If they’d been caught, Compton says she and her girlfriend would have been expelled and outed to their home churches. She didn’t feel the need for that knife anymore. Suddenly, she thought she knew what gay people did. Her father answered that the teen didn’t date girls, that he was “just one of those sweet boys.”Ī few years later, at Church of Christ college David Lipscomb, Compton was so scared of the lesbians rumored to live in her dorm that she hid a butter knife under her pillow for protection. “What did he do, what did he do?” she remembers asking. But her sixth-grade self felt it was wrong when a teenager was forced to ask her church’s entire congregation for forgiveness. Linda Compton didn’t really know what it meant when she found herself drawn to pretty teachers or why boys weren’t as interesting. Growing up in Old Hickory after WWII, she doesn’t remember hearing the words homosexual or lesbian, not even any gay slurs. They are tales of largely hidden, but vibrant lives. Before the Stonewall Riots, before America’s first gay pride parade, Middle Tennessee’s LGBT community was very quiet, but it was there.įor the past seven years, Nashville’s Brooks Fund has collected the stories of what it was to be homosexual in Middle Tennessee before 1970.
