Sinister Wisdom 92: Lesbian Health Care Workers

By Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom 92: Lesbian Healthcare Workers is a special issue that focuses on lesbian healthcare workers, and particularly nurses. Workers and recipients of lesbian healthcare come together to share their personal experiences through essays, poems, and other imagery that highlight systemic issues, and express gratitude to the healers within the lesbian community.

Essays by:
• Peggy L. Chinn & Elizabeth R. Berrey
• Maria V. Ciletti
• Sharon Deevey
• Kelli Dunham
• Alma Garcia
• Sarah Lipkin-Lamay
• Karen Starr
• Maida Tilchen
• Jean Taylor

Creative Work By

Judith Beckett
Cassandra Christenson
Joan Cofrancesco
Michelle Duford
Diane Solis
Samn Stockwell

And More!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Jan 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944981020

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

Book preview

 Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Fall Fundraising Campaign Acknowledgments

Elizabeth Hansen

Notes for a Special Issue

Sharon Deevey

Lesbian Self-Disclosure After Sixty

Maida Tilchen

Adventures of a Lesbian Nurse Among the Navajo

A Tribute to Helen D. Weinstock, RN—My Lesbian Aunt

Samn Stockwell

The Lost Tribe

Prescient

Judith Beckett

A Peculiar Pickle

Kelli Dunham

Opening the Door

Jean Taylor

Lesbians Who Care

Anonymous

This Is Their Journey

Diane Solis

Kink

Nurses

Gifted

Peggy L. Chinn and Elizabeth R. Berrey

Cassandra: Lesbian (Non)Presence in Nursing

Paula Sayword

Polly Unfound

Corinth, Vermont

Karen Starr

Shifting Ground or My Life as a Lesbian Abortionist

Joan Cofrancesco

The Golden Years Before AIDS

Maria V. Ciletti

The Softer Side of Medicine

Alma De Leon

Tales of a Nurse

Cassandra Christenson

Dad, Dad

Under the Hollywood Sign

Sarah Lipkin-Lamay

Notes on Rebellious Nursing!

Proserpina

Unbalanced

Sue Lenaerts

A Patient's View (Photograph of Judith Witherow)

Book Reviews

Contributors

Advertisements

Notes for a Magazine

It is an enormous pleasure to present Sinister Wisdom 92: Lesbian Healthcare Workers. Guest editor Elizabeth Hansen has assembled an excellent collection of writings by, for and about healthcare workers who are also lesbians. In addition to some writers who have appeared before in Sinister Wisdom, including Jean Taylor, Joan Cofrancesco, and Sharon Deevey, Elizabeth brings new voices to this issue of the journal. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of this issue of Sinister Wisdom is the way it speaks in multiple voices across and through generations.

When I began editing Sinister Wisdom one of my goals was to ensure the continued meaning and relevance of Sinister Wisdom to the founders’ generation and to new generations. I believe that it is only by building bridges across lesbian generations that we can ensure the continued vitality of Sinister Wisdom as a lesbian cultural institution. In Sinister Wisdom 92: Lesbian Healthcare Workers, Elizabeth takes up this vision and assembles an extraordinary issue of the journal. I am enormously grateful to Elizabeth for all of her work on this issue and I hope you find it as powerful and meaningful as I do.

After three and a half years of publishing Sinister Wisdom and getting my sea legs as editor and publisher, I am pleased to announce that in 2014 SinisterWisdom returns to being a quarterly publication. Between now and January 2015, we have four compelling issues planned, three curated by guest editors. It has been an extraordinary pleasure to work with the fine literary lesbian activists on special issues of Sinister Wisdom, and I am excited to present a new issue to you every three months.

Of course, Sinister Wisdom can only continue publishing quarterly with support from readers like you. Our 2013 fundraising campaign was a success, thanks to donors from around the United States and around the world who believe in and support Sinister Wisdom. I am pleased to thank all of the donors who support Sinister Wisdom above and beyond the price of a subscription.

I will formally ask for your support again this fall but always welcome contributions to Sinister Wisdom throughout the year. You can give online at our website, www.SinisterWisdom.org, using PayPal or send a contribution to our post office box in Berkeley, California. I appreciate your support and confidence in Sinister Wisdom— and I hope you enjoy reading Sinister Wisdom 92: Lesbian Healthcare Workers.

Julie R. Enszer, PhD April 2014

Sinister Wisdom Fall Fundraising Campaign Acknowledgments

Thank you to all of the supporters of the Sinister Wisdom fall fundraising campaign! We raised over $4,000 to support Sinister Wisdom during 2014.

Anonymous

Cara Armstrong

Roberta and Fairfax Arnold, in memory of June Arnold

Elliott batTzedek

Alice Bloch

Sarah Browning

Stephanie Byrd

Oriethyia Mountain Crone

Edith Daly

Muin Daly

doris davenport

Julie Davids

Helm de Laat

Regina & Irene Dick-Endrizzi

Denise Duhamel

Elana Dykewomon

Kate Ellison

Veronica Enszer

Jenny Factor

Anne Fairbrother

T’ai Ford

Amy Guy

Jaime Harker

Gillian P. Herbert

Sarah Hoagland

Joanna Hoffman

Peggy Kocoras

Cassandra Langer

Joan Larkin

Sue Lenaerts & Judith Witherow

Leslie Liszak

Devi Lockwood

Sheree Mack

Catherine McNeil

Glen Morgan

Joan Nestle

Rose Norman

Ellen Orleans

Lynne Phoenix

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Jendi Reiter

Laura Rifkin

Andrea Routely

Staci R. Schoenfeld

Maureen Seaton

Laurie Silverman

Denise Smith

Polly Taylor

Sarah Valentine

Cristina Vegas

Deb Whippen

If you missed our fall fundraising campaign, make a gift online at www.SinisterWisdom.org

Notes for a Special Issue

It comes as no surprise to Sinister Wisdom readers that lesbians are always on the cutting edge of arts and culture. This special issue takes a different perspective on lesbian talent by focusing on healthcare workers, primarily nurses. With Florence Nightingale* as the profession’s founder and perpetual role model, lesbian nurses have been on the forefront for a long time.

My interest in the value of lesbian nurses’ self-disclosure in the workplace grew out of an experience I had as a per diem visiting nurse. My weekend caseload included a visit to two old retired nurses (crones), one of whom was dying. The regular nurse seemed overly protective and insisted that she be called over the weekend if death were imminent. While her attitude was partly understandable, I believe the underlying issue was that she was unsure whether I would be respectful of the women’s relationship. Had I been out to coworkers, and perhaps even to the patient and her partner/caregiver, I might have allayed the nurse’s concerns and the women might have felt less constrained during my visits. This type of dilemma may be less of an issue nearly thirty years later, but I know it is still something that many lesbian healthcare workers struggle with intermittently, if not regularly. This issue of Sinister Wisdom celebrates lesbian healthcare workers; it is not intended to enumerate grievances. But it is also a reality check on where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

We need more than employers who schedule diversity in- services that completely ignore the many LGBT employees and audience members. We need more than nurse educators who present simulation scenarios using a lesbian couple yet do nothing to address the specific needs potentially faced by lesbians.

Among the promising developments is the recent inclusion of nursing in the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA). One of the objectives of the Nursing Summit at the 2013 GLMA conference in Denver was to "Develop . . . a[n] action plan for LGBT health in nursing related to: education, patient care, policy/

research, clinical care and homophobia in the profession. Another organizationofferingavoicetoradicalnursesis Rebellious Nursing! Their first conference was held in Philadelphia in September 2013. See Notes on Rebellious Nursing!" by Sarah Lipkin-Lamay.

At one time I adamantly distinguished between lesbian healthcare workers and healthcare for lesbians. The more I worked on this issue, the more that distinction seemed irrelevant. Lesbian healthcare workers serve as advocates for lesbian clients and address systemic issues that impact them as well as us. And lesbian healthcare providers are, inevitably, recipients of healthcare themselves. So, the contents of these two categories are combined into one.

I am grateful to the extraordinary lesbians who so generously share their personal experiences and talents with Sinister Wisdom readers for this special issue. Wonderful essays, poems, photographs, and even a set of cartoon panels, arrived from mental health workers, a unit clerk, a social worker, a sequential artist (cartoonist), librarians, nurses, retirees, and other authors and artists. They address nursing history, health issues, personal loss, and social change. I especially want to thank Merry Gangemi, who, although completely nonlinear (and therefore not a healthcare worker!), is an amazing writer and a former Sinister Wisdom co-editor. She has provided invaluable guidance as I have dealt with details big and small in putting this issue of Sinister Wisdom together.

*The article Out Lesbians in Nursing: What Would Florence Say? by C. Randall and M. Ellison published in 2012 in Journal of Lesbian Studies, 16:1, 65–75, is a must-read!

Elizabeth Hansen

Guest Editor

 Lesbian Self-Disclosure After Sixty

Sharon Deevey

How does the experience of lesbian self-disclosure change after age sixty? Is it still as scary? As liberating? As rare or as frequent? Do I come out to this new doctor who is only interested in the results of my colonoscopy? And since I have been happily single for five years, is there really anything to tell? In this article I will share some of my lesbian self-disclosure experiences during

the last years of my nursing career and after retirement.

I came out as a lesbian in 1970, at twenty-six, after a brief marriage to my college boyfriend. I burst out joyfully into a climate of antiwar protest, radical idealism, and rock and roll. When my first lesbian lover and I were expelled from our lesbian-feminist collective for middle-class behavior, I got a job photocopying at the Washington Post. I decided that visibility was the only way that I, as an individual no longer welcome in a political collective, could still make a difference in a homophobic world. I was haunted by the Holocaust. I believed, and still believe, we have to stand up and be counted, so I began self-disclosing as a lesbian in the workplace. I came out on company time in thirty-five different jobs by the time I left my last paid job in 2006.

In my early thirties I moved from Washington, DC, to Cleveland, Ohio to attend nursing school. When the nursing care of homosexual patients was discussed in class, I nervously came out. I later wrote about my self-disclosure experiences in an article called Lesbian Self-Disclosure: Strategies for Success, published in 1993 in the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing. I frequently entertained my lesbian friends at potluck suppers by recommending ways to self-disclose using careful timing, humor,