American actor Jessica Toltzis first became aware of Edie Windsor in 2019 while scrolling through Instagram.
“I saw a photo of this older woman wearing a shirt that said, ‘Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian,’ says Toltzis.
The actor and writer, whose TV credits include the series Your Honour starring Bryan Cranston, did not then know that Windsor was an under-sung gay civil rights campaigner who in her eighties had fought the American government for the right to allow same-sex marriages. Nor that in 2013 when the supreme court ruled in her favour, she won.
The story is now the inspiration behind Edie, Toltzis’s one-woman show which has just opened at the Edinburgh Fringe.
“The next time I saw her it was in a post called Our Favourite Mensches. I looked her up and saw she was this Jewish lesbian from Philadelphia,” adds the 29-year-old who is herself a Jewish lesbian from Philadelphia.
“What really drew me to her is her bravery and being thrust into the limelight when she didn’t want to be – and realising that being a champion of a greater cause is more important than being silent,” says the writer and performer speaking from her Los Angeles apartment.
[Missing Credit]
Edie was Edith Schlain before changing her name so that, as Toltzis puts it, “she could walk into a room and the first thought people had would no longer be ‘Jew’”.
Whether Windsor thought that passing as a gentile was preferable to people wondering if she was a member of the royal family is not clear. But she certainly became royalty for those American same-sex couples who were finally able to marry in the country in which they lived.
Up until the supreme court victory they had to elope to other jurisdictions which is what Windsor and her wife Thea Spyer did when they married in 2007. The ceremony took place in Toronto and was officiated by Canada’s first openly gay judge.
However, when Thea died two years later Edie found that because American law only recognised marriage between a man and woman she received a $363,000 (£274,550) tax bill. Incensed, she took the state to court, a case that led to a change of the law in 2015.
“I play her from the ages of 34 to 82 and it starts off with the night before the supreme court case ‘Windsor versus the United States of America’. The play goes back and forth between the Sixties and Seventies, and into 2013 when the actual case happened,” explains Toltzis.
Edith Windsor at DC Pride in 2017[Missing Credit]
After Windsor died in 2017 Barack Obama said, “Few were as small in stature as Edie Windsor – and few made as big a difference to America.” Bill Clinton agreed. “In standing up for herself, Edie also stood up for millions of Americans and their rights,” he said, while former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio praised Edie for giving the “moral universe a good kick in the ass”.
Yet although achieving as much as many other gay rights campaigners – many of whom were Jewish including Larry Kramer and Harvey Milk, both of whom have been represented on screen and stage – Windsor is far less well-known, says Toltzis.
“Most people I talk to about this don’t know who she was,” says the actor.
Yet if Edie was conceived as a celebration of Windsor’s achievements, the show now feels like a defence of them, especially in an era where it is hard to imagine an increasingly conservative supreme court granting more rights to same-sex couples.
“Gay rights and LGBTQ rights are still under attack. It seems that things are going backwards,” says Toltzis. “A decade ago [threatening Gay and LGBTQ rights] was not even a consideration, and now they are under threat. So 100% the show is a defence.”
[Missing Credit]
For Toltzis, being both gay and Jewish was not always straightforward and she identifies with a line in the play where Windsor asks, “If it says in the bible that man should not sleep with, I have to ask, ‘God, why would you make me gay?’
“I’ve asked this question myself,” says Toltzis. ‘I think there are a lot of [Jewish] people who think if you’re Jewish, being gay doesn’t really fit into that. I have not invited them to the show. But there are others in my life who I never thought would want to come to see the show, like a dear cousin who is modern Orthodox who brought her boyfriend. I was so moved by that, because there are a lot of religious Jews who probably would not support the show.”
Toltzis is the daughter of a therapist and professor on her mother’s side while her father, now retired, worked in advertising. He now writes poetry. Their daughter being gay “was never a problem. It was always ‘we will love you no matter what,’” says Toltzis. “I’m getting emotional.”
The bigger surprise was Toltzis’s chosen career. “But I think what I do is the natural combination of both of them – the emotional and the intellectual.”
As for Windsor she was not a religious person, says Toltzis. “But she does represent this very Jewish attitude that justice is something to strive towards, and fight for. And that is incredibly Jewish.”
The performer hopes her play will “inspire people to be themselves”. Following Windsor’s example, the key, says Toltzis, lies in being public about those parts of oneself that others think you should hide.
“Being gay is not just a part of me. It is all encompassing. It is about who I am. It affects how I move through the world. It affects who I love and who I could marry one day.”
This very thought occurs to Toltzis every time she performs her play. She never really saw herself as a political animal. However, writing about and performing Windsor’s experience has taught her that “everything is political, just by leaving the house. What you wear, how you show up, it is all political,” says Toltzis.
Growing up she knew a few gay men but did not personally know any lesbians, which she says probably “stalled” her coming out beyond her immediate friends and family. Now that she has, largely thanks to the show, the sense of liberation is palpable.
Windsor died at the age of 88 from a heart attack, or what Toltzis describes as “broken heart syndrome” following her wife’s death.
Yet the quality that Toltzis hopes to capture in her show is the infectious life-affirming energy that at the age of 82 allowed her take on the United States government and, as Toltzis puts it, “sue the crap out of them”.
“Every night when I get up on stage I look out at the audience. Sometimes there are my friends or family or sometimes they will all be people I don't know. And I think one day, hopefully not at 82 like Edie, but one day these people will see me marry someone. And I'm allowed to do that, and to think that, because of this woman.”
‘Edie’ is at the Edinburgh Fringe at The Annexe at Paradise in The Vault (venue 29) until August 16
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.