By Ed Kimble
Claire Ellington knew from an early age that the conventional middle-class world didn’t have everything quite right. Growing up a tomboy “from the get go” in 1950s-60s Charlotte, NC, “I recognized right away the world had a problem, but I didn’t have a problem.”
Claire’s rebellion against conventional life put her on a fiercely independent path of discovery to root out and dismantle oppression in her own life and help others do the same. She now facilitates Senior Pride’s LGBTQI+ Elder Discussion Group, launched in March before the COVID-19 shutdown and now continuing via Zoom every other Saturday afternoon.
Claire discovered feminism at 19 reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, while working a summer job in Grand Teton National Park. “I was very lonely. I could not feel connected to the heterosexual world. I had not solidified my identity,” she recalled. “And as soon as I started reading that, I was home.”
She returned to Charlotte “determined to be a feminist,” got involved with the Charlotte Women’s Center, and soon realized she was lesbian. “When I first felt sexual attraction, my response was ‘Yay, I’m not frigid.’ I was just relieved. Oh my god, I’m a normal person. This was the context. I’m normal, I’m gay. In other words, I’m a sexual being, I can have relationships, I know where to go, what to do,” she said.
Claire was active in the Charlotte Women’s Center through her twenties, embraced a radical lesbian separatist lifestyle, helped take over a local women’s rugby team called Charlotte’s Harlots (quickly renaming it the Charlotte Women’s Rugby Club), and helped form the Drastic Dykes collective, whose influence continues today through Sinister Wisdom Journal.
She moved with a partner to Denver in the early ‘80s where she discovered Re-evaluation Co-Counseling, which she describes as social-justice-based peer-to-peer counseling to help individuals reclaim humanist ideals by acknowledging oppression of all kinds, from racism and sexism to classism and homophobia.
“Love what you are doing! Love it! Be it! … Being gay is great. It’s a great thing. Being lesbian has opened my world and opened my view and given me a much deeper view of everything. … What a wonderful amazing special thing! Don’t waste a single minute of it.”
She continued to practice co-counseling after moving to Tucson more than 20 years ago. She quickly involved herself in the local lesbian community thanks to Contact Dykes connections. Defying classist middle-class systems, she supported herself with part-time manual labor work sustained by women who wanted to hire women for their home improvement and maintenance jobs. She established a steady clientele for her services, operating under the business name Chore Buster.
“The work was just a necessary evil to support activism,” she said. “The co-counseling is volunteer activity. The lesbian work was all volunteer activity. Those were the things I cared about.”
Among her many local activities, Claire facilitated a women’s coming out group for Wingspan for two years, the Lesbian Discussion Group, affectionately nicknamed the LSD Group.
She did break down and get a bachelor’s degree in counselling from Prescott College due to “middle class guilt,” but got over that guilt and decided not to pursue further education and licensing.
Claire has been involved with Senior Pride for two years. “I needed to be part of a community that was about getting old, being queer and gay and being old. I needed that because getting old was scaring me and does scare me and I wanted to be in situations where we can be supportive of each other,” she explained. “To me aging is a much bigger deal than any of our differences as gay men or women. Aging trumps all of that.”
Claire’s advice for the younger LGBTQI+ generation?
“Love what you are doing! Love it! Be it! … Being gay is great. It’s a great thing. Being lesbian has opened my world and opened my view and given me a much deeper view of everything. … What a wonderful amazing special thing! Don’t waste a single minute of it.”
~ Ed Kimble is Senior Pride’s media content coordinator