This post was written by IWA Student Specialist, Abbie Steuhm.
The LGBTQ+ community has grown in incredible size and visibility in the last decade. The legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S. in 2015 was a colossal milestone for LGBTQ+ rights, and it has arguably helped in the normalization and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people nationwide. However, one may wonder about the lives of queer couples before this milestone. What did they do when they wanted to take their relationship to the next level? Did they just live together? Did they even believe in the concept of marriage? Kittredge Cherry and Audrey Lockwood’s forty-seven years together as a married lesbian couple helps answer these questions.
Cherry and Lockwood met as students at the University of Iowa.
Reverend Kittredge “Kitt” Lynne Cherry and Audrey Ellen Lockwood were both born in 1957, with Cherry living in Iowa and Lockwood living in Wisconsin. The two graduated from the University of Iowa together in 1979 with Bachelor of Arts degrees. The couple then lived together in Japan, with Cherry on a studying-abroad scholarship and Lockwood beginning her career in business, before returning to the U.S. and settling in San Francisco, California. It was in San Francisco that Cherry and Lockwood became involved in the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), one of the few Christian churches that welcomed the LGBTQ+ community. The two are now living together in Los Angeles, where Cherry continues her work on LGBTQ+ and spirituality via her blog Q Spirit.
It was in 1975 during their freshman year that Audrey Lockwood and Kittredge Cherry locked eyes with one another for the first time—and certainly not the last—while attending the University of Iowa. Lockwood reminisces on their meeting in her short article “My Summer of Love,” noting how her and Cherry “managed to get ourselves out of Burge Dorm and into the Stanley all girls’ dorm sophomore year, where we fell madly in love, as we watched beautiful sunsets from our room on the 10th floor overlooking the Iowa River.”
That love continued to flourish even as the couple traveled to Japan and then to Los Angeles, California, where Cherry was ordained as a minister for the MCC. Together, the couple advocated for LGBTQ+ rights, particularly LGBTQ+ rights within the Christian church. Cherry has written many books and articles about LGBTQ+ people’s spirituality and sexuality within the Christian church, from Hide and Speak: A Coming Out Guide (2006) to The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision (2014). One of the earliest articles Cherry was involved in was the 1989 Los Angeles Times article, “Marriage Between Homosexuals is Nothing New for Some in S.F.,” where Cherry gives the proud statement that she still lives by to this day:
“I don’t think we need the state to tell us our marriage is real. I think our marriage is just as real now as if it were legally recognized.”
Despite legal marriage equality being decades away, they were married by the Metropolitan Community Church in 1987.
Same-sex marriage at this time was illegal, and most churches refused to even marry same-sex couples in spirit, but Cherry and Lockwood found a wonderfully willing ministry through the MCC. In 1987, Lockwood and Cherry were married, and they lived together happily as one of the few lesbian couples who were proudly “out” during the time. Despite not being legally married, Lockwood and Cherry nevertheless vowed their commitment to one another under their own beliefs and religion. They lived together for the next forty years until their marriage was legalized after the Obergefell vs. Hodges decision in 2015. They continue living happily ever after in Los Angeles to this very day.
It was no doubt a long road that Cherry and Lockwood traveled to get to where they are now along with the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. Cherry and Lockwood’s photobooks gives wonderful detail and insight into the history of the LGBTQ+ community, from every cat adopted and protest marched in the fight for same-sex marriage. Such a long, winding history, and yet Lockwood still remembers her time in the University of Iowa dorms. In the last lines of her article “My Summer of Love,” Lockwood says:
“To this day I can still see the view from 10th floor Stanley, as we listened to the Brandenburg concertos, Chopin nocturnes, and David Bowie singing ‘Oh You Pretty Things.’”
Guest post by Dr. Heather Cooper, Visiting Assistant Professor in History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies
During LGBTQ History Month in October 2018, I worked with the Iowa Women’s Archives and University Special Collections to organize an archives visit for students from West Liberty High School. The several students who were able to attend are members of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), a student organization that provides a safe and supportive environment for LGBTQ youth and their cisgender heterosexual allies and raises awareness on campus about LGBTQ issues. The group’s faculty advisor, Katlyn Clark, has been teaching English at West Liberty High School for three years and is also enrolled in an English Education MA program at University of Iowa. I first became aware of this important student group when Katlyn was enrolled in my Sexuality in the U.S. course during Summer 2018. Her independent research project explored the importance of GSAs and the need to continue to develop more inclusive programming and pedagogy in the high school environment.
“Spinster, a lighthearted lesbian [card] gayme,” Iowa City Women’s Press recordsLGBTQ History Month seemed like the perfect opportunity to introduce these students to some of the amazing archival records at UI that document the history of local LGBTQ activism. I relied on the expertise of archivists Kären Mason, Janet Weaver, Anna Tunnicliff, and David McCartney to pull together some of the most interesting and engaging materials from relevant collections. When students arrived, they found a smorgasbord of documents and artifacts, including issues of the feminist journals Ain’t I a Woman and Better Homes and Dykes; correspondence and newspaper clippings related to “Rusty” Barcelo’s LGBT activism; and records from the Gay Liberation Front, one of the first student groups of its kind in the country. Students also had fun exploring “Spinster,” a feminist and lesbian reimagining of the “Old Maid” card game, printed by the Iowa City Women’s Press. David McCartney introduced our visitors to the amazing timeline of Iowa City queer history that he and Kären Mason created for the outhistory.org project several years ago.
Miranda Welch’s high school graduation cap, 2006, Miranda Welch papers
Reflecting on their visit, high school senior Miguel Solis wrote that, “… most people’s knowledge of LGBTQ+ history is mainly the Stonewall Riots and the AIDS crisis. Iowa actually has a large history for the LGBTQ+ community that most people do no not know about. … I learned [that] the very first form of ‘Pride’ in Iowa was a last-minute float in the Iowa homecoming parade.” Senior Dio Gonzales described their visit to the university as “an eye-opening experience. … My favorite part was being able to go around and see different kinds of posters, books, and magazines that were released.” In contrast to the usual hushed environment of the library, we encouraged students to talk and wander around the reading room to get a feel for different kinds of materials. Our conversations led Librarian Anna Tunnicliff to bring out a few boxes from the unprocessed collection of Miranda Welch, a student activist from small-town Iowa. Among the papers and artifacts was Welch’s high school graduation cap, bedecked in pride-colored ribbons and gems.
In preparing for their visit, Katlyn Clark mentioned that the students were especially interested in transgender history. But the nature of archive collection practices and typical end-of-life donations means that IWA and Special Collections currently have very little material on this relatively contemporary topic. That archival silence created an opportunity to talk about what it would mean to try to build a transgender archive and to document the experiences and activism of LGBTQ people today. Aiden Bettine, a History Ph.D. student, joined us to talk about their current project, the Transgender Oral History Project of Iowa (TOPI). As Aiden explained, “A primary goal of the project is to empower transgender and gender non-conforming communities to collect and preserve their own histories by training trans-identified people in the methodology of oral history.” Students later commented that learning about TOPI’s goals was a very important part of their experience at the archives.
Students from West Liberty High School’s Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) learning about local LGBTQ history at the Iowa Women’s Archives.
On the day of their visit, our discussion about creating a transgender archive offered a perfect segue to talking about how students in the Gay-Straight Alliance could start to record and preserve their own history of activism. Since the club’s official recognition in 2017, they have successfully campaigned for the creation of a gender-inclusive restroom on their campus and, every year, they organize school-wide participation in the Day of Silence, a national event that brings attention to anti-LGBTQ bullying in schools. Members of the group have attended leadership workshops at the GSA Conference in Des Moines and they regularly attend the annual Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ Youth. I wanted to encourage the students to think about themselves as important historical actors whose activities deserved to be documented and preserved. I hoped that showing them the records of other student organizations at UI would help them recognize that the work of student groups like theirs was important and would be valuable to researchers and other activist groups in the future. We also talked about ways to build their archive, such as writing down the narrative of how the group was founded and keeping records of their members, group meetings, and specific events and activities. Katlyn reports that since their visit last fall, students in the GSA have talked about creating a twice-a-year newsletter to record their activities. Reflecting on our discussion in the IWA reading room, Miguel Solis wrote, “We really just need to keep trying to make a change and leave our mark on the school so that one day we can be remembered in history and be talked about as people who made a difference.”
A special thanks to Kären, David, Anna, Janet, and Aiden for their help with this! And to Katlyn Clark, C. Blick, Jacqueline Castillo, Dio Gonzalez, Angie Meraz, Mary Norris, and Miguel Solis for joining us and sharing the amazing work they are doing in West Liberty. Hope to see them on campus as official Hawkeyes in the years to come – the future is very bright!
Heather L. Cooper, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies
“We will meet all of us women of every land. We will meet at the center, make a circle. We will weave a world we to entangle the powers that bury our children.” — cover art for WRAC’s December 1978 newsletter
Iowa City’s Women’s Resource and Action Center (WRAC) opened in 1971 as a place for women to meet about and organize around issues that mattered to them. With support from the University, members of WRAC hosted a rape crisis line, formed anti-racism organizations, and kept track of local LGBT friendly businesses and housed dozens of discussion and support groups for women from all walks of life.
WRAC published monthly newsletters for Newsletters frequently included schedules for women’s events in town, notices for
“A Feminist Prayer” from vol. 1 no 12 issue of the WRAC newsletter
for discussion and support groups, and opinion pieces on issues important to women. Newsletters also frequently included feminist poetry, such as “A Feminist Prayer,” printed in a 1975 issue.
WRAC, still on the UIowa campus, recently moved to a new, bigger location. If you would like to tour WRAC, it will be hosting a reception this Friday, July 14th, at 6pm as a part of the Iowa City Feminist Reunion.
This post was written by Christina Jensen, Student Assistant in the Iowa Women’s Archives and graduate student in the UI School of Library and Information Science.
October is LGBT history month! To celebrate, we’re taking a look at some of the eye-catching cover art of Better Homes and Dykes, from the Jo Rabenold papers.
Better Homes and Dykes was a newsletter published in Iowa City by the Lesbian Alliance between 1972 and 1982. Issues featured editorials, satirical essays, and community information. In the inaugural issue, a welcome message proclaimed:
Who are we? We are those of you that have been working women, old maids, housewives, unmarried aunts, women’s libbers, students, career women, et al. No longer content with being in the Shadows of the Feminist Movement, much less shadows to each other […] Better Homes and Dykes is for all lesbians here in Iowa City and elsewhere.
LGBT periodicals like Better Homes and Dykes were often created by independent publishing collectives, targeted a narrow regional distribution, and often existed for short periods of time. Better Homes and Dykes is one of the many examples of independent LGBT press preserved in the Iowa Women’s Archives. These documents were critical tools in early LGBT community building and remain important artifacts of LGBT history, capturing the birth and growth of the gay rights movement.
Want more? Visit the Iowa Women’s Archives! We’re open weekly Tuesday-Friday, 10:00am to noon and 1:00pm to 5:00pm.
A list of collections related to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Iowans can be found here.
The Iowa Women’s Archives and University of Iowa Archives Collaborated on the exhibit entitled “LGBTQ Life in Iowa City, Iowa: 1967-2010,” which was entered in the “Since Stonewall Local Histories Contest” hosted by OutHistory.org.
Kären Mason, curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives and David McCartney, University Archivist, curated the exhibit, which was posted along with LGBT histories from across the country on a non-profit website dedicated to uncovering and preserving the history of the modern movement for LGBTQ rights.
The online exhibit begins with the 1967 publication of The Iowa Defender, which included an article about lesbians in Iowa City. Photo from the Iowa Women’s Archives.
Rally in Iowa City to celebrate Iowa Supreme Court ruling upholding gay marriage, April 3, 2009. Photo by Laurie Haag
The Iowa City exhibit begins in 1967 with The Iowa Defender publishing an article on lesbianism in Iowa City and ends in 2010 with The Iowa City Press-Citizen naming a lesbian couple (Dawn and Jen BarbouRoske) as “Persons of the Year” for their role in challenging Iowa’s defense of marriage law and ushering in same sex marriage in Iowa in 2009. According to OutHistory.org, the exhibits are meant to be “works in progress” that continue to chronicle important events.
The curators used collections from individuals in Iowa City, the University of Iowa Archives and the Iowa Women’s Archives to compile a visual timeline of the history of LGBTQ activism in Iowa City.
Some collections used from the IWA include: Ain’t I a Woman? newsletters, Rusty Barceló papers, Tess Catalano papers, Cherry and Lockwood papers, Common Lives/Lesbian Lives records, Jill Jack papers, Jo Rabenold papers and the Women’s Resource and Action Center records. To find more collections that have materials on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activism, visit: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa/Topical_holdings_lists/LGBT.html
