Minnie
In 1975, I lost custody of my two sons, then seven and six years old, when I came out as a lesbian in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Later I wrote a book of poems, Crime Against Nature, about that experience and our successful struggle to stay connected as mother and children, as "family."
The sodomy statute, the "crime against nature" law, which the state and my husband used to take the children was repealed at a national level only two years ago, in 2006, in the Lawrence decision by the US Supreme Court.
Here I am holding three pictures—one of me and my youngest son Ben with his wife Katie and their two children, Simon Bruce and Ruth; one of me and my oldest son Ransom with his wife Laurel and their newborn son Alden; and one of my beloved partner of fourteen years, transgender lesbian activist Leslie Feinberg, with my aunt Gilder, who loved me unconditionally all my life, before and after I came out to her as a lesbian.
Surely the depth of Gilder's love came in part because of her own queer life, that she was someone who, in 1925, when she was six years old, walked a mile into town to demand the barber cut her hair off "like boy's." She wore it that short until the day she died at 85, a working woman who never married, who led her courage of her life, unnamed, unknown, and unhonored by the world. I pay tribute to the passionate love she gave the world.