Paradise Lost

By the time Barbara returned to Salt Lake in 1965, Tibby was having a harder time ignoring her sense of hollowness. One night, she says, she had a vivid dream about Miss Shannon, her world history teacher from sophomore year. Miss Shannon had moved to Baltimore, but something about the dream made Tibby write to her. When Miss Shannon wrote back, she mentioned that she'd seen one of Tibby's classmates, Barbara Kenny, who'd since returned to Utah and was working as an artist in the basement of her parents' advertising office. Tibby found herself heading to that basement studio, ostensibly to buy some art for her house. The women were both in their late twenties. Barbara can still remember Tibby coming down the stairs. This is the most beautiful person I have ever seen, Barbara recalls thinking. Tibby says it dawned on her at that moment that Barbara was gay. And she was struck by Barbara's willingness to live an authentic life in a stiflingly conformist place. Here is a real lesbian, she says she thought.

She still couldn't comprehend how a relationship with a woman could be a real option; after all, she'd been taught that gays were freaks, sinners. But over long talks and walks with Barbara, Tibby could tell that this connection was something meaningful. She asked her husband for a separation.

In 1968, the women moved into a house together: Barbara in the basement and Tibby upstairs with the children. Even as Barbara was thrilled to have found a partner, Tibby went numb. She had lost her husband, her church, her position in life. Her 5-year-old daughter, Holly, missed her father and bucked against Barbara. Desperate, Tibby took the truth about her relationship with Barbara to a psychiatrist, who turned with it to the very authority she feared the most: the Mormon church.

One night church officials were at the women's door, telling Tibby the relationship was immoral and suggesting that Holly could be endangered by being exposed to it. Church officials could excommunicate Tibby as a lesbian. She says she also feared that they would press her ex-husband to bring the matter before civil courts presided over by Mormon judges obedient to church leaders. Tibby was terrified that she could lose not only custody of the children but the right to even see them. She went to church officials and lied about her relationship with Barbara to keep the question of what was best for her children in her hands.

She never faced a church proceeding, but she and Barbara decided they couldn't stay in Utah. And Tibby came to the painful conclusion that she couldn't take both children with her. While James was deeply attached to her, Holly adored her father, who'd remarried. Tibby thought she might do better with him, his new wife and stepchildren. She and Barbara would make a home for James.

The bar was low that day in 1970 when Tibby and Barbara drove out of Salt Lake City and headed east. At that point, the best the women believed they could hope for was to be left alone.

Amazing. Tibby was drinking a glass of wine in public. She was 32, and a new resident of Alexandria, Va. And she felt like she was running down the street naked, that's how liberating it felt to drink alcohol in public on her first major excursion outside Utah. No one was watching, monitoring, reporting back. No one cared.

"I felt free," Tibby says now. "People seemed far more liberal here. Interesting in variety and the sense that not everyone had to be the same, not like in Utah."

"We didn't know," Barbara says with a sad shrug, looking upon her adopted state differently now.

"We never expected any rights," Tibby adds, half-mournful, half-angry.

Whatever sense of liberation they found proved very limited; plus, Barbara and Tibby had no idea what to do with it. Modest and conventional to start with, they've never been the type to march or wave flags. Couple that with the shame heaped upon them in Utah, and the women spent the next two decades making Northern Virginia their own sort of closet. They established separate bedrooms and an understanding that there was to be no outward sign of romance, either in public or in front of James, who called Barbara "Kenny." They lived in a suburban development, built bike ramps for James and entered him in the soap box derby.

Tibby was named "most popular female teacher" multiple times by students at Fairfax County's Robinson Secondary School, but she kept all details of her personal life private. The family of three moved to Stafford County in 1975 to be closer to Barbara's job as a clinical social worker in Fredericksburg and farther from Tibby's students. "I didn't want to wind up running into any of them at the grocery store," she says. "I wanted to just live my life."