Paradise Lost

James, now 43 and working in film and television in Los Angeles, remembers a very stable, supportive home with the women. Because they kept their relationship so "circumspect," he says, other kids didn't know or care that he had two mommies. "As a kid I didn't care [that Tibby was gay], I really didn't," says James, who saw his father in the summers. She and Barbara "were good parents."

Tibby's relationship with Holly was far more distant--the result of family tensions that continued to play out long after Tibby fled Utah. She and Holly were able to talk only about once a month and saw each other once a year. Yet it was Tibby who talked Holly into attending college when she graduated from high school in 1980. Almost immediately, Holly says, she fell in love with her female roommate at Utah State. She remembers telling her mother she was involved with a woman.

"Honey," she says Tibby told her softly, "if there is any way you can make another choice, make it, because this is no kind of life."

Holly says she quickly came to the same conclusion her mother had: Utah was no place for gay people. She moved to Virginia the following year, where she finished college and finally established a close relationship with her mother.

By 1988, Tibby and Barbara had been in Stafford for more than 12 years and realized there would be no one to say goodbye to if they left. "When you make yourself so private, how can anyone know you?" Tibby says. That year, the women moved to Fredericksburg, a small city between Richmond and Washington with a grid of charming historic homes, a winding romantic river running through town and not one gay bar but two, right next to the Civil War posters, the tourist trolley and the Ben Franklin store.

Barbara and Tibby loved city living: walking to the farmer's market, the coffee shop, the train. People who knew the women could guess they were a couple, but they never discussed their relationship with anyone around them.

Then one weekend in 1993, Tibby was at a retreat at the Unitarian Universalist Church, which she had recently joined. The group had broken into threes, and her trio was sitting outside on a deck behind the church, discussing their spiritual paths and what had brought them to this place. A black woman was talking about her anger about racial discrimination and how it had left her soul unsettled. Tibby listened as the woman gave voice to something powerfully resonant. How you are dealt with in life affects what you take in, and what you give out, the woman said. It has a spiritual component. And suddenly Tibby found herself sobbing.

I have been closeted for years, Tibby told the women, who held her as she bawled. Suddenly the anguish caused by all she had suffered in her life, the terrible loss of years with her daughter, the whole thing just began to pour out, she remembers. She cried uncontrollably off and on all afternoon. But after that, Tibby started inching out of the closet, and she began pulling Barbara out with her.

They didn't change radically. They still didn't touch in public, even in the gay mecca of Provincetown, Mass., where they vacation each summer. And they still "cleansed" the house of romantic photos when the cleaning lady came every other week, for fear she would quit if she knew. But something began to take root. "I might not describe the relationship exactly, but I would say Barbara and I were 'together' if someone asked," Tibby says. They began putting "one household" on official documents for the first time. They stopped telling doctors they were sisters -- usually.

Together, they joined church committees, the investment club, the women's circle and an elderstudy at the local college. Barbara's practice prospered, growing to 25 to 30 clients at a time. She and Tibby became the type of people who went to the 11:30 a.m. Sunday service early to schmooze with the 9:30 crowd, who knew the names of all the tellers at the bank, who got their hair cut by the same people for 17 years.

Part of the way they grew to know their neighborhood so intimately was by taking many long walks together.

"Walking is a major activity for us," Tibby says in their living room one March afternoon, as they prepare for a regular Friday stroll. Before they leave, they each don a pair of huge brown glasses that look like safety goggles; they wear them over their regular glasses, in place of sunglasses.