Lorraine Fontana, 66, moved to Atlanta 46 years ago with the VISTA program as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. She worked in the housing projects of West End as well as with those living in Cabbagetown, helping residents organize for a better quality of life.
She really hasn’t slowed down since then.
As a former paralegal for the Atlanta-based Lambda Legal office, Fontana continues to ensure the voices of older LGBT people are heard in all progressive movements ― Occupy Atlanta, immigration rights, Grandmothers for Peace. You name it, if it has something to do with social justice, she’s probably been part of it ― marching, rallying and also photographing it all along the way.
The seed to fight for equality for all people was planted in her at an early age. She was active in anti-war protests during the Vietnam era and she tutored low-income students. But watching the turbulent times she grew up was the catalyst that fueled her desire to work to make the world a better place.
“I came from a working class Italian family. My dad ended up in a transit authority union job, my mother was typist. Everyone in our family was Democrats because that’s who working-class people were,” she says. “I think I became this way watching the civil rights movement on TV and reading, Watching the news, paying attention, reading about issues. It became clear to me that the system was not working for a lot of people and I became leftist, a socialist, really early.”
A native of Queens in New York, Fontana attended the Peoples College of Law in Los Angeles from 1976-80. This law school was different, though ― it was an unaccredited, private, nonprofit school run by the students and founded by progressive lawyers for students wanting to serve their communities and people who had limited resources.
But in 1980, Georgia changed its law so that it would not allow a graduate of PCL to take the State Bar and Fontana moved back to Atlanta where she finished her degree at the Atlanta Law School, which no longer exists.
After passing the Bar, Fontana started practicing law and found she hated “boring” legal work.
“I wanted to do civil rights law, poverty law. There were not a lot of places in Atlanta where you could do that,” she said.
Eventually, Fontana chose to not renew her bar license and became a paralegal, working at Lambda Legal from 2006 until she retired in 2013. “I loved it,” she says.
Finding place with Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance
As Fontana became more involved in Atlanta’s socially progressive scene in the late 1960s, she met up with a group of women she loved to socialize with because of their strong attraction to political activism and who were being targeted by the “Lavender Menace” of other women’s groups. These women later became the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, or ALFA, holding its first official meeting on June 23, 1972. It is within this group that Fontana became comfortable with her sexuality.
“They were leftist, radical, communists, socialists ― I was finding a home not only politically but also for me emotionally,” she says.
As a girl, Fontana said she dreamed about actresses she had crushes on and she was always the man in the dream, but she did not think anything of it. “I had crushes on men and women teachers. I never heard gay slurs ― never had the horror of worrying about what if I’m queer,” she says.
She never dated in high school or college, never got married and never felt the need to get married.
“There was never the sense I was missing something. I was just interested in doing what I was interested in doing,” she says.
But through ALFA, one of the first organized groups for lesbians in Atlanta, Fontana found a safe space to become herself.
“When ALFA formed, that became the focus of my life. It was sexual and romance. This was a community I belonged in. I feel very lucky to have been part of that. We all came out in this wonderful, supportive, loving setting,” she says. Fontana came out to herself in 1970. When she attended a feminist conference and was asked on a registration form to identify as either straight or gay, she checked the lesbian box ― her first time acknowledging publicly who she is.
Over the years as more and more people come out and become visible in their communities, acceptance of LGBT people continues to grow ― and that’s what has to be done to ensure full equality, Fontana says. As she has become older in the LGBT movement, and other movements, it is important that people do not forget their elders.
“We are still part of the movement,” she says.