This is Queer: Emily and Nancy

Emily and Nancy have both been calling Richmond home for the last 10 years. Emily is originally from the area, moved away, and then returned for work and with desire to reunite with the community. Nancy was born in Philadelphia and raised in Charlottesville, coming to Richmond with Emily with the hope of raising their now teenage son in an environment that represented diversity more fully.

Emily and Nancy have been together for 20 years, sharing their lives and their queer experience together. The two met in Charlottesville, where Emily shared she did much of her “queer growing up.”

“When I think of my queer identity, it represents intentional exploration of my truth and the evolution of understanding myself throughout the years.”

At 48 and 65 years of age, Emily and Nancy have a lived queer experience that begins well before the legalization of marriage and the societal acceptance of queer love that we see today. And the most poignant memories of those times live with Nancy, who came out around the age of 20.

“I didn’t even know that ‘gay’ was a thing,” Nancy shares, reflecting on her youth. “I’m from a completely different generation, raised in a Catholic family. Very much a tomboy. I started playing guitar at the age of 9, and my life was about music. Boys, girls, dating them. It just wasn’t something I thought about, wasn’t my focus. I was all about that music. That’s all I cared about.”

But, of course, that changed. In the 1970’s, just as the women’s movement was gaining major traction, she found herself seduced by a woman, and she moved with her lover to the Washington, DC, area where she began meeting other lesbians and came into her identity.

“After four years in DC and dating women, learning who I was, I came back to Charlottesville but was still very closeted,” Nancy recalls. “I dated a woman who I was with for 14 years, and she never came out to her family.

“It was such a different time. You had a fake boyfriend. There was this couple we hung out with a lot, two guys, one of which was former military. We considered each of us marrying one of them — to have that security, to have that name. We actually considered doing that with these guys. And it’s so funny because when gay marriage became legal, to read the stories of people who had done that and even forgotten about it after the 70’s and 80’s. Totally different than life today.”

Emily’s path was a similar one, growing up in a Catholic family and finding her identity in her 20’s as well while in Charlottesville.

“Growing up, I was always a tomboy. First picked for football, but I was also a girly girl and the product of a Catholic family. I knew nothing outside of a cis, heteronormative patriarchy. Gay people were bad. Gay people were AIDS. Gay people were men. I knew nothing about gay women. I’m Gen X; I grew up in the 90’s. There was no messaging that told me that gay meant anything except men with AIDS. And that’s simply from the traditional news outlets and the predominant story being told at the time. I had no frame of reference.”

When Emily went to college, she learned that one of her brothers was gay, and she started to learn that gay wasn’t necessarily something to equate as “bad.” It was then that she began to open and explore her own attraction to women. She was dating a man at the time of this awakening, even sharing with him her thoughts that she might be bisexual.

However, it was only after college that Emily felt confident enough to really explore relationships with women and later meet and fall in love with Nancy. They later married and have a son together.

The two chose to move back to Richmond because they found that while their community in Charlottesville was certainly open to queer people and families, the racial makeup of the area didn’t exhibit the diversity that they wished their child to experience as he grew up and formed notions of the world.

“We didn’t want our son to think that’s what the world looked like,” said Emily. “So, we decided we wanted to get him into a place that looked like the world, with different races and backgrounds, and moved to Richmond. We love our life here.”