MerlHistorians can get pretty jaded. Over the course of our work lives, we read hundreds and hundreds of books in our field. Does anyone need to read that much about the U.S. since World War II? Add to this the research trips to libraries or, these days, the hours at our computers looking at archives online. Often I find myself thinking "nothing new here" as I yawn my way through whatever I'm reading.
But then, inevitably, a surprise comes: something unexpected, a story with a different twist, an individual whose life captivates me.
Working on Chicago's sexual history has given me several of these moments. Merle's story is one of them.
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Merle Markland was born in 1902 into a working-class family in Cuba, Illinois, a small downstate mining community. She had an older brother and two younger half brothers, and a stepdad whom she loved dearly. Growing up, she recalled, "I'd never heard of the word lesbian or gay. I didn't know what that meant. I just knew I was different."
She played baseball with her brothers and "aggravated" them because "I'd be better than they were." From an early age, she "had a feeling for little girls." She wanted to walk them home from school and hold their hands and look after them. "I knew there was something wrong, but that was my secret. I didn't know what it was."
At this point in Merle's 1981 oral history, I remember thinking "another tomboy on the road to coming out." But then her story took a surprising turn.
When she was eighteen, her stepfather, who was a line inspector, relocated the family to Canton, Illinois. Next door was a family, the Browns, with a thirteen-year-old named Lil. "My God," Merle exclaimed, "when I seen her, I fell in love with her at first sight." Since Merle thought that Lil's older brother, Les, was a nice enough fellow, she started dating him "to be near her. So him and I, we went together. But the reason I went with him, really in my heart, was to get to be near her."
Merle and Les dated for several years. The Browns liked Merle, especially because she always seemed willing to have young Lil tag along on these dates. And Merle's parents could feel secure that Les wasn't taking liberties with their daughter, since his younger sister was with them. Merle and Les took in movies, went on picnics, and drove through the countryside—and young Lil accompanied them.
After a few years, Les relocated to Rock Falls for employment. Merle concocted a plan for her and Lil to go too. The two young women lived together, and Merle continued—at least for a while—to go out with Les.
From the beginning, Merle sensed that Lil "wasn't like me. I knew her feelings didn't run that way." But, as she said, "I was just nice to her and she gradually learned to care for me." Eventually, Merle confessed her love and, to her delight, Lil agreed to be with her.
Merle's description of this key moment in the story is maddeningly vague. I'm desperate to know more. I wish I could hear the conversation when Merle declared her love. With no words to describe herself other than as "different," how did she explain to Lil how she felt and what she wanted? Did she say something like "I love you as a husband loves his wife?" Or, "we make a good pair, Lil." Or, touchingly, "I care for you, Lil. Let's stay together."
I—and you—will never know. And, curiosity aside, it doesn't really matter. What does count is this: Merle and Lil stayed together for more than five decades. "We was never apart" is how Merle described it.
They were two small-town working-class women on their own, through the Great Depression, a world war, and a postwar decade that made war on queers. It could not have been easy. But to hear Merle tell it, their time together had more than its fair share of rewards.
First they moved to Sterling, Illinois where each got a job waitressing at a café. "We got our own place and boy, we did alright. We always made a living." When they wanted a night out, plenty of male customers were ready to escort them. "We never paid our way," Merle said. "Anywhere we wanted to go, we'd always get a date. We saved our money."
Every few years they'd relocate. "We've been everywhere," Merle recalled proudly. Once, they even got jobs on a ship. In 1952, after more than 25 years together, they settled in Chicago. For a long stretch, they worked in the establishment of a restaurant owner named Maury Saperstein. Lil was head waitress, and Merle often worked night shift.
By today's standards, Chicago in the 1950s was not a great place to be a woman-loving-woman. It was the McCarthy era, and along with the fierce anticommunist witch hunts came a "lavender scare." The Tribune was featuring articles about perverts and moral degenerates. The police raided bars at will. Yes, there was a gay and lesbian community life, but it wasn't easy to find and women had many fewer options than men. Even so, the possibility of building a network of lesbian friends was a lot greater in Chicago than in Sterling or Rock Falls.
But Merle, in her own words, "wasn't even interested." Though she claimed not to care what society thought ( "I was headstrong" ) , she worried lest anyone find out about the two of them: "I knew, for my sake and for her sake, we had to go along. As long as we was working and making a living in the straight world, then we had to be straight. When we came home and were together, that was our business. But we conducted ourselves like ladies when we was out." Lots of people believed they were sisters, "so nobody thought anything about it." As far as Merle was concerned, "we had each other. We didn't need nobody."
Today we might say Merle was deep in the closet. But Merle would have stared at you like you were nuts if you accused her of that. To this tough skinned woman, she was merely being prudent. Lil was everything to her, and as long as she had Lil, why self-disclose?
As long as she had Lil ... Soon after turning 70, Lil became sick. It was terminal, and Merle nursed her at home through the final weeks of life. Merle had loved Lil for 58 years and now, in 1978, she faced life alone. In Merle's words, "I didn't care if I died or if I lived. I didn't care for nothing. I wished God had taken me right with her... . I couldn't go to my straight friends and tell them. They didn't know how I felt. I had to keep that all inside of me."
Reading this part of the interview made me teary-eyed. What, I wondered, will this woman, who had never confided in anyone, do?
Well, this was 1978, not 1958 or 1938. In the 1970s, a new world took shape in Chicago. A cohort of activist and feminist lesbians was building community—a public community—like there was no tomorrow. Besides the bars, there were coffee houses and restaurants and newspapers and softball teams and bookstores and community centers and music concerts.
Merle went looking—through the telephone directory. "All I could find in there was gay bars," she remembered. "I'd call up and there'd be a man answering the phone, and I'd say to him 'any lesbians in there? I'd like to talk to them.'" Some bartenders just hung up, thinking it a crank call, but others engaged this strange old woman in conversation.
Finally, after months of this, she came across mention of a counseling service for lesbians. "My God, I thought I had hit the jackpot." Whenever she called, she'd get an answering machine, but "I would call, just to hear that voice, because I knew it was a lesbian talking, just to hear her voice on the recording."
One day, someone called back. She and Merle talked for hours, and soon other volunteers were calling her too. They enticed her out, to a service of MCC's Good Shepherd congregation and the social hour afterward. She asked her escort, Pat, "Are these all gay people?" Merle couldn't believe it. "I couldn't imagine it was that many. I thought to myself, "My goodness, can't be. Now figure that!" Soon she was going to lesbian bars, like His and Hers.
By the time Merle was interviewed in 1981, she had made a new life. Some of her younger friends were into the lesbian music scene and began taking her to concerts and music festivals. The first time she went to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, she was beside herself. "My God, there were ten thousand of them, just a whole ten thousand lesbians. Just think of that. A year ago, I'd give anything in the world if I could have just met one, and here they are, by the ten thousand."
It turned out that Merle had a bit of musical talent. Listening to women perform at bars and coffee houses, she spontaneously improvised her own lyrics. The younger women, Merle chuckled, "get a bang out of a woman my age getting up and singing." At the Michigan festival, she was invited on to the stage. As she sang, "Oh, I'd like to meet someone my age/So come on, baby, and give me a call," women crowded the stage, eager to hug and kiss this woman more than twice their age.
Merle's story was unique to me, a real mindbender. I say this not because there was no other life like hers, but because not many stories like this one have come down to us. Who knows how many working-class women, in small towns across America, made a life with one another? They did it without big announcements, without family dramas, and without taking on labels—or even knowing of labels—that would have marked them as evil or sick. These were queer lives that weren't so queer.
And then there's the magic of Merle's rebirth. It's almost as if she was Rip Van Winkle, who sleeps for a generation and wakes up to discover a new world. Merle took hold of it with gusto, and the way she remade herself is inspirational to me.
Copyright 2009 John D'Emilio
