LGBTQ Nation asked our elder readers to tell us how life has changed for LGBTQ+ people in the past decades, and we got a lot of responses! Here’s one of them.

Cyndia, one of our readers, sent us a detailed explanation of what life was like growing up as a “white-skinned, middle-class born in the USA privilege” and a lesbian woman in the mid-20th century. Her experience shows just how much things have changed for women in this country.

Cyndia says that she wanted to attend Princeton University and that she was qualified to go, but the school hadn’t started accepting women as students. (It would allow the first women to matriculate in 1969, and fewer women than men were allowed to attend at first.)

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Not only that, Cyndia says she remembers not being allowed to pursue a career that she wanted to in a STEM field, wear the clothes she wanted to wear, or travel alone. And she certainly wasn’t allowed to learn about various aspects of sexuality, including “consent, pleasure, respect or safety and without force, unwanted pregnancy, STDs, condemnation, ostracism and guilt.”

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In the early ’70s, she went to Canada to marry a man “to help him stay alive and out of prison.” She lost her name and any chance at having her own career, she says, and if she did have a job, “I could never expect to be paid the same as that man. I could not expect to ever have a woman boss or to be the boss of male employees.” She couldn’t even get divorced unless she could prove that her husband did something seriously wrong.

Several years later, she realized that she was attracted to women.

“Because I was a woman, I could not kiss a woman without knowing that I might lose my job, my apartment, and my entire network of social support, including family, friends, neighbors, academic mentors, and even heterosexual feminists,” she tells LGBTQ Nation.

“If I displayed any affection towards a woman, if I ‘looked like’ a lesbian, or if I simply seemed unresponsive or angry towards sexual attention from men in any public place, I might lose my physical safety. As a lesbian-feminist woman, I could not expect support or solidarity from other women when I spoke out about anything, especially about experiences of sexual abuse, harassment, or rape. Though when I did receive their support, it changed everything.”

Today, Cyndia, who’s now 75, says things are different. She and her partner have been together for 30 years, a relationship that was legally recognized in Canada on March 8, which Cyndia notes is International Women’s Day.

“We have constructed a magnificent Vancouver home, which we share with chosen family. We’re embraced by all of our biological family members and welcomed by our multicultural neighbors,” she says. “We survived suspicion and harassment at work and are retired from honored careers in elder care, mental health, and addictions. For years, we gave our hearts and souls to supporting our brothers with AIDS.”

“Because we are women, women together, we’ve made lives worth living, lives of happiness. Everything we risked and challenged and fought for was worth it. We were ordinary women who wanted to change our lives.”

Cyndia wants younger LGBTQ+ people to know: “We believed we could and we did. So can you!”

If you’re an LGBTQ+ elder and you want to share your story with us, please use this form.

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