Good News Is Gospill

Sue Gospill died last Friday. I’m told it was “her time.”

She was only 75, and that feels REALLY young from my perspective. But the Gospills never treated time like something to stretch. They faced it head-on, talked about it plainly, even casually.

“When you die, can I have this?”

I used to find it strange. My family leaned toward optimism and momentum—squeezing as much life as possible out of every day. Theirs leaned toward realism. Sue embodied that.

The oldest of the three Gospill siblings (my husband was the youngest), she was the original tough cookie. A gay woman coming of age in the late 1960s, Sue lived in a world that didn’t make space for her. She pushed back in the only ways she could—sometimes messy, sometimes defiant. Her parents, confused, purposely clueless, and unsure of what else to do, took her to a recruitment office shortly after her high school graduation and enlisted her in the Navy.

She never returned home. Whether out of rebellion, belonging, or both, she built a life in the military. Retired as a Chief Petty Officer and later consulted for the FAA. That alone says a lot about her grit.

She also did what many women of her generation had to do—she got married. And when her husband found her in bed with a woman, he pulled a gun on her. That was the reality she navigated.

When I first met Sue in 1990, she was divorced and living in San Diego with a roommate who preferred sharing the master bedroom with her. Jay and I had been married for a year, and I had not yet met his sisters. Sue made an immediate impression—fun, bold, a little unpredictable. RX-7, hot tub, full personality; full-on opinionated about everything.

Within two hours, I knew she was gay. Jay argued with me about that for at least a year.

Sue didn’t fit neatly anywhere. Not in her family. Not in society. Not even, at times, in simple relationships. She could be awkward, even uncomfortable, especially with kids. Our son Tom experienced that firsthand.

Let’s just say she was probably more maternal toward her dog. But she showed up in her own way.

She and her father clashed constantly—too much alike, maybe. Yet when he died, she was the one who honored him most deliberately, creating military memorabilia for him that said everything they never could say to each other.

Here’s what sticks with me about Sue: Why, after all these years, I think about her whenever certain folks say they want to “make America great … again.” 

She lived through those “before times” — the era when a woman needed a man to get a credit card and establish her own financial security. Her doctor even required her husband’s permission to have her tubes tied. It was a time when being who she was came with real risk.

Sue lived that—and still carved out a life on her own terms. She was my first sister-in-law. And she was, in her own complicated way, a trailblazer.