LGBTQ+ Washtenaw Oral History Project - Lynden Kelly

Sun, 06/30/2024 - 3:25pm

When: June 10, 2024

Lynden Kelly, who goes by Kelly (she/her), was born in 1954 in suburban Detroit. In 1972, she moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan. She became involved in countercultural organizations and collectives such as the Ann Arbor Tenants Union and the People’s Wherehouse, a wholesale warehouse for the Michigan Federation of Food Co-ops. She recalls visiting LGBTQ+ spaces in Ann Arbor and beyond, including the U-M Gay Advocates’ Office (now called the Spectrum Center), Canterbury House, the Rubaiyat, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. From 1990 to 2003, she and business partner Kate Burkhardt ran Common Language Bookstore, which catered to feminist and LGBTQ+ readers, on Fourth Avenue. Kelly also discusses gender roles, coming out to her parents, marriage equality, and co-founding Ann Arbor Queer Aquatics (A2QUA), a queer swimming group.

View historical materials.

Transcript

• [00:00:11] HEIDI MORSE: Today is June 10th, 2024. I'm Heidi Morse, an archivist at the Ann Arbor District Library, and I'm speaking with Lynden Kelly as part of the LGBTQ+ Washtenaw Oral History series. To start out, could you please say and spell your name?
• [00:00:28] LYNDEN KELLY: Lynden Kelly, L-Y-N-D-E-N, K-E-L-L-Y. I go by Kelly.
• [00:00:37] HEIDI MORSE: Great. What were your parents' names or your guardians' names?
• [00:00:42] LYNDEN KELLY: My dad was John Kelly. My mom was Margaret Kelly. I have two brothers.
• [00:00:52] HEIDI MORSE: If you're comfortable sharing, what year were you born?
• [00:00:55] LYNDEN KELLY: I was born in '54. I'm turning 70 this week.
• [00:01:02] HEIDI MORSE: Happy birthday.
• [00:01:03] LYNDEN KELLY: Thank you. My brothers and I grew up in a suburb in Detroit. I spent my childhood in Royal Oak, went to high school in Birmingham, upper middle class family, really. Came to college at Michigan against my parents' wishes. Have been in Ann Arbor ever since 1972.
• [00:01:38] HEIDI MORSE: That's a great overview. I'm going to ask just a few demographic questions. First off, this is just to get familiar with how you identify. How would you describe your racial or ethnic background?
• [00:01:54] LYNDEN KELLY: White.
• [00:01:56] HEIDI MORSE: What about--[OVERLAPPING]. Sorry?
• [00:01:58] LYNDEN KELLY: Gringo.
• [00:02:02] HEIDI MORSE: How would you describe your sexual orientation or gender identity?
• [00:02:07] LYNDEN KELLY: Lesbian.
• [00:02:11] HEIDI MORSE: Do you have preferred acronyms like she/her, they/them?
• [00:02:15] LYNDEN KELLY: Yeah. I use she/her.
• [00:02:20] HEIDI MORSE: What's your religion, if any?
• [00:02:22] LYNDEN KELLY: None. I grew up in a Christian milieu, but my family was not religious and neither have I ever been.
• [00:02:40] HEIDI MORSE: You said you went to U-M. Did you pursue any additional education after college?
• [00:02:46] LYNDEN KELLY: No. Getting through college was enough. I didn't go straight through. At a certain point, I stopped because I really didn't understand why I was doing it or what I was doing. Then I just finished because I was so close to finishing. I thought, well, this is stupid, I should just do this. No regrets. I feel lucky that I had the opportunity to have a liberal arts education, and I really was able to just pursue my interests, but I was not trained to do anything by college.
• [00:03:33] HEIDI MORSE: What was your main occupation or career path?
• [00:03:39] LYNDEN KELLY: Couple of main things. One was I worked for 13 years at a place called People's Wherehouse, which I'd like to talk about more, which was a consumer-owned food warehouse owned by the co-ops and buying clubs in Michigan. It was worker-controlled, worker-managed. A place where, well, it was outside of the capitalist model, let's just say. I have a lot more to say about that when we get to that part.
• [00:04:25] HEIDI MORSE: Good. We can get into that more later. Are you retired now or when did you retire?
• [00:04:33] LYNDEN KELLY: I worked at People's Wherehouse, and then somebody who I worked with there, Kate Burkhardt, and I opened a gay-lesbian-feminist bookstore, Common Language, which was right downtown on Fourth Ave and we ran that store for 13 years before we sold it to Keith and Martin from the Aut Bar, and they continued it going. After that, my mother had developed dementia and I was her caregiver, and then I ended up working at the place where she lived doing programming for people with memory issues and retired from there. Have been retired now for five years.
• [00:05:28] HEIDI MORSE: Last couple quick questions. What's your marital status?
• [00:05:33] LYNDEN KELLY: I'm married now. My partner and I were able to get married when marriage became legal in Michigan.
• [00:05:44] HEIDI MORSE: Do you have any children?
• [00:05:47] LYNDEN KELLY: No. No kids. Just a cat.
• [00:05:54] HEIDI MORSE: Cats are important. Now I'd like to zoom in on your childhood and talk about that a little bit. Growing up, you said, in suburban Detroit area. What was your family like when you were a child?
• [00:06:19] LYNDEN KELLY: Well, let's see. I'm the oldest kid, a brother two years younger and a brother three years younger, and the neighborhood was very kid friendly, full of people who were our same demographic, so white, het families with kids. The kids played around with each other. We had a park in the neighborhood we could goof around at. Pretty idyllic childhood, I would say. When we moved to Birmingham and I was older, and I was always a tomboy, and most of the kids in my neighborhood were boys, so that worked out great for me. I just hung with the boys and played a lot of sports and did stuff. But as gender roles started to become more important socially, I started not fitting in so well, I was kind of bored, really, in high school. I didn't really have a place that I fit very well. This is a time--I would say I never heard the word lesbian until I was probably 20. I had no idea that that was a thing, never heard the word gay, never understood that homosexuality was a thing, and that was the term of the era.
• [00:08:04] LYNDEN KELLY: This was also a time when I went to high school, girls, if your skirt was too short, you got sent to the principal's office, and you had to kneel down and if your skirt didn't touch the floor, when you knelt, you got sent home, and that happened all the time. There was a lot of policing of gender roles and any looseness. It was an uptight period. This was in the late '60s. In my sophomore year of high school, girls were allowed to wear slacks for the first time. That was a huge liberation. Some of my worst memories of childhood were clothes shopping with my mother because she wanted to dress me up, like a little girl doll, and I hated that. I hated everything I had to wear. It was an identity crisis every day to get dressed in a skirt or a dress and tights. I hated those tights. That whole thing was unpleasant. In high school, in my sophomore year, when girls could wear slacks for the first time, that was a huge thing for me. Huge that you didn't have to wear a skirt. Seems like a a stupid thing. Big difference. When my parents were not supportive of me not moving out of the tomboy style, they didn't get it. They didn't know anybody who was gay. This was a very Republican and straight-square environment. I just did not fit in there. My main strategy all through high school was just wait it out and get out of there. I forgot what the question was. I'm not sure I'm answering it.
• [00:10:44] HEIDI MORSE: Absolutely, you are. Did you have any role models at the time or someone you looked up to--I wish I could be like so and so, or friends that you felt you had community with?
• [00:10:59] LYNDEN KELLY: No, I would say no, not at all. I had one aunt who had been a social worker before she had kids. My mother had been a teacher before she had kids. But there was nobody I can think of. No women who had a job. The women stayed home and took care of the kids. The men went to work and didn't have too much to do with the kids. Did I have any vision of where I was going after that? No. I would say no. My parents had an expectation of me that, I was the one of their kids who was smart, I was the one who was going to be a professional. But honestly, their expectation of me was that I would be Laura Bush. I would wear a nice little blouse and stand quietly next to her husband and smile and be supportive or something. But they did think that, okay, if any of their kids was going to be a lawyer, I think that's what they wanted of me or what they expected of me is that I should be a lawyer or some professional. However, to their credit, they never put that on me. They didn't push me toward that. They didn't give me the message that I wasn't okay if I didn't do that. They really were pretty hands-off of, your life is your own when you become an adult. Make your own choices. I say that, but they definitely had expect[ations]. It was not in their paradigm that I was going to be a lesbian, and that was not okay with them.
• [00:12:55] HEIDI MORSE: That might lead us to talking a little bit more about your experience of coming out, whether to yourself or to others. What time in your life was that, and how was that for you?
• [00:13:11] LYNDEN KELLY: I came to college at U of M. I didn't have any inkling about myself. I still didn't know that being gay was a thing you could do. At the end of my high school senior year, I had started going out with a boy. I had a boyfriend, which, in retrospect was really great because when I came to college, I had a boyfriend who went to a different college who I never saw and never talked to. But it didn't give you status to have a boyfriend, but it took the whole dating thing and looking for a boyfriend or a girlfriend, took that off the table. It was a liberation, really to just get to know new people, goof around without sexual expectations being part of the game at all, which I think was really great. I didn't understand that at the time, but I also was not interested in that at the time. I was never really girl crazy, was never really interested in dating anyway. I was really lucky in my freshman dorm. There was a group of us, five guys and five girls who became friends with each other and became a family with each other. There weren't gender expectations between us. People didn't go out with each other, it wasn't that kind of a thing. It was more that we were just for each other. We hung out together, we went to listen to music together, we went to movies together, we are still friends to this day. We actually now get together every other year still--not still, because it started again when we were in our 40s. But when I look back on my life, I realize, first of all, I was really lucky. We all realized we were so lucky that we found each other and had each other. That was just luck, and that we really liked each other and were the same style. That really set an expectation for me in my adult life that men and women can be together, and be friends, and be co-workers, and be collaborators, and be on totally equal footing. That really at that time, was not common, sad as that is. That was pretty radical. It was not usual that women and men could be friends. Period. There was always an expectation that there was a sexual something that was going to mess things up. I feel really lucky that we found each other.
• [00:17:03] HEIDI MORSE: That's a great time in your life to find a group of people like that.
• [00:17:11] LYNDEN KELLY: As much as U of M is. [PAUSE] Reboot. U of M has always had this thing about excellence and the leaders of the West and all that kind of crap. I'm sure that was around us in that era. This was 1972 till 1976. But that was just not in our little social circle. That elitism wasn't part of what we were doing and what we thought of ourselves. In terms of people being competitive with each other, there wasn't that layer of what, I think, can sully some people's college experiences. This was also the time of Vietnam War. It was during the draft, that was predominant in the culture, certainly for the men in our group. I mean, they all had draft numbers and they weren't students, they had to deal with the state to that extent, which was very real. But also in Ann Arbor at that time, It was really a period of explosive growth. And counterculture was flourishing. SDS had been formed here. Women's liberation was happening. The People's Food Co-op had formed. People's Fruit and Vegetable Co-op was happening. People's Free Clinic was happening. Ann Arbor Sun was like a counterculture newspaper that was published weekly. Yippies had a house over on Hill Street. It was really a time of questioning authority and looking at, what are the social structures in our lives, and do they have to be that way? No. People really truly looking for ways to not really speak truth to power as much as create an infrastructure to make a better world. I think that being upper-middle-class people, being white, being at University of Michigan, the people who were in our environment were people who had been told their whole lives that they were good at school. They were good at whatever they were good at. People really had a belief in themselves that yes, I can start a free medical clinic. I can start a food co-op. Yes, I can be part of that, and I want to be part of that. That was the cultural milieu that was available in Ann Arbor if you wanted to live that way. For me, that was way more interesting than school. I just eked along and eventually got my degree, but I was way more interested in being part of the Tenants Union than I was in being part of the linguistics department.
• [00:21:17] LYNDEN KELLY: My whole first year of college, I still didn't know that being gay was a thing. I had my whole rich life going on. My second year of college, the five of us girls who had met in the freshman dorm, rented a house together. The five guys rented an apartment together, and we did stuff with each other all the time. But the first day that we were moving into that house, which my mother freaked out when she saw that house when she brought me to college, I had gone home the summer my freshman and sophomore year, and this house was a pit. It was a pit. When I look back on it too, I would be appalled, but it was full of garbage and she about freaked out, but she didn't. But anyway, what I was going to say is. I walked in and a friend of one of my roommates was there sitting in a chair who I'd never met before. I looked at this woman, and I thought, wow, that woman is a lesbian. I thought. Wow. I really want to be around her. I spent the next couple of years of my life in pursuit of her. She was not a lesbian. Her twin sister was a lesbian. I think she would have been a lesbian except she was going to be damned if she was going to be like her sister. She was determined to not be gay, but she and I had a thing that we continued in each other's orbit for a couple of years. Somehow, I don't really remember how I understood that lesbian was a thing, but I also knew that there was what we called at that time the Gay Advocate's Office. When I look back in the records of the Spectrum Center, that was never officially its name, but that's what everybody I knew called it. They had this funky little office upstairs in the Michigan Union, there were these goofy little hallways that were half floors, and it was going into Hobbit land or something, like this secret place. You went back all in there. I found the Advocate's Office. Jim Toy was there then. There wasn't a Lesbian advocate, there was just him. He had a library of books. I never became involved with any of the support groups or anything that they did, but I found a book. The Word is Out was the name of the book, which was also a PBS series, too. I took that little book home and I read it, and it was gay and lesbian people talking about their lives. That was when I realized, oh my gosh. This person--oh, they hung around with their gym teacher. Oh, they were in sports in high school, and they just were around girls. And oh, blah blah blah. What do you know? I am gay. So then I took the little book back so other people could find that book, too. That started this funny little period of my life that lasted probably a year where I knew I was gay, but I didn't know any other gay people, except this pretend lesbian who I had a big crush on. That didn't distress me that much. I still had a whole other life, but I was interested in meeting other gay people. Finally, really by chance-- At that time, was the Rubaiyat even open? There was a gay bar in town, The Flame. That was men. Did I ever even go there? I don't think I even went there. I wasn't somebody who was just going to go stand around in a bar. They did have pinball, but I didn't care about pinball, so that wasn't really a draw. They had really cheap drinks, but I didn't really care about cheap drinks, so that wasn't especially a draw. But by luck, I was involved with the Tenants Union because the person who was my landlord, all the people all the different houses that rented for her were organizing a rent strike. Somebody who was a paid part time, work-study person at the Tenants Union was a lesbian. So, finally, I found somebody who--she was hooked into lesbian things in town. So found my people, and it was good. It was fun.
• [00:26:47] HEIDI MORSE: Tell me about when you got connected with that community. What social life or activities did you pursue? How did you meet other people?
• [00:26:59] LYNDEN KELLY: What was going on then was Canterbury House was some Christian church in town, and they had dances every Friday night. She took me to that dance maybe once or twice. That wasn't our main thing. But there was a bar called the Rubaiyat. Gay night, I think it was only one night a week. I think it was even a goofy night, maybe Tuesday night or something like that. But that was religious. We were religious about that. I and of course, everybody I knew--because everybody I knew I knew from there--went there every week. This was in the disco era and they had a dance floor and oh, my god, this is when you could still smoke in bars, too. That was disgusting. You always had a headache the next day, and it wasn't from drinking, it was from all that smoke, which I contributed to. That was one main thing that, I guess if I were going to define the community, that was a big part of it. There were also some women in town who had started well, back up a step. This was at the beginning of when women's music was starting to happen. There was a record company called Olivia that had been formed in California that was releasing Meg Christian and Cris Williamson and other what they called it women-identified music. I might have called it lesbian music. I don't think so. But so some women in town had organized women who were a little bit older than me and a little bit more together than me. Namely they had money, and the wherewithal to put together money, get in touch with the record company, get in touch with the artists and book concerts and book venues, so that when Cris Williamson would come to town and Meg Christian would come to town and do concerts here, and there. Those were a way that women who lived all in Ann Arbor and Ypsi got to know each other, at the concerts. Also, in the backdrop of this, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival had started every summer having a festival which grew to be a huge thing. Have you heard of this? You're younger.
• [00:30:02] HEIDI MORSE: Yeah. I have.
• [00:30:04] LYNDEN KELLY: Did you grow up in Michigan?
• [00:30:07] HEIDI MORSE: No. Minnesota.
• [00:30:09] LYNDEN KELLY: Did you know about Michigan before?
• [00:30:14] HEIDI MORSE: I knew about it, just because of my interest in feminist and lesbian history. I'd heard about it before moving here.
• [00:30:26] LYNDEN KELLY: The festival, everybody in Michigan calls at the festival. Everybody outside of Michigan calls it Michigan. But this was a week-long thing every summer, that was amazing in many ways, good and bad. These women got together and bought this land. I don't know how many acres, hundreds of acres of land in the wild in Michigan. Once a year, they would go there and build up this whole village. All the cooking was done over fire. They were feeding, I think at its peak there were 8,000 or 9,000 people who came to the festival. They had the giant stainless--and vegetarian food. That was a big part of it. This was the epitome of the lesbian separatist movement. They did some amazing things. These stainless steel dumpsters, they would start soaking beans overnight in those 24 hours ahead of when they were going to be served. Then imagine how much firewood it takes to boil a dumpster full of water to cook beans in there to feed the people. The logistical feat was incredible.
• [00:32:09] LYNDEN KELLY: They built up these stages, built up the sound system, the sound was spectacular. Imagine it's a beautiful summer night, they timed the festival to be at the same time as the Pleiades shooting star event early August. You're laying out in this field in the pristine Michigan wilderness, looking up at the sky, watching these shooting stars and a really clear, perfect sound system is surrounding you with music. It was an incredible feat. They did some really amazing things, like how one year a woman parachuted in at the opening ceremonies, and one year at the opening ceremonies at the main stage, they had a fashion show, which at first, I thought, what the hell, what are we having a fashion show? Are we not just encouraging the system that has oppressed us? But then I saw people start walking down that center--there was a big center aisle thing that went out into the audience, people coming off that stage and their stuff down that runway, feeling like they were the greatest thing in the world and feeling beautiful. For the first time in their lives, for a lot of these people, this was the chance for them to feel beautiful and have the crowd agree with them, that they were really beautiful. I'm talking about fat women, skinny women, young women, old women, disabled women, it was beautiful. It took my breath away. That showed me in ways, that empowerment can come from really small things and really small wounds that people have carried their whole lives. There's a lot of work to make a festival like this, to feed 5,000 or 8,000 women. There's a lot that goes into that, so everybody had to take a mandatory two hour shift at the kitchen and a mandatory two hour shift doing something else that could be the kitchen or maybe not be the kitchen. But actually, this wasn't even the kitchen shift that I was doing this that there was this giant pile of watermelons around a tree, and the task was these watermelons had to be brought over to the kitchen so they could be sliced up and handed out. How are you going to get these watermelons over to the kitchen? We made a fire brigade line. The women were throwing the watermelons across the line down to the kitchen table, and there were these two older women who I'm pretty sure were not lesbian. Now, you didn't have to be lesbian to go to the festival. But you had to be a woman, and you had to be women-born women, which was a controversy that we'll also talk about. But these women, I'm pretty sure were straight, and how they found out about it, I don't know and how they got the nerve to go, I don't know because they weren't really the style of hip feminist professionals. They were like, suburban ladies. But they came and they got in that line, and they had clearly not in their lives ever expected themselves to be able to do something physical like that. We were throwing those watermelons along, and you can't break stride when you're doing that, or the whole line falls apart. As they were doing that, they started laughing. This was not an expectation they had of themselves that they were going to be able to do this, and they were doing it, and they were getting giddy with it, and they were so thrilled with themselves. It was so much fun to see them. Again, it made me realize, oh my god, these women are leaving this place different people than when they came in. Just in their understanding of what their capabilities were. It was beautiful. The festival was full of things like that that happened, but it was also flawed in that, for instance, after we had the store, my partner and I went and sold books there. We had some privilege, and there was definitely a hierarchy of privilege at the festival. The workers, namely the people who came early and set up the whole place. They did an amazing thing, but they definitely had privilege. We as vendors had second tier of privilege. A main way that that manifested itself is that you didn't have to wait in line for food, you got to cut to the front of line to get your dinner. But my partner had a 3-year-old son. The first year we went, he was two, and in the earlier years of the festival, the rule was, no boys. Boys were not allowed. Boys over three were not allowed, so that was terrible for her and her family. First year, he could come, and it was really fun, and he knew a lot daughters of friends of ours who had had daughters. The girls could come and play and they could go everywhere, but certain areas that were restricted for the boys. Then the boys, they quarantined the boys in a certain part of the festival, and they would say, oh yeah, but they go on field trips. They go into town and they go to the water park or something. And there was a growing attempt over years to not make it be such a terrible place for boys, but the boys were always second class citizens, and that was same paradigm, different guy on top. What was the world that we were changing? That was always the conflict. So as beautiful as it was and as great as it was for the women, and then as time went on, Michigan had the strictest ruling of any of the other festivals about women-born women only. That was problematic. I was always very conflicted about that.
• [00:40:06] HEIDI MORSE: Yeah, I know I had heard about, that issue with the festival. I hadn't thought about how it impacted families like that, so that's really interesting.
• [00:40:16] LYNDEN KELLY: Yeah, so really, what it meant is that if you had a son, you couldn't go. Unless you wanted to subject your son to feeling bad about himself. That was a really, I think it was an unintended consequence, but also, I guess, a little bit of a lesson for all of us about what are the consequences of making really hard line rules. The Festival, I think I felt bitterness toward it for a long time. The older I get the more I realize that the achievements, that the Festival accomplished are remarkable. It went on for, I don't know how long, 20 years? I don't know how long--were remarkable. Women came from all over the world. I mean, when we sold books, it was such a blast to sell books there because I mean, you have all this lesbian fiction, and that's great, and everybody, everybody who likes fiction loves lesbian fiction because it's our stories, coming out stories, blah blah blah. We also had all this feminist theory and, you know, more serious nonfiction and fiction by women writers, which especially the nonfiction, these women from around the world didn't have access to this. These women from Australia and New Zealand and Switzerland and Germany, they would just eat this stuff up, and it was so much fun to be able to say, have you seen this? Have you seen this and what about this? A way of seeing people come together around books, I guess. That was a big thing for me since my introduction to being gay was through a book. I guess I understood the power of a book and was lucky in my life that I was able to pass that on to others. I remember the opening ceremonies the summer that East Germany and West Germany had reunified, and so they're from East Germany and West Germany walking down that runway together. There was one year where Black women and white women from South Africa were together and walking down that runway together. It was a big force in the lives of everybody in that era. That was also the era when there were a lot of women's zines and magazines. People were able to really connect with each other and then meet each other there. It was a remarkable thing.
• [00:43:45] HEIDI MORSE: Speaking of the zines and books, and I know you've already said you ran, or co-ran, Common language Bookstore for 13 years. Can you talk about what led to you being part of that bookstore, if you wanted to talk about the People's Wherehouse? A little bit more about your career.
• [00:44:08] LYNDEN KELLY: Yeah. People's Wherehouse was essentially a giant food warehouse. We shipped pallet loads of food to people all over the state. It was a worker-managed collective. I wasn't there at the very beginning, but it started, I think with five people. By the time I got there, it was in a bigger building, so it was a giant warehouse building. We had made the decision that there would always be more women than men in the workforce. To this day, I think that's a formula that works great. Maybe there'll be a time in your lifetime that that's not so necessary anymore to be in the majority. We pretty much always had close to half and half. Everybody did the same jobs. Everybody traded jobs. My favorite job there was driving the forklift, I loved driving the forklift. I still do. We had this way of sharing the work that every quarter I think it was--I forget how often we did this, I think it was four times a year, not twice a year--you would bid out different aspects of the work so that, I don't need to go into all the details of how that happens, but suffice it to say that all jobs were shared. All jobs were rotated. Especially the floor manager job. This was the most brilliant thing we did, is that we had a four-week trucking schedule. We had this protocol where one week of the four weeks of the cycle, one person would be the floor manager. Second week would be a different person, the third week, it would be a different person, the fourth week, it would be a different person. Everybody stepped in and out of that supervisory role. Those four people shifted every four months or three months, whatever, however it worked out. I'm really proud of that, and I'm really proud of how well that worked. I wish that model was easily transferred to other things because I think workers are better workers when they know what it's like to be a supervisor, supervisor are better supervisors when they know what it's like to be the worker, and just in and out of those roles was brilliant. For me, in terms of gender roles, etc, not all the women who worked there were gay. A lot of the women who came there and weren't gay when they came there, were gay when they left there, but that's a different story. But that same empowerment, so we would hire women who were not especially butch, and especially used to working physically that much. But the job was that you were building up pallets of 25- and 50-pound bags of things and cases of juice, and you had to get strong, 40-pound blocks of cheese. Job made you strong. At the end of the day, you build up these giant pallets--four foot, five foot pallets of food--and you see the whole from the warehouses filled up with these pallets waiting to go out on the trucks the next morning, or you were the truck driver loading these trucks and unloading this stuff to people. Women who came in not feeling especially powerful, physically, did that job for a little while, and pretty soon, they start thinking of themselves that wow, look what I can do. Really, for me, I never got over that thrill of looking at that stuff and thinking, "Man, that is something. I did something here. That was cool." In terms of why I feel lucky in my life that starting in college, I had these group of friends that were men and women who were just friends and there for each other. Then I went to the Wherehouse and had this group of men and women who were co workers and worked out the physical work together, worked out how we're going to get this done, the managing part of the work together. Always, the expectation of everybody at the table was an equal. There wasn't status around being a man or being a woman, especially. It would be interesting to ask the man if they felt that same way. They felt like it wasn't okay to defy a woman. I don't think they would say that, but I don't know that I can really speak for them about that.
• [00:50:25] HEIDI MORSE: That's fair.
• [00:50:31] LYNDEN KELLY: Yeah, I'll have to ask. I still see some of those guys around. I'll have to ask them. After about 13 or 14 years of that, they were starting to be--So the Wherehouse was worker-managed, but it was owned by the coops, like the storefront co-ops, but many more buying clubs. Buying club is a group of people in a church who decide they want to buy and build together and break down their orders together. This was in the late '70s, '80s where there was really a recession in Michigan so buying clubs were a big deal for a long time, especially with middle class and lower middle class towns and areas. It was a little bit of a social conflict between the owners who were pretty conservative, and, these crazy hippies in Ann Arbor who were running Wherehouse. At a certain point, well, in the heyday, the money was flowing so everything was great when the money is flowing. But as the recession started ending, and we weren't growing and the money wasn't flowing so well, there started to be friction between the board and the collective that was running the business. And first, they fired the collective and hired this guy from Kroger, who was never the right answer, and created a lot of antagonism really with the workers. Then they hired this other guy who was kind of a jerk from one of the storefront co-ops who thought he knew everything, and yeah. This guy said to me one time, I forget what the issue was that that it came up around, but came out that he called me a true believer because I was a true believer in the co-op movement, and he told me I was a sucker for believing in the cause, sort of, and I just thought, this is the way this is going and maybe it's time for me to start looking for something else. Another woman I worked with there, she and I left and started the store. Now, mind you, all this is happening in the context of a greater world where there's this expectation in the culture that you can do whatever you want, you just have to try. So if you want something to happen, do it. Kate and I, I don't even know how we had the idea to run a store. There had been some other women had started a bookstore which was failing and we kind of looked at each other and said, well, could we do this? Yes. Have either of us ever worked in retail before? No. Have either of us ever, I mean, we've been in bookstores, but did we know what we were doing? No. Did we know what to expect? No. But did we think we could just do this? Yes. I mean, how hard could it be? It was kind of like the Wherehouse, you bring books in, put them on the shelves, you sell them out, you take the money, and hopefully everything works out. It did work out, actually, for 13 years. It worked out. But the way it worked out... By that point, she had two kids, and it really wasn't enough money to support a family. The way we were running the store, at least to support two full-time adults, one of whom had other obligations, I could I could get along without making a lot of money, and I didn't need to, but she did. So after 13 years, she left the business after maybe 10 or 11, she left the business, and I kept it going for a couple more years till I realized that it wasn't as much fun doing it by myself so it was time for me. And at that point, my mother was starting to have dementia, and I was starting to feel tied down by having retail hours and needed to do something different. But I do feel like I have always been really lucky in my life in that I was able to do something that I cared about doing that I felt was making the world a better place and I was able to sustain myself by doing that and, that's really a privilege to have work that you care about. You probably know that.
• [00:56:33] HEIDI MORSE: I do. What impact do you feel that the bookstore had on the LGBTQ+ community in Ann Arbor? I saw an ad in a magazine about Lesbian coffee hour and an interview you did with Leslie Feinberg, I think. Was it a space that people came to just to hang out? Did they only come to buy books? What was the vibe of the store?
• [00:57:05] LYNDEN KELLY: Mixed. We were lucky that we started the store at a time when there there was a feminist, there were women's bookstores, that was a thing that had happened across the country so in bigger towns, mostly, Chicago had Women & Children First, Oakland had Mama Bears, Minneapolis had Amazon Books. There was a network of stores who also were in touch with each other and also had the Feminist Bookstore News was at a trade journal really for feminist bookstores, all of whom had sponsored gay and lesbian stuff. [LAUGHTER] I'm just remembering. Ann Arbor's a place where people come from out of town a lot and there was this woman who was walking down the street one time with her boyfriend and she sees the store, and she says, "Oh, look, it's a woman's bookstore," and she turns to him and says, "and you can't come in." Fortunately, I was in there, and I saw that whole interaction so I could run out there and say to him, "Yes, you are welcome to come in, please do come in." We came out of the era of lesbian separatism, but neither Kate nor I were politically inclined toward separatism, and our store was always, from the beginning was for women and men--for lesbians men and feminists of all types. When we first opened up, our tag line, it was "Common Language, a bookstore for women and their friends." And we had this cute little, logo thing that was--there's a Mexican artist named Rini Templeton, who had taken the copyright off all her stuff, and there were a whole bunch of people all huddled together, and we just thought that was so cute and so clever and so welcoming and so great. And there were a couple of young gay men at the time who used to come in the store a lot. I mean, we always had from the very beginning, we had lesbian fiction, we had gay men's fiction, kind of front and center displayed so that from the street, you could see that, this was a place for both. Finally I said to one of the guys one time, they were very friendly and, really into reading and literature and stuff. I said, "Well, how come we don't see very many men coming in here. The lesbians, for sure, they know we're here and they come and blah blah blah." And he said, "Well, don't you understand why?" I said, I didn't know what he was talking about and he said, "Well, it's your name. This is a bookstore for women and their friends. Men see that and they think, oh, this is not for me, I'm not welcome here." We had intended that to mean women and their friends, you are the friends, come on, but they showed us that that's not the way that was being heard and so we dropped that tag.
• [01:00:57] HEIDI MORSE: Did that change anything about who was visiting the store?
• [01:01:04] LYNDEN KELLY: Yes. I think to some extent, but I think that what changed things, even more than that, is that at that time, there were a lot of men's magazines that were porn, basically. They were not hardcore porn, but like Tom of Finland and there were men's magazines. But what changed it even more was when we started renting videos, and we rented gay male porn. That's what got the guys to go.
• [01:01:48] HEIDI MORSE: [LAUGHTER] Gotcha.
• [01:01:51] LYNDEN KELLY: We had a kid's section too. As time went on, we also added sex toys, but that was never as rockin' a section as I thought it would be.
• [01:02:08] HEIDI MORSE: That's funny. You'd think it kind of fit with the vibe, but--
• [01:02:13] LYNDEN KELLY: Yeah. It may be that we didn't really have a chance to develop that before, it was just a couple, maybe two years before we closed. I think Keith and Martin had a developed section, I believe, after they took the store over.
• [01:02:38] HEIDI MORSE: I was curious. I haven't learned a lot about it, but I've heard there was, I think it was called Womanspace Bookstore, maybe in the '70s in Ann Arbor, did you have any familiarity with that?
• [01:02:54] LYNDEN KELLY: I do know some about that. Woman's Space was, I'm pretty sure there were never employees of Woman's Space, but it was run by a large collective of 15 or 20 people who rented a small space, first on Liberty, upstairs from Sam's, where Sam's is now. Then when they built the federal building, all those buildings got changed, and they got kicked out of there and ended up renting a space across from now where People's Food Co-op is on Fourth Avenue, across the street from there and upstairs, there was a space that Woman's Space was in it. I only went in there myself a couple of times, so I don't know how much stuff they have. My sense is they couldn't have had too much stuff because I don't think they had money really to put in inventory. I know that they had big issues around were men allowed in the store or not. "But men need to access to this information, too. They need to expand their minds." "Well, if they want to expand their minds, they can go to U Cellar. They have other avenues to get this stuff. We want this to be a safe place for women to come and blah blah blah." We started in 1990, that was probably in the early '80s, I would say, maybe late '80s even before they closed down. The whole separatist question was a big one for them.
• [01:04:55] HEIDI MORSE: Yeah, just curious. That's interesting.
• [01:04:59] LYNDEN KELLY: The logistics of 16 or 20 people deciding how the place is going to run. I would say likely 16 opinionated people about how things should go and what they should care on. Who's taken what shifts and blah, blah, blah.
• [01:05:20] HEIDI MORSE: So we've kind of covered your career. [OVERLAPPING] Go ahead.
• [01:05:35] LYNDEN KELLY: We tried to make space available. We didn't do this, other people came and did this for us, especially this one guy named Bob, I forget his last name, but fixed up the whole basement, cleaned it up and plywood-ed it up and helped establish a meeting room. We had two separate locations. In the first location, we had a back room, so anybody who wanted to meet there could meet there. Book clubs could meet there, like political action groups could meet there. It was a space that was just available for the community. This was before the Internet too, so this was before Amazon Books too. Amazon Bookstore, the women's bookstore, yes, but Amazon Books wasn't around yet, to answer a previous question. So for people to find out about--this was also early on in the AIDs crisis--for people to get concrete information about what safe sex meant. You couldn't go to the Internet and find that stuff out, but we felt like that was our obligation. That was our reason for being, was to make this kind of information available. All the regular stuff about coming out, yes. That there is such thing as gay, and there is such thing as gender roles, and there are such thing as children's books that don't have to have gender roles in them. All this nonfiction stuff about the history of gay America and etc. That was kind of our mission, but also part of our mission was also, so information was one thing and providing a space for people to use. I guess, a third space. Coffee shops weren't that ubiquitous at that point in time, either. Those spaces got used some, but not as much as I thought they would.
• [01:07:46] HEIDI MORSE: At that point in Ann Arbor, was there still a bar scene?
• [01:07:53] LYNDEN KELLY: The Rubaiyat kept going. I'm not sure when the Rubaiyat closed, but I guess another thing that I felt about a mission of the store is that we were right on Fourth Avenue. We were right downtown, and part of that was intentional. That was a way of making a statement of saying, we belong here. We're part of this community, and we are shoulder to shoulder with everything else that's happening downtown. We never got vandalized or anything like that. Only once our landlord came to us and said, "I'm not asking you to change anything, I'm just telling you, I thought you might want to know that a lady has come to me and complained about your window display." We had a giant window in the front of the whole front of the store was a display table. I can't remember exactly what was in there, but I remember that the whole display organized around the book, Our Bodies, Our Selves. Like what mother wouldn't want their daughter to have that? What's the complaint? What's the problem? But it makes you realize that people can make a problem. There are people who are threatened by women's empowerment. That was the complaint, but she never came to us directly. The Landlord, Gary, was embarrassed about having to even say something, so that was good.
• [01:09:43] HEIDI MORSE: Yeah. Do you want to tell me--this is a jump, but I don't want to forget to ask. How did you meet your spouse? Do you want to tell me more about that?
• [01:10:03] LYNDEN KELLY: Sure. Before I forget though, I do want to make sure I say one thing about my parents. At a certain point in time, I think I had gotten a girlfriend at that point and I came home for Christmas, and I was going to come out to my parents. I told my dad and he flipped out and said, "Don't tell your mother, don't tell your grandmother, don't tell the boys." I was a little bit shocked because, I was excited about the whole thing, and I expected him to be excited too. But that was very clear. That put the kibosh on that and then that led to a whole kind of estrangement between us. Not total estrangement, but I just thought, you have your life, you don't think I fit in it. I have my life, clearly, you don't fit in it, and I just carried on. About one or two years later, he called me up and he said, "Come home right now." I think my mother called me and said, "Come home right now." I didn't have a car, so that was a challenge, but I said, "Well, what's the deal?" "We want to talk to you about something." "Well, can you tell me when it is?" "Yes. Your lifestyle." I said okay, here we go. I borrow somebody's car, I go home. We have this big blow up fight all night where they kept saying, "You have a problem and you have to get it fixed," and I kept saying, "You're left handed, you can't try and be right handed," and they'd say, "You have a problem, you need to go to therapy." Finally, I agreed to go with my dad see a therapist. We go see this therapist who he finds. The therapist is a woman who sits us down. We have this big chat, at the end of the hour or whatever, however long it was, therapist says to us, "Well, your daughter seems pretty clear that she's a lesbian, and she seems to be pretty comfortable with that. You, however, have a really big problem, and I think you need to continue with therapy and deal with your feelings around this." That was the last that was ever mentioned in my household. However, and here's what I wanted to say, I was probably 23 or something. I spent the next probably 40 years of my life not including them in my life at all, keeping myself separate from them. There were some bad scenes that had happened around, my brother got married, my parents told me I couldn't bring my girlfriend who was a very serious relationship and we were living together at the time. She couldn't come to the wedding. I went without her, felt bad about that for a long time. Basically, I kept them out of my life. In retrospect, I regret that. I regret that I wasn't mature enough to understand that what being gay meant in their paradigm was really different than what it meant in my paradigm, and they couldn't see it and I couldn't forgive them for not trying, and in the end, I felt like that was just wasted time. That if I could have been more mature... I felt like I was right. I still feel like I am right. But I'm really grateful that they lived long enough that we got over it. That in the end, he was able to say to me, "I'm proud of you, you've done, we really like Kate"--my wife now, they really like her and they're really glad. They came to accept me and that's a big thing. I didn't realize when I didn't have it, I had this attitude of well, "Fuck you, I got my life and I'm doing fine, I'm living the life I want. I don't need you." In fact, I didn't need them, but it would have been nice to have them, and that was just a waste to let that much time go by. Ironically, in the end, when my mother had dementia, I was her caregiver. There were decades where I thought, I am never going to forgive you. But when it came down to it, what the hell. What's the point of living from an attitude of hate? I am grateful that we were able to reconcile and that that's not nothing, that's something to pursue. I guess, if I had advice to give people, make sure that you're on your own two feet and you feel that you're not vulnerable to them. But once you feel secure in yourself, reach out. Don't cut people out of your life.
• [01:16:29] HEIDI MORSE: That's great advice. Thank you for sharing that.
• [01:16:39] LYNDEN KELLY: My first relationship lasted, I don't know how long, 10 years and really, I thought we would be together for life, but we aren't. Then I was single for a while and that was when we had the store and everything, and then I met my now-wife when I was, how old was I? In 2000, so 20 years ago, when I was 50, late 40s, probably, we got together. She actually was also a book person. She had come from a college bookstore in Massachusetts and moved to Ann Arbor, and we met through mutual friends and were together for, I don't know how long, 10 years or something until we were able to be married. I was pretty ambivalent about getting married, actually. But she had a good job with a company that had health care and that was persuasive. When you've lived together for 10 years, you have a house, you have a life, you are married. And then to do the legal part of getting married, I was very comfortable being on the outside of the establishment--I was much more comfortable being on the outside of the establishment than she was. However, concrete things like health care, dental care, Social Security, persuaded me that I was a fool so we got married. And actually, what I have learned since being married is, when you say "my wife," everybody you're talking to understands exactly the relationship. When you're calling the plumber and saying, "I won't be here, but my wife will be." They know exactly what you're talking about. When you go to the doctor and you say, "My wife is in the waiting room. Could you go get her?" Everybody knows exactly what the relationship is without you having to say anything beyond that. I have found that to be handy. Even in situations like you're playing pickleball and you say to the other people, "Well, I have to go, my wife is waiting for me," or whatever. It's a way of coming out naturally and people understand exactly what you're talking about immediately, and it gives your allies a way of being on your side, and just getting the whole scene.
• [01:19:50] HEIDI MORSE: And what's her name?
• [01:19:52] LYNDEN KELLY: Kate. My partner at the store was a different Kate. My wife's name is Kate also.
• [01:20:05] HEIDI MORSE: My goodness. We've covered a lot. I want to ask you a little bit more about living in Ann Arbor or Washtenaw County generally. This could go back over the decades you've lived here, it could be what's changed from then to now. What is the sense of community that you've felt among LGBTQ people here in Ann Arbor? Have you ever felt that you've personally experienced discrimination for your sexual orientation or gender identity?
• [01:20:50] LYNDEN KELLY: No. I have not. I think a big part of that is that I've chosen to live in Ann Arbor, and that's part of the reason that I chose to be in Ann Arbor or where I could be out and that wasn't a battle. Back let's say in the late 1970s, maybe 1980, my girlfriend at the time and I had a van and drove across country in the van. I'm very anglo looking, not too butch. She's Jewish, a little bit rounder than me, pretty femme and we went through Canada and we came back through the US. At that point, 1980s, it was really interesting because people would try and peg us but they couldn't figure out what we were to each other. A lot of times people would say, this is at the gas station or at the camping place where we would stop. "Well, you must be sisters." We didn't look anything alike and we would just laugh and say, "No, we're just traveling together" and we didn't come out at that point, didn't quite feel safe to come out randomly to people you didn't know in a foreign country or in a strange town. As a marker, how things have changed. But in Washtenaw County, I've always been out to my neighbors and never had friction. For five or eight years or something, my business partner, Kate, and her partner and their son who was five, from the time he was five till he was kindergarten to fifth grade, we owned a house together and lived together. He was going to public school. I wasn't that much a part of that, but they were taking him to school in I don't know, when was that, 1990. It was not that common to have out parents at school, but they always had support from teachers and the principal. The two of them had a Girl Scout troop, Kate coached the little kids' basketball teams and other kids who would come over to our house. One kid's mother had an issue and didn't like that kid coming over to our house but aside from that, no I have never run up against any overt discrimination around being gay. Partly, I think, I don't know if this is true. I also have always I guess made a little bit of a pact with myself that I was always going to be out. Certainly at the festival, even in the '90s, you would see people who clearly in their day-to-day life were not out, and they got to the festival land, and they just went crazy. They were wild with the freedom of being able to just be themselves and I remember thinking wow, what a price they are paying to have whatever, to have the job they have, maybe to be able to keep their kids, whatever that, it is not worth having this week of absolute freedom to put yourself in a box for the other 51 weeks of the year. I know that I'm lucky that I've been able to be in a place where I could be out but I also have made part of the trade-off you make is that you don't make any money. You work a job where you can call the shots and be yourself and be whatever, but you're not making--the whole time we had the store, I don't think I made more than $20,000 a year. Then in my next job, maybe I made $30,000 a year. And no regrets. I feel I have had the privilege of having work that I cared about and feeling I was able to push my little corner of the world in the direction I thought it should go. I didn't have a church, so there was nobody in a church that could hurt me. Certainly, I didn't have kids with a man who, I mean that's another place that people can really be hurt. I didn't have a job where I wanted something from somebody that they could keep from me. I was able to engineer myself into a sweet spot.
• [01:27:30] HEIDI MORSE: Can you tell me about your T-shirt?
• [01:27:34] LYNDEN KELLY: Oh yeah! A2QUA. Does it show?
• [01:27:43] HEIDI MORSE: Ann Arbor Queer Aquatics?
• [01:27:45] LYNDEN KELLY: Does it say "We can't even swim straight?"
• [01:27:48] HEIDI MORSE: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:27:51] LYNDEN KELLY: A couple of years after I had the store, there was a guy who I knew just because he came to the store sometime, and he was involved in a adult, gay swim league all around the country. There were these teams. He he had moved here from DC, and there was a big team in DC. ACDC [DCAC] I think was their name. He said, "I'd like to start a swimming team in Ann Arbor, but I don't want it to just be men so I'm hoping that you will spearhead this with me and if a man and woman start it, we're more likely to have an integrated group." Really on his initiative, we started this team and started swimming every Sunday at Mack Pool, Fuller in the summer, for I think we made it 35 years. We swam together every Sunday. Made it through COVID. In the early years, I would say the first in the 90s, there were meets all around the country. We went to the Gay Games in 1994 as a team with a whole bunch of other people, Team Detroit. There were people in Detroit who had organized, at that point in time, there were gay bowling leagues, there were gay square dancing clubs. There were gay walking groups, there were gay bicycling groups, there were gay running groups and people from these groups organized together and went to the Gay Games in New York. That was a blast. And we went to Montreal to a meet one time. Some of these guys went to some place in Ohio, they went. I didn't go on that one. We hosted a meet one time. We rented U of M's competition pool and hosted a meet there. It's a way of chronicling the way the culture has changed because I think we started it in 1993. I would say for the first ten years, people came to A2QUA to swim as a way of meeting people because they didn't want to have to go to a bar. And it was also a really nice way for gay men and lesbians to get to be friends. I'm still friends with some of these guys from this group because the men's community and the women's community weren't very integrated then, partly because women, there was this really strong sense of separatism in the women's community, but also, naturally, people in their 20s, if you're gay, you're not looking for--the gay men weren't looking for women, the women weren't looking for men. We just developed separately. There was a bunch of closeted guys who would come and swim with us. There was one guy who came, this was so cute. He was probably 18 or 19, and he had found out about A2QUA and he wanted to come, I can't remember if he lived with his grandma or his grandma was just a big part of his life. She didn't feel it was safe for him to go and be around all these gay men. She wanted to make sure this was going to be an okay place for him. She came and she sat on the pool deck and knit for the whole hour, when he first came but, a lot of closeted guys came because they didn't feel safe being out generally. We rented the pool, so it was, nobody from the public was around, it was just our own little safe place. As time went on over the 30 years, that just became less important in Ann Arbor to have that really segregated space that people could come to and have an opportunity to meet each other. The Aut Bar came around during that time and that made a difference. But it is an interesting profile. By the end of our 35 years or whatever it was, there were as many straight people who were swimming with us just because they wanted a good workout as there were gay people who were coming because they wanted to swim with gay people. But we did a pretty great thing and actually, one of the things I'm proudest about A2QUA is that one of the straight women who swam with us for a long time got pregnant and had a kid during our period of time, and she suffered with really extreme postpartum depression and extreme OCD, pregnancy-initiated OCD. She said that swimming with us, being around these gay people who are just totally out about this is who I am, gave her the strength to just be totally out about, "I have OCD. This is what's going on in my life, and I want you guys to know it." And helped her through that period and she said, "Yeah, I really learned a lot from you guys". I felt proud about that too.
• [01:34:16] HEIDI MORSE: That's great. Final question, unless you have more to add after. When thinking back over your entire life, what are you most proud of?
• [01:34:42] LYNDEN KELLY: I'm proud that I've been able to be out in my whole life. I've been able to do work that I thought was meaningful and been able to stick to that. That's a lot.
• [01:35:08] HEIDI MORSE: Is there anything I haven't asked about that you'd like to add?
• [01:35:15] LYNDEN KELLY: I don't think so except that libraries are really important. Libraries and archives are the repository of a lot of stuff and, myself included, when you want to find out something and you don't feel like you can ask your parents or ask your teacher or ask your friends, being able to go to the library and look up, what does homosexual mean? That's a really important thing for a community to offer people. Thank you.
• [01:35:50] HEIDI MORSE: Well, thank you for taking the time to share with us and to tell your story. We really appreciate it.
• [01:35:57] LYNDEN KELLY: My pleasure.