Kay Van Deurs aka Kady (1927 - October 14, 2003) was an artist, writer, and lesbian activist.Partner Diana Davies
Queer Places:
Workshop of the Children, 500 Hudson St, New York, NY 10014
324 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Kay Van Deurs aka Kady (1927 - October 14, 2003) was an artist, writer, and lesbian activist.
Kady Vandeurs was born in Pensacola, Florida, the daughter of George and Ann Shepard Vandeurs. After being cast out of her childhood home in Poley, Alabama, by her homophobic father—a WWII veteran who associated her lesbianism with communism and bolshevism—she found support from underground networks of other queer women who eventually grew to be family. Though a writer and artist at heart, she accepted work where she could find it: laboring in gig journalism, mimeographing books at various shops along Fourth Avenue’s “second hand book row,” and even setting type and doing odd jobs in Weiser Bookshop, the “supermarket of the occult” that stood on Broadway, just below 8th Street.
When Kady moved into an abandoned store front on West 10th Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1961, she did not plan on organizing an official non-profit from its sidewalk—especially not one that functioned as a toy and craft-making studio space for children. Living with housing insecurity and on the edge of poverty, Van Deurs cautiously, though illegally, attempted to call the windowed shop home. Eventually, so too would many of her racially and ethnically diverse neighbors who also came from impoverished or working poor backgrounds. Though short-lived, hundreds of Greenwich Village children claimed “Workshop of the Children” (Workshop) as their neighborhood space at the height of its popularity from 1961-1964. For Van Deurs, a lesbian-identifying woman struggling to live and work within city and psychiatric systems hostile to queer people, the experience of running Workshop was crucial in shaping the trajectory of her humanitarian work, and in helping her embrace her LGBTQ+ identity. Despite the enthusiasm from prominent community advocates such as Jane Jacobs and practitioners at the Lower East Side Quaker Meeting House, the experimental sidewalk shop never found a permanent home. Still, its presence offers a glimpse into intergenerational race relations and a unique form of queer activism not popularly associated with the LGBTQ+ rights movement in twentieth-century New York City. In 1963 the Workshop moved to 500 Hudson Street.
When the Stonewall Riots broke out in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, Van Deurs was two blocks away in an apartment on Bleecker Street. She had just gotten home from a 5th Avenue Peace Parade Committee meeting (an anti-Vietnam War activist group) when her lover ran into her apartment at 3 a.m. to tell her about the situation at the Stonewall Inn. At the time, she explained that she just “didn’t understand.” A week later, when she heard that gay activists were meeting in Washington Square Park, she decided not to attend out of fear of attending a “gay meeting,” still reluctant to publicly identify as a lesbian. Just two years later, though, she felt differently about openly affiliating herself with Gay Liberation. At the urging of friend and photographer Diana Davies, Van Deurs went to Albany on a chartered bus to “change the state laws against homosexuals.” Davies, in broad daylight, captured her image on the steps of the state capitol building, holding a sign that read “REPEAL SODOMY STATUTES.”
That event, the first ever “Gay Rights March on Albany” in March of 1971, proved consequential to the future of Van Deurs’s activism. From that point forward, she devoted her activity to the Gay and Women’s Liberation Movements, the Women’s Peace Movement, and the Anti-War Movement.
She published articles in Big Mama Rag, the New Women's Times, and Off Our Backs, and studied design, painting, and graphic art at Greenfield (Massachusetts) Community College. She participated in the Women's Pentagon Action (1980-1981) and at the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace & Justice near Seneca Falls, New York (1983).
With her friend Diana Davies, she designed jewerly, and they owned a studio at 324 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. In 1978 she self-published The Notebooks That Emma Gave Me: Autobiography of a Lesbian, with photographs taken by Diana Davies. The one on the cover was of Kady at the “Hold Hands” demonstration on May 6, 1973, in which over 600 members of the LGBTQ+ community representing various New York City area gay rights groups marched across the George Washington Bridge in a show of solidarity. Van Deurs is pictured on the bridge, holding a banner that reads “Lesbian Liberation Committee,” a sub-comittee of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), which was later renamed Lesbian Feminist Liberation after departing from the GAA.
Panhandling Papers, written and self-published by Kady Van Deurs in 1989, is a compilation of select pieces of Van Deurs’ writing, chronicling her activism throughout the late seventies and eighties. The portrait on the cover, by Paula Gottlieb (1981), highlights Van Deurs’ work as a silversmith by prominently featuring multiple labrys-inspired necklaces – objects that earned her the nickname “Axemaker to the Queen.” The labrys was a double-sided battle axe depicted in portrayals of the Mother Goddess of the ancient Minoan Civilization that flourished in the Aegean world until 1450 B.C., and claimed by many lesbian feminists in the Gay and Women’s Liberation Movements.
Kady died in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 2003.
My published books:
