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Diane Divelbess
(1935 - living) U.S.A.

Diane Divelbess

Artist

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Diane was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and attended college in California, where she earned a BA Fine Arts degree from Scripps College and a Masters of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate University. She studied printmaking and silkscreen privately with Nick Dematties and Jack Duganne. She is Professor of Art Emerita with California State University, Pomona, where she taught for 27 years. She has exhibited on the West Coast from California to Washington. Divelbess and her spouse, Grethe Cammermeyer, now live on a beautiful property with a stunning view of Saratoga Passage near Langley, on Whidbey Island.

Diane Divelbess

She lives with her lover, former colonel Margarethe (Grethe) Cammermeyer. The couple's house is now essentially a gallery. It contains massive collections of what Diane calls the "kitschiest" stuff - from Pez witches to Frida on a rubber eraser and the Black Madonna in a walnut shell. Diane is a great collector of folk and tribal art and has masks adorning the walls in juxtaposition to her serene renditions of a teacup. Diane paints, draws with pencil and crayon and utilizes various printmaking techniques.

Grethe Cammermeyer loved the Army so much that she put camouflage bedspreads on her sons' bunk beds. She volunteered for Vietnam. She aspired to be a general and the chief nurse of the Army National Guard. She even dreamed to retire with full military honors, in a parade with a band playing.

But a parade for Grethe, born 1961, looks doubtful. For seven years, ever since she told a military investigator that she was a lesbian, the Army has been trying to discharge her. She is still in uniform with the Washington State National Guard, thanks to a ruling by a Federal District Court that an Army ban on homosexuals violated her constitutional rights. But the Army and the Justice Department are appealing that ruling, although she is less than a year away from mandatory retirement and on May 6 2015 went on inactive duty.

Last year, "Serving in Silence" was turned into a made-for-television movie that won three Emmys and, in March, a media award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for telling a gay story "with honesty and integrity." The movie cost her what was left of her privacy, but she says there have been compensations.

"It helped my sons" - the four of them are now 19 to 27 - "understand what I went through, in a visual way, and I think it was a vehicle for sensitizing other people, too. It says to people: 'Gay people are just like you. We go to work, just like you. We get stuck in traffic, just like you. We stop on the way home to shop for groceries.' "

She says that she and Diane are "shining examples of middle-class normalcy." Like many other middle-aged couples, they are responsible both for a teen-ager (Grethe's youngest son, Tom Hawken, a college freshman), and for an elderly parent (Diane mother, Veda, who lives with them).

Home for this blended family is a new cedar-shingled house, shaped like the wings of a sea gull, that Grethe and Diane built here on Whidbey Island, an hour by car and ferryboat north of Seattle. With its four bedrooms, family room, art studio (for Diane) and two offices, it is bigger than Langley's old-fashioned town hall.

Her full-time civilian job, which was never in jeopardy, has shielded Grethe from the economic hardships faced by many of the 1,500 full-time members of the armed forces discharged annually because of their sexual orientation.

Grethe frequently speaks to high school and college audiences, because, she says, young gay people need the most support. "Barriers are broken one case at a time, one person at a time," she says. "People now will say, 'I know Joe, and he's gay but he's all right,' the way they used to say, 'I know Joe, and he's black but he's all right.' It's a slow process."

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Source: https://www.whidbeylifemagazine.org/ & http://www.broadwayworld.com/ & http://www.broadwayworld.com/ & www.seattletimes.com/

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