Mona and Francis

We are all just here to walk one another home.  Ram Dass

I remember the first time I was asked.  It seemed strange.  Strange that something so integral, essential, and normal might come with a reason.  Like asking a fish why it chose water or a bird the air.  But they asked--then--and others often since.  "Where did your passion come from?"  No, that was not it.  That would have been too general.  They asked more specifically: "Where did you get your idea about gay people?"  I remember saying, "I've never thought anything else or had reason.  In fact, to me it seems you have to have reasons to think otherwise."  The question, though, made me think.  And all I had to do was think about thinking and I knew.  

When I was a little girl of the 50s, living in Shelburn, Indiana, which seemed to me the center of the Universe, we had a couple of stores in town.  There was the Turner brothers who owned Turner's Store where you could get meat, groceries, hardware, work clothes, and about everything else you needed--Walmartesque, I suppose.  And there was Buster Littlejohn's Drugstore with its soda fountain a big magazine rack (don't handle unless you're going to buy), and a Gaskins Dry Goods Store.  I don't know what all they sold, but must not have been anything wet.  And there was the Ben Franklin.  We called it ''the Dime Store'.  Among other things, they sold candy and toys.  Trinket kind of toys.  After you saved your pennies, you clutched them tightly in your hand and your mom or grandpa took you to Mona and Francis's Dime Store, and you got to see what your savings would buy.  It was a magical time in what was always to a four year old, a magical place.  Everybody in town and from the farms around town knew them.  Mona and Francis who lived above the store. Thing was, however, sometimes when people in town spoke of Francis and Mona they would smile a different kind of smile and one of their eyebrows would raise in a funny way.  My mother would wait until our conversation with the 'raised eyebrow' person was done, and after we walked away, she would say, "Aren't Mona and Francis the most wonderful women in town.  Don't we love them, and don't they love us all!"  There was no way to answer her broad, honest smile, except with a big 'yes!'

Then when I was about eight, a woman by the name of Christiana Jorgensen made the headlines.  For some reason, my mother told me her story.  Born with a birth assignment of male and serving a tour in the US Army, shy, retiring, depressed George Jorgensen, went to Denmark where sexual reassignment surgery had been done for decades, and came back Christiana, choosing her new name after her surgeon, Dr. Christian.  Her whole life could now be lived for the first time.  Falling later in love, she and the man to whom she was engaged were denied a marriage license, and he was fired from his job.  She went on to speak and educate all the US-- who cared to learn--about what my mother wanted her eight year old daughter to understand:  "Sometimes when a baby is growing inside its mother, something that usually happens one way, does not in the same way, and the baby is born with a different body than they really are.  Think what it would be like to be born with a boy's body and really be a woman inside all your life. It would be so hard, wouldn't it.  (Showing me the picture in the newspaper, she said) It's really great this worked out so well for her, but there are lots of people who think it is wrong to be who you really are.  That is sad.  It will change."

Decades later when I told my mother how these stories impacted my life, she said she couldn't even remember them.  I told her I was not surprised.  It was just Sheila being Sheila.  My mom being my mom.  

The song is right.  Rogers and Hammerstein knew.  Though their South Pacific song was criticized by a whole host of the United States when it became popular in the 50s, it was correct.  It said you have to be carefully taught to hate and fear people your relatives, neighbors, and society hates.  It doesn't come easily.  It takes so much reminding and finger pointing--to do anything but respect and see that differences in people make us only richer.  Anything else has to be spoken and demonstrated often and loudly.  It has to create such a fuss.  Because truth, richness, love, beauty and such richness are normal.  If it is Truth it is simple-- not always easy, but simple.  Truth works for that change about which my mother spoke.  Without all the fuss otherwise, it takes only a couple of comments--and living them out.  For me, it just took a mom, Mona and Francis, and a chance to live!

Blessing and Peace,
Yvonne