This Vet Fought for—and Won—the Right to Be Buried With Her Wife
Madelynn Lee Taylor just wanted to be buried alongside her late wife, Jean Mixner, in the Idaho State Veterans Cemetery. But trying to secure this right in the conservative state of Idaho brought this private 74-year-old veteran and former phone company worker out of her “comfort zone,” she said on Thursday.
In July, Taylor made national news when she filed a complaint against the state after cemetery employees told her she couldn’t make arrangements to have her ashes and her wife’s interred in a single stone columbarium at the cemetery. Veterans are allowed to be buried with their spouses, and the couple had been legally married in California. But Idaho law did not recognize same-sex marriages from other states.
This changed on Oct. 15, when Idaho’s same-sex marriage ban was overturned. On Tuesday, Taylor went to the cemetery to arrange for Mixner’s ashes to be kept there, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Being denied equal burial rights wasn’t Taylor’s first experience with discrimination. She joined the Navy in 1958, when she was 18, but was kicked out six years later after someone reported that she was a lesbian.
She then went to work for the Mountain States Telephone Company and, in 1995, was staying in Minnesota with her brother—who’s also gay—while on assignment for work.
All winter, he’d been setting her up on blind dates with women. “I don’t know where they dug ’em up,” Taylor said in an interview with TakePart.
Then, at a house party in Kansas City, Mo., on her way back to Idaho, Taylor’s ex-sister-in-law introduced her to Mixner. Taylor was supposed to leave the next day, but, she said, “I kept making excuses, for days. I stayed in town for about a week longer than I should have.”
The pair had a long-distance relationship for three months and ran up a $300 phone bill. Then, Taylor said, she “flew down to visit [Mixner], and while I was there she sold her house and we packed up and made the U-Haul trip to Idaho.” (And yes, she has heard the joke that lesbians bring a U-Haul truck to the third date.)
From then on, “we never went anywhere without each other, we always wanted to be together," Taylor said. She loved that Mixner “was a lady, absolutely. Totally.” She never left the house without drawing on her eyebrows. But the couple was adventurous too. They traveled around the country for years “work camping,” earning money as hosts at campgrounds, and built themselves houses in Idaho and Arizona.
Taylor and Mixner had an unofficial marriage ceremony soon after moving in together but weren’t legally married until 2008—when they tied the knot in San Bernardino, Calif. Taylor said after they married legally, the relationship “felt more complete.”
Mixner will be interred at the Idaho State Veterans Cemetery on Tuesday, Oct. 28. Taylor is expecting that news cameras will be there again, but she’s OK with that.
“We have a lot of youngsters that are married now legally in the service, and they weren’t getting fair treatment in the different states,” she said. “I kept at it not just because of me, but for others.”
Related stories on TakePart:
• Meet the Inspiring Gay Couple Who Just Got Married in Idaho
• Still Opposed to Gay Marriage? Read These Inspiring Quotes From the Judges Who Are Legalizing It
• Here's Why Legalizing Gay Marriage in Texas Is a Smart Move
Original article from TakePart
