The Lavender Scare is chronicled in a 2004 book by David K. This makes reference to what’s become known as the Lavender Scare, which was the gay analog to the 1950s Red Scare. In Billye’s episode, Billye explains how your teaching certificate could be revoked if you were suspected of being a communist or a homosexual. In our MGH Shirley Willer episode, Willer, who was the one-time president of DOB, talks about how wearing masculine attire made her the target of police brutality. The episode talks about the risk of arrest for male impersonation faced by women wearing fly-front jeans. Have a look at this DOB newsletter in which they announce the convention. Īs Billye mentions in the episode, the Daughters of Bilitis held its first national convention in San Francisco in 1960. And take a tour of a GLBT Historical Society exhibit about The Ladder in this video. Gallo’s Different Daughters-A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Movement and be sure to listen to our episode with DOB co-founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, too.įor information about The Ladder, the magazine of the Daughters of Bilitis, read Malinda Lo’s article. To learn more about the Daughters of Bilitis, read Marcia M. Undated photo of Billye Talmadge’s partner, Marcia Herndon. įor an obituary of Marcia Herndon, Billye’s longtime partner, go here. Watch a interview with Billye Talmadge from the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ Daughters of Bilitis Video Project.Ĭheck out Beyond the Mist, a book of Billye’s musings and poetry, here. īillye Talmadge’s oral history can be found in Eric Marcus’s book Making Gay History. A short obituary of Billye appeared in the Bay Area Reporter. Read a brief biography of Billye Talmadge in this article by Billye’s friend Suzanne Deakins.
That’s the only reason I’m not using my name.” Billye Talmadge, in red, posing with her sister Betty, 1980s. And financially at this point in time, I can’t. But what you can’t fight is the way they get around it and make it so god-awful that you say, ‘Fuck it!’ and quit. That’s the usual way now, because you can fight this kind of discrimination. I would not be fired on the spot if they found out, but it would be made so difficult for me that I would have to quit. If we were not living on my salary, I wouldn’t care about using my real name.
She said, “I’m not using my real name for this interview.
Please note that for her inclusion in the Making Gay History book, Billye asked me to alter the spelling of her name to protect her identity. Photo courtesy of Suzanne Deakins.Įxploring the links below you’ll discover just some of ways in which Billye challenged the prevailing prejudice against lesbians and how she moved the ball forward at a time when a woman wearing fly-front jeans could face arrest or worse. At the time I interviewed Billye, I knew next to nothing about her life, but based on that contemporary lens I’d made assumptions about Billye “the accommodationist.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.Ĭasting aside my contemporary lens, I came to discover what Billye and the other courageous women on the front lines in the 1950s and ’60s were up against and how they nonetheless built a fledgling movement that provided a solid foundation for so much that came after. This is the tricky thing about looking back on history through a contemporary lens-it makes it easy to criticize early activists over goals and tactics, because most of us don’t know nearly enough about what the world was like, what the context was, for their actions and decisions. What I learned from reading about Billye, who was an early member of the Daughters of Bilitis-the first organization for lesbians in the United States, which was founded in 1955-made me think she was what some LGBT historians have called an “accommodationist.”īillye earned that label because in the early days of the movement, DOB encouraged its members to wear traditionally feminine clothing (skirts, not fly-front jeans) that didn’t make them easily identifiable as lesbians. When I subsequently met and interviewed Billye, she taught me an important lesson. Episode Notesįrom Eric Marcus : I first learned about Billye Talmadge when I began my research for the Making Gay History book back in the late 1980s.