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151 k 14 Vale­ rie Tay­ lor A Woman for All Gen­ er­ a­ tions It’s hard not to think gen­ er­ a­ tion­ ally. ­ Groups of peo­ ple come of age at a par­ tic­ u­ lar his­ tor­ i­ cal mo­ ment, and it marks them for­ ever, creat­ ing a bond. I grew up in an en­ vi­ ron­ ment where every­ one spoke of “the im­ mi­ grant gen­ er­ a­ tion.” We all knew what it meant: the old folks were dif­ fer­ ent from the young. ­ African ­ Americans of a cer­ tain age speak of grow­ ing up under Jim Crow, in the seg­ re­ gated South; it ­ shaped them in pro­ found ways. Jour­ nal­ ists write about Baby Boom­ ers or Gen­ er­ a­ tion X. Tom Bro­ kaw pens a ­ best-selling book ­ called The Great­ est Gen­ er­ a­ tion. A large group of aging ­ Americans ­ speaks of “the ’60s” in a way that says “it made us who we are.”­ Within the LGBT world, no­ tions of gen­ er­ a­ tions cir­ cu­ late, too. Peo­ ple refer to the Stone­ wall gen­ er­ a­ tion or the sep­ ar­ at­ ist gen­ er­ a­ tion to de­ scribe an ex­ pe­ ri­ ence that dis­ tin­ guishes them from other gays or les­ bians. What­ ever the label, the as­ sump­ tion is that our gen­ er­ a­ tion, how­ ever de­ fined, makes us who we are. As we move ­ through life, the world ­ changes, and we don’t. It’s as if we’re ­ trapped for­ ever in a by­ gone time. I think what draws me to Vale­ rie Tay­ lor, the pulp nov­ el­ ist, is that she re­ sisted this pi­ geon­ hol­ ing. ­ Though she lived to be ­ eighty-four, she ­ flat-out re­ fused to re­ main stuck in the box of a par­ tic­ u­ lar ­ coming-of-age ex­ pe­ ri­ ence. She al­ ways re­ mained a woman of the mo­ ment, a woman who ­ changed with the times. This essay first ap­ peared in Windy City Times, Au­ gust 6, 2008. Part III: Local Stories 152 Velma Na­ cella Young (Taylor’s birth name) was born in 1913 in Au­ rora, Il­ li­ nois, when it was still a small town be­ yond ­ Chicago’s ­ sprawl. Her fam­ ily had lit­ tle money but ­ plenty of books, and, when Velma had the ­ chance to at­ tend col­ lege, she ­ seized it. Two years at Black­ burn Col­ lege in Car­ lin­ ville, Il­ li­ nois, gave her cre­ den­ tials to teach at coun­ try ­ schools. They also made her a so­ cial­ ist. This was in the mid­ dle of the De­ pres­ sion, and lots of ­ Ameri­ cans were seiz­ ing so­ cial­ ist ideas of eco­ nomic jus­ tice. In ­ small-town Amer­ ica in the 1930s, there ­ weren’t many im­ ages of les­ bian life. Nor was it com­ mon then for a woman to sup­ port her­ self. And so Velma Young, like who knows how many ­ women-loving women of her gen­ er­ a­ tion, got mar­ ried. She had three sons with her hus­ band, ­ William Tate. But he ­ proved to be “an al­ co­ holic ­ no-good bum,” and, after four­ teen years of mar­ riage, Velma took her sons and left. While much of white Amer­ ica was en­ ter­ ing the “Father Knows Best” era of ideal­ ized fam­ ily life, she was break­ ing out of the house­ wife box. Writ­ ing was her way out. Velma had been com­ pos­ ing sto­ ries and poems since child­ hood. In 1952, using the pseudo­ nym Vale­ rie Tay­ lor, she pub­ lished, in her words, a “raunchy hetero­ sex­ ual love story” ti­ tled Hired Hand. With the $500 she re­ ceived for it (a solid chunk of cash in those days), Tay­ lor—as we’ll now call her—“went out and ­ bought two ­ dresses and a pair of shoes, got a job, and con­ sulted a di­ vorce law­ yer. . . . That was a good lit­ tle roy­ alty check,” she re­ called, many years later. De­ spite the huge sales of pulp nov­ els, au­ thors did not re­ ceive a fair share of roy­ al­ ties, and Tay­ lor al­ ways ­ needed a day job to sup­ port her­ self and...

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