From silence to pride: Grinnell LGBTQ+ residents share stories on love, loss and identity

When Pat Lipton led the search committee for her church’s next minister, she didn’t expect to find love. 

Nine years had passed since her second husband’s death, she said, and her world revolved around caring for her 38-year-old son with Down syndrome. “But God had other plans for me,” she said. 

The person who caught her heart, though, wasn’t just a gifted minister: she was a woman. 

Lipton, now 75, remembered falling in love in secret, unsure how to reconcile her feelings. She shared her story during a Nov. 11 panel at the United Methodist Church, hosted by PFLAG Grinnell, the local chapter of a national organization that provides support, education and advocacy for LGBTQ+ people, their families and allies. 

“I thought about it a lot, I prayed about it a lot and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her,” Lipton said.

Her brothers accepted the news. Her son was ecstatic. But she said her daughter and mother turned away, refusing to acknowledge the relationship.

“The journey has been difficult at times, and it has been joyful at times,” Lipton said. “I really regret the day my mom passed away without seeing the love that we have for one another.”

Still, she said she has no doubts.

“I feel that our marriage was one of the best decisions that I ever made. I wish my daughter would have attended a PFLAG meeting,” she said.

The panel featured five community members who shared their journeys of love, identity and acceptance.

“I want to share my story not because it’s unique, but because it’s far too common,” Bonnie Lipton, 71, wife of Pat Lipton, said.

From a young age, Bonnie Lipton said she sensed she was different, though she didn’t yet have the words to describe it. She said she knew that the feelings she had for girls wouldn’t be accepted by her church or her family, so she kept them hidden. 

“I dated men, and I did a darn good job at it,” she said as the audience laughed. “Then I had two long-term relationships with women.”

Bonnie Lipton never spoke of the words lesbian, homosexual or queer with her family, she said. “My female long-term relationships were totally accepted by my family, but those words were never spoken,” she said.

After her parents passed away, she said she came out to her sister.

“I was told that I was sick, that I was sinful and that I would burn in hell,” she said. “A few years later, at that sister’s funeral, her four-year-old grandchild came over to me and looked at me and pointed at me and said, ‘You are the devil.’”

Then she came out to the church.

“I was told I had turned my back on God, but the truth is that it was the church that had turned its back on me,” she said. “Not only was I told that I could no longer continue on my ordination path, but that I no longer could be a member of that church.”

She eventually found a denomination that embraced her for who she was and welcomed her calling. Lipton was ordained into the Christian ministry and went on to serve six congregations in Maine and Florida, as well as work as a hospice chaplain and later at a retirement community.

“I even felt worthy of asking the woman that God brought into my life at age 60 to marry me almost 11 years ago, and what a blessing that has been,” Lipton said.

Jim Powers, 65, grew up in a very religious family northeast of Cedar Rapids on a farm. “Until I graduated from high school, homosexuality was still listed as a mental illness,” he said. 

After four years in Iowa City, he said he felt something was missing. Though he had taken small steps toward self-acceptance, he said, the community around him wasn’t the kind of support he needed. That changed when he moved to Grinnell.

“After the last 37 years of being out and happy and proud gay man, I met a local man,” Powers said. 

Powers, who has served on various city boards, and his husband, a retired firefighter, have remained visible and active in town. “We found Grinnell to be just an amazing community, to sort of live our lives openly and happily and find community,” he said.

Frank Appleton, 73, was raised in New Orleans by Dutch parents. Appleton said he began exploring his identity in college, where Gay Alliance groups were starting to form.

He then lived a closeted life by fear, he said, in Maryland, working on the public education system. Eventually, Appleton moved back to New Jersey after his father had a heart attack. 

“At that point, I met someone whom I fell in love with and I started to meet gay people again,” he said. 

After his father recovered, Appleton, his partner and five others moved to San Francisco together, seeking a more open and accepting community, he said.

It was towards the end of the 1970s, Appleton said he noticed people were dying suddenly. “People were speculating about this whole gay illness,” he said.

When his mother became ill and his relationship with his partner ended, Appleton moved back to New Jersey. At that time, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, and people were dying right and left, he said.

Appleton had started going out with a new partner who was HIV positive. He recalled visiting his partner many times in the hospital. That partner has since passed away, he said. 

It was then the late 1980s, Appleton met his now husband, who is from Grinnell. “He came out when he was 13 and his parents were very accepting,” he said, adding that it was nice to have the experience of a family who supported him.

Appleton went on to work in various AIDS advocacy groups. “I experienced a lot of death early on and that was moving to me,” he said. 

Anden Lovig, 31, lived for 24 years as a female in Brooklyn, Iowa. “Didn’t know anything about being gay, or queer or trans,” he said. 

When he went to college, he joined various women’s organizations, he said, where he met his now-wife. His wife was the first to ask him if he had ever thought about being transgender. “I never quite felt right,” he said. “I always pushed it aside.”

In 2019, Lovig came out. “Whether or not I was ever going to have top surgery or go on testosterone, all of those things have just kind of evolved as I’ve grown into myself,” he said. 

“It’s been really fun to figure out who I am,” he said. The event closed as Lovig shared a hug with his grandmother, one of the organizers of Grinnell’s PFLAG chapter.