In this post, I wrote about how my life was when I first met my partner; the Never Never Landishness of it all. How exciting it was to me as a 25 year old with no education and no work history (but now sober and madly in love) to be embedded in a community where "real" jobs and careers seemed optional.
More than 30 years later (in fact for the past 10) I have bemoaned in a big way the hole in my life resulting from not having and never really having had, meaningful work. Yes, I had jobs, and thankfully most of them were good jobs with benefits, so I am now semi-retired with a nice little nest egg and good health insurance subsidized by my last employer. I have a lot of former colleagues, who are friends in a way, some of whom are a source of the modest amount of freelance work I do to supplement my Social Security. But I never trained for a profession that I loved, even one I eventually failed at. Jobs were a necessary evil. The one thing I really wanted to do, sing classical music, seemed totally out of reach (largely, but not entirely, as a result of my own self destructive behavior). This post (by way of the "not entirely") describes (in my rather immature voice of almost 10 years ago LOL) some of the battles I would have had to fight in my chosen community if I went down that route. So if I wasn't going to sing, I could be a professional Lesbian. What did that mean exactly? To me it meant taking any job, the "low-hanging fruit", which for me meant working as a secretary at a publishing house, being out, letting the chips fall where they might, and raising people's consciousnesses. Because typing, organizing an office, proofreading, and copy editing were skills I had learned at my mother's knee, and the publishing business seemed the least unfriendly place to be "out", particularly if you were willing to stay in a lower level job (which I did for quite some time, but not permanently), I more or less stayed there, until all the life was sucked out of the industry and if I hadn't retired, I probably would have become a living, breathing, machine doing the same mindless things over and over.
A few nights ago I watched this film and suddenly had an "aha" moment. Although I knew that when I was growing up all gay men and Lesbians were in the closet at work (although for many it was an open secret), I had no idea of the mass firings that had occurred in the early 1950s. That would have been when I was a small child, but the fallout lasted for decades. These were people who were the cream of the crop, with advanced degrees, people who had indeed trained themselves for professions that they loved, working in the State Department. Not only were they summarily fired, they were not allowed to speak in their own defense or hire attorneys. For most of them their careers were ruined. Many fell into poverty.
One thing I noticed when I first became involved with the Lesbian Community (this was about 5 or 6 years after Stonewall) was the big time "work-aversion" of so many of these women, my partner included. A lot of them were on Welfare. Whenever I hear the phrase "welfare cheat", I don't see the face of a Black woman with children, I see "Blue", the butch Lesbian who somehow managed to bilk the government out of SSDI for decades by telling them she was going to AA meetings (true) and that the idea of working made her clinically anxious (not). Those not on Welfare worked odd jobs: babysitting, dog walking, house painting, being a typist sent out to different places by a temp agency. Poverty was a badge of honor. Maybe a number of these women had been cruelly fired by establishment organizations or were afraid they would be. My partner, who had had several high level jobs at photography magazines in the decade before I met her, said that she lost the will to show up for work after she broke up with her parther (the one before me) and couldn't talk to anyone about her unhappiness because she had to stay in the closet. She never recovered or worked in a professional job again. A number of these voluntarily underemployed women had had a "Seven Sisters" education. There was a former librarian who became and exterminator (she claimed she actually made more money as an exterminator but she had no benefits). Of course there were several exceptions. There was the doctor who treated patients at the free clinic who also had an ER job (no one in an ER really cares whom you sleep with), and her partner, an accountant, who did people's taxes (mostly in the gay community). And there were lawyers and a tiny handful of academics. And of course all those women, like me, working in the publishing industry.
By the time I had my first full-time job, "out" gays and Lesbians had been around for a while so I doubted that I would get fired for having a picture of me and my partner on my desk and answering honestly if anyone asked about it, but until the mid-90s, I never saw any "out" gay person in a higher level job.
So that's the story. Careers were not the Holy Grail in those days for gays and Lesbians, apparently we had learned our lesson in the early 1950s and it stayed in our DNA for a long time.
As for my dream of becoming an opera singer while being "out"? That was in 1977-1980 and Patricia Racette, the first "out" Lesbian opera singer, to my knowledge, didn't appear with her coming out statement in Opera News until 2002.
ETA: I began singing, the second time, in 2004. Coincidence anyone?
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