Lenny Lasater
A dedicated, “very butch lesbian,” Lenny Lasater was born in northwest Tennessee in 1957. Lenny grew up in a musical household. Her father was a piano tuner and the church organist. Her mother sang harmony and played the piano.
Lenny wasn’t out as a lesbian in high school. She claimed to be boy-crazy, but mostly because she liked the stuff boys had: their cars, their hobbies, their knives, their Harley Davidsons, and motorcycles. She came to her lesbian senses when she was eighteen, which did not surprise much of anyone, other than her parents, given her “butchie-ness.”
In the late 1970s, Lenny Lasater was a trailblazer for women when she joined the first class of women coal miners in the United Mine Workers of America Local in Birmingham while working in the deep mines of Alabama. She accomplished this after two years as a psychology major at the University of Tennessee in Martin, and then, a short stint studying pharmacology at Samford University in Birmingham.
Lenny continued on a circuitous path to be only the second woman to reach journeyman level of electricians with the IBEW [International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers] Local union in Nashville, Tennessee, which did, indeed, take her on many journeys.
Lenny settled at long last in Atlanta, where she formed her own business, Lenny Lasater Electrical Company, doing residential electrical work, much to the delight of the lesbian community. She got clean and sober. To pursue her love of music, she began writing and singing songs by starting a popular band with a group of talented Atlanta women musicians, the band now known as Just Roxie.