From Kristina Boerger

Kristina is currently Director of Choral Activities at Carroll University, and was the last roommate Janet had besides me (I'm being silly-- Janet had moved into a one room efficiency next to the music building by the time I met her). Like so many of Janet's friends, Kristina has done about a million musical things, but she's also managed to do her fair share of political activism in her copious spare time. When Janet was rooming with her, Krisitina was the president of the Gay and Lesbian Illini, a group that espoused the radical for the eighties notion that people shouldn't be harassed or shunned on the basis of what the gender of the people they fell in love with was.

Kristina writes....

One day we were chatting, and Janet quietly mentioned her bafflement over responses she had gotten from schoolmates about her having asked me to room with her: they were stunned that she would have knowingly invited a Lesbian to live with her, and they questioned the wisdom of that choice -- how it might impair her comfort level at home and how it might reflect on her.

These concerns she dismissed in her simple, gentle way as being laughably stupid -- pitiable, even. Something in the way she related this to me communicated the loveliest, most uncomplicated kind of bedrock respect for me; I was very touched by it. Up until then, it had not occurred to me that I could have found myself without a rent-mate to cooperate with, had it not been for clear-headed, compassionate Janet Whittaker. How unfailingly kind she was, always, to me.

Janet got her share of misunderstandings (perhaps understandable, since at that time, Kristina was going out with a flute player whose name was also Janet), as well as the less amusing harassing phone calls. Janet told me the calls had been no big deal for her, since it wasn't personal. She just felt bad that Kristina had to endure that nonsense. But I could tell she was bothered, because it was personal-- Kristina was a friend. I think those days had their influence in later years. Janet never was a rally going type-- but she always voted and would proudly slap that "I voted" sticker on the fridge. And there were more than a few Prop 8 signs that earned the wrath of a swift kick and the epithet of "stupid jerk".