I'm Eric Marcus and this is making gay history. Billy Talmud was an educator. Over the course of her life, she was an elementary

school teacher, accumulated two PhDs in education, and won awards for her work with

blind and deaf children. But for most of her working life, who she was

threatened what she did.

Billy brought her passion for education to her activism when she joined the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S.

The Daughters of Belitis in the mid-1950s.

Billy did everything from counseling women who had been thrown out of the military

to holding Gaben-Javas in her own living room.

That was the 1950s version of a consciousness raising group.

Do B offered Billy the chance to provide a new generation of women

with the answers she herself had so desperately sought as a young woman coming of age

in the 1940s. But if anyone had found out about

Billy's work with the daughters, she could have been fired from her job. When I

interviewed her in 1989, she asked me to intentionally misspell her name for

my book to conceal her identity.

She was still worried about losing her job if her colleagues found out she was a lesbian.

Here's the scene. Billy Talmadge is in her early 60s and lives with her partner Marsha Herndon and there are three cats,

two enormous calicoes and one tiny kitten in a small house in what was a rough neighborhood across the bay from San Francisco.

Billy is sitting at her dining room table.

She's heavy set with short reddish blonde hair.

She laughs easily and speaks with the excitement of a pioneer recalling the early days of her life in the movement

Billy lights a cigarette before explaining how she came to be a crusader for lesbian rights

...