THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 6, 1995 TAG: 9507060049
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 449 lines
SOME MONTHS AGO, Alice Taylor was asked to tell the story of her coming out as a lesbian. For a newspaper article.
She wasn't sure what to do. So she wrote out a list of why she should do the interview, and another of why she shouldn't.
The ``should'' column was empty.
The ``shouldn't'' one was full: The violence she and her partner might suffer. The hurt feelings it could cause in her church, already bruised by the homosexuality issue. The impact on the small ministry she runs for the homeless. The feelings and privacy of her children.
She asked her long-time partner what she thought. Carol Bayma quoted Esther 4:14. In the passage, King Mordecai poses a question to Esther, who must decide between remaining silent or speaking up to save other Jews from persecution: ``Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?''
For Alice and Carol ``such a time as this'' is now.
This is the time to tell a story about one quiet couple in one low-key church in one average neighborhood. Two women - both in their 50s - who have spent decades opening the door of their sexuality to one person after another, to themselves, to their children, their relatives, their friends, their church, their community.
Who have asserted their identities quietly - not through lawsuits or hunger fasts or marches.
And who have been shunned and embraced as a result.
They have learned there's a difference between people speculating they are gay and knowing definitely. ``It was OK when you were just you,'' one friend confided to Carol. ``Why did you have to go and make it official?''
In their own small circles of church and family, they have put a face on the issue of homosexuality. They have challenged stereotypes with their long-lasting relationship. Their gray-headed normalness. Their quiet Christian ways.
And they are doing the one thing they vowed to do when they began their relationship 23 years ago: They are growing old together.
Alice, a soft-faced woman with a warm smile and feathery gray hair, is late coming home tonight from her job with St. Columba Ministries, an ecumenical group that helps the homeless. Carol has turned on a yellow light outside the couple's Virginia Beach house.
Alice walks in and goes over to a chair where Carol sits. She grasps her hand and smiles. Blue eyes meet blue eyes; crinkled laugh lines appear on the two faces. The two say nothing, but speak the unspoken language of couples.
Two decades ago, that same look gave Carol her first clue that Alice liked her in a way very different from the usual friend.
``There came a time when I realized she was happy to see me,'' says Carol, a smooth-cheeked woman with short-cropped, gray hair. ``When her face lit up.''
Snapshots of Alice's and Carol's children and grandchildren clutter the piano top. As Bernie, their dog, flops down on the floor, the two women piece together the mental snapshots of coming out.
Carol thinks back to when she was 9 or 10 years old. She sees herself pedaling down a dusty road in the Michigan town where she grew up. She was with friends. One by one, the others dropped off the trail.
They didn't like the long bike rides she took. Or the sitting for hours next to a lake, gazing at the thin reeds and roosting birds. Sitting, thinking, daydreaming.
Carol didn't mind being left. She was an intense young girl who liked to spend time alone. Even as a young girl, she sensed something was different about her.
She dreamt the typical girlhood daydreams - where she was the heroine, saving someone - but that someone was always a girl, never a boy. Carol knew about gay people but couldn't quite fit them into reality. She thought about them like she did Roy Rogers and cowboys and Indians - people who were somewhere between real and fiction.
One place she was well-rooted, though, was the church. More so even than at home. The preacher at her small Presbyterian church was progressive for the 1950s, inviting African-American children to church socials and sending the segregated, prejudiced congregation into a tailspin. Even though he knew the congregation didn't agree with him on various social issues, he stood his ground.
That tolerance later helped Carol square her sexuality with her religion. While fellow Christians might use the Bible to attack her, she believed in her heart that God loved her.
``In church I was encouraged and treated like someone good,'' says Carol, now 52, and a civilian employee of the Navy. ``As long as I was connected to the church, I never felt alienated from God.''
After high school, Carol married a Navy man and moved to Virginia Beach. But all along she felt like she was pretending.
She wanted children, to pour herself into motherhood. Jennifer was born five years into the marriage, and Ben a few years later. For years the duties of being a parent distracted her from a fading relationship with her husband.
Enter Alice. At a book-club meeting. She went at the invitation of a friend.
Alice noticed one woman in the circle of members. The woman hadn't read the book, but she was still vocal about her opinions. Then she fell asleep in the middle of the meeting.
Alice took an instant dislike to her. She was obnoxious. Egotistical. A loudmouth.
The woman was Carol.
Still, Alice's friend thought Alice and Carol had a lot in common.
True to her friend's intuition, Alice connected with Carol. They were both in unhappy marriages, both trying to raise children in households that didn't feel right.
First the two women talked about books. Then, religion.
Alice had never had a strong connection to the church. But Carol talked her into going to church services at the Presbyterian church she belonged to. Then Bible study and Sunday school. More discussions. More church activities. Alice joined the church. And Sunday school.
The two women discovered themselves as much as each other. They gardened together, took family field trips together, even vacationed together. They baby-sat each other's children. Alice helped Carol get a job during a period when Carol couldn't seem to stick with anything. She helped her line up job interviews, scolded Carol when she ran late for work, told her she needed to take more responsibility.
And Carol helped Alice come out, not as a lesbian, but as a person. When they first met, Alice was painfully inhibited. She wouldn't let other people touch her, and she wouldn't reach out to anyone. If someone sat next to her, she moved. She wouldn't talk unless spoken to first. She rarely laughed.
Carol got Alice to loosen up, to talk with other people, to hug and touch. To be human.
Carol asked Alice to sing in the church choir, which Carol directed.
``I can't,'' Alice said.
``Yes, you can,'' Carol answered. And Alice joined.
Then, Carol asked her to sing a duet.
``No, I can't do that.''
``Yes, you can.'' And Alice did.
Alice is now 56, sitting in a chair across from Carol. ``I can't say there was love there then, because I didn't know what love was,'' Alice says, cocking her head to the side and squinting a little. ``In my whole life I didn't know what it was. But Carol touched me somewhere in my spirit and personhood. She called out in me things I didn't know I had. She softened me. I was a brittle, severe person. She taught me to laugh.''
One thing they both knew in those early days of their friendship was they weren't finding love in their marriages. Carol knew why sooner than Alice.
One day, six months after meeting, they were sitting at the kitchen table at Alice's house. Having one of their usual three-hour discussions.
By this time, Carol had acknowledged to herself she was gay.
She needed to tell Alice. Carol was beginning to be attracted to her, and she had to find out how Alice felt about homosexuals. If Alice had a problem with gays, Carol would have to leave. The awkwardness would be too much to handle.
Worried about how Alice would react, Carol couldn't get the words from her throat to her mouth. So she picked up a matchbook cover and wrote down a single sentence. She handed it to Alice.
``I'm a homosexual'' it said.
Alice read it. ``Oh,'' she said in a nonchalant manner. ``OK.''
Alice filed it away in her head, but it didn't matter much to her. She had met gay people before, so she felt no surprise or condemnation.
Carol was instantly relieved. By this time, her eight-year marriage had broken up, as had Alice's 13-year one. Carol began courting Alice in the days and weeks after. Flowers. Little gifts. Phone calls. She asked Alice to go for a walk on the beach, what she considered a first date. But Alice broke her arm playing softball the day before.
For three nights after that, Carol stayed by Alice's side in the hospital, talking with her, making sure her children were OK. When Alice went home, Carol stayed with her to cook and help out.
Alice couldn't wait until Carol showed up. It was the first time she had leaned on someone emotionally for help.
``I don't know when I began to fall in love,'' Alice says. ``I know I was terrified. I kept thinking, `This is wrong, this is different, this is not the way things are supposed to be.' ''
And yet that is the way things were.
Ambivalence was the rule for years. A pushing forward and pulling back, a mix of friendship and love.
Carol wanted to move in together; Alice didn't. Carol wanted to tell the pastor of their church, St. Columba Presbyterian in Norfolk, about their relationship; Alice said it was too soon. Carol made sure her children knew she was a lesbian; Alice held back telling her three children.
``She had to wait for me,'' Alice says of Carol.
Then they met a couple at church who would play an important role in their lives.
Jim and Linda Davenport. Alice and Carol became close friends with them, and one day Jim told them he had cancer.
The two women, along with other church members, became a second family to the couple. When Jim was in the hospital during the last few days of his life, Carol and Alice helped Linda care for him around the clock. They split shifts, one spending the day with him, the other the night.
Jim died one morning in spring of 1979. Alice drove Linda home while Carol took care of some of the funeral arrangements. ``I thought Jim and I were going to grow old together,'' Linda told Alice on the drive home.
The words ``grow old together'' struck Alice so strongly she heard nothing else the entire ride home. It's almost as if she saw the words written across the sky. The sound of the words filled her head, her whole consciousness. They resonated inside her. ``Grow old together.''
She considered the message Jim's parting gift to her.
Alice went home and called Carol.
``You have to put your house up for sale, and I'm going to do the same. We are going to grow old together. I'm not going to miss what Linda and Jim missed.''
After that, it would be a gradual coming out, as each saw fit, as the situation presented itself. Children, parents, friends, family. Some people were never told. ``I am careful about who I make friends with or who I come out to,'' Alice says. ``I come out when there's a need. Their need or my need. I am out, and I am not out.''
Nowhere would coming out be quite so frustrating as in church.
The first church they joined together, St. Columba Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, proved to be a good experience. The church, a small, intimate congregation, ministered to families in a nearby low-income housing development. Carol and Alice threw themselves into the church, teaching children, setting up a ministry for the homeless, mowing the grass, helping with fund-raising.
Carol wanted to tell the pastors they were gay, but Alice had mixed feelings. She held back. Then one day the pastors posted a job for youth director. Alice wanted the job, but felt she needed to tell the pastors she was a lesbian. She worried they'd disapprove of her working with children in a formal, paid position.
The husband-and-wife pastors - Caroline Leach and Nibs Stroupe - didn't mind. They welcomed her coming out. In fact, they had been waiting for her to tell them.
Alice got the job, and later also served as an elder, a leader elected by the congregation to sit on the ``session,'' the organization that ran the affairs of the church. Carol also was an elder.
As smoothly as that coming out was, the comfort of it didn't last long. The church folded six years after they joined, because the housing development closed. The church's ministry for the homeless, which Alice still directs, continued under the name St. Columba Ministries, but Carol and Alice had to start looking for another church.
They chose Bayside Presbyterian Church in Virginia Beach, a medium-sized congregation where their children could be part of youth activities they'd missed out on at St. Columba, which focused on serving the poor.
Within a few years, both Carol and Alice were, once again, deeply involved in the church. They helped raise funds for the homeless, led Bible study classes, sang in the choir. Alice served on the session for three years. Both did the things they did as elders at St. Columba, helping with baptisms and giving communion.
Still, they served ``from the door of the closet,'' as they put it. Although they didn't tell people they were gay, they believed many people knew: They lived at the same address, shared the same telephone number, came and went to church functions together.
They were treated as a couple. When one was asked to serve communion, so was the other. One church member gave them tickets to the symphony, saying, ``Here, I thought you and Alice could use these for Valentine's Day.''
Carol and Alice continued in this don't-ask-don't-tell mode until one day four years ago when Carol decided she can't take it any more.
She was sitting in Sunday school class. Fidgeting. Tired of the feeling she got when the subject of homosexuality came up in the class. Which it had four weeks running. The sound of her own silence made her feel like a coward.
``If something comes up today, I am going to say something,'' she vowed.
It did, and she did.
``I can't be quiet anymore,'' she began, the words sticking in her throat. ``You don't know who I am. I'm a lesbian.''
The discussion went on without missing a beat. And one elderly woman - who Carol thought was extremely conservative - reached over, grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze.
It was a liberating feeling. She had admitted she was gay, and the world didn't cave in. No one torched her home. No one challenged her. It felt good. Affirming. Hopeful.
``They just listened to me, and we moved on with the lesson,'' Carol remembers. ``It was not a major thing.''
That was the first step. Carol sensed the congregation was hungry to learn more about the topic, and she asked the pastor to have a study on the subject of homosexuality and the church.
A gay man who worked in an AIDS ministry came to speak. But congregation members who came to listen started interrogating him, attacking his homosexuality.
``But the Bible says. . . '' they interrupted in the middle of his speech.
``But God says. . . .'' when he began again.
``Right here in Scripture it says. . . .'' a third time.
They didn't let him finish. He finally sat down, defeated.
Alice and Carol felt crushed. Alice approached one of the women in her Bible study class after the study. ``What you did to that young man was unconscionable,'' she said, a prickly heat rushing over her. ``I am a lesbian, and what you did to him hurt me.''
The exchange opened a floodgate of emotion. Homosexuals were no longer ``out there'' but among the congregation. Church meetings were held to discuss the issue. Accusations were leveled that a gay had ``sneaked onto the session.'' Anger was vented that Carol and Alice had taught Sunday school classes and served communion.
People called them an abomination; others reminded the critics that Alice and Carol were the same people they were the year before.
Some friendships ended. A very good friend of Alice's wouldn't speak to her anymore, and turned the other way when she saw her or Carol walking down the church hallway. But others supported them. One young man confided in them he was gay, and hadn't yet had the courage to tell his parents.
In the months after that, Alice and Carol noticed they no longer were called to serve communion. At first they were told their names just hadn't come up in the rotation. But after more than a year went by, they asked what was going on.
The session agreed to address the issue. In a letter hand-delivered to them in April, the elders told them they could no longer serve communion.
There would be other slights. Carol stood up in church one Sunday during announcements to let the congregation know about a Presbyterians for Gays and Lesbians meeting. Soon a petition was circulating asking that members not be allowed to use the words ``lesbian and gay'' during church services. Nor to post items on the bulletin board in church.
Now, four years after they came out at Bayside, Alice and Carol feel some frustration but regret nothing.
``Many, many people have to be questioning the issues,'' Alice says. ``They have to say, `They are not the ones we see on CNN doing demonstrations. They aren't child molesters. They don't recruit. They don't have multiple sex partners. They don't do pornography.' ''
She pauses and thinks back a minute to her childhood, and her attitude toward African Americans.
``I was raised to be very prejudiced. Then, when I was older, I began to meet blacks who were smarter than me, better than me. And I thought `Something is wrong with what Mom and Dad said.'
``To me, we are not an abomination. They (members of the church) have to see God in us. They have to be questioning what the drum beat is saying. That is the hope anyway.''
Carol and Alice feel now as though they check a part of themselves at the church door.
Still they go, their twin gray heads a fixture in the front pew. Still they are friends with church members. Still they are involved.
``We feel there is purpose to our being vocal, a reason to it,'' Carol says, explaining why they haven't left Bayside. ``There are people there who support us as individuals, who believe it's important for us to be working this issue in the church.''
One Saturday night in April, Carol and Alice sat around a candlelit table with eight other people eating curried rice. Their banter ranged from serious issues to funny stories that filled the room with peals of laughter.
The gathering, called The Fellowship of the Table, was the brainchild of Rebecca Kiser-Lowrance, the wife of an associate pastor at Bayside. The idea had come to her in a dream. She'd seen all the people of the church who were looking for a place at the table, but couldn't find one. People who were struggling, people who have been turned away, people who were hurting.
People like Alice and Carol.
This was a place for them to gather, to ask questions, to go over issues, to grow stronger in their faith.
Will Kiser-Lowrance, Bayside's associate pastor, is a tall, dark-haired man with a gentle Southern drawl. As he sipped after-dinner coffee, he told a story about when his daughter was born six years ago with a condition in which her intestines had failed to develop. Alice and Carol would come over in the evenings to take care of her, so he and Rebecca could take a walk by themselves.
Emmy died when she was 7 weeks old. Will could not forget Carol's and Alice's act of kindness.
``To hear people at church call them an abomination makes me angry,'' he said. ``Before I met them, my way would have been to support gays privately but to be silent publicly, because of my job. It took two lesbian women to make a man out of me. To make me stand up for what I believe in.''
Will said one of the toughest things for some congregation members had been to square the good works and kind ways of Alice and Carol with their homosexuality. The couple's knowledge of the Scripture with their open declaration of being gay.
He said the church had stopped for a breath on the issue. But that the issue would rise again.
Many in the church are still adamantly opposed to gays in the church.
But before, homosexuals were an amorphous, anonymous group for many people of the church; now they are Alice and Carol. People capable of being hurt.
``They bleed,'' Will said simply. ``They bleed.''
The church is not the only place Alice and Carol have challenged people's beliefs on homosexuality.
They recall the different reactions they've gotten over the years to their coming out:
Alice's maid of honor, who broke off their friendship after Alice wrote to tell of her coming out.
One of Alice's sons, who says he's ``still having trouble with it,'' and won't discuss the issue.
Carol's parents who ignored Alice for years and refused to visit Alice and Carol's home.
But others have accepted them. Carol's mother who, after her husband died, became friends with Alice. And showed off birthday cards signed by both women. Three-year-old grandchild Meredith who calls Alice ``Grandma,'' and Carol ``Grandma Carol.'' Tom House and others who have who have sat by them in church even through times of controversy.
Frank Taylor, Alice's oldest son, can understand the mixed reactions. He's found himself on both sides.
He didn't question his mother's relationship with Carol until he was 25 years old and married.
After a family gathering, his wife said, ``You know, I think your mother and Carol are gay.''
``Mom? Nahh,'' he responded.
He decided to ask her himself, and went by her office at St. Columba Ministries.
He took the news hard. He felt betrayed by his mother for not telling him sooner. Angry at Carol ``for switching'' his mom. He stopped visiting them.
Finally, he went to a counselor for help. She asked him to list the things he liked about his mother and the things he didn't.
He wrote that she was a compassionate person. She had concern for people's feelings. She supported him on all the different ideas he had. She was easy to talk to. She gave of herself.
On the ``dislike'' side was only one item: her sexual preference.
``It's not worth giving her up for that,'' he thought.
Frank is now 34, long-haired, an avid fisherman, a commercial painter. At a family cookout, he talked about his struggle in accepting his mother and her partner.
``I'm kind of proud of them now, proud of both of them really. I feel like they're pioneering types. I don't have a problem talking about it any more. If my friends criticize gays, I say, `Hey, ease back. My mom's gay.' ''
The first Sunday of May Alice was not in her usual place next to Carol at Bayside Presbyterian Church. Instead she was at Squires Memorial Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, where the Rev. Susan Cothran was acting as temporary pastor.
She nodded at everyone she saw, introduced herself to people who welcomed her.
On the first Sunday of every month since the beginning of the year, Alice had found a church to attend where she could see the fruits of another civil rights movement. An African-American church. A church where a woman is pastor. A church where gays are accepted without condemnation.
She attends Squires Memorial on the Sundays when communion is served, since she can no longer serve at Bayside.
Alice worries about Bayside's stance on the homosexual issue. Worries it won't advance much in her lifetime.
``I think we are in the beginning of it,'' Alice says. ``There's not going to be acceptance unless we come out and continue to work for it.''
She and Carol are firm in their own spirituality, and in their notion of morality:
``I never thought gays were immoral,'' Alice says. ``I never put that label on them. All the church has said on the topic is, `Bad, bad, bad.'
``But somewhere along the way in all this self-discovery, I understood God's great love for me. God loved me, sheltered me, saved me. If God loves me, how could people in the church say God didn't love me?''
Alice and Carol are back in their living room for a final interview. They ponder the question of why they have opened their door to a reporter, and consequently, to the world.
``Does there have to be an answer?'' Alice asks, her brow furrowing, before breaking into a smile. ``Can I say, `I don't know?' ''
By now Alice is tired. Tired of the questions, tired of the intrusion.
``I am tired of the issue itself,'' she says wearily. ``It's so little of who I am. I'm a mother, a friend, a partner. I do ministry. I'm a homosexual. I'm a right-handed, blue-eyed old woman. To boil it down to my homosexuality is unkind.''
But Carol knows why they are coming out in such a public way. The reasons spill from her in a torrent of explanation. Teenage gays who are committing suicide in frightening numbers. Stereotypes that don't fit reality. The need for role models. The young people who have come up to them and thanked them for leading the way.
``Gay people are to blame for the way the rest of the world thinks about us,'' Carol says. ``The majority of us are invisible. No one gets to know there are people who live common, ordinary lives. And that's our fault.
``The world is a gift to us. And we can't accept the gift and hide who we are. There's no guarantee it will get better, but we can guarantee it won't get better if there are not gay people willing to be known.''
Even though she is quiet, Alice knows the answer, too. That's why she is here telling this story.
For such a time as this. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
BETH BERGMAN/Staff
Carol, left, shares a laugh with Alice. It was Carol who taught
Alice to loosen up. ``She called out in me things I didn't know I
had,'' Alice says.
Alice Taylor, left, and Carol Bayma, who have been together for 23
years, pray together before dinner, a nightly ritual in their
Virginia Beach home.
Carol puts the wine on the altar at Bayside Presbyterian Church.
She's allowed to prepare the communion, but neither she not Alice
can serve it.
Although they can't serve communion, Carol, left, and Alice prepare
bread and wine at Bayside Presbyterian. Sometimes they feed the
leftovers to the birds.
by CNB