Nancy Lanoue

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Nancy Lanoue was inducted to the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 1993. She is an important advocate for women’s rights and self-defense. In the 1980s, she co-founded the Women’s Gym, a martial arts and self-defense center for women. She holds a black belt qualification in martial arts. She co-founded the Lesbian Community Cancer Project. A breast cancer survivor herself, Lanoue is a major leader in promoting outreach for survivors of breast cancer. She lost her partner, Jeannette Pappas, to cancer. Lanoue said in an interview, “My own breast cancer diagnosis was in 1987, on my 35th birthday. Audre Lorde’s political analysis was a big factor in my early breast cancer activism.” Today, Lanoue and her current partner, Sarah Ludden, are the executive directors of Thousand Waves.

Career

Lanoue has been practicing martial arts since 1977, beginning her training at the Women’s Martial Arts Center in New York, in Goju Karate and women’s self-defense under Sensei Susan Murdock. In her early years practicing martial arts, Lanoue came to appreciate martial arts as a non-violent practice; martial arts played a role in her political analysis of violence, especially with regard to women’s rights and combating violence against women. Lanoue began her career reporting for The New York Post and the Reader’s Digest. Lanoue said, “I thought I was going to be the next New York Times correspondent in New Delhi. That's how silly I was in my early 20s.” Lanoue said she lost interest in working for The New York Post when it was bought by Rupert Murdoch. When she began practicing martial arts to feel safer in the city, she said, “I just knew that's what I really wanted to do — teach martial arts and self-defense.”

In 1979, she decided to direct her professional attention entirely to martial arts. Lanoue and two other women founded the Safety Fitness Exchange (SAFE) in New York City. SAFE was an organization focused on advocating for women’s self defense. It organized seminars on the importance of self-defense and women’s empowerment. SAFE was New York City’s first ever community-based organization that specialized in such a cause (with particular focus on the prevention of rape). In 1979, Lanoue started studying Seido Karate under Kaicho Tadashi Nakamura. Now, Lanoue is a nanadan, 7th degree black belt. She continues to train with Kaicho today.

In 1984, Nancy Lanoue and her partner Jeanette Pappas decided to move to Chicago to fulfill their vision of opening a self-defense gym for women. Lanoue and Pappas spent a year in Chicago organizing and planning for what would become the Women’s Gym. In August 1985, the Women’s Gym opened at 1212 West Belmont. The space was 5,000 square feet, and two floors. Lanoue and Pappas gutted the entire facility, and Pappas was in charge of redesigning it. The gym became a major gathering place for lesbians in the community — in fact, one of the only gathering places for lesbians within the Chicago community outside of bars. Lanoue said, “The Women's Gym was a programmatic success. I think the women who came there got something really valuable. Many, many women who never would have walked into a fitness facility got a chance to relate to their bodies in a positive way. But financially, it was not a success. We spent too much money trying to build the building, make it suitable for our purposes, and it just never paid for itself.” Just two years after their gym opened, on her 35th birthday, Lanoue found out she had breast cancer. And two years after that, her partner Pappas was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Amidst their battles and diagnoses, the couple closed the Women’s Gym in the summer of 1989. Pappas lived for eight months after her diagnosis. She died in October 1989.

In the spring of 1990, six months after the death of Pappas, Lanoue and Sarah Ludden reopened the gym under the name of Thousand Waves. A year after the opening of Thousand Waves, Ludden moved to Chicago from California. Lanoue and Ludden are married today. In October 1990, Lanoue was a huge leader amongst lesbians in Chicago who were eager to understand more about cancer, and be supported in their diagnoses. The Lesbian Community Cancer Project (LCCP) was founded soon after these initial gatherings and meetings. With Lanoue’s personal experience and devotion to tackling the struggles women face, the LCCP’s services came to consist of intimate, personal meetings between women who dealt with cancer themselves — and therefore could offer a certain kind of support that is entirely absent from medical establishments — and women diagnosed with cancer.

Present Day

Today, Thousand Waves is located just two doors down from the address of its original predecessor, The Women’s Gym. It is located at 1220 West Belmont Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. It provides training for adults and children, centered on the mission of preventing violence, and fostering empowerment and self-defense, predominantly for women. One of its programs is Seido Karate, a form of martial arts that focuses on strengthening the body, mind, and spirit. Thousand Waves also offers HIIT It Fitness, a high-intensity interval training fitness program. Part of Thousand Waves’ mission is to promote connection between a person and their body to recognize their innate strength and be empowered.

Lanoue said, “Some people are drawn to martial arts because they're afraid, or they're alienated from their body and have never felt athletic, so they come to Thousand Waves, where it is profoundly non-competitive and very welcoming, and they enjoy being part of the diverse group of people practicing here. Others are quite healthy and fit already, but are seeking more camaraderie than a gym provides. Our close-knit community, combined with being on a path to black belt, makes it easier for our members to be consistent in their workouts. No matter how they start out, we support people to be healthier by giving them the tools to be active, stronger, more flexible.” Thousand Waves also offers a safe space for those who have been inflicted by violence. The gym is recognized for the work it does for preventing violence.

Several of Thousand Waves’ 14 employees are part of the LGBTQ community and maintain key leadership roles. Because most of the gym’s clients were lesbians, Lanoue said, “People joked we should have been called the Lesbian Gym.” The men who practiced at the gym were predominantly gay, wanting to learn martial arts without being in a homophobic environment. Thousand Waves helped train the Pink Angels in the 1990s. Lanoue proudly says of Thousand Waves, “We specialized in LGBTQ safety issues.” The name of the gym, Lanoue says, “comes from a Japanese saying that means one wave sets thousands of waves in motion. The idea behind the phrase is, you don't really know the impact of your individual actions. They could be a lot larger than you think they are, and what kind of waves do you want to set in motion?”

References

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