O'Day, Janet

Interviewer

Johnna Ossie

Files

Description

Janet O'Day is 71 years old. She lives in Maine with her wife, Rosemary. She has one adult son. She was raised in a Catholic Family in Quincy, Massachusettes. She came out later in life after being married to a man and having a son. Religion is important to Janet and she was involved with Dignity in Boston and Maine, an organization that provides Catholic Mass and religious support to Catholic LGBTQ people. Janet continues to stay involved in her church community. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Janet worked at the Deaconness hospital in Boston as a discharge nurse with patients with HIV and AIDS. At this time Janet was also a Eucharistic minister and provided communion to people on the HIV/AIDS floor of the hospital, which priests at the hospital would not do. She also stayed overnight twice a week with a patient who had been discharged but needed a friend to stay overnight with him.

Citation

Please cite as: Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, University of Southern Maine Libraries.

For more information about the Querying the Past: Maine LGBTQ Oral History Project, please contact Dr. Wendy Chapkis.

Publication Date

Fall 11-17-2017

City

Portland, ME

Keywords

Religion (Catholicism), Dignity Boston, Dignity Maine, HIV and the AIDS epidemic, the process of coming out, family, marriage

Disciplines

History of Gender | Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies | Oral History | Women's Studies

Recommended Citation

Ossie, Johnna, "O'Day, Janet" (2017). Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection. 23.
https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/querying_ohproject/23

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.