It was two years before the Stonewall Uprising, and 36 years before Massachusetts became the first U.S. Knowing that a diamond engagement ring would draw too many questions at work, she gave Edie a diamond brooch to symbolize their commitment. On Memorial Day weekend 1967, Thea proposed. Still, Edie later recalled, “I found out that impersonating a man was illegal, so I wore crinolines and a marvelous dress to meet the FBI” (NYU Alumni Magazine).Įdie met Thea Spyer, a psychologist, in 1963 at a Greenwich Village restaurant called Portofino, known underground as “where the lesbians go.” They danced all night, though they didn’t become a serious couple until two years later.
Being gay then meant being barred from working for the federal government, but it turned out the FBI was more interested in Edie’s sister’s union activities. While at NYU, she worked on a computing project for the Atomic Energy Commission and was interviewed by the FBI for a security clearance. In the early years Edie was terrified of being found out. Needless to say, there were very few women in her group. Edie loved her work and eventually rose to the title of Senior Systems programmer, the highest technical title at the company.
She graduated in 1957 and went to work for IBM, where she designed systems architecture and language processors. She realized that if she didn’t have a husband to support her she would need a profession, so she enrolled in a master’s program in mathematics at New York University. Edie and Saul divorced in 1952, less than a year after their marriage.Īt 23, Edie moved to New York City. “Anytime I would see two women walking on the street on a Saturday night, I would be so jealous,” she said. She knew she was a lesbian, but couldn’t imagine how “a queer” could have a happy life, so she married her brother’s friend Saul Windsor. Very, very few people were “out of the closet” at that time certainly not Edie. When Edie graduated from Temple University in 1950 with a degree in psychology, the sodomy laws functioned to deny LGBT people employment and housing by classifying them as criminals. The family recovered, and eventually moved to a middle-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. When she was a little girl they owned a candy store and lived above it the store was quarantined and then sold when Edie and her brother got polio. Edie was the youngest of three children born to James and Celia Schlain. All 50 states had laws against sodomy, which usually meant any form of “non-procreative” sex but which were enforced almost exclusively against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. When Edith “Edie” Schlain was born in Philadelphia on June 20, 1929, homosexuality was illegal.
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