![]() (Liebe told them she’d learned to craft dulcimers.)Įventually, three of the five “miscreants” returned. In order to return, the students had to get a doctor’s note asserting that they were fit to be a “good girl” and return to Scripps. The administration decided that forcing the students to take a year’s leave was in everybody’s best interests. “When the college president learned of the JB’s decision,” Sue said, “he talked to a member of the Board of Trustees, who was a lawyer, and he told the President, ‘you will be accused of harboring criminals, Scripps will be subject to police raids.’ It was about the drugs, but I’m guessing they probably had a little conversation about homosexuality too.” But the administration quickly stepped in. The JB sentenced the five students to encampusment – essentially a strict curfew. They couldn’t directly address the “homosexuality” part of the accusations, because “there were no Scripps rules that said you could not be a lesbian.” So the six were judged from the standpoint of a drug policy violation, but fear of “whip-cracking lesbians” (and yes, one of the gang did occasionally walk around cracking a whip) began to percolate through the campus. The Judiciary Board was faced with something entirely new. So you can imagine I perked up my ears and thought, you know, at the very least I’m going to find out who else…” Image: Sue Talbot (left) with other members of the Judiciary Board. “At that point I believed I was the only lesbian at Scripps,” Sue laughed, “and I had been in relationships with women, but we didn’t have the language for it at that time. The Board was called to session with a new case: “a big case that involves five students plus an alum…a case involving drugs and homosexuality.” Liebe was a rebellious senior, and Sue a straight-laced junior, dutifully serving as her hall’s representative for the Judiciary Board - an autonomous student organization dispensing justice to petty rule-breakers. “How did Liebe get kicked out of Scripps?” I asked. (The top floor of the house, an enormous open space reminiscent of a log cabin, could indeed host an elephant - if you could coax it up the stairs.) Whether you call it a love story or the first rumblings of a revolution, it certainly started with a bang - so I began the interview by addressing the elephant in the room. Their story is the prelude to many stories, a glimpse into the lives of queer Scripps students, then and now. But perhaps to call it a love story is to miss a greater point the two, together, trespassed into a then-forbidden world, an enclave within Scripps’s “ivy walls” that would emerge quietly, cautiously, over a period of many decades. Liebe and Sue’s love story began with a near-expulsion. As idyllic as their life together seems now, the challenges they’ve faced have been far beyond the ordinary from Liebe’s forced departure from Scripps, to the couple’s forays into the radical lesbian movement of the 70s, to their navigation of Liebe’s illness and disability, Talbot and Gray have fought for intersectional feminism since “before the term was even invented.” Image: Liebe Gray, senior photo. After 45 years together, the two seem as comfortable as a pair of old and sturdy boots, roosting happily in their tall and cozy home in the LA hills. Liebe sat in her wheelchair, eyeballing the Dodgers game and offering the occasional witty or impatient interjection. Sue offered me a cranberry juice and sat on the couch across from me. I kicked off our interview after a brief tour of the henhouse and the tomato plants. I had high hopes for our meeting Sue and Liebe did not disappoint. Dodgers (Liebe calls the stadium their “summer home”), and the pair’s matching Rosie the Riveter costumes (pulled together for the L.A. After a cursory look through her pictures, I discovered her large pink glasses, her devout patronage of the L.A. Her profile picture is a stark white-on-gray text reading STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE. If you’re researching queer history at Scripps, she said, have you talked to Sue and Liebe? (That’s lee-bee, I learned later, not Libby, not Elizabeth, lee-bee like the German word for love.)Ī few days later, I was chatting on Facebook with Sue Talbot, Scripps class of 1969, confirmed lesbian and social miscreant. I’d reached out to Sue several weeks prior, after moaning to a mutual friend about my lack of primary resources. As she’d mentioned in one of her Facebook messages, she and her partner Liebe Gray kept bees - and, as I would soon discover, a flock of 17 chickens, two cats, a black lab mix named Gilda, and two placid pet snakes. On a warm Saturday in June, Sue Talbot picked me up at Union Station (“look for the beige Kia Soul”), maneuvering with the impatient grace of a longtime LA resident. An Afternoon with Sue Talbot and Liebe Gray, Scripps College Class of ’69
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