Before Logan Square became trendy and hipsters clad in skinny jeans walked down the tree-lined boulevards, Mary Morse and Joanne Bristol fell in love and made a home there with a hive of honeybees on the balcony overlooking their backyard.
Morse is now deceased. Bristol, only 59 years old, suffers from a rare, devastating neurological disease called progressive supranuclear palsy. The disease makes it difficult for Bristol to speak, let alone walk, and when describing her condition, she said with great effort that she feels locked inside herself.
This brief account unlocks the story of the life Bristol and Morse made together. It honors the love between them.
In the context of gay and lesbian history, it's useful to mention why both women moved to Chicago independent of each other in the mid 1970s. In some sense, they came here to be free. In college Bristol read the seminal book Lesbian Women, which exhorts all women who love other women to move to big cities. With this in mind, she secured an internship at Michael Reese Hospital because, in her words, Chicago seemed like a big enough place. Her partner, Morse, moved to Logan Square in her mid-20s to be a community organizer and stayed, living on the same street for 30 years and settling down in a Victorian worker's cottage that she restored herself. Before arriving in Chicago, Morse was a bit of a wanderer, from working on a Navajo reservation to being among the first U.S. residents to visit the People's Republic of China when it reopened to the world. In other words, after all of her travels, this place became Morse's home.
This sense of home only deepened when Morse met Bristol through a gay and lesbian country dance troop called Steppin' Out. Although they each had had other girlfriends in the past, it became clear soon after their first date for Valentine's Day 1993, that Morse and Bristol would become life partners. On that first date, Bristol offered to go to Morse's house in Logan Square to give her a massage. Friends of the couple, Elizabeth Monk and Jayne Doyle, recounted, "Morse reported that Bristol left an overnight bag on the porch in case she needed it, which she did!"
Bristol laughed when friends characterize the relationship as a massage that lasted for years. Within weeks of the Valentine's Day massage, Bristol and her Siberian husky moved into Morse's worker's cottage. Bristol recalled that her relationship with Morse fit like a slipper after standing in heels for too long.
And she remembered the butterflies in her stomach when they started their life together—and the assurance she felt in Morse's arms. It was the kind of relationship where she pinched herself to make sure the whole thing was happening. She loved Morse's no-nonsense and easygoing attitude, how she didn't give a damn what others thought. In return, Morse doted on Bristol, who seemed to shine in Morse's presence. A good friend, Kathy Munzer, told Windy City Times, "Their love for each other was palpable."
One might say that Bristol and Morse were complements. Both came from rural towns where neither quite fit in. Both were reared in staunchly Methodist families and shared a love for traditional Protestant hymns like "Hymn of Promise" and "It Is Well with My Soul." As feminists, they exhibited the tendency to be strong-willed, but each in a different way. With an activist streak, Morse had a love for politics, and her sister, Penny, recalled that she was "passionate." With Bristol's sense of determination, even in her present illness, her brother, Harry, described her as "tenacious." Being complements, they were also different. On a purely visible level, Morse's short, spiky hair and bottle-cap glasses acted as a kind of foil to Bristol's bright brown eyes, sweet smile and ladylike prettiness. And whereas Morse was energetic and funny and loved to play the accordion at parties, Bristol listens in a way that is quietly beautiful.
As dance partners, Morse was usually the lead, Bristol the follower. They became expert ballroom dancers and liked to dress in fancy clothes. Morse often wore men's vintage outfits, sometimes a tux or silk smoking jacket. Bristol dressed in long, flowing skirts and gowns. Morse's sister, Penny, remembers that at a family wedding, the disc jockey appeared uncomfortable with two women together on the dance floor. He kept playing the music faster and faster. But Bristol and Morse stepped in time, each smiling into the other's eyes, and danced as fast as they could until the music was done.
Regarding honey, Morse was the original beekeeper in the couple. Bees fascinated her, and she loved their hard-working, communal attributes. As a joke, she sometimes opened the door to company in her white beekeeper's suit. Around the time she met Bristol, she tried her hand at urban beekeeping with a movable frame hive in a white wooden box on the back porch. Initially, she kept her beekeeping under wraps for fear that people in the neighborhood would object to the practice. But as the years passed, neighbors commented on how abundantly the flowering trees blossomed. And the couple's backyard became covered in azaleas, peonies, lilacs, daffodils, daisies, white roses, purple phlox and trumpet vine climbing up the siding of the house. When honey harvest time came in August, Morse extracted the golden stuff into glass jars and slapped on a label reading "Homemade Logan Square Honey."
On the art of beekeeping, Bristol went along for the ride, both figuratively and literally. One weekend during the hot summer, Morse and Bristol were transporting a hive in the trunk of their car from the Chicago suburbs when the bees got loose. One landed on Bristol's face, then Morse's. Soon enough, the whole swarm was covering the windows. The couple stopped at the home of their friends to borrow sheets to cover their faces and drove home. According to Bristol, no one was ever stung. She said, "If you are gentle, bees are gentle."
To friends, particularly those in the gay and lesbian community, Morse and Bristol were known for fantastic parties, and for opening their home to those who were not celebrating the Holidays with family. They decorated extensively for Christmas—always with a big, brightly lit tree standing in the bay windows of the front room—and asked partygoers to bring funny, unwanted gifts to exchange. Together, Morse and Bristol, like so many same-sex couples, redefined traditional notions of family.
Then five years into the couple's relationship, Morse was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of 6 percent. She went through several rounds of chemotherapy and sought alternative remedies. By all accounts, she had a good outlook toward the illness. The cancer went into remission but kept resurfacing, usually in the winter when snowflakes started falling. Bristol recalled how she cringed when she felt the cold weather coming.
During this time, Morse heard that a church in the neighborhood called Grace United Methodist was getting a reconciling, LGBTQ-friendly pastor. She started to attend and invited the pastor, Carlos, to her house where they had long conversations, and she asked pointed questions, like how to reconcile mainstream Christianity's masculine God with feminism. During their conversations, Bristol busied herself in the kitchen, skeptical of the politics of the church she was reared in. Further, all of these conversations on life and death were too difficult. So, Morse told the pastor to speak louder, proclaiming from the front room, "I know that she is listening."
Bristol just wasn't ready to say goodbye. And neither was Morse, who kept going. Even when the latter was unable to work, she would stop by the church with her tools to fix the stained glass in the door of the sanctuary or refinish the wood of the fellowship hall. And the cancer did not diminish Morse's sense of humor. Jim Nerison and Doug Mann, friends of the couple, remembered one Sunday when Morse went up to the altar to take communion; she returned with a big handful of bread, declaring, "Well, here's my breakfast."
Every August, Morse continued to harvest honey. And the couple went birding and camping, taking friends on Bristol's birthday in January to a cabin in Wisconsin. Friends said that even when Morse was ill, she led everyone on a hike through the snow and ice. While others slipped, she remained sure-footed. Friend Jean Maloney recalled that all of Morse's doctors were amazed at how long she lived.
Eventually, though, Morse could not hold on and passed away in May 2006. Before she left, she and Bristol went to the Methodist church to have a ceremony. They sat on the altar and the pastor covered them in a blanket—something with a vaguely Native American print. It was on the surface pitched as a ritual of healing but all present knew that the deeper purpose was to declare that Morse and Bristol were married, despite ecclesiastical doctrine or the multifarious prohibitions on such marriages promulgated by the state and federal governments. Morse also asked the pastor to watch over Bristol after she was gone. Then lore has it that Morse, on the day she passed, got up from where she laid and walked through the front door of the house into the spring morning.
As Morse requested, the pastor, Carlos, watched over Bristol. When Bristol began falling four years ago with no reasonable explanation, the pastor helped her to stand back up. When she was diagnosed in the fall of 2010 with progressive supranuclear palsy and afterward when her mobility decreased to the point that she now has to be carried, the pastor answered Morse's call to be there.
Bristol said she feels Morse all the time—more and more every day. She recalled a story from the first weeks after Morse was gone, when she and friends were sitting on the front porch of the worker's cottage in the neighborhood where Morse lived for 30 years. The wind blew through the leaves of the catalpa trees across the street and someone, although no one remembered who, said it was Morse dancing.
There is no doubt in Bristol's mind that they will see each other again. She said the first thing they will do is dance together. In the meantime, the little bluets—wildflowers that Morse planted in the front yard—are coming up after what seemed like an endless winter. And the bees return.
