Merissa Sherrill Lynn was one of the people who built the foundations of the organized transgender community in the United States, at a time when there was almost no infrastructure to build on. Born Wade Southwick in 1942 and raised in New Hampshire, she served in the military in the early 1960s and later earned a BA in Philosophy from the University of New Hampshire in 1971. By the mid-1970s, she had found her way into the small but rapidly developing network of people exploring gender outside conventional expectations. In 1976 she became involved with Fantasia Fair in Provincetown and the Cherrystone Club in Boston, entering a world in which people who today might describe themselves as transgender, transsexual, nonbinary or cross-dressing often shared the same fragile social spaces and had to create their own vocabulary, networks and support systems.
In 1977, Lynn opened her home in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, to people who needed a place where they could meet others like themselves. That gathering became the Tiffany Club, formally organized in 1978 with Lynn, Patricia West, Dee Dee Watson and others among its founders. What began as a small local support organization grew into one of the most important institutions of its era. Lynn served as its director for approximately nine years, while also developing an increasingly ambitious vision of a national and eventually international network. She founded NACD, the National Association of Cross Dressers, and worked to establish community resources including group housing and a retreat. She also became one of the central figures behind TV-TS Tapestry, the publication that evolved into Tapestry, a magazine that offered information, advice, personal stories and, perhaps most importantly, a means for isolated people to discover that they were not alone. Its correspondence and networking function could be life-changing in the years before the internet.
|
| Merissa Sherrill Lynn walking through the park. © Mariette Pathy Allen |
Lynn’s ambitions extended far beyond a club or a magazine. In 1986 she founded the International Foundation for Gender Education, and the organization’s first major convention was held in Chicago in March 1987. As IFGE’s first executive director, she helped turn the organization into a national and international center of transgender information and community life. IFGE published Tapestry, organized annual Coming Together-Working Together conferences, operated an information service, maintained a library and bookstore, produced educational materials, connected local organizations, and provided information to transgender people, their families, professionals and the wider public. Lynn lectured widely for approximately fifteen years and appeared on television and radio, helping bring transgender issues into public discussion at a time when even the language for discussing them was still evolving. She also maintained international contacts, including correspondence with Britain’s Beaumont Society, reflecting her belief that the emerging community could not be confined by national borders.
Her influence reached beyond IFGE itself. When activists in Atlanta sought help creating a major transgender conference in the South, Lynn and IFGE did not simply organize the event for them. Instead, she helped local groups learn how to organize it themselves. That process led to the first Southern Comfort Conference in 1990, which became one of the most significant transgender gatherings in the United States. Lynn’s work also intersected with feminist thought, spirituality and emerging conversations about Indigenous gender traditions. Her involvement with Kindred Spirits and connections with the Two-Spirit community are among the lesser-known aspects of her history. She participated in the educational culture of her time as well, appearing alongside figures including Virginia Prince, Dallas Denny, Yvonne Cook, Holly Boswell and Sheila Kirk in Gender 101: An Introduction to the Nature of the Transgendered.
|
| TV-TS Tapestry Issue 49 (1986) Digital Transgender Archive. |
Yet Lynn’s story is not simply one of uninterrupted success. The same force of personality that enabled her to create institutions could also generate conflict. As IFGE expanded, tensions developed between Lynn and its board. In 1995 she left the organization, publicly describing herself as exhausted and emotionally depleted after years of disagreement. Her own account characterized the departure as a resignation, while later recollections have described a much more complicated struggle over her leadership and the future of IFGE. The question of what actually happened remains part of the contested history of the organization she had created.
Lynn’s later life was marked by a devastating stroke that left her severely disabled. She spent years living with its consequences before her death in 2017 at the age of 75. Her story might have disappeared into the past, but her own words survived. In 2008 and 2009 she wrote a series of autobiographical emails recounting her life and her involvement in the early transgender movement. After her death, those writings were collected and published in 2018 as Merissa Sherrill Lynn: Her History As She Wrote It, edited by Kerri Reeder. The book offered Lynn’s own perspective on the history she had helped make, while also raising questions about memory, self-representation and the complicated relationship between personal testimony and historical record.
Today, the physical and intellectual traces of Lynn’s work are unusually extensive. The University of Victoria’s Transgender Archives preserves the IFGE records, including organizational papers, correspondence, publications and the Tapestry archive. The Digital Transgender Archive contains more than a hundred records connected to Lynn, ranging from Tiffany Club documents and early correspondence to convention materials, publications and her 1995 farewell statement. She received the Virginia Prince Award in 1988 and later a Transgender Pioneer Award at Fantasia Fair, but despite the scale of what she built, her name is less familiar today than those of some of her contemporaries.
Perhaps that is because Lynn’s greatest achievement was not a single book, speech or political campaign. It was infrastructure. She helped create places where people could meet, publications through which they could recognize themselves, conferences where knowledge could circulate, organizations that could communicate across distances and a network through which isolated individuals could begin to understand themselves as part of a community. She was visionary, energetic, ambitious and, by many accounts, complicated. To understand her fully is therefore to look beyond the mythology of a pioneer and ask what it was like to work beside a woman who was simultaneously building a movement, fighting for her own vision of it and sometimes struggling with the people who had joined her in building it.
|
| Merissa Sherrill Lynn at Fantasia Fair, 1993. © Mariette Pathy Allen |
Few people can illuminate those contradictions better than Dallas Denny, who knew Lynn personally, worked within the movement she helped shape, witnessed the world around IFGE and later helped preserve Lynn’s own account of her life. Today, I want to return to that formative period with Dallas, and to the remarkable, complicated woman at its center.
Monika: Dallas, it is such a pleasure to welcome you back. It has been twelve years since our last interview, which is hard to believe. Time really does fly! So much has happened in our transgender community and in the world around us since we last spoke. How are you doing?
Dallas: It is so good to hear from you! Life is good! I was married in 2015 and eleven years later we are still very much in love. We live in the mountains in Northeastern New Jersey, in prime motorcycling and hiking country. In my old age I am careful to gear up when I ride my bike. I have gotten marginally better with the guitar, and as I am married to an opera singer and former voice coach who doesn’t let me get by with being sloppy, my singing has improved.
My songwriting has some traction. In the closing scene of Shon Keane’s film Finding Bernie, I perform my song Dark Old Wind at St. John’s in the Village, accompanied by an all trans and nonbinary choir. I am one of four editors of A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States, from SUNY Press, and my book about controversial activist Virginia Prince should be out around the end of the year. My health is pretty good, all things considered. And yes, I am grievously concerned about the government of the United States and have been writing about the loss of civility and rise of fascism in the US since 2012.
|
| Tiffany Club Leaflet (1983). Digital Transgender Archive |
Monika: It’s wonderful to reconnect after all these years, and I’m glad we have the chance to talk again. Today, I’d like to take you back to a particularly important chapter of your life and of transgender history, your connection with Merissa Sherrill Lynn. Before we talk about the organizations she built, what was she like when you first met her, and what is the first image of her that comes to your mind?
Dallas: I transitioned at age 40, in 1989. I had been on self-prescribed hormones since age 29. Ten years after my first pill, I finally found community and was immediately drafted to run a support group in Atlanta. A year or so later I founded the nonprofit American Educational Gender Information Service, which ran all through the 90s. I provided information and support for all gender-variant people, their friends and families, the media, and sometimes government officials, and published a quarterly magazine and other materials. AEGIS’ mission was similar to a much better-funded nonprofit, the Boston-based International Foundation for Gender Education. I met Yvonne Cook-Riley and CEO Merissa Sherrill Lynn in person in 1990 at the initial planning meeting for the Southern Comfort Conference.
A year later, Merissa and I were an ongoing two-person guitar circle at the second New Woman conference, which was limited to post-operative trans women. I made a habit of taking my guitar to conferences, and Merissa would watch and eventually ask for the guitar. She always grumbled about having to remove her artificial nails. I was impressed with her knowledge of folk songs. I saw Merissa frequently at conferences and we worked collectively on a variety of projects. We were not friends, but we were friendly toward one another.
Monika: Merissa opened her home to transgender people at a time when simply meeting someone with a similar experience could be extraordinary. What do you think she understood about loneliness that enabled her to create such a welcoming community?
Dallas: My own experience was being lonely only in the sense that for many years I could not find my trans peers. I was otherwise quite happy and fulfilled even while yearning to transition. Merissa’s life, I think, was actually lonely. I don’t know much about her early history, but I know she worked for some years as a ski instructor. She wrote an influential essay early on about coming to terms with her gender identity in the mountains. She had no spouse, no children, but she, unlike me, was in contact with others like her, and en masse I think they served as her chosen family.
|
| IFGE 1988, with Christine Jorgensen (right). © Mariette Pathy Allen |
Monika: The Tiffany Club began with meetings in Merissa’s home before becoming a formal organization. What do you remember about the atmosphere at those early gatherings, and what did people find there that they could not find elsewhere?
Dallas: If I had been able to connect with others, I might have been there, but I wasn’t able and didn’t attend. I was about one thousand miles away from Boston, at any rate. I am not certain about the ownership of the house, and I never saw it except in photos, but I understand it was near the Charles River and isolated and was big and rambling. All sorts of people came there to dress, and many lived here and there over the years. I like to think about it as a warren, a place with a lot of cubby holes. I wish I had been able to see it.
There is pleasure and comfort in being around like-minded people, and certainly the members of the Tiffany Club found that. Having a safe and stable place to meet is critical, and Merissa, since I think (not sure) she owned the house, certainly provided that. And of course, if one has a need to be authentic and no place to manifest, a place like Tiffany House allows you to keep your clothes where they won’t be discovered by family or friends, and is cheaper than renting motel rooms.
END OF PART 1
Main photo: TV-TS Tapestry Issue 58 (1991), Digital Transgender Archive, © Mariette Pathy Allen
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
No comments:
Post a Comment