Getting Us Here
scrappybadger August 30th, 2008
Lots of things have been trying to get me back to this blog lately — the Democrati
c Convention, thoughts about how to sort out my hectic life, a friend’s blog. It took a piece of sad news to make it happen, though. Piig emailed me a very short news clip about Del Martin’s death this past week. I did a quick Google search, and to my surprise, lots of news outlets had picked up the 
story. Few of them, however, said anything more about her than that she married her longtime partner Phyllis Lyon this year and that together they had formed the Daughters of Bilitis. That hardly sums up the life of a woman who came to mean so much to so many lesbians.
Both Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon worked tirelessly for lesbians specifically and women in general. What started as a small social network called the DOB became a national effort to link together lesbians who found themselves isolated by a sexist and lesbophobic society. Martin, Lyon, and
women who worked with them insisted that lesbians be visible, that our histories be uncovered, and that we be able to form strong social connections with one another. The Ladder, the print periodical developed by the DOB and initially edited by Lyon, did just that.
Perhaps the most important, or the most visible, aspect of Martin’s and Lyon’s lives for lesbians of my generation is their more than half century 
long relationship. Indeed, their relationship itself is iconic. Many lesbians and gay men have looked to Martin and Lyon as an example of the lifelong bonds that same sex partners can have. Sexism, homophobia, and the kind of 
poverty experienced by many lesbians (and, to a lesser extent, gay men) all contribute to making decades-long relationships even rarer for lgbt people than they are for our heterosexual counterparts. The not-so-cynical part of me has always found some happiness in the idea that patriarchy, and all of its accompanying garbage, couldn’t destroy something that was good.
In one of my Women’s Studies classes this week my students read the essay “A Day Without Feminism,” and we talked about how many things we owed to feminists. I am thankful for the many things they did to make my 
life easier, and I am particularly thankful to lesbian feminists who made the world better for me in a multitude of ways. Their work is neither underappreciated nor forgotten.
Notes:
1. Photos stolen from various websites that stole them from various other websites, etc.
2. I couldn’t find any pictures of one woman without the other.
3. Equality California has done a nice job of detailing Del Martin’s activist contributions.
