Laura Lesburg (pronouns: She/Hers) was born and raised in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. She begins her interview discussing her childhood, coming from a lower middle-class milieu in the assumed-affluent Mount Pleasant area and struggling with her relationship with her family members. She details the ways that she found safety and comfort outside of her family home through a network of now life-long friends, and she details other struggles with religion throughout her childhood. She attended Wando High School, but then moved with her family to Indianapolis, Indiana, finishing high school there and beginning college there. She then lived in Los Angeles, California where she began the process of gradual process of coming out, noting that, coming back to Charleston, she found lesbian roles more stereotypical in the Lowcounty than the West Coast. Her complete coming out, after some difficult conversations with her mother, consisted of just being frank about her life. It coincided with her decision to get sober. Those actions freed her from thoughts of suicide, internalized homophobia, and a numbing of her real feelings. She compares the freedom and the acceptance of herself as a sort of second adolescence, becoming excited about figuring out directions to take in life. Lesburg discusses her family and friends’ reaction to her coming out as well as the difficulties of navigating life as a recovering alcoholic. She also references her limited exposure to queer people as a young person in Charleston, recalls silence on the topic, and negative and/or no responses to the coming out of Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell and the murder of Matthew Shepherd. She refers to the positive impact of shows like Will and Grace and the Russian women’s music group, Pussy Riot. One of the first times she became aware of a large number of lesbians was attending a Women’s National Basketball Association game in Indianapolis; and she also goes into great detail on the gay disco Pantheon, in Charleston, describing its mostly gay male clientele, music, lighting, dress, etc. With respect to the greater LGBTQ+ communities and their challenges, she mentions issues confronting people of color and trans people and describes the idea of “femme invisibility”. Being lesbian, she concludes, has given her insight into what it means to be a minority, out of the mainstream, and it has benefited her in her work as literacy instructor in mostly people of color communities.
