Phyllis Lyon's Tulsa connection
Title
Phyllis Lyon's Tulsa connection
Subject
Lesbian activist and icon Phyllis Lyon's connection to Tulsa
Description
The Oklahomans for Equality History Project traces Phyllis Lyon's family tree to show her birth and early years in Tulsa. Addresses and photos of her childhood homes here are included. The article takes the reader through her early years in Tulsa, Seattle and northern California and discusses her contributions to lesbian and feminist causes.
Creator
Mary Bishop-Baldwin
Publisher
Oklahomans for Equality
Date
Oct. 10, 2026
Rights
Oklahomans for Equality
Format
PDF
Type
Article
Identifier
Phyllis Lyon article
Email Body
By Mary Bishop-Baldwin
Oklahomans for Equality History Project
One of the most influential lesbians in history has roots right here in Tulsa.
Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026, is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Phyllis Lyon, a pioneering lesbian activist who with her longtime partner and eventual wife, Del Martin, founded the first organization for lesbians, the Daughters of Bilitis. In addition, they wrote and published the book “Lesbian/Woman,” and worked for many decades to further feminist and lesbian causes.
The Oklahomans for Equality History Project is highlighting her because, as a Tulsa native, she is one of our own – and we can take pride in that. Phyllis Ann Lyon was born on Nov. 10, 1924, in Tulsa. She died April 9, 2020, in San Francisco.
Other than the fact that she was born in Tulsa, I have never seen any information about her young years before her family moved to the West Coast. Intrigued by the local connection, though, I wanted to know more, so I began digging through records.
I found that Phyllis’ early years were spent in Tulsa just a few blocks from the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a few years from its occurrence in 1921. Imagine the impact growing up in the aftermath of that devastation wrought by intolerance could have had on her.
Phyllis’ father, William Ranft Lyon, was born in 1895 in New York City, but a U.S. Veterans Administration record indicates that he lived in Tulsa on Feb. 1, 1919. (He was a World War I veteran.) A marriage license for him and Lorena Belle Ferguson, who was born in Kentucky but at the time was from Dallas, Texas, was announced in the Sapulpa Daily Herald on April 1, 1924. A 1924 Tulsa city directory indicates that the couple lived in Unit B4 of the Gotham Apartments in Tulsa and that William Lyon was the vice president and treasurer of the Lyon Co. The 1925 Tulsa city directory lists William R. and Lorena Lyon still living at the Gotham Apartments but in Unit C3.
The Gotham Apartments, a four-story, 23-unit building built in 1920, still stands at 215 W. Fairview St. in The Heights district just north of Tulsa’s Inner Dispersal Loop – which of course didn’t exist when the Lyons lived there. It is within walking distance of downtown Tulsa, where William Lyon likely worked when the business district was booming in the 1920s.
The Tulsa city directory published in 1929, the year the Great Depression began, lists a Mrs. Lorena Lyon employed as a seamstress and living at 1819 E. 16th St. No husband is listed, and the directories do not include the names of children, so rather than being a solid connection to Phyllis’ family, this record merely indicates that a Mrs. Lorena Lyon lived there without a husband. Phyllis would have been 4 at the time the directory was published; she turned 5 late that year. Tulsa Public Schools could find no record that she ever attended school here.
By 1930, the year Phyllis turned 6, the young family had moved to Seattle, Washington, where William Lyon was a salesman for U.S. Gypsum, according to that year’s U.S. Census and a Seattle city directory. Perhaps he had moved there to get established in a job and home before his wife and young Phyllis joined him. A second child, Patricia Lyon, was born to the couple in 1931 in Washington state, records show.
The family moved within a few years to northern California. A voter registration list for Berkeley, California, on Nov. 8, 1938, shows that the parents were both registered to vote there, with William Lyon a registered Republican and Lorena Lyon a registered Democrat. Women had had the right to vote everywhere in this country only 18 years at that point. Imagine the political discussions that young couple might have had within Phyllis’ earshot.
The family had moved to Oakland, California, by the time of the 1940 Census, which listed William as a building materials salesman but did not state for what company. They were living in an apartment in Sacramento, California, where he was a manager for a building materials company, at the time of the 1950 Census.
Phyllis graduated from Sacramento High School in 1943 before attending the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1946. Thirty years later, in 1976, she earned a doctorate in education in human sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
According to her biography in the Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Papers in the GLBT Historical Society Museum and Archives in San Francisco, Phyllis Lyon was a police-beat reporter in Fresno and a reporter at the Chico Enterprise-Record, both in California, during the 1940s. In the 1950s she was on the editorial staff at two building trades magazines in Seattle, where she met Del Martin, who also worked for one of the publications.
“They were platonic friends for two years before becoming romantically involved,” their joint biography in the museum’s collection says. “They returned to San Francisco together in 1953. ... In 1955, they were part of a group of eight lesbians that founded the Daughters of Bilitis ... to counteract the loneliness and isolation they felt as lesbians, creating what was to become the first national combined lesbian organization and support network. Martin served as president from 1957-60, and Lyon was president in 1962.” The Daughters of Bilitis began publishing “The Ladder,” a monthly magazine for lesbians, in 1956.
The couple co-authored “Lesbian/Woman,” which was published by Glide Publications in 1972. “The book includes case histories and personal experiences that document lesbian attitudes, lifestyles, and challenges of living in a heterosexual social structure,” according to their biography. It helped countless women – including me – come to terms with the realization that they were lesbians at a pre-internet time when they might have thought they were all alone. The book let them know that there were other women like them – that it was OK to be a lesbian and that they were not alone.
Then-San Francisco Mayor George Moscone – who was assassinated along with gay San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk in 1978 – appointed Lyon in 1976 to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which she served as chair from 1982 to 1983. She also was chair of the commission’s Lesbian/Gay Advisory Committee.
Del Martin, whose birth name was Dorothy L. Taliaferro, “was the first ‘out of the closet’ lesbian elected to the National Board of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1973,” according to her biography in the museum’s archives. Martin also became a nationally known advocate for abused women, having authored “Battered Wives” in 1976, and was a leader on many boards and commissions.
Fifty-one years after they moved to San Francisco together, Phyllis and Del became the first same-sex couple to wed in California after then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom instructed his city clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004. More than 4,000 same-sex couples were married in San Francisco before the California Supreme Court nullified their licenses later that year. But when that same court ruled four years later that same-sex marriage was constitutional under that state’s constitution, Phyllis and Del again were the first same-sex couple to marry in California, and Newsom personally officiated their ceremony at City Hall. The legality of that marriage was never in doubt. After the couple had spent their adult lives together, Del Martin, 87, died two months after that second wedding.
Oklahomans for Equality Grant Writer and Development Manager Beverly Cotton remembers meeting Del Martin sometime around 1977, when Beverly was an undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Before meeting Martin, “I knew about the Daughters of Bilitis; I knew about the work (Phyllis and Del) had done in California for abused women, all that work.” And she had read “Lesbian/Woman,” before meeting Del. “It had an impact on me in terms of ‘I was not alone,’” she said last week.
Martin met with a few members of the OU Gay Activists Alliance, which was seeking official recognition by the university. Prior to the meeting, “I have to confess, I was intimidated, and I’m not often intimidated. But it was such a big deal to me and such an honor to meet with her.”
She recalls that during the coffee-and-donuts meeting in a campus conference room early one Saturday morning, Del talked about “staying the course and ‘Don’t let them beat you. Keep going’” in the students’ quest for university recognition as a campus organization. She told the students she admired their courage in this conservative state, Cotton said.
“She inspired me and really the whole group to continue our work and not to give up,” Cotton continued. “I was so inspired that someone was openly gay and an open lesbian.”
Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin made an impact on thousands of women, indeed letting them know that they were not alone and that strong, bold women can make a difference in this world.
Perhaps experiences in Phyllis’ young years in Tulsa made a lasting impact on her, too, helping her to become strong and brave in pursuit of her own authentic life and in helping others do the same.
Although Phyllis left Oklahoma at a young age, she had remaining ties to the state. Her maternal grandmother and at least two aunts are buried in Oklahoma City cemeteries, the website findagrave.com shows.
We at the OkEq History Project are proud to make the local connection to Phyllis Lyon, a lion in lesbian history.
Oklahomans for Equality History Project
One of the most influential lesbians in history has roots right here in Tulsa.
Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026, is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Phyllis Lyon, a pioneering lesbian activist who with her longtime partner and eventual wife, Del Martin, founded the first organization for lesbians, the Daughters of Bilitis. In addition, they wrote and published the book “Lesbian/Woman,” and worked for many decades to further feminist and lesbian causes.
The Oklahomans for Equality History Project is highlighting her because, as a Tulsa native, she is one of our own – and we can take pride in that. Phyllis Ann Lyon was born on Nov. 10, 1924, in Tulsa. She died April 9, 2020, in San Francisco.
Other than the fact that she was born in Tulsa, I have never seen any information about her young years before her family moved to the West Coast. Intrigued by the local connection, though, I wanted to know more, so I began digging through records.
I found that Phyllis’ early years were spent in Tulsa just a few blocks from the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a few years from its occurrence in 1921. Imagine the impact growing up in the aftermath of that devastation wrought by intolerance could have had on her.
Phyllis’ father, William Ranft Lyon, was born in 1895 in New York City, but a U.S. Veterans Administration record indicates that he lived in Tulsa on Feb. 1, 1919. (He was a World War I veteran.) A marriage license for him and Lorena Belle Ferguson, who was born in Kentucky but at the time was from Dallas, Texas, was announced in the Sapulpa Daily Herald on April 1, 1924. A 1924 Tulsa city directory indicates that the couple lived in Unit B4 of the Gotham Apartments in Tulsa and that William Lyon was the vice president and treasurer of the Lyon Co. The 1925 Tulsa city directory lists William R. and Lorena Lyon still living at the Gotham Apartments but in Unit C3.
The Gotham Apartments, a four-story, 23-unit building built in 1920, still stands at 215 W. Fairview St. in The Heights district just north of Tulsa’s Inner Dispersal Loop – which of course didn’t exist when the Lyons lived there. It is within walking distance of downtown Tulsa, where William Lyon likely worked when the business district was booming in the 1920s.
The Tulsa city directory published in 1929, the year the Great Depression began, lists a Mrs. Lorena Lyon employed as a seamstress and living at 1819 E. 16th St. No husband is listed, and the directories do not include the names of children, so rather than being a solid connection to Phyllis’ family, this record merely indicates that a Mrs. Lorena Lyon lived there without a husband. Phyllis would have been 4 at the time the directory was published; she turned 5 late that year. Tulsa Public Schools could find no record that she ever attended school here.
By 1930, the year Phyllis turned 6, the young family had moved to Seattle, Washington, where William Lyon was a salesman for U.S. Gypsum, according to that year’s U.S. Census and a Seattle city directory. Perhaps he had moved there to get established in a job and home before his wife and young Phyllis joined him. A second child, Patricia Lyon, was born to the couple in 1931 in Washington state, records show.
The family moved within a few years to northern California. A voter registration list for Berkeley, California, on Nov. 8, 1938, shows that the parents were both registered to vote there, with William Lyon a registered Republican and Lorena Lyon a registered Democrat. Women had had the right to vote everywhere in this country only 18 years at that point. Imagine the political discussions that young couple might have had within Phyllis’ earshot.
The family had moved to Oakland, California, by the time of the 1940 Census, which listed William as a building materials salesman but did not state for what company. They were living in an apartment in Sacramento, California, where he was a manager for a building materials company, at the time of the 1950 Census.
Phyllis graduated from Sacramento High School in 1943 before attending the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1946. Thirty years later, in 1976, she earned a doctorate in education in human sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
According to her biography in the Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Papers in the GLBT Historical Society Museum and Archives in San Francisco, Phyllis Lyon was a police-beat reporter in Fresno and a reporter at the Chico Enterprise-Record, both in California, during the 1940s. In the 1950s she was on the editorial staff at two building trades magazines in Seattle, where she met Del Martin, who also worked for one of the publications.
“They were platonic friends for two years before becoming romantically involved,” their joint biography in the museum’s collection says. “They returned to San Francisco together in 1953. ... In 1955, they were part of a group of eight lesbians that founded the Daughters of Bilitis ... to counteract the loneliness and isolation they felt as lesbians, creating what was to become the first national combined lesbian organization and support network. Martin served as president from 1957-60, and Lyon was president in 1962.” The Daughters of Bilitis began publishing “The Ladder,” a monthly magazine for lesbians, in 1956.
The couple co-authored “Lesbian/Woman,” which was published by Glide Publications in 1972. “The book includes case histories and personal experiences that document lesbian attitudes, lifestyles, and challenges of living in a heterosexual social structure,” according to their biography. It helped countless women – including me – come to terms with the realization that they were lesbians at a pre-internet time when they might have thought they were all alone. The book let them know that there were other women like them – that it was OK to be a lesbian and that they were not alone.
Then-San Francisco Mayor George Moscone – who was assassinated along with gay San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk in 1978 – appointed Lyon in 1976 to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which she served as chair from 1982 to 1983. She also was chair of the commission’s Lesbian/Gay Advisory Committee.
Del Martin, whose birth name was Dorothy L. Taliaferro, “was the first ‘out of the closet’ lesbian elected to the National Board of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1973,” according to her biography in the museum’s archives. Martin also became a nationally known advocate for abused women, having authored “Battered Wives” in 1976, and was a leader on many boards and commissions.
Fifty-one years after they moved to San Francisco together, Phyllis and Del became the first same-sex couple to wed in California after then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom instructed his city clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004. More than 4,000 same-sex couples were married in San Francisco before the California Supreme Court nullified their licenses later that year. But when that same court ruled four years later that same-sex marriage was constitutional under that state’s constitution, Phyllis and Del again were the first same-sex couple to marry in California, and Newsom personally officiated their ceremony at City Hall. The legality of that marriage was never in doubt. After the couple had spent their adult lives together, Del Martin, 87, died two months after that second wedding.
Oklahomans for Equality Grant Writer and Development Manager Beverly Cotton remembers meeting Del Martin sometime around 1977, when Beverly was an undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Before meeting Martin, “I knew about the Daughters of Bilitis; I knew about the work (Phyllis and Del) had done in California for abused women, all that work.” And she had read “Lesbian/Woman,” before meeting Del. “It had an impact on me in terms of ‘I was not alone,’” she said last week.
Martin met with a few members of the OU Gay Activists Alliance, which was seeking official recognition by the university. Prior to the meeting, “I have to confess, I was intimidated, and I’m not often intimidated. But it was such a big deal to me and such an honor to meet with her.”
She recalls that during the coffee-and-donuts meeting in a campus conference room early one Saturday morning, Del talked about “staying the course and ‘Don’t let them beat you. Keep going’” in the students’ quest for university recognition as a campus organization. She told the students she admired their courage in this conservative state, Cotton said.
“She inspired me and really the whole group to continue our work and not to give up,” Cotton continued. “I was so inspired that someone was openly gay and an open lesbian.”
Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin made an impact on thousands of women, indeed letting them know that they were not alone and that strong, bold women can make a difference in this world.
Perhaps experiences in Phyllis’ young years in Tulsa made a lasting impact on her, too, helping her to become strong and brave in pursuit of her own authentic life and in helping others do the same.
Although Phyllis left Oklahoma at a young age, she had remaining ties to the state. Her maternal grandmother and at least two aunts are buried in Oklahoma City cemeteries, the website findagrave.com shows.
We at the OkEq History Project are proud to make the local connection to Phyllis Lyon, a lion in lesbian history.
Subject Line
On Her 102nd Birthday, We Celebrate a Pioneer Who Reminded Generations They Were Not Alone
From
Oklahomans for Equality
To
historyproject@okeq.org
Files
Citation
Mary Bishop-Baldwin, “Phyllis Lyon's Tulsa connection,” OKEQ History Project, accessed November 13, 2026, https://history.okeq.org/items/show/1413.