Her final years were a celebration of her crusade for equal marriage. ULABY: Joshua Lyon worked on Windsor's memoir for about eight months before she died in 2017. During the AIDS crisis, Windsor helped establish New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. The Stonewall riots in 1969 politicized her. With her partner, Windsor was part of a circle of wealthy, discreet white lesbians who liked to weekend in the Hamptons.
ULABY: So Edie Windsor was closeted while getting a degree in applied mathematics and working as an early computer programmer for IBM. WINDSOR: And, of course, you didn't want to be queer. ULABY: She was born Edith Schlain to respectable Jewish parents who ran a candy store in Philadelphia before the Great Depression. WINDSOR: I really was a middle-class girl. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MY MAMA DONE TOLD ME")ĭINAH SHORE: (Singing) My mama done told me. LYON: The jukebox that would play show tunes and old Dinah Shore songs. ULABY: Joshua Lyon co-authored "A Wild And Precious Life." He's four decades younger than Windsor and found himself fascinated by her stories of mid-century lesbian bars filled with cigarette smoke and intrigue. JOSHUA LYON: She really was a big, big, big heartbreaker.
ULABY: Imagine Edie Windsor in her blonde bouffant and pencil skirt arranged on a Greenwich Village bar stool. That year, Windsor talked to NPR about moving to New York in the 1950s, working as a secretary and asking people she met.ĮDITH WINDSOR: If you know where the lesbians are, please take me. NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Edie Windsor won a 2013 Supreme Court case that laid the groundwork for legalizing same-sex marriage across the country. Our arts correspondent Neda Ulaby chose a memoir by the late lesbian activist Edith Windsor. It's a feature in which the NPR staff recommend books for you. If your New Year's resolution is to read more in 2020, well, NPR's Book Concierge can help.
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