12 Feb 2022
My Lesbian sister
All the people in the note below are now deceased so I think I can safely say something about them now
My sister Jacqueline was two years younger than me -- born 14.9.1945 -- and was always from childhood on known as "Jack" -- an omen of things to come
As we were
"Jack" as a kid
She died in her '60s and had no children. She died on July 4 2009 of the family illness -- breast cancer. Her death was expected and both her female companion and her ex-husband were with her until the end.
She was in general a good and kind person and remained good friends with Gary Ward, her ex-husband, for the whole of her life. So I am not the only one in the famiy who keeps good relationships with former partners. My other two siblings are still with their original partners.
She was always attracted to other females but made the effort to try a conventional marriage by marrying her good friend Gary Ward. Gary was a very masculine man, a truck driver and at one time a policeman. And Jack had a lot of masculine attitudes so it could have worked. And they did try all the possibilities in bed in an effort to make it work. But it was no good. She left Gary for another woman. They never ceased to be friends however, through all the ups and downs of their subsequent lives. Gary did after a while marry a real woman and had kids but he still remained friends with "old Jack" as he called her.
It is actually wonderful thing that they always had one another as supportive friends. It must have been a great emotional strength to them
Another support for Jack is a somewhat surprising one: Her mother. My mother was always scornful of men and was a women's liberationist before that was common. She was an admirer of the suffragettes. I think it is pretty clear that she would have been a lesbian if born 40 years later.
Anyway our mother was not at all put out by Jack becoming a lesbian. After "coming out" Jack described herself and her mother as "getting along like a house on fire".
So she didn't have a bad life. She missed out on the joy of having children but I doubt that she was much bothered by that
I saw little of Jack during our adult lives. One might have thought that as we were both interested in women we should have had a lot in common. But we were of course interested in a different sort of woman. Jack's women seemed to me to be pretty rough whereas I like traditionally feminine women.