HOST:

For 25 years… the Lesbian Switchboard operated in New York City… it was a helpline for women with no one to talk to about being gay… 

And if you called in the 1980s… longtime volunteer Denise Tuite [TOOT] might have answered the phone. 

At StoryCorps… she remembered what this work meant to her.

Denise Tuite (DT): The Lesbian Switchboard was located in an old school building. The room was a tiny room, and there were no windows. It was very depressing looking, to tell you the truth.  It was that old, gray, green color they used to paint schools at that time, so it looked kind of dingy. 

But it was our place. You know, it was beautiful. 

Typical calls were, I’m coming to New York, what’s the best  bar for lesbians specifically? But then every once in a while you’d get somebody that would call and just want to talk… Someone from Oshkosh, Wisconsin or something. ‘Should I tell my parents? Shouldn’t I tell my parents?’ 

The suicidal calls we weren’t permitted to take, ‘cause we weren’t trained for that. I had a few of those calls. ‘Don’t kill yourself, don’t be ashamed of yourself, call this number.’ That’s all we could say, really.

But I realized much later on, the switchboard was not only me helping other people, it was me helping me.

My family was very close-knit Brooklyn Irish Catholic. Church every Sunday, go to Catholic school… and I started to realize I was gay, when I was about 14. And believe it or not, at one time I was really pretty (laughs), and I had a boyfriend, but I didn’t want to be with him. And my mother? She wanted me at 16 to marry, so I could get these feelings of being a lesbian out of me.

She felt I was a bad influence on my younger brother and sisters. So when I graduated high school, my mother didn’t want me in the house anymore. You know, and I was still like just a kid.

It would have been a hell of a lot easier for me to get married, and have a family and be accepted by my mother, and loved by my mother…which… is something I wanted. But that wasn’t who I was. 

The impact that the switchboard had on me, I realized that a lot of people out there are like me, and now I had to tell them it was okay… there’s nothing wrong with you.

That’s what people wanted to hear. They wanted to hear that no matter where they were, no matter how isolated they were, there are other people like you. You know, you had to tell them that they weren’t alone.