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14. Valerie Taylor: A Woman for All Generations
- University of Wisconsin Press
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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...