City.

In 2006, Bonnie began helping with the cleanup and recovery of the Sugarloaf land, which had been devastated by five feet of saltwater storm surge, killing dozens of tropical fruit trees and causing water damage to all of the buildings (only one fruit tree survived that). She was recovering from an injury in a motorcycle accident, and Sugarloaf became a healing place for her. She has lived there ever since and has played an important role in managing Sugarloaf Women’s Land Trust. In recent years, Sugarloaf has hosted over 100 guests annually.

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