The Lyon-Martin House

Kendra Mon

They called their house, 651 Duncan, "Habromania Haven". I looked it up, let me see. I have it written down. It was delusional insanity of a cheerful or joyous character. So, they loved words.

Don Romesburg

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon are prominent, towering figures of LGBTQ history. They were among the founders of the first lesbian political organization in the United States— The Daughters of Bitus. They went on from there to be prominent in the National Organization for Women and pushing for lesbian presence within the second wave feminist movement. They were key to articulating lesbian feminism as part of the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. And they both went on to amazing careers in political organizing and advocacy in issues around domestic violence and domestic violence prevention, sexual liberation, and sexual freedom. Old lesbians organizing for change, which was something they did in the 80s and 90s, And then they were the first same-sex couple to get married in California in 2008 when it became legal.

Marcia Gallo

They were very aware of the currents, the political-social currents, that were swirling around them. Both locally and nationally, It was a natural for them to engage. And the home was their home base. And so they would engage from home, as well as, of course, you know go out into other venues. But the home became the place where they did their thinking, their teaching—often of small groups of people—as well as their writing.

Kendra Mon

Del, my mom, wanted to find a house with a view—a rental with a view. And they were driving up that street and saw a sign that it was for sale and "do not disturb the owner" and so they just went up and knocked on the door because they loved the fact that that huge plate glass window was in front and they thought maybe they could talk them into renting. It was a sole owner who was working on the house. It's an old house and an old neighborhood, from the 1920s or something like that, and he was remodeling inside, but he hadn't finished and he wanted to sell it. So, they just fell in love with it and they didn't even look through the house very much at all and they didn't have any furniture, or much to speak of, so they bought it and they took out two mortgages and it was only like $11,500, but that was back then. And they both worked full-time in the city and they didn't have the money, so they took out two mortgages and I remember them having a mortgage ceremony, burning the mortgage ceremony, when the first mortgage, when they paid that off. And when each of their parents came to look at the house they thought they had made a terrible mistake and one of them pointed out that there were no closets in the house at all and they didn't even notice that they were so in love with the view. And Del's mother called it, I forget, you know, some put-down word and— but they just loved the view. They had a chaise lounge in the living room and they slept on that, I don't know how they did it. And they had some crates for books and that was all, as far as I know, that's the way they tell the story.

Don Romesburg

There's a story about how when they moved in here they loved this window. And they loved how it looks out on— it's a gorgeous view of the city, right? I mean you can see all the way downtown from here. You can see over there to the Castro. It's an amazing and special space, right, that really captures what's beautiful about the city. But when people would come over here, they were aware that the FBI, and others might be starting to notice them because of their political organizing. and so, reluctantly, they put up curtains here, right, so, when they first moved here, they were like, "we're just going to leave it open and we're just going to see this gorgeous space here". But they realized that they had to have curtains as this way of being able to be like, "okay, now we're having a DOB meeting", right, and then opening it back up when they were done— which I think is great.

Marcia Gallo

Entering the house was like entering not just the past, but the present— because they were always very involved in whatever was going on in San Francisco. So, if in the mid 80s it was about you know the anti-porn stuff, if a little later on it was about organizing new groups, their involvement in the National Organization for Women, their involvement in the, sort of, International Women's Year activities, whatever they were involved with at that time became part of the conversation and sometimes the trick was steering it back to the research that I was trying to do and to get information from. So, the house, I always saw it as an incubator. So it was their home, it was their haven. It was also their social space. You know, they used that house as a safe space from the very beginning of the lesbian rights movement— a safe space for women to gather. And what's funny is, you know, much has been made about that wonderful picture window. Well, of course, in the early days because of the fear so many women had about even coming to someone's private home and to talk about anything having to do with lesbianism, they had to cover that wonderful picture window with drapes. And Phyllis, early on, told me the story of how she realized that that would be a deterrent for many of the women they were trying to encourage to get involved in DOB— that coming there and sitting in front where people walking by might see you, even if they had no idea who you were, would be a deterrent to many women. So, up went the drapes. Their daughter, Kendra, tells a great story of the happy day when they took the drapes down because things had moved to such a point where, you know, they felt like women would be okay coming to the house. But, it was meetings, it was parties, it was downtime, it was social activities of all kinds, it was sharing stories, as well as reading materials. They would hand me books on the way out the door. "You got to read this. We just got this." So, it it really was an incubator.

Kendra Mon

From when I knew them, they were political. They talked politics, they wore all these buttons. They put, they used that plate glass window to put up posters that could be seen from the street— whatever candidate they supported— and they had the rainbow flag that they would put out occasionally, yeah, and for one Halloween, Del, her whole costume was buttons, whereas, Phyllis, she had more flare.

Don Romesburg

You know, I think in America we really think of houses as these very private spaces and when we talk about lesbian gay lives in the 1950s and 1960s, we talk a lot about how for middle class and white LGBT people, their homes are this space of privacy and protection. Whereas bars and other kinds of spaces were places that were heavily surveilled and policed, right, and so it's important that these kinds of private spaces exist for LGBT people, historically, because they are these sanctuaries where you can step away from the eyes of the law, and of religion, and of medicine, and simply live your lives, right, but what's remarkable about this house and what's remarkable about Del and Phyllis, is that they opened their house up to this much more public and civic responsibility so that this house becomes a space not just of their private sanctuary, which it most certainly was, right, but a space of community building and a space of political empowerment and a space of world making, right, it's from this house that they imagine worlds where lesbians can exist, not just to be tolerated, but to be liberated.

Marcia Gallo

I have a personal stories that are are rooted in that house. When we first met, you know, it was in a conference room because we were organizing a campaign, but they very quickly, when I asked if I could talk with them about this potential DOB project said, "Well you just have to come over to the house." And "come over to the house" was sort of what they said to everybody. You might have met them in some other venue, you know, an event, a meeting room, but it was always, "come over to the house". And so I did with great trepidation, you know, just sort of climbing those stairs, which were sort of life endangering because it is a very steep hill. Knocking on the door and then them saying, "come on in", and sitting in the living room with this giant, you know, what felt like a giant picture window with an amazing view of the San Francisco Bay and starting to talk.

Kendra Mon

They brought in two Danish wood desks. For Phyllis, [it] was a computer desk and for Del it was a plain desk, a kneehole desk, but she had more surface Phyllis, she had the computer and the printer but mom, Del, never changed over to the computer. She always wrote her speeches and her other writings on a yellow tablet, and you could see in the papers, I'm sure, as as they get to them and they as they catalog them, how she would cross out and add on to or they would go back and forth with it and Phyllis would add notes to it or, at times, she even cut papers and taped them together for editing, and then Phyllis—she was the typist, they were both typists and they were both journalists— but she would type them. Then when when she got the computer, she would use the computer to type up their works and like I said before, catalog everything in the in the house.

Don Romesburg

The papers that they kept from the organizations that they were a part of, again, as a historian, I know how important those papers are, and I know how easy it is for them to just kind of go away, right, and the fact that we have the Lyon-Martin papers at the GLBT Historical Society here in San Francisco really gives us this key window into lesbian political organizing across the second half of the 20th century that simply would not exist without that collection. It's the largest collection that the GLBT Historical Society has. It's boxes and boxes and boxes and so much of that somehow fit into this little tiny space right here.

Marcia Gallo

That first time, when I asked if I could have their blessing to write about the DOB, they said, "Oh, well somebody needs to do it. And it needs to be a lesbian. And the men just don't get it right. And so we'll, you know, yeah, we'll work with you. And, you know, what else, do you need?". And I said, "Well your ideas on how to how to get going". And Phyllis gets up and goes to her Rolodex and starts thumbing through her Rolodex, which was meticulous with addresses and phone numbers and information about the people that she thought that had to be part of the story. She said, "Don't just talk to us. You have to talk to all of these people", and handed me a list of probably 40 people who were still around and who she said she and Del would co-sign a letter to, on my behalf. Now this kind of, this is like a historian's like dream. This is heaven on Earth, right? It's so rare that you ever get that kind of, not just encouragement, but like the raw material that you need, right, here's how to contact these people and we'll vouch for you. And I always thought that it was because we came together as activists, that we had this connection and they sort of innately trusted that I would present the activism of the DOB and the groundbreaking work that they were doing. So, I returned to that house, as I think I said already, at least 50 times over the next 10, 20 years. Initially, to sit down with them and interview and decide, you know, what stories they could shed light on. There was, as you can imagine, much much much ground to cover.

Kendra Mon

When they were called about the first marriage by Joyce Newstat who was working on Gavin Newsom’s staff and she pushed for them to be the first married and they weren't sure, but they decided oh well what the hell and so before that, the story behind the story is that they were opposed to marriage because they were afraid that the whole relationship would be changed as patriarchal marriages often are. They had gone through that period where they only knew how to act like a husband and the wife, and so Del chose the masculine role and Phyllis the feminine role, but they gave that up and I think they just didn't want anybody to feel subjugated, but once they were married and saw what joy that they felt differently about it and they saw what joy it brought to so many people that they thought it was important that they had done that.

Don Romesburg

One of the really incredible things about Del and Phyllis and their home is that they were together, not just as organizers, but as a couple, as a married couple, for many, many decades and they're one of the great love stories of the modern LGBTQ movement, in some ways because of that. And, so, I think it's important when we think about them as organizers, that we also think about how as a couple. They were doing all of this organizing. They each had things that they did that were very important on their own, but always, you can imagine, that at the end of the day, after a long day of organizing, a long day of activism, they were coming back together in this house, right, this was the house where Dell Martin wrote her book on Battered Women. This was the house where she wrote, she and Phyllis wrote Lesbian Woman, which was this in incredibly important 1972 book that articulated a vision for lesbian feminism and became a kind of Bible for many people in that movement. This was the home where their papers were kept, where their correspondence was kept, where their research materials were kept, and because they were kept in this home, because they had a stable home and a place to live all those years, when the GLBT Historical Society came into existence and created a space for an archive, their collection became something that could go to that archive, right, so it's so important because having a stable home, having a stable relationship creates the possibility for us to be able to preserve and know the history of our movement in such a profound way. It's hard to overstate the importance of this house to our history.

Marcia Gallo

I think that the other important thing that is hard to to imagine now, I think, for us is that none of the institutions of society were telling them that they were correct, that it was okay to be lesbian or gay. You know everywhere, as Del used to say, “we were fighting the church, the couch, and the courts.” You know we were fighting religion, we were fighting psychiatry, which told us we were sick, and we were fighting the judicial and legal systems. So where were you going to get any kind of validation for your loves and your life. The life you wanted to live had to come from one another. So providing that same space was the way that could happen and I think that that's what the Duncan Street House did.

Kendra Mon

They would read the newspaper there in the morning. That was their routine⁠— have coffee, read the newspaper, talk about whatever was in the newspaper. Sometimes they would listen to tape recordings because there were cabinets full of recordings there too. And there were some curios on a shelf on the wall. And they would, mostly Del, would comb the cats on the table and get rid of the extra fur. And that's where they ate their meals. That's where they talked about things. That's where they maybe wrote and then their evening would be⁠— Phyllis did most of the cooking. Mom had some specialties, but Phyllis liked to read cookbooks and cook special dishes and they had a long cocktail hour. Used to drive me nuts when we would go out to eat and they would have this long cocktail hour and then after the meal they would have this long coffee time, but they would drink martinis, have appetizers like cheese and crackers and sardines or something. And in the later years after they retired⁠— because mostly I was coming over weekends and holidays, they would sit at the table and play solitaire games and keep track on a peg board of who won each game. It didn't matter, but I mean they would keep track and they would play a series of like seven games and that was it. And then they would go on to the next thing.

Don Romesburg

There certainly are a lot of fond memories of their kitchen and the area in their kitchen that's like where their breakfast nook is essentially. I mean this is a small house, like even by San Francisco standards, this is a small house. It's 800 something square feet, right, and so their kitchen is a tiny kitchen. But it has this wonderful well-lit, sunny little breakfast nook, and it's a place where people remember coming and organizing with them, and talking with them, and assembling The Ladder, the lesbian periodical, with them. So, it's a space that I think has an incredible significance, again, in that kind of world making possibility that comes from lesbians gathering together in a fairly small and cozy space and producing amazing things out of it.

Marcia Gallo

They loved their garden and they were very very proud of it. There was always fresh flowers in the kitchen, in the living room, and they often— and I am a gardener and so I would always talk with Phyllis about, you know, what was doing, well and, you know, how she was dealing with different pests and keeping up with the weeding and such, so that was that was a part of the house that was very important to them. It's beauty inside and out.

Kendra Mon

Some of Del and Phyllis's friends and fans joined together to try to figure out how they could be cared for in their old age and so that's how— and they did not want to leave the house. They did not want to leave that window and that view and so they came up with the idea of the stair lift and they helped us have that installed and it just grew from there, the people who came forward who had wonderful ideas and when mom died, we didn't know— and Phyllis was adamant that she was able to care for herself and several people said, “How can she be so stubborn?” and others said, "Well how do you think they got all the things that they did? How did they manage all that?" Well they got it by being stubborn and determined and woeful and so we ended up creating a huge organization of our own making. Pan Haskins, who just died last week, was the master engineer of this whole project— caring for Phyllis without her knowing. And so people joined. We created an LLC, or Pan did, and that corporation took loans from people against the house because by now the house was worth a lot of money and so their loans would be paid off after Phyllis no longer needed the house, euphemistically, and so word of mouth, mostly friend of friend of a friend we built this team, this fantastic team, of mostly queer artists and their friends who would tell Phyllis that they were her friends and they just wanted to hang with her and she would buy it, or not buy it, sometimes she would tell them that they needed to leave and they would hang out in their cars. They were so devoted to her. They were so—they fell in love with her and they were so devoted to her and they struggled to, eventually, win her over and she was cared for by these wonderful companions and she would not— she would refuse any straight caregivers that were sent over. She knew. She knew. And she would pick the caregivers that we would hire by how she related to them and they did that and it just was a wonderful life for her.

Don Romesburg

So often when we think about these towering figures of our political movements— Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Del and Phyllis, right, we think about them for the moments when they were most historical, right, the moments when they were creating change and we don't always think about the span of their entire lives, but one of the things that is so incredible and so moving about the end of their lives was the ways in which a group of lesbians, intergenerational, came together and created a 24-hour round-the-clock care network that came in here and cared for Del and Phyllis, and especially Phyllis, after Del passed and made sure that she could stay in this home until she passed, right, and so it really, to me, embodies the power of lesbian community and a deep reverence and respect and love for what they did. I think so often our elders in the queer community can feel sort of cast aside and without families of origin to support them and without kids to support them I mean, I know Del and Phyllis had kids, but, right, generally for LGBTQ seniors being old can be a really kind of precarious time of life and so it's so beautiful that the lesbian community stepped up and let them live out their final years with dignity and knowing that they were surrounded by love and care in this house.

Kendra Mon

I hope that they take away— that people take away from their legacy the idea or the understanding that change is inevitable and that we are all co-creators of history. They inspired other people to help them co-create change and we have a lot more changes ahead of ourselves and a lot more of building understanding between us.

Don Romesburg

Queer spaces have historically not been preserved and there's a whole lot of reasons for that, of course, there's institutional homophobia and transphobia. There's the fact that many of our spaces have been transient spaces, so spaces like bars where it's commercially owned and then it becomes something else and then it becomes something else. Also because for a long time, we didn't necessarily think of ourselves as a community whose history was worth preserving. We were just kind of getting by and doing the things that we were doing to live our lives and so it's really only been fairly recently that there's been a recognition that places like this matter. Because if we don't preserve them, a key part of that history is lost and a space like this is not significant simply because of its architectural quality or innovation, obviously, this is a very standard house for its time, right, but what happened in the house and the way that the configuration of the house made that possible is powerfully important to remember and pictures won't do it justice, right, this is from a time before all of us documenting our lives 24 hours a day with our cell phones, right, and so if we don't have spaces like this to ground us in the community that they belong to, the home that they were in, and the people they invited into that home to create a movement of transformative change we lose something fundamental about the power of their lives and their legacy.

Marcia Gallo

I hope they know everything about them. I think they know— I hope that they know that these were regular people who when called upon to be great were able to rise to the occasion. And not only not always perfectly, not always, you know, without stepping on toes, not always without dissension, but they rose to the occasion. And they kind of had a commitment to humanity, which went along with this sort of broad political vision that I hope people appreciate a hundred years from now. And I hope that, you know, the house becomes a site of education and activism as it always has been. And a place where people can sort of, not just venerate, but increase the work that we do as LGBTQ+ women, men, trans folks that we are— that we see ourselves as their children, as their legacy, and that we have a spot to identify as the sort of start of it all.