BackCAST Cape Ann: LGBTQ Community on Cape Ann
Episode 4: Kate Noonan and Pat Towler
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Episode 4: Kate Noonan and Pat Towler
The stories you hear as part of the BackCAST Cape Ann series on the LBGTQ community, highlights their contribution, care, and activism. It’s a look back at experiences, significant moments, and persistent memories.
For this episode, I spoke with Kate Noonan and Pat Towler of Common Crow, co-owners of the business for 20 years, located in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Maureen Aylward (MA): So tell me about Common Crow. You’ve been working on this for 20 years. You opened the store in the year 2000, you took over from the Glass Sailboat. Can you tell me about how that transition happened?
Pat Towler (PT): I worked for the Glass Sailboat for the last seven years that it was in operation. Those seven years was a sort of add-on, and it was intended that I would come in to close the business, but we kept it going. And at the end of that period I was ready to move on to do something else, but Mac Bell, the boss, suggested that I could not escape that easily, and that he would like to see if I could buy the business, or buy a portion of the business to carry it on.
Kate and I we were newly in our relationship, yet we put the business together and started to plan a new store that we call Common Crow Natural Health.
For the seven years that I worked for the Glass Sailboat, I had the rare and wonderful experience of working in a downtown business, in a community that I had recently come to, and that sold things that I cared a lot about, but I didn’t have any food business experience. I had a lot of retail experience, and I decided to just dig in like I do and learn everything that was to know about it.
I learned a lot about the three businesses that were part of the Glass Sailboat: the clothing business and the food business and the grocery business. We had a wonderful time there. We had a coffee house that we did for three years, which was really exciting because that’s how I got to meet and know folks in our community like Brian King, and Deb Hardy, other musicians in the community
MA: Kate, where did you come into the picture?
Kate Noonan (KN): I met Pat at the Glass Sailboat. I was working a few doors down as a mental health counselor. If a client didn’t show up, I’d walk up to the Glass Sailboat, grab a cookie and tea, or hang out. I even did a short stint of cashiering and cashing out. I came to Gloucester as my bridge. I had a very successful career as a naturalist historian park manager, sort of birdwatcher, taking people out, guiding, and working for Mass Audubon. I felt like I had done what I wanted to do in that field and decided to take a break.
So I came to Gloucester like a lot of people do, in the early 90s. I was bumping around for a few months not taking an official job and sorting out what I wanted to do. I worked at the cape Ann Food Co-op, and met a lot of the folks who we still serve today. We have employees in the store who worked at the Cape Ann Food Co-op and who worked at the Glass Sailboat.
MA: You’re kidding.
KN: No. It’s hard to leave. We’re all the Gilbert Grapes of Cape Ann. I first met Pat before I went to grad school or while I was in the middle of it. I was studying to do mental health counseling. During that period was when I was coming out, it was a lot of fun. It was really fun to come out at that age.
MA: So how old were you and what was fun about it?
KN: Well, because I was having a fresh start. I was in a new community, I was an adult. I didn’t care what anybody thought about me. I was having fun experiences in so many ways, with individual people, with groups of women. I was being asked out by men, asked out by women, I was just having some fun. And, how old was I? I don’t know. I was not quite 40, I guess, maybe even less than that. A little more than 30. I went to Lesley University and got my Master’s Degree in mental health counseling, and met a lot of really great women there and had my first real full-on girl crush there.
Throughout my youth I was clueless about gay as an option or anything like that. I was fluid in my behavior. I enjoyed playing sports. I was very active. I did not put up with any crap from guys. People called me a feminist and I kind of felt like it was a dirty word because I just felt like a person. I felt empowered in that it was okay to be who I am. It wasn’t all that much about my sexuality as it was about just doing and thinking and being in the world.
I remember a little voice in my head when I was in high school. You’re always in conflict with your parents, and my mother drove me crazy, and the little voice said, “You won’t know love until you know the love of a woman.” And I heard that to mean, “You better appreciate what your mother has to offer.” That’s how I interpreted it at the time.
And when I went to college, girls are crushing out on me all the time, and I didn’t even have a clue. After dating boys, then men, being married for seven years to a man, and that sort of crashing and burning, I had the time and space to explore at a time in my life where I felt completely comfortable doing whatever I felt like doing because I could.
And that is, I guess, why it was easy and fun. It’s always a challenge to come out to your family. But that was pretty hilarious. My sister kept asking me, “Which one is it?”
MA: What do you mean which one is it? Which one would you choose?
KN: Yeah. Which one of the girls is it that you’re hanging out with?
PT: It wasn’t me at the time.
KN: And my brother said, “Oh, you’re going to have to talk to your nieces about all this. I can’t do that for you.” And all sisters-in-law saying, “Oh, hurray.” And then my mother saying, “You can’t come to the holidays,” and then two months later saying, “What are you bringing to your father’s 80th birthday party?” It was just how the family rolled.
For me, there were highs and lows, but it was never like I want to kill myself or anything like that. It was just part of the excitement and rollercoaster of the story because I’d felt like that with my family about any big thing that I was announcing to them. The last words my dad said to me were, “Please tell Pat I say hello.”
MA: Pat, what was your coming out like? Did you have a moment like that?
PT: Kate did it.
MA: Kate did it for you?
PT: Yeah. In thinking about this conversation beforehand, I realized that it’s true that I’m not a joiner. Anyone who knows me knows that, but when I’ve been true to myself, I’ve been very focused on the person and the feeling and the connection more than anything else. Which is not to say that I was freely moving between female and male affection; I wasn’t.
It was a big deal for me to realize that the person who I was looking at coming into the Glass Sailboat for her tea, and looking at me over the cup that she would bring, and a lot of steps of the process, spiritual and otherwise, that brought me to the place where I said, “Oh, this is the person who I love.” In fact, my co-worker said to me, “You’re in love.” And I said, “I guess I am.” And she said, “I know who it is.” They always know, you know? Your friends always know.
And I said, “Tell me” because I was, like Kate, in the middle of a little dance with a couple of different people. And my co-worker was correct, it was Kate. It was fun to discover that this happiness could be part of my life. I’d had a long road before that. Also a marriage to a man before I came to this point in my life. Now Kate and I have found a place where we are connected to each other, and it’s not about gender specific anything, it is that this is my partnership.
Gay and lesbian or other gender community members are embedded in the common culture today more than they were 21 years ago, 30 years ago, a 100 years ago. And so we are privileged in this time to have this comfort, relative safety, relative acceptance. There’s a lot to say about that. It hasn’t been all roses for us. And it’s true that things are different now.
When I knew that we were going to talk about the gay community on the podcast, one of the things that has changed, it seems, dramatically, is that because of this more universal acceptance, some of the inner community activities have dissipated. Around the time that we got together 20 or so years ago, the activity of having a women’s coffee house or a gay and lesbian or LGBTQ community event was happening, but now it has kind of screeched to a stop. It stopped happening.
MA: Do you think it wasn’t necessary anymore because there was that greater integration? Why do you think it stopped?
PT: I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the community at large opened up to us and we were able to immerse ourselves in normal everyday life.
MA: Did you feel like you were separated from the regular community?
PT: Well, when you think about it, safety and acceptance, we all need that. And we all need a tribe where the basis of your being is not in question. At the time, there was a separation between our gay and lesbian community, other gender culture, and the mainstream. It was dramatic enough that it wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t accepting.
So finding your way through your own experience was partly to find your tribe, your community, and be with them and just do normal stuff like go over to someone’s house for dinner or share music together. And specifically for us, music experiences expressed our own context. Kate and I attended some women’s festivals and that were an incredible adventure to see the women-only culture, expressed in community with all orientations, but just women.
KN: I personally never felt any kind of push back for being a lesbian, gay person, different other person on Cape Ann. I always felt like, I’m here, I’m doing what I’m doing, I’m a contributing member of society, I am welcomed and accepted. I accept you. And I think for me anyway, coming at the world in that way it made it easier to be accepted too. Not everyone has that privilege, I know. Not everyone has that sense of self. Being gay is not even like a topic very often. Amongst the staff, it is more so. I remember the first time we had an employee call us a power lesbian couple and I was like, “Oh, really?”
PT: I’m surprised to hear that.
KN: So, as perceived by others, I think it’s really different than the life that we live.
PT: I wanted to tell a story about same sex marriage and the passage of the law. Kate and I were already pretty committed to each other and the very tumultuous period when Massachusetts was in the process of accepting or allowing or permitting same sex marriage, and finally that law was passed. Kate likes to be an early adopter, so we trotted over to Gloucester City Hall and filled in the paperwork. The ladies in the Clerk’s office were shaking and nervous and very anxious. We got our paperwork and the staff were very respectful but were counting and measuring every word and making sure that they were doing everything correctly. We completed our paperwork, and…
KN: Then we got our packet of soaps…
PT: Yes, laundry detergents in a cute little silver bag, which I think I might still have it in a drawer somewhere.
KN: It was like a welcome wagon bag. It is what you get when you apply for a marriage license in Gloucester.
PT: So we left there and said, “All right, we did it. We have this process underway.” You have to be done with your actual wedding by a certain number of days.
KN: Yeah. I think we had like 30 days.
PT: So initially we thought, “We’ll just have a little something.” With all of the details of telling family and friends about this, every single person said, “There will be no little something.” In the end we had our wedding at our home, which was right off of Washington Street and in public view because my garden was directly in view of the street. We had 70 people there; it was a really wonderful day. We had a beautiful ceremony and lovely meal, and it was just awesome and wonderful.
There’s another piece to the story I wanted to share, which is about some of the challenges that we’ve experienced. I’ll tell a story about being in the old store in downtown, just after getting our license. We serve a lot of different people in the store, and diversity and welcoming is part of what we’re about. Folks from all walks of life would come in and get their vitamins, or incense, or whatever they are buying.
One day, one of our regulars came storming into the store. She was mad. She was probably in her 60s, a good customer, came in every day after she went to the Y, and was very kind and sweet to us.
She did not know anything about me personally; however, she was used to speaking her mind at our store. This customer told me that she couldn’t believe that gay marriage was allowed in Massachusetts now and that she was going to have to move out of state.
MA: She didn’t know that you were a lesbian.
PT: Nope. And I was listening to her and doing all of the things that it takes to just let someone have their space. Internally was chuckling because I got it that she didn’t know anything about me. But I let her speak her mind and she was so truly horrified that she was going to talk to her husband about selling their house and moving out of state because she couldn’t tolerate the thought that this was happening.
I heard her and I said, “Oh, it’s going to be okay. Everybody’s going to be fine. I hope you don’t move.” And if you roll forward about a year and a half or two years later, she came into the store another time and she said just casually, “Hey, I saw you in your yard gardening, and you and Kate have made a really nice place.”
I felt like the period was on the end of the sentence without convincing, without controlling, without teaching, but just accepting. It felt really important. And years and years have gone by and this person is still a customer, is still a friend of the business, is still around. Space makes a lot of change happen.
MA: Thank you so much for being on the podcast and we’ll see you at Common Crow.
PT and KN: Thank you.
BackCAST Cape Ann is a production of 1623 Studios. This show was produced by Maureen Aylward with technical assistance from Becky Tober.