ju s t ou* T J an u ary 1991 T 1 3
Donna Cooper
,
Celebrating three generations o f women. She her mother and
her grandmother all support and cherish women
onna Cooper was there when Boise
held its first Gay Pride march, and
she was in good company. Her
mother was there, too. So was her
grandmother. They sat at a table,
answering questions, talking about the links be
tween them—three ■— — —
— ........
generations
of
fem inists,
three
generations
of
women who sup
port and cherish
women.
Cooper and her
A N N DE E H O C H M A N
mother are lesbi- _______________________
ans. Her grandmother wholeheartedly supports
them both. That support fuels Cooper's vision o f
family—a form that fits her life now while hold
ing tight to history, repeating the circle o f gen
erations.
Cooper, 27, works as development coordina
tor fo r the Cascade AIDS Project. On a recent
morning, she was at home, struggling with the
language o f a grant proposal, trying to achieve
the necessary formality while writing in concrete,
real terms about gay male sex.
Her manner is mild, thoughtful, direct. She
sips at a cup o f Earl Gray tea as she talks about
family—the one she was given, the one she hopes
to create. She thinks about having children,
probably in the next fe w years. Her mother en
courages such thinking, Cooper reports with a
laugh. I f Cooper had a child, her mother noted
after that day in Boise, there would have been
four generations at the city's first Gay Pride.
D
hen I think ‘family,’ I probably
think o f my mom first. I was
very much a wanted child; my
mom had difficulty getting
pregnant. She was a traditional
middle-class mother at the time. She didn’t work,
and I had immense quality time with her.
“Then after that I feel sad. Because under
standing that I am from an alternative family
really excludes me from the middle-class Ameri
can idea of family. No matter what my family
docs now, we will never be mom-and-dad-and-
kids-and-two cars.
“I knew I was a lesbian when I was 9 or 10.
I did a lot of private agonizing about it. I said the
word to an adult when I was 13— ironically
enough, to a lesbian teacher. She was afraid of
getting busted for contributing to the delinquency
of a minor, so she took me to a bowling alley,
where we couldn’t be recorded, and talked to me
about what it meant to be a lesbian.
“When I started coming out at 13,1 knew that
it was very unlikely that I would ever create a
traditional family. I knew that it would change
the texture of my immediate family, that it would
change my relationship with my mom and dad
and brother. I didn’t know then that my mother
was a lesbian.
“I was 16 when she officially told me. But
my lesbian friends and I had a bet going for a
long time. We used to joke about it—'yeah, my
mom’s a dyke’—because she had this friend in
Boise who she spent about $90 a month talking
to on the phone. They wrote these long, long let
ters to each other that they exchanged about
twice a week. That woman, Darlene, is her lover
now. They’ve been together about 10 years.
“I had been aware o f my sexual identification
W
with women for a very, very long time. I was
always very fascinated with sex, very curious. I
knew that my response to women was entirely
different from my response to men. But I did feel
a profound loneliness. It was one o f the things
that kept me from being comfortable being a les
bian for several years.
“Until one morning when I was on my way to
school. I was 1 3 .1 was tying my tennis shoes. I
just realized— a profound moment for me— that
lesbians tie their shoes. We do all the ordinary
things. There is this part of us that’s different
from mainstream culture, but really the larger
part o f us is not very different. That was a first
step toward maintaining some sort o f comfort
with my identity.
My grandmother is a
very extraordinary
woman. I think in
another generation
she would have been
a lesbian.
“Originally, I was not fond of [my mother’s]
partner. I was jealous. My mother, who had lav
ished a lot of attention on me, was suddenly dis
tracted. It did mean a disruption in my family.
W hen my aunts and uncles were getting d i
vorced, I always had this kind of smugness. My
family was intact; my mom and dad loved each
other; neither of my parents was messing around.
They had this integrity that I thought would be
everlasting.
“I was so disappointed that I was off-base on
that one. And I was angry for a really long time.
It’s probably been just in the last two years that
I ’ve come to terms w ith .. .the whole dissolution
of my family and have started understanding that
Darlene has become another parent for me. She
is somebody I can rely on.
“ [My mother and I] are closer now because
I ’m no longer rebelling against everything that is
on this planet. I do think that w e’re closer be
cause both of us are lesbians.
“My mother has a whole bunch o f things I
don’t have— having been married, having her
kids. But we do have that essential thing— the
whole com ing-out process, making decisions
about our level of comfort about being ‘o u t’ It’s
funny; she’s becoming more out and in some
ways I ’m becoming less out.
“ My grandm other is a very extraordinary
woman. I think in another generation she would
have been a lesbian. I ’ve never met a woman
who is more woman-identified, despite the fact
that she always says John Wayne could park his
boots under her bed.
“She really has built her whole life around
women. She was really active in Theta Rose, the
women’s offshoot of the Oddfellows, and in Girl
Scouting. She organized a Thanksgiving dinner
in the basement of her senior citizen retirement
complex for 25 gay people. They came and had
dinner and played Trivial Pursuit. She’s really
become part of the fabric of gay and lesbian cul
ture in Boise.
“One of the ways it comes up, that exclusion
from the Great American Family, is that some
times I try too hard to create something that’s
equivalent instead of being satisfied with what I
have. A lot of times I feel really angry because,
statistically, few of us are living in those tradi
tional families anymore.
“It makes me understand that we have an
obligation to tell each other what our families are
really like and to stop trying to be the Brady
Bunch and the W altons. We really need to be
honest with each other.
“I very much would like to have kids. I think
a lot of straight women have kids because they
just find themselves pregnant. I wish it would be
as easy a s .. .just driving along the road one day
and saying: ‘Oh, I ’m pregnant. Guess I have to
accommodate.’ As opposed to having to plan:
Am I making enough money to support a kid;
what if my partner and I break up?
“If nothing else, I think I want to have kids so
I can send them to my m om ’s for a month in the
summer because she’s very into kids. She dotes
on my brother’s children. I feel some sense o f
wanting to have kids for my family. It goes back
to wanting to mark those milestones, the tradition
of my mother and my grandmother, to pass that
on to somebody else, to give someone else the
quality of attention I got from my mom.
“My mother is making a baby afghan as we
speak. So I know exactly how she feels about it.
O aim tcm
C H IN E SE R E STA U R A N T
ix ffl
She asks me about [having a child] practically
every third time I talk to her on the phone.
"My partner’s not into it as much. I at least
hope that once I make the crucial decision and
actually become pregnant that some of those hard
edges will soften. My partner is considerably
older than I am, 21 years older, so from a really
practical standpoint, our life expectancies are
different
“My preference would be for her to want a
kid as much as I do, and for us to enter into a
fairly traditional parenting role— well, I guess
it’s not so traditional— where we’re equally in
vested in the welfare o f the child. I think we
would have very different things to offer a child
in terms of the way we think about the world.
But she doesn’t feel that way and, biologically,
there’s a limit. I have to decide at some point
“My grandmother is 7 7 .1 do feel some desire
to have a child in the next couple of years partly
based on her life expectancy. I really want her to
be able to be there for some portion o f that
child’s life.
“ Recently there was something going on; I
was really upset about something. I called my
mother at 6 am to bitch and cry on the phone for
an hour and a half. And she was fine. The door
is always open. If I lost my job and all my money
and was homeless, the person I’d call, of course,
would be my mom. And she would take care of
me. Not that different from how she took care of
me when I was a kid. And someday I anticipate
taking care o f her that way. It would be very
important to me to return that.”
GRAND OPENING
. DINNER for 2 *10»
Choice of TWO OF THE FOLLOWING, Szechuan Beef, Kung Pao Chicken,
Barbeque Pork with Broccoli or Cashew Chicken. Includes Hot & Sour Soup
Not Good with any other offer.
231-0001
1205 SE Morrison
Hours 11-9:30 pm
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Bridgetown Realty
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