June, 2024 - Lisa M.

PFLAG LGBTQ+ Elders Interviews Podcast – Personal Stories in the Making of LGBTQ History

From Palm Springs, CA, and a Palm Springs City Council member, meet Lisa Middleton, a transgender woman in her early 70s who has led an inspiring and varied life with no signs of slowing down. Holding high-level corporate positions before stepping into local politics, Lisa is currently a candidate for the CA State Senate representing Riverside and San Bernardino counties - predicted to be the closest election in CA in recent years.
Lisa comes from an organic part of California pioneers, the Dust Bowl Generation. Her family came to California with a storyline not far off track from the beloved characters found in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” - to CA from Oklahoma in the 1930’s, leaving behind great poverty and poor prospects of opportunity, most of them went into the fields as laborers in California.
Having been moved to LA at the age of one, Lisa scrambled her way through an education that had her finishing up with a Master’s degree at USC.
Lisa’s interview takes us through her decades living out her not-true self with great loneliness but always a sense of doing her best wherever life took her: marriage to a man, children, her work-life and her waking up time during the Civil Rights period, when she discovered she could no longer live a lie.
Lisa has a warm, matter-of-fact style and she strikes her listeners as a person greatly at home with all the facets of her life. Enjoy meeting Lisa Middleton.