Jerre Kalbas (born March 3, 1918) is a real-life Rosie the Riveter as well
as a SAGE founding member.Partner Patty Storm
Queer Places:
136 Cypress Ave, The Bronx, NY 10454
Jerre Kalbas (born March 3, 1918) is a real-life Rosie the Riveter as well
as a SAGE founding member.
Jerre Kalbas was born in Harlem Eye and Ear Hospital and raised in the South Bronx at 136 Cyprus Avenue before she moved to Brooklyn Heights in 1942 at the age of twenty-four to live with her lover, Patty Storm. Storm at the time lived with her mother in an apartment in a rooming house on Hicks Street and worked as a ballroom dancer, while Kalbas was working as an electrician, welder and jewelry smith. Kalbas recalled that at that time, she "walked like a truck driver", and that Patty helped femme her up in order to better find jobs, going so far as to buy her a purse so that she would stop carrying her money and cigarettes in a brown paper bag. Prior to WWII, even industrial factories would not hire women who presented too masculine. While most of the venues that Kalbas and Storm visited were in Manhattan, Kalbas recalled that they had a lot of gay friends in their Brooklyn Heights neighborhood and that a restaurant called Patricia Murphy's in the Heights was known for having a gay clientele.
Shortly after Kalbas moved in, however, the mobilization for WWII began and the couple left for California where they found jobs working on a ship for the war effort. Jerre later drove back to New York and got a job on the assembly line at the Ford Instrument Company in Queens. Working as a "Rosie" gave Jerre financial independence and a strong sense of self-worth.
In her early 1990s, Kalbas participated in the "Real Rosie the Riveter Project", an archive of filmed oral histories by filmmakers Anne de Mare, Kirsten Kelly & Elizabeth Hemmerdinger that includes 48 women who represent a complex portrait of real life Rosie the Riveters.
Kalbas is also a founding member of SAGE, which provides services and advocacy for LGBT Elders, and has been the primary organizer of the Women's Dance there. Kalbas described being a masculine-presenting lesbian back in the day: "It wasn’t easy, I mean walking down the street. I mean, the guys on the corner there would yell out “Dyke!” you know, and all kind of remarks…but I didn’t pay too much attention to it."
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