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The Last Free Woman

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The Last Free Woman

The first words Nan McTeer ever said to me were, “I’m currently in hospice care. I have lung cancer, it has metastasized to my brain, but my mind is still okay! You’ve got a while to pump me for information.” Back in the '50s, Nan had been the girlfriend of a woman named Virginia McManus—a substitute teacher, sex worker, and celebrity, who’d written a tell-all about her life called Not for Love in 1960. Not for Love was the reason I’d called Nan. I’d suspected that Virginia (“Ginny,” as Nan called her) was a lesbian the moment I read her book, but it was a thing I thought I’d never be able to pin down, a message sent in code words and pseudonyms, received 60 years too late. Ginny had been incarcerated in the Women’s House of Detention, an infamous prison in Greenwich Village and the subject of a new book I was working on. I hoped Nan could tell me the gay side of the straightened story Ginny had written in Not for Love. But the longer we talked, the more I wanted to know Nan’s story: the high school girl who could solo land a single-engine plane on the Calumet River; the college student who was hounded out of her all-women’s school for being a lesbian; the woman who married a gay man in 1957, and a gay woman in 2013. Decade after decade, Nan lived and loved in queer women’s circles that have been only poorly recorded, when they have been historicized at all. My research into the House of D had led me to the edges of many of these networks; I wanted to hear what it was like at the center. So I called Nan back. Here’s her story, in her own words: Me? From Chicago. I grew up on the South Side. My dad was a private pilot. I solo’d on boats first, then planes, then went to Stephen’s [College] because it was an all-girl school and had airplanes. The dean of women was a latent homosexual type. Went after the gay girls on campus, and there weren't that many of us. But we did have a little group. And she was out to get 'em. She called my parents and told them I was known to roam the halls and the women were afraid of me, which was not true. In the meantime, my lover there ran away. And it just got convoluted. That ended my Stephen’s and my airplane-flying days. I went to work for Delta Airlines [in Chicago]. Chicago wasn't fun. There were some gay bars, but it was a shut-down town, especially for lesbians. The men had the Ambassador East, and they could get in their Brooks Brothers suits and congregate in a cocktail lounge over there. There was no such thing for women. The bars [for women] were really trashy. There was a little bar up on the North Side called The Midget Inn, and it was a bunch of factory workers. I remember talking to them, and especially the transvestites. What did they do? Well, they went to work, and then went home. Then they went to the bar. I thought, Well, you know, I like opera, and I like the theater, and I don't think I want to do that. When I was working for Delta, there was also Frank, a queen. He and I and somebody else went to see a Christine Jorgensen show one night. And Christine Jorgensen’s show was all gay talk, okay? The audience did not know what was going on. And Frank and I sat there and laughed. So we picked up on each other. Well, Frank was one of those queens that had to have a girlfriend, to feel better. And his girlfriend got very jealous of me. So he introduced me to Lynwood. They had been in Germany after the war together. Lynwood and I had a very special relationship. He was the brother I never had, and I was the sister he never had. But he also had a drug problem. After Ginny cheated on me, I married Lynwood. It was a marriage of convenience; we wanted to live together and I’d already been thrown out of college for being gay, so I didn’t want to upset my parents any more. Then I met BB, and BB wanted to have a relationship. So I told her, I said, “I'm not ready. Play it cool. See what happens.” And the next thing I knew, Lynwood had moved her into the apartment and we were together two, three years! We laughed about it and said, "You know, if he had not done that, we probably would not have got together." Lynwood, eventually, moved to New Orleans. He worked for one of the VIPs of Finley, whose wife did not want him to have a female secretary. BB and I moved to Houston. That was an eye opener! We thought we had died and gone to heaven. We had never seen so many gay people. The men and women mixed. When you went to a bar—and there were a number of bars in town—you never knew who you were going to sit next to. She might be a stripper, she might be a professor. You went out for the evening and somebody would say, "Well, let's go to my house afterwards." And you’d run into 20 women. The next weekend, you’d run into a different 20 women. There was a woman in town named Marion Coleman. She had a bar almost, well, until she died. But it was always a well-run, clean bar, and she protected her clients. God, she was a standby in Houston! But we had raids here, too; they raided the bars frequently. Sometimes I was caught up in it, and sometimes I managed to make it out the back door! We had one bar where the bouncer—there was a buzzer under her toe. If she saw a cop car coming, she’d push that buzzer and everybody switched partners, so you'd have men and women dancing together, rather than men and men. We had a little group of lesbians we called the Dirty Dozen, used to rent a house in Galveston and play cards, that kind of thing. You have to remember, too, I was a schoolteacher. If it came out, I could have lost my job. I'd already been through things where I was out of work and didn't know what I was going to do. Didn’t want to go through that again! So I kept my nose fairly clean. Houston had a lot of wealthy oil people. So you ran the gamut in gay life all the way up to the top—The Diana Awards [a long-running gay gala in Houston]. I was not invited into that group. But then I met Linda, and she and I had an affair for 15 years. Linda was a professional dancer, worked for Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire. We went to all kinds of parties, and Linda—ha!—she was a lesbian fag hag, running around with the wealthy men involved in the Dianas. So I spent 10 years working behind the scenes for the Dianas—dropped out of it, oh, right around 1979. I couldn't handle Linda’s drinking anymore, and we broke up. Then I met Terri. Terri and I have been together 31 years. I bought a cabin on a little private lake up north of Houston, and she had a cabin three or four doors down. I had a partner at the time, who went off, left me, and Terri’s partner went off and left her. And we've been together ever since! She's a nurse. We went to New York to get married in 2013. And now? She's taking care of me in hospice … Nan was tired when we got off the phone that afternoon, but she told me I was welcome to call again. I planned to do some research, fill out the stories she had told me, and come back with more questions so I wouldn’t be wasting her time. But a month later, on Sunday, February 13, 2021, Nan McTeer died at the age of 84. Over email, Terri told me how much Nan had enjoyed our conversations, and when I asked for her blessing to write this story, she thanked me “for bringing out the bravery, boldness, and beauty of Nan!” But really, all I did was listen. For my entire life, I have been trying to see clearer, to listen closer, to let go of what I know so I can learn what I don’t. Twenty years ago, I got two tattoos on my wrists: “see” on my left, “speak” on my right—a commitment to trying to tell the truth, or close as I can get. It’s a daily practice, like hope or abolition. For every story I wrote in The Women’s House of Detention, there are 50 like Nan’s that I didn’t tell—and a hundred I never found. Every day, something slips into history that we will never recover: a memory, a document, the sound of a dead woman’s voice. Save what you can.
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