About LesGo and Me

Anti-gay Initiatives 608/610 were good for us here in Bellingham. Having a defined enemy helped galvanize the community, which has grown steadily in visibility ever since. Many of us came out during that time. I was one of them. To tell the story of Dial-A-Dyke and LesGo, I have to start at the beginning.

I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, not the best place for a baby dyke to be a teenager in the 50s. I spent all summer at Burgess Glen, a YWCA camp in Cedar Mountain, NC, from the time I was 8 years old, even returned with children of my own. I was graduated from Greenville Senior High School in 1953 at age 16 (I had one date in high school), married at 18 (to the first guy who asked me), graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1957 where I majored in mathematics. I had a son in 1958, a daughter in 1959. I tried hard to play by the rules as I understood them: when that marriage failed, I tried again, but of course, the second one didn't last either. By 1983, I knew I didn't even want to try that again and settled into single life and my career.

I came out to myself on April 28, 1994 at an event sponsored by Hands Off Washington to educate the public about Initiatives 608/610. The meeting was held at the Mt. Baker Theatre with featured speaker Michael Goff, founder of OUT Magazine, who grew up in Bellingham. There were several other speakers that night: Deborrah Garrett, a local attorney; Sue Stackhouse, pastor of MCC; and Maureen Sweeney, an English teacher at Western Washington University.

When Maureen stood up and began to talk very matter-of-factly about her life, her partner, their son, and their neighbors, I knew. That was my epiphany. Here was a beautiful, professional woman I could identify with, and I knew in that moment, in that sudden burst of light, that she was doing what I should have been doing all along, making a home with a woman. It was a very physical experience. I could feel it in my whole body as if I had reached a place so deep I would never be the same. I was pretty sure I would fall out of my seat if I moved at all.

What made this such a profound experience is that I was 57 at the time. I had been living with a woman for 14 years, but she was my stepmother so I didn't think about one of us being a Lesbian. Until that night when my life changed forever.

During the summer of 1994, I explored the Lesbian community, joined ALPS (Associated Lesbians of Puget Sound), and attended their fall retreat at Camp David, Jr. For the first time in my life, I was at camp with 90 women, none of whom were in a hurry to get back to their husbands! Home at last!

Realizing how I had been separated from myself and from the Lesbian community by an ignorant, hostile society, I became very, very angry. But there was no one in particular to be angry with. So I had to think of a way to get even, to turn this experience into something positive. I didn't have to wait long.

In the fall of 1994, four things happened:

1. Anti-gay initiatives, which had begun in Oregon, resulted in the "Hands Off Washington" movement.
2. Rosemarie Stone ran an ad in the Hands Off newsletter announcing a group for "Over 50s."
3. Nancy Mullane held a series of Lesbian Focus Groups at the Y.W.C.A. to discuss our needs and how to increase our visibility in the larger community. At the focus group I attended, women said they wanted a place where they could meet with bulletin board where events could be posted, or at least a newsletter. That's when Dial-A-Dyke was born.
4. Lee Posthumus started a Women's Book Group, which was the official beginning of our relationship."

I knew I couldn't keep up a newsletter so I thought of a telephone line. I happened to have a second line coming into my home so I could dial into work (I'm a technical writer at a local software company), and I wasn't using it very much. I offered to put an answering machine on that line to announce events. Within 3 days, we had a digital answering machine that allowed outgoing messages to be any length. Women called in to let me know about events and I'd read the announcements on the phone line. We outgrew that system in 3 months.

Being somewhat of a techno-junky and always eager to learn new computer skills, I acquired a used PC and installed a communications card with voice mail. Now we had 10 mailboxes and unlimited outgoing and incoming message capability plus fax on demand. Welcome! You've reached Dial-A-Dyke, proudly serving the Lesbians of Whatcom County 24 hours a day.

Rosemarie's over-50s group, "The Gathering" was announced regularly and soon the under-50s crowd wanted to join us. Pat Rose and I were among the charter members. The Gathering became known as LesGo. The name was the brainchild of a guy who worked for me at DIS. I wanted a name that suggested movement and activity, and he just immediately said, "LesGo" (Lesbians on the Go) and it stuck.

In 1997, Dial-A-Dyke was joined by her sister service, LesGo Online. Women who had email but no Internet access could subscribe to the Lesbian Calendar of Events and Hot Flashes, which were emailed whenever there were new announcements. After almost 4 years of continuous service, Dial-A-Dyke was retired on July 28, 1998.

Providing these services has been my therapy, my revenge against the homophobes. My goal has been to make it easy for the women to find each other, to make it trendy to be gay in Bellingham. And it worked! One of our alternative newspapers at the time, The Echo, which specialized in classified ads, had a large Personals section that carried the LesGo Web site address every week. I heard of women who moved to Bellingham because they were looking for a town that had an active Lesbian community.

On their way out of the closet, many women listened to the line and watched the Web site for weeks before they get up the nerve to attend an event, the Lesbian Book Group, or LesGo Events, which were open to Lesbians of all ages.