Emily Greene

Interviewed in 2013 and 2019

Emily Greene was born in Washington, DC, in 1946 to a Southern mother from Asheville, North Carolina, and a Yankee father from Connecticut. Her family lived in Arlington, Virginia, until she was five, when they moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where her engineer father thought he would find work. She recalls the years on Cape Cod with pleasure because her father lived five days a week in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was working. She, her mother, and her one-year-older sister loved having the home to themselves. In adult life, Emily spent a lot of therapy time working through the problems caused by her brilliant father, who was very hard on Emily. She was an excellent athlete, but not a good student academically.

The family moved to Maryland when she was fifteen. Emily chose to attend a small, Catholic, women’s college, Nazareth College, in Bardstown, Kentucky, where she had her first serious, romantic relationship. In her sophomore year, Emily met a companion student, Tess, who was in her junior year. Tess was from the Philippines. Emily and Tess made lots of plans for a life together, but Tess came back from Easter vacation a year later having decided that their relationship was wrong. Emily was devastated and returned for her senior year heartbroken. When she learned that Tess had married a man, Emily had a breakdown and dropped out of college to join Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA).

Emily Greene volunteered for a year in a project in Corpus Christi, Texas, teaching a class of three-year-old children in a school called Dos Mundos. That helped her to realize that she did not want to be a teacher. Emily went on to marry a man in 1970, and she worked as a nursing assistant while he was a medic. Their marriage of three and a half years taught her that marriage to him was not going to work. She learned that she liked taking care of people.

Emily Greene, age 28 and penniless, flew home to her family in New Hampshire in 1974. Her mother was in poor health. Emily and her sisters decided to take their mother to Florida for a short visit with friends. Emily liked Florida so much that she stayed. She went to nursing school from 1974 to 1976, met her first partner, and began a thirty-seven-year career in nursing.

Emily Greene also discovered the Pagoda, a lesbian residential community and cultural center in St. Augustine, Florida. She lived at the Pagoda, contributing substantially to the development of that community for over a decade. Her photographs and videos from those years are now archived at the Lesbian Home Movie Project.

After thirty years in Florida, Emily Greene moved to another lesbian residential community founded by some of the women who had founded the Pagoda. This was Alapine, located in rural, northern Alabama. In 2013, Emily moved to Massachusetts, where most of her family lives, and where she has always visited to do activist work and to be with family. She continues to do her activist work through various peace and social justice groups in Massachusetts.

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