page_title: Mildred J. Berryman
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Mildred J. Berryman / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Grave marker for the resting place of Mildred J. Berryman
context_page_description: Mildred Jessie Berryman, who went by "Berry", was an early 20th century pioneering researcher of lesbian and gay community in post-WWI Utah. She was also a photographer, a mineral merchant, and a manufacturing business co-owner with her girlfriend of over three decades.
context_section_description: Berryman was born in 1901 as the third and last child born to parents Richard Berryman and Mildred Stokes. Her siblings were George (born 1896) and Richard Jr. (born 1898). Her father worked as a bartender in Salt Lake City from 1894 to the Prohibition Era of the 1920s, with 1913 on spent working at a bar called The Opera Bar which acted as an early gay bar attracting many homosexual clientele.  After her first failed opposite-sex marriage she had her first lesbian relationship with her violin teacher Mae Anderson from 1920 to 1921. She joined the LDS church at the age of 19, received a patriarchal blessing at the age of 21, and later entered a relationship with a Mormon woman for over three decades, though she left involvement with the Mormon community to join the Bountiful Community Church. She worked at the LDS School of Music with her former girlfriend Mae Anderson in the mid-1920s and had another failed opposite-sex marriage.
  In 1924 she fell in love with Edith Mary Chapman and lived in her house (that later became a boarding house for lesbians) until 1928. Around that time Berryman became a photographer, and in 1936 had a relationship with "Z". In the 40s she collected and sold minerals specimens from her house and was involved in the Mineralogical Society of Utah and the Women's Benefit Association (W.B.A).
  In 1934 she met a Mormon mother Ruth Uckerman Dempsey at their manufacturing job at Hill Air Force Base, with whom she later had a 33-year romantic relationship. Together they ran a manufacturing business and participated in the Bonneview Garden Club until Berryman's death in 1972. Barry had also served as president of the Utah Business and Professional
  Women's Club. Her stepdaughter Bonnie Uckerman Bullough from Ruth's first marriage married Vern Bullough and they both became renowned sexologists writing on homosexuality.
caption: Grave marker for the resting place of Berryman
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