Valerie Taylor
Valerie Taylor was a prolific lesbian writer and activist. Born Velma Nacella Young, she grew up in rural Illinois and attended Blackburn College, where she joined the American Socialist Party. She married a man in 1939, had two sons, and worked as a teacher and secretary while secretly publishing lesbian poetry under pseudonyms. In 1953, she published her first novel, a heterosexual romance that sold well enough for her to divorce her husband and move to Chicago with her children. She published this novel under the name Valerie Taylor, which she soon adopted as a personal as well as a professional name.
In Chicago, Taylor worked as a proofreader and copyeditor for a mainstream publishing house and continued her writing career. She published several popular books in the genre of lesbian pulp fiction, though she later decried the tropes that the publishing industry forced onto these novels. During this time, she also published poetry and reviews for The Ladder and Choice, lectured about lesbian literature for the Chicago chapter of the Mattachine Society, and entered her first lesbian relationship, with fellow Mattachine member Pearl Hart.
When Hart and others started Mattachine Midwest, Taylor became a face of the organization, writing and editing the newsletter, speaking on radio and television shows, and marching on picket lines. Along with two other Chicago lesbian writers, she co-founded the national Lesbian Writers’ Conference in 1974.
Hart died in February 1975. Homophobic policies prevented Taylor from spending time with her in the hospital, and though she fought for the right to see Hart, she was not able to visit until Hart was in a coma. After Hart’s death, she moved to Margaretville, New York, to be near college friends. Margaretville lacked a lesbian community and Taylor stopped writing lesbian content while there.
In the late 1970s, Taylor moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she became involved with the lesbian community again. She returned to writing, lectured on lesbian literature, volunteered at the local LGBT center, and advocated for the rights of aging lesbians and lesbian elders.
Taylor was born with scoliosis. Later in life, she was seriously injured in a fall and became a wheelchair user. While Taylor does not appear to have ever discussed her homophile activism as related to disability, much of her advocacy for elders overlaps with issues that were important to the disability movement—the right to receive care at home, the shortcomings of insurance, the need for nondiscrimination in care. She was also a member of the Gray Panthers, a group of elders’ rights activists that collaborated extensively with the disability rights movement, and may have worked on disability rights campaigns through that involvement.