Mary Gay Hutcherson

Interviewed on December 9, 2015

Mary Gay Hutcherson, born in 1942 in Marmaduke, Arkansas, to teenage parents, grew up in a household of mostly women. Her father was away serving in World War II and then the Korean war, from which he suffered undiagnosed PTSD, a condition that led to him leaving the family when Mary Gay was only twelve.

Mary Gay Hutcherson had many role models for women being in charge: her mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and lots of aunts. Mary Gay was a high school cheerleader and homecoming queen. For her cheerleading, she won the first women’s athletic scholarship to Arkansas State. After two years of college, she dropped out. In 1962, she married her high school boyfriend, who had been the football captain, and by then, he was in the military. They lived in Japan and Hawaii for most of the eight years they were married.

Mary Gay finished her college degree at the University of Hawaii in 1968, majoring in political science. Mary Gay’s first career job was working in a child welfare office in Arkansas, a job which led to her employer paying her way through graduate school in social work at the University of Tennessee (UT). She earned her master’s degree in social work in 1972. She spent her first year at UT Health Science Center (UTHSC) in Memphis, and part of her second year at UTHSC near Nashville.

Mary Gay Hutcherson directed child welfare services for twelve Arkansas counties when she met her second husband. He worked for a corporation that transferred him frequently. Thus, she held social work jobs in different states. When he was transferred to Richmond, Virginia, she became involved in NOW (National Organization for Women). It was at a NOW party that she met the woman who brought her out as a lesbian in her forties (the 1980s), ending her marriage.

Mary Gay was very active in lesbian and gay events in Richmond, Virginia, , serving on many boards while remaining closeted in her job as a social worker in the public school system. She said, “I had one life in the daytime, and a totally different one at night. It was very challenging.” Mary Gay came out publicly, approaching retirement in 2000, She threw herself a big, wedding party at the Metropolitan Community Church on Valentine’s Day. It was not legal to marry yet, and she did it to make a personal and political statement.

For Valentine’s Day 2001, Mary Gay organized ten lesbian and gay couples to go down to the Richmond, Virginia, courthouse to apply for marriage licenses. They got lots of press coverage. Her picture and sound bites went all over the world through an AP wire story.

May Gay found in 2002, by a fluke, her estranged father, in a Veterans Health Administration hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, dying of cancer. Their reconnection was a good experience. Sadly, coming out to her mother was not. She has not spoken with her mother since that time. Mary Gay said, “I thought my mother could stretch to where I was, and that she would know that I needed her.”

Mary Gay Hutcherson and Yoli, short for Yolanda [Farnum]), got married legally in 2005 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Since 2006, she and Yoli have lived at Carefree Resort, a lesbian community in Florida.