On an early spring day in 1991, Tonda Taylor was sitting in her living room in Charlotte when she received the call that would come to define her life’s work.
“I left the house in a hurry and I’m cold,” she recalls the teenager telling her from a pay phone on the other end of the line. “My father has kicked me out because he doesn’t want a faggot living in his home.”
Tonda’s home number was listed as the contact for Time Out Youth, an organization she’d formed just a couple months earlier to create a safe weekly meeting space for queer youth. But this call was evidence that LGBTQ+ youth in the Charlotte area had far greater needs.
Most people in the city at that time would be hard-pressed to name even a handful of people in town who were out—including Tonda, herself a lesbian. Kids whose lives were at risk due to their own identities had no other place to turn.
Tonda and one of her teenage volunteers drove nearly an hour to the furthest northwest reaches of Mecklenburg County to pick up the caller that afternoon. The 17-year-old stood just 5’3”, and his bright eyes instantly put Tonda at ease. She noticed that he hadn’t even had time to put on socks before leaving his house.
When they got back to Tonda’s, she called other Time Out volunteers until she found a gay couple willing to take him in. He stayed with the couple for a few months as he got back on his feet, found work and eventually earned his GED. He became one of Time Out’s most devoted volunteer leaders. Years later, Tonda accompanied him to his father’s funeral. “He didn’t know what a remarkable son he had,” she thought as she looked into the casket.
The experience became a template for Time Out’s most important work in its early years. If someone called needing a place to stay, Tonda would be there as fast as she could. She could figure out the details later.
Their experiences reminded her of her own life as a queer woman coming of age in Charlotte in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Her well-to-do parents disavowed her lesbianism, which led her to drop out of college and contemplate taking her own life before leaving the hometown she loved for New York City, where gay liberation was becoming more than just a dream.
But the stigma that Tonda’s parents had tried so hard to avoid still found them in the 1980s, when AIDS claimed not just one but two members of their immediate family within seven months: her younger brother Sam, who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, and her father, Andrew, a physician who contracted the disease either during a bypass surgery or while caring for his son.
Tonda and her younger, straight sister, Terry, emerged from their family’s tragedy determined to break the silence about LGBTQ issues in North Carolina. Tonda founded Time Out, which has served thousands of queer youth in the Charlotte area over the past three decades. Terry ran support groups in Boone for some of Western North Carolina’s earliest AIDS patients and became an ambassador for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), touring the country to share the stories of queer Southerners formerly condemned to silence.
At the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, the sisters marched proudly together. Terry held a handwritten sign: “I love my lesbian sister.” The two were blazing a trail for a nascent movement for queer rights and recognition across the South. Three decades later, the sisters still have something to teach us.
‘This Could Be My Sister’
The Taylors moved to Myers Park, Charlotte’s toniest inner suburb, in the 1940s, where they joined the local Methodist church and, as soon as they could afford it, the country club.
Tonda admired her father, one of the South’s first allergists. She still recalls the pride she felt accompanying him on rounds at Charlotte Memorial Hospital. “That’s Dr. Taylor’s daughter,” the nurses would whisper as they passed. Terry knew from watching it all that medicine was her calling, too.
But the sisters discovered early that not all was right in their world. Tonda noticed that when the family’s maid, a Black woman, arrived at her father’s office, she was ushered into a separate waiting room in the back. “How can you do this?” she asked her dad.
“If I integrate my waiting room, I will lose my business,” he told her. “We will have nothing to live on.”
“It was just the way things were,” Tonda remembered in an oral history interview for UNC-Charlotte. And like integration, queer sexuality was not something openly discussed. “Raised in the Methodist church, I knew it was wrong, but I never heard it discussed.”
Both sisters had trouble making sense of the crushes that Tonda had on other girls from a young age. When Terry left home to train as a nurse at the Medical College of Georgia in the 1960s, she completed a rotation at the facility’s psychiatric clinic in part because she wanted to see how doctors treated gay and lesbian patients.
The clinic was the last stop for many families in their attempts to convert their gay children. At the time, the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental disorder, treatable with electroshock therapy. If the patients were discharged without being “cured,” their names would often show up in the obituaries shortly thereafter.
Terry watched as two parents dropped a college-aged son off at the front desk and told staff that if the clinic couldn’t cure him, they didn’t want him back. As she made her rounds that evening, she found the new patient under his bed, sobbing. She crawled under there with him and held him. “This could be my sister,” she thought.
It was around this time, when she was back in Charlotte for a holiday, that Terry decided to talk to her sister. Tonda, who was attending nearby Queens College, admitted that she had started a relationship with one of their parents’ neighbors, a flight attendant.
Her father soon found out and confronted her. “What are you going to do with your life?” he asked, crying. When she replied that she might like to be a psychiatrist, his mood soured.
“There’s no place in medicine for homosexuals, Tonda,” he said. “There’s no way.”
She packed a trunk and told her mother, “I don’t know where you’re gonna send it yet, but I’m heading north.”
A friend convinced her to move to New York City, where she lived in a Greenwich Village walkup. She remembers passing through Sheridan Square on her way to work one morning and seeing police barricades, shattered glass, and broken high heels. She asked a man loitering nearby what happened. “The queers fought back,” he said.
Tonda couldn’t believe it. “We have never fought back,” she thought, and asked the man to repeat himself.
After that, a dam seemed to break.
“There wasn’t even the language for some of what was beginning to happen,” she later recalled. But by the time she started working with a group of gay activists to launch a newspaper, there was a term: gay liberation. She couldn’t quite bring herself to walk in the first Pride march in 1970, but was ready by the second. “It was like stepping off of a bank into a flowing stream,” she told the oral historian. “And I remember just the feeling of, ‘OK. Now I’m one of them.’”
Still, she felt pulled to return to Charlotte. She longed for the city’s trees and couldn’t shake the feeling that her roots were down South. In the early 1980s, just after her 40th birthday, she was home for the holidays when she told her father she was moving back. Disdainfully, he told her there was no place for her in Charlotte.
Tonda burst into tears and ran out of the room. Her mother told her it was for her own good. “There was just nothing much more painful in life that could happen,” Tonda recalled.
As she mourned the loss, she resolved never to let her family hurt her again—and took away a lesson that applied to her later work with youth. “You can’t wait for your parents and your minister to come around,” she told the oral historian. “It may take them years, and they may never come around. You’ve got to go on with your life.”
Homecoming
But soon Tonda’s family needed her. Her brother, Sam, developed a mysterious cough after recovering from leukemia. Terry feared for the worst. “I’m really frightened,” she told Tonda over the phone. “I think I know what this cough is.” As Sam’s illness worsened, Tonda gave up her Greenwich Village apartment and caught a train home.
When Sam got his diagnosis in 1984, AIDS was devastating gay communities in New York City and San Francisco, but seemed less of a concern elsewhere. The U.S. didn’t begin testing blood donations until the following year, which is how Sam likely contracted the virus. But what most Americans could tell you about AIDS, if they’d heard of it at all, was that it was “a gay disease.” Some medical professionals refused close contact with AIDS patients—including in Charlotte, where an early AIDS patient spent 15 hours untreated when no hospital employee would agree to touch him. Others refused to treat AIDS patients at all.
The support that Sam received from his family stood in stark contrast to the experience of almost all the other patients in his support groups. “So many of the families of these men have abandoned them,” he told Tonda. “Because they’ve ‘sinned’ and that’s led to this disease.”
Sam joined an outreach panel that spoke to college, university, and church groups about the realities of the disease and the need for universal safe sex practices to prevent its spread, hoping to dispel some of the rumor and stigma. The “token straight person,” as Tonda described it, Sam warned that AIDS did not discriminate. When a local TV station interviewed him, they distorted his voice and the lighting to make him unidentifiable; all viewers knew was that he was a straight male in his 30s with HIV.
“My God,” Tonda thought, “this is like filming a terrorist.”
Tonda began to speak out, too. “If the AIDS epidemic is going to happen—and our family thinks it is—we should as a community get ready for battle,” she told The Charlotte Observer at the time. “The denial is something we can’t afford.”
Terry agreed. Sam had told her that what did him the most good in those support groups was simply being with others: “I just cry with them.”
Terry lived in Boone with her husband, a doctor who ran a nephrology practice and had treated the town’s first AIDS patient, a Black Appalachian State University student from Zaire. Her husband told Terry that the young man was in the hospital and might appreciate a visit from someone who had experience with the disease and wasn’t afraid to be close.
“If the AIDS epidemic is going to happen—and our family thinks it is—we should as a community get ready for battle.The denial is something we can’t afford.”
Tonda Taylor
Terry knocked on the patient’s door and walked into his room confidently, ignoring the signs insisting that she wear a gown and gloves. “Hi, my name’s Terry,” she said. “I wanted to come visit you.” The patient stared straight at the ceiling. She walked over to the bed and touched his arm with her bare hand. “I thought you might just want a friend,” she said. He finally turned his head and looked the woman with the Piedmont drawl up and down.
“I’ve been praying for a friend,” he told her. “You’re not what I expected—but thank you.”
The two continued to visit after he was discharged, often meeting at Terry’s house by a creek just north of town. Soon, a gay couple joined them. One of them was HIV-positive, and they’d called the local health department looking for a support group. There wasn’t one, but Boone was small enough that the operator had heard about the lady who worked with an AIDS patient.
Terry realized there was an unmet need, so she began advertising the meetings and partnered with Pat Geiger, then the town’s only female physician. Soon, seven or eight HIV-positive students from Appalachian State were regularly coming to her living room. She also started the town’s first PFLAG chapter, and worked with a network of volunteers to deliver hot meals to bedridden patients and arrange rides for appointments.
Boone’s Baptist power brokers condemned Terry’s work. When the first article about Terry’s PFLAG chapter appeared in the Watauga Democrat in 1989, a representative letter to the editor opined: “This is a small Christian town and I for one am offended that I have to see this in the local paper.” Terry began getting angry calls accusing her of “promoting homosexuality,” and a dead rat turned up in her mailbox.
One of her support group members was the Appalachian student body president, a charismatic Republican with a winning smile. When he came out to his parents over spring break, his father walked to his bedroom and grabbed a loaded shotgun. He touched the barrel to his son’s head and told him to leave and never come back.
The student told the group this story sitting on Terry’s living room floor, sobbing. The others got down on their hands and knees and embraced him.
What the student told Terry was echoed by so many others she heard from over the years: “I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid of the rejection of people I love.”
Breaking Down The Closet
Through the decline and death of her brother and father, Tonda knew she needed to find community in her hometown—and to bring gay liberation to Charlotte, even in some small way.
But the city was so closeted that it was hard to even find other queer people. “I felt like I’d stepped into a time warp,” Tonda recalled. Through a whisper network she identified a handful of gay people, almost all of them closeted.
When she finally found a fledgling activist group that met at an office in Dilworth, it was so secretive that they interviewed Tonda before she could attend a meeting. Eventually she found her way to a monthly gathering of middle-aged and retired lesbians.
“They had made it, survived, found a way to support themselves,” Tonda remembered. “It was just understood: You didn’t out anybody.”
But a secretive network like this did little for the region’s most vulnerable LGBTQ residents: its youth.
“There were going to be too many adolescents going through what I had gone through, and yet, gay liberation was what? Twenty years old?” Tonda told the oral historian.
Tonda had taken a job at Charter Pines Psychiatric Hospital, where she interviewed patients to make an initial determination about their admission eligibility. She discovered that many adolescent patients were struggling with issues related to their sexuality. Treatment had come a long way since her youth—the focus was on building the teens’ resilience, and their sexual feelings were not stigmatized—but then they were discharged back to the same homophobic and repressive homes, neighborhoods, churches, and schools that had put them in crisis to begin with.
“The worst part of it was having absolutely no place to go that felt safe, no person, no place, nowhere,” she recalled.
A PFLAG chapter had only recently been chartered in Charlotte, and was beginning to organize a network of supportive parents and friends—but most gay young people in the region had neither. The chapter’s founders told Tonda that there was still an unmet need for wraparound youth support services.
The timing was fortuitous. Tonda had just inherited $100,000 from her brother. And her decades of professional experience in New York had given her insight on how to run a nonprofit organization. She left her job at Charter Pines in 1990 to launch her own effort.
“The worst part of it was having absolutely no place to go that felt safe, no person, no place, nowhere.”
Tonda Taylor
Supporters warned her it would be controversial. The country was in a nationwide panic over adolescent sexuality in general and queer sexuality in particular. Like many other states, North Carolina was on the verge of adopting abstinence-only sex education in schools. The state’s senior senator, Republican Jesse Helms, was campaigning against LGBTQ acceptance, calling gays and lesbians “disgusting people.” Sue Myrick, a Christian conservative who would later fight against gay marriage as a member of Congress, had recently been elected mayor of Charlotte. Police still conducted mass arrests of gay men suspected of cruising in city parks. In 1992, the Charlotte City Council rejected adding sexual orientation to the city’s nondiscrimination policy.
Tonda decided that she would create an organization like the AIDS support groups that had so enriched Sam’s life at the end. It started with just four gay and lesbian kids referred by friends or colleagues. “We asked them what they most needed,” Tonda said, “and they said, ‘a safe place to meet others like us.’”
In 1991, Tonda approached a Unitarian Universalist minister who agreed to offer space. Kids told their parents that they were going to the library to study or, better yet, to a church meeting (which was technically accurate). “They felt that this was the one time in their lives each week that they could be out,” Tonda told the oral historian. “That’s how the ‘Time Out’ name happened.”
Their meetings were raw and cathartic, and afterward the growing group unwound over a meal at nearby Lupie’s Cafe. Soon they were also dropping by Tonda’s house, which became the organization’s unofficial office.
After Tonda listed her home phone number in the newspaper as the organization’s contact, the calls started almost immediately. “The minute the word began to get out that there was some safe, supportive place, it was overwhelming,” Tonda recalled.
Word spread like wildfire, and Time Out quickly became the only hope for young people on the verge of losing everything. Over time, its mission transformed into a network of mutual aid, where people would open their homes to those most in need.
Time Out Youth changed Charlotte in ways that went well beyond its emergency services. In 1991, it hosted the city’s first gay prom. A few years later, it organized one of the first professional conferences on transgender issues, and came to the aid of Concord students who objected to their theater department removing gay content from the school production of A Chorus Line.
In 1999, it supported the local youth playwright Samantha Gellar, whose play about two young lesbians was censored at a Charlotte Children’s Theater ceremony. They worked with the ACLU to stage the inaugural performance at the Great Aunt Stella Center, where 400 people packed the theater.
“The one consistent place of tremendous support was the bravery of the youth themselves,” Tonda said, looking back.
Creating Space
But it took Tonda’s courage, too, said Time Out’s current executive director, Sarah Mikhail. Tonda, now 83, has been retired since 2004.
“We are indebted to her bravery for creating this space—and keeping it going so long that we’re still here 32 years later,” Mikhail said.
Time Out still largely functions as the grassroots, peer-based support network Tonda envisioned, with weekly support sessions and a drop-in space—which now has its own building on Monroe Road.
As the organization has grown, it’s added more resource-intensive services it couldn’t offer early on, like professional mental health care and long-term housing support. It now has a full clinical therapy program, with three licensed counselors on staff, where participants can access both short- and long-term therapy free of charge. In 2022, 80 youth participated in over 1,500 free sessions.
It still provides short-term emergency shelter, but can now help youth transition into long-term, independent housing as they approach adulthood. Last year, the organization helped more than three dozen unhoused young people find stable housing, and it provides financial support for things like bus passes and rental deposits. There’s also the Tonda Taylor Scholarship, which provides thousands of dollars annually for LGBTQ youth attending college or trade school.
Another change in the organization became apparent to Tonda when she gave the keynote address at Time Out’s 30th anniversary celebration: The majority of the young people lining up to meet her afterward were transgender.
Tonda can see that transgender youth still face the kind of challenges that prompted her to create Time Out—about 85 percent of the youth seeking housing from the group are trans. North Carolina recently became the 22nd state to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors, and has outlawed instruction about gender identity in elementary schools and required teachers to alert parents if a student wants to use a new name or pronoun.
Tonda remains as defiant as she was in the ‘90s. “We celebrate our transgender youth,” reads a sign in her front yard. Terry, now 82, feels the same. She told me that, when she thinks of the new gender and sexual identities that are becoming available to young people, she feels nothing but joy.
This is not a new position for either sister. The Time Out holiday fundraising card Tonda designed in 1996 featured a child angel ornament looking down at one broken wing. “We do wing repair,” the card reads, “for many of our children who fly too fast, too low from fear, shame, and isolation. Time Out Youth helps these children to soar with pride as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.”
John Thomason is the features editor at Grist. He lives in New York City and is from Charlotte, North Carolina.
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