Snapshots
From a Lavender Lens
The stacked, faded brown cardboard boxes in the back of my mother’s closet were camouflaged by skirts, dresses, and silky blouses, all from several different decades, hanging from the rack looking fashionable as ever. The boxes had become the secure storage spot for a wild assemblage of photos – a black and white snap of a wedding party, a small group of children standing by a swing set, my mother looking lovely and poised standing on the beach dressed in striped capri pants and a crisp white sleeveless blouse. Those photographs told many stories. Lots of them I’d heard enough of to keep me satisfied.
It hadn’t been a week since my mother passed in hospice care when I found myself standing there outside her closet, the door closed. I had just finished emptying one dresser drawer filled to the brim with pretty petite purses for special events and pulling a card table out from under the bed where it had been out of sight and out of mind for years, all part of the undertaking at hand, emptying the condo.
No matter what sort of tasks come up in times of transition — in this case the leave-taking of your mother — hands become soft sponges caressing familiar items from childhood, absorbing energies that ignite memories, just as photo images from days long gone are emotive. Sometimes the result is a chuckle. Tender remembrances. Often the intensity of the find can be profoundly impactful.
While I found pictures and postcards in the boxes which surprised and delighted me, what stood out was a cluster of black and white snapshots that were not familiar to me in the least, totally unknown territory. Regardless, the moments captured with a simple snap floated through my whole being, bringing up soft tears.
A closer look, and I saw my grandmother – Zenobia was her name – who was probably 23 or so at the time, standing with a gal whose name has been lost to history. In one photo from the early 1920s, most likely taken in the Texas Hill Country, the unknown gal is wearing a light blouse and standing behind Zenobia, her arms wrapped around my grandmother, who’s wearing a silky black blouse with a scoop neck. Both dressed up. Both with sweet smiles meant for the other, I’m sure.
This snapshot and one other gave me a glowy feeling when I brought them out of the closet. Now, less than a decade after the find, and with some research, my story has them, for a while, living a life as a couple, as both were taking classes at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos while beginning their teaching careers. It’s reasonable to think they roomed together in a boarding house. On weekends, I imagine they took short road trips, including to a nearby county fair, in Zenobia’s Model-T.
A second photo I locked my eyes on has the two decked out in what appear to be driving outfits, very dapper. At the time, I said out loud to no one, “Oh, my god. Nana was a lesbian!” Through my lesbian lens, both snapshots offer a glimpse of what I imagine to be their true lesbian selves. That day at my mother’s, when I came upon the pictures, I held each one up in the light and soaked in the visual, let it run through my veins. I got chills. And then had an inkling as to who her gal might be. My mother, on more than one occasion during my childhood, used the description “very good friend” to describe a teaching colleague of my grandmother’s.
When I looked closely at this photo, I also gleaned clues that confirmed, in my mind at least, there was a true Lezbo connection. Zenobia, on the right, her left hand in her pant’s pocket (clue) and, with a very close-in view, you can see her fingers lingering on her gal’s shoulder (clue). They both have on pants (clue). Lastly, they got these outfits in the men’s wear section (clue). Though that last one is conjecture on my part it provides a tingly visual.
While these two gals were brave, they enjoyed the obliviousness of the general population, particularly men. Back then, two women could manage life together in full view without creating suspicion. Then, when the sun went down and the shades were drawn, it was often a different story. But nobody was watching.
Folks usually assumed there was nothing to be had between two women when it came to sex and intimacy, surmising they were sisters, or spinsters, old maids who never could find a husband. So what if they lived together!
This thought process came to us compliments of the patriarchal propaganda from which men concluded the women needed them – for sperm, sex, and to be taken care of – because the Bible told them so. Besides, women weren’t really full human beings.
Just take a read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a dense tome first published in 1947 in France, which examines “the inequality and otherness” assigned to women through the ages.
In the introduction to her book, the feminist icon lets a man explain, referencing the French Renaissance philosopher Montaigne, who, she writes, “well understood the arbitrariness and injustice of the lot assigned to women…”
Then de Beauvoir quotes him. “Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them. There is a natural plotting and scheming between them and us.” And, I might add, the men always win because they wrote the rules.
My grandmother was lucky to have a few years of her young life to experience what it felt like to be something of a free spirit and to love another woman. Ultimately, she would marry a man and birth four babies. But, for a time, she lived as a lesbian, I believe, which I see as her authentic self.
Zenobia’s time with her “very good friend” turned out to be short-lived. Some folks, including my grandmother, might call it fate, destiny, that she would lose her genuine self and find the remainder of her life shackled to the rules and regulations of the patriarchy. Her decision to marry was born of it. She most likely felt it was the way to survive.
And when I consider another layer which shrouded her heart I can imagine she also prayed that a husband and family would massage the grief of losing her dear friend that one day when the two were driving down a country road and the harsh glare from the Texas sun momentarily shrouded the truck barreling towards them.
Zenobia had in her a deep well of perseverance. I like to think it has something to do with her namesake, Queen Zenobia, who in the third century conquered several of Rome’s eastern provinces – in what is now Syria – before the emperor Aurelian took her down. History tells us the queen was married to a man, which leads to the conclusion she was not a lesbian. But who knows?
On another note and in a weirdly interesting way, I am my grandmother Zenobia’s lesbian legacy. How cool is that! So fast forward about 50 years after the sun’s glare…
At the tail end of the 1970s and into the early 80s, I was living in Dallas, working as an investigative TV news reporter, racking up awards – journalist of the year, best investigative reporter – and getting noticed by at least one major network, all the while pretending to be straight but slowly creeping out of the closet as a lesbian. By 1987, I was no longer in the TV news scene in Dallas, having transformed myself into a political activist and lesbian bookstore owner, which are easily one and the same.
Some of you might recall the name of the bookstore, Curious Times. It was filled with hundreds of books, including Herotica, Macho Sluts, The Joy of Lesbian Sex,The Well of Loneliness, Curious Wine, Beyond Acceptance. We also carried jewelry, incense, candles, greeting cards, gems, and crystals, all the usual lesbian accoutrements one might expect to find, except for sex toys, which were illegal to sell in Dallas County, and probably the entire state of Texas.
The bookstore, which opened in February 1987, was on Cedar Springs Road, just off Oak Lawn Avenue, next door to Hunky’s Hamburgers, in the heart of Dallas’ Gay Community, as it was referred to back then, when lesbians were still called gay women. But Curious Times would change that, and to celebrate the arrival of lesbians to the neighborhood, we had a splendid grand opening with lots of champagne, delectable hors d’oeuvres, and loads of hugs. The photos from that evening tell such a beautiful story of lesbians coming together, the smiles captured in the snapshots still resonating joy to this day.
Curious Times was the next step of community-building for lesbians in Dallas, in large part, I believe, because it was a physical space in the heart of the gay community at a time when queerness was stepping further into the mainstream. Lesbians finally had a place of their own. Before the bookstore opened, the gay scene pulsating out from the crossroads of Cedar Springs Road and Throckmorton Street was all boy stuff.
Crossroads Market at the corner of that intersection had a respectable range of books for men, while lesbian reading fare was limited to a short stack. Same goes for the magazines, sex videos, and greeting cards — male centric. The bars just down the street catered to men, and most all of those with music and dance floor had a policy designed to keep women out: No open-toed shoes allowed on the dance floor.
There was no sign on the wall, just a polite verbal notification from the bouncer, whose job it was to give a once over to every patron’s footwear. But it was easy for lesbians — who sometimes wore open-toed shoes—to hit the dance floor at The Round Up, where cowboy boots were practically mandatory. Who in their right mind would want to two-step in open-toed shoes? It’s almost an illegal offense, if you ask me (or most Texans, for that matter).
My activism in the community was wide and varied. When we weren’t minding our bookstore or chiding the bars to stop the open-toed game, my business partner and lover – the word many of us Lezbos liked to use in public because it made many straight people bristle – were at city council meetings, marching in Pride parades, and using the word lesbian with wild abandon. That last one a push back on gay men (and gay women) who too often scorned use of the L-word, and straight people who went apoplectic when they were within earshot of the L-bomb.
Oftentimes, I would write news articles or opinion pieces for various lesbian and gay publications in Dallas. Throughout my life, beginning early on, I always found time to write, no matter what. Writing was at the soul of me, it seems. My grandfather on my father’s side was a journalist, a foreign correspondent who lived in Mexico City in the 1940s, writing for the Dallas Morning News, Collier’s magazine, and other publications. He also authored a novel. There’s some ancestral karma working here. Except that I don’t smoke cigars, but do know the manual typewriter intimately.
So, you can expect me to keep writing and sharing more Lavender Stories, chronicles from my travels on Earth, long threads of rich colors interlacing, woven into the fabric of me. My life is by design, represented in part by a lavender bandana I was gifted early on in my coming out phase. I tied it around my neck, snapped together the pearl buttons on my shirt, put on my jeans, pulled on my cowboy boots, soft as butter they were, and headed off to dance, drink a beer and flirt with women. There was no question I was a lesbian by design, however which way you want to look at it.
History tells us that gifts of violets and lavender within the sapphic community were a giveaway that love was in the air and, simultaneously, a covert expression of interest and affection, if straight folk happened to witness the giving of the gift. Lavender, the color, has symbolized lesbian love over the centuries and in fairly recent decades is said to illustrate that despite the odds – the patriarchal pushback – lesbians can find a place to love and cherish each other.
It’s probably clear by now why I chose the title.
The idea for a memoir started percolating when I came across those two snapshots of my grandmother and her gal snuggled inside a brown box in a closet that gave me pause, prompting me to delve into a story (currently in progress) and some of which I’ll be sharing here, along with other tales.
My transformation from a tomboy to a straight-looking, high-profile investigative reporter with shoulder-length blonde hair who wore makeup and conformed to the straight construct delineated in the patriarch’s playbook seems effortless in retrospect. One rule I pushed back on had to do with clothing — dresses and skirts vs pants. Pants won.
Eventually, I had my hair cut, a big hint back in that day. The first time my mother saw my new hairdo was when I flew down to south Texas for a visit. She was in my uncle’s kitchen chopping onions on a cutting board. She stopped, still gripping the knife, and turned to look at me and my hair and pursed her lips just a little tiny bit. “Your hair is really short. Really. Very short.” I nodded my head yes. She turned back to the chopping board and I asked if I could help.
My mother looked across the counter top at her brother, my uncle, and said, “Kay knows how to chip-chop onions. She’s really good at it.” My uncle nodded his head up and down a couple of times then chuckled after I rolled my eyes at him. I was glad the short hair drama was over. The disappearance of my long hair was a clue my mother translated in her head immediately. She knew what was unfolding. Well, she did, but she didn’t.
Please consider subscribing to Oh, Kay! - Lavender Stories (if you’re not already), and forward this to your friends, old or young, whom you think might resonate with my stories.
My hope is that these tales will not only connect with those of us who lived in Dallas back in the day and maybe still do live there (I don’t), but also reach many others who can relate because of their own experiences in the big cities where they lived or where they migrated after growing up in a small-minded tiny town somewhere. And then there are the young women who might find an interest in those who came before them and upon whose shoulders they stand.
The launch of Lavender Stories is very exciting for me. My hope is that the stories foster a renewed sense of community and generate conversation about who we are as lesbians, how that has shaped us. Please share your thoughts, observations, suggestions, including personal stories which may come to mind.