Claudette & Patricia – Nanuet, NY
Claudette Charbonneau, 79, retired college professor, English and Women’s Studies
Patricia Slade Lander, 74, retired college professor, Social Anthropology, Women’s Studies and Queer Studies
Nearly 40 years after their first encounter, Patricia still remembers the jacket Claudette was wearing. They had come face-to-face at a fall 1977 meeting of the Brooklyn College Women’s Studies Program. Patricia had been selected for the Steering Committee, she explains, because she was a “known non-conformist, a feminist, an unmarried mother of two-year-old twins, and ‘straight.’” When Claudette walked into the meeting, she says, “There was a spark.” Besides noticing the jacket, Pat thought Claudette was “energetic and good-looking,” and she was impressed by Claudette’s tenure with the New York Feminist Theatre Troupe, which had toured the East Coast and Canada. Claudette was intrigued by Pat’s “classy background, reminiscent of Eleanor Roosevelt.” They also discovered they had both been involved the civil rights and anti-war movements.
About a year after their first meeting, Claudette confronted Pat at a coffee shop. She said, “I don’t think you are so straight.” Caught off guard, Pat spilled her coffee and ran off to the ladies room. In the “tumultuous” six months that followed, Pat and Claudette were busy “redefining social and sexual identity and disentangling ourselves from other relationships.” In the spring of 1979, they moved in together.
But 1979 was very different from today. “Society was not willing to recognize the relationship between two women who each wore a t-shirt with the slogan, ‘We are not just friends.’” The couple says, “We were criticized when we took the young twins to a Gay Pride march on Fifth Avenue or a feminist rally to celebrate women getting the vote.” Getting through the kids’ high school years, and dealing with joint custody with their father, only added to the stress. “But we just marched right on.”
The key to their lasting relationship? “We are very compatible, though our previous socio-sexual experiences were not.” Claudette says she knew she was “different” since she was a child, and always considered herself a “lesbian feminist separatist.” Pat, however, “had just assumed she was straight.”
Despite their differences, they quickly found how well they worked together as a team. They have co-authored articles and two books. Their first joint project was to interview more than 30 women who came out in midlife. It was 1986, and they couldn’t get a publisher to take it on.
“Society has changed, thank goodness,” they say. After seeing the recent lesbian romance film Carol, Claudette said, “Thank God for the Women’s Movement.” Her grandmother once said about her: “We have a criminal in the family.” But the movement changed things, making same-sex relationships between women “less oppressive,” she says.
The couple married in 2003 in Toronto. All seven of Pat’s closest family attended, and Claudette had two lesbian friends attend as “fictive kin.” The New York Times even wrote about it. Claudette says her favorite things about Pat are that “she has tons of energy, writes dynamite letters and is very creative at solving any problem. She’s also courageous.” Pat’s favorite things about Claudette: “She’s stubborn, has a great (but rare) smile, and is committed to her world view.”
Looking forward five years, they plan to be “holding hands on our love seat and still living in our 1904 un-renovated farmhouse with a gay flag on the porch,” they say. “And Hillary in her second term as President!”
Thirty-seven years into their relationship, Claudette and Pat advise other couples to “find common ground and stick with it.”
They certainly have.
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