“Fenceberry” is the result of combining two surnames: Fenceroy and Mayberry.

I n high spirits because the February day was warm, Jean Mayberry honked and waved at a neighbor, a woman she knew only as “Aleta, the lesbian down the street.”

“She smiled at me, and I was hooked,” recalls Jean, who was way too shy to introduce herself. So, she searched the Sioux City, Iowa, phonebook line by line until she spotted Aleta’s address and discovered her last name: “Fenceroy.” Jean threw a party to have an excuse to invite Aleta over.

That was the start of the name Fenceberry, according to an article by Deb Price.

They developed both a hobby and a service:

They distributed via email every newspaper article they could find about anything gay — a court ruling, a celebrity coming-out story, a syndicated column, a hate crime.

For their devoted fans, the Fenceberrys became town criers, telling us far more than we could learn from the occasional gay article in our hometown papers.

Aleta has passed away at 57, “after a short, brutal battle with cancer.”

Aleta understood that in the race to achieve full equality for those of us who are gay, each of us can carry the baton only so long. In the early years of the Fenceberry articles, Jean did the lion’s share of the work because Aleta was in grad school.

But for most of the eight years, Aleta took the lead. In 2004, she decided that the Internet had matured enough for them to bow out.

“It’s been a pleasure and an honor,” Aleta said to The Washington Blade. “Nobody told us to do this. We just kind of started doing it. … The void will be filled by someone.”