Joyce Schon: My First Long-term Partner

Joyce Schon (1952-2016)

I seem to be standing at a crossroads where past, present and future intersect. Being on the receiving end of a nasty ending of a twenty year relationship has left me feeling sad and nostalgic so I looked up an old ex partner online. Our relationship was one that lasted fifteen years from 1980 to 1995. I’d heard more recently she’d moved to her home city, Detroit and became a civil rights and immigration attorney. Last I heard she was still a member of Revolutionary Workers League, the Marxist-Leninist group to which she had always belonged.

I was dismayed to discover that Joyce Schon died of metastatic breast cancer in 2016 at 64 years of age. We had totally lost touch by that time, but I did wonder why she changed her email suddenly and was no longer active. She was still a Facebook friend so I knew I could message her there. We are all immortal online. I located only a perfunctory obituary that was geared toward straight, conventional family only. 

The fact she was a lesbian was missing from the obit. All her years of union activism and leftist organizing had been erased. It was appalling to see Joyce reduced to a traditional woman without spouses, children or interests.

What can I say about our time together? I remember the early days when I was 29 and she was 28. It was a wild, passionate time. We went to political meetings constantly. We also had sex everywhere. In parks, on beaches in every room of our apartments. She lived in Berkeley and I in San Francisco and we were each too poor to own cars but fortunately, there was BART.

Politically we were quite different. Joyce was a member of RWL, a group I referred to as Really Weird Leftists. They were a vanguard Trotskyist party. I, on the other hand, was involved in groups like Lesbians Against Police Violence and Revolting Lesbians. That made us a mixed marriage of sorts.

Joyce worked as a Ward Clerk at SF General in those days and was one of the first to work on the newly created Aids Ward. She was also a shop steward and union activist extraordinaire. Thirty for forty was her slogan for workers there: thirty hours of work a week for forty hours pay. She spoke Spanish with such an authentic accent that whenever she used it her conversation partner would deluge her in the language so rapidly that she couldn’t understand a word. 

She was committed to getting the message of socialism out into the world. I remember when the SF Chronicle was on strike. At the time, I was a research librarian there, a member of the Newspaper Guild. Joyce spoke at a strikers meeting in the Warehouse district of San Francisco. There were about 7,000 people in attendance, members of the Newspaper Guild, the Printers Union and the Teamsters. She addressed the huge crowd without wavering. She spoke with passion and determination. 

Joyce had a beautiful voice and played guitar. She sang both union songs and “women’s music.” “The Woman in Your Life,” was a particular favorite of mine.

In 1991 when I was diagnosed with melanoma and scheduled to have an intensive skin graft on my leg, she took my tumor, floating in its vial, to the head of the melanoma clinic at Mt. Zion for a second opinion. That experienced doctor said that the major disfiguring surgery I was scheduled for in two days, was unnecessary for a forty-year old. He recommended a much less destructive re-excision procedure instead. I have the full use of my leg now because of that decision.

Joyce always wanted to return to her home city of Detroit. In 1995, by mutual decision, we broke off our relationship. Our paths had diverged. My cancer experience had changed me. I became a Buddhist and a more spiritual person. She was still devoutly political and wanted more freedom. We parted ways like two adults who cared for each other. It was an ethical, mutually agreed upon decision that didn’t involve one party sleeping with someone else. Joyce was always an ethical person with a high degree of integrity. I look back on that breakup fondly now, aware of how bitter and ugly things can get.  

After we split I'd given her a check for a thousand dollars as a promise to make good on buying out her share of our home. A couple weeks later, without speaking to me first, she went to the title company and legally took her name off the title, literally giving me the house. She did this because of her Marxist convictions. She knew that my family members were all dead or remarried and that I would probably never be able to buy a house again. She, on the other hand, was from an upper middle class family and her parents were still alive. The magnitude of this gift still makes me cry. Because of Joyce I believe in genuine kindness and compassion that transcends romantic love. 

I am old enough to feel death gaining ground. My life is beginning its final chapter. I must seek out the person I used to be. She is still alive inside me and has grown older, wiser, stronger, less afraid. I speak through her voice now. When I open my mouth the only words I'm able to utter are the unadulterated, unmitigated, unapologetic truth. Joyce Schon you taught me well. I miss you.