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Description
Pauline Shulman and Diane McCarney oral history interview for the Lyon-Martin House Oral History project. ABSTRACT: Pauline Shulman and Diane McCarney were neighbors of Del and Phyllis from 1994 onward, across the street at Newburg and Duncan, three doors down. They had sightlines into one another’s homes from their kitchen windows. Their friendship evolved as Pauline and Diane supported them in their aging. Diane drove them to their 2004 marriage before then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, and they were their escorts to their 2008 City Hall marriage. They tell stories of the longtime goodwill of the neighborhood toward Del and Phyllis going back to the 1950s. They describe how Del and Phyllis politicized them initially through neighborhood politics related to gentrification. They give a lot of details of the furnishings and art as well as how Del and Phyllis used the garden and rooms in the house, including at the end of Phyllis’ life. They also detail the caregiving model in her later years. They describe their walkthrough video of the house after Phyllis passed, which has also been donated. They express interest in the space being recreated in ways that give the rooms “narratives” about its lived-in history for Del and Phyllis as well as an artist-in-residency and lecture/salon program, in a “living and breathing kind of way, not like a stilted sort of museum sort of thing....Something with a community spirit.” Located at 651 Duncan Street in San Francisco, the Lyon-Martin House is the former home of lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon (1924-2020) and Del Martin (1921-2008). In 2021, the City of San Francisco designated the Lyon-Martin House a City Landmark in recognition of its association, through Lyon and Martin, with the lesbian rights, homophile, and marriage equality movements.
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