Kimberly Melton oral history interview, 2017 February 9
Description
Kimberly Melton discusses her thirty years as an LGBTQ activist in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ms. Melton was raised under Catholicism until the age of thirteen--a year in her life she attributes with great importance. While attending junior high school at thirteen, Ms. Melton became aware of her bi-sexual identity, and she describes the nurturing environment she and her group of friends cultivated. Ms. Melton's higher education led her to the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she attended the Mary Foust Residential College program for her Bachelor's degree in Education. Ms. Melton recounts that, similar to her time in junior high school, sexuality wasn't publicly discussed during her time in college. After college, Ms. Melton returned to Charlotte in 1985 and pursued LGBT community through the local organizations Queen City Friends (QCF) and the Gay and Lesbian Switchboard of Charlotte, both organizations housed under the non-profit Metrolina Community Service Project. Inclusion is a topic that Ms. Melton discusses often, highlighting the specific challenges faced by Charlotte's lesbians of color and reflecting on her own relationship with a woman of color. In 1990, Ms. Melton co-founded WOW (not an acronym), a local lesbian and women's organization that Ms. Melton explains often worked with local gay men's groups, producing more opportunities for cooperation and dialogue. Ms. Melton highlights that this cooperation soon became vital, as the AIDS epidemic devastated Charlotte's gay male communities during the 1990s. Additional topics Ms. Melton discusses include the first National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta, Georgia in 1991 and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charlotte.
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