Kate Hackett
I can only imagine how difficult it must be for same-sex couples today, much less decades ago. And the relationships tended to be kept quiet, which means that so many of those couples and their families have no record of their love. What a terrible shame.
So it was really sweet that a Twitter user had a 100-year-old photo to share with the world.
Mark Miller posted on Twitter about a photograph that has been in his family for nearly a century.
There is a photograph in my house that haunts me. It is 100 years old. I don’t really need to look at it anymore because I have memorized every detail. But look at it I do. It is safely in my cupboard of photographs because I fear it might dissolve away in the vulgar light.
Mark explains that the photo shows his “great-aunt who died two decades before I was born. She is holding her not yet four-year-old son. It was taken by her lover, Lucia Larranga. It is, all at once, triumph and love and dignity.”
He calls the photo a “celluloid talisman against the vampire of lesbian erasure” — which I love. Miller says he feels that the photo provides comfort because it shows that these women led complete lives, despite any erasure of the time period.
“Leslie was born in 1895 in San Francisco,” Miller writes.
He further explains that she lost her mother when she was young and the mother was interred in a pyramid-shaped crypt in California.
“Einnim was named after (you will not see this coming) her mother Minnie by spelling the name backwards. I had suggested this tactic to my wife Kiki who violently opposed the idea of children named Kram and Ikik. Yet she is considered to be *fun* at parties and people *like* her,” tweeted Miller.
Leslie kept in touch with her grandparents and the family still has notes they wrote to her.
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When she was 22, Leslie met Lucia Larranga and fell for the older woman. They decided they wanted a child, but, of course, in 1917, there was no in-vitro or artificial insemination.
So Leslie married a junior army officer named Kenneth Moore.
And so as World War I drew to a close, Moore married and divorced Leslie. Their son Robert was born in 1918.
In 1920, the family took a trip to Hawaii and returned with Louise Taylor. The three women returned home and raised Robert together.
Miller explains that the couple was well off and dressed to impress.
Leslie died in 1946. Lucia in 1969 and Louise in 1975. They were strong believers in the first in first out inventory control system. They left many little gifts for each other and Bobby collected a few. Here’s one.
Miller says he never knew any of the three women, but did know their son Bobby when he was young.
I never met any of them. I knew Bobby as an older man when I was young. He would come to our house for dinner dressed in a suit with gold tie-pin and cuff-links and, invariably, tennis shoes. Those three women raised him. They sent him to Stanford. He drew cartoons for the New Yorker. He played piano. He never worked. He never married He was gay. He was lovely and eccentric and accepted every invitation and showed up slightly less than rarely. “Bit of a sniffle coming on.” He would go to the Balboa Cafe in SF at night and play for hours.
Pretty damn cool.
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