Billye Talmadge

Billye Talmadge (December 7, 1929 – October 24, 2018), also known as Billie Tallmij, was a lesbian American activist and educator at the forefront of the burgeoning gay liberation movement in the 1950-60s as well as a founding member of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first organization established to fight explicitly for lesbian civil and political rights in the United States.

Her main focus was empowering lesbian youth through education and counseling at a time when many homosexual and lesbian voices had been silenced by the current social and political climate.

Billye Talmadge was born in Missouri, but raised in Oklahoma by her mother.

She never knew her father and was always a self-described tomboy.

She was the niece of Herman E. Talmadge, former U.S. Senator and Georgia Governor.

Talmadge first became aware that she was a lesbian at the age of 17 in her freshman year at a Kansas college, when she received a letter from a high school friend detailing her involvement with a girl.

Shaken by the news, Talmadge sought answers from her Dean of Women, who gave her a reading list which included The Well of Loneliness, a book credited as an important step to self-acceptance by many other lesbians of the time and cited by Talmadge as her equivalent to the Bible.

Talmadge described herself as being so absorbed in it that she read it twice in one weekend, describing it as a “a coming home, a recognition, and a knowing.” Once she had a name for it, Talmadge recognized that her sexuality influenced her social relations throughout her childhood.

At the same time, Talmadge found a particular distaste for Krafft-Ebing and similar literature popular at the time, which described homosexuality as biologically anomalous and perverse.

Unable to find other published works to answer her questions, Talmadge turned to following another student rumored to be a lesbian on campus for a few days, before approaching her at a café just off campus.

They drove to a park, where Talmadge asked her questions ranging from what being a lesbian meant to how to make love to a woman.

This conversation became a milestone in Talmadge's life, credited for giving her an understanding of herself as well as a knowledge that there were others who had the same questions, and there needed to be people they could turn to for honest answers.

Following Talmadge's graduation in the late 1940s, her mother found out about her sexuality by chance after the mother found a letter in a school annual which Talmadge had written to a friend that was supposed to move to Seattle after her.

Her mother blamed herself and the lack of a present male influence in Talmadge's life for her sexuality, but despite admitting to not understanding, continued to support Talmadge and any lovers or friends she brought home throughout her life.

Talmadge stated that her close relationship with her mother made her lack a need for disclosure and acceptance which drove many other lesbians of her time.

Talmadge did not have her first relationship until two years after she began identifying as a lesbian, at which time she had finished college and taught her first year at a school.

Her first relationship started in Seattle with Jaye “Shorty” Bell, with whom she then moved to San Francisco, where she discovered there was other literature available regarding lesbians and homosexuals.

Following her move to Seattle after she graduated college in the late 1940s, Talmadge briefly worked in the acoustics divisions at Boeing Aircraft where her work required a high security clearance.

She was followed by a national security agent as part of the investigation process for granting clearance for approximately three weeks.

At the end of this period, the agent followed her into a gay bar on her way home from work and revealed that he had been investigating her and warning her that if he had told the company she was a lesbian, she would have been fired immediately.

Talmadge obtained top security clearance just before she quit to follow her then-girlfriend, Jaye Bell, to San Francisco, CA.

Talmadge held 2 PhDs in education and was foremost a teacher and educator.

In the course of her career she won the Golden Apple Award for her work with blind and Deaf children.

At the time, many state laws listed the suspicion of homosexuality as reasons for immediate termination from a teaching job.

This led Talmadge to use the Welsh spelling of her name, Billie Tallmij, as a pseudonym in order to keep her identity and activism separate from her source of income.

Talmadge first learned about the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco when a friend invited her and her then-girlfriend to a house party at Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon’s home.

At this point, the Daughter of Bilitis (DOB) had been in existence as a social group meant to keep young lesbians out of gay bars, which were undergoing frequent police raids.

Of the 8 women who had originally been part of the DOB, Martin and Lyon were the only remaining members when Talmadge attended the party.

Discussion between the attendees of this house party transferred the focus of the DOB from a social group to an activist agenda.

In the early 1950s, a personal friend left out a piece of personal correspondence between herself and Talmadge which was discovered by the local postman.

The letter contained information on both the women's sexualities and had been written on stationary identifying Talmadge's name and place of work, which the postman then used in an attempt to blackmail Talmadge's friend for sexual favors.

Upon finding out about this, Talmadge grew angry and looked up the closest FBI office in the phonebook.

The FBI office was closed when she arrived, but it was located directly above a post office, and Talmadge demanded to speak to the Oakland postmaster general.

The postmaster general set up a meeting with the postal inspector, who questioned Talmadge on whether the contents of the letter could be construed as pornography.

Talmadge denied this and stated when asked that it was a letter that the post inspector would feel comfortable letting his teenage daughter read if needed.

The postal inspector got in contact with the Seattle authorities, who placed the postman under arrest for tampering with federal property and blackmail, both of which were tried as felonies.

Talmadge cited this experience as a driving factor in her work in educating gay and lesbian youth in order to make them less vulnerable to both legal authorities and individual blackmail.

In 1955, Talmadge helped write the Daughters of Bilitis statement of purpose, in which she focused primarily on popularizing education.

Talmadge encouraged representation and racial diversity in the organization, which she noted to include not just African American members, but also Asians and Latinas.

Talmadge spent twenty years with her long-time partner, Berkley professor and Cherokee activist Marcia Herndon, who died in 1997.