1 10 16 https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/dde74c471b59298b12382643b19f2581.png 083a25c93fe4dcc562a3bcda83000ef7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Wittman OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-02.xml Interview Keyword This field adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the “keywords” field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. The Morning Call OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 August 23, 2019 Bob Wittman, August 23, 2019 LGBT-02 01:37:42 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg The Morning Call Le-Hi-Ho AIDS Bob Wittman Mary Foltz video/mov WittmanBob_20190823_video.mov 1.0:|25(2)|52(11)|71(9)|92(12)|115(3)|132(18)|163(12)|182(12)|199(12)|222(2)|239(14)|260(14)|279(13)|296(5)|315(7)|330(7)|353(3)|372(8)|389(12)|412(2)|431(10)|448(13)|465(17)|482(16)|501(5)|516(16)|533(17)|550(13)|567(16)|586(8)|605(9)|624(5)|641(6)|658(11)|679(2)|698(4)|715(15)|732(14)|749(11)|772(3)|787(15)|806(17)|823(17)|842(5)|861(13)|882(13)|901(15)|922(15)|945(9)|966(7)|991(3)|1010(13)|1033(3)|1054(6)|1077(11)|1098(9)|1113(11)|1132(7)|1151(3)|1170(2)|1189(10)|1212(19)|1231(8)|1254(7)|1273(6)|1294(13)|1313(6)|1332(11)|1351(8)|1372(14)|1393(2)|1414(7)|1435(18)|1450(10)|1473(11)|1492(5)|1511(11)|1528(10)|1551(2)|1570(9)|1591(5)|1610(8)|1629(10)|1648(9)|1665(5)|1682(13)|1697(6)|1716(15)|1737(6)|1752(8)|1771(4)|1788(11)|1807(6)|1818(14)|1837(17)|1860(8)|1877(16)|1896(5) 0 YouTube video &lt ; iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/USlSpmxUSIQ?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"&gt ; &lt ; /iframe&gt ; 0 Interview Introduction MARY FOLTZ: -- when you’re ready to go.&#13 ; &#13 ; CAROL MOELLER: Okay, ready. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: My name is Mary Foltz. I’m here today with Bob Wittman to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We’re here in Bob and his partner Frank’s home in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on August 8, 2019. [Carol Moeller?] is our videographer today. Bob, I just want to thank you so much for your willingness to talk to us today. I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself by just stating your full name and then spelling it for us. &#13 ; &#13 ; ROBERT HENRY WITTMAN JR.: My full name is Robert Henry Wittman Jr. My last name is -- confounds everybody, and I’ve spent my whole life correcting people and it is W-I-T-T-M-A-N. No relationship to the poet or the candy company.&#13 ; 0 81 Childhood / Family MF: Right. To start our conversation today, I’m going to ask you to share a little bit about your childhood. Could you describe the early years of your life for me today? &#13 ; &#13 ; RHW: Well, I was born in Allentown, grew up here. I really spent my whole life here. As a matter of fact, the only time I had not lived in Allentown is the two years I spent attending Syracuse University from which I graduated in 1975. Other than that, I’ve been here all -- my whole life. And I was born in Allentown Hospital. I grew up in the South Side of Allentown, and my jobs have always kept me here. I always thought maybe I’d escape and move to a place that might be very different from Allentown, that was always kind of an attraction to find that, maybe move to the big city, but jobs always took precedence -- that and my relationship. 0 377 Growing Up in Allentown MF: So I’m Mary Foltz. I’m back with Bob Wittman, and we’ve just been talking about his -- some of his childhood experiences. I’m going to ask Bob, could you tell us a little bit more about what it was like to grow up in Allentown? &#13 ; &#13 ; RHW: Very different than it’s like growing up in Allentown today I suspect. There were three big, interesting department stores downtown, there were multiple movie theaters, there was some live theater. We still have some good restaurants but it was a very different place. A little of the old business activities may be coming back with some of the new development but -- so it’s beginning perhaps to look a little bit like it did in the old days. 0 1002 Life in Syracuse / Introduction to Gay Freedom League RHW: I went to Syracuse, and I discovered even before I arrived in some of the materials that came to my house over the course of the summer, kind of pre-registration materials or pre-arrival materials, and there was list of campus organizations, There must have been a hundred of them, ski club and chess club, debating club, you name it. But there was also something called the Gay Freedom League. So that was really my first introduction to gay people -- not just the gay movement but gay people. Gay Freedom League 0 1739 Coming Out to Family MF: This is Mary Foltz, and I’m back with Bob Wittman. He has just finished discussing his experiences at Syracuse University. And so I wanted to ask a question that kind of goes back a little bit about when you described coming out to your parents. Could you say a little bit more about how they responded when they found out that you were gay and living with another gay man while you were attending Syracuse University?&#13 ; &#13 ; RHW: Well, their reaction to me and their -- the way they dealt with me and responded to me being gay has definitely evolved. I think they were just as uninformed about it really as I was, less so clearly. So none of us really had any framework to discuss it or much context to put it in. I can remember saying things I would never say now, but I’d say things like, “Why don’t you just view this like I have a drug addiction and it is part of me and it’s something you have to deal with?” 0 2175 Working at The Morning Call RHW: Actually, my plan was never to return to Allentown. I was a journalist, it was the era of Watergate, all of that had unfolded really while I was in college. There was the Washington Post and the New York Times and that’s where every young kid graduating from college with a journalism degree wanted to end up. So I was eager to get out into the world, and I didn’t really think Allentown was going to be a good stepping-stone. I had worked at the Allentown Morning Call really since the time I was in high school. I got a job, a part-time job there. And when I was a college student, I discovered that the Morning Call had an opening in the news department for what, in those days, they used to call a copyboy The Morning Call 0 3131 LGBT Reporting from The Morning Call MF: This is Mary Foltz. I’m back with Bob Wittman, and he has just described for us meeting who would become his partner Frank at the Morning Call offices. And he has also just described how Frank really knew about Bob from a series of articles and knowing that Bob was publishing about an organization called Le-Hi-Ho. Bob, I’d like to ask you about your coverage as a reporter of LGBT organizations like Le-Hi-Ho. How did that come to be a focus of your journalism or how involved were you on reporting on LGBT issues at the Morning Call? &#13 ; &#13 ; RHW: Well, I was a general assignment reporter, which meant that I covered a lot of municipal governments. Oh, God, I received almost just everyday a different assignment to do a different thing. However, you could do or you could suggest -- editors encourage you to suggest special projects, special stories that you wanted to work on, something you’ve heard about in the community and thought important to give it some coverage. I was pretty closeted at this point at the Morning Call. Le-Hi-Ho ; The Morning Call 0 3726 Meeting Liz and Trish / Local LGBT Politics RHW: So for instance, the Allentown -- so a group of people had been interested, including some people early, early on in Le-Hi-Ho had been interested in adding equal protection language to the city’s human relations ordinance dealing with gay and lesbian people. But Allentown City Council was just always, always, always really, really intransigent, until a young woman arrived on the scene here in Lehigh Valley, by the name of Liz Bradbury and her partner Trish Sullivan. Liz was not a person who was going to sit back and let things take their course. She really wanted to take things in hand and push the envelope. Allentown Anti-discrimination Ordinance ; Gail Hoover ; Liz Bradbury ; Trish Sullivan 0 4127 Reporting on AIDS Crisis RHW: And actually, I was the guy doing a lot of the reporting of the city hall debate while all this was going on. But another episode that happened during that time was the AIDS crisis was breaking. I can remember picking Frank up in his apartment before we were living together on a Saturday morning, I think it was, and we were about to head off to make a day trip to Philadelphia. This was among the first months of my relationship with Frank. We weren’t even really calling, I’m pretty sure, that we were even lovers. AIDS ; Brian Foley ; The Morning Call 0 4553 Work with Le-Hi-Ho MF: This is Mary Foltz, and I’m back with Bob Wittman. He was just telling us a little bit about his work with the Morning Call and some of the pieces that he has written that were focused on the LGBT community in the valley. Bob, I think this is a good segue to talk about your work with organizations like Le-Hi-Ho. So perhaps you could tell me, how did you get involved with Le-Hi-Ho, and what were the aims and goals of Le-Hi-Ho when you were involved with that organization? &#13 ; &#13 ; RHW: When I graduated from college and came back to the Lehigh Valley, the -- if you wanted to experience gay life, I mean go look for gay life, you had basically two options: You could go to a gay bar, and there weren’t many of those, two or three, or you could go to Le-Hi-Ho. Le-Hi-Ho used to kind of bill itself or least many of us thought of it as the alternative to the bars. Clint Miller ; Le-Hi-Ho ; Mattachine Society ; National Gay and Lesbian Task Force ; Paul Kendall ; Paul Reeder ; Ron Seeds 0 5100 Other LGBT Organizations RHW: Actually, the two Pauls I just mentioned, Paul Kendall as he was retiring as a geology professor from Kutztown University, decided to give himself a retirement project, and he pretty much single-handedly with the backing of Le-Hi-Ho, organized and opened a gay community center at Eighth and Hamilton. The Bradbury-Sullivan Center is a latter-day version of that. Sadly, it’s not a descendant of it. The community center didn’t become the gay -- the Bradbury-Sullivan Center. But for a few, brief glorious years, the Lambda Center at Eighth and Hamilton Street flourished. I’m trying to think what other organizations were founded, and I’m struggling a little bit to do so, but I think there were a couple of others. AIDS Services Center ; AIDS Services Committee ; Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center ; Lambda Center ; PFLAG 0 MovingImage Bob Wittman describes his life growing up gay in Allentown, reporting at The Morning Call, and the LGBT community within the Lehigh Valley. MARY FOLTZ: -- when you're ready to go. CAROL MOELLER: Okay, ready. MF: My name is Mary Foltz. I'm here today with Bob Wittman to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We're here in Bob and his partner Frank's home in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on August 8, 2019. [Carol Moeller?] is our videographer today. Bob, I just want to thank you so much for your willingness to talk to us today. I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself by just stating your full name and then spelling it for us. ROBERT HENRY WITTMAN JR.: My full name is Robert Henry Wittman Jr. My last name is -- confounds everybody, and I've spent my whole life correcting people and it is W-I-T-T-M-A-N. No relationship to the poet or the candy company. MF: (laughs) Could you please share your birthdate with us? RHW:I was born on May 15th in the year 1953. MF:And prior to beginning this interview, you and I sat down, you read through a consent form, do you consent to this interview today? RHW:Yes, I absolutely do. MF:Right. To start our conversation today, I'm going to ask you to share a little bit about your childhood. Could you describe the early years of your life for me today? RHW:Well, I was born in Allentown, grew up here. I really spent my whole life here. As a matter of fact, the only time I had not lived in Allentown is the two years I spent attending Syracuse University from which I graduated in 1975. Other than that, I've been here all -- my whole life. And I was born in Allentown Hospital. I grew up in the South Side of Allentown, and my jobs have always kept me here. I always thought maybe I'd escape and move to a place that might be very different from Allentown, that was always kind of an attraction to find that, maybe move to the big city, but jobs always took precedence -- that and my relationship. But I had a very good childhood. You asked about my childhood ; I had a wonderful childhood. It was a pretty normal childhood. I was part of the great, big baby boom generation. My parents bought an almost brand-new house on the South Side of Allentown that was built right after World War II. My parents were the World War II generation. They moved into a neighborhood with people exactly like them, all working-class moms and dads with young children. There must have been about twenty of us who were all around the same age, and my backyard was their backyard and vice versa. We just ran from property to property on the South Side of -- on the North side of South Mountain. So we had connection to the woods and the South side Reservoir, Waldheim Park, eventually Mack Pool when they built it. So these were some of my landmarks of childhood. My family's somewhat small. I have no siblings, my father had none, my mother had two, so the immediate family was pretty small, but we were very, very close growing up. And I attribute whatever happiness I've found in life to the fact that I had a very, very strong family. You know particularly, these days, and the life I've led since, I've met people who didn't come from that kind of background. In fact, it seems it's hard to find people who have a childhood they can look back on and say, "Wow, it was really a good time." So I've really come to appreciate as an adult actually how really blessed I was. I had an aunt and uncle who had a summer home, a second home at Lake Wallenpaupack in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and it was just a wonderful place to spend time, and I spent my whole childhood conniving ways to get there. My aunt was very generous with allowing me to be a guest frequently. She gave me a week every summer that was Bob's week to come to the lake and be with my cousins and enjoy the lake. But to tell you the truth, every carload that was or every car that was going from the Lehigh Valley to Lake Wallenpaupack, I was always hoping I might get a call, "Hey, does Bobby want to go along?" because that was a place I really did a lot of growing up. There were sailboats and water -- motorboats and waterskiing, and it was just really a terrific background I have. CM: Okay, can we pause please? Sorry, I just have to check real quick. (inaudible) There's nothing going from the audio. MF: Oh, I see. CM: The mic to the... That's what was bothering me before. It wasn't quite right. But we can make up the audio you've done so far with the TASCAM mic or just the camera I think. MF: Yeah. CM:Not to worry. MF: Okay. CM: Much better. MF: Okay. CM: Okay. MF: All right. CM: Okay. MF:So I'm Mary Foltz. I'm back with Bob Wittman, and we've just been talking about his -- some of his childhood experiences. I'm going to ask Bob, could you tell us a little bit more about what it was like to grow up in Allentown? RHW:Very different than it's like growing up in Allentown today I suspect. There were three big, interesting department stores downtown, there were multiple movie theaters, there was some live theater. We still have some good restaurants but it was a very different place. A little of the old business activities may be coming back with some of the new development but -- so it's beginning perhaps to look a little bit like it did in the old days. But anybody from my generation can remember things like Hess's department store on a sale day when people hundreds deep were waiting in front of the front doors when the store opened in the morning. I lived on the South Side of Allentown sort of distant from the downtown but as a young boy, I learned to ride the city's public buses, the transit system. It was nothing at all for me to hop on a bus and run into town on the middle of the day and catch a movie or meet friends and just run around the department stores, getting into not too much trouble but really using that as almost a playground too. I still dream about it. I know some people who have maybe come later and they're a little impatient with some of us who can't get over the Hess's days. I confess, I still dream about it, you know it was really a marvelous, marvelous place. We've been talking about a childhood growing up, and I guess I'm making it sound quite idyllic. And in its background and in its foundation, it certainly was, but I was a young man who was trying to grow up and trying to develop. And so there were also a lot of challenges that were in the foreground during my experience. One was the fact that, actually, I wasn't a very good student, and this was a terrible problem for me. I was surrounded by bright people. My cousins, I have mentioned earlier from the Lake Wallenpaupack, were my best friends, and they were very, very good in school, all straight-A students both of them, and I wasn't. I was going to be the first person in my family to go to college, and some of my grades by the time I got to high school suggested that that might not work out that way. On top of that, there was the Vietnam War, which began when I was a little, little boy, and I can remember asking my father at some point, "Dad, am I ever going to have to get sent over there?" And he said, "Oh, this will be over long before you're of draft age." Well guess what, it wasn't. Although by the time I did reach draft age, truthfully, they weren't drafting many American boys anymore. They pretty much wound down the draft, and the next year, I got a very low draft number. But I didn't know that growing up and so a couple of things were working to really disturb my sense of well-being, and they were all interrelated. I mean there was Vietnam and kind of a consequence of not having good grades and not going to college was maybe going to Vietnam. So I felt I had to get good grades, so I would not have to go to Vietnam. So those two were definitely related to one another. And then increasingly, it dawned on me that I was different in another way as well. I didn't really know what that was at the time. I thought I was the only person in the world who felt the way I did. And it's hard to imagine that you could feel so lonely and isolated given the world that we have today. But it was a very difficult thing for me to deal with, with being gay. I mean actually, I like the idea of being gay. I just found that the world had no idea what I was feeling, and there was no context for it. I mean it simply was not in the paper ; it wasn't discussed. You might pick up a reference to gay people, to homos, to fags, that kind of thing in street conversation and family conversation but certainly not in any positive context. There were no role models. There was no media buzz about it ; there was just nothing. So it was my own feelings about friends I had and why wasn't I growing up and developing attraction for girls when they started to. So the growing up was a mixture of these very good times and when I felt I had good, strong support and then also wondering what would happen if some of these other things didn't work out. Like little Bobby didn't grow up to want a family and a wife and children. What if little Bobby didn't grow up and wasn't able to go to college, what would he do then? So those were some of the challenges I faced growing up. The fact is, in time, they all worked themselves out pretty much. I didn't have the good grades to get into a good college, but what I did was I marshalled my brain resources, and I enrolled in the community college, Lehigh Carbon Community College. I spent two years there, I got an associate's degree, and I grew up enough academically that I was prepared to go on to a big, four-year college. I had a really good experience at "L-Tri-C", as we call it here in the Lehigh Valley, Lehigh Carbon Community College, LCCC. I got good grades ; I made the dean's list. I joined an academic trip to the Soviet Union only a year or two after it opened up -- was opened up by Richard Nixon's -- President Nixon's trip there. I really had a good experience. I might also say during all this period of time at the community college, I also had a girlfriend, a very nice young woman I met through a mutual friend who's my age. I actually stole her, and we had a good time dating during the years of my -- kind of the final months of high school and my -- the first two years of college while I was at the community college. She was a student at Moravian College, so we were basically two home living -- still-at-home-living college students, so we shared that in common, and I think really enjoyed each other's company. I will confess, it took me months to kiss her for the first time. I think she knew that that signaled something. However, once I did kiss her, I kissed her a lot, and I found I enjoyed it. But I also found I really liked her brother who was a year or two younger. And after we separated to go to on with our education -- me after two years at the community college. I graduated from there, and I transferred my credits to Syracuse University from which I graduated in 1975 with degrees in journalism and political science. My girlfriend also had decided for her own reasons to transfer from Moravian, and she went on to Susquehanna University. In her case, I think it was mostly she wanted the experience of not being a home student, a student living at home and so she talked her parents into the transfer, so we're both transferring at the same time. After I was in Syracuse just a few weeks, she got a -- I received a letter that -- from her that said, "You know since we're not going to be seeing each other for months at a time now while we're both away from school, I hope you think it's okay if we date other people." And truthfully, I was very happy that she's made that suggestion because I was ready to start dating men. I went to Syracuse, and I discovered even before I arrived in some of the materials that came to my house over the course of the summer, kind of pre-registration materials or pre-arrival materials, and there was list of campus organizations, There must have been a hundred of them, ski club and chess club, debating club, you name it. But there was also something called the Gay Freedom League. So that was really my first introduction to gay people -- not just the gay movement but gay people. So I was mighty intrigued about this, and after I got the letter from my girlfriend, I decided I wanted to try to reach this organization. You know this is pre-computer days, so you did everything by mail, and the different campus organizations maybe had offices. This one actually did, and it also had an office address. So I sent a letter to the Gay Freedom League from my dorm room, and it was answered by the postal system. The letter came back to my dorm room from somebody who was sort of helping to coordinate the Gay Freedom League. I don't know that it had any one leader. It seemed to me it had sort of a collection of people that haphazardly ran this organization. So the man asked me if I would like to get together and talk, and that's exactly what I wanted to do. I think he gave me his telephone number, and I nervously placed a phone call to him, and we set a date to meet on campus. I wish I could remember the guy's name, but he was about as different from me as you could imagine. I mean I have short hair now -- I had short hair back in college then -- he had hair down to his waist. I mean this was the age when there still were hippies, and he would've easily been classified as a hippie. He was quite out, and of course, I'm very nervous about this whole project I'm embarking on. I think we met at the campus coffee shop. And we sat across from each other in a room crowded with other people, and he started saying, "Well, and there's nothing wrong with being gay and if you're gay and" dat, da, ra, and he's very loud. I just felt like everybody in the room was looking at us. He discovered my discomfort and so we walked to an academic building, actually the school of music, which had a great, big auditorium. And you could almost always go in there and sit with your books and study and listen to students rehearsing on the organ or the piano upfront. So that's what we did, and that's where we had a really good talk. He also detected that he was quite different from me, and he said, "You know there's somebody new that has come in that is new to Syracuse also like you, and he's actually not a student. He works for the university, but he's just a year away from being a student. He's a year out of college himself, and he's gay. He's much more straightlaced, more like you. I think you'd enjoy knowing him." So sure enough, he followed through, even before I had a chance to react or anything, and before I know it, this guy is knocking on my dorm room door. I was a little surprised at the forcefulness of this guy's entrée to me, but nonetheless, I came to appreciate it. His name was David. He had just been hired after giving up in graduate school at that point. He had been going to Columbia and left New York City because actually he was gay, and he had been having trouble dealing with that and academia and so he decided to go jump-start his career. He had planned to go into like college development work and so he secured a job at Syracuse in the publications office. I guess his plan was he was going to take some graduate courses at Syracuse and so forth. It wasn't long before he enlisted me in a college project, a campus project, a school project to update, which they did every year, the campus handbook. I was still a student in my first year at the college, and now suddenly, I'm being offered the editorship of the college handbook. I've been doing some house cleaning here recently, and I came to discover I actually saved -- I didn't now, I threw them out a week ago, but I saved my pay stubs. I forgot I got a little stipend of about fourteen dollars a week for working on the college handbook. But one thing led to another. David and I became pretty close. The guy who introduced us turned out to be dead right. We did have a lot in common we discovered or at least in our outlook in life, in our hopes and dreams and that sort of thing. So he became really my first serious gay mentor. Along about this time, now mind you, I'm, uh, a freshman, junior -- how does it go? Freshman, junior, sophomore, senior, is that correct? So I was a sophomore I was in my third year of college, but my first year at Syracuse. That first year at Syracuse, I lived in a dorm with another roommate who, over the course of our months together, realized all of a sudden he was living with a gay man. He didn't quite know how he felt about that. I mean we've stayed in touch, and we're friends to this day, but at first, it was a little bit of a shock. And it happened around the end of the school season, and he said, "You know I think I'd rather find another roommate for next season." And truthfully, I was headed in that direction anyway, but very quickly, what developed is the acquaintance I've made, David suggested that the two of us can find an apartment together off campus. And that at that point appealed to me greatly, so we did that. It was quite fun, my first time doing this, it almost felt like a little gay couple finding an apartment and sign the lease and so forth. And so I came home from the summer looking forward to the coming year. My action really sent alarms to my family at home. They were a little surprised that I was mo-- well first of all, wanted to move out of the dorm, and secondly, that I was moving in with someone who was not really a student but an employee. My father amazingly, who was a well-connected guy, went to the trouble of doing some background checks on David and managed to find out that he was gay and presented this to me that he had found this out and asked me if I was. So that brought everything to the fore. I, over the summer, have been trying to think of ways to tell them, and in fact, I kind of gave him maybe a reason to look into his past because I had broached the idea to everybody, my parents and to David, to maybe make a visit to Allentown over the summer, you know, "Come visit, stay overnight." It never happened, and we never even had gotten close enough to even talking about a date. But in the meanwhile, my father made this discovery and decided -- you know, it seemed at the time that he didn't really want to be very nice about this. Nonetheless, what was he going to do? I was going back to school in a few weeks, the lease was already signed, this was going to be my friend. I assured him that he was a man of enormous decency. And I guess they gave me the benefit of the doubt, and the year unfolded as I intended it should. Eventually, they met David, they took him out to dinner, they... You know he made some lovely pictures of us in the backyard of the building we lived that still are around in frames on coffee tables at home. But what they really didn't realize, what David was giving me. David worked for the university, and it turns out, David worked for a gay man, and that gay man reported directly to the chancellor. So all of a sudden, I had this perfect opportunity to be around, seeing their homes, socialize with some really rather accomplished gay people. This wasn't the hippie that took me into the loft of the music school for a private chat. This wasn't a guy who walked me through the cemetery and wanted to make love to me, I guess, amidst the tombstones. This was a guy who, you know, met his friends for cocktails and brunch on Sunday mornings and sat there together with his friends. And they read the New York Times and talked about big things, big topics, big things in the news, big things going on, on campus, campus politics, campus business for that matter. So I wound up having a really interesting, unique, and I think a really beneficial time at Syracuse just because of the way that all worked out. So why don't we end it there? (break in video) MF: This is Mary Foltz, and I'm back with Bob Wittman. He has just finished discussing his experiences at Syracuse University. And so I wanted to ask a question that kind of goes back a little bit about when you described coming out to your parents. Could you say a little bit more about how they responded when they found out that you were gay and living with another gay man while you were attending Syracuse University? RHW:Well, their reaction to me and their -- the way they dealt with me and responded to me being gay has definitely evolved. I think they were just as uninformed about it really as I was, less so clearly. So none of us really had any framework to discuss it or much context to put it in. I can remember saying things I would never say now, but I'd say things like, "Why don't you just view this like I have a drug addiction and it is part of me and it's something you have to deal with?" I imagine I used that negative concept in trying to reach them, so that's why I say none of us really had the words, the language because it wasn't discussed. I mean nobody did. Families weren't talking about this in these day-- in those days. My father in many ways was my best friend, but he was a difficult man. He was a marine. He was a little insecure about his own fabric as a person, his own composition. Not the sexuality I don't think, although maybe sometimes my mother speculated about how confident he was. I always thought my mother was kind of the more sympathetic of the two but in a way I found I couldn't really discuss with her. It hurt her. It hurt her feelings, you know something -- she might likely cry. My father on the other hand would run sort of hot and cold on it. He could be my best friend about it or a real obstacle to me trying to deal with it. I mean, at one point, he'd say, "You know I was in the marines, and when I was in the marines, it seemed to me everybody in the navy was gay. Maybe you should join the navy." And other times, we'd talk about things, and he would let me get very candid, and he could be very sympathetic and then other times, it was just... I don't know, it was just something he couldn't deal with. He was quite proud of the family tree and family traditions. He became a bit of an amateur genealogist, and suddenly, the family tree stopped with his son, so it would seem, and so it did as a matter of fact but... With him it was -- it never really resolved itself to a place where I'd say I was comfortable with it and he was comfortable with it. When I was a young man, he developed cancer. He was a heavy, heavy smoker and so this was maybe not a surprise. He eventually died of lung cancer, but he had lymphoma in the mouth and that from cigarette smoking. So he was dead by the time he was fifty-nine, and I was probably, at that point, how old would I have been? I guess I was in my thirties. I had already met Frank, my partner. We haven't talked about yet today, but I think we probably will. But while we're on this story, suffice to say that Frank came into my life, and I met him through the newspaper. He became a work colleague of mine as well as my lover and partner and eventually my husband. And my father really liked Frank. My father loved history, and Frank's background is in history. He's a historian by academic training and by profession. All of the work he did for the newspaper we worked for, for the Morning Call, were feature articles about local history. So this gave my father always something to talk to Frank about, and he loved Frank for that. So Frank really helped break down, I guess, some of the mystery of what it was like to be gay. They did tell me after I introduced Frank to my parents that I came walking through the door -- walking in the backyard I guess it was with Frank at my side, and I was apparently just beaming. I don't think they quite fully understood until that moment that this was somebody I really cared about. He wasn't just a friend I wanted them to meet. So he really did help bring a lot of clarity to my relationship. My father passed on, sad that that was, and then it was just my mother and me. And gradually over the years, she became completely accepting of it. In 2013 when we decided, for a lot of practical reasons mostly, that it made sense for Frank and I to get married. We did, and we asked my mother to be our witness. We did it in New York City in the marriage license hall of the city clerk's office. And my mom bought us both carnations for our lapels, and we said the vows, and she was very excited to be a part of all that. So that's why I say it really did evolve. But this all began at Syracuse, and I didn't know where it was going to go when I left Syracuse and returned home after I graduated. Actually, my plan was never to return to Allentown. I was a journalist, it was the era of Watergate, all of that had unfolded really while I was in college. There was the Washington Post and the New York Times and that's where every young kid graduating from college with a journalism degree wanted to end up. So I was eager to get out into the world, and I didn't really think Allentown was going to be a good stepping-stone. I had worked at the Allentown Morning Call really since the time I was in high school. I got a job, a part-time job there. And when I was a college student, I discovered that the Morning Call had an opening in the news department for what, in those days, they used to call a copyboy. It was just really kind of an office boy. Before you had computers, you had real paper that stories were written on, on typewriters, and those pieces of paper had to be carried physically to an editor who edited. After he was done editing that piece of paper, it had to go upstairs to the composing room to be set into type so that paper had to move around, and copyboys provided that motion. Eventually, I used that copyboy position to become a summer intern who wrote stories, kind of acted like a reporter and... So by the time I went away to Syracuse, I actually had -- to work on a journalism degree, I actually had real-life experience going out and covering a municipal meeting, like maybe the Coplay Borough Council or Upper Saucon Township Zoning Board. I mean it these were tiny, little meetings in the meeting hall sometimes so rural, they were hard to find. But nonetheless, it was real journalism. You know the stuff got printed in the newspaper the next day. So, obviously, I had to quit the Call to go to Syracuse. I couldn't continue to work there part time at nights and on weekends and summertime when I had to be four hours away and then in central New York attending classes. But I left in good terms, and fortunately, they arranged a summer internship between my junior and senior years. And then after I graduated, they still didn't know if they had an opening for me. They said, "Come back and be a summer intern yet again, and we'll see what happens by the fall." Fortunately by the fall, they had an opening and sort of, in a way, the rest is history. I remained there for most of the rest of my career. I certainly didn't intend to. I thought I was just going back there briefly. For a few years, I'll work there. It was going to be a good job. As I was graduating from college, I applied to a lot of places, and after I was working for the Morning Call for about a year, I got a call from UPI, United Press International, the wire service. It's now out of business. I mean it's a good idea I didn't link my career to its vessel but um... So I thought I might not -- no, I didn't think I might. My goal was always to not stay at the Morning Call. Although I liked the place, it was my hometown newspaper, I'd made friends there, my plan always had been to move on. My friend David that I mentioned who was so much of a mentor to me in college, the man who worked for the university and with whom I later enjoyed an apartment the final year of my time at Syracuse wound up in California, eventually in San Francisco, exactly where a gay person wanted to be at that time. So for a long time, a few years anyway, I thought I was going to end up working for San -- in California working for a newspaper. I did a lot of job hunting out there. Being gay helped actually. As it turns out, David had made a really good friend of the man who was no less than publisher of the Sacramento Bee and a couple of other papers in like Fresno -- they're all named Bee -- and guess what, he was gay. So David arranged for me to have an interview with the publisher of the Sacramento Bee. In San Francisco -- no, not in San Francisco, that's where he lived. So he took me out to dinner, we had wine. I mean how -- who gets to have an opportunity like this? And I probably, had I continued to press him and press that opportunity, I probably could've wound up working in Sacramento later that year or the next. But in the meanwhile, I'd met Frank, and that really kind of put the brakes on stuff. Actually, it was Frank who recommended that I take the train to San Francisco to kind of what turned out to be that last trip I made job hunting and then when I had the dinner with C. K. McClatchy, publisher of the Sacramento Bee. He said, "You had gone by airplane so often, why don't you take the train?" and it turned out to be a wonderful experience. Unfortunately, I should've taken him along, then it would really have been a good experience. I did it alone. I had worked for the Morning Call after I graduated from college for about eight years before Frank arrived. And, um, his arrival was part of an effort that the publisher of the Morning Call, at the time, was making to really change and transform the newspaper. The Morning Call in those days was owned by a family. Now, it's owned by -- actually, I think it's owned by a hedge fund, but eventually it became owned by the Times-Mirror Corporation of California, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. And later, they sold, and it was purchased by the Chicago Tribune organization. But when I started there and when Frank joined the newspaper, it was still owned by a local family. They lived in the Parkway, they drove to work, they ate at the Pennsylvania restaurant, and it was a very folksy operation. The publisher, an older man, Donald Miller, Donald P. Miller, a real patriarch of both the newspaper, and his family had decided early on that his son would take over the news business, and the son was quite interested in doing so. He spent his academic career preparing for it, and his father fixed him up with some good training jobs at other places to sort of groom him to be publisher. And when Donald Miller got to be, I don't know, up in his sixties or seventy or something like that, he decided it was time for his son Eddie to take over and so he began giving more and more responsibility to Eddie. First, he gave him a position as executive editor, and eventually, he sort of said -- the publisher said he would step back and let his son Edward become -- the title he chose for himself -- editor and publisher. So it was during that period that Frank and a whole lot of other people were hired by the son. And he really wanted to transform the paper and make it something more than just a small, little, local, hometown newspaper. He wanted it to win awards, and he wanted it to have a top-notch staff, and he wanted it to have a national reputation. So he hired a lot of people including Frank. The problem was he spent a lot of money real quickly, and his father just didn't understand the program that the son was embarking on. And they had immediate and ongoing conflicts over the budget and over priorities and just how to run a newspaper. Eddie was not in an enviable position, that's for sure. I mean, his father (laughs) was an interesting man. I'm glad he wasn't my father even if he would've afforded me all the opportunities that Don Miller was able to afford his children. They didn't get along, and eventually Eddie quit. And as things were becoming unraveled, this sort of experiment of bringing in a whole lot of outsiders to beef up the paper and add some real editorial muscle to the staff was petering out. The young people he brought in, many of them said, "Wow, you know, this isn't going to work out in the long run, maybe we shouldn't be sticking around here as long as we thought." And so the Morning Call became during that period a real springboard for people to jump on for a year and jump out and go off to a place like maybe the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Washington Post, New York Times maybe, big-city newspapers. Those of us who watched this all come in and watched all these people leave, we gave the -- this crowd of newcomers who didn't stick around too long, gave them the epithet, the boat people. This was kind of a springboard off of what was happening in current events at the time. There were a whole lot of people trying to escape Cuba and were taking life rafts and leaky boats and unlicensed vessels just to be dumped near American shore, and they'd wade to shore and then... It was during the Carter administration, and they became known as the boat people. So we cynically called our colleagues the boat people who were sort of shipped in and came in and made a whole lot of noise and did some flashy things and then, boom, all of a sudden, they were gone. Well, Frank was one of the last people that Eddie hired before he came in one morning with a screwdriver and took his -- unscrewed the nameplate from his door and threw it on his father's desk and said, "I quit." Frank was actually hired not to be a reporter but to be a researcher. He came from a background of working in the state archive for the state of Missouri. He had trained for that in his -- in college. He had a degree in history and so he was good at looking at records and find his -- finding his way through piles of research. So he was going to be a researcher, and Ed Miller, the son of the publisher, eventually the publisher, had figured out he was going to put a team of people together that would be an investigative team. There was going to be kind of a permanent editor and so permanent copywriters. The reporters would move in and out as projects changed, and Frank would be a permanent researcher assigned to this unit. Well, it never got off the ground. Eddie quit right after Frank arrived, and suddenly, a whole bunch of new people were running the newsroom. And eventually, they came to Frank and said, "What do you do here?" By then, I guess I had met him. I was not one who liked necessarily the -- some of the drama that had attended -- you know, Ed Miller's attempts to transform the newsroom. Some of us who were there all along and hoping for these things felt a little bit left out. So some of it was personal, but some of it was just, wow, there's so much noise and so much coming and going, I just need to do my job, and I was focused in that way. So one day -- the story I like to tell -- I was sitting at my desk. I had some downtime. Another reporter was sitting literally on my desk, the corner of my desk, the two of us were talking. And suddenly, out of the periphery of my eye, I see this little guy walk across the newsroom carrying a great, big stack of books. And I said to Joyce, the other reporter, I said, "Now, who the hell is that?" And she said, "Well, that's Frank, that's Frank Whelan, you don't know Frank? He's been here about a month, Eddie hired him, he's going to be a researcher," and explained this whole thing. I said, "Well, I don't know. No, I haven't met him," and that was that. And I didn't want to meet him. But then one day, I'm sitting at my desk, early one morning just reading the paper waiting for the workday to begin in earnest, and I look up, and there's this guy, Frank, who's pointed out to me a few weeks before, standing in front of me. "Hello, I'm Frank Whelan, I work here at the Morning Call" and then he proceeds to say, "I see you've done some articles on an organization called Le-Hi-Ho. I would like to get to know some of those people." The way he said it, I knew exactly what he was saying, I'm gay. And I took a gulp, and I said, "Oh, you would? Let's go have some coffee." So we walked down to the company cafeteria, and we had coffee. We had dinner that night, and we kind of have been together ever since. There you go, a good place to end. (break in video) MF:This is Mary Foltz. I'm back with Bob Wittman, and he has just described for us meeting who would become his partner Frank at the Morning Call offices. And he has also just described how Frank really knew about Bob from a series of articles and knowing that Bob was publishing about an organization called Le-Hi-Ho. Bob, I'd like to ask you about your coverage as a reporter of LGBT organizations like Le-Hi-Ho. How did that come to be a focus of your journalism or how involved were you on reporting on LGBT issues at the Morning Call? RHW: Well, I was a general assignment reporter, which meant that I covered a lot of municipal governments. Oh, God, I received almost just everyday a different assignment to do a different thing. However, you could do or you could suggest -- editors encourage you to suggest special projects, special stories that you wanted to work on, something you've heard about in the community and thought important to give it some coverage. I was pretty closeted at this point at the Morning Call. I mentioned that Frank figured it out, but when I first started working there eight years before I met him, I was extremely nervous about it, about anybody finding out. I avoided the subjects and really tried to hide it. You know I'm human, and you want to be friends with people, and you don't want to keep everything away from everybody, at least I didn't, so I mean I did tell some of the reporters. There was another reporter, big, actually African American, utterly heterosexual, lover of women to the end of the day, I wound up being friends with and told him that I was gay. And it was John Clark who suggested, "Why don't we do a story on gay people in the Lehigh Valley?" And I guess my reaction was like, "Really, you mean there's more than one, there's more than me?" But I guess I knew that there were others.I knew about Le-Hi-Ho. I'd been to a few Le-Hi-Ho meetings. So we suggested it to the editors, and they said, "Yeah, go ahead, do it." You know, looking back on it, it was really poorly done compared to things that I did later, but this is what Frank found. I think it was probably like three to four stories. They were all very, very short. There was none of the kind of in-depth -- you know finding a person and creating a story of that person to tell a larger story. That's what we really should have done, but we didn't. It was kind of superficial reporting. Nonetheless, nonetheless, that is absolutely the first local reporting that was ever done on the gay community. There may have been references to homosexuals being arrested or even -- maybe even political activism in other communities in New York City, places like that, so these have been wire stories but a local story, no. One of the other reporters, an old guy, awfully nice guy, but he sort of heard this, what John and I were working on. In fact, he asked us and said, "So what are you two guys working on?" We told him, "We're working on a story on the local gay community." He kind of, hmm, sniffed and, "Well," he said, "I guess Allentown has always had its queers," and walked away, so... But that's the story Frank found. In subsequent years as gay people and the gay movement and then eventually AIDS became more and more a topic of people's conversations and more a topic of legislation, it therefore became more of a topic of local news. So, you know, a lot of that reporting fell to me just because one, two, three, four, who's available here today. But in time, as I came out more and more and editors understood that I was actually a resource on this subject, then it came to develop that I was actually assigned stories because I was gay. And I liked that. I mean, I was proud of that. The Morning Call, my editors were looking to me as somebody that they could trust, that here's somebody who understands the community. He's got some connections, he can get the interviews, he can get the information. So to that extent, I did wind up doing an awful lot of reporting especially on the gay community, on gay events and so forth. At the same time, I was being a little subversive. Reporters are not supposed to dabble in... Actually, reporters are not supposed to have private lives period. That's the way some editors and some editors that I worked for viewed the way things should be. I always had a little trouble with that. For one thing, I'm a restless guy and I'm impatient, and one of the reasons I got into the news business is because I wanted to change the world. And it was during the time of Watergate that I was going to college and so there was -- imbued throughout journalism was this idea that a good news story could effect change, so... But I wanted to take it a step further in terms of gay people. I just felt that they had been so underrepresented in the news in the past that I wanted to make sure that kind of the movement move forward. And if I could do anything as a journalist, I wasn't going to stand in the way. So I did a lot of things that my editors would have not approved of had they known. I just did it very quietly. I mean I was reporting on in some cases, but in other cases, I've befriended gay people, some people who wanted to be active. I mean some of these were Le-Hi-Ho. But that actually was not -- although it was the Lehigh Valley's first and really one of the nation's first and longest enduring gay organizations, it wasn't actually politically, politically active. I mean the very fact that it existed was political you might say. But it didn't try to get certain candidates elected and other candidates defeated. You know, it just didn't work in that way. The people who were involved in Le-Hi-Ho weren't involved in it because they were political people. However, other people came along later who did want to get involved in politics, who did want to see Allentown and the other local communities pass human rights ordinance that contained language about protections for gay people, equal treatment for gay people. And those people, of course, I wound up knowing as a newspaper reporter in part because they were people that we're reporting on and the things they wanted to do and accomplish, but at the same time, I gave assistance to. So I really blurred lines, but my bosses never really knew it, and the people that I was reporting on respected me more for it. So for that reason, I never thought it was a problem. Actually, I had a thirty year running debate with my editors about how involved a reporter could be. I always maintained that I could be as political as I wanted just so long everybody knew where I was coming from. So what difference does it make if Bob Wittman is a liberal Democrat reporting on a conservative Republican mayor for instance? As long as the conservative Republican mayor knows that Bob Wittman is a liberal Democrat, but he's going to give the Republican mayor a fair shot on everything he tells him, which I did. So to me it was -- I didn't really see myself as violating ethics policies in the way I behaved. I knew exactly how far I could push this and how far not to. And only a few times did I ever say, "Hmm, I probably went a little farther than I should, but hopefully, nobody will find out." So for instance, the Allentown -- so a group of people had been interested, including some people early, early on in Le-Hi-Ho had been interested in adding equal protection language to the city's human relations ordinance dealing with gay and lesbian people. But Allentown City Council was just always, always, always really, really intransigent, until a young woman arrived on the scene here in Lehigh Valley, by the name of Liz Bradbury and her partner Trish Sullivan. Liz was not a person who was going to sit back and let things take their course. She really wanted to take things in hand and push the envelope. Liz was a little naïve at first, but, boy, she was a quick learner, and I was one of her teachers. For instance, she thought it would just be an easy thing. It sounded logical to her. If you made a logical argument to logical people, they should see the logic and pass logical legislation. But Liz, this is emotional, it's not just logical. And so her idea that "Well, why don't we just go and propose this to city council in the right way, the proper way and in a becoming way?" and I said, "No, I think you need to do more. You need to get people on your side before you take that step, you know get the lawyers on your side, get the doctors on your side, get other organizations on your side, get neighborhood groups on your side." And you know what, she did that. She spent two years, three years, I don't know how many years doing exactly that. She published her own community newspaper for the gay community and right down the center of it on page one, was a growing list of organizations that supported Allentown -- the passage of Allentown -- of a human relations or human rights ordinance in Allentown. She's one step further. She enlisted an acquaintance, another woman, a lesbian to run for Allentown city council, and she won. She organized the, you know, local gay community, made sure people are registered to vote and got them to vote, made sure they voted on election day, and they elected Gail Hoover to be Allentown's first openly gay city councilwoman, city council person period. So now, they had at least one guaranteed vote on city council, so now it's a matter of persuading, what is it, six more I guess. Right now, Allentown City Council I think is completely Democrat, and I bet a human rights ordinance like this wouldn't have too much trouble passing. But in those days, the Democrats and the Republicans serving on city council were pretty even, evenly numbered. And even among the Democrats, these were pretty conservative people. But she began working on them kind of one by one, take -- meeting with them, going out for coffee, going out for breakfast, and that kind of thing. She finally got the council president. He's just passed away last week, David Howells, a former Allentown policeman. That's what his career was. Only in retirement did he get involved in politics. She convinced him. I thought it was a hard sell, but she convinced him. There's another guy in city council, David Bausch, never been married, always has a German exchange student living in the home, has a million-dollar, literally a million-dollar toy collection, antique collection in his house, rumored, always whispered about that "David Bausch must be gay." But believe it or not, he absolutely did not support the ordinance, so we knew that there was some uphill battles -- there was going to be opposition, there was going to be some support. So there are couple of key people right in the middle: One was a Republican by the name of Tom Burke, a bright guy, actually from Massachusetts, a retired Proctor &amp ; Gamble engineer whose big passion in life is golf. And that's really mostly what he cares about, but he does care about good government and good legislation. And he is one of these people that Liz was hoping everybody was, and that is somebody who could listen to a logical argument and make a logical conclusion and then embed that in legislation. So here's an instance when Frank and I probably stepped a little bit beyond the line of what we should've done as reporters. But we knew Tom was sort of sitting on the face on this issue. We invited him here to our house for a beer or coffee or something, kind of in the after-work time, time period. We sat outside on the back porch on a summer afternoon, and for a couple of hours talked Tom into voting, voting for it. I mean, he did leave here committed to doing it, and all during the open debate, nobody knew how Tom was going to vote until he voted. But in the end when it came time to vote, Tom voted yes. And it pushed it right over the edge. They only needed his vote, on more vote, he gave it, and there it happened. So it was pretty cool. You know that involves human or the human rights ordinance and kind of direct politics. And actually, I was the guy doing a lot of the reporting of the city hall debate while all this was going on. But another episode that happened during that time was the AIDS crisis was breaking. I can remember picking Frank up in his apartment before we were living together on a Saturday morning, I think it was, and we were about to head off to make a day trip to Philadelphia. This was among the first months of my relationship with Frank. We weren't even really calling, I'm pretty sure, that we were even lovers. We were just two men who worked together, and he was new to Pennsylvania, and I was enjoying taking -- spending weekends, taking him places and acting as tour guide. He got in the car that morning though all upset, and there's been a story in the New York Times about something they're calling a gay cancer. It's killing men in San Francisco and New York, and nobody has any idea why. So there was a wake-up call. But sometime later, you know, as we're watching this news unfold on two coasts, I got a call from an acquaintance, a gay man whom I knew slightly through like Le-Hi-Ho. And he said to me, "Would you be interested as a newspaper reporter doing an interview on a story with a local man who has AIDS?" Now you see, nobody knew that AIDS was anywhere but in New York and San Francisco. I'm sure people knew that there was evidence that it was elsewhere. But in people's minds, I'm pretty sure nobody thought it was really here or gave it much thought at all that it was something that the local community would be someday dealing with. But I, of course, was immediately interested in learning about this. I said, "Yeah, I'd love to." So it was arranged. They said, "The only condition is going to be that he wants to be anonymous," and I said, "Oh, it shouldn't be a problem. We do this a lot. The newspaper grants anonymity to people a lot when there's good reason and this is -- I'm pretty sure we can explain to editors that there's a good reason." In this case, the reason the man wanted to be anonymous is that he and his partner owned a sandwich shop on Hamilton Street, in the business district. And they were very worried because it was still a crazy, crazy time. Nobody knew, really knew what AIDS was. You know they... At this point, I don't think they even had the name HIV, had yet come into existence. They only knew there was this cluster of symptoms that people got, and they didn't know why. So there's an awful lot of fear. People may not realize it today, but I mean there were politicians, state legislators talking about maybe quarantine -- creating quarantine camps and the like the way they did for epidemics in previous centuries. So any rate, they owned a sandwich shop, their health care was all tied into their business that they had set up for themselves, and they really didn't want to upset any applecart. So that was their reason for wanting to be anonymous not really because they were timid or didn't want to be activists. They both turned out to be very much activists. So I agreed to the condition. I did the interview. My newspaper realized they had a good story and an important story, and they played it on the top of page one on the Sunday paper, which in those days, had a very, very impressive circulation. And it's the largest circulation of The Morning Call's newspapers on Sunday. I did the interview, I wrote the story, I turned it in. The young man that I interviewed for the story who had AIDS used -- chose his own made-up name, and that was Brad Edwards. So that's how it ran in the paper, Brad Edwards along with many follow-ups that came in days or not days but months and years later. I turned the story in ; my editor read it. I knew where it was running, but late in the game, my editor called me from across the room from his desk. I picked it up, and he said, "I don't mind that I don't know who your subject is that you interviewed, but I understand that you don't actually even know who Brad Edwards really is." He said, "I want you to know." He said, "You don't need to tell me, and we're certainly not going to publish it but I -- so I do want you to know who it is." So I said, "Well, okay," and I called up the subject. His name was Brian?, and I called up Brian. I didn't know who he was. I called up Brad (laughs) and said, "Brad, I'm afraid there's a problem. My editor thinks I need to know who you are. He doesn't need to know, we're not going to publish it." He said, "Well, you actually already know me. My name is Brian Foley," and of course immediately, I connected him with the sandwich shop and some of the other gay organizations that were beginning to blossom at that time. Brian became one of my very best friends. That's one of the only times in the news business that somebody became truly a personal friend, not just a good working acquaintance, somebody you'd bump into, maybe even go and have drinks with. I mean this was the guy that became my skiing partner, you know my -- or frequent dinner partner. One early or one weekend when there was snow falling and forecast of huge amounts, he came over with sleepers and spent a couple of days and just got snowed in with us. Just a wonderful, wonderful friendship developed out of that story completely unintended. (break in video) MF:This is Mary Foltz, and I'm back with Bob Wittman. He was just telling us a little bit about his work with the Morning Call and some of the pieces that he has written that were focused on the LGBT community in the valley. Bob, I think this is a good segue to talk about your work with organizations like Le-Hi-Ho. So perhaps you could tell me, how did you get involved with Le-Hi-Ho, and what were the aims and goals of Le-Hi-Ho when you were involved with that organization? RHW:When I graduated from college and came back to the Lehigh Valley, the -- if you wanted to experience gay life, I mean go look for gay life, you had basically two options: You could go to a gay bar, and there weren't many of those, two or three, or you could go to Le-Hi-Ho. Le-Hi-Ho used to kind of bill itself or least many of us thought of it as the alternative to the bars. Le-Hi-Ho, people who would say, "Well, what's Le-Hi-Ho?" Well, it's an alternative to the bars. It met once a month on a Sunday afternoon at the Unitarian Church then located in Fountain Hill at the end of a shady, tree-lined lane. I attended a few of the meetings after I graduated from college and I was living here alone and looking for that gay life, but I didn't find much that really attracted me. I'm trying to remember what some of the programs were that they had every week -- every month. When they had the Sunday afternoon event, there was usually a program speaker. The only one I do remember and remember myself being a little furious at even attending is -- was -- it was a kind of a macramé demonstration, how to do macramé. Everybody in those days were making macramé wall hangings and things like. Well, I couldn't have been -- could have cared less about macramé, and it seemed to me a rather stereotypical thing for a bunch of gay men to be doing on a Sunday afternoon and I just... Frankly, I didn't go back. The macramé event I think sealed it for me. Le-Hi-Ho was started by -- I think it had some greater purposes than macramé believe me. Ron Seeds, the guy who started it did so at the height of the Vietnam War. I was talking about it earlier how it affected me and my outlook on life growing up. Ron was looking at it really as a standpoint of a gay person, what do gay people do. So he really created Le-Hi-Ho to provide information -- what your options are if you're a gay person and you're about to be inducted into the United States Military, the US Army. By the time I became involved with Le-Hi-Ho, the war was pretty much over, and draft resistance was a thing of the past and so Le-Hi-Ho had kind of become just, I think, really largely a social organization. There was certainly no political aspect to it. They didn't bring in political speakers. There was no... Maybe they brought voting materials or I should say voter registration materials to meetings. They might have gone that far, but otherwise, it was not political at all. When Frank came to town, as I mentioned in our previous discussion a few minutes ago, he mentioned to me that he was interested in getting to meet some of those people. So I'm pretty sure we went to the following meeting the very next meeting that would've occurred that -- whatever month that was when he came out to me at work. And you know what, he discovered that it was kind of the same thing like I warned him. However, not long after that, we got a notice through the mail. Le-Hi-Ho put out a regular monthly newsletter, as I recall, and maybe even some meeting announcements in between times, I'm not sure. But at any rate, we heard about a speaker that Le-Hi-Ho was bringing to the Lehigh Valley an old activist, a female, a lesbian I think from The Mattachine Society days by the name of Barbara Gittings. They knew that this would be kind of a special, special event bringing in a speaker like this, so they secured a hall at Muhlenberg College instead of the hard-to-find Unitarian Church at the end of the tree-lined lane in Fountain Hill. And Frank and I attended, and to our surprise, to our amazement, it seemed like a whole new Le-Hi-Ho was taking over. The man who stood in front of the audience that day and introduced Barbara Gittings, introduced himself as the new president of Le-Hi-Ho, and he had identified himself as Clint Miller. He was standing there in a sharp, three-piece suit, and I was just completely blown away. Frank and I came back and said, "Wow, what a difference. You know, maybe this organization is really going somewhere." I'm not sure what would've happened next, but what did happen next is we bumped into Clint and of all places the ACME. And we all decided right then and there that we should be friends and so we did. And after that, Le-Hi-Ho and my friendship with Clint and some of the people that now were occupying Le-Hi-Ho kind of merged into just one. Le-Hi-Ho still didn't quite know what to do with itself, what it should be. Clint Miller and some other I'll mention... Clint is still alive, quite vigorously so, but two other people I'll mention who have passed away were Paul and Paul, Paul Kendall and Paul Reeder, two college professors near retirement age by the time we got to know them and then did retire. This and a couple of women, Susan Schellenberg and her partner eventually Catherine Ziel and a few other men, I could go on and on, but formed kind of a core of friendship and commitment to Le-Hi-Ho. As I started to say, we still didn't really do too much as an organization. We still didn't really get involved in politics, none of us. As a newspaper reporter, I was probably -- or I should say I was -- probably had more interest in politics than anybody but as a newspaper reporter, I was the one who was in the least position to be able to really act on getting -- pushing Le-Hi-Ho in the direction of politics, so. But, what -- one of the things it did do though is it left itself open and receptive to the aspirations of other people to create organizations and create community. So somebody came to us and wanted to form a local chapter of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Le-Hi-Ho decided that it would be a really great idea to help them. We didn't want to become the local chapter of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, but we figured the Lehigh Valley was plenty big enough to support Le-Hi-Ho and that group, and so why not? Actually, the two Pauls I just mentioned, Paul Kendall as he was retiring as a geology professor from Kutztown University, decided to give himself a retirement project, and he pretty much single-handedly with the backing of Le-Hi-Ho, organized and opened a gay community center at Eighth and Hamilton. The Bradbury-Sullivan Center is a latter-day version of that. Sadly, it's not a descendant of it. The community center didn't become the gay -- the Bradbury-Sullivan Center. But for a few, brief glorious years, the Lambda Center at Eighth and Hamilton Street flourished. I'm trying to think what other organizations were founded, and I'm struggling a little bit to do so, but I think there were a couple of others. I think PFLAG may have had a foot -- been given a boost up by Le-Hi-Ho, but certainly, the Lambda or the Lambda Center as the gay community center back in -- I guess this would have been the 1980s and early 1990s. One thing that the Lambda Center did give birth to and hence, Le-Hi-Ho also gave birth to was the AIDS Services Center. I'm not sure if that still exists as a freestanding entity. I think in its latest iterations, it sort of fell into the fold of Saint Luke's Hospital, which is a good thing. But it began right in the living room of the apartment where Frank and I lived. Frank was on the board of the Lambda Center. Although I was deeply interested in its activities, I felt as a newspaper reporter -- not that Frank wasn't a newspaper reporter -- but as a newspaper reporter reporting on the community, reporting on politics, reporting on gay affairs that maybe I shouldn't be on the board of the Lambda Center. But Frank didn't feel that restriction. He didn't really report on the gay community the way I did and so he served on the community center board from the time it was created. The community center only lasted a couple of years, and I'm about to tell you why and how it went out of business. Soon after or around the time that the Lambda Center was forming, so was AIDS becoming a real thing here. In fact, the story I mentioned a few minutes ago involving the anonymous Brad Edwards, who eventually emerged as Brian Foley, that happened exactly contemporaneous to the operation of the center. I can even remember when that -- the night that that story appeared, there was a big event at the center, and I can remember sitting in the midst of a big crowd of people, everybody looking at me and saying, "Who is it? Who is Brad Edwards really?" Because the story said Brad Edwards is a made-up name. And, of course, I didn't say. Brad Edwards, Brian Foley was not in the room that night. There were other nights he was in the room, that room, however, interestingly. So after AIDS, after the story about Brian and then there were some other examples of AIDS fronting the newspaper began starting to pay attention to it, began asking doctors if they have cases, and began reporting statistics to see if -- to see what -- to report on what was going on. And then a prominent young man by the name of David Rodale died. David was the son of Ardath and Bob Rodale of Rodale Press. He was a gay man who was interested in theater and might have had a wonderful career doing that, but AIDS caught up to him and killed him very early on in the epidemic. Of course, his parents were stricken, and his mother was approached by the Lambda Center about perhaps making a contribution, and she was kind of intrigued. She knew about her son, of course, that he was gay, she loved her son. At the same time, being gay killed him so, I think she viewed it and so it wasn't an easy sell. She finally did give some money. It wasn't a small amount either. It might have been like ten thousand dollars. For that organization, it was a ton. In fact, it was probably more money than anybody had ever given them. But she specified that the only thing she wanted it to be used for was AIDS. Well, Lambda Center already had kind of an AIDS committee. I think they called it the AIDS Services Committee. But now suddenly, the AIDS Services Committee had money. In fact, the AIDS Services Committee had more money than the rest of the Lambda Center, and it became the classic story of the tail wagging the dog. I mean, eventually, the people who were running the AIDS Services Center formed a revolt, literally said, "We've got the money, we've got the interest, we've got the crisis, we've got the agenda. We think we should take over the center." So they did, and not taking over the center but transforming the Lambda Center into the AIDS Services Center. We were quite upset about it, Frank and I personally, Le-Hi-Ho as an organization. We remember Lambda Center needing to move out of their space in a great big rush all in one evening. These other folks were playing for keeps, and they wanted the space, they wanted our stuff out of there. There were several hundred books that formed the library and several cartons of information that formed an archive that needed to go somewhere in a hurry. Frank and I had just bought this house. It was sitting here rather empty at that point, and was only a few blocks away from the Lambda Center. So all that stuff was rushed here in a few cars with not much thinking, and here the stuff remained for many, many years after. To tell you the truth, that is kind of the end of my gay activism when the Lambda Center disappeared and became the -- you know it's -- what was left of it became the AIDS Services Center. After that, Le-Hi-Ho just kind of settled into what-do-we-do-next frame of mind, and they never really answered that question. More and more, the events, our meetings turned out to be just really rather intimate, personal meetings, dinners at each other's homes. We'd discuss a little business, we'd make note of how much was in the checking account, and we would kind of lament that Eighth -- that Le-Hi-Ho's role had been usurped by the course of events. And that's the way it kind of just petered out over the years. Eventually, the money that was in the checking account was withdrawn, and I'm trying to remember where we gave it. We had a meeting. I'm pretty sure it was just dinner at somebody's house. We sat around over wine and said, "Well who should we give these several hundred dollars to?" We made a good choice at the time, and everything came to -- you know it just kind of drifted and drifted apart. So there's lots and lots and lots more I could talk about, about being gay and growing up in a very changing time. But I've enjoyed what we have talked about today, and I'm hoping it's -- people who stumble across this in years to come will find it interesting. MF:I know they will. It has been such a pleasure to talk with you today, but let me just have two final questions quickly. I'm just wondering if -- do you know any people in the region that you really think we should have a part at -- have -- invite to be a part of this project or to give an oral history rather? RHW:Well, I think you've already acquainted yourself with some of the people connected with the Bradbury-Sullivan Center. And so some of those people like Liz and Trish date back to some of the years I'm talking about and so they certainly would. Many of us are getting old, and memories are becoming sketchy, and our voices are beginning to crack and dissemble on us. But the Clint Miller I mentioned is still a guy. He's in his eighties, but he's still -- he's working, and he's out and about every day, and he might be able to share some memories. Ron Seeds and his partner are up in Connecticut now, so they're a little removed but are still around and kicking. And I think still have good memories, good enough to be doing what we're doing here today, so they would certainly, certainly be two. I wish that Paul and Paul were alive because they would be terrific to talk to, but they are -- but they both have passed away. I'm drawing a blank. MF:Well, those are great, great names for us to follow up on. And I think I'll go ahead and close our time together simply by saying, it has been such a pleasure to hear some of your stories today. I have learned a lot both about reportage in our region and also Le-Hi-Ho and certainly activist organizations here. But I also love the stories about your childhood and going to Syracuse University, so I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much for being with us today. RHW:You're very welcome. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:37:43 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bob Wittman, August 23, 2019 Description An account of the resource Bob Wittman describes his life growing up gay in Allentown, reporting at The Morning Call, and the LGBT community within the Lehigh Valley. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-02 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-08-23 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/ac119b5677e6eefd21937be4a4366c07.png 36edd9d5708951cf034dac90258eca60 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed D.J. Landis OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-05.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 June 12, 2020 D.J. Landis, June 12, 2020 LGBT-05 01:39:12 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg D.J. Landis Mary Foltz video/mp4 LandisDJ_20200612_video.mp4 1.0:|29(4)|64(8)|83(14)|102(8)|115(12)|132(14)|151(7)|168(8)|185(9)|204(8)|223(14)|240(10)|259(2)|274(12)|291(14)|312(2)|335(4)|350(5)|371(5)|390(11)|409(5)|428(4)|443(8)|460(16)|477(12)|492(17)|505(19)|524(2)|541(11)|558(5)|577(5)|596(2)|613(6)|628(17)|643(13)|660(7)|677(6)|694(7)|719(12)|736(11)|753(14)|772(4)|789(2)|804(9)|819(16)|836(13)|857(7)|876(8)|893(19)|910(4)|929(8)|946(5)|961(7)|978(16)|1001(10)|1024(12)|1045(6)|1064(6)|1079(9)|1100(4)|1117(3)|1134(5)|1155(12)|1170(15)|1191(6)|1212(16)|1235(9)|1248(9)|1263(9)|1282(6)|1301(5)|1318(6)|1329(14)|1344(7)|1359(15)|1374(12)|1401(5)|1420(7)|1435(9)|1448(5)|1461(4)|1478(7)|1497(4)|1514(14)|1535(4)|1554(17)|1569(7)|1586(9)|1601(12)|1618(10)|1635(6)|1654(6)|1671(12)|1688(5)|1707(3)|1722(14)|1731(5) 0 https://youtu.be/CNefhC2A5-g YouTube video 1 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: Well, good morning. My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with DJ to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we are meeting on Zoom because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. And today’s date is June 12, 2020. So first I just, DJ, I want to say thank you so much for doing this interview with me today.&#13 ; DONNA J LANDIS: You’re welcome. &#13 ; MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? 0 117 Early Life in Shamokin MF: Great. All right, well, let’s go ahead and get started. And I’m going to start the interview by just asking you, could you tell me a little bit about your childhood? &#13 ; DL: Well, I grew up in the coal regions, Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and I’ll be seventy-five years old on Sunday. And I was always a tom boy. My mother bought me dolls, but they stayed in the box. I didn’t play with dolls. I wanted guns and all the boy’s stuff, all the boy’s toys. And I was just playing football, baseball, I did all that stuff, and I had a lot of friends, and we just rode around. It was all the good stuff. I was never a little girl playing girl stuff. 0 304 Growing Up / Familial Relationships MF: Tell me a little bit about sort of that extended family and your relationships with either your biological parents or your parents, parents who adopted you.&#13 ; DL: We were friendly at first, and then my biological mother and my adopted mother, like I said, they were good friends, and they thought my adopted mother couldn’t have children. So what happened is when my biological mother gave birth to me they adopted me, and then when my adopted mother ended up getting pregnant there was a little bit of a rift there. So then I didn’t have contact for many, many years. And then with my biological father, I did have contact with him. [00:06:00] But you know, back then when you were adopted it was always hush-hush, nobody talked about it. 0 624 Being a Tomboy in Shamokin MF: I’m curious about, you know, you describe yourself as being a tom boy. So you’re kind of hurting in your family life, but it sounds like you had relationships in the community with neighbors. What was it like to be a tom boy in Shamokin when you were a young person?&#13 ; DL: It was good. I started doing odd jobs at nine years old. We lived -- are you there? We lived across from a grocery store. I would come home from lunch break and deliver groceries for nickels and dimes, and I would save that because I figured my own money, nobody could tell me how to spend it. And if I wanted something I would just ask my mom because, like I said, I was spoiled. But it was great. I had a lot of friends, and I was sort of like -- my girlfriends that couldn’t protect herself, I was their protector. If they couldn’t fight I would fight for them. And I wasn’t the type that would sit and play with dolls or play girly girls. That wasn’t me. 0 772 Youthful Experiences MF: So I’m curious about your rebellious spirit. When you bagged school you said we did typical things. What were the typical things you do when you snuck off from school?&#13 ; DL: Oh, we would go down to different places and go get hoagies and ride around and go different towns and just do all that stuff. Of course you couldn’t stay around where you was at school so you wouldn’t get caught. Or because you would get detention. I had so much detention just from rebelling at home ec because I wouldn’t do the home ec stuff. I wanted shop because I couldn’t understand. The boys could take home ec. Why couldn’t the girls take shop? And we had to wear dresses to school even in the winter time. No long pants, dresses. 0 1047 Steps After Graduation MF: So describe what happens for you after you leave school. What is sort of the next step of your life after your adolescence?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Okay, so after that, after I left school, I would hang out in the little town called Kulpmont, which was like, six or eight miles -- four miles from Shamokin and in Mount Carmel and party, drink, like teenager stuff. But our parties were different. We used to go up into the mountain, (inaudible) up in the coal mountains, and we would stay up there and have our weekend parties and not come down and cause trouble. And the cops knew we were up there, and they were okay with it, long as we stayed up there and we didn’t come down and cause any trouble or anything else. We would have a party, and it would last the weekend, and open the trunks of my car, and everybody had to put their keys in my car, my trunk. So you couldn’t get down. You had to stay up there, not cause any trouble. And we built a pavilion that you would have, you know, you pay $10, you drink all the weekend, you have food and everything else. And we would drive to -- a bunch of us sometimes would go to Philadelphia because we had friends then that graduated and worked in Philly. At the time they worked at, used to be Bell Tel. I don’t know what it was called, but and then from there we would meet there, go down there and spend a weekend and drive up to New York. There was plenty of parties. You know, you had to in-know to where the parties were. But that’s how I got in to go the Village and The Stonewall. 0 1169 Interactions/Associations within the LGBT Community MF: Tell me more about that. Were these parties -- were they coed parties? I mean, going to Stonewall, of course, you’re with LGBT people when you go into New York to Stonewall. Tell me a little bit about the kind of makeup of your friends and were you associating with LGBT people in Shamokin, or was that primarily in Philly and New York?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: No, that was in Shamokin. In Shamokin, in the town of Shamokin the gay bars would be after 2:00. And you couldn’t go earlier until after 2:00 in the morning. And of course we were underage, but that was okay. They let you in. And there was other clubs that you could go, like it was up in Berwick. It was Berwick Hotel, when you were of age, but it was down in the basement. And the first gay bar I went to was called the Lark. And it was -- the dance floor was only about 12 by 12. That’s how big it was. It was small. It was in the back room of a bar. And there was another bar that we went outside of Sunbury, and you’re dancing all, and I would say no clenching, no clenching. And then the other bar, it was you would go Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday it was straight. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday it was gay. So everybody knew that the town knew which was which. So if you didn’t want to be with the gays you didn’t go. And there was a lot of the women that would come that they were straight, but they loved being around the gay people. 0 1305 Coming Out MF: When did you know you were gay, or when did you encounter gay community? You talked about the first gay bar that you went to, but when did you know you were a part of the gay community?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I guess I always -- I just was different. There was only one guy I truly, truly loved, but we couldn’t be together because he was an Italian. And back then you had to be Italian to be with Italian. His wife was already picked out. But we remained friends. And I was married to a man. I got married at 19. I got divorced at 19. And I came out at 19. And him and I are friends now. We’re better friends than we were married. 0 1452 Experience in Gay Bars / LGBTQ Community in Shamokin MF: So I’m curious about some of the bars that you describe, like the Lark and other places. Could you describe what was a night out -- what did that look like? What kind of music did they play? What were those bars like? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Back then when you went to the gay bars the butch type girls would be dressed more boyish, and their girlfriends would be -- you could tell the difference. They would be dressed up nicely and, you know, like if they were going on a date with a boy. But that’s how they would be dressed, not like they’re dressed today. You would know a butch from a fem. And that’s how you did it. And you went to the bars. You danced. You socialized and just like a couple. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Was the gay community in Shamokin and those coal towns -- what was the size of that community? Was it a small, insular community, or what was the size of it?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Very small, people knew but they didn’t say nothing, to your face anyway. They might have said something behind your back. But when I came out at 19 I never changed. It was like you accept me for who I am or you don’t. It’s your loss. That was my attitude. 0 1627 Travels to Bigger Cities MF: So I have one more question about the bars. So I’m curious, you went into Stonewall in the late ’60s. What was that like, to go into New York City with friends from Shamokin? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: We enjoyed it. It was wonderful. I mean, it was like wow, the Village, we loved the Village. You can go on up there. We would go every time we could come we would go up. It was just unbelievable the difference between little towns where you had to wait to go to the bars and then go to New York where it was all open. But it was bad. The night the Stonewall was raided I was supposed to be there. But my gay friends, the males, they couldn’t change their own tires or nothing, so I had to do that. And that’s why we didn’t go. And I’m glad we didn’t go. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: So I’m curious about that, like the openness that you see in New York City versus living in a small town, did you want to continue to live in that kind of small region, that Shamokin region? Did you ever considering going to New York City, or did you really prefer the kind of small town atmosphere? 0 1845 Working in the 1970s/Taking Care of Mother MF: So you’re working up in the kind of Shamokin region. Can you tell me a little bit about the jobs that you held during this time period? Is this the early ’70s that we’re talking about?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yeah. I tried sewing. Like I said, I hated home ec. I tried that. I quit the job. I worked one day, and I didn’t know. I sewed everything together. I didn’t know that. I flunked that. But I worked building RVs. Pace Arrow I was called. You get a chassis and then you built the camper on the chassis. All you got was a chassis and you had to build everything on the chassis. And it was a joke at first when they first came out because if you were in an accident you didn’t call [the body a fender?] you called a carpenter because they were made out of wood. They were top heavy. You couldn’t drive if it was real windy on an interstate. You better be afraid, topped over. 0 2096 Meeting Sandy/Connecting with Other Women MF: Well, I know Sandy is an important person in your life, so could you tell me how you met her at state hospital? How did you two meet?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: She was my boss. I went to work on WD, which was a unit down there, and she was my boss. And when I told her stories she’ll say what the hell are you talking about? I’m still your boss. So but we split for almost 30 years, and we’re back together now. In February we were together 26 years. Like I said, when Sandy and I split I met this woman, and I just believed everything she told me because at that time I was still not trusting people. And I still had the chip on my shoulder and everything. And in between time I ran in -- Sandy and I met in between. And I asked Sandy to take me back, and she laughed. When Sandy’s nervous she laughs. So I thought oh well. 0 2327 Living as a Same-Sex Couple in Shamokin MF: Did the two of you live together with her children in Shamokin?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yes. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: And so can you describe a little bit what that was like, to be a same-sex couple living together in Shamokin?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: It wasn’t too bad. I guess it was harder on the oldest child because his friends used to make fun of him. And I was friends with her husband too. So it was like, you know, we were all friends. When he got sick I helped take care of him. I would go up and make sure he got all his medicines and everything, and it was, you know, we all got along. Like I said, it’s like I’m who I am, you accept me, and that’s how it is. She didn’t bash the husband, and he didn’t bash the wife. You know, it was like, we just talked, you know. If he needed something to drive, I would drive him and his girlfriend places, and, you know, he had a girlfriend, and he just drank a lot. 0 2569 Favorite Memories of 20 Year Relationship MF: [inaudible] some of your favorite memories from that partnership, that 20 years together? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I would say the birth of the first grandchild. I love him dearly. He was my favorite. I have to say he was my favorite. But there was, you know, the proms, the weddings, the graduations, typical all, like, if you were a married couple, the typical thing of what goes on with their kids, their dates, their broken hearts and just the typical things of what a married couple would do if they had children, the ups and downs, the fighting. But it was -- I can’t say it was bad. It was good times, a lot of good times. 0 2852 Butch-Femme Culture MF: You early talked about the kind of butch-fem emphasis in the bar culture, and I’m wondering, how did you feel about kind of butch-fem in the bar culture or in the larger sort of gay community?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: How do I feel about it?&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Yeah, were you a part of butch-fem culture, or were you sort of outside of that?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I guess I was part of it. I always dressed that way, so it was nothing new to me. My hair’s longer now than it has been in years because I can’t get a haircut, but it was -- I didn’t wear fem clothes. In fact, when I worked -- and this is funny, but it’s a true story. When I was building RVs my niece was getting -- she always says she was my niece, was getting married, and I said I had to go get a dress for the wedding. And my boss said to me if you’re going to get a dress I want a picture of it, and I’ll pay you for working. So I went. I didn’t get the dress, but I put my partner’s dress on, made her take the picture, and I showed it to my boss, and I got paid for the day. I didn’t own dresses. I still don’t own dresses. The last dress I wore was I think in ’63 or ’62 when my cousin got married. 0 2983 Loss of Partner MF: They look beautiful. The one on your shoulder looks amazing, but I could see that one a little bit more. Oh, that’s so cool. So you describe -- this partner had an untimely death from the 20-year relationship. What happened at that period? You know, tell me a little bit about what happened around that time?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well, she had breathing problems. You know, we all smoked back then. Everybody smoked. And she had asthma. And she had it for many, many, many years. And like I said, we grew up on that street, so I know her for, you know, from when her firstborn -- and it just was getting worse and worse and worse. And her oldest son and I took her to Hershey Medical. And he gave her only six months to live because her lungs -- her one lung collapsed. But she didn’t know it. She didn’t want to know. So, you know, we didn’t tell her. And a few months later she was rushed to the hospital, and this doctor came in and told her -- she asked did she have cancer? He said no, but you’re dying anyway. So she just gave up. So she died November 11, I think it was, in ’93. And she made me promise to call Sandy and tell Sandy because she said you always loved Sandy. You never gave up. You never stopped loving Sandy. You would never let anybody say anything bad about Sandy. 0 3013 Tattoos MF: So I’m curious about [break in audio]. I’m curious about your tattoos because you brought them up. You said you have a woman’s name tattooed on your arm. You’ve got 10 tattoos. &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yeah.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Tell me a little bit about your tattoos.&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well, our neighbor’s son was doing tattoos. And he needed people to practice on. So I said sure. My mom said don’t you dare. Wrong thing to say to me, don’t. And I got it. It’s a big thing with flowers and double hearts and a blue bird and all that. I have a black rose. I have an eagle tattoo. I have a dream catcher tattoo on my other shoulder. On my back I have a yin-yang. On the other side I have a Pegasus on the other with the rainbow. On my leg Sandy’s songives tattoos out in Minnesota, but this was in California. When Sandy and I had our holy union, Mark and Michelle came, that’s his wife, but he’s remarried now. I have a cherub on my leg with double hearts. The cherub represents the grandchildren, and the double hearts is Sandy and I. I’ve got hot stuff devil, so. And then I’ve just got the last tattoo I got from Mark was a ribbon because Sandy had lung cancer. And I have it white with her name on it and my color as a care taker and the date when she had her lung cancer. So that’s my tattoos. 0 3315 Rekindling Relationship w/ Sandy MF: So when you came down from Shamokin to Allentown to visit Sandy, tell me a little bit about, like, how you got back together. How did you make that transition from friends or potential friendship back to partners?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well, we always stayed in contact, but my former partner used to talk more to Sandy than I did. Sandy and I would say hi, how are you? Okay, yeah, me too, blah, blah, blah. But her, my former partner and Sandy would talk more than I. And we would even come down and visit. Because see, I had people from Shamokin moved down here, and that’s when I moved to Allentown. I stayed with people from Shamokin that was family friend from family like grandfather lived with them, you know. And so I lived with them when I came down here until I got my apartment across the street from them. And then when Meg passed I come down. I called Sandy, and she invited me down. And it was a little strange at first, but then I kept coming down. She invited me down, and we got back together. 0 3627 Life in Allentown in the '90s MF: So you moved to Allentown in March of, I think you said 1994. Tell me a little bit about the neighborhood that you lived in Allentown. Like, what was it like to move to Allentown in the 1990s?&#13 ; DL: Where we’re at now, we’re in the same house. We’re in the same house, Sandy’s house, and neighborhood’s fine. They all know, and we get along. Actually, Sandy works at the state hospital forty-one and a half years. And her parents love me. And actually in 2001 I changed my name to Landis. That’s Sandy’s name. My name was Golda. When I met Liz and Trish I was Golda, my married name. And in 2001 when I changed my name Sandy’s parents, her mom especially really loved it, that I became a Landis. And we’re still in the same house, twenty-sixyears still in the same house. And the neighbors, I have no problem with them. I watch every -- I know everything that’s going on in the neighborhood. I watch. I know new cars and old cars and what belongs here and doesn’t belong here. 0 3868 Connecting w/ Pride Festivals DL: Well, I was trying to sell my property up there. I mean, what I did, I rented it to sell for a year. I went to my very first pride fest. The year before I heard about it. I read about it on TV. But I went to my first pride fest. I called Liz and Trish. And I called Mickey Katz. I don’t know if you know Mickey Katz. And I talked to them. And I started volunteering. I went over, and I met Liz and Trish. And I start volunteering. I just thought it was wonderful that they had something like that for gay people. And I volunteered for our pride fest. I went to Harrisburg’s for their pride fest. And I went to Philly for their pride fest and worked them. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What did it feel like for you to be at that first pride festival in Allentown?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: It was wonderful. And it, you know, all this and, you know, no problems. It was different back, you know. This was wonderful. They had something for gay people that I never knew they had. Well, the very first gay pride down here was in ’93, I think they started it. And then I ended up going being on the pride board for a couple years. But it was wonderful. I just totally enjoyed it. 0 4378 Involvement w/ other LGBT Organizations in Allentown MF: So you’re working on the Pride board in Allentown. What other LGBT organizations were you involved with in Allentown during this period of the ’90s?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: There was one called Kindred Spirits, [GLOR?], and with Liz and Trish it was a different name back then. It was PA- Gala. And I can’t think of the other ones, but it was different, quite a few. I tried to help with every one I could. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Yeah, Liz and Trish describe you as, like, a volunteer all over the valley, that you were just sort of like, just helping in any way you can. I’m not familiar with Kindred Spirit. Could you talk a little bit about what that was and how you worked with that organization? 0 4613 Involvement w/ Religious Organizations in Allentown MF: Were you involved with any religious organizations during this time period like MCCLV?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yes.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Tell me about -- &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I belonged to [inaudible].&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Tell me about your involvement with MCCLV.&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I went there. I was at a birthday party, and this friend of mine was there, and she was leaving to go to church. It was at Sunday night at 6:00 or for first six. And I said can I come with you? She said sure. And I went. They were in -- sharing a church, Unitarian church in Bethlehem. And I enjoyed it. And that’s the first I went to church down here with MCC. I was a member. I belonged there 17 years. I was on the board. I was on the property board for six years. And I helped move with the church and all of that. There’s where I fell. We moved from Ford Street. Was it Ford Street? From Merchant Square. We were at Merchant Square on Vultee Street. We moved from there to Ford Street in Allentown. And I was working at the church, and I fell 15 feet and broke my leg. But yeah, I belonged to MCC for 17 years. And now I belong to St. Mark’s, Lutheran church. 0 5101 Importance of Volunteering and Leadership MF: You really have so many stories about volunteering or being on leadership, both in LGBT organizations but in your church organizations both at MCCLV and now with your Lutheran congregation. Could you tell me a little bit about why volunteering and taking on leadership roles in community organizations has been important in your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well actually, they asked me to become one of the leaders. They asked me. I was just a member over a year, and they called and asked me to be on their board. And I was honored. I said I’m not even a member only a little over a year and you’re asking me to be on your board. I was honored that they asked, you know. So that’s how it is. They asked me. And I’m honored. And I told them right from the beginning my mouth sometimes got me in trouble. And they were happy. Because I speak my mind, and that’s where it got me in trouble at MCC. You ask me a question and I’m going to answer it, and if I feel something’s wrong I’m going to speak my mind, and that’s what happened. 0 5206 Legitimizing Her Relationship w/Sandy MF: I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about just kind of to turn back to you and Sandy, did you have a commitment ceremony or, you know, something prior to the passage of marriage equality? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yes, we had a holy union back in 1998 at the Unitarian church where we had that. My family from Delaware all came. They all love Sandy. And it’s like you can’t accept Sandy. And before my biological mother died we mend the fences, and, you know, I said this is my partner, and if you can’t accept her you’re history. You’re not as important to me as she is. And that’s how it is. They can’t accept Sandy then we’re history. And in 2001 we had, in Connecticut, we had a civil union. We can’t get legally married in Pennsylvania because I would lose my benefits. That’s why we -- not legally married in Pennsylvania or we would be because I’m a fixed, very low. Like, I only get $1,000 to live on. And my medicine, because I have COPD, two of my inhalers are over $1,000. 0 5378 Current Relationship with Sandy MF: So now in your seventies, how would you describe your relationship with Sandy now that you’ve been together for so many years and you’re in your seventies, you’re kind of in this, like, really beautiful part of your relationship because you’ve been together so long. Describe that for me. &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I still love her with all my heart. And we talk, which we never did in the beginning back in the ’60s. We didn’t talk. We talk. We’re honest with one another. And like, she’ll say how are -- like if I’m not feeling good I’ll say I’m good. She’ll say honest? And if I’m not feeling -- I won’t say honest unless I mean it. But we talk. We don’t just do something. No matter what it is we talk about, give each other’s opinion on everything. We trust one another. 0 5544 Current Status of LGBTQ Community&#13 ; MF: Well, we’re getting close to the end of the interview. So I want to ask just maybe one or two more questions. In your seventies, as you look back on your experiences and really the kind of LGBT movements from the ’69 and Stonewall, you know, through the present, how do you think things have changed for LGBT people? What have you sort of witnessed across your life? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well, I don’t remember the movie, but they showed a movie at NCCC one time. And I was there helping one of the groups out. And the younger people that was younger than me were in there that didn’t come out as early as I came out. And when they came out, and they kept thanking me. And it’s like, for what, you know? I don’t consider myself a hero or warrior or nothing else. I’m just me, plain old me. And it’s a lot different. Now I see people walking hand in hand, you know, couples, and I think wow, what a difference, what a difference. They didn’t realize what it was like to go to a bar after 2:00 in the morning to be with yourself and friends. And I got a nickname called Bobbie because I was, like I said, I was butchy, and this drag queen thought I was a guy. And I told him no. He said from now on you’re Bobbie to me. And so I did a couple drag shows at the church, and I went by Bobbie. But it’s so different. And they don’t realize how lucky they are that they can walk down the street hand in hand and not get bashed or beat up or anything because a lot of that was going on. We fought for a lot of this. I remember so many years standing on Hamilton Street fighting for gay marriage in the freezing cold. 0 5770 Final Message DL: I would just say not to be ashamed of who you are or who you love. Love is love, no matter what color, what race, or who it is. Love is love. And don’t be ashamed of who you love. And don’t hide who you love. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Thank you so much, DJ. It’s just been such a pleasure talking with you today. 0 MovingImage DJ Landis discusses early childhood and young adulthood in Shamokin, PA, her thoughts about being adopted, and her family life. DJ addresses a number of gay bars in small towns and cities as well as LGBT social scene and butch/femme identities. The interview also addresses her work life at Pace Arrow, the challenges facing LGBT couples prior to marriage equality, and two serious relationships in her life. In reference to LGBT organizations, DJ discusses Pride of the Lehigh Valley, GLORA, Kindred Spirits, and MCCLV. DJ ends the interview with a discussion of her marriage to Sandy at a Unitarian Church. INTERVIEW WITH DJ LANDIS JUNE 12, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: Well, good morning. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with DJ to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we are meeting on Zoom because we're in the middle of a pandemic. And today's date is June 12, 2020. So first I just, DJ, I want to say thank you so much for doing this interview with me today. DONNA J LANDIS: You're welcome. MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? DL: My full name is D-O-N-N-A J Landis, L-A-N-D-I-S. But everybody calls me DJ or Deej. MF: Thank you. And will you please share your birth date? DL: June 14, 1945. MF: Thank you. And so prior to starting this interview we had talked about consent. So I just want to check back in with you, do you consent to this interview today? DL: Yes. MF: And do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available on online spaces? DL: Sure, not a problem. MF: And do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, and that might be articles or websites or presentations, things like that? DL: Sure. MF: And do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript of this interview to identify parts that you want to delete or withdraw from the project? DL: Yeah, I understand. MF: Great. All right, well, let's go ahead and get started. And I'm going to start the interview by just asking you, could you tell me a little bit about your childhood? DL: Well, I grew up in the coal regions, Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and I'll be seventy-five years old on Sunday. And I was always a tom boy. My mother bought me dolls, but they stayed in the box. I didn't play with dolls. I wanted guns and all the boy's stuff, all the boy's toys. And I was just playing football, baseball, I did all that stuff, and I had a lot of friends, and we just rode around. It was all the good stuff. I was never a little girl playing girl stuff. MF: What was it like to grow up in Shamokin? What was that region like? DL: It was a cult where -- it's different now than it was back then. It was a nice town, friendly, and everybody knew everybody, and it was like you did something wrong and you didn't have to worry about your parents not finding out because somebody did. Everybody knew everybody, and your Oma's going to get you, and you didn't have to worry about being safe because everybody watched out for everybody. MF: Tell me a little bit about your family. Did your family work in coal mining in Shamokin? DL: My father was in the service, and he worked for the government down in Middletown, Pennsylvania. He worked for the Army base down there, the military base. My mother didn't work. So he basically [break in audio] And I was the only child. First though I guess I better tell you I was adopted. And I was adopted at four hours old. And my biological mother and my adopted mother were best friends. And my biological father and my adopted father were cousins. And that's how it was. And I am actually related -- my aunt was married to a black man, and I have, like, 17 biracial cousins. And I love them dearly. And I am not a racist. MF: Tell me a little bit about sort of that extended family and your relationships with either your biological parents or your parents, parents who adopted you. DL: We were friendly at first, and then my biological mother and my adopted mother, like I said, they were good friends, and they thought my adopted mother couldn't have children. So what happened is when my biological mother gave birth to me they adopted me, and then when my adopted mother ended up getting pregnant there was a little bit of a rift there. So then I didn't have contact for many, many years. And then with my biological father, I did have contact with him. But you know, back then when you were adopted it was always hush-hush, nobody talked about it. And that's wrong because you should, you know, talk about it because I actually grew up with a big chip on my shoulder because I only heard people talk about, when they think I wasn't paying attention, about it. And that's not good. I think it's great now how they have open adoptions where you talk about it and all that. Because otherwise you're going to grow up like I did for until I was in my twenties with a big chip on my shoulder. And I just never trusted people then. MF: Could you say a little bit more like, why was there a chip on your shoulder? What were your feelings about being adopted? DL: I didn't understand. I didn't understand because I didn't know the story back then. Nobody talked about it. And when you hear that nobody -- your mother didn't want you, you know, people would say things and you didn't know why. And so you didn't -- you hurt, but I never would cry. I just kept everything inside. And it just hurt that, you know, you didn't know why you were adopted. And it's wrong. I really believe you should talk about it when you're growing up. Don't wait until you're in your teens and twenties to find out. Because I now, on my mother's side, I have, like, seven or eight other siblings. And I only really bother with, know two of them. And on my father's side I know the three of them, but we don't have no contact. MF: Tell me a little bit about your relationships with your parents, the parents that you lived with, your adopted parents. What was it like growing up in that family? What were those familial relationships like? DL: It was good. I mean, I was spoiled. I got everything I wanted. And but you didn't hear the words love. You know, back then you didn't hear them words love. But I was a spoiled brat. I mean, whatever I wanted I got. They bought me my first car and everything. They were good to me, but it was rough growing up because when my adopted mother got pregnant and she lost the child, then she started drinking. And then I used to get beatings and everything. And you know, she would go out. Good thing she was a loud drunker, when they would come home, her and her friends, because then they knew she was coming, and, like, she had already locked me in a room, so she would go out because my father worked, and the neighbor's would let me out so I could, you know. And then when they hear her coming they put me back in the room and lock me back in. But it was rough from the time I was, like, maybe eight until I was about eleven or twelve years old. MF: I'm curious about, you know, you describe yourself as being a tom boy. So you're kind of hurting in your family life, but it sounds like you had relationships in the community with neighbors. What was it like to be a tom boy in Shamokin when you were a young person? DL: It was good. I started doing odd jobs at nine years old. We lived -- are you there? We lived across from a grocery store. I would come home from lunch break and deliver groceries for nickels and dimes, and I would save that because I figured my own money, nobody could tell me how to spend it. And if I wanted something I would just ask my mom because, like I said, I was spoiled. But it was great. I had a lot of friends, and I was sort of like -- my girlfriends that couldn't protect herself, I was their protector. If they couldn't fight I would fight for them. And I wasn't the type that would sit and play with dolls or play girly girls. That wasn't me. MF: What was school like for you in Shamokin? DL: Oh, I liked school, and I didn't like school. I was a rebel, I guess. In high school or grade school -- I loved grade school, was a block away. It was when I got in high school I was a rebel. I would bag school, and just typical stuff. I was a rebel, I guess, because at our school back then girls couldn't take shop, and I wanted shop. We had to take home ec. That was learn to cook and sew and clean and all this for your husband and your future. Ugh. I didn't want that. I wasn't to learn to work on my car and do other kind of jobs because I had helped my dad put a motor in my car and all this. So I don't want home ec. I flunked home ec. MF: So I'm curious about your rebellious spirit. When you bagged school you said we did typical things. What were the typical things you do when you snuck off from school? DL: Oh, we would go down to different places and go get hoagies and ride around and go different towns and just do all that stuff. Of course you couldn't stay around where you was at school so you wouldn't get caught. Or because you would get detention. I had so much detention just from rebelling at home ec because I wouldn't do the home ec stuff. I wanted shop because I couldn't understand. The boys could take home ec. Why couldn't the girls take shop? And we had to wear dresses to school even in the winter time. No long pants, dresses. MF: What are some of your favorite memories from your youth? DL: How my friends and I would, especially on Saturdays, do hiking. Pack a lunch and go hiking and just walk around, different places and climb the coal banks. Believe it or not we used to hop on a moving train and ride it for seven miles. Then I walk back. On a Saturday there'd be coupons, they'd been on the Thursday paper up there, our Thursday paper be all kind of coupons in there for grocery stores, and the store across the street from our house would pay you whatever the coupon was worth, ten cents, they give you have of it in cash. So we would walk around a whole town and knock on doors and ask that we were poor. We couldn't afford the paper. Could they give us the sports section with the coupon? And I happened to knock on a door that they recognized my voice. The husband didn't, but the wife said, "Donna Jean, is that you?" Because I would say we're so poor. She said, "Does your mother know what you're doing?" Before I got home my mom found out. Boy, did I get it when I got home saying I was poor. Yeah, my dad was at work, and we didn't have a job, and I needed the coupons to buy groceries. But we made, like, $15, $20 every weekend doing that until we got caught. But I had a good childhood, lot of fun. I never stayed in the house, but you knew when to be home. You didn't have to be told. You knew when the night lights come on, get home. MF: It sounds like you and your friends were kind of outdoorsy, you know, hopping on trains, going for hikes. Can you tell me a little bit about that region of Shamokin for people who don't know what that kind of natural landscape is? What was it like to be out hiking in those areas? Did you have favorite spots to visit? DL: We would go up the mountains. There was coal holes. You had to know where the coal holes were because, you know, sometimes I would help pick coal for people that couldn't afford to buy coal for their heat. So I would help pick coal for them. And you had to know the difference between coal and slate. Because slate wouldn't burn. And it was like, there was a lot of coal holes, lot of rocks. It's mountain area. It's nothing like it used to be. But it was beautiful. You just had to know where to walk, and all over. MF: So describe what happens for you after you leave school. What is sort of the next step of your life after your adolescence? DL: Okay, so after that, after I left school, I would hang out in the little town called Kulpmont, which was like, six or eight miles -- four miles from Shamokin and in Mount Carmel and party, drink, like teenager stuff. But our parties were different. We used to go up into the mountain, [inaudible] up in the coal mountains, and we would stay up there and have our weekend parties and not come down and cause trouble. And the cops knew we were up there, and they were okay with it, long as we stayed up there and we didn't come down and cause any trouble or anything else. We would have a party, and it would last the weekend, and open the trunks of my car, and everybody had to put their keys in my car, my trunk. So you couldn't get down. You had to stay up there, not cause any trouble. And we built a pavilion that you would have, you know, you pay $10, you drink all the weekend, you have food and everything else. And we would drive to -- a bunch of us sometimes would go to Philadelphia because we had friends then that graduated and worked in Philly. At the time they worked at, used to be Bell Tel. I don't know what it was called, but and then from there we would meet there, go down there and spend a weekend and drive up to New York. There was plenty of parties. You know, you had to in-know to where the parties were. But that's how I got in to go the Village and The Stonewall. MF: Tell me more about that. Were these parties -- were they coed parties? I mean, going to Stonewall, of course, you're with LGBT people when you go into New York to Stonewall. Tell me a little bit about the kind of makeup of your friends and were you associating with LGBT people in Shamokin, or was that primarily in Philly and New York? DL: No, that was in Shamokin. In Shamokin, in the town of Shamokin the gay bars would be after 2:00. And you couldn't go earlier until after 2:00 in the morning. And of course we were underage, but that was okay. They let you in. And there was other clubs that you could go, like it was up in Berwick. It was Berwick Hotel, when you were of age, but it was down in the basement. And the first gay bar I went to was called the Lark. And it was -- the dance floor was only about 12 by 12. That's how big it was. It was small. It was in the back room of a bar. And there was another bar that we went outside of Sunbury, and you're dancing all, and I would say no clenching, no clenching. And then the other bar, it was you would go Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday it was straight. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday it was gay. So everybody knew that the town knew which was which. So if you didn't want to be with the gays you didn't go. And there was a lot of the women that would come that they were straight, but they loved being around the gay people. MF: When did you know you were gay, or when did you encounter gay community? You talked about the first gay bar that you went to, but when did you know you were a part of the gay community? DL: I guess I always -- I just was different. There was only one guy I truly, truly loved, but we couldn't be together because he was an Italian. And back then you had to be Italian to be with Italian. His wife was already picked out. But we remained friends. And I was married to a man. I got married at 19. I got divorced at 19. And I came out at 19. And him and I are friends now. We're better friends than we were married. MF: So when you say you came out at 19, what do you mean by that? Do you mean that that's when you started going to the gay nights at the bars, or, you know, what do you mean by --DL: Yup, yup. Like I said, I got married in 1964, and I really came out, was 19, and I came out in '65. But I start going to the gay bars before that, but I wasn't sure I was gay. I thought I was, but I wasn't sure because I had feelings for this girl, but I wasn't, you know, didn't act upon them or anything. I felt comfortable being around the gay people. And I wasn't sure about anything. I was just, felt comfortable being around them, but I didn't have gay feeling, you know, moved on them until I was 19 years old. MF: So I'm curious about some of the bars that you describe, like the Lark and other places. Could you describe what was a night out -- what did that look like? What kind of music did they play? What were those bars like? DL: Back then when you went to the gay bars the butch type girls would be dressed more boyish, and their girlfriends would be -- you could tell the difference. They would be dressed up nicely and, you know, like if they were going on a date with a boy. But that's how they would be dressed, not like they're dressed today. You would know a butch from a fem. And that's how you did it. And you went to the bars. You danced. You socialized and just like a couple. MF: Was the gay community in Shamokin and those coal towns -- what was the size of that community? Was it a small, insular community, or what was the size of it? DL: Very small, people knew but they didn't say nothing, to your face anyway. They might have said something behind your back. But when I came out at 19 I never changed. It was like you accept me for who I am or you don't. It's your loss. That was my attitude. And I mean, I never had a problem with, you know, housing. My jobs, they knew I was gay at my jobs, and I never had a problem. Fact, one of the jobs I worked for -- I was the first female foreman building RVs. And my two bosses were from Wyoming, and they knew I was gay, and we had a couple other gay workers there. They wanted me to go to Wyoming with them, and I said no, I wasn't going to go out that way. But I was who I was. I was upfront. I was honest. I didn't pretend to go home to my boyfriend or husband or whatever. I just, I was me, accept me how I am. And that's how I am to the day. MF: So I have one more question about the bars. So I'm curious, you went into Stonewall in the late '60s. What was that like, to go into New York City with friends from Shamokin? DL: We enjoyed it. It was wonderful. I mean, it was like wow, the Village, we loved the Village. You can go on up there. We would go every time we could come we would go up. It was just unbelievable the difference between little towns where you had to wait to go to the bars and then go to New York where it was all open. But it was bad. The night the Stonewall was raided I was supposed to be there. But my gay friends, the males, they couldn't change their own tires or nothing, so I had to do that. And that's why we didn't go. And I'm glad we didn't go. MF: So I'm curious about that, like the openness that you see in New York City versus living in a small town, did you want to continue to live in that kind of small region, that Shamokin region? Did you ever considering going to New York City, or did you really prefer the kind of small town atmosphere? DL: I really loved Philadelphia. And I loved it. I wanted to go to Philadelphia, and but then I was working. And I was accepted at -- I don't know if you remember the Philadelphia Warriors Roller Derby? I was accepted to go to the school for Little Richard, but I couldn't afford to go to Philly and not work. So I had to decline, but that broke my heart. I wanted to be a Philadelphia Warrior. MF: I'm actually not familiar with the Philadelphia roller derby. Could you tell me a little bit about what that was and what that league was? DL: It was a sport, roller derby, like, they have the different teams all over from New York and Chicago and all that where they would skate against one another. And I loved it. It was a rough game, but I loved it. It was popular back in the '60s and the -- well, not the '60s but the '70s and the '80s I guess it was. It was Buddy Atkinson, Little Richard, Judy Arnold. The older people would know it. The younger girls won't know it. They still have some now, but it's not like it was. MF: So you're working up in the kind of Shamokin region. Can you tell me a little bit about the jobs that you held during this time period? Is this the early '70s that we're talking about? DL: Yeah. I tried sewing. Like I said, I hated home ec. I tried that. I quit the job. I worked one day, and I didn't know. I sewed everything together. I didn't know that. I flunked that. But I worked building RVs. Pace Arrow I was called. You get a chassis and then you built the camper on the chassis. All you got was a chassis and you had to build everything on the chassis. And it was a joke at first when they first came out because if you were in an accident you didn't call [the body a fender?] you called a carpenter because they were made out of wood. They were top heavy. You couldn't drive if it was real windy on an interstate. You better be afraid, topped over. MF: And how long did you work on building RVs? How long were you at that job? DL: I only worked there three years, and they laid me off. They were kind because my mother had cancer, had facial cancer, so they left me collect unemployment to take care of her. MF: Tell me a little bit more about taking care of your mother? DL: She had had it in her face where soon as it would hit a different spot she would hemorrhage. And we took her to, I think it was called Saint Vincent's Hospital in New York. And there was nothing they could do. It was too far gone because she had it when she was a child at eight or nine years old, and then it came back. And that was in '75 right after my father passed away. But between that, in '65 I moved to Allentown. MF: So describe that a bit more for me. Were you living in Allentown and then driving back to care for your mother or --? DL: No, I moved to Allentown, and in '65 I came out, separated from my husband in February. March I moved to Allentown. I had my divorce in April. And in May I met Sandy, the state hospital in 1965 in May. And her and I went together for almost three years. But by that time I was wild. Nobody was going to tell me anything. I wasn't nice to her. I was really -- wasn't very nice. Like I said, I had a chip on my shoulder. And it was I did what I want when I wanted to and nobody was going to tell me anything different. And then we split. I met a wrong person that was a mistake in my life. And then I moved back home, and my father died. He died of an aneurysm. And then he died in '74, and my mom had the cancer in '75. And she died in '77. They only gave her six months, but she lived two years and two months. MF: Well, I know Sandy is an important person in your life, so could you tell me how you met her at state hospital? How did you two meet? DL: She was my boss. I went to work on WD, which was a unit down there, and she was my boss. And when I told her stories she'll say what the hell are you talking about? I'm still your boss. So but we split for almost 30 years, and we're back together now. In February we were together 26 years. Like I said, when Sandy and I split I met this woman, and I just believed everything she told me because at that time I was still not trusting people. And I still had the chip on my shoulder and everything. And in between time I ran in -- Sandy and I met in between. And I asked Sandy to take me back, and she laughed. When Sandy's nervous she laughs. So I thought oh well. The first person I ever had any relationship was a married woman in Shamokin. And she used me. And oh well, you learn from the heart -- you know, you learn from that. But out of that relationship she had, and I loved the children. And I loved her until after a while, but she had grandchildren, and I loved the grandchildren, everything, but you know, when she passed it was like I had to pay a 15 percent inheritance tax and everything. And we were together like 20 years. So it wasn't that I would go to the bars and hook up with different people at the bars. I never did that. I was like, I always had somebody in my life. MF: So the relationship after Sandy, the one that was 20 years, can you tell me a little bit about how you met each other, how that relationship started? DL: She was my neighbor. She was neighbor, and it just happened one night that she kissed me, and I thought oh, this is pretty nice. But it was rough because she was married, and she was still with her husband. And it was like, ugh, I can't do this. So then that's before I came down to Allentown and meet Sandy. That was before I met Sandy. And then after Sandy and I split I was with this girl for a couple years, and I was like, nah, I don't want someone that's going to run around on me and cheat on me. So then I ended up back with the first person I ever had kissed. MF: And did she move to Allentown to be with you, or did you sort of move back to -- DL: That's when I moved back to Shamokin. But she did help take care. And that's one of the reasons I [inaudible]. She helped take care of my mom with me. She was there with me to help take care of my mom. MF: Did the two of you live together with her children in Shamokin? DL: Yes. MF: And so can you describe a little bit what that was like, to be a same-sex couple living together in Shamokin? DL: It wasn't too bad. I guess it was harder on the oldest child because his friends used to make fun of him. And I was friends with her husband too. So it was like, you know, we were all friends. When he got sick I helped take care of him. I would go up and make sure he got all his medicines and everything, and it was, you know, we all got along. Like I said, it's like I'm who I am, you accept me, and that's how it is. She didn't bash the husband, and he didn't bash the wife. You know, it was like, we just talked, you know. If he needed something to drive, I would drive him and his girlfriend places, and, you know, he had a girlfriend, and he just drank a lot. MF: You describe after your partner passed having these sort of property taxes, and a lot of younger people won't understand why. So I'm wondering if you could explain a little bit about pre-marriage equality what it was like for gay people to own property together or to, you know, to live together and then have that relationship not be recognized by the state or the government. So could you describe a little bit about what that was like to kind of live together and own property together, et cetera? DL: It was like you were strangers living together even though you were couples. It wasn't recognized as a couple. You were just like strangers living together even though you had property and it was in both names. You had to pay like that, when she passed me on the house, and I had to pay 15 percent income tax, inheritance tax on half the property because both our names was on it. But we weren't recognized as a couple. And so everything was 15 percent, and even to today, if you're not legally married in Pennsylvania or any state you have to pay 15 percent tax. It's not like you get away with it. If you're married you only pay nothing really or six percent. But back then it was, you know, being legally married wasn't up until what, about few years ago? I don't remember. I remember fighting for legal marriage with Trish and all of them. But back then it was rough. You had every -- you filed income tax. You had to file it separately. You couldn't file jointly. Even though you supported them you couldn't claim them. MF: [inaudible] some of your favorite memories from that partnership, that 20 years together? DL: I would say the birth of the first grandchild. I love him dearly. He was my favorite. I have to say he was my favorite. But there was, you know, the proms, the weddings, the graduations, typical all, like, if you were a married couple, the typical thing of what goes on with their kids, their dates, their broken hearts and just the typical things of what a married couple would do if they had children, the ups and downs, the fighting. But it was -- I can't say it was bad. It was good times, a lot of good times. MF: You're really talking about the beauty of that extended family, the children and the grandchildren. Could you talk a bit about how her extended family and how your extended family accepted you or didn't accept you as really a marriage relationship? How did your families respond to your relationship? DL: It was okay. I didn't have a problem. The kids called me Aunt. And everybody accepted -- like I said, when you're in Shamokin it was like everybody was family anyway. My aunt, you called my aunt Aunt. I called her family Aunt or Uncle, and it was accepted. It was everybody knew everybody. Like I said, it was like everybody knew everybody so it was like you're aunt or uncle to everybody almost. MF: So during this 20-year period are you working at this time, or what is happening? DL: Yeah. MF: Tell me a little bit about where you were working and what kinds of jobs you had. DL: Well, I was working at Pace Arrow, and then that -- like I said, my mother got cancer. Then after that I went to work at, I can't remember the name of it, but it was a fabric place, and I was what they called an assorter. And it was in a sewing factory, but I didn't sew. We got material from a plant or from wherever it came from, and we assorted it into bundles, and it went to the sewers. And I had a partner, and they all knew I was gay too. I mean, like I said, Shamokin was a small town. And you know, all the towns up there, you know people from working around, and basically I didn't have -- like, I never had a problem because I was up front with people. I was honest. They knew who I was. I wasn't pretending to be. I think when you pretend to be something you're not and you lie about it people tend to rather be, in my opinion anyway, rather you being honest and be up front about something than oh, I'm going home to my boyfriend or my husband and that's not true. And I mean, I was, like I said, a rebel. I have tattoos. I have, like, maybe 10 of them. I got them when I was, you know, when my mom said don't dare, and that was, oh, don't say that to me. But I got them. I had a woman's name tattooed on my arm. So you know, what am I doing? MF: You early talked about the kind of butch-fem emphasis in the bar culture, and I'm wondering, how did you feel about kind of butch-fem in the bar culture or in the larger sort of gay community? DL: How do I feel about it? MF: Yeah, were you a part of butch-fem culture, or were you sort of outside of that? DL: I guess I was part of it. I always dressed that way, so it was nothing new to me. My hair's longer now than it has been in years because I can't get a haircut, but it was -- I didn't wear fem clothes. In fact, when I worked -- and this is funny, but it's a true story. When I was building RVs my niece was getting -- she always says she was my niece, was getting married, and I said I had to go get a dress for the wedding. And my boss said to me if you're going to get a dress I want a picture of it, and I'll pay you for working. So I went. I didn't get the dress, but I put my partner's dress on, made her take the picture, and I showed it to my boss, and I got paid for the day. I didn't own dresses. I still don't own dresses. The last dress I wore was I think in '63 or '62 when my cousin got married. MF: So did you have relationships with other butch women? And if so did you talk a little bit about being butch or what it was like to be butch during that time period? DL: Yeah, there was a lot of us that was there. We all dressed the same. And you just knew. And I'm proud of myself. I can always -- and I guess that's one thing that they knew. I never crossed the line of a friend. If a friend was involved with somebody I would -- I guess you would say put the make on them. I never did that to a friend. A friend's a friend. I would never cross that line. MF: So I'm curious about [break in audio]. I'm curious about your tattoos because you brought them up. You said you have a woman's name tattooed on your arm. You've got 10 tattoos. DL: Yeah. MF: Tell me a little bit about your tattoos. DL: Well, our neighbor's son was doing tattoos. And he needed people to practice on. So I said sure. My mom said don't you dare. Wrong thing to say to me, don't. And I got it. It's a big thing with flowers and double hearts and a blue bird and all that. I have a black rose. I have an eagle tattoo. I have a dream catcher tattoo on my other shoulder. On my back I have a yin-yang. On the other side I have a Pegasus on the other with the rainbow. On my leg Sandy's songives tattoos out in Minnesota, but this was in California. When Sandy and I had our holy union, Mark and Michelle came, that's his wife, but he's remarried now. I have a cherub on my leg with double hearts. The cherub represents the grandchildren, and the double hearts is Sandy and I. I've got hot stuff devil, so. And then I've just got the last tattoo I got from Mark was a ribbon because Sandy had lung cancer. And I have it white with her name on it and my color as a care taker and the date when she had her lung cancer. So that's my tattoos. MF: They look beautiful. The one on your shoulder looks amazing, but I could see that one a little bit more. Oh, that's so cool. So you describe -- this partner had an untimely death from the 20-year relationship. What happened at that period? You know, tell me a little bit about what happened around that time? DL: Well, she had breathing problems. You know, we all smoked back then. Everybody smoked. And she had asthma. And she had it for many, many, many years. And like I said, we grew up on that street, so I know her for, you know, from when her firstborn -- and it just was getting worse and worse and worse. And her oldest son and I took her to Hershey Medical. And he gave her only six months to live because her lungs -- her one lung collapsed. But she didn't know it. She didn't want to know. So, you know, we didn't tell her. And a few months later she was rushed to the hospital, and this doctor came in and told her -- she asked did she have cancer? He said no, but you're dying anyway. So she just gave up. So she died November 11, I think it was, in '93. And she made me promise to call Sandy and tell Sandy because she said you always loved Sandy. You never gave up. You never stopped loving Sandy. You would never let anybody say anything bad about Sandy. So I called Sandy, and I was just happy that we were going to be friends for the way I treated her. Because I was nasty to Sandy. Like I said, the chip on my shoulder wasn't good. And because Sandy has two boys. But anyway, I called Sandy, and she invited me down for around Christmas time. I came down. And I thought we would just be friends, but we ended up getting back together. And I love her dearly. She's the best thing to happen to me. And we talk now, which we didn't before, because, you know, we were both 19 years old, and I come from a small town in Shamokin into a big city, and nobody was telling me what to do. I regret how I treated her. I regret that every day of my life. MF: So when you came down from Shamokin to Allentown to visit Sandy, tell me a little bit about, like, how you got back together. How did you make that transition from friends or potential friendship back to partners? DL: Well, we always stayed in contact, but my former partner used to talk more to Sandy than I did. Sandy and I would say hi, how are you? Okay, yeah, me too, blah, blah, blah. But her, my former partner and Sandy would talk more than I. And we would even come down and visit. Because see, I had people from Shamokin moved down here, and that's when I moved to Allentown. I stayed with people from Shamokin that was family friend from family like grandfather lived with them, you know. And so I lived with them when I came down here until I got my apartment across the street from them. And then when Meg passed I come down. I called Sandy, and she invited me down. And it was a little strange at first, but then I kept coming down. She invited me down, and we got back together. MF: So when you got back together did you move to Allentown then, or where were you living at that time? DL: I still had my home in Shamokin, but I would come down every couple weeks, and I knew I was going to move. I didn't know where I was going to move. This is before Sandy and I got back. I knew I was leaving Shamokin. I just couldn't handle Shamokin anymore. Because there was -- some of my former partner's children and I didn't get along after, you know, because I felt they could have done more than they did for their mother instead of just stop in five minutes and say hi, how are you. And I felt they could have came because it was like 24-7 I was there. I could have needed a break. When you take care of somebody you could use a break. But I didn't get that. I mean, I went to the store, and I had to be back, pay bills and everything, and be back in a half an hour. And it was like, they said oh, I should have done more. I said yeah, you should have done more. You could have done more. And it was like I paid for everything. The only thing they paid for is their own flowers. But I paid for everything. And the one thought I should just turn over the house to them. And I didn't. I sold it. And I gave the oldest grandson a nice amount of money. A thousand dollars I gave him. But then you have to -- I only sold the house 20,000. It was a house, a storefront and an apartment. Down here I could have got like $150,000. I just wanted out of Shamokin. I didn't care. I just was at the point where it was getting nasty. So I just wanted out away from all the trouble. It was like, I don't need any more problems. It's, you know, you can all be on your own now. You're not young children. You're all married. You all have children. You can be on your own. And, you know, because I didn't sign the house over to the one it was a big upset. And it's -- I just felt I could not live in Shamokin and be happy. So I knew I was going -- this was in November I knew. And I just knew I was getting out of Shamokin one way or another. And I just had to get out. And then I stayed with friends. And I came back and forth to Allentown with friends, and then in March I moved down here, March of '94. And I just went back and forth until I sold the house. I mean, anything I needed done I had to pay for up there. They didn't help. Everything I needed done it was I had to go up, cut the grass, trim the hedges. Nobody did it for nothing. It was always about money. MF: So you moved to Allentown in March of, I think you said 1994. Tell me a little bit about the neighborhood that you lived in Allentown. Like, what was it like to move to Allentown in the 1990s? DL: Where we're at now, we're in the same house. We're in the same house, Sandy's house, and neighborhood's fine. They all know, and we get along. Actually, Sandy works at the state hospital forty-one and a half years. And her parents love me. And actually in 2001 I changed my name to Landis. That's Sandy's name. My name was Golda. When I met Liz and Trish I was Golda, my married name. And in 2001 when I changed my name Sandy's parents, her mom especially really loved it, that I became a Landis. And we're still in the same house, twenty-sixyears still in the same house. And the neighbors, I have no problem with them. I watch every -- I know everything that's going on in the neighborhood. I watch. I know new cars and old cars and what belongs here and doesn't belong here. MF: So it sounds like -- did you move in with Sandy, or did you -- when you moved back to Allentown in March, did the two of you moved in together then? DL: Sandy already had this house. Sandy already bought the house. She moved here. She's living here now in June will be twenty-seven years. So she had the house six months before I came down. I taught Sandy how to drive. MF: Tell me that story. How'd you teach her to drive? DL: We got in trouble because I taught her how to drive on state property. But I thought it was safe. That's better than out on the road. But I taught her how to drive, and yeah, but we got in trouble for it. MF: How did you get in trouble? DL: Because of her driving on the state property without a license. MF: So when you moved to Allentown, you move in with Sandy in March, tell me a little bit about what else was happening in your life in 1994 in Allentown. DL: Well, I was trying to sell my property up there. I mean, what I did, I rented it to sell for a year. I went to my very first pride fest. The year before I heard about it. I read about it on TV. But I went to my first pride fest. I called Liz and Trish. And I called Mickey Katz. I don't know if you know Mickey Katz. And I talked to them. And I started volunteering. I went over, and I met Liz and Trish. And I start volunteering. I just thought it was wonderful that they had something like that for gay people. And I volunteered for our pride fest. I went to Harrisburg's for their pride fest. And I went to Philly for their pride fest and worked them. MF: What did it feel like for you to be at that first pride festival in Allentown? DL: It was wonderful. And it, you know, all this and, you know, no problems. It was different back, you know. This was wonderful. They had something for gay people that I never knew they had. Well, the very first gay pride down here was in '93, I think they started it. And then I ended up going being on the pride board for a couple years. But it was wonderful. I just totally enjoyed it. MF: When you volunteered at the different pride festivals, what did you do? Were you setting up booths? What was your volunteering -- DL: Well, in Philadelphia I worked the beer booth because Allentown didn't have a beer booth. And it was funny. The second time we did that -- I did that for a couple years. Sandy went with me, and it was I was doing the beer, and she thought oh, I couldn't handle it. She couldn't. So she did the vodka, the Absolut vodka. And when it first opened she said oh, I can handle this only one. She gave them the first vodka, and she turned around, and she said where the hell did they all come from? But yeah, we did work the booths. We went and helped. We did the same thing in Harrisburg. In Harrisburg I got them to come up and help up here on Pride with us, and then in return I went down and helped with them. And I helped with Philly. MF: Tell me a little bit about the Pride board. What was it like to be on that board? How did the board operate? What was it like to try and set up the pride festival here? DL: Back when I was on it was different than what it is now. It was like you send out, get in touch with vendors, and I was helping with the setting up, marking off the field where the booths would go and all this. And then I would stay overnight and sit overnight so they wouldn't vandalize the vending places until we set up. And then we would work it, work the booths, and do that. And like, back then we didn't charge to get in. And then we -- I was part of the very first parade with them, Hamilton Street into Pride. You didn't realize how expensive it was for the police to block off the streets for to have the parade come down the streets. That was, I think, the only parade that we had. We had music and everything else. It was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Like I said, ours never had alcohol. And I'm not sure if I like the idea of, you know, charging people, but you know, that's only my opinion. I'm not sure what -- then we had the protestors. Then I was a silent witness for the protestors. And we had it down in Harrisburg. Yeah. It was rough at first. MF: Tell me a little bit about, so you say it was rough at first. Tell me why. How many protestors came out? What was happening with the protesting of Pride? DL: The screaming and the yelling, and you know, it was like why couldn't you just let us be instead of protesting? We're not hurting nobody. You know, and God doesn't say nothing about us. You know, it's you love who you love. It doesn't matter what sex you are or what race you are. Love is love. I'm sure, you know, God didn't put us on this earth to say you have to love this person. You have to love that person. The main thing is He don't want us to hate. And to me the protestors was just about hate. MF: Were there a lot of protestors at the first Pride? DL: No, actually that wasn't our first Pride. I guess it was couple years later that the protestors came. And the first ones maybe if they were there they were across the street. You didn't even have any, you know -- it was when that, I guess it's what was his name, Philips or something like that. He started the big mouth stuff. The others one were just, you know, so-so. They were against it, but you didn't have it until he came with his big mouth. MF: What was it like to be a silent witness? Can you tell me what that is and what it felt like to be a silent witness? DL: What it was is you just stood there, and you kept your mouth shut. And that was hard for me. And you just didn't let them get to the people that was walking in to the Pride Fest. You stood there and just stood there quietly, and no matter what they said to you you ignored them. But you blocked them from getting people, you know, getting in the other gay people's face. You were like a bridge between them. I don't know if they still have them or not. MF: Can you tell me -- you said at one point it was that the parade was so expensive because you had to block off the streets. When you were on the board, how were you funding the pride festivals? Did you have donors? How did you raise that money to make that happen for the --DL: Well, you know, when you were sold a spot, depending on the space you bought, you rented it, you paid for it, and that's how we got money. And then we had different, you know, depending on your size of the spot you wanted and where you wanted it costs the money. And that's how you made money. And you know, you sold stuff, but I don't know if we had sponsors or not. We might have. I think we had a lot of donations. Like we put the fliers out. They were donated by different people. And people that -- like a flier, people rented space to put in the, you know, paid for an ad to put in the advertising. MF: So you're working on the Pride board in Allentown. What other LGBT organizations were you involved with in Allentown during this period of the '90s? DL: There was one called Kindred Spirits, [GLOR?], and with Liz and Trish it was a different name back then. It was PA- Gala. And I can't think of the other ones, but it was different, quite a few. I tried to help with every one I could. MF: Yeah, Liz and Trish describe you as, like, a volunteer all over the valley, that you were just sort of like, just helping in any way you can. I'm not familiar with Kindred Spirit. Could you talk a little bit about what that was and how you worked with that organization? DL: It was like a get together. You would meet if you had to talk. Most of them was like, didn't have a partner at the time, but I did. And it was like we meet at -- we used to meet at Unitarian church at Center City in Bethlehem at Center Street and talk, say, about like -- it was like socializing gathering to talk about your feelings and what happened and all this. And then we would leave there for about an hour or so, and then we would go to Diamonz or something before the charge, get in. We would go there and just drink, dance, shoot pool. We would meet every -- I think it was a Friday. I believe it was a Friday. And the other, GLOR was male and females. Kindred Spirit was mostly all female. GLOR was a mixture. It was, I think it cost you like $10 a year to join. And it was like different people had something at their house every weekend. Somebody else had something or every month somebody would have something. And it was like you get together, potlucks, and stuff like that. And it was like maybe go hiking. They get together to go hiking or down to Longwood Gardens, who wanted to go, or go golfing or something like that but in a group. And I don't know if it's still going on or not, but it sort of phased out after a few years. I guess we all got older. I know at first they used to think I made Sandy up because she was always working. But she worked second shift at the state hospital, you know. But it was funny. So we had a event at our house, and then at first they said I paid her, somebody to do it until at last a couple came later, stayed later, and then they realized I had to ask her where stuff was because she knew and I didn't know. But yeah, it was funny. MF: Were you involved with any religious organizations during this time period like MCCLV? DL: Yes. MF: Tell me about -- DL: I belonged to [inaudible]. MF: Tell me about your involvement with MCCLV. DL: I went there. I was at a birthday party, and this friend of mine was there, and she was leaving to go to church. It was at Sunday night at 6:00 or for first six. And I said can I come with you? She said sure. And I went. They were in -- sharing a church, Unitarian church in Bethlehem. And I enjoyed it. And that's the first I went to church down here with MCC. I was a member. I belonged there 17 years. I was on the board. I was on the property board for six years. And I helped move with the church and all of that. There's where I fell. We moved from Ford Street. Was it Ford Street? From Merchant Square. We were at Merchant Square on Vultee Street. We moved from there to Ford Street in Allentown. And I was working at the church, and I fell 15 feet and broke my leg. But yeah, I belonged to MCC for 17 years. And now I belong to St. Mark's, Lutheran church. MF: And when you first started going to MCCLV, could you describe how it felt to be a part of a church community that's primarily LGBT? DL: I thought it was wonderful. It was really, really nice. I thought it was great. And lot of the people that I knew from Kindred Spirits and that went there. But yeah, I was on their board for six boards. I was property chair for six years. I really enjoyed MCC. But then, you know, time comes where you move on. MF: Can you describe why you decided to move on and a little bit about that kind of religious journey to a different church? DL: Oh, how can I say it nicely? I just felt maybe different. I felt differently about things that the church -- I just felt I know who I am. I know who I was since I'm 19 years old. And it's not all about just the gays. There's other people, just because they're not gay, that don't mean that you can't be friends with. And it's just time to move on. I just felt it wasn't the same as I was first in love with the church. Things, personalities changed. People changed. And speaking, I just felt when I -- you know, you ask me a question, I'm going to speak my mind. And you don't like it, and friendships change. I'm trying to be very polite and not say nothing but being honest. And it felt time for a change. MF: So how did you find your new church? And what has that experience been like for you? DL: Well, friends of ours that went to MCC, she was a secretary at St. Mark's. And they got tickets for Elvis impersonator, and they know I liked Elvis. And she called me up and said come and meet them. You know, come. So we went there, and there was people there that Sandy worked with at the hospital and kept saying join, come join this called Sharing Life. You'll love it. So we ran into -- so we did. Sandy went, and I went in November. So we seen the Elvis impersonator. So we went to the Sharing Life, and what that is is it's people from the church that have this deal with mentally ill. And the nurses and all that from the state hospital where Sandy worked started this. And what it is is different patients from the -- they don't call them patients now. They're clients or started this where once a month the beginning of the month they had crafts. So many people come for crafts. On the third Wednesday of the month they come, we give them something to eat, and we have bingo or a dance or something like that. And we enjoyed that. And the people was so accepting of Sandy and I being gay that they were so wonderful. And I said to Sandy, eh. This was in November, and I said that February was our anniversary. I said let's go to church. I'd like to see this church. Because the church was beautiful. And we went in, and the people were so accepting. It was like -- it was great. And I remember the sermon. The pastor said we're here for the people, not for the church. And I said, I like that. So then we went a couple times, and then we missed for two weeks because we went on vacation. And when we came back everybody said oh my God, you're here. You're here. We thought you didn't like us and that you weren't coming back. So we are now members of the church. I'm on the church counsel. I love the church, and I love their outreach. We do a pantry, open-door pantry. Twice a month we give people food that's in our zip code because there's so many we can't do it all. Because ours is a food pantry where they pick what they want except for now with this virus going on they tell us what they want and we fill the bag. Because we give them meat, sometimes eggs, milk, cheese. So it's not like where we fill a bag and just hand it to them. They pick what they want. I just love their outreaches, and I love the church and the people. It's the people. They love you for who you are. MF: You really have so many stories about volunteering or being on leadership, both in LGBT organizations but in your church organizations both at MCCLV and now with your Lutheran congregation. Could you tell me a little bit about why volunteering and taking on leadership roles in community organizations has been important in your life? DL: Well actually, they asked me to become one of the leaders. They asked me. I was just a member over a year, and they called and asked me to be on their board. And I was honored. I said I'm not even a member only a little over a year and you're asking me to be on your board. I was honored that they asked, you know. So that's how it is. They asked me. And I'm honored. And I told them right from the beginning my mouth sometimes got me in trouble. And they were happy. Because I speak my mind, and that's where it got me in trouble at MCC. You ask me a question and I'm going to answer it, and if I feel something's wrong I'm going to speak my mind, and that's what happened. MF: I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about just kind of to turn back to you and Sandy, did you have a commitment ceremony or, you know, something prior to the passage of marriage equality? DL: Yes, we had a holy union back in 1998 at the Unitarian church where we had that. My family from Delaware all came. They all love Sandy. And it's like you can't accept Sandy. And before my biological mother died we mend the fences, and, you know, I said this is my partner, and if you can't accept her you're history. You're not as important to me as she is. And that's how it is. They can't accept Sandy then we're history. And in 2001 we had, in Connecticut, we had a civil union. We can't get legally married in Pennsylvania because I would lose my benefits. That's why we -- not legally married in Pennsylvania or we would be because I'm a fixed, very low. Like, I only get $1,000 to live on. And my medicine, because I have COPD, two of my inhalers are over $1,000. MF: Can you describe the civil union ceremony for me? What was that like? DL: Well, our holy union at the Unitarian, both Sandy's sons walked her down the aisle. And the pastor, I forget her name, but we have her pictures and everything, she married us. But it was great seeing her walking down the aisle with both her sons there. And her one son calls me Mom Number Two. But he's more laid back. The older son is -- he lived in California, so you can tell how laid back he is compared to the other son, but we get along good. MF: So now in your seventies, how would you describe your relationship with Sandy now that you've been together for so many years and you're in your seventies, you're kind of in this, like, really beautiful part of your relationship because you've been together so long. Describe that for me. DL: I still love her with all my heart. And we talk, which we never did in the beginning back in the '60s. We didn't talk. We talk. We're honest with one another. And like, she'll say how are -- like if I'm not feeling good I'll say I'm good. She'll say honest? And if I'm not feeling -- I won't say honest unless I mean it. But we talk. We don't just do something. No matter what it is we talk about, give each other's opinion on everything. We trust one another. We don't hang in bars. We're home, basically home bodies. We like to travel. But with this going on we're not planning no vacations. We already canceled our vacations for this year. But next year we're planning to drive to Minnesota to see her oldest son Mark. Michael lives down in Phoenixville, but with this going on we don't go to see him either. But it's still wonderful. We talk. We don't leave the house without kissing each other goodbye and saying we love each other. We never go to bed without kissing and saying goodnight and love each other. We never do that. And it's great. We laugh. We watch TV. We read. Right now I'm working on a puzzle, and she'll help me pick out pieces. But it's wonderful because we might disagree. We still say thank you, please. We treat each other with respect. MF: Well, we're getting close to the end of the interview. So I want to ask just maybe one or two more questions. In your seventies, as you look back on your experiences and really the kind of LGBT movements from the '69 and Stonewall, you know, through the present, how do you think things have changed for LGBT people? What have you sort of witnessed across your life? DL: Well, I don't remember the movie, but they showed a movie at NCCC one time. And I was there helping one of the groups out. And the younger people that was younger than me were in there that didn't come out as early as I came out. And when they came out, and they kept thanking me. And it's like, for what, you know? I don't consider myself a hero or warrior or nothing else. I'm just me, plain old me. And it's a lot different. Now I see people walking hand in hand, you know, couples, and I think wow, what a difference, what a difference. They didn't realize what it was like to go to a bar after 2:00 in the morning to be with yourself and friends. And I got a nickname called Bobbie because I was, like I said, I was butchy, and this drag queen thought I was a guy. And I told him no. He said from now on you're Bobbie to me. And so I did a couple drag shows at the church, and I went by Bobbie. But it's so different. And they don't realize how lucky they are that they can walk down the street hand in hand and not get bashed or beat up or anything because a lot of that was going on. We fought for a lot of this. I remember so many years standing on Hamilton Street fighting for gay marriage in the freezing cold. But most of the people, I can only say I think only twice I ever had something thrown at me during that time. Most of the people past and honked their horns. But there was other places where there was bashing, like with Mathew Shepard and a couple others. You know, the movement back then was very different. You had to be really close and, you know, different now. They're lucky. Things has changed, and they're lucky to have it changed. Some people lost their jobs. Some people lost their homes. Some families put them out. My family stuck by me. Sandy's family stuck by her. But we were lucky. But some wasn't as lucky. MF: Have we missed anything today in this interview that you really wanted to share today in our conversation? Is there something that you'd like to share that we haven't addressed yet? DL: I would just say not to be ashamed of who you are or who you love. Love is love, no matter what color, what race, or who it is. Love is love. And don't be ashamed of who you love. And don't hide who you love. MF: Thank you so much, DJ. It's just been such a pleasure talking with you today. DL: You're quite welcome. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:36:19 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource D.J. Landis, June 12, 2020 Description An account of the resource DJ Landis discusses early childhood and young adulthood in Shamokin, PA, her thoughts about being adopted, and her family life. DJ addresses a number of gay bars in small towns and cities as well as LGBT social scene and butch/femme identities. The interview also addresses her work life at Pace Arrow, the challenges facing LGBT couples prior to marriage equality, and two serious relationships in her life. In reference to LGBT organizations, DJ discusses Pride of the Lehigh Valley, GLORA, Kindred Spirits, and MCCLV. DJ ends the interview with a discussion of her marriage to Sandy at a Unitarian Church. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-05 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-06-12 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/73e989999007b94d1372c4013af5aed3.png 7c33c07be0c05cc1996b27411d1bee3f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Don Kohn OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-09.xml Interview Keyword This field adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the “keywords” field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. PFLAG OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 May 11, 2020 Don Kohn, May 11, 2020 LGBT-09 01:37:24 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg PFLAG GLAAD MCCLV Don Kohn Mary Foltz video/mp4 KohnDon_20200511_Final_video.mp4 1.0:|19(6)|52(8)|83(10)|104(3)|123(9)|140(7)|155(2)|170(16)|189(10)|210(9)|225(3)|242(14)|261(2)|278(7)|295(17)|310(10)|333(14)|350(11)|371(2)|390(4)|411(4)|432(5)|453(7)|472(2)|489(8)|510(2)|529(15)|552(10)|569(14)|588(11)|609(4)|628(6)|647(11)|664(13)|685(10)|706(6)|725(17)|744(10)|765(2)|782(13)|803(8)|820(17)|839(9)|860(11)|881(7)|900(3)|921(3)|942(9)|963(7)|982(3)|999(7)|1018(10)|1039(10)|1058(15)|1077(12)|1096(5)|1113(7)|1132(7)|1151(16)|1168(15)|1185(13)|1208(3)|1227(9)|1252(3)|1271(8)|1286(5)|1305(9)|1322(6)|1343(13)|1362(6)|1381(13)|1400(9)|1419(9)|1442(3)|1459(12)|1476(11)|1493(5)|1512(8)|1531(13)|1548(8)|1571(3)|1588(12)|1609(8)|1626(10)|1647(8)|1664(17)|1683(15)|1698(15)|1717(3)|1734(7)|1757(15)|1776(2)|1797(3)|1828(2)|1861(4)|1888(5)|1921(2)|1930(17) 0 YouTube video &lt ; iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XrrqqvV0Eco?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"&gt ; &lt ; /iframe&gt ; 8 Interview Introduction MARY FOLTZ: So my name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Don Kohn to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are meeting on May 11th, 2020, and we’re conducting this interview via Zoom. So Don, thank you so much for your willingness to speak to me today. I’m just so thrilled that you’re willing to share your story. And to start, before we jump into the interview, would you be willing to state your full name and spell it for me?&#13 ; 0 169 Early Years / Family MF: Oh sure, I’d be happy to. Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: I was raised in Omaha, Nebraska. I had two brothers, a mother and father. I left high school and came out to Lehigh University, where I graduated, and later on raised a daughter -- not a whole family, just that. Melinda was raised in New Jersey, went to Trenton State, until the end of our junior year, where we got married, and she transferred to Moravian. Okay. 0 403 Developed Understanding of Diversity MF: When did you develop your understanding of embracing diversity?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: I don’t know. I went -- my high school was very diverse. When I entered into the realm of GLBT people, and that I know I went back and questioned, what did I think, and how did I treat people? Gee, was that person that I knew -- I had a friend at work, and was he gay? And did I greet him right? It evolved. It evolved from a belief probably that people were all the same. As far as GLBT people, I probably didn’t know much about it. Again, it evolved. So -- that’s right, there was someone in my adult life before we had our daughter, we had a friend who had a child. And the child’s nanny was a gay man. 0 682 Moving to the Lehigh Valley / Schooling / Job MF: Well, I will be curious about, if we move on a little bit, what it was like for you to move to the Lehigh Valley and to attend Lehigh University. What was that move like for you?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Again, it’s so long ago. I can remember I was -- on the football team, I was one of the helpers, I don’t think (inaudible) it called. Standing in the middle of the field, at that time Lehigh’s Goodman Field was nothing except one building and a practice field. There was nothing else out there (inaudible) and saying, how did I get this far away from home? I don’t know. I guess I never looked back that much. I was back two summers, and that was it. Again, the world here is different, and the people were more -- I don’t know. I can’t remember back that far to give you a good answer. 0 1307 Daughter Coming Out / Joining PFLAG MF: So I know that one of the impetus for joining PFLAG was your daughter. So could you describe a little bit about how she came out to you, and how you felt about the coming out process?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: This is interesting, because if Melinda was here, you’d get two different answers. Sally had a best friend, who they did everything together, whatever. And they were in a play together, where her friend and her brother had the leads, and Sally had a supporting role. And I was backstage afterwards. GLAAD ; Liz Bradbury ; PFLAG ; Trish Sullivan 0 2075 How PFLAG Helps Families MF: Maybe we could talk a little bit about, what kinds of activities did PFLAG organize for families? And what kinds of events were you organizing in the early years of your presidency?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Let me say this, I think it’s important to note, right now in the Lehigh Valley, there’s a lot of acceptance. We really are out of business, PFLAG is, because -- you could tell in the early days, we get a phone call -- Melinda and I had the help line. That was another thing we did when this woman transitioned out and went to California. While I wasn’t president, we took on the help line. And we just stopped that last year. Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center ; MCCLV ; PFLAG 0 2745 PFLAG's Strategies for Parents / Advocacy &#13 ; MF: Well, I’m curious, you described -- you said, “We got them through it.” And I’m wondering if you could describe how. What strategies did PFLAG use to help parents that were really struggling to accept their children? How did you help people work through their fears?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Melinda was better at that than I am. Although when she was still working and I was here consulting, I’d get the phone calls, or at the meetings. And I think the meetings -- the phone calls, it was just talking through it, and inviting them to the meeting. Reassuring them that they didn’t do anything wrong. Reassuring that their child was still the same person they knew before. PFLAG 0 3340 PFLAG's Involvement w/ Freedom to Marry MF: Well, so I’m wondering if maybe -- you’ve mentioned the Freedom to Marry events a few times. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about PFLAG’s work on that particular political issue. How was PFLAG involved with the Freedom to Marry movement?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Well, PFLAG nationally was certainly involved. Locally, again, we, as all other organizations in the area, supported that. Again, we went to the Freedom to Marry evening event. It wasn’t necessarily PFLAG support, but on the Friday before the event, there was a march on the Lehigh County Courthouse, where people went in to try to get marriage licenses, unsuccessfully. They took their money, though. Anti-Discrimination Law ; Freedom to Marry ; The Morning Call 0 3742 How LGBT Organizations Work Together in the Lehigh Valley MF: Well, so I have two different sort of ideas for moving forward. But I want to ask the sort of larger question. Looking back on all of your work in PFLAG, how do you think PFLAG as an organization has impacted the Lehigh Valley?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Let me just say, not everything was PFLAG, okay? You know, my support of Renaissance wasn’t necessarily PFLAG, some of it was personal. I’m looking at something else we have in front of us. When MCC had their Christmas party and they needed a Santa Claus, guess who volunteered? You know, was that PFLAG? No. MCCLV ; PFLAG 0 4410 How LGBT Organizations Changed the Lehigh Valley MF: Well, we’re getting towards the end of our ninety minutes, and I have two questions that I’m thinking of. One is one I asked earlier, but I didn’t ask it well. This is sort of a historical question. What do you think PFLAG -- but then the other organizations, MCCLV, Lehigh Valley, Renaissance -- what kind of impact do you feel those organizations have made on the Lehigh Valley in their early years, when we’re thinking historically about your early work in PFLAG? How did those organizations together change the Lehigh Valley?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Well, like I said, the Lehigh Valley over the twenty years has changed from not as accepting to a pretty accepting community. 0 4706 PFLAG's Attendance Decreasing MF: Okay. I want to return to something that you talked about sort of briefly before. But you talk about a sort of change in the need for PFLAG, that the shift in Lehigh Valley has decreased the membership and attendance at meetings for PFLAG. I’m wondering if you could reflect a little bit on that transition. From a really active organization to our current sort of moment, why do you think PFLAG’s attendance sort of declined and the interest in the organization kind of declined a bit?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Well, there obviously -- again, there’s much more acceptance today than there was then. Why? I don’t know. You know, I’m an engineer, I don’t know why. 0 4967 Personal Reflection on PFLAG MF: How has being involved in PFLAG mattered to you personally, or mattered to you as a father and as a spouse? How have you personally been impacted by your years of work in multiple organizations, you know, centrally with PFLAG?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: I mean, my daughter thinks we’re more gay than she is, because we’re more involved. Yeah. Let me put it this way. No offense to the Jewish religion or Jewish people, but we were involved with the synagogue for many years -- not a lot, we started late, when my daughter was Sunday school age. 0 MovingImage Don Kohn talks about his involvement with the Eastern PA chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). MARY FOLTZ:So my name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Don Kohn to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are meeting on May 11th, 2020, and we're conducting this interview via Zoom. So Don, thank you so much for your willingness to speak to me today. I'm just so thrilled that you're willing to share your story. And to start, before we jump into the interview, would you be willing to state your full name and spell it for me? DON KOHN:Full name, Donald Jerry Kohn, K-O-H-N. I think Donald and Jerry don't need to be spelled, but Kohn, K-O-H-N. MF:Thank you. Could you please share your birth date? DK:June 4th, 1947. MF:And we had a phone conversation about consent for this interview, but I'll just ask you a few questions here now for verbal consent. Do you consent to this interview today? DK:Yes. MF:Do you consent to this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? DK:Yes. MF:Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, and other formats that might appear in the future? DK:Yes. MF:And do you understand that you'll have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview and identify parts that you'd want to delete or withdraw from the project? DK:Yes. MF:Wonderful. Okay. Now let's move into the interview part. Today I want to start with a question about your childhood. Would you tell me about your early years -- DK:I just want to add something that we discussed earlier. MF:Go ahead. DK:My wife and I did most of -- my wife, Melinda, did most of this together. Most of the stories I tell of that are for both of us, but I did want to give a little background and answer some of your questions and some of the discussion from her point of view also. Okay? MF:Wonderful. I'll be happy to hear about the work that you've done together. DK:You wanted to know her -- starting with my -- ask your question again. MF:Oh sure, I'd be happy to. Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life? DK:I was raised in Omaha, Nebraska. I had two brothers, a mother and father. I left high school and came out to Lehigh University, where I graduated, and later on raised a daughter -- not a whole family, just that. Melinda was raised in New Jersey, went to Trenton State, until the end of our junior year, where we got married, and she transferred to Moravian. Okay. MF:What was it like to grow up in Omaha, Nebraska? DK:You know, I don't know that it was any different. I mean, as a youth, you just know what's around you. You don't know there's a difference between Nebraska, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. You don't know that. In high school, you probably still don't know it. When I moved from, at the advice of my older brothers, and came out East, I realized, yes, there's a big difference. Midwestern towns, particularly Omaha at the time, was a one-horse town. There were only Italian or steak houses for restaurants. There wasn't a lot of cultures. There wasn't a lot of interests like there is here. There's no shore, there's no Poconos. You know, it's a different world. It's changed somewhat, I'm sure, in the fifty-some years. But at that time, it was different. MF:Could you talk a little bit about your family and the family dynamic? What was it like growing up in your family? DK:My older brothers were much older. They always treated me as the little brother. My parents were -- my dad was very forceful. Not abusive, but forceful. And I have to look back and probably think that my father was not accepting of diversity, we'll say it that nice way. Okay? MF:I have a question about that, but when you say not accepting of diversity, what, in particular, are you thinking about? Was he sort of like a small-town guy, sort of concerned about outsiders in your community? DK:I'm not sure I can even categorize it. It's just the way he spoke, the way he commented about different people, the way people's color, people of different nationalities, et cetera, over the years. And some of that may have been tainted, or an impression I got later on when I was older and recognized and my own feelings about diversity versus theirs, were different from theirs. He wasn't an overt racist person, it's just the kind of person that you run into who is quiet, but you can tell sometimes they're not appreciating other people. MF:When did you develop your understanding of embracing diversity? DK:I don't know. I went -- my high school was very diverse. When I entered into the realm of GLBT people, and that I know I went back and questioned, what did I think, and how did I treat people? Gee, was that person that I knew -- I had a friend at work, and was he gay? And did I greet him right? It evolved. It evolved from a belief probably that people were all the same. As far as GLBT people, I probably didn't know much about it. Again, it evolved. So -- that's right, there was someone in my adult life before we had our daughter, we had a friend who had a child. And the child's nanny was a gay man. And I guess at that point, I made a decision to treat that person as a person. I won't say norm, but not be concerned with his sexual orientation. Like I said, that all evolved. So the best way to describe my journey, if you call it a journey, is my acceptance of diversity has gotten far beyond just people of color, skin colors or religion, but just in the general accepting of people who are different, and who have different concepts of what I think of, or what I was taught, or what I grew up as. By the way, I think my father was very, this is how he thinks, and therefore, the world around him should think the same way, okay? So maybe that's coming back. So it's a journey. And I'll also say this ; if -- my wife was one of the early people who work in industry, and they did not like to be called, "Girl." My dad's attitude was, "I'm going to call them 'girl,' it doesn't bother me." My attitude's always been, if I put my foot in my mouth and say the wrong thing and someone corrects me, and there was someone who was very good at correcting me on those issues with GLBT people, then the difference is not that I said it in the first place, but that I ever say it again. That I learn from it. So yeah, it's a journey, and I won't say that. I'm not still on it. I still wonder whether, sometimes thoughts creep up from the old days, that I'm, gee, that's wrong, I shouldn't think that. It's repressed. So, yeah, okay. MF:You describe this kind of evolution of your thinking about diversity. I'm wondering, did that occur in part with your move East and out to Lehigh University? DK:I don't know. You know, it's a long time ago. Like I said, my high school was very diverse, from both skin color, religion, ethnic background, financial. We had some very poor people, and we had some very wealthy people at the school. I guess I don't know if it ever started, like I said, so I can't put a thing and say, this is the day that somebody hit me over the head and said, "Diversity's good." All right? Maybe it was in something inherent in me that I just definitely don't see, striking differences in people, okay? Maybe it's a want to -- like the Freedom to Marry, to say, gee, that's wrong thinking. I know I should change it. I don't know. I don't know. MF:Well, I will be curious about, if we move on a little bit, what it was like for you to move to the Lehigh Valley and to attend Lehigh University. What was that move like for you? DK:Again, it's so long ago. I can remember I was -- on the football team, I was one of the helpers, I don't think (inaudible) it called. Standing in the middle of the field, at that time Lehigh's Goodman Field was nothing except one building and a practice field. There was nothing else out there (inaudible) and saying, how did I get this far away from home? I don't know. I guess I never looked back that much. I was back two summers, and that was it. Again, the world here is different, and the people were more -- I don't know. I can't remember back that far to give you a good answer. MF:Describe for me a little bit about your course of study at Lehigh, and the early years of your career here in The Valley. DK:I graduated in chemical engineering. My grades started bad, worked progressively up to the senior year. I didn't do all that bad at the end. I went to work for an insurance company as a fire protection engineer, did that for about three years, and then I went to work for Pennsylvania Power and Light, in the design area of fire protection, office buildings, power plants. And then about '95, I went on private consulting. I go with my wife, she graduated from Muhlenberg with a degree in mathematics. Went to work for -- Burroughs, we were down in Philadelphia, she went to work for the Burroughs Company, in computers. When I moved up here, she went to work for Bell Labs and became one of their computer experts, had supervised people. And the last ten years -- she retired many years ago -- last few years ago, she was an omnibus person, taking care of people's problems. So that helped with our diversity concept also. MF:Well, since you talked a little bit about Melinda, how did the two of you meet? DK:Oh, yes. Remember, because you said you went to Lehigh -- Lehigh was all men back in the sixties. So we had a mixer one day at the Jewish Community Center/Synagogue, which was off the corner of the campus, which is now a campus-owned building, all right. Packer Avenue and the street that goes up towards the alumni, the main street that comes from town -- it's right there. Okay. So interestingly enough, I saw this gal I wanted to ask to dance. I walked up to her, and two seconds before I got to her, somebody else took her away. (laughs) And who was behind her, but Melinda. And it progressed from there. MF:What did you like about Melinda in the first years that you were dating? DK:Same thing I still do, how about that? It's been fifty-two years, at the end of the month. I'd have several steady girlfriends, and, you know, every time each one of them had a quality I liked, but obviously didn't have all the qualities I liked, Melinda seemed to have all the qualities I liked. As far as her point of view, I was a tall Jewish boy. (laughs) Melinda's tall. Okay. MF:Do you want to describe what some of those qualities were? DK:No, just let's go on. MF:Okay. DK:You know, it's so ingrained in me, I'm not sure I could pick them out anymore. You know, I guess many couples split apart and then divorce, we've gotten sort of together. And there are some things she's better at than I am, things I'm better at than she is. Basically, yeah, I just -- there's too -- you know, we only have a certain amount of time. You don't want me to start listing all of her good qualities. We won't get on to the other things. Okay? MF:That makes sense. She sounds wonderful. Why don't we talk a little bit about -- DK:That was the one or two prejudices that I do have, and that's (inaudible). MF:Why don't we talk a little bit about the early years of your marriage, because I know we'll be working up to your work with PFLAG. But what were the early years of your marriage like working and living in the Lehigh Valley? DK:Well, first of all, we spent three and a half years in Philadelphia. Then we came to Lehigh Valley, and I guess it was work. We had a house, and did things around the house, and remodeled a house or two. It's nothing out of the ordinary, nothing different, yeah. Centered around work. MF:Talk to me a little bit about building your family. DK:I guess we made a decision, as many people do right now, saying, do we really want to bring a kid into this world, with all the things going on? We both had our careers, we were both working, we were both happy. And whatever, it's hard to go back -- you're asking me to go back so far in time. But we finally decided that when one of us wanted a child, we would have one, and we did. So about nine years after we were married, we had a baby. And that was Sally. I'm sorry if you hear the geese in the background. I live in the country. MF:That's fine. The geese aren't bothering the sound at all. DK:Good. MF:Describe for me what it was like your first years as a father for Sally. DK:It's interesting. Melinda had a friend who had six kids. And we went through a lot of -- because Melinda worked -- we went through a lot of childcare concepts. And I think when we -- we had a full-time person taking care of her. And when the person couldn't make it, we defaulted to taking her over to this other woman, okay? And she only liked babies, although she had six kids. She loved taking care of babies. And she ultimately had to -- and so I worried that I would only like Sally as a baby. I also worried that having a full-time housekeeper, I'd miss the important things. Well, let me say other than the teenage years, I enjoyed all the years. For things like, you know, learning to crawl ; she was crawling -- or standing up, that's right. I was laying on the floor, and she came to me, crawled over to me, and started to crawl over the top of me, and then stood up. So I got to see her stand up first. We had a family Thanksgiving, I think it was, and she was crawling around from family member to family member, when she stood up and walked across the room. And we all said, "Did you just do that?" So it was an exciting time. While both Melinda and I worked, we came to not work a lot of overtime, so that we were home with Sally. And we did a lot of things on the weekends that you do with kids, and stuff like that. So it was an enjoyable time. MF:What was Sally like as a child? DK:A lot of fun. Like I said, teenagers -- I don't even know if I want to talk about those. And go on the record. But as a child, she was a lot of fun. She was cute, you know, I can remember her -- try to take a picture of her, you know, she had to walk up and see the camera, things like that. And probably around -- now, understand Melinda was into computers, and that was her business. So we got the personal computer very early. So Sally really grew up on computers. When she was in high school, she was teaching the teachers about computers, that same thing, so-- MF:So I know that one of the impetus for joining PFLAG was your daughter. So could you describe a little bit about how she came out to you, and how you felt about the coming out process? DK:This is interesting, because if Melinda was here, you'd get two different answers. Sally had a best friend, who they did everything together, whatever. And they were in a play together, where her friend and her brother had the leads, and Sally had a supporting role. And I was backstage afterwards. And it was something about the way that she looked at this partner -- and I want to leave the partner's name out, because I'm not sure where her parents -- they're -- that was Sally's first partner. And up to the time they split, her parents weren't supportive, very supportive. So I won't mention names. I said, there must be something more to this. Well, they were graduating high school, and as a graduation present, we were going to send them to New York to see a play. The other gal's parents asked a question, and they thought it wouldn't be a problem, and they told them. And the other parents slammed down and said, "You're not going anywhere without a chaperone," da da da da da da, okay. Now here's where the difference comes. I believe she waited until she got home. Melinda thinks she called on her cell phone and told us, thinking we wouldn't have a problem, and we didn't. Melinda thought she had a target on her back, okay, and was very concerned from that standpoint. And now here comes Liz and Trish, and PFLAG, somewhere in there, it might have been a year afterwards. But I accepted my daughter fully, and my wife accepted her fully. But here comes the education part of it is -- what did I accept? Technically I knew what a lesbian was, but I didn't know a lot of the details. I didn't know -- it was easy for me to -- and speaking to an English teacher here -- you -- understand I'm an engineer, my ability to talk and communicate isn't as good, and certainly not as good as my daughter's is today. I needed to know what to say and what not to say, and have some education. And that's -- PFLAG's one of the places I got that. So yeah, we were fine with her and that. And frankly, through her college years, dating and interfacing with her first partner, we got to see that budding romance. You know, as a parent, what do you want from your child? You want to see -- when you give up on the fact that you're not going to have a husband and wife, and two point three kids and a picket fence and two dogs, you really want to see that your daughter has someone who wants to take care of her and loves her. We got to watch that. We got to see that happen, because we spent several times with both of them. They would spend a lot of times on breaks at our house, okay, so we got to see all that. So it was, like I said, yeah. So we accepted her. It wasn't a big, traumatic event for our family. MF:Your daughter comes out, your family's very accepting. But you just described, you wanted education. You wanted to know what to say, when to say it. Could you describe how you found PFLAG, or how you found Liz and Trish? DK:Well, let's see, I don't know. Why I did it, I can tell you. Besides the education, Sally was a teenager, she was about eighteen at the time. And as I either knew then instinctively, or wanted to know -- I clearly know now, because that's how I counsel parents at PFLAG -- if your teenager comes out to you and you say, "Okay, that's fine," and walk away, they think you don't accept them. So you've got to do a little more than just say, "It's okay," and walk away. If you start asking too many questions to a teenager, then you're prying, and they don't like that, either. So what do you do? In our case, joining PFLAG sent my daughter a very clear message that we were accepting and willing to learn more and do something. I might add in here, a couple of things happened when she was in college. First year, which I think was a year before we actually got really involved with PFLAG, mainly because of Sally's partner, who was local, and didn't want it to be known and that. So we were sort of asked to be in the closet for a year, okay? Sally, during college, interned first for the GLAAD, the Gay, Lesbian -- no, GLAAD isn't -- I'm starting to use a different acronym. And so we went down for -- instead of parents' weekend, we went down the weekend before. You said you, when we previously talked, that you were down there then. We had the AIDS quilt in the mall. Sally ran a booth at GLAAD, at the AIDS quilt. Then afterwards, at night we went to a party, with Sally, again, being the intern, had to be at the door to greet everybody. But talking about diversity, and I always tell people, sometimes us white males who are in the majority, ought to find ourselves in the minority sometimes, see how it feels. Here we were at a party, there may have been one other heterosexual couple. You know, I had to be careful. I couldn't tell any of my jokes, which I was just beginning to realize I couldn't, you know? We had dinner afterwards, and I found it very interesting, some of the directors Sally was -- I found this gal was talking about going out to bars and finding girls. I wasn't that far out of (inaudible), I'm thinking, boy, we have some things in common, okay? But that was another event that I like to say comes -- Sally also interned for the National Gay-Lesbian Task Force, both in Washington, D.C., and New York, and became, and to this day, is still friends with some of the leaders (inaudible). In fact, I guess she was still in college when we went to the National Gay-Lesbian Task Force Greeting Change Conference, and we paid for her partner to also go, so all four of us were there. I might point out that somewhere in here, Sally's attitude was, she's got a couple of terrible parents, teenagers going up to where we are today, "I got a couple of terrible parents, what the heck are they all about?" It's, like, okay. At the conference, I kept telling her -- because Sally knew, she was an intern, she knew people, people knew her. And I referred people to her as, "I'm Sally's dad." "Hey dad, you're embarrassing me." "Well, that's my job. I'm a father. I'm supposed to embarrass you." Where, somewhere in the middle of this, people kept coming up to Sally and saying, "Your parents are fantastic! I wish my parents would have come to this. I wish my parents cared enough." Sally started to realize that maybe we weren't so bad, okay? So that PFLAG, all this stuff was our way of letting our daughter know, it's okay. (inaudible), it's okay if you're gay, you know. And being supportive, being supportive of her and her partner. And PFLAG just sort of fell into that. That again, the educa-- I'm not sure if we did it for the education, or we did it because the typical parents that want to go to PFLAG to learn more about it, I don't remember that transition. I do know that once we got, we got hooked. And of course, Liz and Trish were regulars at the meetings. MF:Tell me a little bit about why you got hooked. What was so moving about being a part of PFLAG for you? DK:Well, I'm not quite even sure. But that I remember doing it, I just don't remember the whys. We joined PFLAG, and at the times -- and I can't remember the names, I probably can look them up, but there were three families -- yeah, three families, we'd say, that started the local PFLAG chapter ; one of them had already gotten older and tired and stepped away, maybe they went to Florida. One remained -- Helen Early remained for a long time, even after we were there. Helen, she just passed away last year, I think. Then there was a woman in there, I can't remember, but she was the president at the time, and her husband was dying of cancer. She knew that when he did pass, she would be moving to California to be with her kids, okay? So it was sort of, like, "gee, Don, you seem like a right person. Would you like to be president?" Okay, and that was, like, a year or two. And that was, like, you know, I'm one who likes to get involved with an organization, but learn a little bit about it before I start getting heavily involved. So there was a woman called Elsa [Stohl?], who worked at Bell Labs, who was, again, an ally. Very diversity-oriented. They had a diversity group at Bell Labs, and she was head of it, as I remember. As it was explained to me, Elsa likes to get into a group, give it energy, and then move on. Okay, get it setting right, get it going well. So she stepped in to be president. But she wasn't always available. She was traveling enough that it defaulted to me. And so Melinda was, of course, we were there always together and doing things. And it just defaulted to, gee, I might as well step in to be president, because Elsa's going to move on, and Elsa's doing it all anyhow. Again, those were the early -- I don't remember that part of it as much as I remember the different events and things that we did, and the people and things like that. MF:Maybe we could talk a little bit about, what kinds of activities did PFLAG organize for families? And what kinds of events were you organizing in the early years of your presidency? DK:Let me say this, I think it's important to note, right now in the Lehigh Valley, there's a lot of acceptance. We really are out of business, PFLAG is, because -- you could tell in the early days, we get a phone call -- Melinda and I had the help line. That was another thing we did when this woman transitioned out and went to California. While I wasn't president, we took on the help line. And we just stopped that last year. In the early days, we'd pick up the phone and hear (gasps) -- and then we knew that was a parent that was in trouble, you know? As one of my friends said, because I used her as an example in meetings, you know, with everybody -- I can't -- I don't know what to do. I said, "Go turn to so-and-so, look what she did. What was your first reaction?" "I was going to jump off a cliff." Okay? Now she's a person who's one of our active members, or was. Today, in the last few years, we've got nobody coming to our meetings. If we did get someone coming to the meetings or calling us, it was, "How do I help my child? My child's being abused at school. I want to go stick up for his rights," things like that. So the whole complexion change, that's number one. Number two, right now we have the Bradbury-Sullivan Community Center. There are a zillion different programs. We have GSAs, we have all sorts of activities. Back twenty years ago, we had PFLAG, we had MCC Church, and that was just about it. Liz and Trish had a newsletter, had some friends, had some things, but there was no real organization of activities. So if you, for instance, needed to come out and you needed to get to your parents, you might come to PFLAG. If you were a forty-year-old who had been married and then realized your sexual orientation, where do you come for information? PFLAG. So it was a whole different situation back then. So what did we do? First of all, we had monthly meetings. You know, they were held at the same place. They did switch around different places, but generally you knew where they were, so you could come. They were confidential. You could call us -- you could come and talk and meet with people who had been there before and learn, that's why Liz and Trish came. Somewhere in there, really in the early days, because we went to one of the first PRIDE meetings, back in those days, it was GLBT, right? Well, the gays knew who they were. The lesbians knew who they were. There was some question about what a bi was, okay. Transgender -- that just didn't fit their image. That just didn't -- again, people shall remain nameless, but someone in GLBT in the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual group was, like, "I don't understand why these men are getting dressed -- I just don't understand it." So I'm going to try to guess here for a minute that I said -- first of all, I made an early on decision to go and find out about transgender, because that's part of our mission. I attended some Renaissance meetings. I became friends with some people from Renaissance. Then because of this person, they said, "We need to set up." So we had an event one Saturday afternoon where we invited some of the leaders of the community to learn about transgender. I believe I can explain transgender and what it's all about as well as anyone now. Okay? By the way, fast forward to a couple of years ago, that same person was talking to someone, and this someone said to that person, "I don't understand this." "You don't have to. Just accept them." Okay. So we had the meetings. We had a few special things like that. We attended PRIDE, we had a booth at PRIDE. We supported different activities, like the Freedom to Marry. I can't remember if we did any other special -- you know, there were certain events where -- convening events where we had to set up a table. I do remember one time setting them up a table on Sunday, some event, and this woman comes up. I said, "Take all the literature." She said, "I already got it. I was at the meeting Tuesday." And it's, like, "Well, it's supposed to be confidential." Okay. Mostly we tried to have our meetings and be a presence, so that I suspect if you went to the -- the younger people don't know who we are, because we weren't as important. But if you go back to the people who were in the community twenty years ago, that age group, I think you'll find there's a whole bunch of people that know more than I, and we don't know them. Because they knew that there was this group out there, led by Don and Melinda, who supported them, even if their parents didn't. Okay? So that's what we did. And we did what PFLAG typically does, and that's the national thing of PFLAG. MF:I want to talk a little bit about the monthly meetings. You really describe people sort of calling the help line, or being panicked. For people in our community today, I think they'd be interested why people were so panicked, or the kinds of concerns that people that called the help line, or people that showed up at the meeting, what kinds of concerns were they bringing to those early PFLAG meetings when it was so essential for people in our community? DK:For the GLBT people, it was -- again, it seems to me we had a lot of people who would have been married and in relationships, whether they were forced or whether they thought that would change their -- I don't know. But they did realize that we were a source of support. We also had just GLBT who came to the meetings because there was no other form of support. Where are you going to go, okay  take you as an example, you're gay, where are you going to go back then? To a bar? Where are you going to go for support? We were that support. Then there was the parents who were -- I looked at, and Melinda, GLBT parents, families and friends. Friends. So that doesn't mean you have to -- we're everything, okay, everybody's included. But from the parents' standpoint, this was a time when parents in Lehigh Valley were, God help me if my kid's gay. I must have done something wrong, what do I do? You know, it was the whole gamut. I mean, we had parents who were just absolutely shocked, we don't know where we're going. I think we had a few who just came because -- remember one, got to tell a funny story. My daughter's in junior high, and she wants to have this boy over to do a project. And it's, like, "No, mom and I aren't here, you can't have a boy over to the house." Fast forward a bunch of years, the parents, the boy and his brother come to the meeting, and that boy is gay. I guess I didn't need to worry, okay? But so we had -- it was a big difference -- different people came for different reasons. But by and large, parents were, at the time, it was, "What am I going to do? I'm going to jump off the cliff. How do I handle this? What do I do? Have I done something wrong? Get me through this." And we got them through it, you know? We could turn around and say -- and use members who were in the meeting, or whatever, to say they were in the same position you were, look at me now. Okay? And by the way, when I said I reached out transgender and I had that meeting, that person who ran that meeting is today one of my best friends. She is. She transitioned somewhere in there, did part of that transition at my house. And she would come to the meetings for anyone who was a transgender person, to help. So we were there, again, in the early days it was the parents who were just -- they were ready to do whatever. And they needed some semblance of how to cope with it, all right. You know, Melinda and I did fine. But that's not what everybody else did. Today we see more on TV, we've got more interaction. There's more acceptable -- we've come to grips with it, I guess. Not to say everyone, but some. It's a changed world. MF:Well, I'm curious, you described -- you said, "We got them through it." And I'm wondering if you could describe how. What strategies did PFLAG use to help parents that were really struggling to accept their children? How did you help people work through their fears? DK:Melinda was better at that than I am. Although when she was still working and I was here consulting, I'd get the phone calls, or at the meetings. And I think the meetings -- the phone calls, it was just talking through it, and inviting them to the meeting. Reassuring them that they didn't do anything wrong. Reassuring that their child was still the same person they knew before. I think that we had a few rare -- where people came to a meeting and they were just irate. They weren't going to accept -- I mean, as you know, there's just a group of people who are never going to accept the diversity, or GLBT people. But those people in the middle, and they're just lost souls, if you will, we need to take care of them. When we stopped having meetings, we did have one on one, and there's only one couple that we had that's, like, they were just obnoxious. And we wanted to throw them out. I couldn't believe how they were treating us and their son in our house. But in general, I think we just tried to show people that their children were the same child they were before. They knew more about that child than they did, and that things would be all right. Things would get better. Things that they would find out, and some of the things we talked about, it's, like, gee, you don't want to miss that when your son finds a partner. You don't want to miss that relationship, watching that. You don't want to be in a situation where you don't see your son. You know? And there's a few horror stories, and we used to not deploy those. But there are cases where parents didn't talk to the kid, didn't talk to the kid, and then there was no kid to talk to because of suicide. But generally, no. It's just a basic of talking them through, and the meetings, meeting other parents. We would tend to have sometimes Liz and Trish -- well, they were always there, but sometimes we'd have GLBT people who were (inaudible), oh my God, she's gay, what am I going to do? She won't amount to anything. Well, no. Then we'd bring in someone who was -- you know, go to the community, or whatever accomplished, and say, you know, "Come on. Your child has no future? It's not going to be any different," you know? So I guess that's basically what -- we also -- and that brought us back, we also advocated for, and I think we can talk about that, is going to government things and talking, and standing up in front. I had a great one with politicians of saying, you know, "Yeah, only ten percent is gay." Yeah, but every one of them, every one of those gay and lesbian people have a mother, father, an aunt and uncle, et cetera, et cetera." I said, "Maybe they're going to say it in public. Well, when they go in that voting booth, are they going to vote for someone who's against their child? I don't think so." We can come back to that later, too, another example. But go ahead. MF:Well, you just mentioned advocacy. What you describe is this real commitment to helping people work through fears about their children and their friends, to helping LGBT people feel connected, be leaders or pillars in the community. Now you're introducing this advocacy piece. Can you describe some of the major works of advocacy that PFLAG, during your time in PFLAG, really undertook? The major advocacy issues that you put at the forefront of your PFLAG group? DK:Let's see. I can remember meeting with a state senator, who said, "We really don't think gays should be married. They're not ready for it". And they've been divorced a couple of times." I can remember somewhat involved, Melinda more so than I was, when we had the -- well, in Allentown, we started with the Equal Rights Amendment, add gay, sexual orientation, gender identity to the anti-discrimination law. And as I remember, there were two times ; the first time didn't go anywhere, and the second time did. And I will share with you, part of the project was the Kreiders are also in this project. Kreiders didn't know Allentown very well, and they were older. And they used to come to our meetings regularly, okay? So that's a real thing, when you're a parent and you're emotional, and you think, and here's this former Mennonite minister and his wife who are little tiny old people saying, "It's okay." All right? Anyway, we had dinner with them and then took them to the meeting. And we walked in, and some people standing next to Liz and Trish said, "The other side's stacking on the deck." Liz said, "No, they're on our side." (laughs) So we went to those meetings, we spoke. I spoke, usually. Bethlehem had some more things, we spoke there. Melinda and I were honored by the Allentown Human Relations Commission for some of our work. And that's where I can tell the story. There's a couple of times where I tried to speak to groups and colleges, high schools and that. I wasn't real successful. Liz was more successful getting in than I was. But the first time I did it, I went with a lesbian, and she taught me something. And I use it every time I speak to a group. And at the Human Relations Commission is a good example. Someone I know tried to get the politicians to give her money for -- she was going on a walk for some charity, GLBT, probably, oriented. And it never happened. Okay. So in my talk, because I had to give an acceptance speech, and Liz said, "Make it count." So I start off as I do mostly, I say, "How many people in this audience are GLBT? I don't want anybody to come out," but, you know, a few people raise their hand. And I go on, I talked for a while. And then I say, "How many in this audience have a relative, a brother, sister, family member, uncle, or a friend who's GLBT?" At Lehigh, with the Gryphon Society, I did that talk, and I had seven percent, from one or two in the first place. Well, in this case, I had a large percentage, maybe twenty, thirty percent. And the reason I do that is to show that, you know, you walk into a thing and you say, oh, I can discriminate, there can only be one or two in here. Then you realize you're treading on unsafe water with a lot of people. At the end of the event, those politicians fell over each other to try to give this person a donation, okay? I'm sure there's a lot of other things we did as far as advocacy and speaking, and things like that. A lot of what we did, what I did, again, was indirect. Like I said, there's a lot of people who I'm sure -- and there's a lot of things we did just to show support, you know? Why did we go to the Freedom to Marry events, you know, the marriage type events? To show our support. You know, we were a presence. We were someone who was there, someone who was to show the community that there are two adults, or more, who do care, even if their parents don't. And again, back 20 years ago, a lot of GLB people did not have supporting parents. So here came two people who they care about, okay? So I don't know if you call that advocacy, okay. MF:Well, so I'm wondering if maybe -- you've mentioned the Freedom to Marry events a few times. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about PFLAG's work on that particular political issue. How was PFLAG involved with the Freedom to Marry movement? DK:Well, PFLAG nationally was certainly involved. Locally, again, we, as all other organizations in the area, supported that. Again, we went to the Freedom to Marry evening event. It wasn't necessarily PFLAG support, but on the Friday before the event, there was a march on the Lehigh County Courthouse, where people went in to try to get marriage licenses, unsuccessfully. They took their money, though. I always thought that was interesting. You know, they'd take the money, but they wouldn't give them a license, you know? Anyway, that was February, and it was cold. So we had to do something for the -- so Melinda made -- I don't know how many years when it started, and I don't know how many years, but obviously it stopped, but she made scarves every year. Something like sixty, seventy scarves. And she was a machine knitter, she had a machine that did it. But nevertheless. And of course, each year was a different color of the rainbow flag, okay? And there are people who -- probably Liz and Trish still have every one of them. But again, that was -- I guess we probably held banners sometimes. I can remember  I don't remember what it was, I can remember being out in the cold, some banner and some things, whether that was Freedom to Marry or some other rights event. There was a -- with the adding orientation and gender identity to the Allentown Relations Commission Anti-Discrimination law, there was a challenge to that. I was not that involved, Melinda might have been more involved, where we were calling and checking and telling people not to, and stuff like that. You know, asking to rescind their -- a lot of people signed up to oppose it. We were calling and making -- because a lot of that was almost fraudulent the way they did it, at least in my opinion. But I can remember being a little bit involved. I can remember there being a court case, and we went there again in support. Understand, it wasn't as much that we actively did stuff, as much as just being there and saying, look at how many people there are. Or, look, there's some -- there was a case where, I think it was during that time, the Allentown Morning Call had an insert that was Spanish language. And this Spanish language one wrote a scathing article. And I don't remember the details right now, but a scathing article, anti-gay. And we had some real good supporters in the Spanish community, the GLBT activities. And of course, I'm sure Liz and Trish were there. So we had GLBT representation. And I went, maybe Melinda too, I don't remember. Well, you know, the Morning Call is, like, oh well, you know, this and that, and everything else, and you know, at one point, they said, "We use that newspaper because that's where we get our press people." Now somebody taught me this in industry. There's a time when someone could say something that someone can't, okay? As a straight male, I can say things in that kind of a situation that maybe a gay or a lesbian couldn't say, or a Hispanic couldn't say. And I turned to think and said, "You know, there's some very intelligent Hispanic people. Maybe you could get a few columnists and editorial people, rather than just" -- okay? So, you know, I guess Melinda and I interjected ourselves, where we could, in support, in just numbers, in just saying, there's straight people who are supportive in this. The Civil Rights Movement, and you know, that was in my childhood, as I knew it, got its real strength when white people started supporting it. They could no longer just ignore them, the group. And so that was a little bit of where my thought process came is, you know, this is going to take off more, the more of us that can support it. When we get the parents enraged -- which we did. I think through PFLAG that said, "You can't do that to my child!" You know? "I'm sorry, that's my child. What do you mean, my child can't have this, or can't have that?" We actually, I can remember this thing with fighting the people who signed off, and, you know, my wife called up a friend of ours and said, "What do you mean, your daughter" -- maybe she didn't quite say it to the daughter, but her attitude was, "What do you mean, you think your daughters are better than mine?" Okay? So it's, I guess, to say, as an engineer, I'm a problem-solver, and anywhere I could see that I could help solve the problem, I jumped in. And some of it was quiet, some of it was -- I'm not an in-your-face person, but, you know. Where else should we go here? MF:Well, so I have two different sort of ideas for moving forward. But I want to ask the sort of larger question. Looking back on all of your work in PFLAG, how do you think PFLAG as an organization has impacted the Lehigh Valley? DK:Let me just say, not everything was PFLAG, okay? You know, my support of Renaissance wasn't necessarily PFLAG, some of it was personal. I'm looking at something else we have in front of us. When MCC had their Christmas party and they needed a Santa Claus, guess who volunteered? You know, was that PFLAG? No. That's just me, all right? And that's me supporting the community, all right? So go ahead, what were you going to ask about PFLAG? MF:Well, this actually makes me think about a different question, because I think what you're describing is -- and you'll just have to tell me if I'm right -- but it sounds like the Lehigh Valley LGBT organizations were kind of inter-webbed, in a way, or connected importantly, so that you were drawing on each other for support for different kinds of events or for where you're dressing up as Santa Claus, you know, that you were really sort of working in tandem with each other. Maybe could you describe a little bit of how organizations worked together in the Lehigh Valley? DK:Well, I think you may have used the word "was," and I'd like to change that to "are," because I think we still are. Renaissance had a presence in our meetings at PFLAG. MCC, we had a presence at theirs. And in fact, they would end up having -- some of them, I can't remember if it was Freedom to Marry, or something, it was on a night with Renaissance, and so -- and Renaissance used their facility at the time. I think they still do. You know, there is that inter-mixing. I don't know that we ever made the distinction when we went to do something as a group, like fighting for rights, or Freedom to Marry, that it was PFLAG or MCC, or this or that or the other. You know, occasionally we'd have to go and explain to somebody, I can remember -- oh, we need to talk about Reading and Monroe County a little bit. But someone, one of those, it's, like, didn't quite understand why gender identity was important. And yet this particular lesbian always is mistaken for a man. Her voice is low. And I tried to tell her, when you go out in public -- this sounds prejudice, it's not, it's not meant to be -- but there are certain stereotypical things that people look at and say, she's a lesbian, okay? She's gay. If you don't fit that stereotype, they don't know. And believe me, I've convinced myself over and over and over again that they're not typical, not stereotyped people. But they don't know who she's sleeping with. And in fact, I'm pretty sure she's not sleeping with anyone. It's the gender identity that they see that they are tagging her. And so if you get gender identity on the books, then it's protection, okay? So and today, it's still interweaved. Here I am, PFLAG's essentially not -- you know, the only thing I claim is that I used to be involved with PFLAG ; we used to have a PFLAG. But I moved on. I'm now involved with the Community Center. I am their head of design. You don't know about the first one, but that was a hefty design project. But this one, there hasn't been that much design, but there's a little bit. So I'm still helping the community. I'm still involved, or I can be. I'm a little older, so I'm slowed down a little bit. So I like to think that we all have our little bit of the pie, and we all have a segment that is different than the other. There are times when I felt they overlapped too much, maybe, and it's, like, why are you doing that? That's what we're supposed to be doing. But it's all good. And the pie is us. And so I have never felt like if Renaissance needed something that I wouldn't be there to help them. If MCC needed a Santa Claus, I'd be there. If the community needed scarves for Freedom to Marry, Melinda was there. And it's still that way. It's just you've got so much more going on today, that it's -- yeah. MF:My previous question I'll return to, but I'll make it broader now. DK:Can I just bring up one thing? MF:Oh yes, please do. DK:You know, because we're talking historical here, too. At some point in time we were doing things, and Reading was starting up. And we said, gee, we have a newsletter, why should we have two? Why don't we bring them in? So we started doing things. Then later on, around 9-11, somebody came to our meeting and wanted to start a group up in Monroe County. So we ultimately put those three groups together and called it Eastern PFLAG. It used to be Lehigh Valley, I think. But now it's Eastern PA. I'm not sure we ever fully operated as one group ; each had their leaders, and each did the leaders slightly different and there wasn't a lot of back and forth. Although I can remember taking a group of transgender people to Reading and also to Monroe County to help a situation, and that. So I just wanted to bring that in, that we did formulate and bring -- and right now, Reading has also ceased to have meetings, for the same reason. Monroe County's slowed down and stopped, and we're not sure what's going on up there. We want to separate functionally because -- but I'm not sure what's going on. Yep, and then we've got all the people. But anyway, I wanted to bring that in, that we -- okay. MF:I have a question about that. How did you support Monroe County and Reading in developing their PFLAG groups? What was that process like? DK:Well, first of all, we had, at the time, was running a newsletter. So we extended that newsletter to them so that they're members. Then we kept membership lists. We had a rather large membership list, which was confidential. Everything went out as blind copies, but we'd keep people informed and keep them connected, if you will. I would often go to the Reading meetings. We had a picnic often, and we would have the people together. And sometimes when Reading PRIDE and that, we would set up a table. Again, the personalities were such -- Reading and Allentown -- we never really intermixed much, if you're new to The Valley. But somehow the Lehigh Valley is here, and when you cross that border into Berks County, you're not in Lehigh Valley, according to Berks County people. You're in Berks County, and it's heavens to Betsy that you, you know, it's an (inaudible) -- and by the way, I'm a quarter of a mile from Berks County, okay? But Monroe County was just -- and I had gone up to their meetings a couple of times, just to interface with. It was when we had one Treasurer. We made donations to different -- and that's something else we did -- we made donations to different groups and activities. And I can't remember where we made donations. But we collected some money, and we tried to spread it around a little bit, and somewhat evenly between the different groups. Reading did have a -- I can't remember, it's down here -- they had a funding organization, community funding, and they set up on to do stuff for GLBT. They got additional money from somewhere, matching funds. And I was on that board for a while, to try to figure out where to spend the money. I don't remember where we ended up spending money. But that was an interesting activity, too. The problem is, you tend to do -- if you were writing a resume that you wanted to get another job, or as my consultant, you would write down all these things you did so that you could say, "Hey folks, here's what I did." When you do it just because you want to do it and you think it's the right thing to do, you don't always write it down. You don't always remember what you did, and how you did it. MF:Well, we're getting towards the end of our ninety minutes, and I have two questions that I'm thinking of. One is one I asked earlier, but I didn't ask it well. This is sort of a historical question. What do you think PFLAG -- but then the other organizations, MCCLV, Lehigh Valley, Renaissance -- what kind of impact do you feel those organizations have made on the Lehigh Valley in their early years, when we're thinking historically about your early work in PFLAG? How did those organizations together change the Lehigh Valley? DK:Well, like I said, the Lehigh Valley over the twenty years has changed from not as accepting to a pretty accepting community. And yes, some of that is watching TV and more GLBT people on TV, et cetera. And some of it is just, you know, what's going on the world. I think that the other part of that equation has to be the different groups in the Lehigh Valley. When you get up and you put signs up and say, "We want equal rights" -- I just realized, yeah, I didn't go to those things. It's cold. But I made the signs for them, okay? That's another thing I forgot I did. You know, it's calling attention to what's going on. When you go to city council and you fight for equal rights, and all that gets press, and everything else. So it's those groups. We didn't get where we are today without struggles and without people's efforts. Those different groups, each in their own way, helped do that. The early days of PRIDE. In the PRIDE Festival, we need a bigger -- having a par-- we used to have a parade down Main Street. People see that, you know? There's another one, we participated as a group, PRIDE, with my old truck in the Puerto Rican parade, okay? And -- trying to think now, it was something else -- so those different things and those different activities are what, I think, painted a picture to the community of who we were. And there were allies. The few times I spoke at organizations or to schools, Liz is speaking, all that has caused a different thing. Probably it helps that we've got people in responsible positions at different companies. You know, I'm not -- no offense to Mr. PP &amp ; L where I used to work, PPL now, there's no &amp ; in there, they took it out when I left -- but I used to kid and laugh. Says, you know, it's too bad there's some bigot in there. It's terrible to be a bigot. You have to remember who you hate. As a Jewish person, I'm not sure I feel totally comfortable at times. I probably knew of some gay people who I didn't, you know, (inaudible), but I wasn't necessarily friendly -- I am friendly with those people now. Try and take care of my sins, if you will. But when I got caught up and found out that they have a gay association, I was flabbergasted, okay? So, you know, that all helps with -- it's hard to say why we got where we are, okay? A friend of mine transitioned while at Mack Truck. Mack Truck supported her. You know, what was that all about? Some of the colleges we have were not supportive. Again, I don't want to go into one of them, but they weren't supportive, and others were, okay? So it's not -- I don't know. All right? Don't know how it all came about, and glad it did. MF:Okay. I want to return to something that you talked about sort of briefly before. But you talk about a sort of change in the need for PFLAG, that the shift in Lehigh Valley has decreased the membership and attendance at meetings for PFLAG. I'm wondering if you could reflect a little bit on that transition. From a really active organization to our current sort of moment, why do you think PFLAG's attendance sort of declined and the interest in the organization kind of declined a bit? DK:Well, there obviously -- again, there's much more acceptance today than there was then. Why? I don't know. You know, I'm an engineer, I don't know why. It's a social economical, whatever, change. And how much we had impact on that -- I can guess, like I just said, you asked what the groups did. I can guess. But the effect is that people are more tolerant, and learned tolerance in Lehigh Valley. Is that because of the effects we did? Is that effect of watching more things on TV -- I mean, I watch these home shows where the couples are looking for a home, and it seems like a larger and larger percentage are same sex couples. That's got to be a positive thing, when people see it and say -- you know, their children, and say, "Gee, I just watched that show the other day, and these two guys could afford this really expensive house. You know, I guess my son's going to do all right." Or, "My daughter's going to do all right." You know, all that has an effect. As to which one, or what, I don't know. Maybe PFLAG didn't have a big effect on that. Maybe we're just seeing the effect, you know? Affect, effect, whatever. But we kept seeing a big decrease in the people coming to our meetings. We held on for quite a while, and finally it was like we didn't even stay the whole hour. We were just, like, nobody's here. You know, we talked about changing our format to being just -- because we like getting together once a month, okay, in the early days. And maybe even towards the end. We would get together for dinner before or after the meetings, because we got to be real good friends. So I don't know why it changed. I just know it absolutely did change, again. Now I've had a few people say, "You should keep doing it." I say, "Why?" You don't keep selling tacos when nobody wants tacos, you know? All right? I'm not sure how much the meetings and all that helped, as much as Melinda and I and all the other PFLAG parents being there. And understand, I mean, PFLAG wasn't just Melinda and I. There were people in Reading, two or three people that were involved with the Reading group. They kept Reading going, and kept influence and a presence in Reading. We have still people, friends here who were in our board and our involvement who also, you know, came to those meetings and came to those events and things like that. So, yeah. MF:I'll ask one final question, and then we'll move towards the conclusion. We talked a lot about sort of community impact and the shift in PFLAG, and I kind of want to move towards ending with a more of a personal reflection. DK:Okay. MF:How has being involved in PFLAG mattered to you personally, or mattered to you as a father and as a spouse? How have you personally been impacted by your years of work in multiple organizations, you know, centrally with PFLAG? DK:I mean, my daughter thinks we're more gay than she is, because we're more involved. Yeah. Let me put it this way. No offense to the Jewish religion or Jewish people, but we were involved with the synagogue for many years -- not a lot, we started late, when my daughter was Sunday school age. And when she was about ten, eleven or so, we moved to the country. It became very hard to get her there midweek for Hebrew school. On weekends I would drive her there, it took me a half an hour to get there, class was an hour, then I had to wait around, do something for an hour and then take her home. That was a pain in the neck. During the week was hard, because we both work. And subsequently, we made the decision based on her and her feelings, and everything else, to drop out. The best I can say is, the synagogue was a clique. We never quite got into the clique. We have friends who were involved with the synagogue who were our friends before, and they're still our friends. And yeah, we made a couple. Right around that time was the Matthew Shepard event, and we had  well, there's another example. We went to the Matthew Shepard events, and there was candles and stuff. We did the same thing with the event in Florida. So, you know, that's where we show our presence, if you will. Anyway, I'm standing there, and I'm looking around at the GLBT board. And understand, that was relatively early in our involvement with the community. And I said, I have more friends right now in the GLBT community than I did in the synagogue. I'm going to put, I guess, a pat on my back a little bit -- about five years ago, I guess it was 2015 at the Bradbury-Sullivan gala, we were honored, Melinda and I. The Kreiders were honored before us, and we really love the Kreiders. Roberta refers to me as "son," I refer to her as "mother," and that's pretty odd when you have a Mennonite and a Jewish couple that were that close. And we still see them every few weeks. So we thought that was a big deal. We thought, man, we didn't do much -- by the way, Sally was keynote speaker. And we got a standing ovation. This is my community now, right? And I don't feel I do a lot for it. Other people think I might. But to me, it's my community, and I do things for my family, my community, all right? So does that answer your question? MF:Yeah, thank you so much. Well, before we close, I just want to give you the opportunity, is there anything else that you really want to share today that we haven't yet talked about? DK:You know, there's so many things over those twenty years that I'm sure I did that might be interesting to the community, I don't know. But like I said, it's been a great time, it still is a great time. You know, it's always -- a stereotypical comment is, "Some of my best friends are GLBT." Well, it's not -- that's true. It's not a fake comment, okay? The Kreiders are our best friends. Liz and Trish are our best friends. Some of their friends are now our best friends. Again, I've got a couple of friends who are transgender. I'm going to leave you with this: In the early days, I was concerned of who was gay, and who wasn't, all right? I don't have gaydar, and so I don't know. My biggest concern at some point in time, in certain times, is to know what gender or -- no gender, sexual orientation or gender identity people are, because I want to be able to say to someone, "I'm on your side. I'm a supporter. I'm an ally." You say that to a gay man, and he's not, you might get beat up, okay, and insulted. You know? It could be an insult. Transgender are even harder because someone who's either crossdressing or transgender wants to be accepted, and doesn't want to be identified, okay? So if I can pick them out and identify them, they just lost. So how do you tell someone GLBT, you're on their side? Okay, so two stories with that ; one, we were at the Creating Change conference in Pittsburgh that year. And the events were either at the basement or the top floor. And everybody was riding up and down in elevators. Now I won't begin stereotyping, but most lesbians don't dress very fancy, okay? Melinda gets on the elevator, and from the back of the elevator is, "Hi, mom," which I believe is a euphemism for someone -- a member of the community. "No, that really is my mom." It was Sally, okay? That's one story. The other is, I have ceased to care what somebody's orientation is. I am at events at Bradbury-Sullivan, or whatever, where I can pretty much guess that probably somebody is or isn't. In my early days at PFLAG, and I wanted to be able to prove to myself and be able to say this -- we'd go around and tell who we were. And I have to admit, I tried to pick out who was gay and who wasn't. One time, there was a man with a younger guy, who I knew was gay, and was sitting there like this. And I said, "Oh, that's dad. He's not happy." No, it was the partner. MF:Mmm. DK:Another time it was a woman, who I said, oh, she's gay. No, she was there because of her son. Okay? I don't care anymore. It doesn't matter to me. You know, if somebody tells me, fine. I know a little more about them, you know? I'm not interviewing you, so I don't know a lot about your background ; we should have talked. But it doesn't matter to me anymore. Maybe that goes a little step beyond acceptance, a step beyond where we're at, whatever. But, you know, if somebody wants to share with me what they are or who they are, or whatever, that's fine. It doesn't matter to me anymore. I don't -- it's not that I don't care. It's just that you're a person, I like this person, and I'm not going to make a judgment based on their sexual orientation or their gender ID, and they're fine with me regardless. So that's probably what -- I said it started with getting more and more acceptance and diversity. Now I have to give one more piece of Don Kohn philosophy here. There are those people of a religion belief who believe that we're being tested on earth, and we won't go to heaven if we fail that test. Those people who believe that way have a different idea of what that test is than I do. My belief -- (inaudible), this is a great forum for this -- my belief for this is, what is universal throughout the planet? Diversity. And maybe it's our approach to diversity that's our real test. And a lot of people are failing it. Okay? MF:Don, thank you so much for talking with me today. It truly is -- it's just been a real pleasure and an honor to hear some of your stories. DK:I enjoyed it. I enjoyed talking with you also. And I'm glad -- you know, you talk about what I've done, I think what you're doing, and the rest of the people with this oral history, is also doing something for the community. So we'll have to come when you get honored. I'll have to put the bug in Adrian's ear, that should be one of the honorees, that's the group who's doing this. Okay? MF:Thank you so much. DK:He does listen to me sometimes. MF:Well, again, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. I will just conclude the interview there by letting you know that we'll reach out with a transcript, probably within the next three months, if that's all right. DK:Okay. MF:Great. DK:All right. MF:All right, that will be where we'll stop the interview, but I wanted to stay on the line with you and just check in. How did that go for you? DK:Well, well, I think that there's areas that I was surprised we didn't get to, and there's probably more. But I threw in a few things that I thought were important. Yeah. I thought it went well. MF:I thought it was fabulous. Look, I was tearing up there a little bit. I had to -- fortunately I had Kleenex here, but I didn't want to have that on camera, so -- DK:Oh, okay. MF:I had to dab my eyes there a bit. Yeah, I thought that was wonderful. Well, if there were things that we missed today that you were surprised about, we could always reschedule a second interview if you feel like you're-- DK:I don't know that they were that important. I think I got the important stuff in. MF:Okay. All right. Well, then I will be in touch when we have a transcript for you, and I'll send that via email. And in the meantime, if you have any questions for me, or any concerns for me, anything you want to talk about, just reach out. DK:I'm fine. I just -- we'll see each other, I'm sure, at the Bradbury-Sullivan Community Center sometime and say hello. I'm terrible at remembering people, so it's not a strongpoint. Whereas as a professor, I'm sure you know who all your students are, and so-- MF:Yes, but then sometimes, like a year later, I'll know the face, but I'll forget the name, so-- DK:Politicians are very good at remembering me. I'm terrible. As I'm getting older, I'll remember someone and it's, like, but I can't remember the name. Then it'll hit me. MF:Well, just poke me and say, "I know you. Remind me where from." DK:Well, I'm saying if you see me, poke me, and -- let me put it this way. There's not as many gray-haired old men who show up -- (laughter) with their wives, you know? It reminds me of one time, somehow we got tickets to a GLBT event. I don't even remember how we got it. I mean, they sent it to PFLAG. So Melinda and I said, "We'll go." And there we are. It's, like, "What are you doing here? You're not gay!" You know? "Well, okay." So again, sometimes it's interesting to be in a -- to find out what it's like to be in a minority, when you get to be there. It's not the same. I can't say that I know what it's like to be a lesbian or a gay man. But I understand. And so it's -- yeah. MF:Well, I will say "hi" to you when I see you at the Bradbury-Sullivan, then. DK:I'm looking forward to meeting your partner, I assume, so-- MF:We would be delighted to meet you. DK:Yes. MF:Well, I will be in touch really soon, Don. I hope you have a wonderful day, and thanks again. DK:Good. Thank you. It was enjoyable. MF:Bye, now. DK:Bye-bye. How do I get out of this? MF:I'll just end it for both of us. DK:Okay. MF:When I click this button, I'll disappear. DK:You know, always when I've done Zoom for other things, like a friend of Liz and Trish's had a Zoom birthday party, Melinda always set it up. And my granddaughters had cello concerts with a bunch of kids, and she set it up. So this is the only time I've ever been on Zoom. Now Facebook, I do my yoga class on Facebook. Not on Facebook, on Skype. So that I'm familiar with. But -- okay. MF:You did wonderful for Zoom. Okay, I'll turn it off right now. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:37:24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Don Kohn, May 11, 2020 Description An account of the resource Don Kohn talks about his involvement with the Eastern PA chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-09 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-05-11 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/ab6d82d0c441e82f0bc771ba95a53b85.png 7e1917db5a211d5984c580967db1107c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Foltz, Mary Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Whelan, Frank OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-01.xml Interview Keyword This field adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the “keywords” field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. Le-Hi-Ho OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 July 23, 2019 Frank Whelan, July 23, 2019 LGBT-01 01:20:48 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Le-Hi-Ho The Morning Call Lambda Center AIDS Whelan, Frank Foltz, Mary video/mov WhelanFrank_20190723_video.mov 1.0:|25(11)|54(5)|75(6)|98(18)|117(15)|142(10)|167(16)|196(2)|221(6)|244(2)|267(9)|294(8)|317(5)|340(13)|363(11)|386(8)|413(5)|440(7)|465(13)|494(9)|515(14)|546(4)|571(8)|592(13)|615(15)|640(2)|665(12)|690(16)|711(6)|736(16)|757(5)|784(6)|807(10)|830(8)|853(7)|876(5)|895(13)|918(17)|941(12)|964(9)|989(10)|1014(2)|1035(2)|1060(4)|1083(5)|1104(9)|1125(17)|1150(16)|1171(8)|1190(18)|1211(15)|1232(12)|1253(13)|1274(2)|1291(15)|1308(11)|1329(16)|1354(10)|1375(12)|1398(8)|1421(8)|1444(13)|1467(14)|1494(4)|1517(7)|1538(5)|1561(7)|1582(12)|1605(4)|1628(12)|1653(6)|1674(5)|1693(10)|1716(17)|1743(15)|1766(13)|1791(9)|1812(12)|1831(7)|1850(2)|1875(3) 0 YouTube video &lt ; iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ncxuqg6zLeY?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"&gt ; &lt ; /iframe&gt ; 26 Interview Introductions MF: I’m Mary Foltz, I’m here with Frank Whelan to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. And this project is sponsored by the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and we are funded by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are here in Frank and Bob’s home in Allentown and today is July 23rd, 2019. 0 93 Childhood / Family MF: Thank you. So, to really just start our conversation, I’m going to ask if you’d share a little bit about your childhood with us.&#13 ; &#13 ; FW: Okay, I’ll fill you in as I can. I was born in Orange, New Jersey and I lived there only briefly. My parents got a chance to move to a home in Livingston, New Jersey, and in Livingston is where I actually grew up and spent most of my childhood life till I went off to college in 1969. I had a interesting early life. My parents were interesting people in a lot of ways. They were city people. 0 678 First Gay Experience / Schooling FW: Well, it was about that time when I was in, I guess, I was in Catholic grade school that I first got my first inklings about possibly being gay or whatever it was. I didn’t know. This was in somewhere between, like, the fourth or fifth grade. I had a friend, Martin, who I knew fairly well. He had some health problems and just they used to call a blue baby, as my mother used to say. And that was something that he had some, when he was born, he’d had some problems or his mother had had some problems with the pregnancy. But he was the first person I ever actually had contact with sexually. 0 1570 Encountering Gay Liberation Front FW: And in 1978, I graduated, I had gotten my master’s degree. In that interim, something happened that changed my life, totally. There was a man there, a young man who was working with me in the sociology department. He was a computer guy. He was married but he had been in the Air Force Academy and had left it because of some sort of cheating scandal or something like that. But he knew about computers, so he was handling the computers for this particular professor whose project I was working on. Gay Liberation Front 0 2101 Moving to the Lehigh Valley / The Morning Call FW: Meanwhile, my friend Walt Harrington had gotten a job here in Allentown with The Morning Call. And he was working very hard and got involved with the owner of the paper, was trying to change the paper. Paper in those days, in the early ’80s was really beginning to make a move, it was out of its provincialism. And the owner’s son was taking over and he hired Walt and a bunch of other people and they were doing really groundbreaking journalism stuff. The Morning Call 0 2308 Introduction to Le-Hi-Ho FW: Walt and I had a -- interesting relationship. But so, I did. I began to look in back about this local, this organization, this Le-Hi-Ho. I heard talk of it and I went to find out that a lot of these articles about Le-Hi-Ho and about the gay community were written by Bob Wittman. And so, one day, I went over to Bob and he was sitting at his desk and I said to him, “I see you’ve written a lot of articles about this Le-Hi-Ho organization.” And he said, “Yes?” And I said, “I’d like to get to meet these people, get to know these people. Barbara Gittings ; Le-Hi-Ho ; Paul Kendall ; Paul Reeder 0 2640 Beginning of Lambda Center / AIDS Services Committee/Center FW: But we got really interested in the gay things from there and Paul Kendall began the process of bringing forward the concept of the Lambda Center, a gay community center. He actually went on local television. He went on Channel 39 and they used to have a “Manager’s Chat,” they called it. And he came on and explained what this was about. AIDS Services Center ; AIDS Services Committee ; Lambda Center 0 3090 Inception of Le-Hi-Ho FW: One of the things I had not mentioned which I probably should had to do with the inception of Le-Hi-Ho. Now, I only know this because several years ago, about two years ago, Ron Seeds, who founded the Le-Hi-Ho, told me, sent me a letter. A fellow in New York named Dick Leitsch who was with the Mattachine Society, and Leitsch was very influential. Dick Leitsch ; Le-Hi-Ho ; Mattachine Society ; Paul Kendall ; Paul Reeder ; Ron Seeds 0 3269 More on AIDS Epidemic / Impact on Lambda Center &amp ; Le-Hi-Ho FW: So, now, have that on the record. Well, fast forward to 1984, ’83, ’84, and, of course, AIDS is now popping up. And this is the time period when a lot of people, wealthy individuals in the community who had lost their family members, in particular Ardath Rodale of the Rodale Press, her son, David, had died of AIDS and he had been in New York awhile and was very active in New York. AIDS Services Center ; AIDS Services Committee ; Brian Foley ; David Rodale ; Lambda Center 0 3835 Continuing LGBT Advocacy / Local Politics MF: So, what happens for you after Le-Hi-Ho closes its doors? &#13 ; You’ve secured a place for the archive.&#13 ; &#13 ; FW: Right.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: How do you continue to be involved?&#13 ; &#13 ; FW: Well, I continue to be involved with consultations with writing about things about gays. I’m a little bit skittish about some things because, first of all, the younger people, I don’t want them to look that I’m interfering with them. I want to share this with you. So, this is something that -- the transition with Liz and Trish taking over the movement and basically, you know, they did -- excellent people, fantastic, what they did to getting the gay rights ordinance in Allentown. Allentown Anti-discrimination Ordinance ; Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center ; Liz Bradbury ; Trish Sullivan 0 4200 Issues at The Morning Call Regarding Pride MF: Okay, I’m back with Frank and we just sort of talked about Le-Hi-Ho and some of the other political organizations in the Lehigh Valley that were working on LGBT issues and some of the tension between different people in the sort of broader Lehigh Valley LGBT movement. I wanted to sort of ask you if you could expand a bit on maybe the kind of Pride scene in the Lehigh Valley because Pride became a major -- you know, Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley became a major organization.&#13 ; &#13 ; FW: Right.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Could you share a little bit of your thoughts about that organization?&#13 ; &#13 ; FW: Well, that organization was a great organization and I have no problem with it at all. It was great. You had those parades, we had those events that focused around Pride. We haven’t been to one in a while because, well, we just haven’t been. But we felt very much, well, this is the story, my story of Pride, what happened to me involved with Pride. Pride ; The Morning Call 0 MovingImage Frank Whelan recounts his life as a gay man, the LGBT organizations he was involved in, his work as a reporter for The Morning Call, and it's impact on the Lehigh Valley as well as his life. MARY FOLTZ: [It's gonna do just?] -- go ahead and press play. Or record, rather. FRANK WHELAN: Record, good. (laughter) MF: Okay. Oh, and I should just remind you, I'm going to ask you to say your name and spell your name. And it's Whelan? FW:Whelan, yes. MF:Whelan. And I'll ask for your birthday and then I'm going to just ask you to confirm that you -- all right, well, I'm Mary Foltz, I'm here with Frank Whelan to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. And this project is sponsored by the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and we are funded by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are here in Frank and Bob's home in Allentown and today is July 23rd, 2019. Frank, thank you so much for your willingness to be here with us today to speak with me. I'm wondering if we could start? Could you please state your full name and spell it for me? FW: Certainly. My name is Frank Albert Whelan, W-H-E-L-A-N, Jr. MF: And could you please share your birth date? FW: My birthday is October 22nd, 1949. MF: And earlier, before we started recording, did we go over a consent form? Are you consenting to this interview today? FW: I am consenting to this interview, yes. MF: Thank you. So, to really just start our conversation, I'm going to ask if you'd share a little bit about your childhood with us. FW: Okay, I'll fill you in as I can. I was born in Orange, New Jersey and I lived there only briefly. My parents got a chance to move to a home in Livingston, New Jersey, and in Livingston is where I actually grew up and spent most of my childhood life till I went off to college in 1969. I had a interesting early life. My parents were interesting people in a lot of ways. They were city people. They were from the 1920s and '30s people, when they were born, and the culture of the '30s and '40s in the cities of northern New Jersey, New York, Newark, East Orange was something that they a part of. That's how they approached life. My father had -- was an interesting life, his background. His father was the son of a man named Charles A. Whelan. This would have been my grandfather, my great grandfather. Charles A. Whelan was the founder of the Whelan drugstore chain and he was also the founder, with his brother George, of the United Cigar Stores. They were extremely wealthy, very, very wealthy by just about anybody's estimate. It was estimated, in 1920, that they were, my grandfather, my great grandfather, who was Charles A. Whelan, was actually worth fifteen million dollars, which was quite a bit of money at the time. And he had a lot of money and they threw it around, and his family. And they bought a lot of homes and they toured a lot and they did a lot of things and then the stock market crash happened. And although they were not ever having to worry about where their next meal was coming from, believe me, they were not as wealthy as they had been. The '30s were tough times for them. My father had two brothers and my father's brothers were a little bit rough on him when he was growing up. He was the youngest one. And my grandmother, not intending to, of course, used to embarrass him constantly by referring to him as Baby Frank. So, my father grew up, he was Frank A. Whelan, Sr. So, my father grew up sort of with this complex about masculinity, which we could get into at some point. But he was -- it was an interesting household they had. My grandfather was a man who collected art. He collected rare books. He had the money. His father had plenty of money and so he did this kind of thing. One year in 1925, for example, my grandfather gave his father, my great grandfather, a copy of Joseph Conrad's manuscript of a novel Joseph Conrad had written. And so, this is the kind of thing that you're talking about here. And my grandfather knew a lot of painters in New York. He knew Edward Hopper, he knew several others who wouldn't -- John Sheehan, Sheehan,(John Sloan) think his name was, and these were the kind of people that he mixed with. And I got a lot of my information and background and interest in arts and things from him. I don't know whether he knew it or not but I think he suspected, as I was growing up, because of my interest in other things, that I was gay. My grandfather was a bisexual and I found this out one day. I was, like, sixteen years old and he and my grandmother used to come up to our home in Livingston on Sunday afternoons. And it was my job to take the lawn chair out of the back of the car and set it up so that he could sit there because he had a bad back. And one day, I'm doing this and -- (phone rings) MF: Okay, you were right out, setting up the chairs. FW: I was setting up the lawn chair that he always used because his back bothered him and he felt uncomfortable sitting in that kind of a harder chair. And while I was taking it out of the back of the car, he looked at me and he said, "Frank, I think you and I understand each other." And I said, "Yes, Pop, I think we do," because at that point I already had the feeling of where I was going with myself. And he didn't say any word. Nothing. We never spoke of it again but that's what was going on. Well, my father was of a different type than his father. My father, he was present when the family money was disappearing and he didn't have that kind of money. Grandfather and my grandmother still had enough money to make themselves comfortable. They had a summer home at the Jersey Shore, they had an apartment in East Orange, but they did not pass much of that on to my father. One of the things that they did do was buy homes. My grandmother bought a home for my father and his brothers out of her money that she had in Livingston for each one of them. So, that was something because none of them could afford it. My father never went to college. He got out of high school. He was in the Navy during World War II. He's in a ship in the Pacific, an ammunition ship, which he always likes to tell us was going to -- lucky there was not an atomic bomb attack. He was lucky there was atomic bomb attacks on Japan, otherwise, he would've been part of the invasion fleet of Japan. And he used to like to say to me, "And you would not be here." So, (laughter) anyway, I was aware from him different stories about his growing up that his parents, although my grandmother worked very hard to keep them together as a family, raise their boys properly, nobody ever urged them to go to college. Nobody ever urged them to have any kind of -- it was just sort of assumed that they would have money. Well, of course, they wouldn't have money, so they would of had to start out on their own. My father met my mother in East Orange, New Jersey in the late 1940s after he got home from the Navy. Oh, here's a story I'd like to share that I forgot about about my father in the Navy afterwards. In 1946, he was in San Francisco and he was with a bunch of other sailors and they went to this club in San Francisco and this person was playing piano. And he always liked the music of Eddie Heywood, who was a pianist, jazz pianist, popular in those days. And so, where he first heard him was in San Francisco. But they were in this club and he was with his friend, one of his little more older and more knowledgeable sailors. And he saw this good-looking woman and thought, boy, isn't she attractive? And so, you know, as we used to say in the Dark Ages, put the moves on her. And there was this other woman around and, like, giving my father dirty looks, you know? And, like, just looking at him, like, you know, "What are you doing?" Oh, and that kind of thing. And my father is twenty and naive about the world, asks the friend of his, he says, "Well, what's her problem? What's the matter with her?" And this friend of my father's said, "Well, you're trying to pick up her girlfriend, for one thing." (laughs) And my father said, "Her what?" (laughter) So, you can imagine. This is where my father's experiences with gay things begin. And he and my mother -- I should tell you, my mother was a wonderful mother, very good. She was a wonderful person. She had a -- from a family that was nowhere near the social class of my father. And her father sold Beechnut Baby Food out of the back of a big Packard car he drove around in, because he was this salesman for Beechnut baby food. And they lived in various parts of the Northeast. They lived in New York City for a while, where my mother was born, by the way, in Brooklyn, in 1927. But she had her mother, my grandmother, her mother was not a very nice person. She was an odd lady. Eventually, she would drink herself into oblivion. But she used to pick on my mother and was very unfair to my mother. And so, my mother grew up with sort of an inferiority complex about this whole thing. Well, I, you know, sort of got that impression from things that I'd sort of picked up over the years about the way they acted towards each other. It was a strange -- So, she had a strange relationship with her mother. My father couldn't stand her mother, just drove him crazy. And she -- it used to drive my father crazy. They mutually drove each other crazy. But eventually, my parents' marriage worked out to the point where they did have eight children, I being the first one. And my brothers and sisters, we all kind of developed very distinct personalities. None of us was really very much the same. So, as I was growing up, I knew what I wanted in life was a quiet place to read a book and be left alone and not bothered. And so, my brothers and sisters will tell you today it they were here, they would say something like, "Well, you were always in your room reading a book. You were never out with any of the rest of us." Well, I thought, well, yeah, well, why should I be, you know? What's wrong with that? And you have your life, I have mine, that's it. What's wrong with that? But they kind of knew I was sort of strange. Well, it was about that time when I was in, I guess, I was in Catholic grade school that I first got my first inklings about possibly being gay or whatever it was. I didn't know. This was in somewhere between, like, the fourth or fifth grade. I had a friend, Martin, who I knew fairly well. He had some health problems and just they used to call a blue baby, as my mother used to say. And that was something that he had some, when he was born, he'd had some problems or his mother had had some problems with the pregnancy. But he was the first person I ever actually had contact with sexually. And he was another boy. I mean, we were both boys, we were roughly the same age. We were both about thirteen, fourteen years old. And I knew at that point what I liked and I didn't know what it was. I didn't really know, you know? This is what I like doing with somebody else, with another boy, but I don't know whether, I mean, is this okay? And then, over the years, I met some other boys who I did this with off and on. This was not heavy duty. This is merely a lot of mutual touching and that kind of thing. But I tried to work that through but I didn't know, you know? It was so confusing. People today, people assume a lot. They think gay people assume that people are gay, you know, that you can be gay and it's just okay and that's fine and that's cool and RuPaul and hallelujah and everything else. But I got news for you: in those days, it wasn't, especially if you were fourteen, because I was supposed to be interested in girls and I wasn't. I tried dating. I dated one girl, Christine. Very nice girl. Rather big but nice and she was a friend. I liked her as a person. And then, there was another woman that I dated, Penny, Penny Way. I knew her through a church group that I belonged to. But, you know, it really became clear that, to me, at least I understand that these women wanted me to do something with them that I did not want to do and I didn't know why I did not want to do it. And that was the strangest thing to be involved with because you were going, like, between one thing and between another thing. So, I was, like, what does this mean? What does this mean? Why am I having these feelings towards these men, that I don't have any feelings towards these women. And, you know, then, well, at that time, I began to realize that I was having wet dreams and problems and masturbating myself thinking about men, not women. And I thought this is odd. What's wrong with me? And my father -- everybody knew I was odd, you know? My father knew I was odd. So, of all things, he sent me down into New York. This was 1966, into New York, to a priest there. There's a Franciscan monastery in New York, and to talk to this priest, to straighten out my life or whatever it was. And so, I did this and I talked to this priest and I finished speaking to him and he said to me, "Well, you realize, of course, you're a homosexual." I said, "What? (laughs) What?" (laughs) And I said, "Well, what does that mean?" And he said, "Well, you know, this is what you are. And, you know, you don't have to be. You can do things. You don't have to get involved with sex. You can do things that make you sexually, blah-blah, you have to recognize the fact that you're a homosexual." And he said, you know, this is what they said. "And you have to deal with it." And so, I came back home and I told my father. (inaudible) my father practically fell on the floor. But I think at least it gave my father an idea, a context of what I was going through. My high school years, I graduated from the Catholic grade school I was going to, St. Philomena's, in 1964. In 1964 to 1965, I was at Mount Pleasant Junior High School. Then, from 1965 to 1968, I was in the senior high school, Livingston High School. It was an interesting place to be for a lot of people. Many of my college students, fellow students were extremely bright people. They had a large interest in a lot of different things. They had parents who were pushing them towards college. They were taking the PSATs and the SATs and all these things. And all you heard about from them was, "I'm going to get a good college and my parents are going to kill me if I don't get in a good college. I've got to go to a good college." And one of my fellow classmates in this class was a young man named Roger Chen. And Roger Chen, in 2014, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry. So, gives you some idea of the kind of caliber of people. And not that everybody was at Roger's lev but it was that kind of environment. I was not, obviously, in that crowd. I was very bright in history but abysmal in math and science. I could not work my way through math. I could not do algebra, I could not -- you know, they said A plus B [adds up?] and I said, "Well, where's the numbers? And it's an addition, why do we have letters?" And so, my mind wasn't shaping its way around that. And then, I just was sort of out. I was not part of one group, I was not part of another group, I was not a brain, I wasn't a jock. When I was in grade school through high school, in gym class, when they picked classes, I was the last one picked and the guy would say, "You want Whelan?" "No, I don't want Whelan. Do you want a Whelan?" "No, I don't want a Whelan." So, you can imagine, (laughs) I was pathetic at the time period. But I went to high school, went through, got through high school, and then I graduated from high school. And then, bingo, I'm out of high school and then what do I do? What do I do? I want to go to college but my father doesn't know how to help me. He never went to college. My mother doesn't know how to help me. She never went to college. Oh, yes, she did, actually. My mother spent two years in a Catholic college, studying to be a kindergarten teacher. And then she met my father and they were married in 1948 and that was the end of that. But I was basically left on my own when I got out of high school. So, took this little job here, took this little job there. And finally, and so at Essex County Community College, was opening in Newark, And so, I went there. Had to see what it would be like. And while I was there, I met two very remarkable people, both of them African American professors. One of them was named Stephen Butler, he was a sociology professor, and the other one was named Clem Price, who died just several years ago. He was president of Rutgers, or Rutgers, Newark, at any rate, when he passed away. But the two of them saw that I had a lot more on the ball in their classes and finally one day, and I can still see it in my head, talking to Professor Butler, standing in the hallway, and he said to me, "You know, you're too bright for this place. You really ought to be in a real college." Turns out he had some connections. He had another job at something called the Upward Bound program for black students over in Queens Community College in New York area. He was from New York City originally. And he said, "I could, you know, let me look into things." So, I knew one thing I really want to do is I wanted to go away to school. All my friends in Livingston were going away to school. And so, that's what I really wanted to do. I also had, I mentioned earlier, that I was part of a church group. That church group was not a Catholic church group. It was a Presbyterian Church group. I had broken with the Catholic Church and joined the Presbyterians because they accepted me and they liked me. And my mother, of course, cried, naturally, being an Irish Catholic of her vintage. But I didn't know those people and those people were all going off to college. I wanted to go away?, so I said to Steve, "Well, I'd like to go away." And so, he came up with some colleges for me and then he said, "Oh, Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois. Why don't you try there? They have a work study program there, you can work there at college, and it's cheaper." And so, I could actually use the government funding that I got from the student loans for that. And so, I did, and I went off to college, Blackburn College. Well, Blackburn's, like, in the middle of nothing. But it was, a wonderful place for me to be, because I grew up there and I began to come out to myself and to come out to some people. People began to realize that I was gay or whatever that was. And by 1969, when Stonewall's happening in New York, I am on a train for central Illinois to my first year at Blackburn. And I met some very good people there. One of my closest friends, Walt Harrington, straight man, who was a very good friend. And also, I met a lot of people that didn't know the other Frank and that was terrific relief. And so, I could begin to carve myself, who I was. And I still was dealing with problems with my sexuality. It was just something that I was trying to ignore and I didn't do anything about it one way or the other, you know? They used to say, "Oh, is that Whelan? He's just weird," you know, that they just wrote me off. "He's just odd." But I was doing very well in classes. I was doing very well in things that were not science or math related. And so, I did well. They kept me on and I was a history major and gradually I got to know things and got to know the college well. And people knew and I knew and the boys knew, the other men knew, young men knew that I was. And this one guy I knew, very attractive young man, Michael [Stieglitz?], he was a Croatian background from someplace, from East Chicago, Indiana. And he and I would eventually end up sometimes ending up in the big shower together. (phone rings) And then -- MF: Can we pause? I'm sorry. FW: Sure. MF: Hold on one second. (break in video) In describing some of his experiences with other students at college, and I'll just let you continue. FW: Well, I was particularly attracted to this young man, Michael Stiglitz. He was from East Chicago, Indiana. His family were a steelworker background. Very nice looking young man. And I would end up in the shower. I mean, they were big gang showers at Blackburn. And I never would make an overt pass at anyone. That I did not do. That I would figure, as my old man used to say, be spittin' Chiclets, meaning that someone's going to punch me out if I try that. So, I didn't ever do it. But I sort of would look at him. I'd look at him and admire. He's a beautiful man, you know? Well, one day, I was standing in line for the cafeteria and everybody else was standing in line in the cafeteria. And I realized, you know, for a while, I was thinking, well, Mike's probably not liking this. I'd better not pay attention to him anymore. This is ridiculous. And so, I stopped doing it once or twice. And then, we're standing in line, getting ready to go into the cafeteria with all these other students around. And he says, "Frank, haven't seen you in the shower lately! What's wrong? You tired of looking?" Well, I could've found a place in the sidewalk and disappeared at that point but nothing came of it. Nobody ever harassed me, nobody ever complained. So, I guess they all knew but nobody was talking about it, I don't know. So, 1973, I graduated from Blackburn and I was having trouble because of my history degree, I couldn't find a lot, different jobs. I was working in a lot of places. But one thing I did know: I came home briefly, for about two, three weeks, and I decided I did not want to spend the rest of my life in Livingston, New Jersey with my parents. Whatever else happened to me, I did not want that. And so, what I did was my grandmother actually loaned me some money and she said, "Well, you go out to the Midwest, you find yourself a job." And so, I went back to Carlinville because I had known people there, and found a job. And was a laboring job. Wasn't much and I was not terribly good at it, to be honest, but I did it. And the fact that I could do it and do something for myself and did not feel dependent on people, that really helped me. And so, gradually, I evolved. And then, my friend, Walt Harrington, who I mentioned, he was at the University of Missouri and he was with the sociology department. And he said, "Well, you have to go to a big school. You can't be here." So, I went there, back to the University of Missouri at Columbia for about a year or so. And I took some graduate courses and I was doing fairly well. But it wasn't perfect. It just still wasn't working out exactly as I wanted. So, I ended up going back to the work life and I found an opening for a small magazine in Springfield, Illinois. And my friend, Walt, who had helped me get to the University of Missouri, I said -- and he was just graduating from the University of Missouri's journalism school. He has a combined degree of journalism and sociology and he said, "I'm looking for a job" and I said, "Okay, well, here's this small magazine. Maybe you'd like to start there." And so, he did and he and I worked together for a long time. And he got a little bit nervous with me but not because we were [at it?]. Never proposed anything sexual with him. But one time, he said to me, he says, like, blew up, he said, "We're living too close together here. Just, you know, like, you're eating off me and I can't deal with it." And I said, "Oh, okay, well, I didn't mean to do that." But so, the magazine finally failed and I went back to journalism, back to the University of Missouri and I got a part-time job with the sociology department. And also, I was a graduate student in history. And in 1978, I graduated, I had gotten my master's degree. In that interim, something happened that changed my life, totally. There was a man there, a young man who was working with me in the sociology department. He was a computer guy. He was married but he had been in the Air Force Academy and had left it because of some sort of cheating scandal or something like that. But he knew about computers, so he was handling the computers for this particular professor whose project I was working on. Well, I found this man very attractive and so went up to him and propositioned him, which isn't something -- I didn't do much. At this time, I was also -- the Columbia -- Missouri had a small adult bookstore and so I would go there on occasion. Not often, but on occasion. And Tom [Jokehurst?], this fellow I knew as the computer guy. I said to him, you know, I told him, expressed my interest and then he picked up a copy of the University of Missouri's newspaper and he pointed to an organization called the Gay Liberation Front. And he said, "Frank, I can't help you but maybe these people can." And so, I was, like, okay, I hadn't even thought of that. Why wasn't I thinking of that? So, I went to the meeting and I went to the door and I tried to open the door at the meeting. And a doorknob wouldn't open totally. And finally, I was pulling on it and finally a voice from inside said, "Come on, come on in!" And I did and I've been gay, officially, ever since. MF:That's a good place to pause for now. (break in video) MF:So, I'm back from break and he's just described encountering the Gay Liberation Front for the first time. So, Frank, I'm going to ask you: well, what happened after you encountered GLF? FW:Well, after I encountered these gay people, I suddenly realized that, you know, I don't have to try and pretend that I'm straight because I was trying to date with young women from the sociology department who I was working with. And it was clear to them and clear to me as it had been way back when I was in high school to the women involved that I was not there with them in their space, interested in them sexually or, you know, romantically. And so, I began to see these people there as who I was and a part of what I knew. And so, I began to mix with them and go to club meetings and I didn't really have heavy duty sex with anybody there in that group. But I did get to know what it was like to be a gay person and out and open. And this really changed me. It changed me because then I realized I don't have to try and be something that I'm not. And that was an earthquake for me. People talk about moments that changed their lives and this was the one that changed mine. So, I began to just, you know, go to the gay meetings and this kind of thing and identified myself as a gay person. And once I was sitting in this restaurant in Columbia where a lot of students gathered and I was with some friends of mine from the sociology department and I was talking about being gay, you know? Just a little -- casual, I mean, I'm gay, yes, I'm gay man, and that's what I am. And then, a friend of mine, one of the sociology people who knew all this, he said, "Frank, you know, there's people in this booth over here. They don't like what they're hearing you say, what you're talking about." So, I said, "Well, they're going to have to learn to live with it because I'm going to do it." And nobody came around the corner and smashed me in the face or anything like that, so I guess that was that. But, boy, I tell you, it was -- and I just blossomed as a person. That was just wonderful for me. And finally, I was not only good in history and other things but I was finding -- making a name for myself. And so, by 1970s, 1978, I had my master's degree. And I'd also, at that time, while I was at Missouri, year or two after I joined the Gay Liberation Front, I got a job as the assistant archivist to the University of Missouri. And Ralph Havener and he was, you know, worldly enough to deal with it, you know? It didn't bother him. He was seen with me, it didn't bother him at all. Was a married man and had children, you know, this kind of stuff. But very, very with it for that period of time and it just didn't bother him. And I was working with him and with a woman there, Cora. I can't think of her last name at the moment but she was very nice. And so, we all got along fairly well and I gradually began to read gay publications. I had a good friend who got The Village Voice, so I started reading The Village Voice, started thinking about New York and I'm thinking about, wow, what's all going on there? And then, I got a subscription to Christopher Street, which is a gay magazine at the time and I was reading that and began to see, you know, there's a larger world out here of gay people that you don't know anything about. See, I didn't understand, when Stonewall happened, I was way on the other side of the country. So, I had thought, I mean, it was, like, yeah, well, there was this thing that happened but it was only till years later that I began to realize what Stonewall was. And I think that was the case with a lot of people. I mean, Stonewall grew to be a legend but it grew to be a legend largely because of time, people talking about it and writing about it in the gay community. When we were talking the other day about some of these things, I said and I was thinking, you know, this is how the movement spread and it didn't happen overnight. (inaudible) caught fire about Stonewall and the entire gay world was aware of it, took quite a while to penetrate. So, I was doing this in Missouri and then graduated in 1978. And then, Ralph Havener is the archivist at the University of Missouri, put me in touch with the archivist for the State of Missouri, Gary Behan. And that was a shake-up in my life because I would have to move from Columbia, Missouri, which was relatively, by Missouri terms, enlightened, quote-unquote. But to Jefferson City. And Jefferson City was not enlightened at all. Has a population of thirty thousand people, which was smallest state capital in the country. And I could do my work and do my other stuff but I had to, you know, I had to try and find gay people. And I had, again, to do that and I found some bad -- some guy who was a little bit older than I was, but a gay man. And he clued me in on the scene in Jefferson City. And he was actually from Springfield, Missouri. And believe it or not, Springfield, Missouri had a gay bar. And so, he took me down there to that place once or twice. There was a gay bar in Columbia called the Wheel or the Cartwheel, I can't remember, but it was down there. And so, it was there in Columbia. So, I also went to that sometimes when I was in Columbia and met some men there. But I didn't really get into the Jefferson City scene. And then, there was all the talk, you know, as the gays in Jefferson City used to call it "Closeta City" because there were so many closeted gay men in Jefferson City, one of whom was a very prominent state legislator. And the rumors were circulating around in the gay community that he was doing it in the office, his sexual office -- yeah, sexual office -- his senatorial office with boys he picked up on the monument that overlooked the Missouri River, behind the state capital building. And Missouri had this huge state capital, beautiful building. But there's a monument there and you look over this huge area and his car would cruise, his Cadillac would cruise back and forth there, trolling for men. So, I guess I wasn't worth it, so nobody trolled for me. But anyway, so that was a part of what my life in Jefferson City was like. Meanwhile, my friend Walt Harrington had gotten a job here in Allentown with The Morning Call. And he was working very hard and got involved with the owner of the paper, was trying to change the paper. Paper in those days, in the early '80s was really beginning to make a move, it was out of its provincialism. And the owner's son was taking over and he hired Walt and a bunch of other people and they were doing really groundbreaking journalism stuff. And so, Walt remembered that I had helped him get a job at that magazine in Springfield years before. And so, he contacted me and said, "Hey, I think you really ought to look. [I will try and?] help you get a job here." And he did. And he did. And then, there were all kinds of problems at The Morning Call. Not with me directly but with the paper, the father of the son of the own-- the original family was father and son. The father was not quite ready to retire. The son was pushing. There were a lot of people at the paper at the time who were very disillusioned with all of these new people coming in from outside. And so, there I was in the middle of all this. But it worked out okay for me. A lot of them left. Walt left to go to The Washington Post, which was a dream. And I think if I had asked and tried hard enough, I would have, could have, might have been able to get a job at The Washington Post in the library or some capacity. But by then, I had met Bob and that was a little thing that changed somewhat in my life, my -- approaching it. But I was interested in just trying to find my way in this town of Allentown. And then, I knew that, I sort of suspected that Bob was gay. He didn't come and talk to me. And he will tell you this story, and so I can tell you a little bit about it: at the time, I'd had a problem. When I was in Jefferson City, I had fallen down some stairs in the home which I was and my neck went back like this. So, I had to wear a neck brace. Well, every once in a while, it would act up. So, I'd put the neck brace on. So, I was in the newsroom, walking around, carrying huge piles of books because I was supposed to be a researcher. And then, Bob looked over and saw me and said, "Who the hell is that?" to this woman who was sitting on his desk. And another reporter, "Oh, that's Frank Whelan. Don't you know Frank Whelan?" Said, "No, and I don't want to." Boom. That was the end of it. And so, I said to Walt, like, still contact with him, he was at the Post at this point and I said to him, "Are there any gay people here at The Morning Call?" And he said, "Yes, there are," because Bob was open at the paper, it was not a big deal for him at the time. And I said, "Oh, well, like, how can I meet them?" He said, "Well," he said, "if you people can find each other the way you tell me you can, you'll find him." Click. So, (laughs) okay. Walt and I had a -- interesting relationship. But so, I did. I began to look in back about this local, this organization, this Le-Hi-Ho. I heard talk of it and I went to find out that a lot of these articles about Le-Hi-Ho and about the gay community were written by Bob Wittman. And so, one day, I went over to Bob and he was sitting at his desk and I said to him, "I see you've written a lot of articles about this Le-Hi-Ho organization." And he said, "Yes?" And I said, "I'd like to get to meet these people, get to know these people. Could you tell me about them?" And then, he looked at me and said, "Okay. Let's go have a cup of coffee." (laughs) We went down to the cafeteria, had a cup of coffee, and that's really my first introduction both to Bob and the local Le-Hi-Ho scene. Now, Le-Hi-Ho in that day, in those days, was going through a kind of a transition. You have to understand, AIDS had not broken on the scene yet. I was still doing things with and picking up men at the adult bookstore and having tricks. But anyway, that's what I was doing. And I didn't think twice about those. Nobody thought twice about any of that in those days. And so, I just sort of figured, well, you know, and here's this guy Bob, he's nice, and he knows me, so we started to date a little bit and then go out. And he took me down to New Hope, which was the gay universe back then, you know? And I went down there with him a couple times and, you know, but about a year or so later, we moved into this apartment. It's up the street at 1036 Walnut, where we lived for ten years. So, at that point, Bob was telling me in the early '80s, because I came to The Morning Call in 1981. And so, this previous editor left, his father took over. There were all kinds of things happening. But I was asked to become a writer by the editor that took over. Said, "Can you write?" Said, "Yeah. I've done that." He said, "Well, go ahead and do some, we'll see what happens." So, I began to write local history stories and people seemed to like them. And so, that was the beginning of that. But with Le-Hi-Ho, Bob said to me -- I wanted to ask him questions about it. He said, "Well, I don't know. They're really kind of a strange organization. You know, they're okay, but the real movement that they were pushing is gone and now they have parties where they macramé and it's this kind of thing." And I'm, like, oh, wow, okay. I'll talk about macramé to people. But, you know, I want to meet people, I want to meet gay people. I wanted to meet gay people and I didn't just want to meet gay people at bars, men at bars. I did do that but, you know, it was not working for me because I had been out in Missouri and was not going back in the closet just because of -- I'm in Allentown, so I wanted to be with people. And so, I went to a few of these Le-Hi-Ho meetings and I could see what Bob was saying about it because it was just not happening here for me at those meetings. And then, I met, well, then we went, the new group of people had taken over the Le-Hi-Ho and they were the ones that invited Barbara Gittings to speak at Muhlenberg. And this would have been about 1982, '83. And Bob and I had been living together at that point, had already taken a trip to England. We'd gone to Europe once and so I said, "Let's try it. Let's go see what it's like." Well, then we met people there who were gay people who were out and were interested in gay politics and gay life and gay everything. Nothing to do with doing macramé. So, that's when Le-Hi-Ho began to fade out in the local scene. Never disappeared entirely but it wasn't the gay organization. Couple of other people who I met as a result of this meeting, older people, one a faculty member at Kutztown called Paul Kendall. Another one was Clint Miller, who was an organist at St. John's Lutheran Church over here. And these were people who had larger gay experiences far beyond anything that I'd had. And I became very good friends with some of them. And Paul Kendall and his partner, Paul Reeder, they had been living in the Village in New York. And Paul Kendall got a job at Kutztown, so then they bought a house out in rural Kutztown area, a nice property, ten acres of ground. It was on a mountaintop but they weren't farming, trust me. They did, like, new things. And we would go out to their house and have dinner. And Paul Kendall was a gourmet cook and he would cook these wonderful meals. And we'd sit there and Paul Reeder would make sidecars and I, like, after a while, Bob's driving, we're coming back from their house. And their house is way out in the country. It's, like -- (hums nervously) and I, you know, that, and I was sound asleep, so it didn't bother me. But we got really interested in the gay things from there and Paul Kendall began the process of bringing forward the concept of the Lambda Center, a gay community center. He actually went on local television. He went on Channel 39 and they used to have a "Manager's Chat," they called it. And he came on and explained what this was about. So, he was perfectly open. And he was a professor, you know, so these kind of people just really were the people that I got to know and I really, really liked them. And so, that was my kind of life. That's the life that I saw and I wanted to get involved with. And so, then, Le-Hi-Ho was, like I say, was there and we were part of it. But the Lambda Center begin to consume more and more of our time. And it was just at that point when the Lambda Center was starting to emerge that AIDS hit. I can remember clearly the first day that I knew there was something called HIV or "the gay plague". Or I didn't know what exactly they were calling it at -- that was a day in the summer, July, and I picked up a copy of The New York Times and there was an article by their medical writer, Lawrence K. Altman, about this strange illness that seemed to affect gay people and that the people were calling the gay plague and all kinds of other things. And I read this thing and at first I was just, like, I -- many gay people, you know, at the time, we'd always been hearing these people telling us about, oh, you know, this'll happen to you, you'll get cancer, you'll die, you know, for having sex, gay sex. And so, people were, like, what the hell is this? Who's cooking this up, the CIA, the FBI? What's behind this? At first, I was just not buying it. Just not buying it. And then, they said about it happening in New York and San Francisco and then I began to think, well, maybe it's a New York or San Francisco thing that they're doing. See, I had begun to get even more involved in the Lambda Center. I got on its board. We were doing all kinds of things having to do with being gay. Like, if your partner's involved in the hospital, how to get access to them. If you're doing a will, how to make sure your partner gets -- when you get out of the will, you can actually give to them. And that was something that, you know, I was interested in. All these things were happening. I was thrilled. And the Lambda Center, we had a lawyer come in and explain about wills. We had all kinds of -- or I gave a lecture on the rise of Nazi Germany, the anti-gay movement in Nazi Germany and what happened to the gay people in Germany. And, I mean, I was really moving, things were happening. And then suddenly, we felt the need, the organization felt the need, a number of people within the organization felt the need to create something, what they called the AIDS Services Committee. And then, the roof caved in as far as I was concerned. MF: That might be a good place to pause. (break in video) Record. Okay, this is Mary Foltz. I'm back with Frank. We were just talking a bit about the Lambda Center. And Frank, I'm wondering if you could tell us just a little bit more about what was the impetus to start the center, what was it like getting it up off the ground? FW: Well, the impetus for starting the center really did begin with this professor, Paul Kendall. He was saying and he did say quite a bit that we need an alternative to the bars. We need a place, an organization where gay people can deal with the political realities of life and that this doesn't have to be just someplace where you get to meet somebody. Now, Paul wasn't opposed to that but Paul said his attitude was that someplace, people should have some way to talk to each other besides a drink in their hands. And Paul was not opposed to drinking, I can tell you that right now. But he felt very strongly that a political slant had to be given to gay life. Okay, now we were trying to get -- gay people had begun to win some acceptance in the late '70s, early '80s. Now maybe this is time to have an organization to help, also, other gay people come out to deal with who they were, to give them an idea that, hey, gay is okay. It's normal. It's not odd, it's not weird. And just because you lived in a small town somewhere, you can feel isolated, but there's a place for you to go, a place for you to -- people will understand you. And that was really what attracted me to it and I think Bob to it, because we could remember quite clearly what it was like to feel like you were the only one and nobody else is going through what you're going through. Nobody ever had and nobody ever will again, you know? God or something, fate has dumped all this on you. So, I got together with Paul Kendall and various other people did, too. Paul Reeder, his partner, kind of got a little -- Paul Reeder was kind of a shy guy. He did the stuff but in the background. He did not take an active role in running the organization. There was another friend of theirs, interesting enough, also a Paul, Paul [Boutin?], who they knew from New Hope and who was also from New York, had been in New York. And they all got together and began to think about this organization and to talk to each other and to put a board together that would be the board of the Lambda Center. Paul Kendall very purposefully went on television on Channel 39, the "Manager's Chat," and this was a big moment for us all, too, because we did not -- you know, how would the public take this? Would there be outraged phone calls? Would there be, you know, threats to firebomb the place? What would happen? And Paul was very, you know, he was in a jacket and tie and he was pointing out that he was a professor at Kutztown and that what the Lambda Center was and what the explanation of Lambda was, and that was the beginning of the Lambda Center's birth, really. And when that program was on television, we began to get volunteers. People wanted to, willing to work on the hotline and people called. We began to get people contacting us. One of the things I had not mentioned which I probably should had to do with the inception of Le-Hi-Ho. Now, I only know this because several years ago, about two years ago, Ron Seeds, who founded the Le-Hi-Ho, told me, sent me a letter. A fellow in New York named Dick Leitsch who was with the Mattachine Society, and Leitsch was very influential. I mean, he was the driving force behind making it able for gay men to drink in New York bars without being accused of being gay, you know, and that kind of thing. Or saying, "Oh, you can't have and drink now, you're gay." So, he was involved with that. And so, when they were forming Le-Hi-Ho, this was created basically because Ron Seeds had met this young man, Rick [Balmer?]. And Rick Balmer was afraid of being drafted. This was still the Vietnam War era. The draft was still out there. That would have been 1968, '69. And, well, and Ron Seeds was acting as a draft counselor. And so, the two of them came to the conclusion that there have to be a lot of other gay people like us out there who need this kind of organization. So, they contacted Leitsch at the Mattachine Society in New York and they asked him, "Could you possibly give us a list of people from the Lehigh Valley who have contacted the Mattachine Society about gay issues?" And all they wanted to do with that was to send something out to people saying, "Hey, we're going to form this group. Do you think that there's a need for a group like this in the Lehigh Valley?" Just to these people because, clearly, these people had already contacted the Mattachine Society. And Leitsch did but he said, you know, "We don't want, you know, [you don't want to?]" -- they were a little uneasy about giving out names. So, I think they gave out, like, addresses or something like that instead of -- no names attached. And they sent those out across the Lehigh Valley. And from there, they got some responses, Ron and Rick did, and they began to write the people who responded positively about the creation of Le-Hi-Ho. So, that's how Le-Hi-Ho spread from the Mattachine Society and Dick Leitsch to the Lehigh Valley, because of Ron Seeds and Rick Balmer making the outreach to them, okay? So, that I wanted to clarify. So, now, have that on the record. Well, fast forward to 1984, '83, '84, and, of course, AIDS is now popping up. And this is the time period when a lot of people, wealthy individuals in the community who had lost their family members, in particular Ardath Rodale of the Rodale Press, her son, David, had died of AIDS and he had been in New York awhile and was very active in New York. And so, she came forward with some offer for money. But she refused to give it to an organization that advocated homosexuality. You know, it was, like, oh, oh! And I was, like, yeah, well, if she doesn't like us because we're gay, then why should we even think about this? But, of course, we live in America and money goes and money talks. And the idea of getting money for this AIDS Services Committee was too, too much. And so, they spun off and became the AIDS Services Center. And that was what really infuriated me. I was just livid. I thought to myself, my God, all we've tried to get to make this organization work and for all gays at all levels and the gay issues and now we're going to turn this into AIDS morning, noon, and night. And I didn't care for it. I mean, well, I guess I was being selfish to an extent and I grant you that. I didn't know anybody who had AIDS, I felt this was more like a New York and San Francisco kind of thing as many people in the Lehigh Valley did. And then, I was sort of distant from it. And it was at this point that Bob found or someone came forward to Bob, our friend Brian Foley, later our friend, who told us that he was HIV-positive. And told Bob and he wanted the story in the paper. And Bob wrote that story. I'll let Bob give you a lot of the details of that. That's his bailiwick. And he took that and wrote the first story about it. And except for one or two letters to the editor of The Morning Call, we didn't get a lot of reaction that was negative, any negative reaction. But I was fighting this other battle at the Lambda Center and I was watching what was happening. And it was all AIDS all the time and I was, like, okay, well, yeah, it's important. It's really important. It's really, really, really important. But I could see it was being eaten alive, Paul Kendall could see it was being eaten alive. Whole organization was being eaten alive by people who just weren't -- interested in AIDS. And so, eventually, the Lambda Center folded. But Le-Hi-Ho was still there. And Rick and Ron were gone from the area at that point, or I think they were thinking about leaving, or they sort of got out of their involvement with it because they had some rough periods in the '70s when locally things here were not too pleasant. But I was not personally involved with that, so I can't speak to all that. But I can speak to the fact that we sort of -- remnants of the Lambda Center sort of took control of what was left of Le-Hi-Ho. And we tried to have meetings and we tried [to have?] organizational things and we did a few things. And we had members who were happy but Le-Hi-Ho kind of fell into a group of friends working on gay issues and socializing. And that was what happened to Le-Hi-Ho. Meanwhile, the AIDS groups and these kind of things were moving forward with where they were going. And so, we kind of, well, that's it, you know? They've co-opted us. And I think Paul -- one of our good friends, Clint Miller, this organist from the church said, "We've been usurped." That was his word for it. "We've been usurped." And we were, basically. So, that ended the role of the Lambda Center. But we tried having, we did have some meetings, we had some things, various discussions and that kind of thing. We did attract some people to the meetings but it just was not the same after AIDS, the AIDS bulldozer came charging down on top of us. And so, I continued to go to these meetings. We continued to hold Le-Hi-Ho meetings till finally, Rick contacted us and contacted what was left of Le-Hi-Ho. He didn't know really what was going on, Rick Balmer. Rick, I'm sorry, Ron Seeds I should have said. Ron Seeds did not really know what was going on but he wanted some of the books that were down here, part of their collection and the gay novels and those kind of things, not the papers of Le-Hi-Ho. And so, at that point, as I'm remembering it, and you might want to clarify some of this with Bob because I'm sure he may remember parts differently than I do. But as I remember it, Ron, a lot of these books, he wanted to bring them back to Connecticut up there to use them for a gay community center up there that he was involved with. And so, we did that and then we decided, well, what do you want us to do with these papers and things? And he said, "Well, I don't have any use for them now." He said, "Why don't you keep them and see" -- and so, that was the consensus. Le-Hi-Ho's board, such as we were at that point, said, "Okay, fine, let's put these someplace." "Well, where are you going to put them?" "Well, I don't know. I don't have any space." "Well, I don't (inaudible)." Finally, they realized we had the space upstairs in our attic. And so, that's where they went, for years, (laughs) until, obviously, we decided, when Le-Hi-Ho was on the point of abandoning itself, to vote to go out of business, officially. And Bob and I said to the leaders, we got Paul Kendall and some of these other people. And so, "What do we do with the archives? What do we do with the records?" And Bob and I came up with the proposal and I'm pretty sure, you know, it was us, we came up with it, that we think they ought to be turned over to the Allentown Public Library. It's an Allentown institution, it concerns people involved in Allentown, primarily, and it was something that we felt, at that point, that this would be the best place for them. And we decided that, and we talked to Renee Harris over there, and she was very thrilled. She appeared to be very thrilled ; I assumed she was about it. And so, they came over here and we got the records out and brought them over there to the library. And there they sat till when Susan showed up. (laughs) But when I did this, we did this, when Bob and I did this, I sent a letter to George Chauncey up in Yale, and I said to him, "I know you're interested in these kind of things. I've read your book, Gay New York. I enjoyed it very much and I want you to know that this is where these records are." And I got a record back, I got a letter back from him saying, "Thank you very much. I wondered what had happened to them. I'm working on book on how gays, gay culture grew across the country after Stonewall. And so, thank you for telling me where they are," You know? That was the end of the conversation with George Chauncey. That's all he wanted to know, [as far as I can tell?]. But I was pleased with that and Bob was pleased with that. We wanted very much for those records to be preserved because it was important for us that the country know it wasn't just New York, it wasn't just San Francisco and a lot of things happening with a lot of people across the country. And Allentown had a gay organization six months before Stonewall, a gay political organization. So, if not the oldest, I -- we like to say we were the oldest gay political organization outside of New York and San Francisco, because we weren't the Mattachine Society, obviously. But so, that's what we did and that's where students of -- here you are. Any questions? MF: Well, I'm wondering, after Le-Hi-Ho closes its doors -- FW: Right. MF: -- you continue to be active in the LGBT community. FW: Yes. MF: So, what happens for you after Le-Hi-Ho closes its doors? You've secured a place for the archive. FW: Right. MF: How do you continue to be involved? FW: Well, I continue to be involved with consultations with writing about things about gays. I'm a little bit skittish about some things because, first of all, the younger people, I don't want them to look that I'm interfering with them. I want to share this with you. So, this is something that -- the transition with Liz and Trish taking over the movement and basically, you know, they did -- excellent people, fantastic, what they did to getting the gay rights ordinance in Allentown. That was something we both were involved in, Bob more than I was, and with her. But we felt that Trish, rather Liz was sort of dominating the whole thing. And she was kind of, I'm trying just to make this as, you know, because I don't want to discredit her at all. We think the world of her. But she got involved in local politics with the former mayor. And the former mayor was one of these hard knuckle guys. And so, she began to think that she should be hard knuckle, too. So, she, you know, she was following his lead and we felt that, you know, yes, your issue should be the gay community but why are we following this individual, you know? And there was all kinds of local politics involved. The mayor, Mayor Pawlowski, was involved in one thing and another, playing off one side and another. This was his modus operandi. And he did it, apparently, well enough to -- partly wasn't quite too honest but he did well enough for him. And the people in the gay community, Bob and I, we just felt like we were really shoved out. You know, Liz and Trish were going to run it and that's what they wanted. So, the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, we now appreciate it and we're glad that it's there but it took us a while to deal with that because, to be quite honest, Trish's -- right, Liz's attitude -- Trish is, like, just off there, she was always very nice, we said hi to her. But times were coming when we wouldn't speak to them. We'd see them in places like the farmer's market and just not talk to them because we felt that what they were doing was politicizing, small "P" politicizing it, turning this into something about politics and the mayor and doing whatever they could to boost up the mayor. And the center's creation, Bradbury-Sullivan Center was a payback to them for having supported the mayor. And that was, like, Bob had some problems with them. He can talk to you about those things if you want to talk to him about them and if he'll talk about them. He may not because he was very upset at the time. Bob was working with an organization called HADC. He still is on its board. He resigned but he was a grant writer for them and he was very active, very casually involved with their affordable housing agenda. Mayor Pawlowski had been head of another organization which had rivaled HADC. And so, therefore, Mayor Pawlowski did whatever he could to make HADC embarrassed. And Bob was furious at Pawlowski because of that. And then, of course, Liz Bradbury's [toading?] up with the mayor, you know, it just didn't synch or feel right to us. We thought this was some sort of a political payback. Okay, now Pawlowski's in prison, and so we're vindicated to that extent. But it was a lot of shit, to be quite honest, that we had to go through. And Liz was symbolically -- and, you know, we had such high hopes when she got the ordinance passed that this was going to be a different kind of thing. And it's amazing, when people got around Pawlowski, they became like him. And that was what they wanted to do because they figured they had to do that. These are amateurs playing at politics. And, you know, so they figured they have to be tougher than tough with the way they're playing politics. So, at any rate, so there was some disagreement, a lot of disagreement for a time with Liz, personally. Her personality, she has a very huge personality, and that kind of assumed a lot of things from a lot of people. And the people that had been involved in gay things for years who welcomed her, you know, wanted to see her involved, appreciated her involvement basically felt like we were used at that point. And Bob, you know, Bob got really furious one evening. His boss was up for an award for his work with the community and Liz was using all her influence to support somebody else. So, yeah, that's what was going on here. So, a lot of these things are happening and I know that's not really germane, necessarily, to what we're doing here. But that was the remnants of what happened after Le-Hi-Ho, and so -- MF: We just have to pause right now. (break in video) MF: Okay, I'm back with Frank and we just sort of talked about Le-Hi-Ho and some of the other political organizations in the Lehigh Valley that were working on LGBT issues and some of the tension between different people in the sort of broader Lehigh Valley LGBT movement. I wanted to sort of ask you if you could expand a bit on maybe the kind of Pride scene in the Lehigh Valley because Pride became a major -- you know, Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley became a major organization. FW: Right. MF: Could you share a little bit of your thoughts about that organization? FW:Well, that organization was a great organization and I have no problem with it at all. It was great. You had those parades, we had those events that focused around Pride. We haven't been to one in a while because, well, we just haven't been. But we felt very much, well, this is the story, my story of Pride, what happened to me involved with Pride. We were contacted by the Pride board one year, I think it was in 2006, that they wanted to have an event that focused, that honored the grand marshals of the parade. Our friends Paul and Paul had been the grand marshals one year and so they had selected us, Bob and I. And we were thrilled. We were just thrilled. And we appreciated it. Taking this into account, want to say that The Morning Call never -- knew we were out, knew we were gay. Never, ever, ever in the years that we had been there had any objections. Matter of fact, they would go to Bob, in particular -- not much me but to Bob, in particular, ask him who in the gay community should we talk to? Who do you think we should deal with? How do you think we should deal with these things? So, when Pride advertised it, we were pleased. Well, what also happened was this: an editor from The Los Angeles Times, a lady named Ardith Hilliard came here. And she had just been named executive editor of the Call. And she had her own notions about the role of journalism. And journalists, in her universe, were to be, like, policemen or nuns or priests. You took a vow of journalistic ethics which you did not sully yourself with having opinion. Your opinion was not to be countenanced or whatever you felt about a thing was not to be shared and you should not take a stand on any political issue of the public moment. Well, Bob and I didn't see what we were doing as taking an issue on a political scene. What we were doing is basically supporting this Pride organization and being grand marshalls. Well, I swear, it just, like, blew up. This Ardith Hilliard just began -- she [attached?], established an ethics policy and if you didn't follow her ethics policy, she was going to accuse you of being, you know, something less than an ethical journalist. Well, Bob wasn't at the paper at the time. He'd already left. I was there and I could tell there was a movement afoot to get rid of a lot of the older people, a movement that was coming out of Chicago, and that they were looking for ways to get rid of people who were not young, let's put it that way. And it would probably end up costing them money or something like that was going on. Well, so, I knew of this. And they had a meeting for us and they got us all together and they basically told us that we had to, we should accept a buyout from them. And I said, "I can't. I can't do that. I'm sorry, I can't do that." So, ever after that, my bosses tried to embarrass me, to belittle me, to do whatever they could to make sure that I quit. And I refused to do it. Well, I think they hooked into this ethics policy to use as something that they could work on me with. And so, when it was said I was going to be in the parade, she forbid it. She said, "No, you're not going to be in that parade. You're not going to be in that parade. You can't be in that parade. It's unethical, taking a stand on a public issue, stand on gay marriage," which was kind of crazy, first of all. This had nothing to do with gay marriage to us, it had -- being honored by the gay community for our relationship. That was all. As a matter of fact, as Bob will tell you, he and I were probably people who were skeptical of the idea of marriage as marriage. We would say things, we had long discussions with Paul and Paul at their dinner table about it. You know, gay people should have something. Straight people should have marriage and that's fine and it works for them, okay. But gay people should go beyond that and do something that's a separate kind of thing for gays, you know, that -- it reflects gay life differently than straight people's lives. And that's what we thought. Well, Ardith Hilliard had a certain view of the world and so she wasn't going to accept that. And so, bingo, she basically said, "You're not going to be in the parade. You're not going to be in the parade. You're not going to be in the parade." I said to her, "Ardith, this is about my rights, my rights as a person. Why can't you see this?" And I couldn't understand why she couldn't see this. I mean, she was supposedly an enlightened liberal person from Los Angeles. Oh, and so she just pressed and pressed and pressed. And finally, we just had to say, "That's it. I'm going to be in the parade." And she was yelling at me and browbeating me. Finally, one day, I left the Call. I left the Call. I packed up my things, I walked out, early in the morning, before anybody else was there, and I said, "Goodbye, Morning Call," and I walked out the door and brought my stuff home. And I said, "I'm going to be in the parade." This was a Friday, the parade was the next day. I'm lying on a massage table and the phone rings. And I think I left a number where I would be if she had any questions. Well, she exploded at me. "You're not going to that parade! You're not going to the parade! If you go in that parade, you're fired! You're fired! You're not going to be in that parade!" And I said, "Ardith, I think we're beyond it at this point." So, I ran out of that place and she was browbeating me and browbeating me. "You'll lose your job, you'll lose your job! If you're in that parade, you'll lose your job!" And it's, like, I was horrified. And so, finally, I thought, well, this is the first time I heard why they're doing this to me. So, I just was horrified by the whole thing. And so, that day, the next day, Bob and I got in the car and we drove off and I lost my job. But Ardith Hilliard ended up getting involved in a huge lawsuit. We sued her because she defamed me, which is one of the things that journalism, you're not supposed to do. She basically used an article to call me unethical. The article wasn't about the parade. Didn't mention parade. The article didn't come out about the parade. It came out about Frank Whelan's being unethical. And this is a no-no. You can't do this, you know? So, and they used to give libels -- and so, they libeled me. And the word got out about this and our attorney, Rick Orloski, went after them and eventually, after much carrying on, they were finally -- Rick said, "Okay, I want you, under oath, under oath, under oath and in court to explain what exactly you were doing to Frank Whelan. What exactly were you doing?" And then, they pulled off, away from it. Later on, a woman who was going through a similar thing, was not gay, who was a very, extremely straight woman, she sued the Call. And I was called in to give a deposition about her by my lawyer, who was Orloski, in front of The Morning Call's lawyer, a man named Malcolm Gross. And, yeah, his protégé at the time, a young woman lawyer who was handling this thing. And finally, at the end of this, Orloski pulls out and says, "I have here a document from Susan Hunt. Susan Hunt had been the editor before Ardith Hilliard and Susan Hunt says that this whole thing was cooked up in Chicago to get rid of people who were of a certain age, fifty-five and up. I've got the document." And I've got a document upstairs, too, by the way, and a copy, I got a copy of the deposition. And I just couldn't believe it. And this young lady who was a very talented lawyer, she was, like, (gasps) just crashed. She couldn't -- it really, you know, this whole world crashed that day. But I was so glad and so pleased that I was vindicated. And then, through this whole thing, people stopped me and asked me how I was doing, was everything okay? The community responded to me, not her, not to Ardith Hilliard. They responded to me. So, I ended up -- there on that table is the picture that got us into trouble, picture of Bob and I together. And that appeared in The Morning Call. And that was what caused all this brouhaha and me losing my job. MF: Yeah. FW: Okay? MF: Well, we're about ninety minutes, so -- FW: Okay. MF: -- I think this might be a good place to stop. FW: Cool. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:20:49 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Frank Whelan, July 23, 2019 Description An account of the resource Frank Whelan recounts his life as a gay man, the LGBT organizations he was involved in, his work as a reporter for The Morning Call, and it's impact on the Lehigh Valley as well as his life. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-01 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-07-23 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/d4abf92b9bfeaa3a82dc41c64dd49d37.png e7a5310cbe604bdd2e08986d4e22d395 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Jane Land Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mary Foltz OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-10.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 May 29, 2020 Jane Land, May 29, 2020 LGBT-10 02:01:53 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Mary Foltz Jane Land video/mp4 LandJane_20200529_video.mp4 1.0:|27(10)|62(3)|77(18)|92(14)|111(13)|128(18)|147(6)|168(16)|187(2)|204(7)|221(17)|240(17)|259(7)|280(11)|301(14)|322(4)|343(12)|368(7)|391(13)|412(12)|437(3)|454(8)|479(10)|500(7)|521(8)|546(5)|563(16)|580(12)|597(15)|616(16)|639(7)|658(10)|675(10)|694(9)|713(14)|730(12)|751(15)|776(18)|797(17)|816(19)|833(14)|852(18)|871(11)|892(3)|915(12)|934(12)|953(8)|976(13)|995(9)|1010(6)|1027(9)|1040(15)|1059(8)|1072(15)|1097(9)|1114(3)|1135(11)|1152(11)|1175(6)|1196(7)|1219(4)|1240(15)|1257(14)|1280(15)|1299(4)|1324(9)|1349(5)|1364(12)|1387(11)|1408(3)|1431(12)|1452(5)|1473(9)|1492(3)|1515(4)|1536(13)|1559(6)|1580(8)|1595(2)|1614(4)|1635(7)|1656(14)|1683(2)|1704(10)|1725(5)|1748(2)|1771(5)|1792(8)|1815(8)|1834(7)|1853(6)|1870(11)|1887(2)|1906(11)|1927(7)|1944(5)|1961(3)|1978(16)|1999(8)|2016(9)|2035(7)|2054(14)|2073(9)|2088(16)|2109(12)|2128(11)|2149(18)|2168(14)|2189(12)|2208(10)|2229(10)|2250(10)|2269(6)|2292(9)|2313(11)|2336(2)|2359(15)|2382(12)|2405(8)|2426(11)|2447(14)|2468(6) 0 https://youtu.be/vTO9qsDg640 YouTube video 4 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: All right. My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Jane Land to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. Jane and I are meeting on Zoom because there’s a pandemic going on, and today’s date is May 29, 2020. So, Jane, just first, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; JANE LAND: Oh, sure.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? 0 125 Early Life/Family&#13 ; MF: Okay, great. Thank you, Jane. So to start our discussion today, I’m wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your childhood?&#13 ; &#13 ; JL: My childhood, it was a long time ago, -- I’ll be seventy next month -- and I grew up in the country. My father was a chemist. He had a PhD in chemistry, and he worked for a large pharmaceutical company. And my mother had a library degree, a master’s in library science, but she was a homemaker until I was in seventh grade. I had only one other sibling, my sister, an older sister. She was six years older. She passed away a few years back. So I grew up in the country, and it was a great place to grow up, and I think it had a bearing on who I am. I spent a lot of time outdoors, playing outdoors, and my friends that I played with, my playmates, -- there weren’t too many kids around -- they were all boys. 0 518 College Pressure MF: So you described wonderful adventures as a child in the outdoors and making rafts on the river. And you described a kind of self-sufficiency, a kind of self-knowledge earlier -- early on in your life. What kinds of things were you interested in beyond the outdoors as you were going through middle and high school?&#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Well, you had asked about -- just mentioned something about education and I... There was a lot of unspoken pressure I think to get a college degree. Everyone in the family was educated. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I struggled with that. I really was not keen on going to college because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I have a lot of college credits, but I never got a degree in anything. [laughs] So I did start out by going to college after I graduated. I went to Bucks County Community College for a year and learned... I signed up for data processing. I had degrees in data processing, which was the old punch card system, ones and twos on the punch cards, and that was really boring to me. But as part of that, one of the courses I had signed up for at Bucks County Community College was accounting, and I learned that I liked accounting very much, so I changed majors to accounting. 0 755 Looking Towards the Future JL: So after I got divorced from my husband, I started searching for -- thinking about going back to college. I did attend some college, some more college. I was in Minnesota with my sister-in-law who had gone there for her master’s degree. I took some courses there, I came back to Muhlenberg, took some courses there. Eventually ended up living in Bethlehem and attending Moravian College, and I was getting a degree in social work. And then, one semester before I was due to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in social work, I realized that that was not what I wanted to do. I still hadn’t figured out what I was going to be when I grew up, what I really wanted to do. &#13 ; &#13 ; I was talking with one of my psychology professors at Moravian, and when you asked me to do this oral history with you, I did spend some time thinking about what were the people and the things that influenced my life the most. And that college professor, he -- a psychology professor, his name was Tony LoGiudice. And I was talking with him about so actually getting depressed thinking about spending the rest of my life being a social worker. Social work is a fine profession, but it just was not going to be my thing. And he said, “Well, you know I can give you some -- a battery of tests, and they’ll show what you have an aptitude for. I’ll send them away, and they score them, and then when I get them back, get the results back, we can sit and talk about what you might do when it showed your strengths were.” 0 1112 Schooling &amp ; Career&#13 ; MF: This is a wonderful story that you’re sharing now. I’m curious if you could just talk a little bit about why you felt compelled to explore social work and accounting prior to thinking about other things like mechanics like -- and auto mechanic courses in particular. And I guess what I’m trying to ask is like during that time period of the ’70s, what seemed possible to you as a woman laborer? Did you feel that there were specific careers like social work that were open to women and others that were closed? So I’m just curious why you were -- you thought social work in the beginning even though you weren’t really enjoying the classes. So could you talk a little bit about that, the logic that you had for the courses you were choosing prior to really finding this field that felt really compelling to you? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Sure. Well, accounting was simply by accident. It was a course requirement that I was taking. It fulfilled some liberal arts requirement for a degree, and I just discovered that I really liked it. I really liked working with numbers. I’m not a mathematician, that’s an entirely different thing than -- accounting was just basically arithmetic, but I really excelled at that. And it’s funny that fellow Doug, that boy that used to come over to play, we would often play bank. We would play banker in the -- in my room, and we would do things with money, and it was funny. But to this day, I still do volunteer work as a bookkeeper for the church and have for several churches. So it wasn’t really anything conscious there. It was just something I found I really had a knack for. 0 1659 Being a Woman in a Male Dominated Workplace MF: So you described finding this career in -- entering Northampton Community College. I’m curious, what was it like to be the only woman in that -- in the classes for mechanics at Northampton? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Well, the first thing I did was I didn’t tell my family what I was doing. I stopped going to Moravian College and enrolled at NCCC -- in Northampton County Community College, and in that program. I went to the classes for several months pretty much the first semester before I was in a situation where I had to admit to a family member that I was no longer going to Moravian College, [laughs] so... And there were several family members -- and this is beyond my immediate family. I can remember my uncle in particular sending me -- as he lived in Illinois, him and my aunt, and my uncle sent me this scathing letter about what a big mistake I was making not finishing my college degree in social work and that the idea of being a mechanic was a really bad idea, and that I should really reconsider what I was doing with my life. 0 2351 Social Life in Bethlehem/NOW&#13 ; MF: At this point, you were divorced. What was happening in your social life during the -- that time in Bethlehem and then while you’re moving into this new career? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: At that time, I got involved with NOW, became a member of a chapter in Bethlehem. I was just a member but trying to get plugged into women’s rights and find some support there, that kind of thing. So I belonged to that for a while, and eventually, there was another chapter in Allentown. I don’t remember if it was called -- I think it was called Lehigh Valley rather than Allentown NOW. I’m pretty sure that’s Lehigh Valley NOW, and that’s where I met Dixie White who was an activist that I’m sure you probably know about. I know that ; Liz Bradbury had talked to me about that connection and finding my name in some of Dixie’s memorabilia once Dixie passed away. 0 2415 International Women's Conference 1977 JL: [...] I got the job in August of 1977, and I took the job with the stipulation that even though I wouldn’t have been entitled to any kind of vacation after just joining the company, that I be given time off to go to the international women’s conference that was held in Texas in 1977. I’ve been chosen as a delegate for that. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What was that conference like when you went to Texas? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: That was pretty amazing. I was young though. I was twenty-seven at the time, I wish that I had -- and just newly plugged into NOW and women’s rights, and I wish I had -- I could’ve appreciated it more because the women that attended that... I got in as a delegate. Dixie White said, “Why don’t you apply to be a delegate for this?” and I said, “Okay.” 0 3018 Experiences with the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community MF: It’s 1977 or ’78, around there, you got a great job at PPL. Are you dating at this time? Are you in the LGBT community at this time, and if so, what was that like? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Dixie and her partner [Carol?] were always on the lookout to find someone for me to match up with, and I did eventually. I’m trying to remember how we exactly met. Oh, I know. So I was working at Dave &amp ; Wayne’s, and for the moment, I can’t remember exactly how I met Diane, but -- or maybe it was actually another woman. But this woman had a house on Carlton Avenue in Bethlehem where she was -- and I got to know her and [Diane?], my first lover. [Annie?] had a room on the third floor of this house that wasn’t in use. It was actually the attic. &#13 ; &#13 ; I needed a cheaper place to live to meet my expenses and so I talked Annie into letting me make the attic a livable space and letting me live there. So I insulated it and did some other work to it and ended up living there, and that’s where I met Diane. She lived there also. She had rented another room. So there were four women living there, Annie, Diane, me, and a woman from -- who was a professor, a visiting professor at Lehigh University. 0 3388 Coming into Lesbian Identity MF: Good. I don’t think we talked about -- how did you come into a lesbian identity? When did you start to get a sense of your sexual identity? Was it in the ’70s, was it earlier? How did that happen for you? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: I came out to myself in 1977. I realized looking backward that I’ve been in love with my camp counselor, [laughs] in love with a girl that I met at Girl Scout camp also, and just realized that, wow, I’m not heterosexual. Those relationships aren’t working out. Even when I was going to mechanic school and working at Dave &amp ; Wayne’s and also working at Paul’s Garage, I still dated men, but it wasn’t doing it for me. And I realized when I got involved with NOW and were around all these women that it was incredibly exciting because I realized that this is who I was, that I was a lesbian. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What was it like to live with in Diane in Catasauqua together when you built that, that home together? 0 3618 Life in the 1980s MF: So you’re living in Catasauqua, you’re working at PPL, what -- how -- what changes in your life in the ’80 s are you -- how do you sort of enter into the ’80s? What are the big things that are happening for you in those early years? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Well, once I got a job with PPL in the garage, you start out as a handyman. In garage is basically you’re a gofer, you run for parts, you jockey cars around. Pretty much that’s what you’re doing. You don’t really get to do any mechanical work. So I had gone from doing pretty much -- doing a lot of mechanical work at Paul’s Garage to being a gofer. 0 4253 Being a Lesbian at Pennsylvania Power &amp ; Light MF: Well, I mean, that has -- that kind of leads me to wonder about what it was like to be a lesbian working at PPL during that time period. I’m curious, was there homophobia in the workplace? What was it like to be at PPL as a lesbian person? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Yeah, that was really tough. It was hard enough being a woman in a nontraditional job, and then to be lesbian on top of it was really hard. The whole time I worked in the garage, I was closeted, I was not out but every-- virtually everybody knew it. [laughs] Well, I don’t know ; it’s kind of weird. The guys who gave me a hard time, they seem to know it, they seem to pick up on it. They guys who were my friends didn’t exactly seem to pick up on it because actually several of those friends along the way expressed that they had a romantic interest in me in one form or another -- two of them did. &#13 ; &#13 ; We managed to weather through that and not go in that direction without me saying I am not interested in relationship with a man other than a friend. And we managed to maintain our friendships. Eventually after I left the garage, I ended up in -- I was a mechanic for a number of years and then a job came along as the parts person. They called it the transportation material handler. And the fellow who was in that job, they needed to have a second person, and his name was [Dave?]. He came to me and asked me, “Would you please apply for this job?” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, the pay is about the same, and I’m not a mechanic, and you’re really good at what you do. And there’s some men that are applying for the job -- going to apply for the job that I do not want to work with, so would you please apply for the job?” 0 4612 Fighting for LGBT Benefits at PPL&#13 ; MF: So PPL today has an LGBT staff group. At that time, were -- did you know other people at PPL that were lesbian or gay, or was it mostly like people knew but didn’t know or was it -- &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: No, you knew, you knew who the gay people were there. Your gaydar told you who they were. You gingerly approach them and then they acknowledge they were gay also. So in ’95, they started cutting back on services, and they went through the transportation department. Because of the union, I was -- the fellow Dave who asked me to take that job as the parts person, he was there first, so they cut back to one material handler in every garage, so I lost my job in 1995. I went up to the service center, which was also on the same property and became a dispatcher for -- a power dispatcher for repairs of electrical -- sending people to repair electrical equipment for storms and that kind of thing. And that’s when I became out. I was actually outed by a lesbian up there who was not a very nice person and decided she would do that for me whether I liked it or not. 0 5347 Work with Other LGBT Organizations in the Lehigh Valley/AIDS Outreach MF: So while you were working with GLOW at PPL, were you aware of other LGBT organizations in the valley that were working on similar issues? Or did you have connections with other activist organizations in the valley? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: We did. Air Products was one we often -- that we were connected to, and we would often talk with, maybe meet with here and there. They were ahead of us in trying to get benefits, but in the end -- I’m not sure if they ever got benefits in the end. The people at Air Products were -- all the people we worked with were professional people, people with degrees, so they were considered management employees at Air Products. So I think because of that, Air Products acknowledged them earlier than PPL acknowledged our gay and lesbian workers. But I think because of maybe financial issues, the company was -- I’m not sure why that Air Products seemed to struggle. You would have thought they would get all the benefits before we did. 0 6077 Spirituality MF: Well, we’re nearing the end of the interview, and there two sort of areas that I’d like to explore just a little bit further. I’m interested, you’ve mentioned a few times about being a Quaker in the ’70s. I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about your spirituality? I’m wondering if you could just discuss a little bit about your emergence into the Quaker church and maybe the evolution of your faith? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Okay. Well, I started going to Quaker Meeting in the early ’70s I guess. And I mentioned my psychology professor, Tony LoGiudice went there, and that’s how I ended up attending a Quaker Meeting. He said that I might like this place. Maybe he recognized I was a lesbian -- that was years before I knew I was a lesbian -- I don’t know. But maybe just because I was in a nontraditional -- looking to get into a nontraditional job or probably because Quaker Meeting was a place that allowed people to -- it was not dogmatic, a dogmatic type of religion. &#13 ; 0 6363 Connection Between Faith and Lesbian Identity&#13 ; MF: It sounds to me like your faith -- the faith communities that you’ve been involved in, the Quakers and now the Unitarian Universalist, have been really affirming of both women and LGBT people. Like the MCCLV church in Bethlehem has been -- in Bethlehem and Allentown has been really supportive of LGBT people. Would you say that you ever struggled as an lesbian with your faith? Or would you say that your faith always confirmed the value of your identity, of your sexual identity? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: I didn’t have a religious faith until I was a young adult and did a bunch of searching at different churches to try to find where I fit in. I did that for a good number of years. So it wasn’t until maybe like 1972 -- I would have been twenty-two at the time, twenty-three, around there -- that I found Quaker Meeting. So it’s probably to my advantage that I didn’t have much of a religious upbringing because even not having a religious upbringing, I still struggle with -- that I was a gay person and that this was wrong in society’s eyes. 0 6463 Meeting Michele MF: That certainly was the case for me being raised Catholic ; it was a little bit of a challenge. Okay. So since we’re nearing the end of the interview, I’m wondering if you could share the Michele story? Like how did you meet Michele, if you could talk a little bit about this primary partnership in your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Well, it’s pretty bizarre. [laughs] Before Michele, before I met Michele, I had two other lovers. The first one was Diane, and the second one was Janice. And Janice was with me a couple of years and maybe four I guess it was, and she had two children. We all lived together, and Janice had been a straight woman and then she decided that being a gay woman was what she wanted. And she did that for four years and then decided she wanted to be straight again. So she left me and I had the house still in Catasauqua, the town house. 0 6869 Effect of Marriage Equality on Relationship with Michele MF: What did marriage equality do for you and Michele? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Oh my God, it was huge. It was huge, just huge, and I’m surprised. We were so shocked that we got the right to get married in Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania. It was 2014, May of 2014 when they passed that, and my brother-in-law who lived in Texas -- my sister had passed at that -- by that time -- my brother-in-law who never speaks to me called me. He’s an extremely quiet guy, extremely quiet -- called me and said, “I just heard this on the news.” He was the one who told me that it had been passed in Pennsylvania. &#13 ; &#13 ; Later that day, I got -- the phone rang, and I picked it up and it was -- I didn’t understand what I was listening to at first, but it was a conference call with the gay... I can’t even remember at the moment which gay group it was, but they were having a conference call, the lawyers that had fought for these rights and talking about what had happened, what had transpired, and what it meant. And so when I say it was huge, we’ve always been married whether we could be legally married or not. We’ve always been married in our minds, in our hearts. But it meant that we no longer had to maintain huge insurance policies to try and help pay for -- you know if one of us passed away, the other one would inherit it. 0 7198 Closing Remarks MF: [...] But before we do that, Jane, I just want to ask, is there anything that we really -- that we missed today that you really felt you wanted to share in this interview? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Not that I can think of. I will share one story, and I don’t know why this just popped in my head. But when I retired from PPL by that time, I had -- it was a good company to work for, good benefits and good pay, so I kept taking jobs that were there. I always considered the garage my home. That’s really who I am, really where I spent the most time, but I moved on to other jobs. But when I retired, I had not worked in the garage. I retired in 2012 ; I had not worked in the garage since 1995. When I retired, it was the guys in the garage who threw me a party, and that meant the world to me. 0 MovingImage Jane Land describes her childhood in Bucks County, her experiences at Moravian College in a social work program, and her movement to Northampton Community College to study mechanics where she was the only woman in the auto mechanic program. Land goes on to discuss her work as an auto mechanic at a variety of shops until she took a job at PPL in their garage and eventually as parts manager. With reference to her work, she discusses sexism and homophobia in the workplace and her work on gay and lesbian rights for employees of PPL. Beyond her discussion of her career, Land describes LGBT community spaces in the 1970s and 1980s, her work with N.O.W. in the 1970s (including attending the 1977 International Women’s Conference in Texas) and AIDS Outreach, and her religious affiliations with Quakers and UUC. Toward the end of the interview, Land discusses marriage equality and her spouse, Michele Strohl. INTERVIEW WITH JANE LAND MAY 29, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: All right. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Jane Land to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. Jane and I are meeting on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on, and today's date is May 29, 2020. So, Jane, just first, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me today. JANE LAND: Oh, sure. MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? JL: My name is two syllables long, so you have to listen carefully, it goes by fast. It's Jane Land. Last name is spelled L-A-N-D, and first name is J-A-N-E. MF: Thank you. And can you please share your birthday? JL: June 28, 1950. MF: All right, so prior to starting this interview, you and I talked a little bit about consent for the interview, and I'll start by just asking you, do you consent to this interview today? JL: Yes. MF: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made available online in searchable formats? JL: Yes. MF: And do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats including articles, websites, short films, presentations, or other formats that might become available? JL: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you will have at least 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts that you might want to delete, or to withdraw the interview from the project? JL: Yes, I understand. MF: Okay, great. Thank you, Jane. So to start our discussion today, I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your childhood? JL: My childhood, it was a long time ago, -- I'll be seventy next month -- and I grew up in the country. My father was a chemist. He had a PhD in chemistry, and he worked for a large pharmaceutical company. And my mother had a library degree, a master's in library science, but she was a homemaker until I was in seventh grade. I had only one other sibling, my sister, an older sister. She was six years older. She passed away a few years back. So I grew up in the country, and it was a great place to grow up, and I think it had a bearing on who I am. I spent a lot of time outdoors, playing outdoors, and my friends that I played with, my playmates, -- there weren't too many kids around -- they were all boys. The family on a lot adjacent to ours, -- we had three and a half acres, and it was rural, so everybody had some acreage -- there were four boys there so that's primarily who I played with. We didn't have a lot of toys, so we invented things all the time to play. And we traveled quite a distance to play. We had a creek that was maybe a mile away, and we would ride our bicycles into town sometimes. But mostly, we played outside in -- at the creek and in the fields and in -- climbing trees, building treehouses, and building rafts for the creek to navigate on the creek and dams on the creek and catching crayfish and putting them in our pond that we would make. I can't think of all the ways in which we invented things, but we have very few props, very, very few toys, so we had to use our creativity a lot. MF: So what part of the country did you grow up? Where was the closest small city to your country home? JL: I grew up in Northern Bucks County, Pennsylvania, so I was between... The closest town was a small town called Telford, which is actually in Montgomery. And I lived just three houses from the borderline between Bucks and Montgomery counties. I went to Pennridge High School and graduated from there in 1968. MF: And culturally, what was it like in that area around Telford? What was the community spirit like? What kinds of values were promoted in that country community? JL: I don't know. I just know the immediate families that my parents socialized with or had a connection to, basically neighbors. My parents were both educated, my father more than my mother even. My sister went on to get a master's also in biology. And a lot of the people they socialized with were similar middle-class families that the father had an education, mother may or may not have had an education, often did but didn't use it. As far as political -- politically, I'm not really aware politics went -- things that were talked about. MF: I'm curious about your relationship with your parents. You described their emphasis on higher education that they really believed in education. What was your relationship like with your parents when you were a child? JL: My father had to -- he had a job with -- at that time, it was called Merck Sharp &amp ; Dohme, it later became Merck Incorporated. And his commute to work from our home was maybe like twenty-five, 30 minutes. But at the time, I was eight years old, he took a job in -- had to take a job with the company in North Jersey, so he traveled. He commuted about three hours a day, so I didn't see much of my dad. When he was around, he was -- he had a fleet of cars that he would use to get to and from work. When one would break down, he'd have to grab another one and leave it for the weekend when he could fix it. He was a very bright man and very self-sufficient. He didn't have a lot of time to talk or spend with me, but I do remember watching him do things a lot, watching him fix the cars and anything that broke in the house, that kind of thing. My mother was I think a depressed person and so I didn't have -- you know, she kept to herself a lot. So I pretty much had to learn how to be self-sufficient early on. MF: So you described wonderful adventures as a child in the outdoors and making rafts on the river. And you described a kind of self-sufficiency, a kind of self-knowledge earlier -- early on in your life. What kinds of things were you interested in beyond the outdoors as you were going through middle and high school? JL: Well, you had asked about -- just mentioned something about education and I... There was a lot of unspoken pressure I think to get a college degree. Everyone in the family was educated. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I struggled with that. I really was not keen on going to college because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I have a lot of college credits, but I never got a degree in anything. [laughs] So I did start out by going to college after I graduated. I went to Bucks County Community College for a year and learned... I signed up for data processing. I had degrees in data processing, which was the old punch card system, ones and twos on the punch cards, and that was really boring to me. But as part of that, one of the courses I had signed up for at Bucks County Community College was accounting, and I learned that I liked accounting very much, so I changed majors to accounting. But then after a year, I ended up getting married. This was during the Vietnam War. I married a man who then ended up getting drafted into the service, and we traveled. He was first stationed in Phoenixville and then we traveled to San Francisco. When he was drafted, his -- after he finished basic training, he became -- he was assigned the career of a medic. And since it was during the war, medics was not a good occupation to be in. In times of war, they always try to take the medic and the radioman out of commission, so -- the enemy that is. So he signed up for more time and became kind of the equivalent of a M*A*S*H nurse, a field hospital nurse, and... The only reason I mentioned that because, obviously, that was a mistake I made in my life, getting married to a man. It took me a while to figure that out, but I mentioned it because I got the chance to travel a lot. So I lived out in California for a while and got to travel around the country. MF: Well, I'm curious, how did -- did you -- how did you two meet, and how did that relationship develop during that really tumultuous time of the Vietnam War? JL: He was the nephew of a high school professor, a high school teacher that I actually never had in high school. But he was -- Uncle John was a very -- a freethinker, and as it turned out, a closeted gay man. But he was a very dynamic teacher, and he would hold these -- he would have get-togethers with his students where they would come to his house and talk about all kinds of ideas. Really a very, very good teacher who would really expand your horizons, get you to thinking about different things in life. So after I got divorced from my husband, I started searching for -- thinking about going back to college. I did attend some college, some more college. I was in Minnesota with my sister-in-law who had gone there for her master's degree. I took some courses there, I came back to Muhlenberg, took some courses there. Eventually ended up living in Bethlehem and attending Moravian College, and I was getting a degree in social work. And then, one semester before I was due to graduate with a bachelor's degree in social work, I realized that that was not what I wanted to do. I still hadn't figured out what I was going to be when I grew up, what I really wanted to do. I was talking with one of my psychology professors at Moravian, and when you asked me to do this oral history with you, I did spend some time thinking about what were the people and the things that influenced my life the most. And that college professor, he -- a psychology professor, his name was Tony LoGiudice. And I was talking with him about so actually getting depressed thinking about spending the rest of my life being a social worker. Social work is a fine profession, but it just was not going to be my thing. And he said, "Well, you know I can give you some -- a battery of tests, and they'll show what you have an aptitude for. I'll send them away, and they score them, and then when I get them back, get the results back, we can sit and talk about what you might do when it showed your strengths were." So we did that, and we met. He said, "Your mechanical ability is extremely high." I said, "Well, what would I do with that?" He said, "You could be -- well you could be like -- you could be like an electrician or a carpenter or an auto mechanic, something like that." I said, "Really?" and he said, "Yeah, you know this is a really high score in mechanical ability and ability to analyze things and investigate them, be able to apply logic to come up with answers," so I said, "All right." Well, I'm not good at science, so I don't know how well I'd do at being an electrician, understanding the science of electricity. And at the time, it was 1975, and there was a recession going on and so the construction trade was really struggling. I was doing very poorly, so that was a -- that would be a really poor career choice because it'd be tough to make a living and so I chose mechanics. So my next step was where to go to school to become a mechanic, how do I do that. But I quit Moravian one semester shy of getting my degree in social work and one year short of getting a minor I guess, you'd say, in accounting or a dual degree in accounting and enrolled in Northampton County Community College. But before I did that, I went there. I was going to enroll there because they had an auto mechanics training course. But this was 1975, and it was like, would they even let me in as a woman. So I talked to somebody in admission, and somebody said, "Well, why don't you -- I'll give you the phone number for the fellow who runs that training program, and why don't you talk to him, see what he has to say whether he'd let you in or not?" So this fellow's name was George Gerstenberg, and I called him up. He just turned out to be a young fellow. He was not that far from my age, pretty close to the same age -- this was in 1975 -- and told him what I was interested in doing and why. I told him that after I had taken this test and learned that I had this -- realized that I had this ability. I thought back in when I was going to Moravian, I worked my way through college cleaning houses, and along the way for some reason -- these were often households that had educated adults in them -- and the men were not very handy. And the women would ask me if I could fix things and actually really insisted that I try to fix things ; I don't know why. This one woman asked me one day if I could fix a lamp, and I said, "Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure I could fix a lamp because I'd watched my father do it." She said, "Well, here, take this, go and fix -- see if you can fix it and then bring it back." So the next week, I brought it back, and I made the repair, and it worked again. She said, "That's great. I have a mixer that doesn't work, you think you could fix my mixer?" And I said, "I don't know about that. I have no idea about a mixer." She said, "Well, why don't you just take it home and try it, see what you can do with it? It's not working, so if you can't fix it, fine, but if you can, it's broken and I could use -- I'll pay you to fix this mixer." So I took it home, and I took it all apart, and that's something I realized that I used to do when I was a kid. My mother had a friend that had a son my same age, Doug was his name. He would come with his mother over to our house to visit, and we would squirrel ourselves away in my bedroom, and we would take things apart, so... [laughs] So it was just simply by taking it apart, it was -- had a bunch of, I don't know, hair and fuzz, dust stuck in it, and it just needed a good cleaning and lubrication again, and I put it back together, and it worked. So I talked to George Gerstenberg and he was like -- I was really surprised. He was like, "That would be terrific. It would be great to have a woman in the class." He said, "You'll be the only one," but he said, "I welcome it. I encourage you to try that. I think it would be wonderful." So because George thought it was wonderful, I got an opportunity. I'm not sure I would have gotten that opportunity if he hadn't thought it was wonderful back in 1975. MF: This is a wonderful story that you're sharing now. I'm curious if you could just talk a little bit about why you felt compelled to explore social work and accounting prior to thinking about other things like mechanics like -- and auto mechanic courses in particular. And I guess what I'm trying to ask is like during that time period of the '70s, what seemed possible to you as a woman laborer? Did you feel that there were specific careers like social work that were open to women and others that were closed? So I'm just curious why you were -- you thought social work in the beginning even though you weren't really enjoying the classes. So could you talk a little bit about that, the logic that you had for the courses you were choosing prior to really finding this field that felt really compelling to you? JL: Sure. Well, accounting was simply by accident. It was a course requirement that I was taking. It fulfilled some liberal arts requirement for a degree, and I just discovered that I really liked it. I really liked working with numbers. I'm not a mathematician, that's an entirely different thing than -- accounting was just basically arithmetic, but I really excelled at that. And it's funny that fellow Doug, that boy that used to come over to play, we would often play bank. We would play banker in the -- in my room, and we would do things with money, and it was funny. But to this day, I still do volunteer work as a bookkeeper for the church and have for several churches. So it wasn't really anything conscious there. It was just something I found I really had a knack for. One thing that I do realize is really instrumental in my childhood was my father never said you can't do this, you can't do that, a girl can't do this, a girl can't do that. He never ever said those things. And so in a silent way -- he was a pretty quiet guy, in a silent way, he was very encouraging that there wasn't anything that I couldn't do that -- if I put my mind to it, which is pretty much what he had done with his life. He was an only child whose father had died when he was still in college and so he pretty much -- I imagine he'd been in the same kind of circumstance where he just had the confidence, and he just decided there wasn't anything he couldn't do. He was trained as a chemist, but he is busy teaching himself how to repair automobiles and all kinds of equipment. The water pump died, he'd be hauling it out of the well and replacing that. Just anything that broke living in the country where there weren't many services or people who were trained in services, you had to do it on your own. You had to learn how to do it on your own, and that's pretty much what he did. So I think just being around that even though I remember as a kid, I'd ask -- as I got older, I'd ask if I could help because he was basically working all the time. Whether it was going off to work for a paid -- for a salary or working around the house, he was just always incredibly busy. So I'd ask if I can help, and usually within sixty seconds or less of me then trying to do what he had told me I could -- I should do, he'd be impatient and take it away from me because he just didn't have the time. I realize that in retrospect. But I think that was a huge -- an influence on me that he, in his silence, never gave me the idea that there wasn't something I couldn't -- anything I couldn't do. So when I went to college, I probably took -- I probably decided on a degree on social work for the same reason that virtually everyone who goes into social work and psychology goes into it for, which is their chapter one or their childhood had some major dysfunction in it. And then you were -- you went on to college and enrolled in those two disciplines to try and figure out your chapter one. And so it helped me just figure it out some and -- but the thought of -- and I enjoyed the courses. Along the way, I had to do a service project in the community, and I ended up at Northampton County prison. There was a small women's detention center there, and it was a very small area. They kept them segregated from all the men because they thought that would be a huge problem, and they basically had nothing to do. They were in this tiny area and had nothing to do. So I started a program there. It wasn't hard to get them to... I thought it would be really difficult to get the prison system to take any suggestion I had, but I think they were concerned about public opinion and the press. I started a program there where I got some sewing machines donated, and the women had sewing machines. And they actually had some women guards I think who had some sewing ability who then helped them learn how to sew as a career, as a way to make money when they would get out of prison. And so I enjoyed that part of social work, but it was not what I wanted to make a living out of, trying to help people figure out their own problems. I had enough trouble figuring out mine. [laughs] MF: Well, now, I'm curious about -- you said you were drawn to social work to figure out your chapter one. What did you figure out in the social work program about yourself or your family? JL: My mother lost her mother when she was -- I think it was ten -- ten years old and so my mother -- I figured out that my mother was stuck at that age. She had a trauma. There weren't many psychologists or psychiatrists back in those days. People didn't go for therapy particularly if you lived out on the country, so she pretty much was stuck at that age. And a lot of her life was tied to that, so she spent -- so I think she was a fairly depressed person and I didn't... I actually didn't see a lot of her growing up. She was a librarian as I had mentioned, and she spent a lot of time reading, escaping. My father was a good man, but I think he was angry that his partner in life was not being much of a partner. So he had a pretty bad temper. And my older sister, she was six years older, and six years older is like a lifetime at that age. I learned all this from social work and -- social work curriculum and my classes in social work and psychology that she picked up the dominant parent's behavior, so she had a very bad temper. So I spent my childhood trying to stay out of the reach of depressed and angry people [laughs] and a good part of my -- a good portion of my adult life too, so... MF: So you described finding this career in -- entering Northampton Community College. I'm curious, what was it like to be the only woman in that -- in the classes for mechanics at Northampton? JL: Well, the first thing I did was I didn't tell my family what I was doing. I stopped going to Moravian College and enrolled at NCCC -- in Northampton County Community College, and in that program. I went to the classes for several months pretty much the first semester before I was in a situation where I had to admit to a family member that I was no longer going to Moravian College, [laughs] so... And there were several family members -- and this is beyond my immediate family. I can remember my uncle in particular sending me -- as he lived in Illinois, him and my aunt, and my uncle sent me this scathing letter about what a big mistake I was making not finishing my college degree in social work and that the idea of being a mechanic was a really bad idea, and that I should really reconsider what I was doing with my life. My father was like, "Okay, great, and what will you do with it when you're done?" I said, "Well, you know I hadn't gotten that far yet," and he said, "Well, if you want to go in to business for yourself, let me know and I will help you." And my sister who I had a terrible relationship with because she was so angry also all the time -- she was -- had a very unhappy childhood. Because she had the same parents I had but also because she was -- she was very heavyset. She had extremely curly hair that she couldn't manage back in those days, -- the hairdressers weren't used to that -- and she also had terrible acne, so she -- I think those things were all factors in our life that made her a pretty unhappy and angry person. But I was surprised. She said to me when -- and she was the one I had to admit. She kind of pinned me down in a conversation long distance, and I had to admit to her that I wasn't going to Moravian anymore and told her what -- I had to admit to her what I was doing. I was scared that, uh-oh, now, I'm going to get in real trouble, and she surprised me. One of the few times in my life that she supported me, and she said, "You know, I wish my husband could go back and take something that he really enjoyed doing because he's not happy doing what he's doing." So I ended up really different from my family. I didn't want to spend my life as an angry, depressed person. I didn't want to... It wasn't a degree that mattered to me, it was that I found something that I had a passion for, and I found that I just loved mechanics. I just adored mechanics. I did well at school. I had so many credits that I didn't have to -- I transferred all my liberal arts credits and fulfilled all those -- that criteria and just was taking the automotive course and still working to support myself cleaning houses. I never finished the auto mechanics either. I did well, I think I was maybe first in the class, I can't really remember. But I took enough courses that I got it, and I was confident that I could keep learning. And then I decided that. The money was running pretty thin, I didn't want to take out loans, and so I got a job as an auto mechanic and finished learning to be a mechanic by working in a garage. MF: How did the other students in Northampton respond to you as the only woman in that program? And then I'll continue that, like how did male mechanics respond to you on your first jobs out of college? JL: You know I don't remember anybody in the auto mechanics class giving me a hard time because George wouldn't have allowed it. But I was busy learning. I didn't really care what they were doing. [laughs] I was busy learning, and it was just -- I was like a vacuum cleaner, I just sucked it all up, I just loved it. It was definitely my thing. I did well in classroom and well in the shop. Probably the question that you're asking should be asked of the guys that I went to school with. My guess is that they weren't... They were a little intimidated by me, I would imagine, because we were all students, and it's one thing to have another male student -- if you're a male, have another male student by yours side, and you're learning. But to have a woman doing better than you were doing in school was probably hard for them. I know for sure later on in life when I worked as a mechanic, that was one of the things that I recognized. If I did well as a mechanic and as being a female mechanic, it was really hard for men who weren't great at what they did to work alongside a woman who did a better job at mechanics than they did. It was a problem, and I realized that later on in my career, so... I first worked at a place in Bethlehem that might still be there. It was called Dave &amp ; Wayne's. What I did was when I decided that I'd had enough education and really couldn't afford anymore and needed to get a job, I just went door to door to garages asking for a job. Now, I don't believe anyone hired me because they thought that I could do the job at that time. I believe I was hired because it was a novelty, and they thought it would be fun and that -- probably that they could like... It would be fun to see me fail is what it would be. So at Dave &amp ; Wayne's, I did okay. I think the biggest problem I had was the male mechanics there would come over and want to talk, want to chat, want to flirt. Sometimes, it was great that they'd come over because I could learn from them, but the bosses did not like it. And so I was there maybe three months, something like that, and I got fired because I wasn't getting enough work done. I wasn't getting enough work done because these guys kept coming over and [laughs] interrupting me from working on a customer's car. It was the only job in my life that I was ever fired from, and I was devastated. It was not Labor Day. It was right before Labor Day. It was probably on a Friday. I know it was on a Friday. It's probably the Friday right before Labor Day weekend. Yeah, they came over to me in the morning and said, "We're going to let you go, so you can finish out your day, and we'll give a paycheck and then you can be on your way." So I thought about it for a few minutes, and I thought, well, I've still got half a day to go look for a new job. I had to support myself. I mean, I'm sure my family would've helped me if I asked them, but I didn't want. I wanted to be my own person. I felt if I was going to be in this career, and originally I felt they weren't going to approve of it, I needed to pay my own way. So after about half an hour, I went to Dave and Wayne, and I said, "If it's okay with you, I'll leave now," so they let me go. It's about eleven o'clock in the morning, and I did the same thing all over again. I started pounding the pavement, going to different garages looking for another job, and by the end of the day, I had another job in a garage. I'm sure it was for the same reason that I worked for Paul's Garage on -- in Fountain Hill on Broadway. I don't know if that's still there. I'm sure he's no longer in business because he was older than me but not by much. And I got a job there, I'm sure for the same reason, and actually, he used to work -- he started out his career working for Dave &amp ; Wayne. I didn't know that at the time. And so I'm sure I was hired there because I was going to be a novelty also. But Paul was -- he was owner of the garage, and he had a part-time mechanic working there, a young guy named Jeff, and I think that he was more -- a little bit more practical. I think he felt that he could take advantage of me pay-wise -- that he could use me to do a lot of work and pay me little and get away with it. So that's what happened. I worked my butt off for him. I became really fast at what I did. He taught me things. I learned how to do valve jobs on engines really well, so... He liked the work I did on that and so I would do a lot of the valve jobs, engine repair, upper half of the engine on a lot of vehicles. I would do other things too. I got my state inspection license while I was there, and I did a lot of tune-ups, that kind of thing, so... And you asked, how did men -- how did people feel about me being a woman working in this career. I remember at Paul's Garage, the customers that gave me the hardest time were women. Women play a part in discrimination also and stereotyping also. So for the women, a lot of them looked at me and were like, oh my God, I don't want a woman to work on my car, she doesn't know what she's doing. I need my car fixed, I don't want it to be wrecked. And so those were my toughest customers were the women. Sometimes, Paul would tell them, "Well, we'll get your car fixed, and we'll call you." And then after the car was all fixed and working fine, then he would tell them that I had worked on it. He would do things like that. He wasn't terribly supportive of me, but he was in the sense that he gave me a job. You know, 1975 to give me -- to give a woman a job in the garage was pretty big deal, so I have to give him credit. MF: At this point, you were divorced. What was happening in your social life during the -- that time in Bethlehem and then while you're moving into this new career? JL: At that time, I got involved with NOW, became a member of a chapter in Bethlehem. I was just a member but trying to get plugged into women's rights and find some support there, that kind of thing. So I belonged to that for a while, and eventually, there was another chapter in Allentown. I don't remember if it was called -- I think it was called Lehigh Valley rather than Allentown NOW. I'm pretty sure that's Lehigh Valley NOW, and that's where I met Dixie White who was an activist that I'm sure you probably know about. I know that ; Liz Bradbury had talked to me about that connection and finding my name in some of Dixie's memorabilia once Dixie passed away. So I learned the one thing that NOW was good for -- I've never been real big on being a member of groups. I'm just more of a solitary person who needs to do my own kind of thing. But what I got out of NOW was a sense of connection and sisterhood and some support in that way. And also, I met a woman named Sharon who worked for PPL -- it used to be called Pennsylvania Power &amp ; Light -- and she said, "You ought to apply for a job at PPL." I said, "Well, it's an electric company, what would I do for them?" She said, "Well they -- you could be a mechanic in the power plant." She said, "Or they have a garage where they repair their vehicles, you could work for the garage maybe." So I applied there. And you asked how men reacted to me working in this nontraditional field for women, I'm the only person that I ever encountered at PPL who had to go through four interviews to get my job. The job interviews were not about... Well, and first of all, they didn't just -- I didn't just put in an application, and they called me. I put in an application, and I didn't hear from them in several weeks, so I called their HR department, and they told me, "Yeah, we'll get to it, we still have your application, we'll get to it." So I called maybe two or three times and so after maybe three times of calling them, they brought me in for an interview. And so the interviews were all about not my mechanical ability. Didn't ask me, how do you do this, or how do you fix that, or what do you think would be wrong with the vehicle if this happened? Because some of the people who were interviewing me weren't just HR people. Most of the interviews -- I think maybe the first interview was probably the HR department, and the other three were people who were in admin in the garage, in the transportation department. And so they'd want to know things like, well, if you're out in the field working on equipment, construction vehicle equipment like bulldozers or digging trucks, whatever, and you have to go to the bathroom, what will you do? Those are the kinds of questions [laughs] they wanted to ask. Or what are you going to do when some guys swears in front of you? I mean that's what those three interviews were all about. I remember only them asking me one -- somewhat a mechanical thing, which was if you have to go out and fix a flat on a line truck, how would you go about doing that? Because you're talking about a tire and a rim -- an 1120-tire with rim weighs more than I do. So I told them how I would use leverage and just like a guy would do. He's not going to pick up a 1020 [laughs] and throw it on to -- the studs on the wheel, so... So eventually, I got the job. I got the job in August of 1977, and I took the job with the stipulation that even though I wouldn't have been entitled to any kind of vacation after just joining the company, that I be given time off to go to the international women's conference that was held in Texas in 1977. I've been chosen as a delegate for that. MF: What was that conference like when you went to Texas? JL: That was pretty amazing. I was young though. I was twenty-seven at the time, I wish that I had -- and just newly plugged into NOW and women's rights, and I wish I had -- I could've appreciated it more because the women that attended that... I got in as a delegate. Dixie White said, "Why don't you apply to be a delegate for this?" and I said, "Okay." So I did, and I wasn't picked, and this was a process that went on for several months, maybe a half a year or something like that. She said, "Well, try again, but this --" She said, "If you want to get in since you're not really plugged into the leadership, you're my friend and I'm a leader in NOW, but since you're not really plugged into the leadership or haven't had any -- an active role in leadership," she said "you have to find -- you have to be a minority. Why don't you try being a specific minority, and maybe you can get in to fill a quota that way with the conference?" I said, "Well, what minority would that be? I'm a female and I'm white, what minority would be --?" She said, "Well, you're a Quaker, so apply as a religious minority," and so that's what I did, and I got chosen because I was a Quaker, which is a not very well-known type of religion, so... And that's where I knew Tony LoGiudice from, my psychology professor. That's how I ended up at -- being a Quaker was because he was also a Quaker and attended the Lehigh Valley Quaker meeting. So I went to the conference, and it was incredible. Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, you name it, Gloria Steinem, they were all there. The conference was to set -- it was run by parliamentary procedure and was to set what were the important things that women needed to pursue to become equal citizens in our country and in the world. It was really an international thing, and so... I don't know ; they picked out maybe 20 platforms of things that needed to be worked on from an equal rights amendment to women having access to educa-- equal access to education, equal acce-- equal pay for jobs. It was pretty heavy stuff. [laughs] MF: Did you bring back some of those platforms to the NOW organization in the Lehigh Valley? What were the major Lehigh Valley, the kind of platform issues for the NOW organization here? JL: I did not. I ended up not being much of a NOW member. I'm trying to think of a way to say this. There was a lot of dissension about how things were going to be run, and I'm a doer and not so much a talker, and so... They got rather enmeshed in trying to figure out who was in power and where the leadership was going and so I drifted away from there pretty quickly. MF: It's 1977 or '78, around there, you got a great job at PPL. Are you dating at this time? Are you in the LGBT community at this time, and if so, what was that like? JL: Dixie and her partner [Carol?] were always on the lookout to find someone for me to match up with, and I did eventually. I'm trying to remember how we exactly met. Oh, I know. So I was working at Dave &amp ; Wayne's, and for the moment, I can't remember exactly how I met Diane, but -- or maybe it was actually another woman. But this woman had a house on Carlton Avenue in Bethlehem where she was -- and I got to know her and [Diane?], my first lover. [Annie?] had a room on the third floor of this house that wasn't in use. It was actually the attic. I needed a cheaper place to live to meet my expenses and so I talked Annie into letting me make the attic a livable space and letting me live there. So I insulated it and did some other work to it and ended up living there, and that's where I met Diane. She lived there also. She had rented another room. So there were four women living there, Annie, Diane, me, and a woman from -- who was a professor, a visiting professor at Lehigh University. MF: So what was the community like? I mean that sounds great to have a house of four women in Bethlehem. What was the community like in the '70s, the LGBT community? JL: 1977, it was pretty closeted. You had to worry about losing a job, not just losing a job but having... It was difficult to be out because you had to really worry about how you were going to make a living because it was not -- it was -- people were pretty ugly about it back then. Diane and I ended up being partners, moved out of Anne's -- Annie's house and bought a home in Catasauqua. You could go to Rosemary's bar in the Flatiron building in the east Allentown off Union -- very close to Union Boulevard, and that was it. You found each other. You're gaydar helped you find sisters and brothers out there in the community. You found ways to manage to hint at things that you each would safely realize that you were both gay. And then you would see each other at each other's homes, do those kinds of social events, and go to the bar and be able to dance and let loose there. And there were a couple of festivals around. There was a good one called [Sister Fire?] down in Maryland every year, those kinds of things. MF: What was Rosemary's bar like? Will you describe what a night out at Rosemary's might look like? JL: Rosemary's bar was a good location. It was on this little -- literally on this little triangle of land. It was pretty much the building, so you didn't have to -- the wonder of the bar didn't have to share the building with someone else. There wasn't a neighbor that could -- a neighboring business that could complain about a gay bar being there. And it was a great place where you could just go and be yourself. They have a deejay, a number of deejays, really good deejays. You could go and dance and drink and just relax and be yourself. And Rosemary kept that bar going for a lot of years, and it's a pain in the butt to run a bar and she was just -- you know, a lot of times back then, the bar owners were really supportive of the community. They would have special events and that kind of thing. It was like a home. Back in those days, Diane and I used to have -- on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, we would have open house at our house. Any of the friends that we had, gay and lesbian friends could come and visit and hang out at our house. We put out the invitation every year because a lot of gay people could not go home to their families with their significant other. Maybe they couldn't go home at all even by themselves. They had been ostracized by their family, they had been abandoned, turned away by them -- by their family, and they were not welcome. So it was always a place where people could come to be together and instead of being depressed about their family's treatment toward them, where they could feel good on a holiday. MF: Good. I don't think we talked about -- how did you come into a lesbian identity? When did you start to get a sense of your sexual identity? Was it in the '70s, was it earlier? How did that happen for you? JL: I came out to myself in 1977. I realized looking backward that I've been in love with my camp counselor, [laughs] in love with a girl that I met at Girl Scout camp also, and just realized that, wow, I'm not heterosexual. Those relationships aren't working out. Even when I was going to mechanic school and working at Dave &amp ; Wayne's and also working at Paul's Garage, I still dated men, but it wasn't doing it for me. And I realized when I got involved with NOW and were around all these women that it was incredibly exciting because I realized that this is who I was, that I was a lesbian. MF: What was it like to live with in Diane in Catasauqua together when you built that, that home together? JL: Well, it was an existing home, and actually, we had lived also in -- we moved from the South Side of Bethlehem to a row home in Allentown that we owned with a third woman who was -- so the three of us on the house together. She was much older. She was from Quaker Meeting also. So it's tough living, two people together, let alone with three or four. So first we lived together, four women and then it was three women and then we realized you just need to live with your significant together because it doesn't work out too good. So we ended moving to a town house in Catasauqua. And you had to be careful about what you were doing that you didn't offend the neighbors. It was still a fairly closeted situation, although the street we lived on in Catasauqua, we had just picked it as a house that we liked well enough and could afford, and it turned out, it was like lesbian heaven there. We had two women, two gay women that -- oh, sorry, we had two lesbian couples that lived on that street. It was just a circle, a town house circle, two lesbian households and two gay men households on that street, and they were -- in this development, there were three circles. On the other circles, there were also gay people, so it turns out that there was a lot of gay people there. So we also had that support that even though we weren't being really out in the neighborhood, we had each other there, and somebody we could turn to or socialize with. MF: Who knew that about Catasauqua? I've got to say like who knew? JL: [laughs] Yeah. [laughter] Right, we didn't know. It was just an accident. Well, I don't think it was just an accident ; I think it was meant to be. MF: So you're living in Catasauqua, you're working at PPL, what -- how -- what changes in your life in the '80 s are you -- how do you sort of enter into the '80s? What are the big things that are happening for you in those early years? JL: Well, once I got a job with PPL in the garage, you start out as a handyman. In garage is basically you're a gofer, you run for parts, you jockey cars around. Pretty much that's what you're doing. You don't really get to do any mechanical work. So I had gone from doing pretty much -- doing a lot of mechanical work at Paul's Garage to being a gofer. But I did that for a couple of months, and it didn't take long until I got into the mechanics. They had a mechanics training program there, so... It was a four-year program where you worked and you also went to school. And so once I got started at being a mechanics, I had shift foreman whose name was Al Koch. And when I think back -- when you ask me to do this, I thought back to who were the people in my life that really made a difference, Al was another one. Just like Tony LoGiudice and George Gerstenberg, Al Koch, my shift foreman, right away let me inspect cars and trucks. The transportation department, PPL was responsible for all the equipment, any -- everything up into cranes, all the equipment they owned or leased at the time and did the repair work on. Al recognized that I had my state inspection license, which usually if you went through PPL's training program, you didn't get a chance to sit for your exam and become a state inspection mechanic until year three of your training. He gave me the opportunity to do that right away. He was encouraging, but he was fair. He didn't treat me differently than the others. He treated me a little differently in the sense that I remember very keenly one day he paired me with a guy named Jack, another mechanic there. And it was to do a routine maintenance, lubrication, change oil, that kind of thing on a line truck, a digging truck that would dig holes to plant poles -- and to do the maintenance and also the state inspection on it, so pull wheels to look at brake lining and that kind of thing. Jack was not a very good mechanic. He hated working with me. He refused to speak to me the entire time that we did the work on this vehicle, so I ended up having to... All the parts of the vehicle that he checked over, since he wouldn't tell me what the condition was, I had to do the whole -- I had to do his part of the job also. And so when it was done, it had taken me twice as long as it should have taken two people to do that job because I -- he wouldn't talk to me. And I went to Al, and I said, "This is what happened." I said, "Please don't put me with someone again." He said, "I understand, I won't, I won't do that to you again. You're a junior mechanic with a state inspection license, I put you with someone who was farther along in the program, but obviously, it was a problem, it made --" He didn't say all this out loud, but this was the gist of the interaction we had that this was an embarrassment to this man, plus he wasn't a very good mechanic, so he never did that again. So I did all my work on my own. Very rare that I work with someone, it was extremely rare. So Al was really good about that, really supportive. He protected me in that way. When I worked on the garage, I would think of it this way. I looked at the men that I worked with, and there were the guys who were like, it's no problem that you're a female working on this job, and those became my friend, they're my friends and good friends. And about a third of the mechanics, it was like, okay, so you're here, that's fine, no big deal, but we didn't become close. And then the last third, they were the problem ones, they were the ones -- and it took me a long time to understand this. It took me a while to understand this, a couple of years, but I came to understand that those men that really hated working alongside a woman or working with a -- or having -- the idea of having a woman as a mechanic. Those men were ones that were not good mechanics, they were not confident in their skills, they didn't really understand mechanics very well, it was not really their thing. And those were the ones that were -- gave me the hard time, all the time. They were constantly threatened because... And I realized, they might -- being in a situation where I do a much better job than they did and then what did that mean about them. And so those were the ones that would sabotage my work where when I'd walk away from the vehicles and go to the restroom or whatever, come back, they'd had poured transmission flood down the carburetor so that when you start it up, it would smoke like crazy. They'd change the -- loosened the distributor and changed the timing on the engine so that the engine would backfire and wouldn't run, those kinds of things, so... But then, there were the guys who realized that I could be helpful because I have little hands and I could get in really tight spaces. Where when you're working on the hydraulic systems of a line trucks, the digging trucks and the bucket trucks, that I could get in these very tight spaces to get fittings loosened or started again to get them threaded and all kinds of places that were little places, so... But the one thing I remember when I first became -- started to do mechanical work there, a lot of the guys were upset with me, and finally after a couple of weeks, the union steward, the shop steward took me aside and said, "Look, you have to slow down. You're working way too fast, and you're making us look bad, so you need to slow down," [laughs] so I did. And, yeah, I have to say I always enjoyed working for a union. The union is real -- really instrumental in me being able to keep my job. The union was a fair enough union. It had its problems just like everything does in life, but they were about keeping the union employees employed. And so there could be... Along the way, I wanted a place to change my clothes and shower just like the guys did. You're filthy dirty, and you have to crawl into your vehicle and drive home. They didn't have a locker room for the women. The first thing they did was to take -- to -- in response to my request, the union stood behind me, but management was not about to build one woman a locker room, and so what they did was they changed my hours by half an hour. So I would use the men's locker room at the beginning of the shift and at the end of the shift. My shift was half an hour different, so I could use the women's locker room. The union made -- meant that I was going to get -- I was a mechanic trainee just like the other mechanic trainees ; I got paid the same amount they did. So I really appreciated working for a union. But I think that I was a pretty darn good mechanic. I'm not one to toot my horn, but I do think I was a pretty darn good mechanic, and that's what changes people over time. That's what changes discrimination. So along the way occasionally, women would bid into the job of transportation handyman, and it was always a mixed blessing. It would be nice to have another woman there, but if they weren't putting out a thousand percent, then it was -- made my life harder. And along the way, the women that did come through, pretty much all of them were in the category that they weren't really mechanics. They didn't have the training or the inclination or the, yeah, aptitude for it. And over time, it no longer became a problem for me because they did recognize that I was a good mechanic. And they'd say things like, "Oh well, you're different." But I had plenty of people from other departments, like the linemen would come in to drop off their vehicles, and they come up to me and say, "You know you're taking the job away from a man. You don't belong here. You're taking a job away from a man," and I'd say, "Well, who's going to support me? I have to have a way to support me too. Why shouldn't I be able to have this job?" "Well, you should marry a man and then there would be -- and then that job would be there available for a man." MF: Well, I mean, that has -- that kind of leads me to wonder about what it was like to be a lesbian working at PPL during that time period. I'm curious, was there homophobia in the workplace? What was it like to be at PPL as a lesbian person? JL: Yeah, that was really tough. It was hard enough being a woman in a nontraditional job, and then to be lesbian on top of it was really hard. The whole time I worked in the garage, I was closeted, I was not out but every-- virtually everybody knew it. [laughs] Well, I don't know ; it's kind of weird. The guys who gave me a hard time, they seem to know it, they seem to pick up on it. They guys who were my friends didn't exactly seem to pick up on it because actually several of those friends along the way expressed that they had a romantic interest in me in one form or another -- two of them did. We managed to weather through that and not go in that direction without me saying I am not interested in relationship with a man other than a friend. And we managed to maintain our friendships. Eventually after I left the garage, I ended up in -- I was a mechanic for a number of years and then a job came along as the parts person. They called it the transportation material handler. And the fellow who was in that job, they needed to have a second person, and his name was [Dave?]. He came to me and asked me, "Would you please apply for this job?" I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, the pay is about the same, and I'm not a mechanic, and you're really good at what you do. And there's some men that are applying for the job -- going to apply for the job that I do not want to work with, so would you please apply for the job?" And at that time, I was getting really tired of the guys who would sabotage my work and so I thought, oh, maybe -- it was the same pay, maybe this would be a good idea. It broke my heart to stop being a mechanic but I... And it was a hard transition for me because I love what I did. I just was tired of the struggle every day coming and having to deal with some men [laughs] who just couldn't wrap his head around the idea that I would be -- as a woman, be working there. It was a blow to their ego and so there was a certain number of men who it was constantly -- they were out to get me, but like I had said before, not all of them. But I decided I would do that. And so I became material handler and really kind of became the parts manager, even though that was not a title, that was not my title. Because the other fellow really wanted to just do the paperwork, pay the bills for the parts, and this, that, and the other, and wanted me to be the one to find the parts for all the equipment we have. And so it turned out, I ended up loving that job. I could use my mechanical background to do that job, and I could use my knack for accounting and my knack for problem solving. I would find parts sometimes all over the world. I remember one time, I had to -- I ended up pursuing -- looking, and I would read the diagrams for all the vehicles and all the hydraulic plumbing and everything. We had a cable stringer that needed a part, and the cable stringers were used a lot in dock work. You'd think, well, what do you need a -- why would you go to...? I went to the manufacturer of this particular piece of equipment, and it was used for dock work, but it was also used to string electrical cable, heavy -- really heavy cable. I ended up talking to somebody in Italy to find this part. And I was equally as good at doing that job if not better because I was -- I got to operate by myself. I used my mechanical ability and also my problem-solving abilities, and I felt I was really appreciated by the management there. In fact, sometimes, one of the poor mechanics would ask me for a part, and I'd think, why in the world would you want that part, and I'd ask him. I'd say, "Well, what's the problem with the vehicle?" and they'd say, "Well, it's doing this or that or not doing this or that, and I want this part." So I'd say, "Okay," and then I'd have to go to the foreman and say, "So-and-so wants me to order this part. This is what's wrong with it, I don't think this is the problem, I think he needs this other part instead." And the foreman would say, "Yup, you're right, go ahead and order it." So that didn't make me popular with that third group of mechanics who weren't competent at their job. But I was on a much more level playing field because I was the only game in town. They had to come to me for their part. So if you treat me too badly, you might not get the part you needed in the time you need it. [laughs] MF: So PPL today has an LGBT staff group. At that time, were -- did you know other people at PPL that were lesbian or gay, or was it mostly like people knew but didn't know or was it -- JL: No, you knew, you knew who the gay people were there. Your gaydar told you who they were. You gingerly approach them and then they acknowledge they were gay also. So in '95, they started cutting back on services, and they went through the transportation department. Because of the union, I was -- the fellow Dave who asked me to take that job as the parts person, he was there first, so they cut back to one material handler in every garage, so I lost my job in 1995. I went up to the service center, which was also on the same property and became a dispatcher for -- a power dispatcher for repairs of electrical -- sending people to repair electrical equipment for storms and that kind of thing. And that's when I became out. I was actually outed by a lesbian up there who was not a very nice person and decided she would do that for me whether I liked it or not. But in retrospect, it turned out to be one of the best things in my life because I was just tired of trying to be closeted. And so that's when I got involved in -- shortly thereafter, another woman, a lesbian there -- PPL announced they were going to start diversity groups, and a woman activist there named Donna asked that there be a gay group and so that was begun. And I ended up writing the proposal for lesbian and gay rights for employees. Because at that time, if you were a heterosexual employee of PPL , you got all kinds of benefits for your family. And if you had -- you were in a gay relationship because you couldn't be married, you couldn't get any of those benefits. So the biggest argument I made in the proposal I wrote for all kinds of benefits for gay and lesbians was you are -- it should be equal pay for equal work. And that's what you say you have here at this company, but it's not because all of the single people are subsidizing the married couples because they get a huge advantage cost-wise of paying for the benefits for the rest of their family. Whereas our lesbian or gay partner does not get those benefits and has to go out and buy them elsewhere. It took seven years. I think it was seven years... I'm not sure about the timing here whether it was -- it took -- I think it took seven years and maybe seven years for management to get the benefits. It was either five years and seven years or seven years and nine years. Management got the benefit first, employees that were gay and lesbian that were management, and then it took two more years to get the union to give us the benefits. And I still to this day cannot believe that the union stood behind us. [laughs] It wasn't easy to get them to stand behind us. It was actually from the larger union leadership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who pretty much forced our local IBEW to give gays benefits. Prior to that time, if your significant other in life died -- and we had several of these situations. If that person died, you might not even get the time off to go to the funeral. MF: Not all of our listeners, especially younger generations, will be familiar with the kinds of benefits that you were asking for. But what you've just described is like the ability to attend a funeral, the ability to leave work to go to a hospital if a loved one is experiencing illness. I'm sure life insurance might have been something else. But could you describe a few of the benefits that you really identified in that white paper and that you really fought for those seven years for all gay and lesbian PPL employees to have access to those benefits? What were they? What did you really prioritize? JL: Sure. The first benefit we got was a single benefit and what was the right to go -- have the day off to go to the funeral of your partner. That was the first one. And you had to declare that you had a relationship, and you had to prove that you had that relationship by -- now, this isn't something that anybody who was married had to do. They didn't have to turn in their marriage certificate in order to get benefits. They just had to say, "Hey, this is my wife or my husband, and these are my kids' names, and these are their birthdates," and that kind of thing. But the very first benefit we got was a funeral benefit and bereavement benefit. And that was that you could have from the time you're -- just like the straight people got, from the time your partner died if you had them registered as your partner to the time that the funeral occurred, you could have those days off and then you had to return to work the day after the funeral. I know in dispatch, there was someone who was in that case. Well, actually, in that department, it was called -- the fellow held the job of system operator, and his partner died. And because system operators are -- you must -- there aren't a lot of them, and they had to be on the job 24/7, and they did a lot of overtime just like the people in dispatching did, this fellow, they would not let them go because they didn't have a replacement. And so I can't imagine, I can't imagine how much -- how hard that must have been and how much that must have hurt. I was amazed that the fellow hadn't even -- hadn't quit the company, but he weathered through it. There was nothing for us when we started, nothing. When I say it took the seven and nine years, that was to get health insurance. So we're looking to get health insurance, and you couldn't be married at that time as a gay person. So you were looking to get that health insurance. I remember there was one woman in the -- our group there at PPL. The name of the group was called GLOW, Gays and Lesbians in the Workplace, and [Tammy?] was her name. She would call her her wife even though they legally weren't married, and her wife had two children. Actually, the two children were born by artificial insemination in the time that they were together. And so Tammy was a great poster child for our cause because we would occasionally be able to have a meeting with someone in higher management, and we would bring Tammy in to plead her case -- she was great. And Tammy worked as a power plant operator out in Central Pennsylvania, and she will come in. She was a tough broad, but she would tell them, "It breaks my heart when my children are really sick, and I don't have health insurance for them. And I must try to take them to the hospital and get care for them, and I can't get care for them really very well because I don't have insurance, and my partner does not have insurance." And so eventually, the best that they were able to do was to get her partner and the children who were her biological children, she had carried them, on Medicaid. But still on Medicaid, the services were really poor. And so she was one of the big factors that helped turn them around, but it was a lot of factors that -- a lot of work over seven years to try to get them to give health insurance. When you got health insurance, they made it clear that -- the legal department at PPL made it clear that if you left the company -- well, let me not even say left the company. If you retired and you're -- you went on Medicare then because you're a retired employee, that your spouse would no longer -- if the spouse was younger, they would be kicked off of the PPL insurance policy because you weren't legally married. So actually, the rights that I fought for, for all those years, I never ended up using because my partner and now, my -- who's now my wife, Michele was eight years younger, and she's self-employed. We looked at that and said, "You know, I'm going to retire, you'll get bumped off. You have a preexisting health condition and you will end up not being able to be insured, so we're going to have to continue insu-- you're going to have to continue insuring yourself because I don't dare put you on this policy. Because, one, you'll be in your late fifties when I will retire, and trying to find you an insurance policy would be very difficult, that we could afford." It was really already unaffordable, I mean, until I was able to get married -- till we were able to get married and then I could go back to PPL and say, "Okay, now even though I'm retired, you need to put my wife on your insurance policy." That was in 2015, not very long ago. [laughs] But by that time, Michele was paying twelve thousand dollars a year for health insurance as a self-employed person. So when you say help younger people understand, this was huge. Also, I was able to get a life insurance policy for Michele when I was at PPL. That was huge because when you couldn't be married, you're talking about if one of you passes away, the other one has to pay fifteen percent inheritance tax on everything you have accumulated in your life together, and Michele and I have been together thirty-six years, and we maintained -- early on, we got life insurance policies against each other so that if one passed away, the other one would have the life insurance policy to pay the inheritance tax on everything we had built in life. MF: So while you were working with GLOW at PPL, were you aware of other LGBT organizations in the valley that were working on similar issues? Or did you have connections with other activist organizations in the valley? JL: We did. Air Products was one we often -- that we were connected to, and we would often talk with, maybe meet with here and there. They were ahead of us in trying to get benefits, but in the end -- I'm not sure if they ever got benefits in the end. The people at Air Products were -- all the people we worked with were professional people, people with degrees, so they were considered management employees at Air Products. So I think because of that, Air Products acknowledged them earlier than PPL acknowledged our gay and lesbian workers. But I think because of maybe financial issues, the company was -- I'm not sure why that Air Products seemed to struggle. You would have thought they would get all the benefits before we did. MF: Were outside of employee -- like industry-based LGBT organizations, were you aware of social or health-based LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley? Or were you involved with any other organizations outside of the -- outside of GLOW at PPL? JL: On the individual level, I got involved with a community service group, a gay community service group called AIDS Outreach. I didn't have the time to try and dig out when I had actually all the -- when I started volunteering for them, but I'm pretty sure it was somewhere around '92, '93 maybe that I volunteered to be a worker at AIDS Outreach. At that time, the AIDS epidemic had been going on for some time, and it was getting activists. AIDS activists were getting their stories out more and more in the press. There was still a hugely negative sentiment around someone with AIDS. When I started with that group, what that group did was I was, what they called, an AIDS buddy. So they would pair a volunteer to be a support person for someone who had AIDS that had come to AIDS Outreach for services. And so as an AIDS buddy, I was there to be the cheerleader, the person who would help when someone is really sick, get groceries, to be an advocate for services, which might be health services, all kinds of things. And when I started, I volunteered for that job because I had read an article in the newspaper and I thought -- just it moved me to tears. I thought it's hard enough to die, let alone die without a single person in the world there to support you, to give you comfort, to touch you. People were just scared out of their minds by AIDS. And AIDS Outreach not only provided the buddy program, but they educated the public that it's like, you're not going to get AIDS from this person who has AIDS by touching him. You're not going to get it unless you have a transfer of blood products or -- and that kind of thing. You are more of a danger to that person who has AIDS and a compromised immune system than they ever will be of you. If you're not having sex with them, you're not swapping saliva or blood or semen -- I'm sorry to be graphic, but that is basically a product semen -- and so you're not going to get AIDS, and you're not really at risk at all. The first AIDS buddy I had when he was hospitalized -- every time he'd be hospitalized, they had him in a quarantine room. The people would -- or the nursing staff would come in and when they absolutely had to. They pretty much avoid coming into the room. They were scared to death of AIDS and not unlike the situation we're in right now with COVID-19. But I think in a lot of ways, it was even worse because there was the stigma of in our country it was, you don't have this disease unless you're gay on top of it. So you have this horrible disease, it also means you're gay and we don't -- society, for the most part, really ostracizes and does not like gay people at this time in history. And so, I couldn't imagine trying to live with AIDS or die with AIDS without a support system so that's why I got involved. It was hard back then. MF: For how many people were you a buddy during that time period in the early '90s? JL: I worked for AIDS Outreach until the year 2000, and I had three AIDS buddies. I was an AIDS buddy for three clients over that time. The first one, his name was [Brian?]. It was early on, and there was -- they didn't have a combination drug regimen at that time, so he did not last long. So it was maybe a year that we were together. The second person that I was an AIDS buddy for, his name was [Nick?], and I had him for a good number of years. By that time, they had combination drug therapies, but again, they weren't the greatest, and Nick was not -- Nick was -- well I'll just say it. Nick had drug-use problems and so that being a drug user and having AIDS was pretty darn tough on someone's immune system. We were probably together for five years -- four years -- maybe four years, yeah, maybe like three to four years, I guess, until he passed away. And then the last person I had was a woman who was a heterosexual woman who had gotten AIDS from having sex partners -- male sex partners that had AIDS because -- probably because they were drug users. I think she dabbled some in it but not hugely in drugs. And she had four boys, and she was the last client that I worked with. MF: Did you -- in 2000... I guess my question is like, did that organization, was that still -- organization still going strong into the early twenty-first century, or did the volunteer structure change in that, in AIDS Outreach as an organization? JL: I looked on the internet this morning to see if AIDS Outreach still existed. It looks like it does still exist. I know they worked closely with the Lehigh Valley Hospital to provide services for people who have AIDS. People are able to live decently, decently well with AIDS these days, so the picture has changed a lot. I stopped being a volunteer for AIDS Outreach in the year 2000. The last woman, the woman that I had, her name was [Marie?]. The woman who ran AIDS Outreach is a wonderful person named Linda Lobach, and to this day, I think of Linda Lobach every couple of months probably because she had a great saying. She would tell the volunteers and all the people that work for her that "When you're dealing with people with AIDS, AIDS is one thing, but there's a lot of other behavior that enters into working with another human being and trying to support them." When there was a problem, she would say, "Take the AIDS out of it, and what are you left with? Is this reasonable or not reasonable?" [laughs] And so I still use that little bit of wisdom and logic to deal with a lot of things in life, take the whatever out of it, and what are you left with? Yeah, this is not reasonable behavior. [laughs] So I parted ways in 2000 because the last client I had, Marie was... She ended up losing her four children because -- I often had to be the parent. These kids would go without food. I didn't have to, but I wanted to try to help them. Eventually, somebody reported her to a neighbor, or someone she knew reported her to children and youth services, and they took her four kids away because she was... She had AIDS, but take the AIDS out of it, and you were left with someone who was doing drugs, drinking to excess at times, and basically hanging out at bars to find men, and leaving her kids unattended, so... I thought that it was a good time to part ways. AIDS Outreach had been -- to me and my way of thinking, had been established for a very good reason, and that reason was getting lost. And it may have just been... I don't want to discourage AIDS Outreach -- [cat purrs] Hi, Spanky. This is my cat Spanky. [laughs] Say hi Spank. [laughs] Okay, Spanky, go play somewhere. I don't, by any means, want to disparage AIDS Outreach. It was a wonderful organization and did a lot of good work and probably still does a lot of good work. And it may just have been the client I had, but I thought I'd had enough. I needed to do something else, so... MF: Well, we're nearing the end of the interview, and there two sort of areas that I'd like to explore just a little bit further. I'm interested, you've mentioned a few times about being a Quaker in the '70s. I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about your spirituality? I'm wondering if you could just discuss a little bit about your emergence into the Quaker church and maybe the evolution of your faith? JL: Okay. Well, I started going to Quaker Meeting in the early '70s I guess. And I mentioned my psychology professor, Tony LoGiudice went there, and that's how I ended up attending a Quaker Meeting. He said that I might like this place. Maybe he recognized I was a lesbian -- that was years before I knew I was a lesbian -- I don't know. But maybe just because I was in a nontraditional -- looking to get into a nontraditional job or probably because Quaker Meeting was a place that allowed people to -- it was not dogmatic, a dogmatic type of religion. They encouraged people to be freethinkers. You could believe in God, or you could have eastern India -- East Indian background and religions. So you could be of any kind of faith and be accepted there. There were people who were agnostic or atheists. It was a hodgepodge of people that basically believed there is a spiritual light within each of us that we can touch and nurture and share with each other. Quakers were early pioneers of endorsing domestic partnership relationships. Before there was marriage, there were certain states where you could go and be united in the -- as a domestic partner with each other. So it turned out to be a good place for me. MF: Are you still in the Quaker church, or was that your consistent faith community through your adult life? JL: I will always be a Quaker at heart. They worship and they don't... We have what's called an unprogrammed -- the one in Lehigh Valley was called an -- what we called an unprogrammed Meeting where there was no minister. You would sit in silence and meditate. When you felt that a strong urge to speak that you had been given a message from -- a spiritual type message to share with others, then you would stand and share that message. When I say I'll always be a Quaker at heart, it is because that's the way I prefer to worship or to -- that's my spirituality that speaks to me. I'm not a member of Quaker Meeting any longer. There are no Quaker Meetings where I live now. The closest I could come is Unitarian Universalist Church, which again is very supportive of gay people. Any disenfranchised groups, both the Quakers and the Unitarian Universalists are -- champion rights of the oppressed or the disenfranchised group. They worship very differently and so I will -- I like the people at the Unitarian Universalist Church. I share a lot of the same values with them, but their way of worshipping is entirely different. They have a minister and a programmed service, and so... That's not so much to my liking. MF: It sounds to me like your faith -- the faith communities that you've been involved in, the Quakers and now the Unitarian Universalist, have been really affirming of both women and LGBT people. Like the MCCLV church in Bethlehem has been -- in Bethlehem and Allentown has been really supportive of LGBT people. Would you say that you ever struggled as an lesbian with your faith? Or would you say that your faith always confirmed the value of your identity, of your sexual identity? JL: I didn't have a religious faith until I was a young adult and did a bunch of searching at different churches to try to find where I fit in. I did that for a good number of years. So it wasn't until maybe like 1972 -- I would have been twenty-two at the time, twenty-three, around there -- that I found Quaker Meeting. So it's probably to my advantage that I didn't have much of a religious upbringing because even not having a religious upbringing, I still struggle with -- that I was a gay person and that this was wrong in society's eyes. So there were some guilt but not as much as -- I certainly had a number of friends who had been, say, brought up in -- maybe the Catholic church was one of the hardest ones. If you were brought in the Catholic faith and you were going to be gay, you were doomed to struggle and struggle and struggle with what you had been taught was wrong to do and try to figure out how to come out and be a reasonably happy and well-functioning gay person. MF: That certainly was the case for me being raised Catholic ; it was a little bit of a challenge. Okay. So since we're nearing the end of the interview, I'm wondering if you could share the Michele story? Like how did you meet Michele, if you could talk a little bit about this primary partnership in your life? JL: Well, it's pretty bizarre. [laughs] Before Michele, before I met Michele, I had two other lovers. The first one was Diane, and the second one was Janice. And Janice was with me a couple of years and maybe four I guess it was, and she had two children. We all lived together, and Janice had been a straight woman and then she decided that being a gay woman was what she wanted. And she did that for four years and then decided she wanted to be straight again. So she left me and I had the house still in Catasauqua, the town house. I could make it financially on my own, but I had other, a couple of loans because I had made some renovations to the house. I think I had a car loan out, and I was really strapped for cash, so I needed to find a roommate fast. So I asked my friend Dixie White. This was one of the people I said, "I'm looking for a housemate that's going to be probably somebody who's a lesbian or possibly a gay man, but somebody that wouldn't be offended living with me, and I need to find somebody fast." So Dixie had gone to -- she put out the word to a couple of people. And this one day, she went to the dentist, and the dentist, hygienist, or maybe it was the office manager was a gay woman, a lesbian, and she said, "I have this friend who's looking for a housemate." And so, this woman whose name was Gay [laughs] took down my name and my phone number and said, "I'll keep that in mind." And so as I recall, I think I have these details right -- Michele might confirm it when you speak to her -- but Michele was a patient I believe and came in to the dentist's office and so Gay told her. And Michele had just lost her lover who had gone and run off with some woman, other woman and so Michele needed a place to stay. And so this woman, Gay who was a total stranger to me and not very well known at all to Michele ended up putting us together. And Michele contacted me. She came over to look at the house, and I was pretty traumatized at having been left and I was pretty scared of... I just wanted a roommate to help me pay the expenses and so I -- and so Michele had -- she smoked and while she was there, I asked her if I could get her something to drink. It was during the day, oh probably late afternoon, and I didn't expect her to say she wanted some type of alcoholic drink, but she asked for an alcoholic drink. And so I was like, oh, I was a little scared, she wanted alcohol and she smokes, and I told her. I said, "No one smokes in this house. I will not allow you to smoke, you'd have to smoke outside." And she was nervous, had a couple of drinks and so I wasn't sure about that. And so she said, "Well, let me think about it." And she called me back sometime later and said, "I have decided that I don't want to become your roommate," she said, "but I would like to date you." [laughs] So that's how we met. MF: Well, what did you say? What did you say when she said that? JL: So we started dating. It was tough because we both struggled financially because neither one of us ended up with a roommate. We did that for about six months and then she moved into the house with me. [laughs] MF: That's a great story. [laughter] If you reflect back on your relationship because you get -- been together decades, how would you describe your relationship with Michele? JL: Well, Michele is a psychologist by profession, so.. But you take the psychologist out of it as Linda Lobach would say, and you're just left with a person where you have to learn how to negotiate a lifetime together. Do we fight? Sure, we fight at times over the years. It's gotten to be less and less and less, but we both needed to grow, and we grew together. And so we have a pretty solid relationship at this point. And we are a team. We've been together longer than any of her siblings and their relationships. Let me think here a minute. All of Michele's siblings are divorced and have remarried or -- let's see, are they all remarried now? Yup, they're all remarried. They've been divorced at least once if not twice. And so occasionally when they were going through the hard times in their relationships, they would ask us, "Well, what's the -- what's your secret to staying together all these years?" And we'd say one word, "Commitment." You want to make a relationship work, you have to be committed to the relationship. When you're having a hard time, you don't get to run away. You have to stick it out and work it through, and it is no magic bullet. You're not going to be madly in love with each other like you were at the first for the rest of your life. It's going to be a different kind of love that grows very deep because through thick and thin, you stick together, which builds trust, which is an issue for a lot of gay relationships. And you are there for each other and don't break that trust, and you'll get through it, whatever it is. MF: What did marriage equality do for you and Michele? JL: Oh my God, it was huge. It was huge, just huge, and I'm surprised. We were so shocked that we got the right to get married in Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania. It was 2014, May of 2014 when they passed that, and my brother-in-law who lived in Texas -- my sister had passed at that -- by that time -- my brother-in-law who never speaks to me called me. He's an extremely quiet guy, extremely quiet -- called me and said, "I just heard this on the news." He was the one who told me that it had been passed in Pennsylvania. Later that day, I got -- the phone rang, and I picked it up and it was -- I didn't understand what I was listening to at first, but it was a conference call with the gay... I can't even remember at the moment which gay group it was, but they were having a conference call, the lawyers that had fought for these rights and talking about what had happened, what had transpired, and what it meant. And so when I say it was huge, we've always been married whether we could be legally married or not. We've always been married in our minds, in our hearts. But it meant that we no longer had to maintain huge insurance policies to try and help pay for -- you know if one of us passed away, the other one would inherit it. We didn't have to have these really complicated legal documents. We didn't have to... We could be married, and Michele could be on my insurance policy at the company I used to -- that I retired from. I mean that was the biggest one. What did it mean to have marriage equality? Health insurance. [laughs] That's what it meant, health insurance and the right to inherit without having to pay tax. That's it in a nutshell. You no longer had to produce documents, if one of us was in the hospital, that said we had the right to see each other or to make decisions if someone was in poor health, and we were in that situation a number of times. Doctors that would fight with us, get out of here, you don't have a right to be here, huge. MF: Did you have a ceremony together when you got married, or what was your marriage like? JL: We got married at the Unitarian Universalist Church that we belong in -- belong to here in Athens, in the area, Athens and Sheshequin. Good friends of ours from the church, Katie and Chris were the first couple in the county to go to the courthouse and apply for a marriage license. Michele had to think about it a day or two, what it might mean to be out as a psychologist in business for herself. And she thought about it for two days and said, "That's it, I'm not going to live in the closet, we're doing this." We became the third couple to apply. And interestingly, the second couple to apply in our county was from New York State where they already had marriage, the ability to get marriage -- be married for a couple of years, but the county that they lived in in New York State were very close to the border. The clerk there that would issue the marriage license was very homophobic and gave them a very hard time and so they came to Pennsylvania to get their license. So Katie and Chris were the first and Michele and I were the third applicants, and our minister was just finishing up a sabbatical from the church. She came back in June -- I think as of June the first and Katie and Chris and Michele and I were all married at the same day in the same ceremony. We wanted to do it quickly because we were afraid that the state of Pennsylvania would withdraw. The legislation would be overturned, and we would no longer have the right, or it would become a legal issue. So we wanted to get married quickly, so it would at least make it tougher for them to divorce -- to divorce us, so to say, so... And our anniversary is coming up June the fourth, and Katie and Chris and Michele and I still join together every year on -- if not that day, the closest day that we can to it to celebrate that we were all married on the same day. MF: Oh, that's just wonderful. Well, we are well over 90 minutes, so... I have more that I'd love to talk about, but I feel like I really need to end the interview. But before we do that, Jane, I just want to ask, is there anything that we really -- that we missed today that you really felt you wanted to share in this interview? JL: Not that I can think of. I will share one story, and I don't know why this just popped in my head. But when I retired from PPL by that time, I had -- it was a good company to work for, good benefits and good pay, so I kept taking jobs that were there. I always considered the garage my home. That's really who I am, really where I spent the most time, but I moved on to other jobs. But when I retired, I had not worked in the garage. I retired in 2012 ; I had not worked in the garage since 1995. When I retired, it was the guys in the garage who threw me a party, and that meant the world to me. MF: Well, it's clear that they agreed, too, that you really were a star in that garage, and they felt really connected to you. JL: Even the ones that gave me a problem when I worked there, after I was forced to be out, I go back and visit periodically, they all become my friends. And so we all stay in touch till this day. MF: Thank you for sharing that story. The way that I'll end our interview is simply by saying, Jane, it's just really been an honor, a real privilege to hear your story today. Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me and to talk about your life. JL: Well, thank you for inviting me, Mary. I'm a pretty low-key person. At first I really didn't know if I wanted to do something like this, but I thought, oh, let me be out of character a little bit and do it. So I hope it works out for you, what you needed. Thank you for the opportunity. MF: Thank you so much. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:01:53 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Jane Land, May 29, 2020 Description An account of the resource Jane Land describes her childhood in Bucks County, her experiences at Moravian College in a social work program, and her movement to Northampton Community College to study mechanics where she was the only woman in the auto mechanic program. Land goes on to discuss her work as an auto mechanic at a variety of shops until she took a job at PPL in their garage and eventually as parts manager. With reference to her work, she discusses sexism and homophobia in the workplace and her work on gay and lesbian rights for employees of PPL. Beyond her discussion of her career, Land describes LGBT community spaces in the 1970s and 1980s, her work with N.O.W. in the 1970s (including attending the 1977 International Women’s Conference in Texas) and AIDS Outreach, and her religious affiliations with Quakers and UUC. Toward the end of the interview, Land discusses marriage equality and her spouse, Michele Strohl. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-10 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-05-29 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/0a590c6e81907b9e5a1310564a613eb6.png b8acc897f1b74823cde44472e91fbaf8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Joseph Burns OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-07.xml Interview Keyword This field adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the “keywords” field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. Le-Hi-Ho OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 October 12, 2019 Joseph Burns (Part 1), October 12, 2019 LGBT-07 01:29:35 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Le-Hi-Ho Joseph Burns Mary Foltz video BurnsJoseph_20191012_Video 1.0:|27(4)|50(9)|71(6)|92(5)|109(13)|134(9)|155(7)|174(14)|191(7)|214(16)|235(10)|260(2)|281(18)|300(6)|319(15)|340(14)|363(3)|386(2)|415(2)|436(3)|459(4)|480(6)|501(13)|522(9)|541(5)|564(2)|583(11)|604(3)|627(14)|650(12)|675(4)|694(11)|711(9)|732(4)|751(10)|770(7)|791(10)|812(14)|835(9)|854(14)|879(3)|900(14)|919(2)|940(6)|961(6)|978(18)|995(7)|1016(4)|1037(2)|1054(13)|1071(3)|1090(2)|1123(7)|1142(5)|1165(10)|1184(6)|1209(3)|1232(3)|1245(10)|1274(10)|1301(10)|1334(3)|1353(13)|1374(6)|1395(9)|1420(7)|1437(13)|1458(3)|1477(9)|1496(5)|1519(17)|1546(12)|1563(8)|1586(11)|1605(10)|1626(4)|1649(4)|1672(3)|1697(7)|1720(5)|1737(14)|1762(13)|1789(7)|1812(3)|1833(10)|1850(7)|1875(7)|1892(7)|1913(2)|1926(5) 0 https://youtu.be/mrynu9OOewM YouTube video 4 Interview Introduction MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I’m here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are here with Joseph in his home in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania. It is October twelfth, two-thousand nineteen. Carol Moeller is our videographer today. Joseph, I want to thank you so much for agreeing to --&#13 ; &#13 ; JOSEPH BURNS: Thank you.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: -- talk with us. And the first thing I want to ask is did you consent to this interview today? 0 63 Childhood / Early Life MF: And just to start our conversation today, could you tell us a little bit about your childhood?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay. I was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, which is north of Pittsburgh, about thirty miles. And it’s a town of about thirty-thousand, I think. Maybe twenty three- thousand at that time. So, it’s a medium sized town and it was the county seat. And it was a great life. This was before the war. I was born before the war. Then, I began -- the war years, of course, started in forty-one and we spent our time, a large part of our time outside the city because they were polio summers, okay? So, when the summers came, we went outside the city. 0 738 Starting Le-Hi-Ho / About Le-Hi-Ho MF: I just am excited for you to keep going. You should feel like you can just keep talking in the direction that you want to go. And then, if you exhaust it, then I’ll ask a question. I mean, I have so many things that I’m curious about. Why? Why you started Le-Hi-Ho and how it kind of came together, who you were talking with? You know, how did you imagine this organization?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Oh, I left town. When I left home, I was ready, I think. I was ready to go. I was ready to find what I knew was there, okay? I knew that there were, I knew such of a thing -- was gay bar. I had never been into one prior to that. I had had, I think, yeah, and twenty-three, I had another event, another time when I was with somebody. Le-Hi-Ho 0 3135 Le-Hi-Ho Newsletter MF: So, my questions are, you know, what in particular did you want to publish in the newsletter? Did you publish on politics or was it --&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: -- more social?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: I did -- it was politics. I was [strong?] informational and, a matter of fact, got into trouble for it. I was writing as much -- I was doing all this scholarship on the side. And so, I was making what I called reviews of these books. They weren’t reviews of these books. They were really giving you -- since you aren’t going to read the book, this is what the book said. And these are important ideas, okay? Le-Hi-Ho 0 3598 Being Out in the Lehigh Valley MF: Can I ask, before you moved to the Lambda Center, what was it like for Le-Hi-Ho and just to be out in Bethlehem as a city. Like, what was it like at Bethlehem Steel --&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: I didn’t have --&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: -- to be out?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: -- any problem with it. I wasn’t extraordinarily social. I mean, I kept with some gay people. Remember, at that time, you had -- Friday night was your gay -- okay, Friday, Saturdays was your gay time. And so, that was, it was kind of what you did, okay? Le-Hi-Ho 0 4198 Contact with Other Organizations MF: May I ask -- there’s this really interesting way that in the stories that you’re telling, Le-Hi-Ho is moving all around the region. Members are going to Philadelphia, you’re going to New York City, you’re in contact with these major --&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: I was.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: -- organizations, yeah.&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: So, I was because I wanted to be, okay? And I wrote that. And, you know, I wrote about the Stonewall and the meeting and the conflict that was taking place between the old guard and the new guard, which is the homophile organizations and this new group that wants to be out and political and it wants to be very forward and right in your face, confronting. 0 4414 PA Council for Sexual Minorities / Gay Caucus JB: I just did it and the Le-Hi-Ho, two things happened. There was an organization that started in ‘75. This is five, this is six years later, in Reading, okay? Came to Le-Hi-Ho and said, “We’re starting, need your advice.” I went down and stayed with them, literally, for a long time. That organization that we started was called -- at that time, there was movement to start this Pennsylvania Council on Sexual Minorities. There was a group that met in Harrisburg, conceiving this idea, making it up with Governor Shapp’s approval. 0 4917 Impact of Le-Hi-Ho MF: So, I just want to ask that -- you know, for you, personally, what kind of impact do you think Le-Hi-Ho had on Bethlehem, on the Lehigh Valley, and just on the region, more broadly?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay, ask me again.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What kind of impact did Le-Hi-Ho have on Bethlehem, on the Lehigh Valley?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay, I --&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What’s its legacy?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: -- said that the educational thing was very important. Okay, you’re reaching out to high school students, to college students, giving them good information on a regular basis. 0 5200 Citizens of Decency JB: I’ll tell you what: there’s another organization that founded in ‘87. We founded in Allentown with the Allentown -- so, we call ourselves Citizens (inaudible) for Better Community. The reason we did that, there was -- it was a professor at Lehigh, professor at Muhlenberg, Frank -- I’ll think of his name after awhile. It’s not important or anything but -- who, as soon as we announced that we were going to try for gay rights in Allentown -- organizing organization called Citizens -- COD, Citizens for Decency, something like that. 0 MovingImage Joseph Burns talks about his experience of being a gay man in Bethlehem, PA in the 1970s and '80s, namely his involvement with Le-Hi-Ho (Lehigh Valley Homophile Movement). MARY FOLTZ:My name is Mary Foltz and I'm here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are here with Joseph in his home in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania. It is October twelfth, two-thousand nineteen. Carol Moeller is our videographer today. Joseph, I want to thank you so much for agreeing to -- JOSEPH BURNS:Thank you. MF:-- talk with us. And the first thing I want to ask is did you consent to this interview today? JB:Yes, of course. I did, absolutely. MF:Wonderful. We're really grateful that you take the time to talk to us. And I want to start by asking you, could you please give me your birth date? JB:Eight-one-forty. August first, nineteen-forty. MF:And just to start our conversation today, could you tell us a little bit about your childhood? JB:Okay. I was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, which is north of Pittsburgh, about thirty miles. And it's a town of about thirty-thousand, I think. Maybe twenty three- thousand at that time. So, it's a medium sized town and it was the county seat. And it was a great life. This was before the war. I was born before the war. Then, I began -- the war years, of course, started in forty-one and we spent our time, a large part of our time outside the city because they were polio summers, okay? So, when the summers came, we went outside the city. We had a piece of property outside the city about eighteen or nineteen miles. We went there and spent our summers as children and took our friends along and really stayed out -- pretty much out of the summer polio season, which was devastating in terms of how many people would get sick. And we never did. But outside of that, it was very happy. That was an extraordinarily happy time to be -- my family was good. Well off enough to be able to afford to stay out there. My father came and went every day, for work. And my mother ultimately became a member of the school board, which kind of influenced my life a little bit, made me a little, you know, a little more cautious about who I was and what I could do. But really (inaudible) a whole lot but she -- I think my -- between the two of them, my father would be the more nurturing figure, okay, and the person that I really went to for more nurturing. And that was just true of the family. My mother was a good person and really -- but she had her feelings about things, very different, and was not as caring somehow, not able to communicate the same sort of warmth as my dad did. And so, we had a very special relationship (inaudible) and that was very warm and well-remembered. He lived until I was nineteen. Died in 1960. By that time, I was growing up enough -- I had come out -- I didn't come out, as a matter of fact. I was hesitant, lonely as a child (inaudible) a lot of my childhood, and especially as I became gay. At about thirteen, I think, was my first experience, with a friend. Another person in school, the same age, the same grade of school that I was. Happened in my home. In the basement, there were a pair of, set of bunk beds downstairs, and that's where we had our first encounter. And we went on for probably several months but not longer than that. He was an individual interesting to me because he had some effeminate characteristics more than I would have and more than typical for men. But he also -- and I saw him a gap of time, okay? Remember, I was thirteen then. We were probably -- I remember knowing him till we graduated school and he was a clerk in a men's store, which -- he was still a clerk in a men's store. That's what he did for his whole existence and retired from there. And I didn't see him again for fifty-five years when we came together for the high school reunion. Went to first high school reunion. I went back, it was fifty-five years. So, he's the same person. Exactly the same person. But he was married all these years, to a woman. Assume had children. Nobody talked about children at the reunion. Surprised the heck out of me. I thought that would be the whole conversation. Not at all. Nobody even talked a word about children. And people were so much the same as they were in high school. Like, the high school president was still in charge of this particular occasion and he -- very much the same. Looked the same, talked the same, was the same. Personality, the same. And it was true of so many people but it was also true of this boy, which I thought was most remarkable that he had not changed in all these years and yet had never probably been gay himself. I just find it absolutely remarkable that he remained -- maintained marriage and maintained his lifestyle. And after that, there was only one other person. Then, there was a long period of plight for a long time when I was too shy, too afraid, and too absorbed in the whole business of being gay to reach out. Probably fearful, probably not ever very heterosexual and could -- that was not something I even got to very much at all. I tried. Went out on a few dates. But there was not anything that I was really interested in doing, quite honestly. And that -- maintained myself, even through high school and college. I did not have another encounter with anybody. I knew I was gay. Certainly was dealing with the issue myself but I did not reach out to any other gay people and rarely knew any. When I left Butler, finally, at the age of twenty-seven, and this was years later, I still only knew two gay people in Butler. So, it was a lonely life for me there and was very willing to leave and went to Allentown, Bethlehem, really, in '67, and at twenty-seven. Partly, I had dropped out of college and I was going to go back to college. Well, I went back and I didn't go to college but I did stay in Bethlehem, very happily, and started to come out. And slowly, going to a bar called Rubes. I don't know what Rubes is -- was in existence then, on the corner of Ninth and Hamilton, as I recall. And there was another bar down -- the bus station was kind of gay, part-time, on weekends, especially. And as that happened, in '69, somebody bought the bar by the name of Larry Johns. Yes, Larry Johns is his name and he bought that particular bar, called the Rendezvous, then. And it was the bar that was associated with the bus station and it's just a very small bar. I don't think more than fifteen seats in it. And he put a dance floor in back, which was quite exciting for the time. And then, he founded Stonewall, later on. Sold the Rendezvous, although Rendezvous continued for a long time as a bar. And, let me see, so coming out was slow for me. I met a few people prior to Le-Hi-Ho who were -- in that day, there were queen bees, okay? And a queen bee would be a male homosexual who is -- usually a lot of personality and enough to hold other people. And he would create a social circle for himself. Now, in some times, and this was true almost in every town in America -- probably had a queen bee who was truly -- dominated that society. And not a very large circle. There might be just five or six people, it might be fifteen people. Might be a very large group depending on the person himself. But they were very -- they were leaders, they were social leaders. Commanded the social scene and really, there were specific people. They were funny, they were gregarious. They were also extraordinarily sarcastic, sarcasm being the coin of the realm, to a certain degree, because that passed for sophistication. I'm not sure quite what had happened. I always thought sarcasm hurt more than it was good. But it still was the coin of the realm and if you were sarcastic, then you got to be more popular and more -- dominating those people. So, I met a young man who was in his fifties, had a small coterie of two, three other people, I think, and a home in Bethlehem. A nice little home, quite comfortable. And that was my social set for a while. I met a few people at the bar, older men, specifically. By that time, I was twenty-seven going on thirty. And Le-Hi-Ho was founded when I was twenty-nine. So, my point was that I went -- being, feeling lonely. I was going to a psychiatrist for a period of time and I would talk to him about how do I get to know people? How do I be social? What do I do? Le-Hi-Ho started in, I think, in May or April of 1969, just right after the Stonewall -- and that's important. I'll talk about that. But that was the end of my psychiatry, yeah. I found what I needed, you know? I really kind of did not bloom but I certainly came out and was willing to come out. I had read in the paper, the Philadelphia -- no, wouldn't have been, 'cause that -- I'm not sure. Would have been the morning paper out of Philadelphia and I don't -- I'm not sure that I remember the name of it anymore. But Barbara Gittings was listed in there and she was my inspiration because I thought if Barbara Gittings could be out like that, and she (inaudible) she had been the editor of Ladder and was an activist in Philadelphia. A gay activist (inaudible) be an activist. And I thought, boy, if she could do it, I could do it, too. And so, my opportunity, then, came up pretty quickly after that and I was very, very happy and it was the first moment I knew I was going to be out. I was not going to be one of the closeted people. But that was the brief up to that point, okay, if there are any questions about that. Do you have anything to ask me about that? Any illuminations? MF:I just am excited for you to keep going. You should feel like you can just keep talking in the direction that you want to go. And then, if you exhaust it, then I'll ask a question. I mean, I have so many things that I'm curious about. Why? Why you started Le-Hi-Ho and how it kind of came together, who you were talking with? You know, how did you imagine this organization? JB:Oh, I left town. When I left home, I was ready, I think. I was ready to go. I was ready to find what I knew was there, okay? I knew that there were, I knew such of a thing -- was gay bar. I had never been into one prior to that. I had had, I think, yeah, and twenty-three, I had another event, another time when I was with somebody. And then, it became a little more natural and I met some more people. Individuals. Typically older. Oh, probably even older than I was and I was already twenty-seven. Now, that's interesting. I came out at that age, too. I decided I was coming out and so I wrote to my mother first and the rest of the family and said, "I'm gay" and was -- came out, literally, to them and to other people. So, I was working in Bethlehem still at that point. And I was able to come out in my work, which -- I was working as a laborer. And open-hearth furnaces and so on (inaudible) so, I knew people but it -- again, it was a lonely, lonely existence and I felt that keenly. And I felt very, very lonely. I called it my lonely years, twenty-seven to twenty-nine, between twenty-seven and twenty-nine, when I was able to come out, when I was able to really reach out to other people with Le-Hi-Ho and found my, you know, my niche for myself. Well, I was very, very happy about that afterwards. Became the first newsletter editor for them. And the first meeting, I think the -- well, we'll talk about that, too. I was -- Le-Hi-Ho was founded through the auspices of Mattachine, New York City. And approximately, I think, February. I don't know the date. And I have the letter and it's in the -- I sent that (inaudible) inviting people to -- person who was going to form a group through the auspices of Mattachine, New York. He was a local, Ron Seeds. And Ron Seeds was also working at Bethlehem Steel. He was more, he was in the office, and I don't know what he did. I think he was probably mid-management somewhere but it would be mid-staff management, I believe, not directly supervising anybody that I'd be aware of. He was approximately my age. I'm not sure where we were. At that time, I was twenty-nine when Le-Hi-Ho was formed. I met my lover that first meeting and I did not get together with him. But I knew I saw him, knew who he was. Met him again at Christmas time, at New Year's, New Year's Eve, at -- in 1970. New Year's Eve -- of [Grant?], the 1970s, '69 into '70. And we were a place called the Coral Reef in the Poconos. Now that's important because among other things, we -- Le-Hi-Ho had early fundraising was drag shows. And they were down at the Coral Reef, the Coral Reef being in the Poconos, some distance from where we were. And they were successful. We would have several hundred people and we made three or four hundred dollars out of them, which was a lot of money to us. I mean, we were shoestring budget the whole time, literally. We just never needed, we never lacked for money. If they ever did, they put in the newsletter, "We need money" and people would contribute and they went on. But it was still, it was not, never became a greatly funded organization. Just went along, published this newsletter for twenty-five years, there's been a continuous newsletter. Now, the fact that Le-Hi-Ho was founded -- this is important -- again, it was founded in 1969, April or May. It was through the Mattachine. There was a decision, first, that we had to make about whether we'd go with Mattachine, would become a Mattachine, or we'd become an independent organization. I argued for independent organization and I think that most of us were in favor of that, rather than sending our money away. A little money, it was. It would have cost us twenty-five dollars a year, I think, something like that. But was twenty-five dollars is twenty-five dollars back in that day. It was different. That was a sum of money that you didn't automatically have when you were young. So, we went to stay, but what happened with Le-Hi-Ho was it was formed, therefore, as a social educational organization, okay? And this was what early organizations were. And you talk about homophile organizations? Homophiles stayed in the closet. If you remember Mattachine, they had this structure -- was such that they had -- the leadership was supposed to be out and leading the organization to be there for the public presence, okay? And they could do all the public things and everybody else could remain in the closet and be spoken for. That did not preclude them being activist people but the Mattachine grew to about four-hundred people, which was, at that time, was quite enormous. Now, they had done that, of course, by maintaining all the names, never letting anybody go. We did the same thing with Le-Hi-Ho and with other organizations later on. We just kept them on the books for ourselves. Kept saying the newsletter's -- so, we claimed them as members, even if they were no longer active, which very typical that they weren't. Okay, but being social, educational was what Le-Hi-Ho did, okay? They had a social hour after every meeting. I think I talked about, well, I talked about it before we started. There were about thirty people, would go to a meeting. A number of them would be the activists who took the meeting. And then, they would follow it with a social hour, assigned coffee, assigned refreshments and coffee, and every month. And it was very, very popular. That was what people went for, they really -- that social hour was well attended and very important, I think, again because it was, at that time, probably the social alternative to the bars. There were virtually no others, and certainly none of that ilk, in which you can get to know people without [the bedding, coming off?], without that being the focus of conversation. You would talk about all kinds of other things. You would talk more as a normal conversation. I think it was a very important aspect and a very important difference that went down that made that such an important organization. And it waxed and waned. There were sometimes -- were fewer people, more people. At the beginning, would all connect the business together. Well, that was a three-hour meeting if they had to do that kind of thing. And then, we also learned that that was just not successful. That was not what people went for. So, we learned to -- they built a board, ultimately, that took care of the business. And there was a -- Ron made himself the -- I forget what it was called but the Mattachine, New York and there's actually the same executive. And I don't remember -- executive something or other. Thank you. Okay, so Ron was the executive, meaning that he was responsible for the organization. Once led a fight one time to get the key for the mailbox. Now, the reason I did it was I felt that there were things going to the mailbox that I wanted to know about. I was the newsletter editor and I was really wanting to know about other activities across the horizon, which we didn't -- which I was not informed of but Ron was because, at that time especially, when there are other organizations, you sent your newsletter out to everybody else and the other organizations to keep them reminded, as -- that you were both in existence, what you did. So, but Ron said, "Look, I'm --" faced down the board and said, "I'm going to keep the key. I'm going to be here. I'm going to be head of this organization and I will be here tomorrow and when you guys are all gone, I'll be here." He was almost right. Almost right. He left about '87, I think, somewhere in the late eighties, I'm thinking, like -- and I don't know what that story was. By that time, I was gone myself. To finish that story, okay, back with Ron. And so, he led the organization, did most of the business and conducted most of the meetings. We did get a president. We named ourselves Le-Hi-Ho ultimately. Was a while there -- we wrote some bylaws. Bylaws was -- piece of shit. Never do it. It just takes -- big waste of time because you never -- you don't pay -- little attention to the bylaws after they're written. And they can take up a great deal of time. But finally, they give us a name, which came out to be Le-Hi-Homophile Organization and we shortened that to Le-Hi-Ho. And I remember who did it. That's neither here nor there. There was a person involved with the organization who was a rare book seller. Interesting man. He served that and he was a person who did not like conflict at all, so he didn't even like the meetings. He felt the conflict was too strong for him. Was a very gentle man. Very gentle person. But he came up with the name, ultimately. Good friend and a good person. Older. Again, older than myself, even at that point. Le-Hi-Ho was distinguished by being a little bit older. Generally, the membership would be in their twenties to thirties. And that's a little unusual for gay organizations of any ilk, to not be much younger and much more college age or whatever. These were young men who were starting their careers, typically. And again, that's who came. And sometimes from a distance. We had people coming from Wilkes-Barre, people coming from that area, and around, around, around. There were a few interesting people that might have belonged at one point or another. There was a fellow name of Paul. What was the last name? Oo, can I -- forgive myself. (inaudible), he was a -- Phil Andros, which if you know Phil Andros was a pornographic writer. But he was, yeah, that's what it was. And he -- but by then, he'd been retired from that. He was no longer writing the books but he was (inaudible) with his lover and was one of the interesting characters we once knew at Le-Hi-Ho that were associated with -- and he died, I think, not very long after that, I believe of AIDS, but I'm not sure of that. There were no other famous people, particularly, that I can think of. And Phil was very modest. Paul was very modest. Told us that but he never claimed -- and I was probably -- I was one of the few who would recognize him from pornography. I used to go to New York City and pick up the stuff in Times Square. So, of course, yes, I knew what Paul -- Phil Andros. That was exciting and he was a major author. When I came out in Pennsylvania, I had been to college in Pennsylvania. I had been to college in Bethlehem. And I went thereforth to college, universities -- one university, Lehigh. And then, there are four colleges, I believe: Moravian, Muhlenberg, Lafayette, and -- three cities. And there was also a Catholic school, St. Catherine, St. Catherine, Saint Frances de Sales. And there was even, actually -- there was a Baptist school that nobody knows about -- was in existence. Not quite unknown but it was a college, probably a junior college, but I never knew which one. I used to know its location and I used to observe it. My point was that I went to the colleges, I went to the universities, and I went to the libraries, particularly, that I could find, okay? And I was not much, I was not a great, I was not at that point much of a scholar. But I could not find in any of those libraries anything in the card catalog under homosexuality. There was zero works, okay? And what I could find one time was a book I -- it's written by a psychiatrist, I believe, in association with, well, very famous Midwest -- doesn't matter now. At any rate, there was one blurb about homosexuality, short paragraph thing. Two paragraphs, perhaps. And there was a book in Le-Hi-Ho by Derek, Philip Derek? What was his name? He was one of the very few novelists at that time who was actually publishing books that were gay specific. His last name was Derek and now I can't remember his first name, most regrettably. There was supposedly a copy of that in Lehigh University. It was not on the shelves, I can tell you that. And that was typical. That's what I found is there was very, very little, and not in. I was actually, with a very good book shop because I'd been a student and liked the Moravian Bookshop a great deal. It was a wonderful resource. They thought I was a student. I had been there so often, been there for years. I don't know how they thought I was a student after I was there fifteen years I was associated with them. But they were -- I knew people there and they were my sources. And so, I got a lot of books. I developed a nice library for myself, about one-hundred and fifty books by the time Le-Hi-Ho opened up. And there were not very many books at that time. You have to remember that Psychopathia Homosexualis was still in existence, okay? Now, 1874, it was written. This was a textbook for gay people! Come on! I mean, this is bad stuff. And it was all case histories, that sort of thing, and very -- people like Berger -- Bieber were writing at that time. I don't know if you've ever read Bieber. Irving Bieber was, oh, he was -- terrible man. Wrote a book in 1952. I got a copy of it, was, like, the thirteenth edition. That's how bad it was. I mean, it was all that was available and it was -- he was the one who said, you know, he equated us with -- homosexuals are criminals, teachers were criminals, they all have the same personality. They're all psychopaths. It's all psychopaths. Well, that taught me, that's -- I wasn't. I mean, that was my beginning of my liberation, was knowing who I was not. I was not that person. Nobody I knew was that person. Nobody I knew was of that ilk. But he was just devastating and everything he had to say was very, very negative and he had all his cases and all this stuff and illustrations. But it was a paperback book and the thirteenth edition. And that's just sick when you think about it. Still makes me sick when I think about it because that was really -- that and Berger, Edmund Berger or was it Edmund Berger? [I think Renee?] -- was all I could find. And these were the books that were coming out then. These were the authorities -- were trying to find out why am I homosexual? Was a big question. Screw the question, you know? I learned quickly to forget that, that just that was irrelevant. I am. But it was -- intellectual journey through that. And then, I got, like, The Homosexual in America. Loved Donald Cory. I was just grossly a fan of this man who would -- in '50, I think, perhaps, in the time of the McCarthy era, wrote this book called Homosexual in America, which was probably the first apologist for homosexual -- and he himself was a married man. He was a member of Mattachine. And I wrote to Mattachine a fan letter, as a matter of fact, and said, "I really appreciate the fact that you've done this. This is extraordinary and what a brave and courageous and wonderful" -- they wrote back and said, "He's out of the organization. We kicked him out." (laughs) So, the story about him is, and I find this out later, he was a sociologist who wanted to use the organization for research and to make himself a famous researcher, to [promote?] himself. And Lehigh -- and they turned him down on it. They would not support that. And he tried to become leader of the organization, tried to become the executive director, and that's when they threw him out. His name was -- I want to know, 'cause this is important. He still wrote that -- hate senior moments like this. I'll think of it and I will add that back. But he believed that men were afraid of women, is why they became homosexual. And this was [Ralph Ellard Ellis?] if you remember the name, was a psychiatrist which was -- this was his whole thing. And he said that that was his -- it was his thesis, that people are homosexual because they're afraid of women. He spoke at Le-Hi-Ho one time, which was not a time I was -- by that time, I had acquired a lover and was not directly involved with Le-Hi-Ho, or not very much, so I didn't know he was there. And I was quite surprised because -- but he came and spoke to the organization. Matter of fact, it's in the newsletters. I was actually quite shocked because I wouldn't have had him. He was really -- and he had a major following. But he also wasn't as tough on it. He wasn't just condemning homosexuals as Bieber and Berger and the other people had been. So, I had a library. I did a lot, well, as much research as I could. I find out about Evelyn Hooker, obviously, Ford and Beach, who was the sociologist who made it clear -- the cross-cultural studies and cross species studies. John Money, his sexual studies. And began to learn that there was a whole modern view emerging. Now, I think that that's very important, intellectually, okay? The intellectual beginnings of this were interesting because there were very few authors prior to this who were doing anything on sex at all, okay? And especially when they were across studies or other cultures. For instance, Richard Burton, a very, very famous author, very famous traveler in the East who had written a lot of cross-cultural studies and a lot of cross-cultural things about the -- and that whole Eastern culture. You can think of -- who? Carpenter, John Carpenter. And it was John Carpenter in England, did that -- wonderful books. André Gide wrote a book called Corydon. Was very famous homosexual. He also happened to be a pedophile, regrettably. Went to Algiers. But he wrote about it. One of the books that I found for the library was his diaries, his journals. Journals they were called in that day and he'd written about -- they were continued in four volumes. And I had the slightly abbreviated paperback edition but it was good enough and certainly told me a lot about -- and he was world famous at that point and he was an authority -- if you remember, Leo Tolstoy, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, became such a famous author and became the voice of peace and this world known, world renowned moralist. And that's the role that Gide filled. He became in -- writing a book called The Immoralist, among other things. He became that kind of authority figure and was very much highly regarded despite being gay. Corydon was published and when he published it, he only did twelve copies, so that never did get out until after he was dead. Then [there were -- the number?] (inaudible) published. I happen to have, was fortunate enough to find a copy of it. His thesis talked about a male's beauty and how beautiful males were and they were dominant. And you find beautiful birds, okay? Cardinals, for instance, the cardinal family, the male is the red cardinal. The females are the brown cardinals. The females also lead. They go first, then the male follows when it's safe. But they also were in, (clears throat) I'm sorry, in nature, were very often the more beautiful of the species, the more resplendent of the species to get -- and they were the ones that the females were attracted to. Remember that they, you know, that they did perform the dances or whatever. They had the plumage, the right plumage and the right light and look to be -- [set their genes?], partly because of the (inaudible) and he -- so that's what he emphasized. Interesting thesis. Also, interesting to me, when you talk about early homosexuality, and this was back in -- the term was (inaudible) until eighteen-something, seventeen-something, eighteen, I think. At any rate, [it was?] not a term. And before that, they were called inverts, intermediates, third sex. All-important concepts. And they used to talk about the important contribution that these particular people made, okay, that they could make the society that I've always kind of believed in. I've always thought that homosexuals had a special mission, had a special something, that we understood differently than the dominant culture did, the dominant heterosexual culture did. We weren't as marriage-oriented, for instance. We were freer in our associations and -- but I think now, as we've gone on, I think that what we were looking for is what is now emerging, which is that wonderful fluidity, that you could be anything, okay? That you could be male, female, without limits, without labels, without anything to identify with, that -- and yet, that fluidity, this makes you go all over so that you are all of those things, happily. I was not. I was a male homosexual and I, at my point, when I came out, was binary choice, okay? You were gay or you were straight. I chose gay, absolutely. I wanted to be that and I also emphasized my maleness, as opposed to anything, and really was not happy with the social sets in which the guys would call each other Mary. That made me uncomfortable because I thought that's kind of denial of who we are. And it so often was biting and so often was a putdown or an insult and sarcasm, that sarcasm that I talked about, was so much part of the humor. And that was a part of the humor, too. You had parties, drag shows, and what you did, okay, you -- everybody -- where you went into drag. I never did again. And it just wasn't me. But I think, too, that I really feel that I should have had -- I already knew growing up, when I was asking myself these questions, that there's a large part, a large component of me is feminine as other people would understand it. Not a sports person. A person who liked more concerts, liked music, who liked more things that might be softer and less hard and less harsh. And my brothers were athletic, I always thought. And I felt that difference. So, I kind of still -- I wish I had developed that more and been more open to developing it, that I would be a different person. And now I don't understand, it's very difficult for me to understand young homosexuals because they are so fluid and they are so -- can make that change and identify with it in a way we couldn't. To me, bisexuality was almost an excuse. But again, it never was. There are true bisexuals. I have learned that over the years, too, and accept that. But now, there's something more than that. There's this wonderful fluidity of being whatever you want to be and expressing it all. And I think, especially, Adrian does a terrific job and the Lehigh Valley is doing a terrific job of emphasizing that particular aspect of things. I look at the programs and what I get are everything is very much oriented to the trans community, a lot of it is. You're doing a lot of trans (inaudible) so many of the programs emphasize that as opposed to, okay, a more strictly male homosexuality. Come back to Le-Hi-Ho again for one second. This was a very male organization. There were no women, okay? There was one woman who was directly involved in Le-Hi-Ho in the first 10 years. Her name was [Lou Augustine?]. Lou Augustine became a member of the governor of Pennsylvania, the Governor's Council on Sexual Minorities. She was appointed to that. She lived in Reading. And she [come up to?] groups. She came up to Le-Hi-Ho periodically through all those years. And she was almost the only one who did. And I used to fight Le-Hi-Ho because after -- and in those first ten years, I began to change. There were so many feminists, and met Dixie and so on, so I was really trying to get them to understand that they don't have women, that they need to look at this because -- for many, many reasons. I thought that, for instance, now was our model -- except that the feminist movement was so broad. And that's for many issues, from childcare to pay, to just everything was so different for them. And men didn't pay attention. They did not support that. They didn't support the abortion rights, which they wouldn't do -- they wouldn't come out and say, Le-Hi-Ho -- and I tried to get them to do this. Would not adopt a resolution in favor of abortion or anything else, anything to do with feminism. They just simply wouldn't do it. And I wasn't disappointed and I understood because -- but they were a conservative organization. Again, they were founded two months before the Stonewall, it made them very different. They were social, educational, homophile. No organizations after the Stonewall or after -- yes, after Stonewall, I went to a conference in October of that year, '69. It was last meeting of ECHO, East Coast Homophile Organizations. There were several organizations involved. Le-Hi-Ho was new but so were a whole lot of other things, like HI, Homophiles of -- where? I don't remember. There was a group in -- [Robert Biddings?] was in charge of a group in Philadelphia. Mark Segal had just founded Gay, I think -- the GAA, yes, thank you. And so, I think there were quite a number of organizations. I recall there were thirteen organizations, almost all of them new. Now, the question, of course, with the old guard was shall we seat these people? Can we believe them? You know, they're new, they're young, they're radical about -- and they were, for instance, Foster Gunnison was himself an organization. Foster Gunnison, his whole job and his whole organization was, himself, keeping all the archives of all the earlier groups. And so, he built up a tremendous library and a very important library in New England of all those early newsletters and whatever was new and all the records of those groups. He tried to maintain some semblance of it. But that was (inaudible) okay. Mattachine New York was Dick Leitsch, who I went to see one time. When I came out, I went to New York. I had been to see a program, I think, in '63 that talked about Mattachine and showed the door of the organization, which was somewhere in the Village at that point, as I recall, a glass door. I'll never forget that. And so, really, that was one of the first things with them, when I came out, and I couldn't go to school the next day. I went to the library and I looked up Mattachine. MF:Do you want to stop? JB:It was important to me. And I went there, went to see him in New York. Went to the Mattachine office and walked in and just introduced myself. I was so happy. Went to Philadelphia. At that time, Janus Society was in existence and one called the Homosexual Law Reform Society. Both happened to be the same address in what turned out to be Polak -- why can't I remember their first names? I can remember his last name but I can't remember his first name -- published the Janus Society newsletter called Drum. And he also ran a pornography shop -- is what he did. I think was easier as a business or whatever. When I went to the address, went upstairs to the second floor, met the secretary. He was not in. Dammit, his name just crossed my name again. I mean, he was not there but clearly there was pornography all over. You know, the shelves in back were -- and that was what he did was supply -- pornography supplier. I don't know if that was his main job. He was well known and he did -- Drum was unusual, a little bit pornographic in terms of the newsletter. And I had a copy for years and didn't realize that I -- and I probably turned it into the projects here at the Dickinson when I realized that it was, in fact, the newsletter of the organization. But it had pictures of -- posed pictures back in that day. It's what you did, the posing straps and that sort of thing were de rigueur. You do nothing naked. That wouldn't have been possible but as much naked -- as close you could get. Clark Polak, I believe. Clark Polak, I believe, was his name. Joined their West Coast organization. I would join ONE to me was (inaudible) which was -- I think one in San Francisco, one in Los Angeles. ONE was an educational organization, did meetings, did presentations constantly to the public. Le-Hi-Ho was distinguished for that. They had a wonderful speakers' bureau. I was not a member of it. I wasn't Ron's favorite person but [as their?] -- was really very much in charge of that. Did a wonderful job. Presentations all over the Valley, very, very active, and through all the schools, the high schools, the colleges. Was a very main function, as well as the social organization, which we talked about. They also were very supportive about other things but they didn't -- they were not supportive about women. They wouldn't do the women's rights. They weren't really big on women's rights, although ERA was becoming stronger and stronger through now and now is very, very powerful organization in Pennsylvania. And Ellie Smeal was president, national president, and come from here. Gloria -- not Steinem but Gloria -- what was her name? Sackman-Reed. Gloria Sackman-Reed was the president then, followed by Dixie after that. And Dixie held conference in Philadelphia. And, I'm sorry, in Allentown. And then, she became president that year, [but did?] the conference -- she was self-nominated or nominated (inaudible) president -- Pennsylvania NOW. And that was '87, I believe, '86, '87, because in '87, we're supposed to have a conference in '86, in '87, early '87. We never did. And I'll tell you, that's another story and a later administration. But stay with Le-Hi-Ho for the moment. So, Le-Hi-Ho was very definitely male, strongly male. And I think that later, they did change but it was not until after I had left. I left in '83 to go to Chicago to live with my lover. And lived with him for ten years there, then another ten years in Houston. And then, we got divorced. His choice. I came back here to live with my sister in two-thousand. Had been together, been with Doug for eighteen years at the time he wanted the divorce. We stayed together for another year and a half just in order to sell the house, prepare the house, and so on, for sale. And I wanted to celebrate the coming of the new century with him, the millennial -- I wanted to do that. And really, it was a little bit of an anti-climax in the end. Not sorry that I did it, though. He was a good man and I was very much in love at that point but it just didn't work out. And they were my feelings, not his. Okay, Le-Hi-Ho. MF:May I ask -- JB:And what else can I say about that I could, yeah, (inaudible) MF:Well, I'm curious about your role as the newsletter organizer for Le-Hi-Ho. JB:Okay. MF:So, my questions are, you know, what in particular did you want to publish in the newsletter? Did you publish on politics or was it -- JB:Okay. MF:-- more social? JB:I did -- it was politics. I was [strong?] informational and, a matter of fact, got into trouble for it. I was writing as much -- I was doing all this scholarship on the side. And so, I was making what I called reviews of these books. They weren't reviews of these books. They were really giving you -- since you aren't going to read the book, this is what the book said. And these are important ideas, okay? This man is representing, for instance -- the writer, one from a man by the name of Wainwright Churchill -- wrote a book on -- and it's one that's gotten lost that I very -- don't understand why it did -- on the pro-gay cultures in the past. And so, he emphasized Greece as homo-positive, positive as opposed to negative, and the Roman culture as being more positive than negative and other cultures being more positive than negative. And he talked about them quite specifically, in quite a great, celebrated depth. And so, I would write that in the newspaper, wanting you to know that this saves you. This is saving your ass, okay? Very, very important piece of writing, this thing is. And so, I did it that way. Barbara Gittings wrote a letter and said, you know, "That's not a review." And Ron Seed wrote a letter and said, "You aren't earning views?. You're fired." So, I was fired. And that was about a year and a half later, year and a half or two. There was a person who -- the gentleman who started the newsletter was a guy who owned -- the real bookseller was throwing an advertisement, I think, after the first reading. So, I say, "We're going to have a second meeting." So, he wrote a newsletter for it. Well, that was the beginning of the newsletter and I took over the next one as being the newsletter editor because I wanted to do that. I thought it was a good fit for me. And I did things my own way. There was a little bit of humor that I wrote. I'm not funny. Believe me, it was a terrible piece. It was a lousy idea. And it really was a kind of a bit of a campy persona, which I am not and couldn't really play well. But that was that. And so, my emphasis was trying to be on educational -- and telling them about what was going on, okay? And I think that at some -- what I thought was positive about newsletters that I liked was that, okay? And other newsletters were done -- for instance, there was -- when Gays United of Lancaster's college, U.L., was founded, they formed -- they did a newsletter that became the Pennsylvania -- not rural but what do they call it? Damn. I'll have to think of that again later, too, because it was an important contribution. It was to, like, by the Boston Gay News. Talks about all the other organizations. Talked about what was going on, what was important, what were the leading causes, what -- and so, politically, if you were an activist, that's what you read because it really gave it to you in a way that The Advocate was not doing and it was much more social, much broader, and a lot more advertising in terms -- and a lot of beautiful boys, that sort of thing. And kind of light on good material. Now, it had not always been that way. I remember The Advocate, [firstly?] when it started, and reading it -- I was subscribing at that point -- like, I was a member of those organizations remotely because I couldn't -- that was my way of participating. All I could do what there was to join and pay attention. And one was giving me good information, Advocate was giving good information. And much as I could participate, they were. So, I thought that was a very, very important part of it. I found -- I just donated, I think I've said that, all those books for the library of Le-Hi-Ho, to start the library at Le-Hi-Ho. Mattachine donated their extra books, okay? And if you went to Mattachine, the forepart of -- you walked in, there were stacks of books there. Not very many. It wasn't -- maybe four or five depths but that was the largest collection that I ever saw and knew of. And my one-hundred fifty books, I thought, was quite extraordinary for the time because there were so few still being written. You know, openly -- books that were not people who -- there were some English books. They were hard to find and I tried to find everything I could find. I mean, I would go to books on the margin, okay, that were being dumped onto the market because they weren't any good, going to a special seller. And you'd go there and find books by English authors about -- writing about people who were gay. Was wonderful to me (inaudible) and plays. Very little of that. Le-Hi-Ho often went to plays in New York. Went to see Puppy Dog Tails, went to see -- what was the, shit, Boys in the Band, was, of course, new then. The Homoerotic Opera. Thomas Mann, A Night in Venice? Is that -- I think it was called? Went to see that. And so, they went often. But that was the beginning. They were Off-Broadway. Very little mainstream stuff. We did show, incidentally -- one of the first mainstream movies was, damn, sorry, why can't I think of the name of it? We had a meeting and we're meeting at that point at the Unitarian Church in Bethlehem, which is up in Fountain Hill, way up in the hill. Yeah, that was -- went there. They were good friends of ours. And so, it was early when we were looking for a place to meet and they did, I think, about three or four or five months into the organization. And it was all those years until we left, which would have been -- I think '83, I think is when the center started that Le-Hi-Ho moved out of there and met at the center -- MF:The Lam-- JB:-- was also there. They have their meetings at the center, as well. MF:The Lambda Center. JB:And stopped going to the church. MF:Okay. JB:Okay? As far as I know. MF:Can I ask, before you moved to the Lambda Center, what was it like for Le-Hi-Ho and just to be out in Bethlehem as a city. Like, what was it like at Bethlehem Steel -- JB:I didn't have -- MF:-- to be out? JB:-- any problem with it. I wasn't extraordinarily social. I mean, I kept with some gay people. Remember, at that time, you had -- Friday night was your gay -- okay, Friday, Saturdays was your gay time. And so, that was, it was kind of what you did, okay? You'd live the much more limited life Monday through Friday. Weekends, then you went somewhere to be gay, maybe in town, maybe elsewhere. I went to a lot of gay bars elsewhere just to see what they were. And because (inaudible) and I wanted to know about them and I put that in the newsletters, too. It was a lot of that sort of thing -- you know?] gay guides were very important. Also, talking about the electoral development, I think that we don't realize how much Sexology magazine had to do with publishing the early arguments about gays -- were done in that particular medium before they were done elsewhere and before there were more academic studies by Money and Hooker and so on and Ford and Beach, before those books came out, they were largely arguing in Sexology over the fact that homosexuals -- how they were acceptable and a natural part of sexuality. MF:And that's a magazine? JB:That would be important. Sorry? MF:Was that a magazine or you just -- JB:Yes. MF:-- mean the discipline? JB:Short magazine. Small one. MF:Oh, really? JB:It was almost a 'zine size. And it was pretty informal. It certainly was not a rigorous journal by any means. Ladder was the first lesbian journal, ONE, for -- a publication called ONE, which was probably the first serious journal of any sort. Christopher Street came out, ultimately. That was a literary magazine, the first one. The New York -- Craig Rodwell opened Oscar Wilde Bookshop in the Village. I went to see that. That was interesting. I went, that was right after Stonewall. And Stonewall was very exciting for me. I knew about what had happened and within a month or so, I think I'd gotten to -- I think Craig opened this bookstore and I went to the bookstore. I'm now thirty years old and the kids in there -- and this is when kids -- if you were over thirty, you were not to be trusted anymore. You were over the hill. And so, the kids in there were looking at me very peculiarly and really making comments about Mattachine and how ill they were for being against -- not as out, okay, as we are. They aren't as free, they aren't doing this whole youth thing. And remember, when Stonewall happened, the first thing that happened was you got this wonderful GSG, Gay Liberation Front's organization. Very, very leftist. Very leftist. And, like, remember Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine was a communist. These guys were leftists of that ilk. Not into communism, particularly, but very leftist in New York, well known. Lots of books, you know (inaudible) sort of book. They were quite exciting people when we met them at that -- yeah, met them in Philadelphia at the ECHO meeting. They were -- exciting group of people. But there were three or four organizations that -- I remember there were -- Columbia University, there was New York City University, there was just every kind of school you could imagine. The state university as opposed to the city university. And they represented -- they bloomed. Like, Philadelphia one or several and Gay Liberation Front's were much more oriented to being political in a broad sense. You were supporting the lettuce -- the Chavez and the agriculturists and the leftists all over the world, were -- your concern -- the Chicago Seven, the, you know, the twelve, the elevens or whatever. Their protests -- were the kind of things that you were supposed to be active in. That was not pleasing to a lot of the membership, so that they started GAA as opposed to that -- Gay Activist Alliance, which said, "We are gay, we're going to pay attention to gay causes and not pay attention to these other causes or not support them." And that was a big thing at that ECHO meeting. There was a huge fight. Frank Cannaday was the president of the organization, president of that particular meeting at that time. And he presided over the meeting and when there was this old guard and the new guard, the old guard and the new people, these new radicals coming in. It was a kind of battle, a very big battle about getting seated in the first place and then the battle was over what to do about the Day of Remembrance. You have the Day of Remembrance -- was held at the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July and that was Frank Cannaday's, that was his -- "here's the deal." The first organization (inaudible) in '64 and marched in Washington with the picket line. Famous picture of Barbara Gittings -- is very prominent in that set and -- but he was in charge of that particular meeting and had presided over this battle royale. And again, the issue that they were fighting about was, well, among other things -- I remember that there was somebody in that organization that was talking about Barbara Gittings as a baby killer, you know? So, at that time, they were not as unified on abortion as we got to be, by no means. There was a terrible battle over that and horrible things happened as a result of this terrible argument going on between the baby killers and the right to lifers. And the other thing that happened was coming out, okay? This is when the GFL in New York was -- very important for -- they went over and took a firehouse, took over, literally, just -- and at that time, you could -- walked in and just took over, literally. And they -- an abandoned firehouse. They took it over and it became quite a major organization. They were doing dances of about five-hundred people and they were (inaudible) super, super exciting. And so, they really lit up New York, completely, and in a way -- but also, as these GSAs were -- GFLs founded on all kinds of campuses everywhere. Every campus would have a GFL. There was a group in Kutztown, as a matter of fact. A young fellow that came to Le-Hi-Ho, Frederick Reed. And Fred Reed was -- became vice president of Le-Hi-Ho. And he was also president of (inaudible) about five members, I think, in Kutztown University at that time. He was a student. And then, sadly, he went to the University of Pittsburgh as a graduate student and died -- I don't know how he died. I don't know the circumstances. I've always been suspicious because he fell off a tower. And one of the towers in Pittsburgh was famous for having these -- their first dormitories were twin towers, okay? Dormitory towers. And he died -- jumping, you know, falling off of that. And who knows? Fred would have been out, he would have been -- outspoken person. Very forthright. He also went to the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade and I got in there and he and I and my lover and a woman went in the first parade together. Very happy circumstance. Barry says that there are pictures of me there. No, I knew that there were. I was pictured -- the week, next week, I'm pictured in The Advocate -- my sign is pictured in The Advocate. I'm sitting there -- but the picture's taken with my back to the camera, so no way -- you can see my bald spot. That's how I can -- recognize my lover and you can recognize Fred Reed, who was standing there with me. Was an amazing time. That's a different story, and inspiring, inspiring, inspiring moment, that first march but -- and so, (inaudible) for years and found out from Ron that he had died (inaudible) -- at the university. MF:May I ask -- there's this really interesting way that in the stories that you're telling, Le-Hi-Ho is moving all around the region. Members are going to Philadelphia, you're going to New York City, you're in contact with these major -- JB:I was. MF:-- organizations, yeah. JB:So, I was because I wanted to be, okay? And I wrote that. And, you know, I wrote about the Stonewall and the meeting and the conflict that was taking place between the old guard and the new guard, which is the homophile organizations and this new group that wants to be out and political and it wants to be very forward and right in your face, confronting. And I wasn't sure. I really had to take a stand, oh, and my stand was I prefer to be out. That was clear. And Ron did not at that time. I remember I put his name in the first newsletter and he protested. Now, he didn't stay that way. I mean, Ron became much more public over this period of time, of necessity. And certain lover certainly did because (inaudible) speaking and so on. But at that time, he was protesting it and that would have been -- that more typically Mattachine -- as I said, Mattachine was supposed to be the leadership was out and everybody else wasn't. The only person ever (inaudible) that was Frank Cannaday and he would insist on it. The stories were funny because Frank always tells it that I was the only person who was out. They said, "We never knew that." It wasn't us. We always thought we were out, we always thought we were doing things under our own name. And Frank said, "No, we all had nicknames." (laughs) Wasn't true. Was true in Mattachine in New York. And the very famous person at Mattachine New York outside of Dick Leitch was the executive director, was a lawyer by the name of -- was great. Austin Wade. That just has marble halls behind it. Austin was, in fact -- and he was -- his name was Arthur Kennedy and he was a professor at Princeton Law. And he was the legal counsel for Mattachine Society but known as Austin Wade and he was more known widely through that. And I was a great admirer of Austin Wade because he was the only -- he was the most powerful figure anybody knew and there were no lawyers, no doctors, nobody of any name or of any profession out at that point. So, what was her name? Was a Puerto Rican woman who was the secretary and she was as famous as anybody else because she was such a mother to everybody and a wonderful person. I've forgotten her name now, unfortunately. But Austin Wade was one of those people -- was a big figure in my mind. And, as I said, I find out later what his name was and he was a member of the Pennsylvania Council on Sexual Minorities, from New Jersey. But he was an invited member of the organization. Very distinguished man. Now, you ask me, why did I do that? MF:Yeah. JB:I just did it and the Le-Hi-Ho, two things happened. There was an organization that started in '75. This is five, this is six years later, in Reading, okay? Came to Le-Hi-Ho and said, "We're starting, need your advice." I went down and stayed with them, literally, for a long time. That organization that we started was called -- at that time, there was movement to start this Pennsylvania Council on Sexual Minorities. There was a group that met in Harrisburg, conceiving this idea, making it up with Governor Shapp's approval. Governor Shapp was a wonderful, wonderful leader and a man of -- that's a whole chapter in itself. It's a very interesting story. As a part of that, well, they did a conference in Harrisburg to introduce the idea of the council and to generate with them on the community enthusiasm for it. And it got some people to -- members of the council. And that happened in '75. In '74, December '74, the Reading group was founded, on Christmas -- New Year's Day, matter of fact, of '75. I think that's correct. But they came to us and I went down and that's how I became involved. But through that conference, they started a group called the Caucus -- in order to get more representatives from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to equalize -- Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and then the rest of the state, okay, so that there were three bodies. Philadelphia has seven, Pittsburgh had five, I think, and we had three. Well, that was not enough for the rest of the state combined. So, we caucused to get more people and call ourselves (inaudible) Gay Caucus. This was interagency organization. So, we then founded -- we met the organization of Gays United of Lancaster, Reading was just beginning. Le-Hi-Ho was a major member and I went and represented Le-Hi-Ho at this new group called the Caucus and it became a separate organization, a state organization, worked for state causes, worked on the state level, wanted to be an interagency kind of thing. So, I was the liaison for that. And Le-Hi-Ho chose not to be involved. I could do the involvement but they were not directly involved. No, they did play a major part later on, a very important part, but they chose not to be active in it, okay, I'm just pointing it out. MF:Why not? JB:It's because they were a different organization. They were not politically oriented as such. Now, they didn't ignore it but they weren't about to invest in it, okay? Like, they wouldn't invest in women. They just wouldn't do it. That wasn't their thing. Was okay. I mean, I got along with them but I didn't feel that it would've been better had they done one of the things that -- Reading was very much oriented, was very open, about half and half. Was half men and half women. Five, six men, five or six women. Every meeting, okay? The Caucus had co-chairs in everything we did. We have co-chairs of the Caucus got there every meeting, every committee we had, push at everything because we wanted to be equal. Equality was very, very important to us and equality with men and women was very, very important. And then, again, the ERA was a major issue at that point, so -- Reading was famous that way, Lancaster was very much that way. Very much oriented to having as many women represented -- but female representation they could get and had generated. And most organizations were. Le-Hi-Ho was the exception, had always been the exception. Again, it was an older organization. They had it as a different substantiality. They were okay without -- didn't need to be something different. Very happy with what they were and did a wonderful job, I thought. I mean, they were so important in terms of the people's lives that were there, okay? And I always say that people come with agenda, okay? They come to your organization with an agenda, something that they need. And mostly, it's just to be known, just to tell you that I'm gay and be accepted. And that's the importance of the organization. If you could shine a love on somebody, that's liberation. That is, in fact, liberation. That's what it's all about, is just that little bit of love and they just bloom. They become these wonderful flowers. And it happened to me, it happens every -- to all those people. And, like, an organization -- let's take Homophiles of Williamsport. Three years they exist as two hundred people and six different counties came to that organization. The important thing was that they had a group talk afterwards, okay, that people came to be able to say -- express their concerns, have their questions, get their information, got their agenda taken care of. That was the important part of the group and outside of that, it probably didn't make a -- it did. It made some wonderful -- some contributions. And it tried to be political but it wasn't so much -- its real satisfaction, it was the same as Le-Hi-Ho. It was a homophile organization. It was founded as homophile organization they said. So, social education was what they thought they thought they were doing but they did much more than that. But there were younger members much more oriented to being out and active in a way that Le-Hi-Ho just wasn't. You could belong -- a very satisfactory life with Le-Hi-Ho, be an active member in Le-Hi-Ho. There were wonderful people involved with that, a whole board full of people and that -- oh, they, just -- Bob Steelman, Helmuth Baerwald, oh, [Ron?] and our first president was Al Ravert. Second was -- oh, the person from Wilkes-Barre. Came to the meeting, said -- again, Le-Hi-Ho had that kind of draw, okay? People would come from distance to be there because it was a working organization. Staying in existence gives you a good reputation, just -- people know when you're going to meet and you're going to meet next week or next month, too. Made a big difference. And so, a lot of people came from elsewhere to be at Le-Hi-Ho. Was true everywhere. All those organizations, -- homophile, as I said, there's homophile -- in that little group (inaudible) knew that they had two-hundred members and they had the membership list. I don't have the membership list. That wasn't my thing. That was Ron's thing. He was the one who was keeping track of all the members and who was involved and who wasn't and where they were from. Garth Watkins was the second president. MF:Well, we're about at an hour-and-a-half and that's when we like to stop. And so, maybe, can I ask one more question and then we'll -- JB:Sure. MF:So, I just want to ask that -- you know, for you, personally, what kind of impact do you think Le-Hi-Ho had on Bethlehem, on the Lehigh Valley, and just on the region, more broadly? JB:Okay, ask me again. MF:What kind of impact did Le-Hi-Ho have on Bethlehem, on the Lehigh Valley? JB:Okay, I -- MF:What's its legacy? JB:-- said that the educational thing was very important. Okay, you're reaching out to high school students, to college students, giving them good information on a regular basis. They were (inaudible) back to class after they started, then they would be invited back again the next year. That was a very, very important function. They were out to the degree that they advertised constantly in the newspaper. They were open to everybody that would come. There was one time -- there was a meeting in which they -- a person appeared with a fifteen-year-old. Scared the hell out of that meeting. You got very, really scared men who were suddenly sitting with a fifteen-year-old person, realizing that this guy can get us all in big, big, big doo-doo. The next meeting, they voted out, they voted the person who brought him out. You cannot be a member anymore and we will not support NAMBLA, okay? Not support the North American Boy Association , which is -- I supported -- I thought that that is dangerous to all of us. And, as an activist, I always limited myself to not being in the presence of young men, okay? Younger men that I knew weren't of any -- of a certain age or even they looked like they were a certain age because I was not going to risk what I would've risked. And my reputation was everybody's reputation. I was the leader. I would have been known -- if I had been arrested, it would have been bad news and I didn't want that. So, that -- one thing that happened, that they -- was another organization -- they were just conservative. There was an underground newspaper at that time. They would not support the underground newspaper but [Sweich that had?] the underground newspaper supported them quite openly in their publication. They wouldn't support them. Now, Dixie White spoke among other people. I was program chair for a while and so I invited a lot of people that I wanted them to know, to make this networking business. So, she knew what else is around and I invited a lot of women and, again, tried to make them more comfortable. And this organization did not work for me, okay? I was gone in '83, when I went, and by then, there'd only been one other woman who had ever really showed any interest and she was a radical and secretly not very interested in them. She was -- always thought they were not -- she was far more radical than that -- member of the women's commission, as well as the lesbian -- Governor's Council on Sexual Minorities. Professor out of Shippensburg. And [Mary Anne Caroll?] was my co-chair in the Caucus. We were Caucus co-chairs together and she became president of NOW, later on, after the ERA had -- after '83. I think '84 is when she became president. And the ERA, closest possibility in '83, as I recall. They had to have it ratified by then and there was no chance. I forget -- well, I lost my train of thought. Okay, but then, you asked was it very -- powerfully important to the Lehigh Valley because it was that represent-- it was that presence and really did a lot of things in support of that. MF:I want to say, on behalf of Carol and myself, we have been so delighted to talk with you today. Thank you so much! JB:My pleasure. MF:And maybe you'll give us -- opportunity to talk with you again sometime in the future. JB:I'll tell you what: there's another organization that founded in '87. We founded in Allentown with the Allentown -- so, we call ourselves Citizens (inaudible) for Better Community. The reason we did that, there was -- it was a professor at Lehigh, professor at Muhlenberg, Frank -- I'll think of his name after awhile. It's not important or anything but -- who, as soon as we announced that we were going to try for gay rights in Allentown -- organizing organization called Citizens -- COD, Citizens for Decency, something like that. COD, I don't remember how that worked. And he and I and -- so, I called, I wanted us to be the matching -- we found that since we knew he was -- founded -- and we founded right away. Is that right? I think we founded right away, when -- as soon as we knew about him. And then, we, he and I, were kind of competing. Got in the newsletter a lot and there was probably a monthly magazine published (inaudible) that was a different time, as well. And, again, it's Lehigh Valley. And it was unsuccessful. Ultimately, what happened with them, we went for two years. We became -- found the organization, ultimately we started the Gay Line, and I had a lot to do with that. [And mostly?] happened -- is in my apartment, as a matter of fact. I was the -- people came to my apartment and answered the -- and worked the telephone there. Started in '80. MF:Okay. JB:And that was '78 to '80. So, we stayed open till then, to found Le-Hi-Ho -- or to found Gay Line. And there were events involved. A good time. We had a lot of fun playing with that whole idea. And we knew we weren't going to be successful. And that was pretty much against -- and it was unfair because they simply claimed that homosexuality was on the books, was still illegal, and therefore you couldn't have rights and they couldn't go further than the state permitted, which the state organization -- didn't recognize gay rights. So, they wouldn't either. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:29:35 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Joseph Burns (Part 1), October 12, 2019 Description An account of the resource Joseph Burns talks about his experience of being a gay man in Bethlehem, PA in the 1970s and '80s, namely his involvement with Le-Hi-Ho (Lehigh Valley Homophile Movement). Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-07 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10-12 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/27482ef26d01776b07651ef10677aa6a.png fb5bdc935085fb0933fb6b179bd11492 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Joseph Burns OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-08.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 October 13, 2019 Joseph Burns (Part 2), October 13, 2019 LGBT-08 01:53:05 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Joseph Burns Mary Foltz video BurnsJoseph_20191013_Video 1.0:|25(8)|50(9)|69(11)|92(2)|109(9)|122(3)|139(2)|156(2)|177(8)|196(7)|217(3)|238(15)|259(5)|280(5)|299(2)|324(11)|343(13)|364(5)|387(6)|406(10)|427(12)|448(8)|465(19)|482(3)|511(5)|532(6)|555(11)|578(16)|603(11)|626(13)|651(10)|672(16)|693(16)|714(17)|733(14)|754(5)|777(6)|788(12)|809(5)|830(3)|849(12)|870(4)|887(9)|906(12)|929(3)|944(12)|965(11)|986(3)|1005(9)|1026(11)|1043(7)|1066(6)|1087(11)|1110(14)|1131(16)|1158(5)|1183(7)|1208(5)|1229(10)|1250(10)|1271(3)|1294(2)|1317(5)|1338(6)|1359(2)|1384(6)|1405(7)|1430(3)|1455(4)|1474(7)|1501(5)|1520(12)|1543(3)|1566(13)|1587(4)|1604(17)|1623(5)|1646(17)|1669(13)|1694(8)|1715(14)|1734(3)|1751(7)|1772(5)|1789(8)|1814(11)|1837(6)|1856(9)|1875(9)|1898(2)|1917(4)|1934(11)|1959(7)|1978(8)|1999(13)|2020(10)|2039(3)|2060(11)|2083(13)|2104(6)|2119(10)|2144(5)|2169(5)|2188(3)|2209(11)|2232(5)|2255(2)|2276(8)|2303(8)|2328(17)|2351(2)|2378(9)|2399(8)|2402(14) 0 https://youtu.be/zEkvYyfuth8 YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz. I’m here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley. This is part of the LGBT community oral history project, which has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We’re in Joseph’s home in Boiling Springs today. It’s October 13th, 2019. Carol Moeller is our videographer. And Joseph, I just want to thank you once again for talking with us.&#13 ; &#13 ; JOSEPH BURNS: Thank you. 0 32 Stories About Le-Hi-Ho MF: We’re so happy to be here, and we met with you yesterday, and we talked a lot about an organization called Le-Hi-Ho, which you had been really one of the earliest members of that organization, and we wanted to start our conversation today by asking, is there anything else that you wanted to tell us today about Le-Hi-Ho?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Yes, probably. I was a founding member. I was the first to respond to Ron’s letter about forming the organization. Le-Hi-Ho 0 538 Founding Other LGBT Organizations JB: But they were not city -- Allentown was -- Le-Hi-Ho and the organization that we founded, which was called the Citizens’ Concern for a Better Community, CCBC -- did that because our friend Frank, a professor at Muhlenberg, created an organization as soon as he heard for it, Citizens Organized for Decency, COD. So I just needed a name to respond to that, so we came up with the Citizens Concern for a Better Community as the gay organization. 0 788 Demonstrations / Protests / Activism JB: Every week we would go and have some sort of demonstration. Sometimes there were no people around at all ; sometimes -- I think that person was -- noon-time, I believe, lots of people out looking at us, watching us do this publicity thing about coming out and opening the door on discrimination, never to close again, and so we got our free -- well, that wasn’t true. We had a parade at one point in connection with this, and I think there were twenty-seven people who actually marched that day, maybe a few more than that. Close enough. 0 4033 Relationship MF: Yeah, you met Ricky through Le-Hi-Ho, so how did you meet your second lover? How did that relationship begin?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Well, I met him again at a New Year’s Eve party -- I think I -- I don’t remember. We might have had a drag party that night. We may have had a Le-Hi-Ho event, drag event on New Year’s Eve of 19-- going into 1970, and he insisted on taking me home, which was our first time together. And after that, we were -- I had him move down here by April, I think, after that. Moved away from his family. 0 5895 Elder Initiative MF: So we’re right at the end of our time, and so may I ask one more question before we end the interview? I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the Elder Initiative that you’ve been involved in.&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay, I work with a group. I had these papers that I didn’t know what to do with. I had all these papers from forty years ago, forty, then, forty something years ago, forty-three or forty-four, from 1969 on, relating to all the organizations in Pennsylvania that I knew about, that were in existence at that time. 0 MovingImage Joseph Burns shares stories of Le-Hi-Ho, LGBT activism, and personal relationships. MARY FOLTZ:My name is Mary Foltz. I'm here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley. This is part of the LGBT community oral history project, which has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We're in Joseph's home in Boiling Springs today. It's October 13th, 2019. Carol Moeller is our videographer. And Joseph, I just want to thank you once again for talking with us. JOSEPH BURNS:Thank you. MF:We're so happy to be here, and we met with you yesterday, and we talked a lot about an organization called Le-Hi-Ho, which you had been really one of the earliest members of that organization, and we wanted to start our conversation today by asking, is there anything else that you wanted to tell us today about Le-Hi-Ho? JB:Yes, probably. I was a founding member. I was the first to respond to Ron's letter about forming the organization. You know, of course, we didn't have a name, we didn't have any place. So we met with several other people ; one of the men was a nurse by the name of Al Ravert, who became the vice president, and Al had a friend with a cabin in the woods somewhere, I think up in Lehighton, I believe, which was appropriate. We weren't sure -- there had been an arrest not very long before that about the Mafia. A group in the Poconos that had -- Mafia leaders had come out from New York, and they went up and raided them and arrested all these people. So we were a little bit paranoid. I thought -- we thought, is that why we're going to the woods, to be out where we can't be arrested? And I don't know who else felt that way, but thirty-one people who came to that first organization, thirteen of us formed the organization, what was -- decided to meet again. And that's how Le-Hi-Ho started, and that was -- it was in April or May of 1969. Now, the two stories I want to tell you about Le-Hi-Ho, while I was thinking of them: one was the first time we met, probably, was Dick Leitsch, we invited Dick Leitsch, we formed in April or May, invited Dick for February, I -- January or February, I'm not sure which ; February, I believe -- to be our speaker. Well, they had that -- a public meeting, we had that at the church. The Presbyterian church in Allentown sponsored us for that particular day. And so we had the day, Dick came, we had -- the gay community was seven people, seven men from our organization. And we were talking about, the first meeting, we were going to blend in to the crowd, okay, we'll just be anonymous. Four ministers and nobody else. Four ministers and us. Now, we're going to hide, right. (laughter) We're going to look anonymous. That's just -- it's just wonderful, as a matter of fact, our first public appearance being publicly identified as gay was certainly -- there was no hiding. And they were as curious about us as we were about them. At the meeting, Dick Leitsch did an excellent job for us. The next story involves Barbara Gittings, who we had I think in June, I believe -- true, it was June -- as a speaker, and that was the (inaudible) meeting at which we had a young minister there who was vociferously -- he was going to preach that night about the evils of homosexuality, and all of us knew all about this, and we were invited to come and hear all about the evils of homosexuality. And quite forthright, and several of the ministers, who I think were a little more open to the idea of us being there than he was. At any rate, we decided we were going to go, we were going to go, okay, and so we had the first public demonstration against homosexuals in 1970, and it consisted of Barbara Giddings, Ron Seeds, myself, and my lover, Paul Forrest -- stood outside the church and waited for these people to come. Nobody ever showed up, okay. So the hour comes, and I hear the music inside going on, so we went up to the door, looked inside, and there's the minister up in the pulpit, his wife, there with his son, and he's preaching all by himself. (laughter) That was the first demonstration in Allentown that we ever had, first public demonstration. Wonderful memory. I just want to get that story out before we get this -- there wasn't another one until we did coming out, and when we did -- the next organization in 1978, and it must have been prior to -- some time prior to the election, I don't know when, exactly. Dixie White, who was then the state president of NOW -- I don't know -- she hadn't been elected yet. This was before the convention, they elected her. It was '77 when Dixie started and we were going to have a convention at the Hotel Traylor, not the Hotel Traylor, Hotel America? Americana? It's on Fifth, is that right? Fifth and Hamilton, I believe. And it was owned by one person -- We wanted to have a convention there, we were going to have a gay convention, we wanted to have our first gay convention, and he says yes, to begin with, and then said no ; it went to the paper and [said it descriminated against us?]ot a lot of publicity about that, and got a lot of controversy, but that was a part of the conversation about discrimination after that, because they had, you know, that was a front-page story -- not a front-page story, but a story that got in the Morning Call and led to the Valley (inaudible). But that had started because the human relations commission, I think -- they may have approached us as we approached them, I'm not sure. But Dixie had wanted to include other causes in the human relations commission, which were gay, lesbian, trans, and bi having rights for anti-discrimination against housing, employment, and public spaces. And the commission was fine with that. There was a fellow by the name of Bob Prince, I believe, was in charge of the commission, very friendly. There was one commissioner who was not friendly at all. He was very forthright about it, too: a young man who had very strong feelings about -- very anti-homosexual. Didn't make a difference. He would've been overruled by the rest of the commission, because the rest of the commission was for us, whoever they were. But we went to City Council on the basis for the first time and talked about the need for gay rights, taking a bunch of us from -- Le-Hi-Ho was very supportive, and people [were?], then, multiple organizations, I mean, we could never represent five or six organizations, just because people were available and sometimes participated in those organizations, so there was a reason to do it ; we weren't just fooling around. But they were not city -- Allentown was -- Le-Hi-Ho and the organization that we founded, which was called the Citizens' Concern for a Better Community, CCBC -- did that because our friend Frank, a professor at Muhlenberg, created an organization as soon as he heard for it, Citizens Organized for Decency, COD. So I just needed a name to respond to that, so we came up with the Citizens Concern for a Better Community as the gay organization. Met at Confront - a number of people came ; I don't -- Carol Bloch was elected as co-chair with me of that organization, and we used to sit for several years ; (inaudible) for three years, actually, from '77, '78, through '80, and '80 -- on New Year's Day in '80, we started the Gay Alliance Service, which was what we did after we tried for gay rights. There were a number of events involved with that. We had public demonstrations at City Hall. One of the first ones was our coming out. I got a door -- my apartment had doors in the basement that they had taken off the building somewhere, and I got one of those, put it in a frame, took it down to City Hall, set it up, and then we came through the door as a way to "come out," come out of the closet symbolically. Made a speech about the history and the fact that we were so oppressed by history or unknown in history in the Dark Ages, we were kept in the Dark Ages unknowing and unable to reach out to each other. And that has been the key to it, the whole thing, I have always said that if you give them support, give them love, it makes all the difference in the world. It's what makes -- what gives them the chance to grow. It's from where they are, and become the people that they will become, and get -- change that unhappiness to joy of a relation -- I remember a young man who was married, I was confronted with them, personally with him, and his wife, and he was very unhappy in marriage. And I liked her a lot, so I was very unhappy, but he wanted to be gay, and I told him about the Stonewall, and what happens when you go in, people will look at you because you're new, and you have to pay a fee, it's a disco, you dance, just a -- and he did. He said, "I was happy. That was the beginning of my happiness." And I really felt bad that she was gorgeous. She was a very lovely woman, short, and he was also kind of short. They made a really attractive couple, but he got divorced, and happily went on with it. Now, I've had that a lot. When you're out like that, you get people come to you, and tell you that they're gay, and "I'll tell you, but don't tell anybody else," sorts of things. So he was one that did that, and that was historic. So Confront was friendly with me, and friendly enough to sponsor and be very open. We met there through the time that we were - the whole organization whole time we met there. We paid them maybe fifteen dollars for the room or something like that. But it was well worth it -- central place, and I lived beside it ; I was next door, literally, to it, at that time, so it was very easy for me to get there. So we had a -- I don't know -- three, or four, or five demonstrations at city hall. Every week we would go and have some sort of demonstration. Sometimes there were no people around at all ; sometimes -- I think that person was -- noon-time, I believe, lots of people out looking at us, watching us do this publicity thing about coming out and opening the door on discrimination, never to close again, and so we got our free -- well, that wasn't true. We had a parade at one point in connection with this, and I think there were twenty-seven people who actually marched that day, maybe a few more than that. Close enough. Not more than thirty-one, who actually marched down Hamilton Street that day. Met at the corner of Ninth and Hamilton, that was -- Rubes was -- I think still in existence then. And we met in front of there. We had a number of people from across the state -- Mary [Antero?] came from Harrisburg, people came from Williamsport, people came from Philadelphia. A friend of mine from Philadelphia brought his peace professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who I enjoyed meeting. I had talked with this person about it for a long time. We're part of a collective down there, a peace collective that he was a part of, and this peace professor was the leader of that collective. Very interesting man, obviously well-educated, and spoke to this -- was one of the speakers along with Mary, and myself, and Dixie White, president of NOW. There was a group protesting us. If you remember the Daddona Park, there's a map there of the Daddona Park down at the end of Walnut Street, and there is an amphitheater on the hill. We were down at the base of it, where we could have the audience in front of us. And there were a number of people there, I said that there were thirty-one -- now, there may have been more at the park, I don't remember that there were or were not. There was (inaudible) number of people -- bunch of protesters up in the top of the hill. A young man again -- oh, I told you about the -- I told you this story, okay. That was Thirteenth Street, that church was Thirteenth Street, and we went into boycott -- still there, still a very small, tiny little church -- you can see it there. Okay, and I don't know where the young man was from, I don't know where this guy was from that did the preaching. I allowed him to speak, and people were mad at me for that, because I figured, let them see that their word of God is not affecting us very much. But we gave them voice -- I gave them a couple minutes, and people were unhappy with that. I doubt -- I've never considered whether I was truly right or wrong with that. I resent them coming into my space, okay. When I find that straight people are appearing in gay movies, it makes me mad, because that's not fair, really. We need our own employment. It happens, and they're good, and I sort of like Frankie and -- Grace and Frankie very much, and I have appreciated actors who did it more now than I was before, but I still resent it, and when subjects are anti-gay, and that happens sometimes without knowing, unless you really look at it and really understand what they're saying -- the message is really anti-gay. And that's invading my space, and I get really, really angry about that. So I think I could understand people's anger when I allowed it to happen, and that particular occasion -- So we went to Sunday counsel a number of times. They ultimately made the decision that we couldn't speak. They'd had enough. After about three or four meetings, they were going to cut us off and not allow -- cut off that debate. So we went the next time with tape in our mouths to show that we were -- demonstrate the fact that we couldn't speak as clearly as we could. I had known that that was the tactic that had been used plenty of times before, but it was effective then. I remember the first time that I spoke to city hall, I was pretty paranoid. I didn't know what was going to happen. I was concerned about my own position ; I was in the telephone book, and I could be found easily, and I thought, I'm going to be the most hated man in the city. Next morning, I was at work, and I heard on the radio -- the radio was on, and I heard my own voice coming across the airway -- they had interviewed me after that night. And that was the first I had appeared that -- no, I think that may not be true. I was probably out on the radio programs. The first time I'd done it in my hometown. But that was also the first time we demonstrated in Allentown, was when we did that march, all twenty-seven of us, and I remember singing a wonderful Quaker hymn about -- the very famous one from Appalachian Spring. I can't remember -- simple, simple what. "Simple Gifts," it's called. Wonderful plain hymn, and the first time I heard it, singing that, and of course, "We Shall Overcome," and then marching up and down the street. We had a sign from -- my lover had made banners for four different organizations: Le-Hi-Ho, Pennsylvania Caucus, the Reading Group, and a group in Northumberland, little town across from Sunbury. We claimed -- Northumberland only four thousand people, so we claimed we had the biggest group in the smallest city, the other gay group was there. Not quite so. Most of the people came from Sunbury. And my good friend of mine was in charge of that. We were friends -- lifelong ; he had married a man before, and they lived together for thirty-six years before he died, and unfortunately not in -- a couple of years ago. Actually, it was more than that, it was more years than that, maybe forty-two or something like that. Now Le-Hi-Ho is fifty, fifty years old ; he met him in '76, so, what -- At any rate, long friendship. The other thing that happened that particular weekend: there was another demonstration in Williamsport. There was a county fair up there, and Anita Bryant was appearing. Now, we had demonstrated against Anita at several points. We went down through Redding one time, and she was appearing at the Masonic temple, and we protested outside there. She was easy to protest. We never saw her, of course, but we did protest, and I remember people came in costume to emphasize the fact that they had to hide their identity -- the first time that ever happened, that I ever saw it happen. And it was a nice demonstration, and that was the first thing we were able to demonstrate. She was there -- appeared then at the Williamsport fair, and I don't remember the county, unfortunately, right off the top of my head. She was to appear at the fair there. So Mary went up. I did not ; we had had our demonstration on Saturday. They were to go on Sunday to the fair, and they did go to the fair. They had a meeting beforehand, they demonstrated beforehand in a park close by. They had about fifty people, I think, or more at this demonstration. Not everybody elected to march. I think -- I'm not sure how many people elected to march, probably less than fifty, I believe. They actually elected to march at the fair itself. They did that, okay, and they went up there and bravely marched around -- frightening, frightening experience. Mary still is marked by it ; says that was the most frightening day she was ever through. When you've got ten thousand people who hate you, and you're marching in front of them. And I got a letter from the person who founded Homophiles of Williamsburg. Name was Gary. He was the -- he followed me in the co-chair. He was the co-chair of the caucus after me. Then he moved away to Williamsport and founded this group called HOW. The rest of the people -- a lot of people went up there from the state. Thank you. Tony Silvestri spoke there at that demonstration, Mary did, Dixie was there, I'm sure. My point about that demonstration was that following that, the -- fellow by the name of Dan Maneval was then chairman of HOW. It was chairman, leader, president, I'm not sure -- doesn't make any difference what his title was. He was the leader of it. And that was like Dan's second or third -- no, it was his first organization, I'm sorry, his first organization. He was interviewed that night ; following that -- it appeared on television, cable television for Wilkes-Barre. Following that, the neighbor kids began to harass him a little bit. We needed to respond to that. We responded several times. In that day, what happened with gay people when you were an activist, you did everything, okay, and you didn't need anybody's permission ; you simply went ahead and did it without -- doing whatever you could make up for a response. And we were often pretty weak about it ; we didn't know what we were doing. We had to invent these things -- effective answers. And I don't know -- I wanted to find out what were effective answers. I wanted to have a meeting to talk about, let's -- what was good about what we did, and what were the failure, so we could be instructive to the next generation. But the next generation doesn't need this anymore. They have the internet, and wonderful, wonderful means, you know -- when we did a newsletter at -- we used to pull the newsletters in our meetings for the aging group in 2000 newsletter -- hell, we had one hundred forty-seven -- we had a lot. We thought, back in those days, by keeping our -- all those people we had been in contact with would never come to the caucus, we sent newsletters as long as they didn't come back to us, and they frequently did, because everybody was young and in transit. But the difference between two-thousand and now -- they, of course, do it by -- they don't send the newsletters out anymore ; everything by email. And those kids take great advantage of that. They are so aware, and I went to a conference -- I'll have to talk about that later -- go back to Le-Hi-Ho, and back to how and why I was talking about it -- and Dan was interviewed, began to harass him -- we went up and went around to the neighbors and said, "Look, this fellow is being harassed in his own home, his parents' home" -- he had inherited it from his parents, who were then dead, and was living there all by himself. We talked to the neighbors, and they didn't -- the cops wouldn't do anything. The cops said, they don't know who it is, and Dan found out later, of course, that the cops had talked to these very people. They had talked to the neighbors and found out, well, yeah, they were talking to the kids. Didn't you know that? No, we didn't know it, and that was very ineffective, and stopped for a bit, started again, around Halloween especially, and it got so intense, so intense, that Dan got really, really scared, because they threw a cinder block through his front door, and attacked his windows, attacked him in his home at night, and it really frightened him to the degree that he actually left home and stayed in an apartment for some time. Ultimately, he sold his home. The cops never did a thing. Our mistake was not to talk to the cops, and not to create this incredible imbroglio over it. We really should have, but I'm not sure that Dan would've been able to stand it, because he was already in danger. He felt -- he was attacked once, but that was some years after that, as a matter of fact. But Dan is still an activist, okay, going on, like, his thirteenth organization right now in Williamsport. He is just incredible, and he's a little trooper. He also got stage three cancer, and he's waiting now to find out the results of his chemo. He'll know about four days, I think the sixteenth. But that was a terrible loss. He was the only one I knew suffered that great a loss, lost his family home over it. Stayed in hiding in a trailer court for a long time, moved back to the city, and lived at the same address for ever since, but thirteenth organization as far as I know. I really lost contact, and I don't know how many -- up to the modern day, keep re-founding it, and re-founding it, and re-founding it -- Howarth for three years did a terrific job, and then it -- I stayed with him until about two-thousand, he decided -- they had to come to me, now, I'm not going to do it again. Well, three or four years passed, and there were suddenly three organization or four organizations in Williamsport of various sorts, liberal organizations, grassroots, that really carried the banner of gay rights, and (inaudible) always been very difficult -- so the city hall, the city paper, would not publish the word "homosexual," would not advertise meetings for any of these groups for many years. I think they finally did, finally made it a change. It was a long time, a hard change. We interfered another time at Bloomsburg. These friends of ours -- the caucus, essentially -- so it was a multi -- people came from different organization -- met at Bloomsburg and talked to a dormitory. Went and talked to kids in the dormitory, and talked tough, and said, you know, again, we're going to -- we shouldn't have -- of course, we were totally nonviolent, as the gay movement has been, by the way, as everybody should be well aware, is that we haven't killed anybody. We had a few demonstrations in which police cars got turned, and that was Harvey Milk. I remember him being -- we were at Echo -- when there was a demonstration happening on the West Coast, I remember hearing about it, because we were very affected by it, cheering and that kind of thing, and Harvey Milk was there. But that's when they had a violent period, the only violence that I really remember outside of -- well, there's been very, very little violence, and no guns, nobody killed, a lot of people -- a lot of gays died, but not any result of our actions, or (inaudible) demonstrations, it didn't happen that way. Except this one occasion, and poor Dan lost his home, and it's so courageous, and I honor him so much. We'll miss him terribly. So there are a bunch of us who remain from those days as good friends, having bonded in that way, in that particular bond, which was deeply bonding, you know, when you're doing that kind of work, and you're -- There just wasn't enough time to talk to each other. We didn't have time to party. We didn't have time to know each other. We just talked, went and talked and talked and talked, because there was so much to say about what was going on, to talk about all the meetings, and all the events, and all -- everything we need to plan, and all that kind (inaudible), that we just had rare times. I think we got caught in a snowstorm at one time and stayed at somebody's cabin. Wonderful party. We all had pot, and if they arrested, they would have arrested the whole rural population ; all those groups would've been leaderless. That was the only time -- that was one of the few times that we ever had times to just be ourselves. Now, in the modern day, we've finally really been -- without the organizations we're getting to know each other again and enjoying it a lot. So back to the demonstrations and CCBC. When Frank organized his organizations, we quickly organized ourselves into this -- what we came to this Citizens Concerned for a Better Community, for lack of -- the first meeting we had, I think we got a committee, and said, "Name it," and that's what we came up with. Kind of a dumb name, really, honestly, but then, it was a dumb thing to do, calling it "cod." I can't think of any more demonstrations we did. We went to City Council ; there was one councilman who was opposed to us entirely, very vociferously, and he was the one who invited Anita Bryant to come to the city, stirred us up tremendously, stirred up quite a lot of controversially, fortunately, gave us -- there was a lot of back and forth in the letters to the editor. We spoke as often as we could, anywhere we could, went on the radio, went to -- churches wouldn't invite us ; several churches invited us, just to understand what we were doing and what we wanted, which was of course just the support for gay rights. Just allow us to have them, you know, say, "We are for it," instead of against us. And what we're looking for is to just be ourselves, not to bother you, not to be immoral, not do strange things to your children, just to be ourselves. And I really -- I am not a particularly good speaker. I would have preferred that other people had done it than me. But I did it anyway, and some other people did. Somewhere along the way, and this might have been later, we got a chance to talk to Presbyterians -- the Presbytery was meeting, you know. We went to a Presbytery meeting and talked to them. It was a relatively small meeting, because they were just them. It may have been a committee of the Presbytery, I'm not sure. But I did convince them to support gay rights. Now, there were churches -- the Moravian Church was one, the UCC, a number of denominations had actually endorsed gay rights on a national level, and we made a lot of hay with that, put that forward. Le-Hi-Ho was very supportive ; when we formed in Allentown, they came across and became memberships without being a part of leadership. That was what they did. They stayed pretty much with themselves, were very supported, wonderfully, and spoke -- City Hall meetings, organized a great packet of literature, better than I could have, because they had resources, they had the library and all the resources to do that, and organize the packet of information for the City Council. Ultimately, there was a mayoral election, and Joe Daddona was the mayor at that time, and Joe lost by seventeen votes. I couldn't help but say, "Look, you know, I didn't endorsed you -- I disendorsed you, and I want you to know that, so we were the seventeen votes." I'm sure that wasn't true, but it was a cruel thing to do, and a stupid trick to do, and that's no politics at all. That's my most stupid, stupid, stupid -- but I couldn't help it. I had to rub it in a little bit. Seventeen votes. But there never have been -- in that time, the Republicans and Democrats traded administrations every time, and it became a Frank somebody, or -- I don't remember Frank's name, and Joe Daddona was elected again another four years, and there's Joe Daddona Park now down there, and that amphitheater is now called Joe Daddona Park at the end of Walnut Street. When they finally got around to counting on it, to actually voting on it, we lost incredibly. The opposition was there. When we had the tape on our mouths, the opposition stood up to speak, and did speak. The City Council member who favored us said, "Let them speak," and City Council retook the vote then, and said, "Yes, you can speak." So the opposition did speak. We did not. But it was an important occasion that they did, and we applauded and all that kind of jazz, applauding our enemies because they were as fierce as we were as the ability to uphold the Constitution. I always felt that was terribly important. There's one more story I could tell you about that, an instant I thought was really important, that you uphold that right for everybody to do that, speak up, free speech. That was one case we did it. And that was pretty much the end of City Council, whenever they voted that in, and had a letter from the solicitor that they could not do city -- lights in the city, because it exceeded the state, and there was no authority for them to do it. They wouldn't take states that had -- the state commission had not announced -- went on with that and met -- was a nicely integrated group of people. We had some blacks, which was rare. We had men and women. Allentown NOW was founded by Dixie White, president, the state president, because she wanted more people to participate as leaders. You excite new leaders if you have a new organization, and she was very much in favor of that, so she created several. There was a group in Bethlehem, socialists, led by socialists, who were truly socialists. I think there were seven of them. And they didn't have a leadership. They did everything by consensus, no president. We didn't have a president either in the group in Reading, because I was the most eligible person. They didn't want me to do it. They wanted to have a local person do it, and they were right, and I refused -- I wouldn't take the leadership, because it was their organization. But they wanted me to do it. So we didn't have a leader ; it moved by a council that ruled the whole thing. And this socialist group was the same. They did everything by consensus, very difficult to do. And they got -- were very big on the business -- they wanted to be the -- on the discrimination issue at City Hall, and not allowing us to speak, that was a figurative issue that they really jumped on, and the governor's -- candidate for governor, socialist candidate for governor, spoke at that meeting, also, that demonstration we had in Allentown. I don't remember her name anymore, but she came to speak for us. Good people, they were. I like socialists. I wasn't one myself, and I wasn't really a lefty, but I really, certainly learned to respect them and to love them. E. E. Cummings said, "Communists have fine eyes." Great line, great line. Is there anything to say about the organization outside of the fact that it was -- I was not good about -- never good about really integrating organizations with people of color. I just wasn't successful at it. I don't know why. They just didn't respond to me, like the transsexual community's not responded well to me. And I regret that a lot. I can't bridge it, can't be different somehow and bridge that, and I always feel my distance from them. And I've known only a few over the years, until, now, the current -- I know a transvestite comes to the aging group -- no, I'm sorry, a transsexual comes to the aging group, our age. She's seventy, pushing seventy, I believe, and is a former teacher, and got me acquainted with the fact that now there is in Pennsylvania a group that has five-hundred people coming to their conferences, all transsexuals, and that's amazing to me. Not all transsexuals, by no means. Some of our people go. And we're very supportive of her, and she's a good friend of mine, and she and I work with the movies now. There have been other people, but she and I are left to do it. But that's -- I was never successful with it. I met a few over the years, but I was not able to make any breakthroughs with them in terms of really personal friendship. One exception was a transvestite who I knew well, who sang in her own voice. She was an entertainer, and we sponsored her several times for organizational meetings, and when we had an opportunity to present anybody, we presented her, because she sang in her own voice, quite good at that. Still living -- now lives in -- I haven't seen her in many -- since then. She was very forthright, works with women, is a hostess, and went to the police when she was discriminated against, and talked to the police, and said, "You discriminated against me." Very, very forthright. About that business with the CCBC, I was discriminated against once and I didn't even know it. My landlord came to me after I was in the newspaper, sometime after that, and said, "I want to use your apartment ; you have to move out. I'm going to be taking over it." At the time, I was ready to divorce my lover, and we did separate, as a matter of fact, then. I was moving out. I also did the separation. I was also going to Confront at that time for personal therapy. Went to that for several years, enormously, enormously helpful, group therapy was. And my landlord was going to have me move out. That day, we moved out everything except the piano, which I was donating to a woman whose daughter wanted to learn to play the piano. So I gave her the piano. The piano was very, very heavy, and we couldn't move it out the day before, it was the fifteenth, or whatever day I'd promised to get it out. So we went back to collect the panel the next day, and the landlord is there, and he says, "That's my piano." I had to pay one hundred dollars to give the damn piano away. He was such a mean bastard. He never moved in, also, and after that, then he re-rented the apartment. That's when I knew I'd been discriminated against, but I didn't understand it before. I didn't think about -- not realize -- connect the dots, because he didn't present it in any way, like, "You aren't welcome," but he wanted me out of there, and got me out of there as a result of that, right after I'd been in the paper. Rick and I separated after eight years, and he stayed in town ; I loaded him down with my dog and all the furniture, I loaded on him so he'd stay in town, not run home to mother -- he was from Milton, Pennsylvania. Bit of a momma's boy. So I made the choice, stayed in town, it was a big mistake. Ultimately, he -- I met him fifty years ago, yeah, fifty years ago, in '69. In 2007, 2008 -- 2007, in August two-thousand seven, in Allentown. I told you I was going out there to see him once a week. But he was married with this woman for thirty years -- he wasn't married. He lived with a woman for thirty years after that, which astonished me. I mean, clearly it wasn't a sexual relationship, but they grew to be interdependent, so interdependent that they really were pretty tight as a couple, not functioning terribly well, low-level functioning, but able to make it, and leaning together really worked for them. She got him to quit smoking. I never thought he would quit smoking, twenty, thirty years now, twenty, thirty, years before, twenty years -- they were together twenty-eight years, I believe, together, when he died. And that was extraordinary, to have him married to a woman, hard to explain, after he'd been gay entirely, and he continued to be gay. He also got beat up one time in a park, right across the street from where I was then living on Turner Street. If you remember, there's a cemetery there on Turner Street, Ninth and Turner, I believe. And that's where I lived in an apartment there, Dixie White's spouse at that time was Debbie Cedar, and Debbie later became another president of NOW, state president of NOW, I think -- I'm not sure when. Maybe after Bishop Whitley and -- I think after Mary. I'm not sure. That would've been the second (inaudible) of three lesbians, I believe, three or four lesbians in charge of the state organization, you know, in a row. But anyway, I lived in a little apartment there for, like, one hundred dollars a month. They were fixing up. Wonderful -- they gave me the lowest price they could, and I had the whole first floor. And just a good place to live. It had a sun porch on -- loved the sun porch. I could go out there -- it was in March, and I was laid off, go out there and just have my coffee in mornings, enjoy the mornings, warm (inaudible) because the sun was starting right in. A fellow used to go by every morning with his cat on a leash, thirty-foot leash. (Laughter) That cat was all over everybody's porch, went walking way ahead of him, it was the funniest thing I ever saw. I never saw it again, a cat like that. I saw a lot of people travelling with cats ; I never saw one on a leash like that, walking around town. But he was beat up in the park across the street from me. Changed his life. He really became very frightened after that, and all through his going-out pattern, he was never able to cruise the streets as he had. He would go to a bookstore, but he would do it at a building like that, and that's what he did, was adopt a bookstore, the Hamilton and Ninth, Hamilton and Tenth, I think it was. He lived on Hamilton and Eleventh, it was -- I don't remember. That was just a huge change for him, because he had been always promiscuous, even when I first knew him. I hadn't known that for a while, but he just liked anything in pants, he would go with it. He just had anal sex, in particular, once. Never had to have it again, but he had to have it once, with not everybody. You know, I thought it was an act of contempt ; I wasn't quite sure with him, why he did it. He was hard to communicate, difficult, an autistic person, I suspect, ultimately. I was very much in love with him. He was handsome to me. He had some sort of feminine tendencies, which I ignored. To me, he was a virile man ; I treated him as a -- I ignored whatever he might have been. Gorgeous legs ; he would've been a fantastic drag -- truly gorgeous legs to the end of his life. Very supportive of me. Took me everywhere, drove me all over the state. He had a car ; I didn't own a car until I was forty, so we had his. We bought cars together, but they were in his name. I took care of that. And we had a little Subaru, which was then a new car, little tiny thing, yellow. Ah! School bus yellow. We went all over the state. Again, intentionally, we went far distance places, we went out to Pittsburgh a lot, and out to my sister's, and went to the colleges around there, and gay bars where we could find them, just trying to keep contact with what was going on. The caucus itself had people from Pittsburgh come out, not anywhere else, but there was that mutual support among the organizations. They were very helpful to us in Allentown. Le-Hi-Ho was unusually helpful. At one point with the caucus, when we had a crisis of leadership -- as a matter of fact, when I was elected president, when I was elected co-chair, the co-chairs had gotten into trouble because they had done something unauthorized, and as a matter of fact, when we read the by-laws, they were authorized, because in the absence of membership meeting, and being authorized with the meeting, then the co-chairs were legal. But they had done something - I've forgotten what it was -- now, but the woman came by the name of Janet Cooper. I told you about Janet before. She was a professor at [Ship?], and she really was so against them, and really got us to oppose them, and I finally told her that there is an issue, there was a vote of confidence in the English Constitution -- the English use the vote of confidence is what the Parliament rises or falls on, is a vote of confidence, and you can vote them out of office. So she insisted on a vote of confidence after I finally explained to her what it was, and the current president and the current co-chairs lost the vote. Went to the next meeting and there was nobody there, we were there, and Mary and I were there, and a lot of their people, but the co-chairs never showed up, period. So we figured they've taken the vote seriously and they're not coming back. So we elected a new president that summer, and I got to be president, but in the interim I'd written it up in the newsletter. I said, we're at this point of crisis, we've done this thing, which is very controversial, and we need to address it in the next meeting. And Le-Hi-Ho wrote this letter, and said, "Look, if you're going to be this way, we're leaving. We are no longer supporting you at all. We're not giving you any money, we're not sending any people, we aren't allowing (inaudible)." Very important, because it really made the caucus look at the whole issue and get upset about losing the support of the main organization, of one that we really counted on, being as powerful as they were over that many years. They were very successful. And that was Ken Burke, another person that I have forgotten, another wonderful person, and [Lou Railer?] was his lover, and those two were students together, graduate students, I believe, and Ken was interested in politics. I think he might have gone into politics, ultimately. But at the time, he was president of Le-Hi-Ho, and a very good one, very strong, and very forthright, and very honest, and that was an important contribution of Le-Hi-Ho to that organization. And they came to the conferences, gave us a lot of staff for conferences, et cetera, and again, they did it without changing their position. They did not personally come to the caucus meetings, but they were -- supported us in every way. Something was key to support in Allentown, and that was the least we were trying for. The other thing that happened at that particular time that I want to talk about briefly was -- she formed the NOW chapter in Allentown. There were thirteen of us. We're all activists. There were two guys, and all the rest were women. We went everywhere. We went to women's conferences. I went to the women's state conferences. It was the year of the women, and they were having a conference in every city. I went to that conference. Wonderful, wonderful conference. A Quaker conference, I remember, great conference down in Philadelphia. I went to -- fell in love with Quaker meetings. Quaker meetings were unusual because you observe silence, and people are moved to speak. At a Quaker meeting, they have no -- there's no leadership. There were no ministers, no leaders. There are only weighty Quakers. Weighty Quakers are people who are known for their wisdom, and to be a weighty Quaker is a really wonderful thing, if you -- men or women are eligible for it, women can speak as well, because men -- although they do sit on separate sides of the church, women on this side, and men on this side. Long, long tradition, never changed, as far as I know. I don't know what happened in the modern church, in more recent days, but even then, in those days, it was still separated. Went to a Quaker meeting, at -- went on a Sunday that we were there for this Quaker conference, and my expectation was, you were going to get very inward, you're going to meditate, okay, you're going to go into this -- "You all flow out," (inaudible). Had that outflow, and your awareness of everyone else is so intense. For instance, like, there was never a consequence, when you're moved to speak -- I never heard two people try to speak at the same time. I don't know how that works, but collectively, so that you -- and you spoke when you had something to say. When the spirit moved you, then you spoke. And that was revelation, and I really loved that particular form of worship ever since. I think it's just superb, superior to everything I knew. But it's that outflow that you get, and which you're becoming such a part of the hole, and so moved by the whole, and listening, and open to -- we went to the Quakers once for a meeting, I think, at Reading, Reading, yes. We wanted to meet the Quaker church, so we went to the meeting, a Board meeting, I think, it was something, whatever -- wasn't the full -- we didn't go to a meeting ; we went to a -- for the meeting, that was the -- the people who wanted to speak on the issue, and they moved by consensus, and they had -- their whole congregation had to agree, or they couldn't do it. Well, there was one person who didn't agree, and he was pretty forthright, and told us why. I was there at the meeting, and spoke to us directly -- we spoke to him directly, and we didn't get it, but the Quakers and the Unitarians were very, very important to the movement. Unitarians sponsored Le-Hi-Ho membership. The Quakers were often spoken -- in support, were very supportive in terms of congregations and in terms of their actions, whether they -- they were very supportive. We happened to fail on that particular organization ; I'm sorry that we did, because the Quakers were wonderful people, always, and had been great. So NOW, the same thing, NOW had a meeting at that time -- local, state, or national, they talked about gay rights, right from the top, in the presence of any organization, and always talked about it in their meetings. What was happening locally was a part of their agenda. So Lehigh -- the Allentown NOW was a totally active organization. We went to -- we marched on Washington, we went to the '93, '83 march -- no -- We went to the march in, I think it was '79, was the first one, '78, '79, and then there was the first march on Washington. It was the second one in '93, which is also big, and people thought that was the first one, but no, it would've been in '79. Went to Chicago, when we were voting on the ERA, they had a demonstration in Chicago, one hundred-thousand people, as I recall, along the lakefront, enormous event. Washington, DC was an enormous event, the women's march in Washington, DC. NOW marched in the women's march in Washington, DC, was an enormous event ; over one hundred-thousand people marched in Washington that year, one of the largest demonstrations. The first and largest demonstration, I think, that had ever been, was back in -- was in San Francisco, gay pride, three hundred-thousand people, I think, at that time, and we had the record for the largest civil demonstration of anything, it happened to be gay rights. We were that kind of active. We were not -- and didn't spend any money in Chicago at all ; we crossed the border, never spent a cent in Illinois. Marched, wonderful march. First time I was in Chicago -- I moved there about two years later, very happily, happiest thing to be in with my lover. There were probably more conferences than that. I can't remember what they were, but they were always important and everything, well-informed. I was also a co-chair of NOW, and I was the only male that I knew of that held that job, and it was on their insistence ; they wanted to have equality. But there were only two of us available ; and the other was a student, at Kutztown again. It was a great organization, really. Dixie was such a mentor to me, and so politically oriented, and always, always involved, very feminist. My mother was about as strong a feminist as you can get for the forties and fifties, and certainly very aware and very supportive of what she knew -- she was anti-communist like crazy, she was terribly anti-communist. Ran for the state legislature, (inaudible) that she was anti-communist. We had to talk to him all over (inaudible), all over the state. It was really -- I learned to disrespect that. It was the time of the McCarthy era, and -- forty-seven, I think, I think when she was running for -- no, that was school board. I don't remember -- legislature, she ran after that and didn't win. Was (inaudible) anti-communist and talking, and watching McCarthy hearings on television. They were actually on television. House Un-American Commission was one of the first televised events from Congress ever, and Joe McCarthy was leading that pack, and talking about the pinkos, the pinko commies, the gay commies, and all that. I learned later that in political science, and obviously at home, and told my mother off, and said, you're totally wrong, and I do not believe in McCarthyism or anything about it, it's just terrible evil, evil, evil, evil the organization. She got over it, and was fine with me after I came out, and my family has been very supportive, very supportive. I did not have a wedding, however. I wanted to, right when I -- well, I fell in love with Doug, I really wanted to celebrate love with him and have a wedding, and get married, and we didn't ; my sister said that somebody might not come, and I didn't want to know who. I just thought that, I don't want to be hurt, I don't want my family to hurt me now. And I still don't know who might not have come. They've always been supportive to my face, and loved Doug. He was a different person than Ricky was, and they liked him a whole lot more. And Ricky was the kind of person who people did not like, and I had people who'd tell me, "Don't bring him. You come, but don't let me see him," or "keep him away from me." That was tough. But Ricky, as I said, was probably autistic, not autistic, what do you call them -- there's a form of autism -- Asperger's, probably had Asperger's. It was (inaudible) among other things. Had a high fever when he was very young, one hundred and six temperature, sustained for a while, and I think it affected his brain, and he was thereafter not as capable, not as bright as he could have been. Graduated high school at twenty-one, I think, but he finally graduated. His mother got him to do that, insisted, and he stayed in school that long, and participated, even though he was older. But he had his problems, and wasn't kind to people. He was wonderful to me, but he would turn down anybody else for a ride, for instance. He wouldn't take them, and other people, he did take. But friends of mine, he turned them down. And that kind of -- I didn't know about it until later on myself, and it was a problem. He had an intelligence in his hands that was wonderfully good. He could knit, or (inaudible), or anything to do with sewing and threads, great -- did a lot of macramé. My sister has several pieces of that. It was a great skill with them. He just had a mental ability with that. One time, he made a window -- seventy macramé things that he had touched so he could put his plants out there, seventy plants, suspended each one on a string, and he'd take -- lower them and water them. It was crazy. Couldn't see out. He liked the covers when it's three layers on the windows. Couldn't see out. And I love sunlight. I don't put covers on my windows at all, any more covers than are there. These were landlords' -- my landlord wants these because they match his, and so they're his curtains, effectively. But I won't cover them. I have to have the light, all the light I can get. Three covers, good Lord. He lived in a very dark hole. This place is dark enough, as you can tell. I can't tell -- in my bedroom, I don't know whether it's light or day, literally. I don't know whether it's dusk. I'm drawing late, so I don't know, when I get up in the morning, I have to figure, is this morning or evening? What is happening? Is it afternoon? I can't tell. three o'clock in the afternoon, if it's a cloudy day, it's dark as dusk in here, because of that porch. And there used to be a huge elm out there, one hundred and fifty year old elm, that had been there when (inaudible) founded, for God's sake, and -- elm? Maple. It was maple. Dirty old tree, but big. Limbs fell off it twice on my car. (Laughter) It was when they decided to cut the tree down the second time, not because it fell on my car, because they didn't want it happening anymore, and, you know, maple -- everything that falls off a maple tree. So they probably tore it down. They came in and tore it, even the tree, took it down to the roots and (inaudible) that up, so it's completely gone now. It was huge and wonderful, but it's very, very dark. Really made (inaudible). And -- MF:May I ask -- JB:Anything else I can tell you? MF:Yeah, you met Ricky through Le-Hi-Ho, so how did you meet your second lover? How did that relationship begin? JB:Well, I met him again at a New Year's Eve party -- I think I -- I don't remember. We might have had a drag party that night. We may have had a Le-Hi-Ho event, drag event on New Year's Eve of 19-- going into 1970, and he insisted on taking me home, which was our first time together. And after that, we were -- I had him move down here by April, I think, after that. Moved away from his family. He'd been going to Canada, Toronto, Canada, weekly, seven hundred miles, to be gay. Which was a little ridiculous, but he was that kind of person. He loved driving, loved driving. Terrible on cars, hard on cars. I didn't know. I thought he knew something about cars ; he didn't know a damn thing about that. I had to replace the clutch every six months because he was so hard on the clutches. I'll never forget that. I've never had a clutch since then. I thought they (inaudible). I thought clutches -- I thought that was a normal part of having a car, but no. Very expensive part of having a car. Blew out the two gaskets on the damn thing before we got rid of that particular car, and that's expensive. That was thousands of dollars. The whole car was only four thousand dollars. Subarus at that time were nothing. They were the cheapest cars in America. New import then. And Ricky was not a great contributor, but he was very, very supportive of me. He never said a word to me about taking me to all those meetings. Was there with me, and we had -- something (inaudible) supporter. He was also -- didn't have a great deal of integrity. He forged a check at least once or twice. We'd give him rent money, and found out later that the rent wasn't paid, or whatever I'd given the money for wasn't paid, and it wasn't gone. So I thought there was personally too much, and divorced him, sadly. He worked at the Shawnee Penn with me, the furniture factory. He was a sewer, I was the distributing supervisor, and he worked in the -- he didn't sew. He was in the layout room where they laid the clothes out and cut them, cutting room. And that was -- there were two guys, older men, American people, five or six or seven Americans in the place, white Americans -- white people. I'm sorry, I apologize. Puerto Ricans were certainly American, and I was very aware of that. They lived at the top of the hill. There was a -- in Allentown, Hellertown, there's an area up there where it was low-income housing, and they lived up there at the top of the hill, and you can walk down through Saucon Park, which is between Allentown and Bethlehem, and they could walk down the hill to go to work, and I, we used to take the bus out, and when Ricky and I separated, I would take the bus, walk down the hill myself, to that complex down -- They were all Puerto Ricans. Very nice people, wonderful people, but they were very short. I never -- I thought I was tall. I'm only five-eight, and I thought I was tall, because they were truly (inaudible). It took me a long time to figure out that I really wasn't. And I never learned to speak Spanish, either, which I regret. I did learn -- I took it in college, but I never learned -- I missed a great opportunity to speak it. I didn't know them better. And there were -- there was one Mexican that came and didn't like it very much. There was not happiness between the Mexican and the Puerto Rican peoples. They looked down on each other, quite frankly. And I think they -- there was a white guy that came there, young fellow, they told him, don't come back, and he quit in a couple days. They were protecting the jobs for themselves. Which was -- they didn't do that to me ; I was college-educated and was a different line of thing. I got to be a supervisor almost right away, because nobody else in the place was educated, either, and then I got the position. It didn't pay me anything ; it was -- like I said, we were poor as church mice. Ricky lived in Milton, was where he was from, and his grandmother went to see us often. She lived to be ninety-six. I had her cane here for a long time, and it broke, unfortunately ; I was very sad about that, because Ricky had given it to me a couple years ago, before he died. I had kept contact with him all those years ; we were good friends, and -- Doug and I were good friends. It's unique about gay people, that they tend to stay with -- good friends with their exes, and know them, whereas Anne said that's unusual for heterosexuality, that they would divorce, and separate, and not know each other, and stay away from each other, and that just wasn't true of gay people I knew of. We typically maintained our relationships. And I certainly did with Ricky for those forty years, saw him on and off, at least twice a year, once a year at the very least, twice a year if I could, and in the last couple years, when he got -- he got to be about three hundred and fourteen pounds at one time. I had him out here, and I took him to the Y, and I said, I want you to see this. I wanted to take you to The Y specifically so I could take you to see the exercise rooms, through all I do, and know that this is a familiar, friendly place, that you don't have to be embarrassed about being here at three hundred and fourteen pounds and so on. He got so that he couldn't walk down the stairs anymore, and stayed on the second floor for a whole year before he got sick, and then went to bed all by himself, just said, "I won't get out of bed," and he stayed in bed for a year, and I went to see him every weekly, and while he was in bed, feeling terrible for the fact that he had gotten to that bad of shape and he just couldn't get out of bed, lost the use of his legs, almost, could barely stand -- I only saw him standing one time after that, and that was in a nursing home, where they'd taken him out of bed, and they have those lifters that can get people up, and they had taken him for exercises to another place, and I went there and saw him actually standing up, leaning on somebody, practically pushing him over, because his legs could not handle it anymore. That was the last time I saw him stand at all, and that was -- then he fell out of bed on the third of January in 1978. She was out doing groceries, and he made enough of a fuss to get -- enough noise to get -- attract the neighbor, called the police, the emergency people went in, got him downstairs, took him to Bethlehem, which is where they had a mental hospital at St. Luke's in Bethlehem, and they diagnosed him with dementia, and from there he went to a nursing home, and he went to a second nursing home. The first nursing home, he went while it was free, while he could do it under the auspices of Medicare, and then, when he ran out of that, then they changed him to an Alzheimer's home, memory of care home, and that's where he died, got pneumonia, finally, and died. It was a long time -- he was a long time dying, had a long time in dementia. It was hard to deal with, dementia is a very difficult thing -- would go to see him, and he may or may not recognize me, and he got angry with me several times. I think one time -- when the limb fell on my car was the month I couldn't go -- he felt abandoned, terribly abandoned, and it was -- it echoed forty years ago for him, echoed his family (inaudible). So I've got this man who was seventy years old grieving about the abandonment, and the loss, and the separation for him of being the gay individual in a family of three brothers, who were all very male, and his dad, who was beating him up some regular basis. And I liked his father ; I didn't know this was true. She's told me that Ricky complained about having brothers beating up when he was younger, and I don't doubt that that was true. They were quite male, very strong, solid individuals. I remember when his dad died of cancer, going to see him, and we went regularly, just to see him when he had cancer, because he was dying, and the boys would stand around, and just be strong, silent, would never have -- no conversation. Didn't know what to say to him, didn't know how to love him, or say, "I love you, Dad," or whatever. That was very hard. His mother was a good person, a warm person, very pretty, but she also put him on a clothesline when he was a kid, and a harness -- I mean, this was typical in the fifties. They took the kids, and put a harness on them, and then attach it to the clothesline so they couldn't run around, they'd get lost. Now, we happened to live in a place which was a V, two roads, one on each side of the house, and his dog was killed there. He had a dog, a white German Shepherd, that was killed, that he mourned for the rest of his life, loved that dog. We had a dog together that I loved very personally, wonderful dog, that was given to us by a lesbian couple moving to a -- a Reading couple who were moving to Chicago. Now this was an interesting couple, too, talk about somebody else for a moment. They had liberated the mines, Bethlehem Steel mines, were the first women to work, to go down into the mines, because they had sued, and were a lesbian couple, and worked together, went down in the mines together every day until they went to Chicago, and then I lost contact with them, sadly, but they had a dog that I went to see one time, when -- she was away, I think, and the dog was there, put away in another part with another lesbian couple that was either living with them or taking care of the dog. I said, "If you ever want to get rid of the dog" -- so they moved to Chicago and gave me the dog -- wonderful, wonderful animal. Turned out to be a transsexual dog -- trans -- a hermaphrodite. Eight years old, she suddenly began to develop -- lose her hair and develop penile bone, and it turned out that I took her to the vet, and the vet said that they weren't sure what was going on here. Either she's not female, or she's -- honest to God, penile bone going on down here, and she's clearly -- I had known her for maybe her whole life, but she was a female who humped everything. (Laughter) Now I've told you, the dog's -- which must have confused the hell out of them, because she felt like a female, she was a female, genetically, but she had been spayed, or they had gone in to spare, and they didn't do anything ; they didn't take anything out, and the vet told me that, whenever he examined her, that she's been spayed, and whatever they did, they didn't remove anything, and so she began to develop this set of balls and penile bone, and eight years old. And she was a spiritual animal. She was a dog that -- you looked in her eyes, she never looked away. You looked into her -- it could look like you were going to her tail, you know, her eyes were that deep, just these liquid pools, she just looked through -- way, way deep into her soul. And I thought she was Buddha. She was my Buddha dog. Suffered in her own way, became nearly blind, and very deaf, and died at seventeen years old, died in my arms, which I wanted to do. I wanted to give her her last -- if this was her last trip through life, I wanted to be done that way, and she died naturally in my arms, which I was very grateful for. But she was -- we were -- she and I were so in love. It was really a special relationship. She was always at my feet, always right behind me, the whole time. She would just follow me around and be right there wherever I was. I had to watch, step over her all the time, as long as she lived with me. And Doug fell in love with her, but she was so much my dog. Special relationship. It just worked out, the first time I had her, I remember -- she came in the house, they gave us the dog, I went and took a bath, put a few pieces of candy up here -- they were cream drops, they were called, I think, they were just sugar -- melted -- fondant with chocolate on them, and she ate them. (Laughter) What a bad dog. That was the start. And then she'd lick me. She loved Irish Spring soap. Loved it. She would lick it off me. And I'd let her do it (inaudible) because it didn't hurt me, and she loved -- whatever she was, boy, she loved that stuff. It was crazy. Very, very special animal, but humped my leg a lot. And again, it was natural to her. I mean, I didn't know -- like I tell you, she got persistent -- great leaper, my God, she could leap eight or nine feet, and did it often. She used to love chewies, and would chew them and take them from her, and she would just leap to the bed, incredible leaper -- was a poodle mix that looked like an English sheepdog. She had her fur done over her eyes. I had a picture of her there somewhere, but it's not -- she was cut at that time. We had to cut her because she got such long hair that she was only comfortable -- we had to sheer her like a sheep, literally, because it got so thick and so tangled, there was just no way we could handle it, so she was -- every summer, we'd have to (inaudible). Wonderful having her. Really grateful. Doug came to me -- I was busy at being an activist at that point. '80, we were doing conferences and so on. We did four conferences with the caucus. So we were doing a series of conferences, did them in '78, '79, '80, and '83. '81, perhaps, and three, I don't remember, '80, I guess it was. And that -- in different places across the state -- we did central -- we did east, central, west, back to east again. I think it was my turn for east. I told you about the Americus turning us down. After they had said yes, they turned us down, over at the newspaper. A little place called Howard Johnson's up above the Poconos, in the Poconos, they called us, and said they would do the conference. They did the conference. Very, very successful. We had to have it twice. We had a snowstorm the first time. We were going to have it in January, thirty-six inches, it snowed that day. Guy called me in Pittsburgh and said, "Are you going to head to this conference with snow starting in Pittsburgh?" I said, "Of course we have the conference." thirty-six inches. Believe it or not, there's a protest group out there on the highway leaving the hotel. We weren't there. I mean, we called off the cops. We called everybody we knew that had bought tickets, and said, please don't come, but then there was this protest group out there doing their thing without us. (Laughter) So we didn't have that conference. We had it again in April. Very successful. There were several hundred people, people were crying all over the place, really good conference. Really special. It was the first -- lots of people came and said, "I never saw so many lesbians before." It was just a thrill to see fifty lesbians in a room. And it was just a good, good conference. We were well-organized, I thought we did a terrific job. We did good conferences, quite frankly, in those years, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and a place called Rainbow Resort up in the Poconos again. Near that place? Yeah. It was owned by two women ; there was a bar in -- Candida's, they originally owned Candida's, lesbian couple, created it for a gay bar, and then Candida was the waitress at that time, and bought the bar, and took over, and still owns it, as far as I know. Candida's, when I was there, I don't know, two or three years ago, maybe -- I (inaudible) visiting (inaudible) and we decided to go to Candida's. God, I feel like a stranger. I walked in in the middle of the afternoon, seventy-nine years, you know, I'm seventy-eight by that time, seventy-seven, and I was just so out of place. Walked in, (inaudible) looked at me and said, like, "Are you real? You're in my bar?" And I never told him that I had been a frequent consumer once upon a time, although I was always older than anybody else. In gay liberation, I was thirty-five ; everybody else was in their twenties or students. And they accepted me, there was no problem with that, and I was always very grateful that there wasn't a problem. I think I was the only one that thought there should be, but there might be ; never was. We got along extremely well. They were not objects of my affection. I had a lover as long as I was around, and -- so I wasn't concerned, as objects of affection -- that never became a thing. But Doug worked for an airline, and I couldn't get out for a date, so I got a dating service, called a dating service, and Doug responded (inaudible) from Chicago. He worked for an airline, so he flew out, worked for Pan-Am at that time, which was still in existence, and they flew out and saw me, and we were together after that. That was -- although it wasn't true. I told him the first time after about six months, I said, no, I'm sorry, I don't think we're going to be lovers. I proposed to him on New Year's Eve, 1981, and we got together after that, and stayed together for another, actually, eighteen years, altogether. He told me, unfortunately, on the anniversary of our first date, which was the one he met me -- that was one of our two anniversary dates -- the oldest one, because it's when we first met, and then when I proposed to him, was the second anniversary date -- one for each of us, essentially -- but that was important to him. It was quite a relationship. Doug had a -- and he was a warm, friendly, funny person that I needed. That really gave me a lot of space. And he was so supportive in terms of just being who you are, and I thought that that was love. I thought that's what love is all about, it's just being so accepting, and it's really, it's okay. We were fine with what we were. And Doug got a little bit impotent. He got to be diabetic. I got to be diabetic after, I don't know, about fifteen years ago, but it was long after he had, and he got to be impotent, and that was a bit of a barrier, a bit of a difficulty for us. But not enough to end the relationship. It didn't for many years. But I think I ultimately tired of it and our lack of sexuality. When I went to college then, I went to junior college in Texas, and enjoyed that thoroughly, so much that I just kept going, and going, and going. Ultimately ended up at Shippensburg University to graduate, which I hadn't done before. And I never told him I was in college the first time. I just saw -- had three years of Moravian, and never told anybody -- I never told the college that I had this education. And I'd gone to junior college in Northampton and in Lehigh County, both, I was going to schools at the same time at the same year, because my job was ending -- my job at Shawnee Penn was getting worse, and worse, and worse ; they were laying me off more and more times. And I knew that I needed educational background to back me up in terms of shipping, in terms of, what is, transportation, engineering. And they had a degree at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem. So I went there. Met Doug about that time. That was right after all that business with the eighties, when we started the gay line. And he came to me the end of that year, the first time. Happy life. He worked for airlines, he worked first for British airways -- I'm sorry, he worked for Pan Am, which is an international airline, very famous, very famous American, and Pan Am was famous for innovating travel routes for every country in the world, virtually. But they would go anywhere -- they had rights to fly everywhere, as the pioneering international travel agency, especially for the United States, and they just kept furthering on that basis. So it's a big company, but it was also -- when they deregulated the airline industry, it couldn't manage, because it had been regulated all those years, and they had union wages everywhere, and difficulties that they just couldn't overcome because they had been under such regulation, and couldn't make the shift to do it. So he started to work for British Airways, and an interesting story: he had gone there, and the first time, they didn't hire him, so the people -- all the Pan Am people that had gone over there went to the office and protested, and said, "We want to have this guy. He's really good." I mean, Doug was a good agent, was a good reservation agent. So they hired him, and then moved to Texas, then he had to go to Texas, then they moved his job, and ultimately outsourced the entire thing. That's when he retired in 2000 then, because they were getting rid of those reservation agents ; it was cheaper to do it by hiring people in India and so on. And so we were -- he retired after we had sold the house, moved to Plattsburgh, New York, to be with his lover in Canada, in Quebec, Canada, which is fifty miles away from Plattsburgh, and went weekly to see him. They traveled back and forth across the border, never lived together, but were often together, until they weren't anymore. They ceased being lovers per se, although there was still a lot of love between the two of them. And Doug made a very deliberate decision. He told me that, you know, "This is over. I'm sorry, but it's over, never to happen again." And I had to accept that, and did. But I stayed, then, another year and a half, to get the house ready to sell, et cetera. We painted everything, and, you know, did what we could for the house. When we went to Houston, there had been a large gas recession which hit Houston very, very hard. There were a lot of homes on sale ; a lot of homes were in foreclosure. So many people were underwater in terms of their mortgages. This was '80, and it had happened in '78. So they were still in depression, in '80, when -- in '87, and it still was affecting the Houston market heavily by the time we went there in '90, '91. And we finally -- we took a year to find the house. It wasn't foreclosure, but it was in a nice area, nice house, for a very cheap price. In Houston, they never had basements, okay, so everything was built on a slab, much less expensive. You didn't have to deal with winter, you didn't have to deal with cold, so houses were differently constructed ; they were a lot cheaper, since their construction -- And we bought a house, a nice house, for about eighty thousand dollars, four bedroom, in a nice area, which was -- they had sold it -- the house was -- they bought the house for that, thirteen years before, the people had bought the house for the same price that we paid for it, so they did nothing. We made better when we sold it. We sold for a hundred and three, I think, to a nice Hispanic couple. I remember that because the next-door neighbor was a white guy, was on the school board, and I told him I had sold the school to the Hispanics, and he said, "You sold to students? You sold people that have students coming to my school? You dared do that? Hispanic people?" I was incredulous. I really had no idea, but I've always known that they had a lot of -- that the people there in Houston were not very nice to Hispanics. San Jacinto was the main street, they called Jacinto, not Ya-cinto, no changing to Y, they wouldn't do that. It was called Jacinto. Which was just the attitude they had, that everybody was an entrepreneur, everybody -- they had a Spanish grocery store that was looked down upon like crazy, wonderful store. It was practically a Wal-Mart's in a grocery store, and they sold clothes and all kinds of items that would appeal to the Spanish community, and were heavily supported by the Hispanics. Boy, they just looked down on them terribly. Did not do that in San Antonio, where his brother lived, did not do it elsewhere in Texas. But there, they were. They were very, very prejudiced. We had a happy life in Texas. Good place to live for us. Suburban life, we adopted that entirely. Had to drive everywhere in Texas, anywhere you went. Six miles to the grocery store, six miles to everything, and Houston was sixty miles one way and seventy miles the other way. It was huge. Not my favorite place. MF:So we're right at the end of our time, and so may I ask one more question before we end the interview? I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the Elder Initiative that you've been involved in. JB:Okay, I work with a group. I had these papers that I didn't know what to do with. I had all these papers from forty years ago, forty, then, forty something years ago, forty-three or forty-four, from 1969 on, relating to all the organizations in Pennsylvania that I knew about, that were in existence at that time. And I did cover them as well as Ron could have, because he was -- I told you he was down at the mailbox, and he got all the mail. But I had a lot of papers relating to a lot of groups, and a lot of things to do with conferences, all of the papers, for instance, we had all the -- turned in -- all of the people that had gone to the conference. We knew everybody that had attended, and paid prior to and at the conference itself. We had that entire (inaudible) papers, all the workshops, anything we'd done in workshops, all the programs, all the meetings we'd had in connection with it, et cetera, and all these different groups, and all the caucus notes, often, sometimes the attendance sheets. It was five feet of space. Half of it was newspapers. The Philadelphia Gay News, Pittsburgh Gay News, and some (inaudible) -- Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were owned by Mark Siegel -- and both of them -- and were the same paper, pretty much, and I think he ultimately dropped the Pittsburgh paper, because it was most of the same news, with some local stuff. The group -- I wish -- now I can't think of -- the guy in Lancaster was the newspaper of the gay scene out of Lancaster started out, and one of the members of that group by the name of Dave -- oh, I forget -- took over the newspaper and renamed it. It became the rural newspaper, and it wasn't ours. We did our own newsletter, but he operated a rural newsletter, a rural base, for all of us to state. And it was like the necessary news, you wanted to know what was happening among all the groups, you wanted to know what was happening in the state and local and national news, and you could read this newspaper, because that's what he reported on and made a specialty out of reporting those -- having that knowledge of what was going on in activism. And I had all those from beginning to end -- no, I'm not sure I had them all. I had a few of them, the beginning ones, but I had all the later ones, and turned those over, and that was half the collection. What was also so mad, because (inaudible) way back in the sixties, when that was new, before the Stonewall, and before there was MCC, I had the first advertisements to that. Troy Perry had put in the newspaper and said, "I'm starting this church," and then when he founded the church, and as MCC grew, I was very interested in that. I'm an atheist, personally, but I've always had very strong supporting about people who had to answer that question ; I did, too. And my answer was atheism, but certainly the religious conflict was very strong with me. I thought about becoming a minister, with lack of anything else to do ; I didn't know what the hell I was going to do, if it was teaching, or a minister, or anything, and I was going to Moravian College, which had a seminary connected with it, Moravian Seminary, and I was very strongly tempted, but my answer -- and I had gone in high school to -- the two people I came out to, one was my minister at the Presbyterian church who was quite negative, and a supporter and an advisor to what was called MLA, which was Young Masons, essentially ; it was sponsored by the Masons. They said it was no connection outside of the sponsorship -- you did not automatically become a Mason, and in no way you had to apply the join the Masons ; you had to apply to join the MLA, too, 1421. And I went to an advisor there. I loved MLA, I was quite taken with the whole moral outlook thing about being a good person, a strong value system for me, and I believed in it very strongly. So that was the other first thing I went to, and he was neutral. He was a single man who was the advisor, [Levin's mother?], and I was good friends with another advisor ; I was good friends with his son, and went often with them to Allegheny River, and so on, in high school. Whatever. What was the question while I start this? Are we done? MF:I think we'll just close now, but let us close on tape ; we'll wait for Carol. So I just want to say thank you so much, Joseph, for speaking with us again, a second time, in two days. We're so grateful that you would share your stories. JB:Thank you. I really appreciate it. I wanted to -- I wish I remembered more -- the actual names of people. I just felt very -- I felt they were important in my life, and that supportiveness was important to me, okay, to be able to do what I could, and I knew that we were creating a miracle, and it was clear that we were during a unique time in history, when -- Pennsylvania was its own story. There were fifty stories in fifty states, and how we began to move out from the cities. It had only been in Philadelphia and in Pittsburgh originally. Philadelphia had the Jane's Society, and the Homosexual Law Reform Society. Pittsburgh had a Persad Center, which addressed the health issues, and Le-Hi-Ho, when it was first founded, was very strong on the draft. Vietnam was very important, and the question was, do you check the box. Ron took care of all that. That was his particular forte, do you check the box or do you not. And the organization was formed on, you know, (inaudible) that important issue, as a resource for it, and it was the resource with schools, because there wasn't anything else. We had a library that people were able to use, did a lot, which is, again, the impact of Le-Hi-Ho, that was part of the impact. We had a regular lending library that was very active. Every meeting, they took the books. I ended up with the books in my home before I left for Chicago. I had the books for about a year in my house. I don't remember how I inherited them, but there was nowhere else for them to be housed, and I handed them off to another member, ultimately, before I left. I don't know what happened. That was '83. I don't know when Ron left town. It wasn't then, because in '83, I was still going to Le-Hi-Ho, and he must have been there. He left town after that. (inaudible) why he no longer housed the library. They kept the non-book files. Maybe the books would be too much. There were boxes, and boxes, and boxes of books, about four-hundred or more, four-hundred or five-hundred books. I think there were five- hundred books, about that. I had grown considerably from when I had it, and a lot of people donated a lot of other funds, papers, academic works, I no longer had access for. And I didn't have those papers. MF:Thank you so much again. JB:Thank you, thank you, thank you. I really appreciate it, and again, I'm sorry that I didn't get to name more people, because they were the important -- they were why I wanted to do it, to remember -- their contributions were enormous. So many, so many, so many people, you know, organized and participated in those conference. So many people came to our meetings and did what they could for us in the lobby days when we lobbied the state capitol several times, supported us in every way, you know, gave us money while -- we were creating a miracle. We knew what we were creating, and I saw it when I went to that concert in Chicago. They were singing for us. (inaudible) people. (inaudible) us. MF:Well, I think part of what has made this project so important for us is that we want to honor -- JB:People have asked me, do you think we ever made a difference? Yes, absolutely, we made a difference, and I saw it when I went there. That was -- Chicago was everybody that moved to Chicago, okay, was not native, and I was non-native. But they formed these two -- there were two choirs in Pennsylvania. The one that I saw in the first concert was the show choir that had just started that year, and they did this wonderful theme of Yellow Brick Road. Going into the concert was really special. I wanted to do a choir way back when. I thought that was -- one of the first things I thought of -- Le-Hi-Ho, wouldn't it be wonderful to have this musical group that just got together -- that was (inaudible) days, that was folk song days, and people -- everybody sang folk songs, folk songs were very, very popular all over the airways, and everybody was singing, and playing, and learning songs, and learning those particular songs. So it would've been natural for us to do, but there was no -- I certainly didn't have the ability. But I loved choirs. I thought it would be great to have some sort of event and singers like that. Couldn't do it, so it was done for me, and I really -- that's been a great joy, to watch both the choirs -- Harrisburg fortunately has a men's and women's choir, not combined, separate, and Mary Antero was in charge -- the treasurer of that county, and her lover is the president of the organization. Wonderful choir. Have grown to about thirty, forty voices, and rejuvenated themselves in the last couple years, and have become the better choir, while the men's choir has been going down and now reforming itself into a new group. It had been the stronger for a long time ; now, the women's choir has come up powerfully. Very wonderful concert that I had -- an organization for -- they did -- interspersed people of color and refugees, all refugees from all over the world, and they sang the songs -- their country -- the way they combined, I thought, was genius. They did a combination of singing the songs of those countries first, and then -- in a foreign language -- and so that the chair had to work in a new language, very difficult music, and that they wouldn't have known anything about ; did a superb job. And then they interspersed them with the people who read their stories, who had written out the stories of the countries they had come from and their struggles to get to be refugees acclimating to America and that sort of thing. It was a wonderful program, really, really special, and the right way to do it, and I had no idea how are you going to combine this. It was splendid, really good concert. And so I just printed all the programs I could get and sent them north to everybody that I -- sent to everybody that I could get to, this is how you do this. This is the way to do this concert. Splendid. MF:Well, I think we've taken up enough of your time on a Sunday. JB:Oh, no, no, thank you. Thank you so much, and thank you for the bagel this morning. MF:Oh, thank you. JB:Enjoyed it thoroughly, and I've enjoyed our time together. Thank you. MF:So have we. JB:And I wish I had satisfied more for you in terms of personal -- I don't know if my personal was as interesting as what I wanted to talk about, which was the activities. We were a very active state, and an exciting state, and I was so lucky to be a part of that, inspired by it, totally inspired. My God, we used to go plugged in in New York, once a year ; the first time, there were eleven thousand people, the first march, in 1970. It grew to hundreds and hundreds of thousands. There were one of a million (inaudible) didn't get it for Stonewall Fifty. I don't think that -- I don't know what the population was, but they were going to try for a hundred, I knew. That would've been exciting. And we had -- Danny -- we had tickets to go, and he got sick. I couldn't go, so I sponsored a bus for him to take some people, you know, I had to sponsor a bus. I gave him money for two people, thirty-six or forty bucks, to Central Park. That was a great day, great day. That's when the movement really was born. They combined to one lane of traffic, and we just got longer, and longer, and longer, until it was 11 blocks long. More blocks than eight blocks. I don't remember. There were just blocks and blocks of people coming up this single lane of traffic. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:53:05 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Joseph Burns (Part 2), October 13, 2019 Description An account of the resource Joseph Burns shares stories of Le-Hi-Ho, LGBT activism, and personal relationships. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-08 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10-13 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/8b8550e02b3c5ba232fb6d1119b4e704.png cb6775fd46a276fbe94207b2cfc5bc56 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Liz Bradbury OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-20.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 August 10, 2020 Liz Bradbury, August 10, 2020 LGBT-20 1:57:36 LVLGBT Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive Collection Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Liz Bradbury Mary Foltz video/mp4 Copy of BradburyLiz_20200810_video.mp4 1.0:|5(3)|60(7)|85(5)|108(5)|133(11)|158(7)|183(10)|208(3)|229(2)|250(8)|269(7)|294(11)|319(7)|342(7)|363(14)|380(11)|405(7)|432(14)|455(13)|484(14)|509(6)|536(13)|563(2)|584(14)|613(5)|638(10)|663(3)|686(11)|709(2)|732(8)|757(3)|780(6)|801(16)|824(15)|847(16)|874(4)|901(9)|928(11)|953(14)|978(18)|999(11)|1026(3)|1047(2)|1068(8)|1093(14)|1114(16)|1139(11)|1158(11)|1181(7)|1206(5)|1233(5)|1256(16)|1281(10)|1306(7)|1337(5)|1362(6)|1389(4)|1412(13)|1433(5)|1458(14)|1483(15)|1510(10)|1533(14)|1560(9)|1581(14)|1606(11)|1631(6)|1652(14)|1675(15)|1700(16)|1717(6)|1742(10)|1767(12)|1794(9)|1819(6)|1844(10)|1865(15)|1894(3)|1917(5)|1942(5)|1963(14)|1986(4)|2009(2)|2030(5)|2053(6)|2072(12)|2095(16)|2118(7)|2143(10)|2164(8)|2185(11)|2208(9)|2233(11)|2258(2)|2285(13)|2308(13)|2333(15)|2354(13)|2375(10)|2396(3)|2419(14)|2438(8)|2465(7)|2488(18)|2513(14)|2536(10)|2561(3)|2584(13)|2605(12)|2628(9)|2651(5)|2672(8)|2693(18)|2714(3)|2737(18)|2758(8)|2779(10)|2792(9) 0 https://youtu.be/wrbrbA_vjgY YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: Okay, my name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences with LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on August 10th, 2020. We’re meeting over Zoom because there is a pandemic. Liz, I’m just going to go ahead and do the consent really quickly. Do you consent to this interview today?&#13 ; &#13 ; LIZ BRADBURY: Yes. 0 87 Maternal Family LB: I’d love to do that because everybody likes to talk about themselves. I do want to talk about my parents a little bit because I realized how much their life influenced mine. Of course, everybody’s parents do. But I don’t want to get stuck in that because I can talk about them for hours and they are pretty fascinating characters. So, let me say that my mother, her mother was the child of immigrants, she was the child of Norwegian immigrants, and she was very much of a bootstrapper. She wanted to make a name for herself. In fact, she used to say that to me all the time, “Make a name for yourself.” She should be thrilled that a building is named after me. 0 459 Paternal Family / Father's Work LB: Meanwhile, so then go back to where my dad was, my dad was born in South Dakota, in Lead, South Dakota. Lead, South Dakota is a mining town in the middle of literally nowhere. I’ve actually been there. We went on a little excursion to see what it was like and it’s truly in the middle of nowhere. It’s right next to Sturgis, where everyone is getting COVID-19 right now, with that big Harley motorcycle thing. It’s really right next to there. Trish got a T-shirt from Sturgis because she said, “Oh, this would be fun.” 0 1030 Liberal Upbringing / Parental Influence LB: So, one of the things about my parents, and I think that the main thing about them was, that they were very liberal. They were passionately committed to that. I don’t know if my mother would have been that way as much had she had a different husband, but she really liked my dad and she really believed in everything that he did. They had pretty diverse friends considering we lived Greenwich, Connecticut, which was a very white, suburban white flight area, where there was a certain amount of segregation, or gated community kind of stuff. But they were friends with lots of people that were very diverse. And so, that was great. 0 1353 Embracing Lesbian Identity LB: So, I really liked girls. And I knew that I liked girls. And I would think about guys and stuff and was so separated from that that I couldn’t really imagine actually being with a boy, or a man, or anything like that. I never got a thrill from that. But when I started to get older and I started to learn that there were lesbians in the world and that there were women that were attracted to women, it was such a rush. 0 1632 Greenwich High School LB: And I also, in high school, was able to gather -- I went to a huge high school, Greenwich High School. At that time, it was three grades and had 3,000 students, so there was 1,000 kids in my class. And because of that, when I was in junior high, I’ve had friends and hung around with people who were artists, and they still are artists, but the people that I met in high school, I had a sort of 10 friends that were really close, we’re still friends in some ways, we don’t have as much communication as I’d like because we all live so far away from each other. But they were zany, erudite, interesting people. 0 1841 College Days at Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore LB: And then, I went to college. I decided to go to art school, and I went to the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. I applied to a bunch of different arts schools. I had sort of wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design, but I didn’t get in there so I went to the Maryland Institute, which was good because everything that happened in my life sprung out of going to Maryland Institute. 0 2192 Woodworking LB: I forgot to say that, Shirley Jankovich, which was the one I had the big crush on, she said to me, “You know since you’re so interested in woodworking you should go talk to this little woodworker guy that does stuff for me for my house. His name is Luigi Cappotelli and he’s a master craftsman. Why don’t you go and talk to him?” So, I went to talk to Luigi, who was in the next town over. I was 15 actually, when I met him, and he asked me to be his apprentice. Or I asked him. We ended up where I was his apprentice. 0 2367 Exploring LGBTQ+ Hangouts / Club Mitchell LB: So, while I was in Maryland, they had a GSA in my last year when I was in college. And so that would have been in 1979. But the people in it were so weird that I would see these people and be like, “I don’t think so.” I didn’t know anybody in the group. But my pal Christine, I came out to her, and I told her about the crushes that I’d had. She had a boyfriend that we knew and stuff. And we had really serious talks about this. And we were really good friends, and we’re still good friends. I just talked to her. 0 2635 Camaraderie in the Woodworking Department LB: But I have to say that in college I worked so hard. I’m still tired from college. I’m really still tired from graduate school. There were days in graduate school that I didn’t sleep for days, for three or four days I just didn’t sleep. And in college I never had time to go out. Maybe after eleven o’clock, I’d have a couple of hours. I guess that’s the way college is now, except I had to get up early for class, because our classes started at eight. And I was a teaching assistant for art history, too. And lots of things happening. 0 2775 Relationship with Jean Ruben LB: Anyway. Then, I decided that I didn’t want to be just an art teacher in school, I wanted to be a college teacher. And I used to say, “I don’t want to have to clean up vomit from a first grader. I just really want to be a college teacher.” And that was smart. I think I did want to be that. But the other thing that happened when I was in college was I met an English teacher named Jean Ruben, and Jean became -- I had her for one class, and she lived right near me in Bolton Hill. 0 3638 Moving to Allentown / Jean in Later Life LB: So, I said, “I think I should think about buying a house because if I have a house, even if I don’t have a job, if I have a house, I’ll have a place to live. I can piss this away really easily if I just use this on rent.” So, she said, “Well, Wayne is in Allentown.” And he was the partner of Arthur Miller who was a friend of ours, who was another teacher, who was a very good friend of Jean’s. And I knew him, he’d been one of my teachers. And I’d done some work for him at his house. And she said, “Wayne is in Allentown. Why don’t you go and talk to him? He’s a nice guy. He’s a sweet guy.” I said, “I’ve met him.” 0 4081 Earning a Woodworking MFA / Finding Community in Terre Haute, Indiana LB: In the meantime, going back to a little bit, when I went to Indiana, and I went to study under [Allen Friedman?] who turned out to be a complete asshole and ended up leaving after the first year, which meant that I didn’t have a mentor while I was there, and there weren’t any other woodworking teachers, so the people in ceramics who didn’t understand anything about wood, there was nobody to teach me everything. And then, they got some part-time guys, and then they got another guy that was kind of an idiot. 0 4827 Leaving Indiana / Moving to Jamestown, New York LB: So, what happened was at the end of my second year in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant, I taught art history, and I done that for the time. And I only had a couple of credits left. I think I had one credit left that I had to fulfill. I’d actually, during the time of working on my MFA, gotten letters in the mail. I’d get this letter that goes, “Now you have an MS,” because I just took enough credits. And then, “Now you have enough credits for an MA in Fine Art.” So, now I had a master’s degree in Fine Art. I’m like, “Whoa.” But my MFA was a 90-degree credit and that had a lot of reviews and stuff. So, I was still going through the reviews. But I had a legitimate masters. 0 5257 Relationships in Jamestown LB: So, I dated some women. And then, I met another woman who was the head of the United Cerebral Palsy offices there in Jamestown, and we had this group of women that were meeting each other, and there was a women’s domestic violence hotline, a lot of lesbians worked there. She was very interesting. I asked her on a date and she was much more excited about the sex, so that was really fun for that beginning of that date. But we were really not ultimately suited for each other. I think we were together for just about four years. 0 5396 New Beginnings / In-Between Relationships LB: So, all this tough stuff was happening. I was in a bad relationship, my mother was going into a nursing home for Alzheimer’s disease, I lost my job that I thought was going to be the most perfect job ever, I didn’t have any money, I had to move to Philadelphia, that relationship didn’t work out. It was a lot of tough stuff. And I was just turning 30. Sasha and I had gone to a party. We knew other lesbians in Western New York and some of them had moved to Eastern New York. And so, we went to a party and we met a group of women, and one of them was Trish. And I was still with Sasha then, but our friend Cheryl, who had the party, when Sasha and I broke up, Cheryl said to Trish, “Liz and Sasha broke up.” 0 5718 Meeting Patricia Sullivan LB: So, Cheryl told Trish that Sasha and I had broken up. And then Cheryl told me that she told Trish that and I said, “What did Trish say?” And Cheryl said, “Trish said Sasha’s an idiot.” And I went, “Whoa, all right.” And then, I got a letter from Trish, remember letters. No, Cheryl asked me to go on a double date with Trish and Cheryl and her partner, at that time, Donna. And they’re not together anymore. But Cheryl has been in a long relationship with another person that Trish happened to have worked with in New York State, because there’s really only about 100 lesbians in the world. 0 6269 Early Days Apart LB: The whole thing that happened with Trish was so fabulous that in the beginning part of our relationship, I was just so overwhelmed by how terrific it was that I was afraid. I’m still afraid. I’m afraid of for when it ends. And if you’re with somebody long enough, somebody’s always going to be sad in the relationship because one person is going to leave. At the end of the relationship one person is going to die, that’s what happened with my parents who were married for 42 years. Trish’s parents were married for 75 years. We come from really great circumstances. 0 6406 Creating a Life Together LB: And after five months, the job in North Carolina, the whole company closed and I got to come home. And we started our life together which was really wonderful. We were far away from each other but Trish had told me in our first conversation that she wanted to retire, because she had lupus. And the stress of her job, which was extraordinarily, it’s a government job, running a government hospital, having to justify every penny you spend, to Albany, when they don’t give you enough money, but when you’re required to do certain things. So, she said, “I’m going to get scapegoated for something. I know that’s going to happen.” 0 6590 Trish's Impact &amp ; Influence LB: Sure. And we can talk about that, and I can figure out anything else I forgot to say. I have to be sure that that’s in there. Because there are a few other things that I didn’t talk about, I think, that have to do with some other civil rights issues that I think are very important that we haven’t touched on that had to do with stuff that Trish and I did. I know that Trish doesn’t sing her own praises as much as she should, but the extraordinary work that she’s done, and I have to say, I’ve done a lot of stuff. I couldn’t have done any of these things if it hadn’t been for Trish. She rescued me. 0 7006 Closing Remarks LB: So, we can talk about other stuff but I did want to say those things, you’ve got that. I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff. Oh, I had all these lists of stuff, here. I think I said all of these things. Yeah. So, my whole life before Trish was just getting ready to be in love with Trish. And that was really the terrific thing. And I do want to say that I had a lot of wonderful support for that, as well. It’s been good. 0 MovingImage Liz Bradbury describes her maternal and paternal family, her upbringing, time at the Maryland Institute of Art and Indiana State University, and relationships before Patricia Sullivan. INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY AUGUST 10, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: Okay, my name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences with LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on August 10th, 2020. We're meeting over Zoom because there is a pandemic. Liz, I'm just going to go ahead and do the consent really quickly. Do you consent to this interview today? LIZ BRADBURY: Yes. MF: And you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, and presentations? LB: Yes. MF: And you understand that you'll have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts you want to delete, or to withdraw the interview from the project? LB: Yes, I do. MF: Well, fabulous. Thank you so much for being with me today. And I'm going to start with just a broad question. Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life? LB: I'd love to do that because everybody likes to talk about themselves. I do want to talk about my parents a little bit because I realized how much their life influenced mine. Of course, everybody's parents do. But I don't want to get stuck in that because I can talk about them for hours and they are pretty fascinating characters. So, let me say that my mother, her mother was the child of immigrants, she was the child of Norwegian immigrants, and she was very much of a bootstrapper. She wanted to make a name for herself. In fact, she used to say that to me all the time, "Make a name for yourself." She should be thrilled that a building is named after me. And she was the grandparent that I grew up with in my family. I saw her all the time. And her name was Selma Barry. Her parents didn't speak English. She got an education. She lived in Bonita, an area of California. And she became a teacher. And she intentionally moved to a place where there were very few women and a lot of rich entrepreneurial guys. And she was very beautiful, so she picked one and she married him. His name was Edmund Drinan Barry. And he was the son of millionaires and stuff like that. And then, she soon after had two girls, my aunt, and then my mother. And then, it was the Depression and he turned out to be a terrible businessman. And he had an orange grove, and he had a dairy farm and stuff, and he just ran them into the ground and had no money and they were always turning off the power. And my grandmother, I think, that his parents had been unhappy that he had married an immigrant's daughter, because he really was in the high level of social register. And so, I think his parents had disowned him, but he was going to make it on his own. And he didn't. And my grandmother was pissed off. She was really mad because she was very concerned about appearances. So, she took her two girls and she had been a teacher and she had gone to normal school, which is what they called teaching colleges, and she moved them to the only job she could get in the Depression, which was in the Mojave Desert, teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, which was an interesting -- so, my mother had gone from quite an affluent life, which she never really realized, my mother was very naïve and very ingenuous, and she never really thought anything about it. I think she was just sad her father wasn't there anymore. And she talked about how she loved being a teacher and she ultimately became a teacher. And she was about 14, I think, when they moved there. And so, she taught all the little kids. She was still in the school and her mother didn't know, she was like K through eight, and she was in eighth grade and she didn't know anything. Her sister had gone to the high school. This was in Victorville High School in Hesperia, was the town, which was, in those days, 200 miles from civilization. Now, there's literally civilization, so to speak, all the way from here back to Santa Barbara and Redlands, California, where they had come from. And so, she worked to teach kids and stuff like that. And they lived in a pretty scrubby life, in that my mother did all the cooking because her mother taught and worked all day and my aunt was in high school and stuff. And my mother loved working with little kids, and playing with little kids, and teaching them and stuff, and she thought that was wonderful. But she didn't learn anything. She learned from teaching, but she didn't really learn anything that an eighth grader would learn to prep for high school. So, when she went to high school she kind of had a hard time. But luckily because her sister had been very smart and very good at math apparently people just gave her good grades. And the other reason was because she was really pretty. And she was pretty educated enough and certainly compared to other people who maybe lived in that area that were really poor, in the desert. But here's the other flip side of that coin. Also in the desert in that area were dude ranches where really, really rich famous people would go for holidays. And so, my mother had a friend from high school whose family owned one of those dude ranches. My mom used to hang out there all the time and she would tell me, "I played ping pong with Loretta Young, and I danced with Jimmy Stuart," and she did, because she was really pretty and a young teenager, just the perfect person to have hanging around these dude ranches for other people. And she was polite and smart, stuff like that. And she also learned how to ride because her friend who had had the dude ranch was a champion horse rider and so, she had aged out of the young woman's thing, so she trained my mother to do it, and she went all through these competitions and stuff. And she said, "You know, I wasn't really into it, but my friend wanted me to do it." That's the way she was. "So, I just did it." So, she did all these interesting things and then she went to college at the University of Santa Barbara, and that was right before World War II, to be a teacher. And her sister went to college to be a nurse, because that's what people did. And my grandmother was saying, clearly to them, "Yeah, well, don't rely on getting married because look what happened to me. Thank God I have this teaching degree." So, they went and did what the only thing that women could do in the 1930s to study, which was either being a teacher or being a nurse. Meanwhile, so then go back to where my dad was, my dad was born in South Dakota, in Lead, South Dakota. Lead, South Dakota is a mining town in the middle of literally nowhere. I've actually been there. We went on a little excursion to see what it was like and it's truly in the middle of nowhere. It's right next to Sturgis, where everyone is getting COVID-19 right now, with that big Harley motorcycle thing. It's really right next to there. Trish got a T-shirt from Sturgis because she said, "Oh, this would be fun." So, my father was born in 1914, my mother was born in 1921. So, he was older than she. And when he was four years old, his mother, in 1918, died of the flu epidemic of 1918. She was 32 years old. He had one sister who was older. And he said the only memory of his mother, the only clear memory of his mother, was at one time, she was trying to fix the furnace and asked them to go and get the tongs from the fireplace, and they thought that she meant the andirons. So, they dragged the andirons down, these filthy, dusty andirons down, and she just laughed hysterically. And he said that's the only thing that he could remember about her. So, one of the things about the flu epidemic of 1918, which we all talk about now, it was so, so serious, 50 million to 100 million people died. And 72 percent of women who were pregnant died when they got the flu. If they got the flu, 72 percent of them died. And actually, the death rate of the flu is about 10 percent. It particularly struck people between the ages of 20 and 40. My grandmother was 32. I think she was probably pregnant because she was the only one in the family who died. My father didn't say that anyone else had the disease. But anyway, as soon as his mother died, his father -- and they had both gone to high school in Lead -- his father decided to go with his brother to make roads in South America. And they went to Chile to do that. So, his brother, Phillip, and he, went there and left my father and his sister, Ruth, who they called PD, in Lead, South Dakota, to be raised by his mother's parents, and his mother's father was the mayor of Leads, South Dakota. His last name was Erwin. But my dad had a hard time I think. They were smart people, but he was left on his own and stuff. So, anyway, ultimately, he was smart and literary and his sister turned out to be very capable as well and she ended up being an editor for Antiques Magazine and living in New York City with her husband, Marshall Davidson, who was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the American wing and wrote books and stuff like that. They were very much in our lives when I was growing up. So, anyway, his father left him, his mother was dead, and so, he was really an orphan but when they grew up, he went to Berkeley and he got a really great education there in English, and then I think he had a year of graduate school, and then he went to South America to be with his father and his uncle, and stayed there, and learned to speak Spanish fluently. So, he could speak Spanish fluently and he lived there for a year or two. And then, he came back because it was right before World War II, and he worked as the person who edited the newspaper, particularly the sports part of the newspaper, of the University of Santa Barbara, which was actually then Santa Barbara Teachers College, where my mother went. And my mother and father met that, and that's how they fell in love with each other. It was right before World War II, my father was drafted, and my mother left school a little bit early and went to where he was. He was going into Officer's Candidate School in Miami. This is the tough war thing that he had. He had to train guys how to fly planes. And one of them was Clark Gable. He trained Clark Gable how to fly a plane. And then they went to North Carolina where he wrote flying manuals and stuff. And he really had a great time. I mean, there was nothing about the war that was bad for him, except for that some of the people in basic training had gone to bad places, and he felt a little bit guilty about that. But he just had a great time. So, when he was in South Carolina, he was married to my mother by then, she was teaching in a little school and my father was at the base. And his CO was Ken McCormick. And Ken McCormick was the senior editor at Doubleday. And another person that was there was Mac Showman. You probably don't know who that is but your parents do. So, ask your parents who Mac Showman is, he created the television show Dobie Gillis. They know what this is because it was the funniest show in the '50s. And he wasn't famous then. And he met Ken McCormick, and he wrote a lot of books, and my dad was best friends with Mac, and he wrote plays and stuff like that. Anyway, after World War II, my father got to get a really good job at Doubleday. That's the way it was in the 1940s. If you had a good education and you were a white guy, you usually got a really good job. And so, he went from being an editor for some creepy little newspaper at a college to now he's a top editor at Doubleday in in his first job there. So, this was after the war, so this is in 1946, '47, his first job was to edit Crusades through Europe, which was Dwight Eisenhower's memoir of World War II. I have pictures of him with Eisenhower. My dad established himself as a very liberal guy, and he also spoke Spanish fluently, so he worked with all sorts of people. And that was his career. And he was at a couple of publishing companies, but mostly, Doubleday and he was there at the beginning, and then he left there for about 10 years and then came back for the rest of the time. And he worked with really famous authors. He ended up being the science fiction editor, so he worked with Ray Bradbury. He kind of discovered Ray Bradbury, not related to us, and Martian Chronicles is dedicated to him. He also worked with Isaac Asimov. He was the editor for Asimov, and I wrote down a bunch of other people because this is pretty cool. He also worked with a bunch of other guys, so Catherine Cookson, Velikovsky, Norman Katkov, who wrote Fabulous Fanny, which was about Fanny Brice, that Barbra Streisand movie that is about Fanny Brice. And Irving Stone, who wrote Lust For Life, he worked with him on writing The Agony and the Ecstasy. Irving Stone was the guy who actually promoted Vincent van Gogh. Nobody knew who Vincent van Gogh was until Irving Stone wrote Lust For Life. He worked with Leon Uris, who wrote Exodus, and Irving Wallace, and Fletcher Knebel, who wrote Seven Days in May. Anita Brenner, who was a really significant writer about Mexico, because he spoke Spanish. And he also worked with Martin Luther King. He was the editor of Martin Luther King's books. He was the liberal guy there, so he worked with Martin Luther King. I have pictures of him with Martin Luther King. He edited Why We Can't Wait. And then, after Malcom X's death, he negotiated to get the autobiography of Malcolm X to come to Doubleday. We lived in Connecticut, and so, he would come home and he'd go, "Yeah, Tony Curtis was in the office today," or, "Hey, guess who's going to be working with us and is going to have the office next to mine. Jackie Kennedy Onassis. This will be so fun." And he's always saying things like that. And as a kid, I never really quite got that. I think my sister, who is nine years older than I am, understood this a little bit better than I did. But that was fun. So, one of the things about my parents, and I think that the main thing about them was, that they were very liberal. They were passionately committed to that. I don't know if my mother would have been that way as much had she had a different husband, but she really liked my dad and she really believed in everything that he did. They had pretty diverse friends considering we lived Greenwich, Connecticut, which was a very white, suburban white flight area, where there was a certain amount of segregation, or gated community kind of stuff. But they were friends with lots of people that were very diverse. And so, that was great. My mother was an artist. And besides being a teacher, she was a painter. And she was involved with the Greenwich Art Society all of my life, I think from the time I was in about third grade all the way through the end of the time that I lived with them. And she was on their board, and she was a painter, and she did wonderful, wonderful paintings. And so, I saw that all the time. My sister was also an artist. She was a photographer. My dad was interested in photography. We had a permanent darkroom in our house. My sister became a photographer. I learned how to do woodworking from my dad. It was a hobby of his. Photography was, too. So, as I was growing up I was learning about all of these things. And the other thing that my parents did was, they were volunteers. They volunteered for stuff all the time. My mother was a volunteer for Greenwich Art Society for 25 years. She was the treasurer, and she did all their taxes. She did everything. She wasn't even into that kind of stuff, but she was very dedicated to doing that. She led some of the shows. They have regular shows at the Greenwich Arts Society and she would be the chair of the show and stuff and do that. And my dad was involved with the local libraries. And even just personally, he would do things like we lived on what they call a private road, and so, instead of the association of the people who lived there hiring a person to mow the lawn, he would just do it. There was a little beach at the end of our -- because we lived on the water. We didn't live on the water, but we lived on an area where there was a beach at the end of the road on Long Island Sound. So, I was really into that thing. I didn't really think anything about everybody else's dad isn't going after work when he comes home from New York and then goes, "I'm just going to go mow the lawn at the pier. I'm going to go do that." And he did that all the time. "I picked up all this garbage." He was really into just giving himself. I think I got that ethic from them. So, I picked up those literary things. Let me say quickly that my mother died of early onset Alzheimer's disease when she was 68, in 1988, right after I met Trish. She was already in a nursing home. And that was devastating because she was wonderful. And she also would have really loved Trish. She just would have loved Trish. And she would have had so much fun with her and I'm so sad that they didn't get to really know each other. My mother lost her memory by the time I was 26. She was really not remembering things. And she didn't know who I was by the time I was 30 and I had met Trish. And she died in a nursing home. My father, like many guys his age, had smoked since he was 12 years old and died of emphysema, but quite a while after my mother died so Trish did meet him and he was good to her. He was a liberal guy. But he also had some of those things that men of that day -- like, he belonged to some clubs that wouldn't let women in. He didn't always get the gay thing. He wasn't any anti, but he just didn't always understand the LGBT stuff. He certainly had gay friends but he said, "I wouldn't talk about that." I said, "Well, why not?" So, we had some confrontation, but they were okay. He was a little curmudgeonly for a guy. But because of them, I grew up around books all of the time. I was horrendously dyslexic as a child, so a little bit of a disappointment. Luckily, that's not as much of a problem once you have computers. But in the olden days, we didn't have spellcheck, so I couldn't spell anything. But I did end up writing books and stuff, but I consciously decided to wait until after he died to do that because he was not supportive. He just didn't think I could ever do that. I actually won national awards for the books that I wrote, so I think he would have been happy about that. But he just didn't think other people could just write books because he realized how hard it was. So, anyway, my mother and father were a big influence on me, certainly, and all the time that I was growing up, I was involved with art shows and I was in art shows. By the time I was 12, I was in juried art show, so I've been doing that for more than 50 years, putting my work out, not just in a show but in a show where people might reject it, which is an interesting thing to learn about yourself and how you feel about that. That's the way art school is. So, I ended up going to Maryland Institute of Art. No, let's go back a little bit, about queerness. So, I really liked girls. And I knew that I liked girls. And I would think about guys and stuff and was so separated from that that I couldn't really imagine actually being with a boy, or a man, or anything like that. I never got a thrill from that. But when I started to get older and I started to learn that there were lesbians in the world and that there were women that were attracted to women, it was such a rush. I mean, even really negative depictions of lesbians in movies and stuff like The Children's Hour, I've talked to you about that before, or in the movie The Miracle Worker, where there's like a little mention of women who go after women? I'm like, "What? What? What's that?" It was so exciting. It was Anne Bancroft because she's so hot. And if you talk to any lesbian, you talk about how hot Ann Bancroft is is in The Miracle Worker, everybody is into that. Everybody. Every woman my age who's a dyke will absolutely say that they were so intrigued by The Trouble With Angels. All these nuns living together, and they're having such a good time and they're laughing and stuff, and I know women who were absolutely not Catholic would say, "I've thought about becoming a nun because I saw The Trouble With Angels, and these women were having such a great time." Even in The Sound of Music, the nuns are so cool and they're all living up there all together, and who knows what they're doing and stuff like that, and they don't care about men at all, it doesn't matter. In fact, they're always bossing men around, Rosalind Russell is bossing men around, it's great. And so, all that kind of stuff was going around in my head. And I've always been attracted to older women, so I used to have these incredible crushes on my teachers. And I have to say that, looking back at them, not all of them were unrequited in many instances. And so, I had attractions. And some of those women are still my friends. If they're alive, most of them are still my friends. And so, I had a very good relationship with one of the art teachers that was in what we used to call junior high in those days. And I'm still friends with her. We were really friends. In fact, she ended up getting a job in Baltimore when I was in college, and we were friends. We hung out and stuff and she stayed at my apartment. And then, she got an apartment nearby and we spent a lot of time together. She was not a lesbian. I just talked to her, as a matter of fact. She lives in Maine, now. But other women that I was attracted to, there was a teacher in high school that I was so attracted to, and I spent so much time with her. She'd give me a ride home every day. I'd be at her house. We'd go to New York. She'd say, "I'm going to New York in the weekend, you want to go with me?" I'm like, "Of course." It was like a fantasy. And it was so easy. And I also noticed that she was touching me all the time. She would touch me in class. And I counted, she did it 100 days in a row that she would come and she would touch my shoulder while she was talking to the rest of the class. I'm thinking -- but anyway, apparently, things fell out because I thought that she would be more -- we had some arguments after I was in college, or maybe after I graduated from college, which was too bad. She died a couple years ago and I'm sorry about that because I thought she was a really fascinating person. She was a great artist. And she really influenced my development in art, to love art all the time. But we would go into New York and she'd go, "I want to go to a fabric store," she taught me about Art Nouveau, she was always collecting pieces that were Art Nouveau, and we would go into these stores. She was a Russian immigrant's daughter, so she could speak Russian. She was Ukrainian, actually. We'd go into New York and we'd be in these districts and people would call out to her. And they knew her name and stuff. I thought that was so cool. We had so much fun. And it was too bad I guess that we didn't continue that. Although, I think there was a reason, I think she was more attracted to people that she could push around than adults, because she didn't have as many older adult friends. And I also, in high school, was able to gather -- I went to a huge high school, Greenwich High School. At that time, it was three grades and had 3,000 students, so there was 1,000 kids in my class. And because of that, when I was in junior high, I've had friends and hung around with people who were artists, and they still are artists, but the people that I met in high school, I had a sort of 10 friends that were really close, we're still friends in some ways, we don't have as much communication as I'd like because we all live so far away from each other. But they were zany, erudite, interesting people. They were really smart. They all went to Ivy League colleges and they all really knew about things. They wrote music, and plays, we wrote plays all the time, and they did art. I was the one who was more in the Fine Arts, but as I said, we had this playmaking group called [The Quadnalescent's Players?] and teachers would come to us -- this was the way it was in the '70s. They'd come to us and they'd say, "Could you write a play for tomorrow night? Skip all your classes, write a play for tomorrow night, because we have parent's night and we need a 15-minute play that's funny." And we'd just do it. We didn't have to go to class or anything. School was so open. And it was perfect for me because you could choose a lot of classes. I didn't like math. I thought math was stupid. And it was, the way it was taught was a very stupid model for people. It was an impractical model. And the teachers were not great. And so, I had an opportunity to not take math. I didn't even have to take math in my senior year at all. I don't think I took it in my junior year of high school, even. I was finished with math when I was a sophomore in high school. That was true. And I was able to take all these art classes. It was a very affluent high school and there were all these different things. I could take print making, photography, ceramics, painting, and drawing, and watercolor, just a class in etching. That was how privileged I was. And I knew how privileged I was. I know other people just had the art teacher, we had six art teachers. And they were all significant in different areas. Charles Eames came and spoke while we were in the high school, and his wife, Ray, and they talked about their work. It was like, "We're not having class today, Charles Eames is coming to talk to us." It was brilliant stuff. And so, I was so excited to do that. And I spent a lot of wonderful time with my other friends who were just brilliant. And I realized that being smart and erudite was really fun. And so, I was learning about classical music, and I was learning about writing, and we were in English classes and history classes together, and jazz. It was really great, because it reinforced that. It wasn't a weird, obtuse thing. None of them were gay, though. And then, I went to college. I decided to go to art school, and I went to the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. I applied to a bunch of different arts schools. I had sort of wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design, but I didn't get in there so I went to the Maryland Institute, which was good because everything that happened in my life sprung out of going to Maryland Institute. I studied Woodworking and Furniture Design. I was in the Woodworking Department. There was a small department. And I also double majored in art teacher education, because I wanted to be an art teacher and I came from a big history of people who were teachers, so I loved that idea. And I developed friends in my department and I made a very, very good friend who lived nearby, and we had almost all of our classes together. Her name was Christine. And she was straight but she was really, really wonderful. Oh, one of the things that happened to me. When I was a senior in high school I got pneumonia, and then I had encephalitis. And I came very close to dying. I was in a coma for about 10 days and it took me about a month to recover. I was in the hospital for three weeks and then I slowly recovered. And a lot of my friends thought I was going to die. They really thought that that was going to happen. And the doctors didn't know what to do. It came from being overtired and having a high fever when I had pneumonia. Because I was working too hard. And one of the things that made me decide was, first of all, I lost my memory for a while. I couldn't remember telephone numbers. I couldn't move my hands as well. It took me a little while to be able to walk again. Encephalitis is an inflammation of the sac around your brain. And I realized a couple of things that I didn't want to do drugs and I didn't want to drink alcohol because not being able to remember and not being in control and not being able to speak even, at times, or order my thoughts, was frightening. And I thought, "Why would I induce that into myself? I never want to do that." And I had done a little bit of that kind of stuff before that happened to me, I didn't decide to do drugs or other things because of that frightening thing that happened to me. And so, when I met Christine Gaffney, when I was in college, right in the first week that we met -- we had to be in apartments, they didn't have any dorms at Maryland Institute in those days, which was really cool because I was a grownup. All of a sudden I had an apartment and I had to do my own shopping, and I had to clean and do my laundry, and go off campus to do my laundry, and get my own phone hookup and stuff like that. In those days, we had landline phones. It was really fascinating to suddenly go from being a very suburban, privileged young person whose mom did all the laundry to suddenly being completely on my own, in a scary city, which wasn't that scary actually, I love Baltimore, and to be in a place where I had to make all of my own decisions every moment of the day. And also, when you're in art school, as I said, everything you do is scrutinized and criticized. That's what critiques are. Every single thing you do, you put it up in front of everybody and everybody can say rotten things about it. And so, you get a really thick skin from that. It's a great thing in a lot of ways because, like people say, "I don't want to read any comments about myself," I don't really care. If they're valid, and if it's a stupid comment, who cares. People get so uncomfortable." I've been in probably 500 critiques of my own work through college and graduate school. It's what you do. It's not that big a deal. You listen to it, and you take the best you can out of it. You try to figure out how to improve your work and then you let everything else go. And I learned that right from the beginning of college. And I think people who don't learn that end up having problems with the fact that not everybody loves everything they do, which happens all the time to people, and it's a shock to them all of a sudden. "Why isn't everybody saying everything I do is perfect?" Art school is extraordinarily competitive. There is no right answer. There's no, "I answered all the questions that were on the thing, and I got everything right." There's nothing. You're always in competition with everyone else around you, all the time. And there's a lot of technical skills that you have to learn that you come away with from art school. Some people come away from college and say, "Well, I didn't really learn anything in college other than maybe being able to write better or something, or to think more critically," but I can say things like, "Yeah, I learned how to use a table saw and bandsaw and how to carve things out of wood and how to bend wood and how to weld and how to develop pictures in a dark room, which nobody does anymore, and I know how to make prints and silk screen," I've got all these skills. And I already had a lot of woodworking skills because I had done that in high school and through art, and I'd learned how to learn power tools. I forgot to say that, Shirley Jankovich, which was the one I had the big crush on, she said to me, "You know since you're so interested in woodworking you should go talk to this little woodworker guy that does stuff for me for my house. His name is Luigi Cappotelli and he's a master craftsman. Why don't you go and talk to him?" So, I went to talk to Luigi, who was in the next town over. I was 15 actually, when I met him, and he asked me to be his apprentice. Or I asked him. We ended up where I was his apprentice. So, I worked for him. I got about 20 dollars a week for working for him, but I learned a lot about woodworking from him. I bought my first table saw from him, which I still have, and use all the time. That was almost 50 years ago. And it was a pre-war, Sears, cast-iron table saw. I've taken it with me. It's in the basement of our house right now. And I use it all the time. And it's a big heavy stationary table saw. And I bought it for 50 dollars from him, I think I worked it off. But he did not speak English well and I would listen to the words he did understand, and then, when rich people would come in to get him to do work, like to redo their kitchen or something, they would say ridiculous things to him that he couldn't understand at all, and he would look at me and I would translate it into the words he knew. Like, one woman came in one time and said, "I don't want it to look like it's just gerrymandered together." So, I turned to her and I said, "First of all, gerrymander means to take apart." And I said to him, "Do a good job." And he had no idea what she was talking about. But we used to go into New York and install things in people's fancy apartments, and he made cabinets. But he made them out of solid wood, and it was very interesting. So, I had that previous experience of working with him. And I had worked with tools with my dad. I actually created a job for myself when I was in high school, where I would repair and build things for people. I'd build cabinets for people, and people would bring me pieces of furniture that they wanted me to fix and stuff. And I did that for years. I did it when I was in college, too. When I went home, I did it that summer as my summer job. So, I was in woodworking with Richard Breidenbach, who was my teacher. And there was another guy there named [Greg Comstock?], who was a part-time teacher. And he ended up getting another job at Jamestown Community College, which he didn't like, and after a couple of years after I finished my graduate degree, Greg Comstock said, "Why don't you apply for this job? I think you should do this job at State University of New York." And by then, I had my Master of Fine Arts in woodworking furniture design. So, while I was in Maryland, they had a GSA in my last year when I was in college. And so that would have been in 1979. But the people in it were so weird that I would see these people and be like, "I don't think so." I didn't know anybody in the group. But my pal Christine, I came out to her, and I told her about the crushes that I'd had. She had a boyfriend that we knew and stuff. And we had really serious talks about this. And we were really good friends, and we're still good friends. I just talked to her. And in those days, she said, "You know, you need to go out. Let's go to the Hippo." So, the Hippo was a gay men's bar, and it was pretty near the college. We used to go there at lunch, so nobody was there. I said, "This is okay because it's gay, but it's all guys." And so, one time we decided that we were going to go to Club Mitchell. So, Club Mitchell was the biggest East Coast lesbian bar. And it was right in Baltimore. And it was down by the docks. It had little cameras, it was all dark around it, and you'd drive around. First, we went the day before to figure out where it was because it was an industrial site there that you could never figure out where it was. So, we went there. The problem with going with a female friend is that, in general, women will not be as available to you if you're with another woman, which was a problem for me because I was looking for a date, bad. And I had really not been around a lot of women that were identified as lesbians. So, we go to the thing and it's just like this block building with a door, and a little light, and a sign about this big that said Club Mitchell on it. And one time I said to Faye Jacobs, "Did you ever go to Club Mitchell?" she said, "Bonnie and I had our first date there." Every woman in that area, women from DC would go there because you could go there very safely. This would have been like 1976, '77. I had a little car. So, we drove down. It was near Fells Point in Baltimore. And we went to the door, you'd need to knock, press a button, and then they'd look at you to be sure, first of all, that you were a woman, or a flaming gay man. They might let a flaming gay man in. But this was a club, so they didn't have to let other people in. And they'd look at you and then they'd buzz you in. And we'd go into this thing, it's an enormous, big open space. And there's a million dykes in there. It was just wonderful. And it was cowgirl night, so they were giving away for some wonderful reason, free cowboy hats. I still have that hat, as a matter of fact. This was many, many years ago. And Christine said, "Well, this is interesting." Because sometimes you could go to a bar, there'd be six women there. This was hundreds. There were probably 300 women there. The problem was, we didn't know anybody and that can often be an uncomfortable situation. But we sat at the bar. Christine used to drink quite a bit, and I didn't drink at all. I never drank, and plus I was driving, so that was fine. Well, you could drink when you were over 18 in Baltimore. You could drink beer or wine. I didn't drink. We saw these women and they were playing this music. Have I told this story before? This is a great story. So, I look across, and there's this row of women sitting on a wall, and there's a big dance floor but nobody's dancing, people are all shy and stuff. And this one woman turns to this other woman and she leans down, and she kisses her neck. And I think I came close to passing out. It was so hot. And I said to Christine, "If I never have to see anything else this will be enough to jerk off to for the rest of my life." It was so great. But I have to say that in college I worked so hard. I'm still tired from college. I'm really still tired from graduate school. There were days in graduate school that I didn't sleep for days, for three or four days I just didn't sleep. And in college I never had time to go out. Maybe after eleven o'clock, I'd have a couple of hours. I guess that's the way college is now, except I had to get up early for class, because our classes started at eight. And I was a teaching assistant for art history, too. And lots of things happening. I met a couple of women, the two other women in my department who are still my friends now, particularly Barbara Miller who is a wonderful person. She lives in Pennsylvania. And it was great to have other women in the department. There weren't very many people in the woodworking department, and when I graduated, it was just me and one other guy. But when I started in the woodworking department, when I was a sophomore, there were two other women who were just a riot. And they were great woodworkers, much better than I, and I learned a great deal from them and they were really free about sexuality, although they were not lesbians. But I remember Barbara saying to Samantha one time, and they were listening to somebody else and one of them said to the other -- they heard some other women say, "I've slept with about 15 or 16 guys," and Barbara said to Samantha, "Remember when you could still count?" It was so great that they had both had so many boyfriends, Samantha had actually been one of the first five women that had gone to an all-boys school. She said, "They used to line up at my door. And they would try so hard." It was a riot. This was before the AIDS days. In fact, it was right at the beginning of the AIDS days. And we did know other gay men. A lot of them died who were young gay men at the college at that time. Barbara knew a number of them and made their quilt squares and stuff. And they were great woodworkers and I kept in touch with them all the way through, and couple of other people and stuff. Anyway. Then, I decided that I didn't want to be just an art teacher in school, I wanted to be a college teacher. And I used to say, "I don't want to have to clean up vomit from a first grader. I just really want to be a college teacher." And that was smart. I think I did want to be that. But the other thing that happened when I was in college was I met an English teacher named Jean Ruben, and Jean became -- I had her for one class, and she lived right near me in Bolton Hill. I had a wonderful little apartment that I paid 95 dollars a month for in Bolton Hill that was two blocks from the school and in a beautiful view. It was a funky, little, weird place. It was tiny. But it was right in the middle of Bolton Hill, which is lovely. And it was in a building next door to where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas would visit. One time I was reading about them visiting F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived next door, in the apartment building next door. I'm like, "That was there." It was pretty great. And Somerset Maugham lived in that neighborhood and stuff, and the Kohn sisters. It was a great area to live in. Very arty. And Jean, I got to know her very well. And she was about 30 years older than I. And she also was not a lesbian as far as she knew. I think she would have been happier had she been a lesbian, or if she had been able to express that in her life. But I remained friends with her. I'm still friends with her now. She's in the nursing home now and she doesn't remember who I am. She's 92, now. But she was extraordinarily, wonderful to me all my life, and all the rest of my life. And she, I have to say, I'm sure she knew that I had a terrific crush on her and she didn't really dissuade me from that, but she never acted on it. And once in a while if I got a little too frisky, she would say, "Just cool your jets on this." Which is too bad, frankly, because I just wrote a little thing in Gay Journal, it was about coming out. And I remember I was in her apartment -- in those days nobody thought anything about having students in their apartments. I slept in her apartment. I used to come in, it would be so hot. This is so unbelievable, but when I worked in woodworking, one of the things we used to say is, "If you're not wearing work shoes and long pants and usually long sleeves, you're not there to work. You cannot work in woodworking in shorts. It's too dangerous. And you can't wear flip-flops because you can really, really hurt yourself." So, I always had long pants on. And heavy long pants. I would go to her apartment in the summer -- because I always went to summer school until I think one summer I wasn't there. I had an apartment, so I would stay there in the summer and take classes and then make money and stuff like that. And I'd go into her apartment. No one had air conditioning, and this is Baltimore. So, it'd be 100 degrees. One time it was 100 degrees in my apartment and I had a fan. I just threw water on myself all night. It was so hot. I go to Jean's apartment and I'd have a big, long shirt on, and then I'd have these heavy pants, and she'd say, "Do you want to take your pants off? Go ahead and do that." And I would do it. I would actually do that in my professor's house. I would go to her apartment and take off my pants. And Christine would say, "I can't believe that you can't see what this is like. You went to Jean Ruben's." I called her Ms. Ruben. It was just ridiculous. But she was wonderful to me and she helped me through lots and lots of things. And when I went to graduate school, I had a hard time communicating with the guy to get into graduate school and she told me exactly what to do. She said, "You need to call him up and this is what you need to say. He's not going to be upset if you just call him," because I hadn't heard back from the college that I was in, and she said, "He's the professor, not the college. They don't get to decide this. He told you you were going to be in the program. Call him up and make it happen." And she really explained that to us. She was very erudite. She had a subscription to the opera and to a couple of other music things, and she would take me. She'd have two tickets and she would take me and we'd go to those things. It was lovely. She was very, very sweet to me. When I went to graduate school, I would visit her. I would come back to go to my parents, it was so far. It was in Terre Haute, Indiana, and I would come back and stay with her, I'd stay overnight, and then I drive the rest of the way because it was an 18-hour drive and I'd often had my cat with me. And so, we would just stop there and stuff. She was very great to me. So, one time I was with her in her apartment and I was fixing a lamp for her because she couldn't do anything stuff like that. So, I was rewiring this lamp, which is one of my skills. And putting a weight in it and doing some stuff. And she was on the phone to her mother who I also knew, she had a very problematic relationship with her mother. And I fixed a lamp for her one time, too. And so, then she gets off the phone, and so we're just talking, and she said, "Who are some of your other people that are your friends?" And I said, "Well, in the building that I live in, when I was an undergraduate, I got to know these people," and she said, "Oh, I know Jay Walter," who was a Facebook friend -- thank goodness for Facebook -- and she said, "Now, he's an attractive guy. Are you attracted to him?" And I said, "Well, I'm gay." And she said, "Oh." And I said, "No, I don't think I'd be attracted to him." And she said, "No, you don't have to explain anymore. I get it. You're gay. Okay, fine." Well, she had a lot of gay friends, including other professors, which I'll get to in a minute. She knew lots of gay people. So, one of the things she told me was that -- people are always saying things to me like this. She went to Smith, and when she graduated right after World War II, she went to Paris, because she could speak French fluently and she wanted to just be an erudite young woman in Paris. She was very young. And she was not particularly attractive. I have to say that she's not conventionally attractive in any way. She had a great, sexy voice. But she absolutely was not something that some straight man would go, "Wow, what a babe." Ever. But she met these guys in a café, and she said, "Well, yeah, I have an English degree and I'm a poet." She wrote poetry. I published a book of her poetry. She's telling me the story, "I met these guys and they wanted me to come and work in this little magazine that they were starting up because they said, 'This is great,' and I wanted to do because this is a poetry writing magazine, and I wanted to do it because I want to be around these writers. I didn't know who they were and they weren't famous but I wanted to be around these writers." And they wanted her to be there because she spoke fluently and she could order the food. And they actually said that to her. And she could also type really fast. She was also a great poet. And I'm like, "Who were the guys who were starting it?" And she said, "It was Zero Magazine," which you should look up, by the way. "The literary magazine Zero." And she said, "There were famous people there," and she named a couple of guys that started. And then she said, "Then there was William Carlos Williams, and the main guy was James Baldwin." I'm like, "So, you're hanging out with James Baldwin every day?" So, she told me all about him and how she thought that really the hardest thing in his life was that he was gay. So, she's hanging out this them. She had all these stories about things. She came back to the United States and then she went to graduate school at Columbia to get her masters, and she was working as a secretary and doing typing, and helping people write papers, and stuff like that. And she said, "We used to go out to jazz clubs. I had a friend that was dating a guy in a jazz band. And we were in New York." This was the '50s in New York, and my parents were there in the '50s in New York, too, and it was all exciting and fun. And she said, "We went to this jazz club, and the musicians, two of them came down and sat with us, her boyfriend, and then they introduced me to the other guy, and his name was Charlie. Charlie Parker, do you know him? 'The Bird?'" And I said, "Yeah, I know who Charlie Parker is. Shit." And I said, "Well, was he good at playing the jazz?" And she said, "Oh, yeah. He was really great. He could play really, really fast." But she never really understood about pop culture. I don't think she could name the Beatles. She was just sort of like that and she would say things like that, all the time. So, she's hanging out with Charlie Parker in jazz clubs in the 1950s, and after she'd written with James Baldwin and was pals with them when she was 19. So, she had fascinating stories. And I wanted to listen to her. A lot of other people didn't appreciate this stuff as much. A lot of other people my age didn't always know who she was talking about because this was the '70s and they didn't know who Charlie Parker was. I was really into jazz. I had his records, for heaven's sakes. And I went to her poetry readings and I was just a groupie, totally a fan. But I continued to be friends with her. Anyway, I said that stuff about coming out to her and him and I said in this little story that I wrote in the Gay Journal, I wish I could say that then we just had this hot little moment together, or more than a hot moment together. But that's not what happened. Instead, we became really good friends. And since I lost my mother when I was very young, I mean, she stopped really understanding things by the time I was 25. So, that was just a few years later where she couldn't really -- and she was wonderful. She was a wonderful, interesting, fun, sweet person, but she lost her memory and that's everything. So, then there was Jean and she was great because also, my parents were terrible at helping me make decisions about my life. They'd be like, "Well, what are you going to do?" If I had a hard thing they'd say, "Well, what are you going to do?" They'd never say, "I think you should do this." I would say to Jean, "What do you think I should do?" I would call her and say, "What do you think I should do about this serious thing that happened?" And she would say, "I think we should think about these things and let's talk about what this means." So, one of the things I found so attractive about her was she was a single woman. She was on her own. She didn't have a boyfriend. She had had relationships with people but she would constantly tell me -- or I asked her several times because -- she was 48 when I met her. I would ask her when she was in her fifties, "Do you have regrets about your life?" And she said, "No, not really. I'm happy with my life. I like my life." I would ask her things like, when I was at State University of New York, I suddenly found out that they were going to cut out my program. And I'd been teaching there for six years. I was in a relationship. It wasn't going very well but I owned a house. I was tenured, so I had no expectation that this was going to happen all of a sudden. I had built the program up to something very significant, and all of a sudden they were just going to cut out the program. It had to do with stupid financial circumstances, and not the least reason was because I was a lesbian. And clearly, there were some issues that they had with that. They didn't persecute me, but there was absolutely nobody that was going to step up for this program, and it was too bad, because it was a jewel in that college's cap. But I remember saying to Jean, "Everything is falling apart. This is what I've worked for all my life and now I'm not going to have this." And she said to me, "You weren't going to stay in this place, in Western New York. This was a five-year plan. You were going to stay there for five years. Now you're going to go on another adventure. That's okay." I was going to move with my partner, who had moved to Philadelphia. So, I moved to Philadelphia. We'd stayed in an apartment for a while. She was in Philly and I was there with her, and things weren't working out. And now I said to Jean, "This is really not working out. Sasha and I are going to break up. I do have some money from my TIAA-CREF fund that I could take out. It's quite a bit of money. And so, I think what I want to do," we had owned a house which we'd sold, and I had a little bit of money from that, about 8,000 dollars, which was quite a bit of money in those days. It turned out I had about 30,000 dollars in my CREF thing, which was a lot of money. So, I said, "I think I should think about buying a house because if I have a house, even if I don't have a job, if I have a house, I'll have a place to live. I can piss this away really easily if I just use this on rent." So, she said, "Well, Wayne is in Allentown." And he was the partner of Arthur Miller who was a friend of ours, who was another teacher, who was a very good friend of Jean's. And I knew him, he'd been one of my teachers. And I'd done some work for him at his house. And she said, "Wayne is in Allentown. Why don't you go and talk to him? He's a nice guy. He's a sweet guy." I said, "I've met him." So, anyway. I did go and see him and he was wonderful to me. And he was lonely. And he said, "I want you to move here. If you fix my stereo, you can store all your stuff in the basement. I'll help you find a new house and then I'll help you fix it up," because he did that all the time. So, I looked at the back of the stereo, turned the on switch on, and then he went, "Yay," and then he helped me. I moved all my stuff because I'd broken up with my partner at the same time my mother had gone into a nursing home because she had Alzheimer's disease, which was very devastating. My dad was moving. So, I had to get all of my stuff out of the house. But I didn't have a house anymore. So, that was very tough. I packed up a lot of stuff that I wanted to have but it was very complicated. So, I really needed a house. My family needed a house. We needed a place to go for holidays. My sister was in the process of moving, as well. She lived in Connecticut but she was between relationships, too, and she didn't really end up having another serious relationship after that time. And I ended up talking to Wayne and moving to Allentown, and really, that turned out to be a good idea. And it was because Jean told me to do that. She said, "Go and do that. Don't worry about stuff that's happened in the past. That wasn't the place for you. It's okay." I think she was absolutely right. And she was saying, "You're young and you don't have to worry about that." So, what I said in the Gay Journal was that when she became older, she was wonderful to Trish. She was absolutely terrific. Every time that she was still cognizant when I would talk about Trish and how long we've been together, because Trish and I have been together for 33 years now, but I'd say to Jean, "Trish and I just had our twentieth anniversary or our tenth anniversary," and she'd go, "I'm just so happy that you found her. I'm so glad that you were able to hook up with her and have this relationship. It's such a good relationship. I'm so proud of you for doing that." And we would go and she came to visit us several times and stuff. But at the end of her life, she was in this little apartment in Baltimore that she'd been in all of this time. It was a condo and she owned it. She began to clearly forget things. We'd go to see her and she'd be walking on a street and she'd say, "I don't recognize this street," and it'd be her street that she'd been walking on for the last 30 years. And Jean's brother took care of her, and still does take care of her, he's five years younger. He said to me, "My wife and I are going to go to Europe and we're worried about Jean because I'm visiting her every week." And I said, "Okay, I'll visit her every week while you're away. So, I'll just go and visit her. I'll be sure she has enough food and stuff like that." So, we did that for actually a couple of months. But it was very apparent that she was at risk. She was over 85 by then. So, she would lose things. Here's a tip, don't buy black things for your parents because if they put a black thing down, you can't see it. If you put it on another black thing, you can't see it. Don't get a black address book. She would call me up, hysterical, because she couldn't find her address book. And she said, "I don't want that bright fluorescent green one." "Yeah, well, that's what we need to have, now." It's true for me, now. See? I have my phone, because my black phone I lost all the time. So, she called me up and she said, "I'm afraid," and I said, "Well, just talk to me." And she felt better after I talked to her and then she said, "Can you call me up now and then?" Well, I was calling her frequently, but I said, "I am going to call you every day for the rest of your life, so you can be calm. I'm going to call you every day for the rest of your life." And I did that for the next six years. And then she stopped knowing who I was and it was scaring her that she didn't know, so I had to stop. So, she's alive now, during COVID, she can't see her brother, she's in a nursing home, I haven't spoken to her in a year, it's a terrible situation. And I miss her so much. But she also can't remember what she's saying from the beginning of the sentence to the end. So, it's not like she's really there. But when she was in her late eighties, she began to express to me that she was not really happy. She did have a lot of regrets. And one of the big regret she had her life was that there was never anyone who wanted to team up with her, in her life. And she said that to me several times. And I remember saying to Christine, "Jean thinks nobody ever cared about her." And Christine said, "Well, why don't you tell her that you cared about her?" And I said, "I don't want to scare her, especially now." But finally, Christine said, "She's not going to remember it anyway," which is true. So, I did say it to her and when she said that again, I said, "You know, Jean, I would have been with you. I would have been with you as long as you wanted." And she paused for a long time, and then she said, "You mean you would have teamed up with me?" And I said, "Yeah, I would have." And then there was another long pause and then she said, "I was too old for you." And I guess she knew that. Maybe there was a possibility that that could have happened, but she had enough integrity to recognize that she was way too old for me. I have to say that she was a little jealous of Trish, particularly at the beginning, and she acted as though she and Trish were the same age, which is really not true. She's about 30 years older than I am, Trish is 12 years older. Not quite the same. But she thought, "Well, wait a minute." But anyway. So, she was wonderful to me through all of that time. In the meantime, going back to a little bit, when I went to Indiana, and I went to study under [Allen Friedman?] who turned out to be a complete asshole and ended up leaving after the first year, which meant that I didn't have a mentor while I was there, and there weren't any other woodworking teachers, so the people in ceramics who didn't understand anything about wood, there was nobody to teach me everything. And then, they got some part-time guys, and then they got another guy that was kind of an idiot. And everything about Terre Haute, Indiana was horrible. It's a horrible place. It smells bad. The water tastes like rotten clams. The college, they had a very good art department in a lot of ways. They had some big-name artists there. They had a few important people. They had a wonderful art history department and two of the art history teachers were very, very, very good to me. I was very indebted to them. And I minored in art history, and I teach art history classes now, and I taught art history when I was at State University of New York, too. so, I got a lot out of working with them. And one of them was gay, and he was wonderful. He was one of the first people who a gay professor that I came out with who really, really supported me. When I went to Terre Haute, I had some friends there. It was so cutthroat in the department that we couldn't even be friends with each other. The other graduate students just couldn't be friends with each other. It was hard. Some people left because of that stress. Some guys in the sculpture department left and just bought a pizza parlor. They just couldn't handle the stress. It was terribly stressful. I just wanted to get my MFA and get out of there. And it was very hard. It was the kind of high-level hazing that you have in the worst hazing circumstances in graduate school. And it was just awful. And I think of that as some of the worst years of my life. But two good things happened. One of them was that I got a wonderful little kitten that I had for 18 years, and the other was that I came out and I started to have really great sex with women, which was really fun. And there were two gay bars there, one of them was predominantly a women's bar, and there was a Gay-Straight Alliance there that I worked with. That was in the '70s. I did programs and stuff like that. So, I really have legitimate credentials that go back to 1979 when I was setting up gay awareness things at Indiana State. And I met a couple of people there in the gay community, in the lesbian community particularly, who were very, very interesting and fun to be around, and supportive. And I think I told you this story before, but after my second review of my work, I was just ripped apart by a bunch of professors who didn't know anything about woodworking, and didn't believe that people should make furniture, they thought they should make sculpture. I was in the furniture department. It was ridiculous. But I had had a horrible review. And I went to the bar, it was a Tuesday night. It had been very, very hard because I went to set up my work in a place where they could look at it, and it turned out that the elevators to take the work to the gallery didn't work, so I had to have another friend help me carry all the stuff up like two flights of stairs. It was pieces of furniture. It was really, really hard. And then I had this review and the things that the people said didn't make any sense, like, "Why aren't you making sculpture?" I'm like, "Because I'm in the furniture department." "Well, why should you?" because they all hated Allen Friedman. He was gone. And they didn't have anything to say. It was awful. There were rats in the building where we were working. I have an irrational fear of rodents, too, so that was very, very serious for me. So, I had this terrible review and I went to the bar, it was called J &amp ; J's this little bar. And I didn't drink, so I couldn't really going get drunk. But I went to the bar. I just wanted to be around queers. And I sat down and there were two women there. One of them I'd had a little relationship with, and the other one I was friends with. And so, it was Debbie and Janet. And they came over. And they don't know each other that well but they did know each other because everybody knew everybody in the bar. And they came over and they sat with me at the bar, and there wasn't anybody else in there. There was about six women in there. It was about eight o'clock on a Tuesday. But they were there. And they came over and they said, "What's wrong?" And I said, "I just had a terrible time at the college." They were both townies. So, I said, "You have these things called reviews and they come in and they talk about your work and they were just horrible to me. And there was nothing supportive. And they were talking about things that didn't make any sense. And they were just showing off for each other who could be meaner to me," it was really like that. And there were a number of other instances where that kind of stuff happened in front of the art history teachers who would later say to me, "Why are they treating you that way?" And I said, "Because they hate Allen Friedman. They hate him and they want to make my life miserable. Plus, I'm a dyke." And a lot of the students were having affairs with professors because that was a way that you could get good grades. And that actually happened, clearly happened, with one person who's my Facebook friend, now. But she had a relationship with several of the other professors, and one guy who was a professor actually raped a student, and all the other professors stuck up for him. It was just horrible stuff like that. I couldn't wait to get out of there. This was in my first year. So, Janet and Debbie come over and Janet says to me, she's a big dykey woman, she goes, "Do you want me and Debbie to go over to their house and beat them up?" And I just laughed because they weren't kidding. They were really going to go over. They would have turned one of their cars over. They would have done that for me. And I thought, "Okay, these are my people. These are the people who understand me. These are the people who I can count on. I cannot count on these people at the college. I can count on these lesbians. They are here for me because we're sharing this thing." And I suddenly felt a totally different feeling about this. So, I did go to that bar, or one of the bars -- there was one called Mothers, and there was one called J &amp ; J, and Mothers was a more mixed bar, it had more men and lots of drag shows and stuff. And then the other one that I went to was this little corner bar, but it had a dance floor. And I would try to go every Friday night. I would work until about nine o'clock, then I'd go out to dinner at this little, tiny Vietnamese restaurant that was in Brazil, Indiana. We don't call it Brazil, because we don't want it to get mixed up with the country, they would say. So, I would go to Brazil, Indiana, and I'd go to this tiny little restaurant that was in a gas station, an old, converted gas station. They had wonderful food and I'd spend 3.98 on this really wonderful dinner. And then, I'd go to the bar and I'd hang out there and I'd try and pick somebody up and have sex with them, which would make me a lot happier if that could happen. And it did happen quite a few times. But I also really decided that I wanted to be in a relationship. And my first coming out was meeting somebody at a bar and going home with them and just praying that this was going to go well because I hadn't been with any other women. And I was thinking that this was why I wasn't having good relationships with men, so to speak, let's say satisfying relationships with men. And I thought, "I'm really hoping this is going to work with this woman because otherwise I'm going to have to go to The Trouble With Angels and be in the nun thing." So, it did. And it was really great. And I thought, "Okay, this is the right thing. This is the right thing." And I had a relationship with her with for about five months and it was pretty serious, and then she dumped me for someone else. And that was really painful because it was the first time that had happened. But I also recognized that I had done the wrong thing in some parts of the relationship. I don't always think about that as a relationship that counted that much, but at the time, it seemed really devastating. I remember going to Charles Meyer's house, he was my art history professor, such a brilliant guy, lives in New York now, and I just came out to him and I said, "I was dating this person, she dumped me, but I want to go on another date, I want to have her to come over for dinner." And he goes, "Oh, let me." And he was a great chef. He started getting me all this food. I was in his apartment and he was setting up all this stuff for me and he's going, "Take these, this is good, this is canned white asparagus, but it's really hot and it's aphrodisiac-like, and you can have that." He was wonderful to me. He was so adorable. That didn't work out either, but I ended up having somebody who did contact me. In fact, I was at a party of lesbians and this woman sat down next to me. And I had met her before at the GSA. And she was very young. She was an undergraduate. I think she was a sophomore at the time. She was way too young for me at that time, for a lot of reasons. But she said, "I want you to meet my roommate. She saw you on campus. She really wants you to go out with her and she's going to write you a letter," because in those days, we wrote people letters all the time. And I wrote Jean a letter every couple of days. In fact, when my friend Christine was on junior year abroad in England, I wrote her a letter every day, sometimes twice a day. And she said, "My roommate here is so jealous because we get two postal deliveries and I get like a letter from you in each delivery." And she was writing me that way, too. I kept them all. I have stacks of those letters. But anyway, this woman, who's also named Jean, Jean Church, and she wrote me this beautiful letter to ask me to go to a play. And it was The Good Woman of Setzuan, it was a college play. She'd actually watched it already, which is typical for a lesbian to do, go to the play to be sure it's okay and then ask them to go to the play. "I saw the movie, it's all right. Now I'll take her to the same movie." And we went out. I sort of messed up on that date because I thought she really wanted to have sex and that didn't seem like something she wanted to rush right into. I ended up writing her a letter back and saying, "I apologize for that, let's go out again," and so we did go out again. We went out a couple more times, and then we started a relationship that lasted about two and a half years. So, what happened was at the end of my second year in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant, I taught art history, and I done that for the time. And I only had a couple of credits left. I think I had one credit left that I had to fulfill. I'd actually, during the time of working on my MFA, gotten letters in the mail. I'd get this letter that goes, "Now you have an MS," because I just took enough credits. And then, "Now you have enough credits for an MA in Fine Art." So, now I had a master's degree in Fine Art. I'm like, "Whoa." But my MFA was a 90-degree credit and that had a lot of reviews and stuff. So, I was still going through the reviews. But I had a legitimate masters. So, Greg Comstock, who was the guy who taught woodworking, he was the other woodworking teacher, not the main guy, but the part-time teacher in Baltimore, said, "I'm in this job in Jamestown, New York. I'm teaching woodworking here. I'm leaving the job. I hate it here. I hate it here because the clouds are too low." That's why he hated it there. And for a couple of other reasons, but one of the reasons was they wanted him to have a masters, and he didn't want to go and get a masters. He didn't want to do it. And he said, "I think you should come here. I think you should apply for this job. I think you could do it. And you have a masters." So, I applied for the job. And during that time one of my other art history teachers, Harriet Kaplow, who's my Facebook friend, although she's well into her nineties now, said, "I'm going away for the summer and my 15-year-old daughter," who's now a Buddhist priest, "is going to be here alone all summer and I would like you to come and house sit for me and live in my house, you and Jean," because Jean and I were together then. And so, I gave up my apartment and we did that. And I was about to graduate soon, I had a couple more credits to do, but I knew that I was going to have to make some decisions about what I wanted to do. But I got a call that I was high up for this job in Jamestown. And they flew me out there, I guess, to interview for the job. And I got it. I got the job in Jamestown. And I was very excited about that because I didn't know what else I was going to do. And that's exactly what I wanted to do. So, I went there and started to teach there. Jean and I drove there, and Greg said that the woodworking department was in a separate building that was actually sort of a big garage that had been converted into a studio at a building that the college owned that was a house, actually, where they put people up and had meetings and stuff. It was a beautiful old Victorian house that had this enormous garage thing that had been converted into the woodworking studio. And Jamestown, New York, has a history of woodworking factories. It was the biggest furniture producer at the turn of the century. At the turn of the 19th century, they had 119 woodworking factories there in those days. And so, 1981 I started the job, they wanted to try to revive that. And they still had a lot of factories there. So, I said to Jean, "I got this job, let's drive out there and then you can fly, I'll pay for you to fly back to Indiana." But Greg said that he was living in his office because there was actually an office upstairs in this building that had a full bathroom. It was a nice big space and it actually had been an apartment. It didn't have a kitchen but it had a place for one, and he said, "My bed is there, the mattress is there, bring some sheets and you can just stay there. I'll mail you the key." I don't even know if this was a legitimate thing to do, but I lived in that. So, Jean came with me, we stayed there a couple of nights. And then she left, and then I lived in that office and taught downstairs. I started in August and all the way through October, I did that. Until one day, when one of my part-time teachers was teaching downstairs, and I had the worst cramps ever, and I thought, "I don't want to be living upstairs when they're making power tool noises." Also, I was beginning to be afraid because I couldn't really lock the doors to my office and people would come in to clean the building. And I was nervous. And I actually jammed pieces of wood to hold them, because I didn't really feel -- I could hear people downstairs and it was creepy. So, I ended up renting a house. And then after Jean graduated, she came to live with me for about a semester, and then she got a job. She was a recreation major, which is kind of a funny thing, but it was like wildlife and she did camp stuff. That's what her degree was in. And they had a big program at Indiana State for that. So, she did her internship on Golden Pond. It was actually at Squam Lake in Vermont. And I visited her there. We were still together and then she lived with me for about six months, and then she got a job at that place, so she went there. And while she was there, she wrote me a Dear Jane letter and said, "I can't do this anymore." And part of it was that she had a lot of really serious issues from child abuse that she didn't want to work on. She just didn't want to talk about them and she didn't want to deal with them and they were affecting our relationship very seriously. And I kept saying, "You're in a place where you can get free therapy. Why are you not doing that?" And she just didn't want to do it. So, we broke up. And that was hard. I had a very good friend who's still my very good friend, I was just talking to her yesterday, who was another new professor at the college when I started there. And I remember telling her about that. She was straight but I remember telling her about that. And she was very, very supportive. She said, "She's not the right one for you." And then soon after that, about six months after that, I met another woman, Sasha Hovack. So, I dated some women. And then, I met another woman who was the head of the United Cerebral Palsy offices there in Jamestown, and we had this group of women that were meeting each other, and there was a women's domestic violence hotline, a lot of lesbians worked there. She was very interesting. I asked her on a date and she was much more excited about the sex, so that was really fun for that beginning of that date. But we were really not ultimately suited for each other. I think we were together for just about four years. We owned a house and it was quite a serious relationship. But when my job was coming to an end, because I talked about this, they cut my job out of the program, she had been working at United Cerebral Palsy then, that job ended and she was working at a big hospital in Erie, and she was commuting from Jamestown, which was a long way. So, she'd actually stay there for three days out of the week, and then she'd drive back. It was a good three, two-and-a-half-hour drive. And very rural drive. And Jamestown is a snow belt area, so it's very hard to drive around. There wasn't any highway to get there. But she was also in a relationship with someone else that I didn't know about. And she's still with that person today, which is interesting. She said she wasn't, but she was. She was living in that woman's house. And so, she got a job in Philadelphia and I moved all of our stuff to Philadelphia, and we sold our house in Jamestown. I moved every single one of her things, including the refrigerator, upstairs, and then she let me know that it was not working out, after I moved all of her crap and all of her huge pieces of furniture. My pieces of furniture, which I made, come apart for easy transport. Her pieces of furniture were just ridiculously huge. So, all this tough stuff was happening. I was in a bad relationship, my mother was going into a nursing home for Alzheimer's disease, I lost my job that I thought was going to be the most perfect job ever, I didn't have any money, I had to move to Philadelphia, that relationship didn't work out. It was a lot of tough stuff. And I was just turning 30. Sasha and I had gone to a party. We knew other lesbians in Western New York and some of them had moved to Eastern New York. And so, we went to a party and we met a group of women, and one of them was Trish. And I was still with Sasha then, but our friend Cheryl, who had the party, when Sasha and I broke up, Cheryl said to Trish, "Liz and Sasha broke up." Oh, and by the way, when I saw Trish, she was so hot I couldn't even look at her. My heart was beating so hard. And at one point, it was a Fourth of July party, so we'd had dinner, we had hot dogs and stuff, and then we were going to go to see the fireworks, and I maneuvered that she would go in the car with me and Sasha because we were all going to go and we didn't want to take all the cars. So, she was sitting in the front and I was sitting behind her and I go, "This woman is so attractive. I can't stand it." And I knew that this relationship between me and Sasha was not working out. I didn't know that she was actually seeing someone else. So, we both knew that this was not working. So, when I went back to Philadelphia because we had gone to New Jersey to this party, and then we were back in Philly at the apartment, and I had applied for a job to be the gallery director, or assistant gallery director at Moore College of Art. And I was very high up. And the person who was the gallery director said, "I absolutely want you to do this job." So, I thought I was going to get this job. And then she said, "We don't have any other good candidates. You're the one. You've got all the credentials." And then all of a sudden she called me up and said, "I'm really sorry, but they want to hire somebody else." I think it turned out to be the wife of a professor in the department, which had been typical in that situation. So, I was really devastated because I hadn't had a job. The money that we got from the house that we sold was running out. And Sasha's rent was pretty high and I was paying half the rent and I didn't have any prospects for jobs. And also, I knew this relationship wasn't working. So, I said to her, "I know that you're not in love with me anymore." And she said, "No, I'm not. I'm not." And I said, "Okay. Let me stay here until I figure out what to do." And she said, "Of course." And we're friends now. It wasn't it a horrible relationship breakup, except for that I had to move the refrigerator and I had paid for half of it, but that was the worst thing. There are worse things in the world. I mean it really wasn't bad. And so, I ended up, then, soon afterwards finding out that I could take all my CREF money out. So, suddenly I had 30,000 dollars, plus I had about 7,000 dollars leftover from our house sale. That's pretty much money. And I said to Sasha, "I'm going to buy a house," and she said, "I don't think that's a good idea, you're going to use all your money for that." I said, "Yeah, but I can always make money. The thing is I don't have any place to live. And I've got all this stuff. I don't want to just move into an apartment." I never wanted to live in an apartment again. We'd already owned a house. I really liked that. I had all my woodworking tools. My parents' house I couldn't move. My mother's in a nursing home, my father's going to move into a condo, I just didn't have any options. And I had huge power tools that were still in Jamestown that we had to move. I moved them into a friend's, Barbara Miller's house, who I had gone to college with. She had a big place in Pike County, in Milford, Pennsylvania. She was a woodworker and she had a big, big space and I said, "Can I move my tools?" She had an enormous warehouse thing in the back of her property that she did her woodworking in. She was a professional woodworker and I said, "Can I move all my wood?" I had wood, even. And she said, "Yeah, move everything in here." I moved my boat there. I had a sunfish boat. It's still there, unfortunately, in the woods with trees growing through it. But I did all of that stuff. I had all sorts of crap that I had to take care of, and Barbara really stood up for that. She let me use her van to move the stuff there. And I ended up having that money and then that was the thing where I met Wayne and I said, "I'm going to buy this house in Jamestown," and I did. And we still live in that house. And I had met Trish. So, Cheryl told Trish that Sasha and I had broken up. And then Cheryl told me that she told Trish that and I said, "What did Trish say?" And Cheryl said, "Trish said Sasha's an idiot." And I went, "Whoa, all right." And then, I got a letter from Trish, remember letters. No, Cheryl asked me to go on a double date with Trish and Cheryl and her partner, at that time, Donna. And they're not together anymore. But Cheryl has been in a long relationship with another person that Trish happened to have worked with in New York State, because there's really only about 100 lesbians in the world. So, we ended up going on this date. We went to a play in the Village, and then we went out to dinner. And then Trish and I, we were walking around, we went to take the train back to Cheryl and Donna's house. I owned my house then in Allentown. And Trish and I sat in the Penn Station and we quizzed each other on everything we could imagine for about an hour. What do you think about living apart? What do you think about being closeted? Because both of us had to have been closeted because of our other relationships and we really hated it. And she was really strong about that. And she said, "What do you think about long-distance relationships?" She said, "I don't believe in them." And we talked about politics, and we talked about kids, and we talked about all this different stuff, really fast, like speed dating in one date. And that was great. And then, Cheryl said that she was going to go to New Hope. And it was near Valentine's Day. I ended up going, and she said, "Trish is going to come." And so, I got to hang out with Trish some more. And Trish had made me a beautiful loaf of bread and I had a really sexy little present to give her, which was a little Christmas ornament that was grapes. It was old. It was an old German ornament. It was beautiful. And Trish said, "I took one look at that and said, 'Okay.'" So, then she wrote me a letter, and invited me on a date. And she said that I had to contact her. She didn't tell me her telephone number or her address or anything. And I said, "You know you didn't do that." She said, "I expected you to work for it." And I did. Because again, we didn't have the internet in those days, so I had to figure out how to do this. And she lived in New York State, Sullivan County. And she lived way up near Bear Mountain. The shortest way is a two-hour drive, but I went the wrong way, it took me three hours to get there. But what happened was at the same time I had had an opportunity. I had been in Jamestown, I'd gone out to dinner at the Chinese restaurant where I loved to go, and I knew the family that ran the restaurant, and the father of the restaurant came and said to me, he said in not very good English, he turned out to be a huge, big-time entrepreneur in Beijing, and his family, his brothers were some of the biggest wheelers and dealers in Beijing. They owned all these companies and stuff. He had actually started this restaurant in Jamestown so he could have a place where all of his relatives could come and get green cards. And so, I knew his daughter and stuff, they'd all gone to college at Edinboro State. So, he said, "I have a possible job opening for you at a paint factory in North Carolina, where they're having a lot of trouble communicating. They sell these specialty paints to people in China and that's my connection, but the guys at the company are so colloquial that they cannot communicate with the Chinese people." Because they would say things to them like, "You can't not never do this," and the Chinese people, who could speak English would go, "What?" And they'd say these wacky things. And they did it on purpose because they were racist, frankly. But he said, "Do you think you could do that?" And I said, "Well, I'm a teacher. If I know how to do it, I can teach anything." And it's in furniture. So, I was going to go to North Carolina. But Trish's date was the weekend before. I was supposed to leave on Monday and my date with her was on Friday night. I was supposed to leave on Tuesday, I think. And so, I went on a date with her, we went to this play, and Trish tells this whole story about this other student and stuff. This is such a bullshit, that is absolutely not true. I talked to somebody for like five minutes, and she was so uncomfortable about that. This was a student that was older than I was that I had happened to see there, and her partner was there, too, that I also knew, or previous partner that I also knew. And we went to this play. It was all about lesbian stuff. It was a lesbian review in the Village. We went with her old girlfriend, for heaven's sakes. And then, her girlfriend. Talk about that, that was problematic enough. So, it was her old girlfriend. Anyway. It all happened that I met Trish through Cheryl, because Sasha had introduced Cheryl to Trish, and then Cheryl fixed us up. That's how Cheryl knew Trish, because Sasha had been taking a course with Deborah, who was Trish's old girlfriend. That's the way these things work in the lesbian world. And those were all in Eastern New York and they all got to know each other, and then that's how Cheryl thought, "Trish and Liz would really be a good item." She was right. So, I had this wonderful date with Trish that started on Friday night. We went to the thing. We came home to her place where my car was. And we sat and talked for hours, and hours, and hours. And I thought, "She's not going to kiss me. I'm going to have to kiss her, because I really want to go to bed with her but I'm tired. I need to go to sleep pretty soon. So, this is going to have to happen before it starts to get light." You know that thing where you start to hear the birds and you think, "Oh my God, I've got to hurry up on this, it's twitter time." So, I thought, "I don't want it to start to get light." So, Trish had come home, she told me later, and taken a nap so that she'd be able to stay up late for this gig. So, finally, I kissed her which turned out to be the right thing to do this time, and she wildly kissed me back, and then we went to bed and stayed there for three days, which was really good. Really good for everyone, except her dog, who was very jealous. Her dog, Obie, who wouldn't let me go to the bathroom because, "Who is this woman?" But it turned out to be a terrific thing. But then, I had to go to North Carolina right then. And so, I went to North Carolina and I called Trish the minute that I got there. I called her as soon as I got home, and then I got in my van, and I drove down to North Carolina, it took 10 hours. And then after I got there, I called Trish again. And then, I said to her, "Could you come and visit me on Easter weekend?" And this was two weeks from Easter. And she said, "I have plans." And then I went, "Oh. Man." And she said, "But I just got a plane reservation to visit you this weekend." Not even two weeks. This is so lesbian with the U-Haul. So, she came. I went to pick her up at the airport. It was a long way away. And I knew that it would be dinnertime. So, when she gets to the airport -- maybe she'd told you the story. But she gets to the airport and she's not on the plane. The people are coming out of the plane and there's nobody there. Well, she had taken an earlier plane. So, she was already in the airport and I was running in. So, anyway, we drove back, we had a wonderful time. The whole thing that happened with Trish was so fabulous that in the beginning part of our relationship, I was just so overwhelmed by how terrific it was that I was afraid. I'm still afraid. I'm afraid of for when it ends. And if you're with somebody long enough, somebody's always going to be sad in the relationship because one person is going to leave. At the end of the relationship one person is going to die, that's what happened with my parents who were married for 42 years. Trish's parents were married for 75 years. We come from really great circumstances. And when I said to Jean Ruben, "I would have teamed up with you," and she said, "I was too old for you," she was right. But I learned from being with older women how to be with older women because that's one of the reasons that I thought Trish was so attractive. She was so capable. She was the head of Helen Hayes Hospital at the time. When I went in her bedroom, I looked over her bed, we were about to go to bed, and I looked over her bed, and she had a handmade copy, silkscreen, from The Book of Kells of a letter of a P. And I said, "That's from The Book of Kells." And I said, "Yes, it is." And she said, "I got it in Ireland." And I said, "Have you seen The Book of Kells?" And she said, "Yes, I have." And I thought, "This is a woman who has seen The Book of Kells. And I'm going to have sex with her right now. This is big. This is a big deal." This was the first time it had happened to me. And she had a book next to the bed, you know how people have things next to the bed for excitement, and it was drawings by [Keta Kellwood's?], of nude women. And I thought, "That's your porn?" It's like a really high-level artist drawing of women. I thought, "This is really, really good. I can't mess this up." Luckily, I didn't. And after five months, the job in North Carolina, the whole company closed and I got to come home. And we started our life together which was really wonderful. We were far away from each other but Trish had told me in our first conversation that she wanted to retire, because she had lupus. And the stress of her job, which was extraordinarily, it's a government job, running a government hospital, having to justify every penny you spend, to Albany, when they don't give you enough money, but when you're required to do certain things. So, she said, "I'm going to get scapegoated for something. I know that's going to happen." Anyway, after a while, and I think Trish talked about this in her talk, we decided ultimately that the most economical and smartest thing to do would be to move into this house, and we did that, and to be antique dealers, which was what I was beginning to do, because Wayne Camburn, he was an antique dealer and he taught me how to do that. And I could use my skills from being an art person to be an antique dealer, which is a very fascinating job. It's one of the few jobs in the world where the more you know, and the smarter you are, the more money you make. That's not true in most jobs. But the more you know, the more you know that this pocketknife is worth 1,000 dollars because they only made three of them, or this piece of art is by Gustav Klimt, and it's a real piece, or that this Hepplewhite piece of furniture is actually from the 1700s. And what we ended up doing is selling sterling silver, mostly, and we have the high-level collection of women silversmiths from the 1600, 1700, and 1800s. And it's very portable. I already knew about furniture that it's hard to move around, and it's not good for it to move around. But I could fix things, too. And so, we did that. And then Trish said, "Let's buy some rental properties, because I have a lot of credit," because she made a lot of money at that job, "And then we can run the properties," because that's what Wayne did, "And we can rent out my house in New York State," which we did, "And then we should have enough income to be able to live off of." And we did. And that's what we did. We did that for 10 years. It was very hard, actually, but also very fun. And then we started to do other things. We are at noon now. Do we have to stop or what do you think? MF: Well, this is actually sort of a good stopping point, although we're starting at the beginning of your life with Trish and Allentown. Would you be willing to do maybe another interview and start there next time? LB: Sure. And we can talk about that, and I can figure out anything else I forgot to say. I have to be sure that that's in there. Because there are a few other things that I didn't talk about, I think, that have to do with some other civil rights issues that I think are very important that we haven't touched on that had to do with stuff that Trish and I did. I know that Trish doesn't sing her own praises as much as she should, but the extraordinary work that she's done, and I have to say, I've done a lot of stuff. I couldn't have done any of these things if it hadn't been for Trish. She rescued me. Because frankly, when we got together, I didn't have any money. I was going into debt. And I had to ask her to lend me a lot of money. I asked her to lend me 1,000 dollars. And we had only been together for about eight months then. And five of them I'd been in North Carolina. Maybe it wasn't even that long. I was crying, and we were hugging, and I felt her go like, "I don't know about that." Because she had other girlfriends and she didn't talk about the other girls, so that's one thing I want to say. When you talk to older lesbians like us, frequently, this thing can happen. You can try this. Ask an older lesbian if she's ever kissed a woman that she didn't go to bed with, because they'll almost always say no. And I have a lot of friends that that would be the case with. It's not as true these days, but it still can be very true. It's certainly more true among women than men. And I've had women say, "Women have kissed me." I say, "No, that doesn't count. You kiss them." And people are like, "No?" Well, here's the deal with Trish. She's never kissed a woman that she hasn't had a five-year relationship with. And she's had four. So, she actually had three other girlfriends before me. When we met, she was 43. And they had really been tough for her. They'd all cheated on her. They'd all really done stupid things because she's so wonderful. But one of the things she said to me right up front was, "I am a jealous lover." And I remember one time after we got together I had a dream that I was having sex with Cher, and the in the dream, I said to Cher, "Oh, wait, I can't do this." And I told Trish the next day, "I had this dream that I was having sex with Cher but then I told her I couldn't do it because you and I were together." And then Trish goes, "You're an idiot. What are you, insane? That was Cher." I said, "Yeah, but." But anyway. The reality is that Trish made my life work. And all the things that I wanted to do right up front, we had a deal. And the deal was that I would put her first, which I have always done, and to see that she is the most important person in my life. That has to be the case. And it has been, for every minute. But for her, she said to me, "I will do everything I need to do so that we can learn new things together. And I'll love learning new things with you," because I'm always about that. And she said she didn't want to be in the forefront anymore. She'd been the head of Helen Hayes Hospital. She had to stand up in front of the New York legislature to justify the budget of a 600-bed hospital. She had been the head of a variety of different professional organizations for physical therapists. She had been at enormous risk for somebody throwing her under the bus because they wanted to get away with something that they were doing bad. She'd been horrendously discriminated against, based on being gay, at the hospital where she worked. And when I met her, up until just a few weeks before we met, every weekend she had had to go into the hospital because she'd had a physical breakdown from her lupus because she'd worked so hard. She'd get up at six o'clock in the morning, she'd come back at eight o'clock at night after working. Even when we were together, she would do that, at the beginning. And she couldn't wait to leave that job. But I think she told you that a new head of the hospital came in, and she was able to be the assistant again, to break that person. And that person was great. And during that time, for the next year, we were fine. And Trish made a lot of money. She was able to vest in her retirement, not get a retirement, but vest in it, so that between the time she was 45 and 55, if we could hold out during that time and manage to get through that she would start to get a small pension, it's not very much, it's about 2,000 dollars a month. She would start to get that pension, and both of our insurance would be covered, which is a huge part. We had to pay for our insurance for those 10 years, which was huge. Trish couldn't afford to let that go because she could never have been insured again because of her lupus. Anyway, I can go on and on about that stuff. But anyway, the significant thing that happened was that I couldn't have done any of these things. I couldn't have done what I did because I never was able to have the time or tenacity to be an activist because I'm too easily distracted by other things. And so, Trish has made it so that we could do all of these things. She's also incredibly, brilliantly frugal, so that we can live. The COVID-19 is killing her because she can't go get bargains at the grocery store. It really is costing us. I had no idea. Well, I did kind of, but it's really costing us a lot of money for her not to be able to shop because she really could make a big difference in terms of our cost. So, we can talk about other stuff but I did want to say those things, you've got that. I'm sure there's lots of other stuff. Oh, I had all these lists of stuff, here. I think I said all of these things. Yeah. So, my whole life before Trish was just getting ready to be in love with Trish. And that was really the terrific thing. And I do want to say that I had a lot of wonderful support for that, as well. It's been good. MF: Well, thank you so much. I think we could set up something for next week and start at the beginning of your life here in Allentown. I'm going to go ahead and just pause the record for a minute, and then we'll just sort of close out. But thank you so much, Liz, for talking today. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:57:36 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liz Bradbury, August 10, 2020 Description An account of the resource Liz Bradbury describes her maternal and paternal family, her upbringing, time at the Maryland Institute of Art and Indiana State University, and relationships before Patricia Sullivan. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-20 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-08-10 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/740a6bfa3b21416d6e86e4f972b0294a.png f4d83e150faacfb6ed213cd8e8407759 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Liz Bradbury OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-19.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 August 3, 2020 Liz Bradbury, August 3, 2020 LGBT-19 1:31:13 LVLGBT Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive Collection Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Liz Bradbury Mary Foltz video/mp4 Copy of BradburyLiz_20200803_video.mp4 1.0:|33(7)|62(9)|79(9)|104(13)|129(4)|158(3)|183(3)|206(5)|233(3)|252(17)|277(11)|302(7)|329(4)|356(3)|385(11)|414(8)|439(14)|468(3)|493(8)|520(10)|543(10)|554(11)|583(12)|608(14)|633(7)|660(7)|683(13)|708(12)|741(4)|764(17)|789(11)|812(13)|835(17)|860(15)|883(9)|908(2)|929(10)|950(9)|977(10)|994(13)|1021(9)|1048(7)|1071(4)|1094(3)|1115(12)|1140(3)|1163(6)|1184(13)|1211(5)|1234(5)|1257(12)|1284(2)|1309(9)|1334(13)|1363(5)|1388(8)|1413(5)|1438(4)|1463(11)|1484(14)|1509(13)|1534(13)|1561(2)|1586(4)|1609(16)|1632(12)|1659(6)|1678(5)|1701(9)|1722(14)|1747(6)|1772(4)|1799(13)|1824(10)|1845(10)|1864(16)|1885(6)|1904(10)|1933(9)|1964(15)|1991(7)|2022(8)|2051(8)|2074(12)|2095(18)|2114(14)|2145(6)|2170(6)|2193(12)|2220(4)|2247(3)|2256(10) 0 https://youtu.be/gFXnnMuRT_s YouTube video English 5 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on Zoom because there’s a pandemic going on. Today is August 3rd, 2020. So, Liz, thank you so much for talking with me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; LIZ BRADBURY: So, glad to be here. 0 109 The Valley Gay Press LB: I can’t remember exactly what I covered in the last time when we were talking about Steve Black. I did talk about Steve a lot. And certainly, he was the one who got us involved with the activism that we did in the 1990s which was over a long period, and then well into the 2000s. One of the things that happened was that, in 1998, we began to produce the Valley Gay Press. 0 203 Finding Community &amp ; Sharing Resources LB: And by the way, I didn’t really mention this, but I really miss it and I think a lot of people miss it. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to continue to do it. It connected me and connected all of the different LGBT organizations with each other, and that was one of the things about Pennsylvania Diversity Network, too. We called it a network on purpose so that we could really talk about the relationship between all these different organizations. And if you look at the Valley Gay Press where we indicated the different things that were going on in the community, in the events section, because we always had the events section, there was a list and the communication information for all these different organizations in the greater Lehigh Valley, and there were over 30 of them. And there still are. 0 365 Transitioning from The Valley Gay Press LB: Well, what happened was that, and as I outlined before, that Steve became very, very hard to work with, and it just got harder, and harder, and harder to work with him and it was very frustrating. And we were also beginning to realize as time went by, and this was over a four-year period, that paying to print the paper was extremely expensive. The cost of the paper just went up and it would just double all of a the sudden. We were printing 800 papers, and they’d say, “This is 120 dollars,” and then the next month they’d go, “That’s 240 dollars.” And we’d be like, “Wait, it was 120 dollars last month.” “Yeah, it went up. And it’s not a lot, it’s just like two cents a page.” I said, “Well, yeah, but it was one cent a page before, now it’s double.” 0 462 Goals for the Community / Haven (run at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lehigh Valley) LB: And we also felt that what we wanted to do was concentrate on bringing information to people and we weren’t going to try to do PA Gala because Steve was running it. And he wasn’t going to stop running it. That was the thing. He was going to continue to run that, and we were going to continue to run an organization that’s primary purpose was getting out Valley Gay Press. And also, other kinds of things. 0 617 Haven Facilitators / Facilitator Age Discrimination LB: So, we were involved in setting up Haven and we worked with Unitarian Church, and we were there for some of the first meetings of that. And I trained to be a facilitator. I was a facilitator at Haven for years. And at one point I was almost at every facilitator meeting. I had a little conflict with one of the people who ran the organization. And I thought that there were some problems with it because I actually didn’t think that we were trained very well. I saw that. I saw youth that had pretty severe problems there that the facilitator had no idea how to handle. And that was confirmed by other facilitators that were there, too, because there always had to be at least three facilitators there during the time. So, it was hard to fill those slots. 0 773 Instilling Pride in Out Haven Facilitators LB: They also had a training -- and I remember this, it was very stressful because Don Kohn was involved with it, a bunch of different. He was on their beginning board, and Tracy Denton was very, very involved in setting that program up, and she really did all the beginning steps to make Haven work at the Unitarian Church. And [Elsa Stole?], who was a member of the church, she really was the other person that made that happen. And it’s done great. They’ve met every single week for, what, 20 years. Every single week they do it. 0 1031 Starting Pennsylvania Diversity Network So, anyway, we had the Valley Gay Press and we couldn’t afford to pay for it and we were having a hard time working with Steve. So, we said to Steve, “We’re going to start a new organization, it’s going to be a 501c3, which is a charity that you can donate to and you can write off of the money. And we’re going to call it Pennsylvania Diversity Network. And Steve understood. We gave him a year to get ready for us to leave, and he was fine with that. And, so we started Pennsylvania Diversity Network, and Robert Roush, who was a development guy, and he now is running a big LGBT youth organization in Western New York that covers the whole part of that state, and he and his partner, Steve Olofson, started the Gay Men’s Chorus in the Lehigh Valley. And I said to Robert, “We will pay you to help us set up the 501c3.” 0 1214 Fighting Anti-LGBT Discrimination at JCPenney So, we had two numbers, our house number and then another number that now is my cell number. And people would call to ask questions about anything. They would call me and say, “I’ve been discriminated against. What should I do?” Well, I was the chair of the Human Relations Commission of the City of Allentown. I was on the commission for many, many years, more than 15 years. I helped to write the antidiscrimination ordinance because when we passed the ordinance, I was involved in writing it so I really understood how the ordinance worked. 0 1477 Providing the Community with Regional Discrimination Information LB: So, I would point out to them how to write the policy that would really protect people so people could be comfortable. People would call me on the info line and say, “I’m coming to a job at such-and-such a place, is this college,” and this has happened, “I’m coming from Princeton and I’m looking at a job at Moravian. Are they LGBT-friendly?” And at the time I said, “No, they’re not. They just removed their nondiscrimination policy. There’s no policy in the City of Bethlehem. You’re really at risk here. I wouldn’t recommend it.” 0 1660 PA Diversity Network's Purpose LB: And I would refer them to lawyers but sometimes the lawyers would contact me because they didn’t really know what the law said in Allentown. It’s not the same from town to town. And I’m very familiar with what the laws say throughout the state, and which laws are the ones that are really protective. So, we wanted Pennsylvania Diversity Network to be able to give that information to people. And we worked a lot on the marriage equality issue, which I talked about. And we also produced the Photo Project, which I talked about as well. So, we did that kind of stuff. 0 1811 Marriage Equality &amp ; Partner Benefits / Effect of United States v. Windsor LB: Did I talk about that one before, Freedom to Marry?&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: You talked about the Photo Project but you didn’t really talk around it, like what other activities you were involved with. &#13 ; 0 2067 Freedom to Marry / Spreading Info to the Community LB: And then in 2014, we got full marriage equality. And so, up until that time, the full marriage equality that happened in 2014 we did these Freedom to Marry things. And Pennsylvania Diversity Network partnered with Metropolitan Community Church to do these things. So, there was a protest outside, and we did that outside the courthouse. And I worked with Beth Goudy a lot about what would be the best use of our time to do this, and what would make the most impact? 0 2208 Making the Information More Accessible LB: So, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was speaking politically, and MCC was speaking from the point of view of a religious organization. And they had larger groups of people to do this. We made a video about it, and we put that up. I would speak to the press. Beth would speak to the press. I would try to have a Spanish statement, because I can read Spanish so it really sounds like I know what I’m talking about. I may have absolutely no idea what I’m saying, but I have a really good accent. So, people would fall for that. 0 2327 Collaboration between PA Diversity Network and the Metropolitan Community Church LB: So, we always wanted to be involved in that and we always worked with MCC, and then MCC would have a service, and I would usually speak at the service. And I usually would go for the laughs. I did a couple of really big laughs ones one time. And I’m one of the things I said was, “You know, we have a lot of different anniversaries when we’re a lesbian couple. And so, lesbian couples, we have all the times that we got married in the church, and the different times we tried to do Freedom to Marry, and our civil union, and our marriage, but for a lot of people, the most important anniversary is their first date, or their first kiss, or the first time they did it,” and people began to laugh. 0 2618 Working with the Community to Disseminate Infomation LB So, we did a lot of different events like that. I think we had some at our house. We were also really involved with ACCO, A Chorus Celebrating Women. ACCO is the name of a mythological woman singer, which is true, actually. But it also stands for A Chorus Celebrating Women, A-C-C-O with a woman’s symbol. And Bev Morgan was the founder and leader of ACCO. She’s a wonderful musician with a beautiful voice. And she had all these women. There was a lot of bi and lesbian women that were involved with ACCO for years and years. She ran that for a long, long time. And we worked with them to promote a lot of their events, or just to be at the events or help them with stuff that they were doing. Because we were very good friends with Bev Morgan and Sandy Fluck. And Sandy Fluck was the chair of the Education Department in Moravian. They live in Rehoboth, now. 0 2733 Meeting Adrian Shanker LB: So, here’s the story of meeting Adrian. So, Adrian was a freshman at Muhlenberg College. And that was in about -- he’s 32 now, so that would have been 14 years ago, so 14 years ago would have been 2006. So, I got a call from Patti Mittleman, I believe, and she was the one who ran Hillel House, and also was involved with running the organization that was really supportive of LGBT students at the college. 0 2806 Including Gender Identity in Muhlenberg College's Nondiscrimination Policy LB: So, Adrian calls me and he goes, “I’m a freshman at Muhlenberg, and I want them to include gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy because it only includes sexual orientation.” I said, “Okay.” So, this is in 2006. So, I said, “Okay, yeah. There’s no problem with that.” He goes, “Well, I want to create a petition to get everybody in the college to support this.” And I said, “No, you don’t want to do that. That’s not what you want to do.” Now, this is one of those few times that Adrian totally listened to me. He stopped doing this. He started telling me what to do, I think, the next year. 0 3173 Adrian's Molding of the GSA at Muhlenberg College LB: And when Adrian started at Muhlenberg, there was about 45 young people in the Gay-Straight Alliance there that they had. And he also did a really smart thing. He stopped letting them worry about changing the name of the Gay-Straight Alliance to spectrum or citron or whatever. Because it’s an enormous waste of time. The federal government allows you to call a group like that Gay-Straight Alliance, and they only actually support that, particularly for high schools. But the thing is that every time a group of college students wants to deliberate that, it usually takes them about eight months to decide what the name is going to be and then they leave, and next year, the next group comes in. 0 3276 Asking Adrian to the PA Diversity Network Board / Making Changes LB: So, after he did that for a couple years, we said, “Let’s have this college student on our board,” and he would be walking by our house. He would walk everywhere, and he’d take other students and walk by our house. He’d ring the doorbell and come in. And we’d hang out with him. Trish would always make him vegetarian food. So, he did that. 0 3535 September 11th Religious Healing Ceremony LB: So, now Adrian’s on our board. And I just want to point out one of the things that happened with that. So, we had September 11th that happened during that time in the beginning part of that. And it was devastating. A year later, there was supposed to be a healing religious ceremony in the community that was put on by the Council of Churches. So, they scripted the whole thing, and they told all the ministers what they had to say. They gave them the script. And one of them was Reverend Beth Goudy of the Metropolitan Community Church. 0 3771 Westboro Baptist Church Fundraiser LB: Well, one of the groups that picked up on this was the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps’s people, the God hates fags people. This is 2002. Now, I have maintained, absolutely, that these people are our best friends. And there’s a reason for that, and I’ll show you why. Because we could not get the Council of Churches to say anything. We couldn’t get any condemnation from politicals. The mayor of Bethlehem wouldn’t say a fucking thing about it. And we were mad that he wouldn’t say anything. This was supposed to be a healing ceremony and we get kicked in the teeth. So, nobody says anything. 0 4269 Televised Debates LB: And I would be on debates. They called me to be on the TV a lot of times. But they really screwed us on the TV a couple of times, because Adrian and I were going to be on a debate one time, on Business Matters and I said, “We will be on this debate about marriage equality, but you have to have,” because they were considering a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the State of Pennsylvania. I said, “You have to have legislators on. You can’t just have some crazy street preacher who’s just going to scream and scream and scream and say, ‘You’re a giraffe,’ and ridiculous stuff like that.” So, Adrian had set it up. 0 4472 PA Diversity Network Advocacy LB: But that was one of the things that we did as Pennsylvania Diversity Network. We did political things. We did speak on political issues. We did actual advocacy with regard to people who had lost their jobs or who had been denied -- we would help people find lawyers that would help them obtain custody of their children or get second-parent adoptions. We advocated to and explained to people about the second parent adoption law and how important that was. 0 4627 Hop the Bridge LB: Even after marriage legal in New Jersey, we did a big effort, it was called Hop the Bridge. And we had a huge demonstration in Easton. We got three couples to get legally married. One of them was my previous girlfriend and her partner, which was 25 years before, he’s my Facebook friend, she said, “We want to do this.” And they’d been together for the same amount of time as Trish and me. And I said, “Okay, I’ll set it up.” She said, “We have a niece in Easton.” They live in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania. So, they came and we had two other couples. It was Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and -- actually, we did it twice. So, we had these different people that did this. I think that was the next Freedom to Marry thing. We took a bus over and did it. But there was a bunch of different ways. 0 4781 Leaving PA Diversity Network to Start an LGBTQ+ Community Center LB: Now, Trish and I had been doing this for 20 years. Both of us had actually been doing LGBT activism since -- I had been doing it since the ’70s, she’d been doing it since the ’60s, she was in on the starting of SAGE, the national organization for older LGBT adults. I was working on stuff when I was in graduate school. We had been working all the way through on civil rights stuff. And truthfully, we were getting worried because we were thinking, “Who’s going to do this stuff after we retire?” 0 4913 Raising Money for the Community Center LB: And then I told the story. And people stood up and clapped. And Barb Ross, who, her wonderful partner Kathy Bergey had died and she had this estate money, she said, “I’m going to make the first donation.” So, I said, “We need to raise money.” I said to Adrian, “After Barb makes this money, I’m going to call for people to give donations in the room. Let’s just do that. Trish and I’ll donate 1,000 dollars,” which was hard for us, because we didn’t have a lot of money. “But we’ll do this.” And he goes, “Okay. Well, I’ll donate 1,000 dollars.” So, okay, we’ll do this. And then he says, “Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks.” He said, “We need to raise 75,000 dollars by October for us to do this. Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks.” 0 5127 Looking for a Physical Space for the Community Center LB: So, one of the things was that the mayor said he would give us a building for a dollar. And the city did do this. Now, we’re running out of time here. But the city did do this. And they arranged to give us this building on Turner Street, and it was a dollar. It was really neat, because it was only half a mile from our house. And it’s a weird-shaped building. And so, in a nutshell what happened was, we investigated that building for a year. And we had architects and hazmat and we did all this due diligence and we figured out there’s no way in hell we can use this building. Among other things, it’s not just covered with asbestos, it’s made of asbestos. It was full of lead and asbestos and Adrian said, “The only thing that was living in that building was dead pigeons.” 0 5463 Closing Remarks MF: All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. It was, again, just such a pleasure. 0 MovingImage Liz Bradbury details the transition from The Valley Gay Press to Pennsylvania Diversity Network, providing the Valley with crucial information, meeting Adrian Shanker, and starting an LGBTQ+ community center for the Lehigh Valley. INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY AUGUST 3, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on. Today is August 3rd, 2020. So, Liz, thank you so much for talking with me today. LIZ BRADBURY: So, glad to be here. MF: I'm just going to go ahead and do the brief consent and then we'll jump right in. So, do you consent to this interview today? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Community Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, like films, articles, websites, presentations? LB: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts you want to delete, or to withdraw the full interview from the project? LB: Yes. MF: Okay. Great. So, last time we talked a lot about the move to PA Gala, and then we moved to discussion of The Valley Free Press/Valley Gay Press that you had put out for 18 years. I thought today we could spend some time talking about the PA Diversity Network, which was the organization that you started after PA Gala. So, could you give me the origin story of PA Diversity Network, and what your aims were with that organization? LB: I can't remember exactly what I covered in the last time when we were talking about Steve Black. I did talk about Steve a lot. And certainly, he was the one who got us involved with the activism that we did in the 1990s which was over a long period, and then well into the 2000s. One of the things that happened was that, in 1998, we began to produce the Valley Gay Press. And at that time my dad had passed away and we had inherited some money and so we could afford, at that time, to pay Trish and I out of pocket to produce the Valley Gay Press out of our own pocket. So, we paid for it to be printed, and PA Gala mailed it to its constituency, our mailing list for PA Gala. And it was a very welcome piece of information for people to get. We also were making people aware of the kinds of political activism they could do, particularly with regard to the passage of the ordinance, the passage of the hate crimes bill, voting information, that kind of stuff was all included. And then, the Valley Gay Press, which was fun to read. And the Valley Gay Press was such an important thing for me. And by the way, I didn't really mention this, but I really miss it and I think a lot of people miss it. I'm sorry that I didn't get to continue to do it. It connected me and connected all of the different LGBT organizations with each other, and that was one of the things about Pennsylvania Diversity Network, too. We called it a network on purpose so that we could really talk about the relationship between all these different organizations. And if you look at the Valley Gay Press where we indicated the different things that were going on in the community, in the events section, because we always had the events section, there was a list and the communication information for all these different organizations in the greater Lehigh Valley, and there were over 30 of them. And there still are. If you look at all the GSAs, if you look at the colleges, if you look at the churches that are really doing significant things like MCC, or the Quaker church, or the Unitarian Church that had specific programs for LGBT people, if you look in everything from the Gay Men's Chorus to, at the time, the sports organization, there was a sports organization, now we have all these youth groups that are happening, Haven came up during that time. We had, of course, Pride, and a bunch of other things that were happening, lots of different things that MCC was doing and within MCC, they had other organizations that were involved. There were other religious organizations. There was a Catholic organization. And then, once we did the outreach to Berks County, because Trish mentioned that last time, we got this grant to do outreach to do Berks County, we included all the Berks County organizations. And there was a bunch of different organizations in Berks County. There was an organization called "The Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Reading and Allentown." And it was this social group that just hung out and we had events here, we'd just invite all these people and they'd just come and make friends and stuff like that. So, we had all these different groups. And the thing is, that people didn't know those groups existed. And today, people don't know these groups exist. People come to us and say they didn't even know there was a community center. They didn't know there was an LGBT organization at Lehigh University. They didn't know there was the Gay Men's Chorus. They didn't know that there was a Pride Festival. And so, all of those things we felt were really important to emphasize in Valley Gay Press. Well, what happened was that, and as I outlined before, that Steve became very, very hard to work with, and it just got harder, and harder, and harder to work with him and it was very frustrating. And we were also beginning to realize as time went by, and this was over a four-year period, that paying to print the paper was extremely expensive. The cost of the paper just went up and it would just double all of a the sudden. We were printing 800 papers, and they'd say, "This is 120 dollars," and then the next month they'd go, "That's 240 dollars." And we'd be like, "Wait, it was 120 dollars last month." "Yeah, it went up. And it's not a lot, it's just like two cents a page." I said, "Well, yeah, but it was one cent a page before, now it's double." And we were printing, then, front and back so that counted. We were printing the equivalent of legal sheets, and some places wouldn't print legal-sized sheets. So, anyway, the cost was getting very high. And one of the things about PA Gala was that PA Gala was a 501c4 organization, which means that it endorsed candidates. And if you endorsed candidates, if that's the kind of organization, you can't be a charity and you can't get sponsorships. PPL isn't going to give money to a PAC, or it wasn't a PAC, but they're not going to give money to a political organization. They want to give money to charity so they can write it off. And we also felt that what we wanted to do was concentrate on bringing information to people and we weren't going to try to do PA Gala because Steve was running it. And he wasn't going to stop running it. That was the thing. He was going to continue to run that, and we were going to continue to run an organization that's primary purpose was getting out Valley Gay Press. And also, other kinds of things. So, the other kinds of things that we wanted to do was to go and speak on LGBT issues, to help other organizations establish themselves, and continue to run with specific missions that were specific, like Haven. We were really involved in the beginnings of Haven and setting up Haven at the Unitarian Church. There had been another organization that Steve Libby had been involved with through Valley Youth House, that had been the first LGBT youth group in the Lehigh Valley that Steve Libby started, and Robert Roush was involved in that. And that was at Valley Youth House. There were a lot of problems with it. It turned out that the guy that was running Valley Youth House, he made statements to us that sounded as though he was thinking that most gay men were pedophiles. At least he said, "Most people presume that all gay men are pedophiles," that's what he said to us. And he said, "We have to fight that every day." And I said, "Well, I don't know what you mean by that." And he said a lot of other things that implied, and this was a long time ago, this was 20 years ago, that Valley Youth House presumed that any kid that was LGBT had severe mental health problems. Now, lots of kids that are LGBT have the stress, minority stress issues, but they're not abnormally affected by the fact that because they're LGBT. And he was likening them too -- he actually said this to us, "I'm part of a parents' group that the parents have lost a child to an accident or violence," and I said, "And that's the same as being gay? Is that what you think that means?" And he sort of said, "Well, you know, there's a lot of stress." I said, "Well, sometimes, not everybody feels that stress. That stress is external. It's not the same." Anyway. So, we were involved in setting up Haven and we worked with Unitarian Church, and we were there for some of the first meetings of that. And I trained to be a facilitator. I was a facilitator at Haven for years. And at one point I was almost at every facilitator meeting. I had a little conflict with one of the people who ran the organization. And I thought that there were some problems with it because I actually didn't think that we were trained very well. I saw that. I saw youth that had pretty severe problems there that the facilitator had no idea how to handle. And that was confirmed by other facilitators that were there, too, because there always had to be at least three facilitators there during the time. So, it was hard to fill those slots. But so, I did that for a long time. And I was concerned about that. And that was one of the reasons that we started our youth group, because the people who were at Haven, and I know that there were a lot of people that were very, very serious about, and very concerned about the youth, but they didn't have any training. Many of them didn't have any training. They also had some policies that, we felt, was pretty discriminatory, blatantly illegal, that they were discriminating against people who, because of minority status, to be Haven volunteers. A lot of it had to do with age. They said, "Anybody under 25 can't be a facilitator." I said, "I was a college teacher when I was 25. How can you say that? In the City of Bethlehem, it's against the law to discriminate against people based on age. So, you can't do that." And they said, "But what if somebody has a relationship with somebody who's 21?" I said, "Well, that's your training issue." That's like saying, "Well, if we have Black people, what if they're thieves?" Yeah, what if they're not? You can't just presume that somebody's going to be inappropriate because they're a minority. That's completely discriminatory. And I had a conflict with them. I said, "I'm not going to list you in the Valley Gay Press if you continue to have this policy because it's going against our nondiscrimination policy. We don't discriminate against people based on age. If you think that someone is going to be too young, you can say they have to have experience. But if this person is a high school teacher, how can you say that they can't be around a person who's 18? That's ridiculous." They also had a training -- and I remember this, it was very stressful because Don Kohn was involved with it, a bunch of different. He was on their beginning board, and Tracy Denton was very, very involved in setting that program up, and she really did all the beginning steps to make Haven work at the Unitarian Church. And [Elsa Stole?], who was a member of the church, she really was the other person that made that happen. And it's done great. They've met every single week for, what, 20 years. Every single week they do it. The problem was that at the beginning they had this training, so I had to go to the training. Trish and I were both at the training. And they had a form that we had to fill out, which was fine. And we had to fill out this stuff, and we had to apply to be a facilitator. One of the things you had to do was, you had to have three letters of recommendation, or at least references, that they could check of people that had known you for more than 10 years. I said, "Fine, that's fine." And then, it said, "Don't worry, we won't tell them that you're working with an LGBT youth group." So, I said, "Why are you saying that?" And they said, "Well, we don't want to out anybody." I said, "But what if the person who is applying is a homophobe? Don't you want to be sure?" And they said, "Well, we don't want to out anybody." I said, "Well, isn't it kind of a requirement for a person who is working with LGBT youth to be honest about their sexual orientation and gender identity? Isn't that what we want, role models for them?" They said, "No, we don't want to have to have people out themselves." I said, "Okay, well, I don't agree with that at all. I think that's wrong." I remember this. And some of the straight people who were involved with this -- and including Don and Melinda Kohn, this is a long, long time ago. I remember Melinda Kohn saying, "Well, what if somebody doesn't want to out themselves?" Then they said, "They shouldn't be a facilitator. That's all it is to it." If a kid says to them, "Well, are you gay?" are they going to lie? Or are they going to say, "I don't want to say?" because if they say, "I don't want to say, you're instilling in some queer youth that it's bad to be queer, and that you should hide, and that you don't have the tenacity to say, 'Sure.'" So, Scott Lauoner, who always wrote for our paper, he wrote "Scotty in the City", and he was a wonderful advocate, and he lives in New York now and I still hear from him all the time, he works with SAGE and a bunch of stuff like that. So, he and I and Trish and Melinda Kohn and a bunch of other people were standing outside of the Unitarian Church. It was in the summer. We were having this discussion, and Melinda turns to Scott, and she says, "Well, I know that Liz and Trish are out to everybody, but lots of LGBT people aren't out to everybody." She turns to Scott and she says, "You're not out to all of your family members." And Scott goes, "I have some third cousins in Arkansas that don't know that I'm gay. But that's about it." And I think that's the kind of deal. I mean, he was a young Republican, although a very progressive one, I doubt he's a Republican now, and he'd been on the Human Relations Commission as an out gay man. And this was 20 years ago. He was the first out gay person on the Human Relations Commission in the City of Allentown. And he wrote in the paper and he didn't care. And Steve Ziminsky, I just interviewed him for a COVID thing, he was a schoolteacher and people would say, "I'm a schoolteacher," I'd say, "Steve's a schoolteacher. He's written letters to the editor where he outed himself, and he doesn't care. He wants youth to know." He wrote this whole thing, like a kid asked him to go to his installation as an Eagle Scout, and he wrote this whole thing about how the Boy Scouts were discriminatory and how he was very proud of this kid to do all these things. But, and then he outed himself in The Morning Call. So, we wanted kids to be proud of our LGBT elders, of our ancestors, of our heritage. And we didn't feel that Haven, at that time, really got that because it was being set up by people that weren't queer, and we didn't feel that they understood. But we worked with them for a long time. So, anyway, we had the Valley Gay Press and we couldn't afford to pay for it and we were having a hard time working with Steve. So, we said to Steve, "We're going to start a new organization, it's going to be a 501c3, which is a charity that you can donate to and you can write off of the money. And we're going to call it Pennsylvania Diversity Network. And Steve understood. We gave him a year to get ready for us to leave, and he was fine with that. And, so we started Pennsylvania Diversity Network, and Robert Roush, who was a development guy, and he now is running a big LGBT youth organization in Western New York that covers the whole part of that state, and he and his partner, Steve Olofson, started the Gay Men's Chorus in the Lehigh Valley. And I said to Robert, "We will pay you to help us set up the 501c3." It's pretty complicated to do it. And he was a development director in a lot of different places and he knew how to do it. And so, he did it. But he said, "I really think this is great you're doing it." I think we said. "We'll give you 400 dollars to do this." We had the money then. And he said, "I will donate it back to the organization." So, he did that. But he set up the 501c3, which is complicated to do. But when you do that, you have to do it at right at the beginning of an organization because if you run an organization for a long time, and then try to set up the 501c3, it's quite hard to do that. So, we set up the 501c3, we got an immediate okay from the government that said that we could run it, which was provisional, and then we began to run it later. I was the executive director ; Trish was the chair of the board. She did all of the membership stuff. She did all the financials. It was a herculean task. And one of the things we did was, we represented on a lot of different other organizations. So, we worked with other organizations, we helped other organizations, we helped with Pride, we always were at Pride, we helped to try to get information to the community at Pride Festivals, and lots of Pride Festivals and different events about how people could lobby their state representatives and state senators and other elected officials to support LGBT issues, which is not actually a political thing. That's a legitimate thing for a 501c3 to do, to talk about issues and then have people support issues. So, so one of the things we did what we worked on Lehigh Valley Health Network to add sexual orientation and gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy. And we were successful with that. And we worked on St. Luke's to do domestic partner benefits. And we used the Valley Gay Press and the organization to do that. I also ran the info line and I've been running this info line for 25 years, and I still do it. It's running right now. And people would call us, at our number, we had a specific number for a while, and then I just said, "Let's just use my telephone number, what the heck." So, we had two numbers, our house number and then another number that now is my cell number. And people would call to ask questions about anything. They would call me and say, "I've been discriminated against. What should I do?" Well, I was the chair of the Human Relations Commission of the City of Allentown. I was on the commission for many, many years, more than 15 years. I helped to write the antidiscrimination ordinance because when we passed the ordinance, I was involved in writing it so I really understood how the ordinance worked. I also knew other kinds of ways that people could challenge instances of discrimination through other things because when people are discriminated against regularly on the job, it almost always falls into the circumstance of sexual harassment. And if it is sexual harassment, then it's against the law and it's been against the law since the 1980s. So, I had a call from a guy -- and this was before we passed the ordinance -- who said that he worked at a major chain pharmacy which is actually owned by JCPenney, and it's a well-known pharmacy. And he was a manager, but he had a higher-level supervisor. The supervisor was constantly saying things that were very rude to him, including writing him emails that said things like, "Hey, at the Pride Festival, you could get a date down there and you could probably get a lot of dick down there," and stuff like that. Well as soon as you say something about somebody's sex life, it's absolutely sexual harassment. And if it's happening from your boss, it doesn't matter whether it's same sex or opposite sex. So, I said, "Do you have any witnesses?" And he goes, "Oh, I have the emails." I said, "The guy wrote you the emails?" He goes, "Well, he put them in the trash but he doesn't know that you could just look in the trash. So, I took them out of the trash and I copied them so I have copies of them." I said, "So, you have copies of this guy saying you can get dick at the Pride Festival." He said, "Yeah. And then he put posters on the wall about it and stuff like that." Well, this really affected this guy's health. He said, "I've had heart palpitations. I have a heart condition." So, I contacted JCPenney, the highest level of people and I said these things had happened to him, and we had documented proof of that, and I was on the Human Relations Commission. Well, that was before we had the law. That would have been in 2000. I said, "I'm part of this organization, we're a civil rights organization. I'm advocating for this guy. He's going to sue you. He's got health problems. It's exacerbated his health problems." They got back to me within two days. And I said, "This is blatant sexual harassment," and they said, "What does he want?" And I said, "He wants this employee to be gone. He wants a new supervisor. He wants some time off. He wants healthcare, to be sure that his healthcare recognizes this," and a bunch of other things. And they did it within a couple of days. But he thought that it was going to be some other kind of thing. He didn't know how to proceed with that. And we had loads and loads of instances like that, where people would say, "This company has a policy that looks like it's really anti-gay but they don't mean to say that." And I've mentioned this in another thing where policies would say, "We don't discriminate based on the law," and wow, yeah, that's really altruistic of you that you don't do something that's illegal. That's not exactly something to laud. So, I would point out to them how to write the policy that would really protect people so people could be comfortable. People would call me on the info line and say, "I'm coming to a job at such-and-such a place, is this college," and this has happened, "I'm coming from Princeton and I'm looking at a job at Moravian. Are they LGBT-friendly?" And at the time I said, "No, they're not. They just removed their nondiscrimination policy. There's no policy in the City of Bethlehem. You're really at risk here. I wouldn't recommend it." One time, we had a guy who called me who was the spouse, but they weren't legally married because it's before marriage equality, of a neonatal surgeons that was coming to Lehigh Valley Health Network and he said, "Do they have domestic partner benefits there?" And I said, "They do not. They do not and we've been lobbying them for a long, long time." This is, again, before marriage equality. They did pass their thing, and as a matter of fact, they passed it because of this. So, I said, "What's your partner going to do?" And he said, "Well, we have two kids," and he told me this whole thing. I gave him all this stuff. I said, "Here's a good pediatrician, and here's a good school, they could go to United Friends School, it's really terrific but we have this nondiscrimination policy at the City of Allentown, but they don't give domestic partner benefits." And he said, "Well, I'm proud of the fact that he's a star. I mean a neonatal surgeon? Somebody that's doing that kind of work, that's the kind of thing that a big healthcare system has a feather in their cap." I said, "Okay. Well, do me a favor. I'm sure, in fact I know that you can get them to give you the benefits through him. Do not accept that. Say to them, 'We won't accept that unless you give everybody these benefits.'" And they did. They did it. And they did it for a bunch of reasons. I also threatened them with Money Magazine, I talked about that before. But that was something that we would do. So, I would get calls. I remember before Equality Pennsylvania was a statewide organization, it was a Philadelphia organization, and before that, it was called Lesbian And Gay Legal something, it was a group of lawyers. And they would deal with discrimination issues. And they had a bunch of interns. I was talking to them and they said, "We have like five people that field phone calls that have questions about discrimination and other LGBT issues." I said, "I do that, too." They said, "How many calls do you get?" I said, "I get about an average of a call a day. Sometimes it's three calls in one day and then not, but it comes out to be maybe one every two days." And then I said, "How many do you do?" And they said, "Two a day." And they had five people working on this stuff. And I would refer them to lawyers but sometimes the lawyers would contact me because they didn't really know what the law said in Allentown. It's not the same from town to town. And I'm very familiar with what the laws say throughout the state, and which laws are the ones that are really protective. So, we wanted Pennsylvania Diversity Network to be able to give that information to people. And we worked a lot on the marriage equality issue, which I talked about. And we also produced the Photo Project, which I talked about as well. So, we did that kind of stuff. And then we did all these other programs. So, our house is a big open space, and so, we actually had art shows in our house. And we did that once a year. We did that, I think, for four or five years until they realized that there was a little bit of an insurance issue there. We were probably a little bit at risk. And that was a fundraiser but it was also really fun. Trish made wonderful food and there would be all these people looking at all this art in the walls because it's big open gallery spaces on the second floor and the first floor of our house. And we used the living room and stuff. We had six or seven artists displaying their work, and a lot of crafts. It was really great. It was very exciting. As I said, we worked right from the beginning with Haven. We worked right from the beginning with the Gay and Lesbian Taskforce. And I doubt that anybody is talking about that taskforce but one of the things that the Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, and they started in 1998, did was -- in fact, it's the only thing they did because they only lasted about six months -- but they created a survey of 900 people that they actually surveyed and tabulated and analyzed, and I don't know where that is, but it might be in the archives. So, if anybody makes any reference to this survey that the Lehigh Valley Taskforce did, [Chris Bose?] was really involved with that, and [Renee Bennett?], and they're still together and they're still in the Lehigh Valley. They may have that survey and that information. It's really an interesting snapshot of 900 identified queer people and how they felt about things in 1998. Very interesting thing to see what would come out of that. We also worked up with MCC on loads and loads of stuff. And one of the things was the Freedom to Marry events that we had. And I think I talked about that before as well. We did a lot of things with Freedom to Marry that had to do with speaking publicly. Did I talk about that one before, Freedom to Marry? MF: You talked about the Photo Project but you didn't really talk around it, like what other activities you were involved with. LB: Okay. So, one of the things that happened with Freedom to Marry, and I think it started about seven years before we got marriage equality. So, we got full marriage equality in the State of Pennsylvania in May of 2014. And anybody that was legally married in any other state, and Trish and I had been married in Connecticut in 2009, we got that full marriage equality in 2014. In 2012, we got federal marriage equality based on the Windsor case, Edie Windsor's case. And so, in 2012 if people were legally married in other states, then some federal benefits would come to them, including that I was getting Trish's domestic partner health benefits at that time through her job at New York State. She was retired, but I got the health benefits. But we had to pay tax on those benefits as though it was money that she was earning. And it was a lot of money. So, we paid about 1,000 dollars a year for those benefits. But when the Windsor case came down through the Supreme Court, which had to do with certain federal benefits, and we're about to learn about Edie Windsor. I'm going to talk about how significant this was, because only Edie Windsor could have made this happen. There's almost no one else in the whole country that could have made the Windsor case happen. And every marriage benefit we got came out of that case. But only Edie Windsor could have done it. And it has to do with how much money she inherited from Thea Speyer. The Windsor case determined that the federal government should recognize benefits for people who were married in other states, in some instances, and who were married in their own states, fully. And in other countries, because Edie Windsor and Thea Speyer were married in Canada, so they have a reciprocal agreement with the United States. So, Trish and I were married in 2009, so in 2012, we didn't have to pay 1,000 dollars a year on the healthcare benefits that I was getting through her domestic partner benefits. They recognized our marriage. And that was a big deal because 1,000 dollars was a lot of money to us. We also recognize that at that point that from that moment on in 2012, if Trish died before me, I would get her pension. And that wouldn't have happened. Well, actually, New York state had that caveat, but everybody that had a federal regulated pension, which is pretty much every pension, so the pension you get, TIAA-CREF pension or something like that, that would all have been covered for anybody that was legally married. So, I was just interviewing somebody who said, "What's the financial benefit?" Because she has been with her partner for a long time. I said, "If you die, your partner can get your pension the way a married person would get it." And she said, "I thought we designate it." I said, "That doesn't work. You can't just designate somebody, unless you have a special caveat through," and that's what New York State had. They said, through their unions, "You can designate one person to get this benefit." But if we had broken up, she couldn't have her next partner do it. That was it, you get one choice and you can choose anybody. But there were all sorts of tax consequences of that. But after Windsor, that was for everybody. And there was also a Social Security benefit that came from Windsor, as well. That was a big deal. And then in 2014, we got full marriage equality. And so, up until that time, the full marriage equality that happened in 2014 we did these Freedom to Marry things. And Pennsylvania Diversity Network partnered with Metropolitan Community Church to do these things. So, there was a protest outside, and we did that outside the courthouse. And I worked with Beth Goudy a lot about what would be the best use of our time to do this, and what would make the most impact? And one of the things we realized right from the beginning was, as I said before, that if we went to Lehigh County Courthouse, we could apply for a marriage license and then they would deny it, but they would keep it on file. And I told you that before, didn't I? yes. So, that stuff, it was important. But with the Pennsylvania Diversity Network, one of the things we were doing was, we started telling people about that. And we'd share that information with people. So, here's the important thing that you need to know, that if you go to Northampton County to apply for a license, your effort disappears the next day, because they're not going to let you apply. But if you go to Lehigh County Courthouse, 100 years from now people are going to go, "What's the deal about Liz Bradbury and Trish Sullivan and why were they constantly denied a license for seven years in a row? And look, more and more people were doing it," because the first year, we were the only ones that did it, and then it was more and more people until every time, there'd be 30 people that would apply for a license until 2014, when they recognized our marriage, and then we stopped doing that. In fact, after we got legally married, I think we stopped doing it then because we thought that, in effect, we were legally married and so we didn't try to apply for another license because we didn't want to get married again, we just wanted them to recognize us. So, I think that went from 2002 to 2009 for us. Other people would apply because they're trying to get the state to do it. But we were there for all of those protests. So, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was speaking politically, and MCC was speaking from the point of view of a religious organization. And they had larger groups of people to do this. We made a video about it, and we put that up. I would speak to the press. Beth would speak to the press. I would try to have a Spanish statement, because I can read Spanish so it really sounds like I know what I'm talking about. I may have absolutely no idea what I'm saying, but I have a really good accent. So, people would fall for that. So, we were in line to apply for our marriage license, and there was a young Latino couple in line, too. And we did this thing and we went outside and then all the press was there, and the television stuff. The thing about speaking in Spanish was, they often didn't have a lot of Spanish content. So, we could almost always get on the Allentown Spanish station, which is part of WFMZ. And usually, I would just start to read the statement and then they'd have a voice over because I really only said two sentences, "nos derechos es importante," that kind of stuff. Then, they interviewed this Latino couple that was in the line, and then the guy says, "Do you think there's a large percentage of gay people in the United States?" And he goes, "Oh, yeah. I do. I think there's a lot." "Well, what do you think is the percentage?" He goes, "Oh, about 50 percent." I'm like, "Yay." And I'm thinking, "Okay." I thought that was a great thing because I think a lot of people think Latinos are very anti and stuff like that. And this young guy was like, "Yeah, it's 50 percent. Why shouldn't they have these rights?" It was great. So, we always wanted to be involved in that and we always worked with MCC, and then MCC would have a service, and I would usually speak at the service. And I usually would go for the laughs. I did a couple of really big laughs ones one time. And I'm one of the things I said was, "You know, we have a lot of different anniversaries when we're a lesbian couple. And so, lesbian couples, we have all the times that we got married in the church, and the different times we tried to do Freedom to Marry, and our civil union, and our marriage, but for a lot of people, the most important anniversary is their first date, or their first kiss, or the first time they did it," and people began to laugh. And I stood, "For those, ours were March 11th, 1987." And then it just got this huge laugh, and it went on for a long time. There was about 250 people there, so it was a big rockstar moment. And I think Beth didn't want me to say it. She goes, "You're not supposed to say those things. It's a church." I said, "Oh, come on. I got a big laugh." She said, "Yeah, you did." And we had the Photo Project there, we would take more pictures of people for the Photo Project, which is another big Pennsylvania Diversity Network effort. So, another thing that we did with MCC, we had another organization that was one of our branches that was called Rainbow Families. And it was run by Donnie and Earl Snyder. They have a little kid. and Donnie and Earl also wrote "Planet Parenthood," in the last 10 years of the Valley Gay Press. It was about what it was like to be a couple of gay men raising a child, and the process that they went through to get their kid, they had an open adoption, and it was very interesting stuff. We did Rainbow Families, and Rainbow Families would put on a Christmas party. This is kind of hilarious. So, we put on this Christmas party at MCC for kids. It was put on by Rainbow Families and Donnie and Earl were very involved with Metropolitan Community Church. But Rainbow Families was our organization, actually. And so, we worked together with the church. There was a sing-along, and it was Christian because they're a church. There was a lot of Latino kids, and kids would come from the neighborhood would come in -- this is when they were on Fourth Street, so there's all these kids. Then, we had cookies and all this kind of stuff. And I read the Grinch in Spanish because there's a lot of Spanish kids there. Trish read it in English, I read it in Spanish. And Don Kohn came -- this is pretty hilarious -- and you may know this, but he came dressed as Santa Claus. Don looks like Santa Claus, if you think about it. He's got the grey, white hair and he had a beard. So, it's two Jews and an atheist put on a Christmas party, or two atheists, and Melinda was there, too. And the funny thing about Don is, he's really Jewish, and he doesn't know the words to any Christmas carol. So, I think he'd get by with "Jingle Bells," but that was about it. So, we had to print out the lyrics so that he could sing along, we'd have a big sing-a-long in the church, and that was fun. And we did that for quite a few years. We did that to have fun in a variety of different circumstances. And we really wanted to be sure that there was outreach to families. So, Rainbow Families had an event for quite a while, they had an event every month, particularly in the summer, where it would be at a park and a bunch of families, it could either be LGBT families with kids or kids that were LGBT, so it was something about the family that was queer. I remember one of the last ones we had, which I think was about 2008, or no, a little bit later than that. And Hannah was living at our house, then, so I think that was in about 2008. And Adrian was there, and he was in college. Now you may not know this about Adrian, but he can make balloon animals. That's one of his top skills. So, he said, "I will come and make balloon animals." And he can make all those balloon animals for the kids. I'm sure that he can still do that. I'm sure it's on his resume. And he made balloon animals for kids, and we did all sorts of things. The kids were playing and the parents are just hanging out and a lot of fun stuff. So, we did a lot of different events like that. I think we had some at our house. We were also really involved with ACCO, A Chorus Celebrating Women. ACCO is the name of a mythological woman singer, which is true, actually. But it also stands for A Chorus Celebrating Women, A-C-C-O with a woman's symbol. And Bev Morgan was the founder and leader of ACCO. She's a wonderful musician with a beautiful voice. And she had all these women. There was a lot of bi and lesbian women that were involved with ACCO for years and years. She ran that for a long, long time. And we worked with them to promote a lot of their events, or just to be at the events or help them with stuff that they were doing. Because we were very good friends with Bev Morgan and Sandy Fluck. And Sandy Fluck was the chair of the Education Department in Moravian. They live in Rehoboth, now. So, these events that were happening would use the Valley Gay Press, and we'd use our other vehicles, and we had a huge email list that I can send lots of emails out whenever I wanted to. And people paid attention to those emails. Because I didn't send things that were just like, "Give us money," or something like that. It would be like, "Edie Windsor's case has been decided, and this is what this means to you, and this is why you need to get married because now you won't have to pay for your benefits and you can get your partner's pension if your partner dies." These are really important things. And then as I said before, Trish's explanation of how you do that. And then we'd constantly be telling people, people calling us and asking us how to do that kind of stuff. And all of those things happened. And so, we went along and we met Adrian. So, here's the story of meeting Adrian. So, Adrian was a freshman at Muhlenberg College. And that was in about -- he's 32 now, so that would have been 14 years ago, so 14 years ago would have been 2006. So, I got a call from Patti Mittleman, I believe, and she was the one who ran Hillel House, and also was involved with running the organization that was really supportive of LGBT students at the college. We had already known Patti for years. Right from the beginning we knew her. She just died a few years ago. It was very sad because she was such a wonderful advocate and so important to so many people at the college. And in fact, loads of people that we know, we knew because of Patti Mittleman. Everybody says that. And so, she said, "I have a guy who's going to call you," and she said his name, and then Adrian called me and he said -- have I told you this story before? Probably. Oh, okay. This is a great story, then. So, Adrian calls me and he goes, "I'm a freshman at Muhlenberg, and I want them to include gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy because it only includes sexual orientation." I said, "Okay." So, this is in 2006. So, I said, "Okay, yeah. There's no problem with that." He goes, "Well, I want to create a petition to get everybody in the college to support this." And I said, "No, you don't want to do that. That's not what you want to do." Now, this is one of those few times that Adrian totally listened to me. He stopped doing this. He started telling me what to do, I think, the next year. But this year, he was really listening to me, I said, "First of all, realize that petitions are a bad way to go about anything because you're really creating divisiveness, and it's harmful to you because if you go ask your friend or your teacher or your parents or your boss, if they'll sign a petition for your rights, and they say no, you're not going to ever get over that. You're going to remember that for the rest of your life. And if you have 10 people say no to you, it's going to be devastating. You don't want to know where they stand on this issue. It's not up to them. It's to the president of the college." And I said, "We already have a law in the City of Allentown that includes gender identity. Why don't you already have that in your policy?" And he said, because Adrian already had the ear of the president of the college when he was a freshman, he said, "The president of the college told me that the college, first of all, it was a Lutheran college, and because they're a not for profit, they don't have to follow the nondiscretionary policy of the City of Allentown." I said, "Well, that's crap. That's ridiculous. Of course, that's not true. Do you think a not-for-profit can discriminate against Black people just because they're a not for profit? Unless it's their mission to do something, they can't blatantly discriminate against somebody." So, I said, "Let me give you an example of somebody that can do that because it's their mission. The Catholic church. It's the Catholic church's mission to follow Catholic principles. So, if they want to not allow people based on Catholic teachings, a divorced person, to have a position at the church, or they don't want to allow somebody who's Protestant to have a position at the church, they're allowed to do it because it's their mission to do it. Cedar Crest College's mission is to elevate and support women students, that's their mission and it has been since the 1800s, one of the ways that they can enforce that or support that, is by keeping men from living in the dorms. That's one of the things that they do. Now, there is some validity to that, it's a women's college. There's some validity to that. And it's their mission so they can do that. The NAACP's mission is to work for the health and welfare of the Black population. So, they can say, 'It's our mission to give scholarships to youth, and we are going to only get them to Black youth, or people who identify as Black, and it's our mission to do that. It's okay. We don't think white people are bad, we're just working for this disenfranchised community.' With the NAACP, clearly that's racial discrimination. They're discriminating against white people. But that's okay, it's their mission and they're not doing it because they hate white people, they're doing it to support Black people. The mission of Muhlenberg College is not to discriminate against, or promote straight people, or cisgender people. It's not. It's not their mission. So, first of all, that's the thing. The second thing is, it's not even the mission of Muhlenberg College to promote Lutheran principles. That's not their mission either. They dropped that mission in the 1800s. Their mission is to educate people. And that's all they do. They educate people. So, if you came in and said, 'I want to go here but I'm not going to get an education,' yeah, yeah, they can say, 'No, you can't do that.' But you can't say to people that, 'We're not going to support you because of your gender identify.' So, it's the law. But the way you want to get them to change the policy. So, first of all, it's a law. So, you can just say to them, 'It's the law. You have to have this policy. It's the law. In fact, you can't even deny people gender-neutral housing, because it's the law. And they're adults. You can't tell people, 'Well, you have to live in this kind of a housing with the opposite sex.' You can't say that in a hotel, so you can't say that in the college. But that's not what you want to do. Go to the president, tell him it's the law, and then tell him that Lehigh already has this policy. Just tell him that. He'll change it in a week. Lehigh's had this policy for two or three years. They have gender identity in their policy. And Muhlenberg wants to be considered the hot, edgy school, and Lehigh is the stodgy, 'We used to only let men in 20 years ago' school. He'll turn it around in no time." And he did. He did. And I said, "You don't have to ask anybody. It's no work. Just go in there and tell him. And if you want him to talk to me I'll talk to him. But you can convince him of this." Well, that was a big win for Adrian. And when Adrian started at Muhlenberg, there was about 45 young people in the Gay-Straight Alliance there that they had. And he also did a really smart thing. He stopped letting them worry about changing the name of the Gay-Straight Alliance to spectrum or citron or whatever. Because it's an enormous waste of time. The federal government allows you to call a group like that Gay-Straight Alliance, and they only actually support that, particularly for high schools. But the thing is that every time a group of college students wants to deliberate that, it usually takes them about eight months to decide what the name is going to be and then they leave, and next year, the next group comes in. So, Adrian said, "Forget it, we're not worrying about that. We're calling it Gay-Straight Alliance, we're not going to call it anything else. But we're going to do a bunch of different important things." And we worked on some of those things. But he pretty much did this on his own. And within a year, he had 700 students in the Gay-Straight Alliance. Yeah. And then, when he left, there were 45 again. Which is something I point out to people all the time. It takes a dynamic person to make that kind of stuff happen. You have to make it attractive. It doesn't just spontaneously happen. You have to make it attractive. And he did all these things, like he had the sex toy expo, and there was a drag ball, and nobody else had done that. He was the one who had instituted these things. All the other things, they were just worried about changing the name to be more inclusive. Just shut up about that and have a drag ball and a sex toy thing, and everybody wants to join. So, after he did that for a couple years, we said, "Let's have this college student on our board," and he would be walking by our house. He would walk everywhere, and he'd take other students and walk by our house. He'd ring the doorbell and come in. And we'd hang out with him. Trish would always make him vegetarian food. So, he did that. That's how we met Hannah Watson, who ended up living with us and now is a very, very close friend of ours, and lived with us for almost two years. So, we asked Adrian to be on our board. And he was very excited about that. And so, once we had him on the board, he began to point out important things that needed to change. And one of them was that he said that he thought that I should get paid, because up until then, I was getting nothing. I didn't get any money, and of course, no benefits. But I did have benefits from Trish's stuff, and we had a little bit of income, and we were still antique dealers up until 2002, and we did other stuff, and we have some crappy investments that give us a tiny little amount of money. And so, we were getting by. We live very, very frugally, and we were getting by. But Adrian said, "You should get paid. You should get 500 dollars a month." And then I got a big raise, I think the next year I got 700 dollars a month. I don't get any benefits. I think we also had a deal where if we got paid for a training, or whomever did the training would get half the money that the place paid us. We never got very much in those days for trainings, but if they gave us 100 dollars, I would get 50 dollars and the organization would get 50 dollars. So, we actually built up our bank account pretty well with that. He pointed out some other ways that we could -- I had already created the Gala. I've wanted that Gala to be a community event, because FACT's event was very, very, prohibitively expensive. It cost 80 dollars or 60 dollars to go. We couldn't afford to go to it. It was fancy. I wanted our event to be very inexpensive and to honor people who were working in the community, so a party for community members, and then honor people. And Adrian has changed that back into a much bigger fundraiser because we make a lot of money from that, and he really wanted that to make more money. But I wanted people to come to it and I wanted to honor people. And he said, "Let's get sponsors for this." And so, we started to do that. We went from making 2,000 dollars to making 8,000 dollars, and now it makes about 45,000 dollars a year. At that time when Adrian joined the organization, our budget was about 20,000 dollars a year. And I didn't make any money. Well, our budget was about 12,000, then we went up to 25,000, because I was getting paid and so we had to make more money. But I also said, "I never want to take any money from this if we can't afford to do other stuff. So, we need to have a savings account," and we did. Because that was one of the things that used to happen with PA Gala, that we would run out of money, and it was really scary that we just wouldn't have any money. And I'd say, "We spent all the money on the last mailing and now we have nothing for the next mailing," and I didn't want Pennsylvania Diversity Network to have no cushion at all, that we couldn't produce the paper, for example. I didn't want to be hand to mouth with it. So, we decided that we would have a savings account about 5,000 dollars in it, which would be a big cushion and that was about half our year's budget at that time, so that would be good, and we built that up. And we did fundraisers and we would have events, a lot of them we would put on, we'd do it. And we were involved with Theatre Outlet that did the Matthew Shepard play, and we did other protests. We were doing a lot of interesting ways to protest and get money where we would get people to pledge money to us or to other organizations. And we would help other organizations to raise money, particularly if they'd been targeted by an anti organization. So, now Adrian's on our board. And I just want to point out one of the things that happened with that. So, we had September 11th that happened during that time in the beginning part of that. And it was devastating. A year later, there was supposed to be a healing religious ceremony in the community that was put on by the Council of Churches. So, they scripted the whole thing, and they told all the ministers what they had to say. They gave them the script. And one of them was Reverend Beth Goudy of the Metropolitan Community Church. So, because Beth was going to be there and she was going to say positive things about our community, we wanted to support her. And we did this a lot. We were really, profoundly not religious. We don't like religion. And this story is one of the reasons. We would often go to MCC stuff, we were very good friends with Beth, and we'd often go to MCC stuff to support her and to support other things, particularly the Christmas service we'd go, because very few people would go to the Christmas service, so we would go to that, just to support her. She said, "You don't do this because of religion, right?" I said, "No, we do it because we like you. It doesn't have anything to do with religion." But MCC was doing some very good things for the community, and we were pleased with that. So, we go to this big ceremony and Beth's going to speak and there's 25 other ministers who are going to get up and do a five- or two-minute gig. And there's two big lines of people from MCC and other LGBT and queer people that are in these lines. It was in a church on Center Street, it was one of those big churches on Center Street out there in Bethlehem. So, Beth's about to go and they had a lot of white people. And I think they got a couple of Black people. So, this guy gets up and he's a Black Baptist minister from Philadelphia. And apparently nobody knew him. I don't know where they got this guy. But he gets up and he gets the thing, and he tosses the script away, and he blames September 11th on gay marriage, just flat does it. It's gay people, it's supporting gay people, that's why this is happening, that's why God did September 11th, God hates fags, the whole thing. Unbelievable. And nobody says anything. And then, another person goes up, and then Beth gets up, and she's just got this look on her face. She's just totally white. I think she's thinking, "What the fuck am I supposed to do now?" Although she wouldn't have thought it that way. So, she gets up and she does her thing and then she gets off stage. And I look down the row to Trish. I look at the other people. And I look at the other people in the next row and I say, "I think we should go." So, we all stood up en mass and walked out of the church and we stood on the steps and we wouldn't leave, but we stood outside. And the head of the Council of Churches comes to the door and she says to us, "Well, I know that was bad." I said, "You don't know how bad that was. You have no idea how bad that was. And here's the second thing. You should have stood up and said you don't support that and you didn't. So, what are you going to do about it?" "Well, we'll have to think of it," mealy mouth, "We'll think about it, I don't know." So, we of course contacted the press and told them that this had happened. So, there was an article in The Morning Call about it that was picked up by The Wire and other people pointed this out, because it was a pretty big deal to blame September 11th on a bunch of gay people in the room. Well, one of the groups that picked up on this was the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps's people, the God hates fags people. This is 2002. Now, I have maintained, absolutely, that these people are our best friends. And there's a reason for that, and I'll show you why. Because we could not get the Council of Churches to say anything. We couldn't get any condemnation from politicals. The mayor of Bethlehem wouldn't say a fucking thing about it. And we were mad that he wouldn't say anything. This was supposed to be a healing ceremony and we get kicked in the teeth. So, nobody says anything. So, the Westboro Baptist Church announces that they're going to come to the Lehigh Valley and demonstrate all over the place, and they're going to support this minister that said this horrible thing. So, I said, "Bring it on." And I said, "Let's do a fundraiser. Every minute they are speaking, every minute they're on, people will pledge 10 cents a minute up to a cap, you can make anything but you pledge 10 cents a minute, and then you can say, 'I'll pledged up to 20 dollars,' and we'll time how long they're here." They were supposed to be here two days. Within one week, we'd raised 1,000 dollars. And we gave it all to MCC. And we got contributions from Alaska. People were spreading this all over the place. We had email in those days. We didn't' have social media, though. So, we did this with just email and people were sending the email around to different churches and progressive churches, and political people were pledging, and these weren't large pledges. We had hundreds of pledges. And we gave the money to MCC because they had really been victimized. This was a religious thing. I just collected all the money and I gave it to MCC. It was great, actually. But as per the circumstances of Westboro Baptist Church, they decided to not show up. Well then, we weren't going to get the money. So, now we really wanted them to come because we wanted the money. And we got attention from this. So, they did come about a month later. And this was in November, or something like that, I think. Yeah, it was in November. So, they show up and they're going to protest at Cedar Crest and Lehigh University. Were you there then, at Lehigh? No. Okay, this is pretty hilarious, actually. Now, this is the thing. We don't want them to protest at MCC. We want them to protest at the Episcopal Church. We want them to protest at the Unitarian Church, although the Unitarians are on our side. So, what we want is United Church of Christ. Well, they came to the Episcopal church and they screamed the vilest, rudest, most horrible things at every single person that came out of that Episcopal church that's right downtown in Bethlehem. Suddenly, they're all on our side and the Council of Churches is saying, "Hate is so bad, it's so terrible," because it's happening to them and they're saying horrible things. The Morning Call interviews the Westboro Baptist Church who tells The Morning Call that they do 1,000 protests a year. I point out to The Morning Call in a letter to the editor that that is ridiculous. A thousand is a ridiculously high number. I said, "That's three a day. So, on the day after Christmas, do they do an extra three? Do they do six the next day? Come on. They don't do 1,000 protests. They didn't even come when they said they were going to come." They didn't even do that number of protests while they were there. And in fact, at one point they said, "We're going to do Lehigh," but they like to go to places where there are big college football games. So, they were like, "We couldn't go because we had to go to Philadelphia to go to a big game in Philadelphia." It was really true. This is this really true. When they show up, they're totally bumbling idiots and they have no idea. They have these horrible signs and it's so easy to protest against them because to say, "God hates fags," that September 11th was the fault of somebody else, it's ridiculous. So, because they protested in Allentown, the mayor of Allentown was very direct, it was Roy Afflerbach then, and he said it was terrible that they had done this. We couldn't get the mayor of Bethlehem to say anything because he was a weasel, and I was really angry that he didn't say something. I humiliated him, publicly for years. But they did protest at Lehigh. It was right outside of Packer Hall. And Beth Goudy, and I, and a bunch of other people from MCC were on the other corner from them. And they have these ridiculous signs. But there's like three of them. So, there's three people. No one else would be with them because they were such buffoons. They weren't really on the campus. They were on the street. Cedar Crest let them be on the campus which they didn't have to do, they could have told them they could be the entrance, but they just let them be on the campus. They didn't want to be on the campus, because nobody would see them there, so they didn't even do it at Cedar Crest. They only do it for high profile. Again, they're our friends because they really are, at Lehigh, everybody at Lehigh thinks they're horrible. All the students are doing horrible things to them. Nobody's on their side because they're so outrageous. One of the things they did was, they'll sing, "God hates fags," to different pop songs. So, they're standing in the corner and Beth and I are across the street, and they're singing, "Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, hey, hey, God hates fags." And they kept doing it. Beth and I were just laughing through the whole thing. So, then, after that for years, every time anybody would mention Westboro Baptist Church, Beth and I will both burst into, "Na, na, na, na," we would sing, "God hates fags," because it was just so absurd. That's the best you could come up with? It was so not offensive in a lot of ways. They weren't like the street preachers that really are scary. We couldn't have paid them for more publicity. And people used to say, "If we'd show Matthew Shepard the Matthew Shepard's play, it would be terrible if Westboro Baptist Church," I'd say, "Pray they come, you'll sell every ticket. People would pour out to support you. They'd give you donations because they're there. You want them to be there because they're so outrageously horrible." And they're so much on our side that they didn't just go stand in front of MCC, they stood in front of the biggest Episcopal church and called them vile, horrible names, and said just the worst possible things you could say. And people who had never had anybody shout anything to them suddenly, "Oh, now I know what it's like to be discriminated against." So, we were really involved with that and we were really involved with promoting that. And we did a lot of other actions to try to get people to -- before Silent Witness, which is actually a very effective way of dealing with pro to anti-gay protesters, we worked on schemes to turn around the ability to do those protests and be successful with them. And I would be on debates. They called me to be on the TV a lot of times. But they really screwed us on the TV a couple of times, because Adrian and I were going to be on a debate one time, on Business Matters and I said, "We will be on this debate about marriage equality, but you have to have," because they were considering a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the State of Pennsylvania. I said, "You have to have legislators on. You can't just have some crazy street preacher who's just going to scream and scream and scream and say, 'You're a giraffe,' and ridiculous stuff like that." So, Adrian had set it up. Adrian was then chair of Equality Pennsylvania. So, it was me and Ted Martin, who was the CEO of Equality Pennsylvania, and then there was a guy who had been on school board who was ultra-far right, and we said he would be okay, but I said, "Unless you can get somebody who is a normal person, you can't just bringing that crazy guy that comes with the megaphone and stands at MCC and shouts out, 'I want to have sex with my child.' Forget it." So, they said, "No, we won't do that. We'll have this guy and if we can't get somebody else it'll just be the three of you." I said, "Okay." So, we get out there and it's the three of us and then they have the crazy guy on the phone. And we're already taping. And I said to Ted, "We can't walk out of this because then he gets the whole forum. He'll be able to talk the whole time. He says these crazy things over and over again. Obviously this person is insane, he's a pedophile, this has nothing to do with this argument. You can't even find anybody to speak intelligently about this." And then, at the end, I said to the guy who's in charge of Business Matters whose name I can't remember right now, but he's the head of the Business Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and he's in all the billboards and stuff, and I can't remember his name right now. He's very effective in this job. But he said, "This is much more interesting if we do it this way." I said, "It's not okay for you to do this because you lied to us. You lied to us and I'm out of here and I will never be on the show again because you lied. You said you weren't going to have him and you did. That's a lie." So, Adrian ended up talking to the producer of the show and he said, "You know, broken trust like this is like trying to use a broken condom. You can't just patch it back together." He actually said that to her. He said, "We can't just overlook this." And we've never been on that show again. Because they did lie to us. They wanted it to be a circus and stuff. But I also debated on National Public Radio, I debated that woman -- I can't remember anybody's names, it's like Molly Mase? It's two Ms. She's the woman who spoke to the Supreme Court about Proposition 8, she's ultra-far right, she's disappeared now because her issue was marriage equality and she lost, and I don't know what's going on with her. But I actually debated her on Radio Times. And they have no argument. But that was one of the things that we did as Pennsylvania Diversity Network. We did political things. We did speak on political issues. We did actual advocacy with regard to people who had lost their jobs or who had been denied -- we would help people find lawyers that would help them obtain custody of their children or get second-parent adoptions. We advocated to and explained to people about the second parent adoption law and how important that was. At that point for me, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was all about information. So, we had the newspaper, we had the info line, we had a really, really large, blanket email potential, which was one of the first times that people could do that. We had an enormous mailing list that we could write to people and send people written information. We spoke publicly. We were on television all the time. Trish hates to be on TV, but I don't mind it that much, and so, we would be at protests and I had figured out ways to speak. We had a really great press list that we could send out information to, I would speak publicly. And Adrian still does that in a lot of ways. He will speak publicly in very infrequent situations. He makes it a media event. And, as we got closer and closer to the center, what we did was, we got full marriage equality in 2016, and Adrian came to us and he said, "Okay, we have full marriage equality now. This is one of our biggest projects that we had done," he had done a whole marriage equality circumstance where when he and his husband got married, they went to the Lehigh County Courthouse, applied for a license, were denied, with me and Trish there and I photographed the whole time. We got in the car with them, we drove all the way to Darien, Connecticut where their families were, and they got married there. They got legally married right there. And then it was this whole series of photographs, and he had this whole thing about how he couldn't get married. And we did another marriage action. Even after marriage legal in New Jersey, we did a big effort, it was called Hop the Bridge. And we had a huge demonstration in Easton. We got three couples to get legally married. One of them was my previous girlfriend and her partner, which was 25 years before, he's my Facebook friend, she said, "We want to do this." And they'd been together for the same amount of time as Trish and me. And I said, "Okay, I'll set it up." She said, "We have a niece in Easton." They live in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania. So, they came and we had two other couples. It was Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and -- actually, we did it twice. So, we had these different people that did this. I think that was the next Freedom to Marry thing. We took a bus over and did it. But there was a bunch of different ways. But the Hop the Bridge thing was, Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and Bill Morrow and his partner whose name I can't remember, and Jen and Mary Ann Kelly. And they'd all been together for a long time. I was with them when they got the licenses. I was the witness. You have to have a witness in New Jersey, so you get the license in New Jersey. I set that up for them and everything. And then we had this big demonstration in Easton. We walked across the bridge into New Jersey where Beth Goudy was in a parking lot and married them in the parking lot in front of all this press, and it was on TV and everything. And then we walked back. We got to the middle of the bridge we said, "We're married, and now we're not married. We're recognized, and now we're not recognized." It got national attention. And Adrian and I worked on that together. And one of the things that Aiden was beginning to realize is when you do a press thing, you have all of your people behind you. You don't talk to your people ; you talk to the cameras and have all the people behind you so it doesn't look like you're by yourself. And that was a really good way of doing it. So, we had hundreds of people there. It was really great. And it was really terrific. And we got front-page articles in all the newspapers and stuff. We had always been very serious when we went to get our civil union, because that's when Trish and I went and got a civil union. Did I talk about that? That's our personal thing, but I'll talk about that when we talk about this other stuff. So, Adrian came to us and he said, "Okay, this is what I want to do." Now, Trish and I had been doing this for 20 years. Both of us had actually been doing LGBT activism since -- I had been doing it since the '70s, she'd been doing it since the '60s, she was in on the starting of SAGE, the national organization for older LGBT adults. I was working on stuff when I was in graduate school. We had been working all the way through on civil rights stuff. And truthfully, we were getting worried because we were thinking, "Who's going to do this stuff after we retire?" And we were praying that Adrian wouldn't move away, which he almost got a job and moved away, but he didn't move away. And then he bought a house. That was really good. He's married now. Okay, now he has to stay here. And he ended up saying to us, now in 2016, "We have marriage equality, you've really done this stuff. I think it's time to start a community center, and this is what we should do." And he said, "And I want to be the director of it. And I want it to be a paying job. So, we need to raise enough money to pay for me and to start the thing so I can quit my job." So, we were coming into the Gala, and I said, "So, we're going to make this announcement. We're going to end the organization. We're going to start a new organization that's going to be call the LGBT Community Center," and he said, "We're going to name it after you. You're going to step down as the CEO, I'm going to be the CEO. You both are still going to be working on it." Trish was the chair of the board ; she would stay the chair of the board for the first year. And we're going to make this announcement. We're not going to tell anybody. It's going to be a secret announcement and we'll tell everybody to come." We had the event at the Symphony Hall in Allentown, this big event room, a beautiful room. My sister was there, she came from Connecticut, because I said, "You have to come for this, it's a big deal." After all, it's her name, too. And the mayor was there, and all these different people. But we didn't tell them exactly what was going on. So, people were guessing, "You're going to run for office," they were saying to Adrian. And then I get up, I have a little fake thing. I said, "I'm going to change the Photo Project," and I could see people going -- and I said, "That's not it." And then I told the story. And people stood up and clapped. And Barb Ross, who, her wonderful partner Kathy Bergey had died and she had this estate money, she said, "I'm going to make the first donation." So, I said, "We need to raise money." I said to Adrian, "After Barb makes this money, I'm going to call for people to give donations in the room. Let's just do that. Trish and I'll donate 1,000 dollars," which was hard for us, because we didn't have a lot of money. "But we'll do this." And he goes, "Okay. Well, I'll donate 1,000 dollars." So, okay, we'll do this. And then he says, "Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks." He said, "We need to raise 75,000 dollars by October for us to do this. Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks." So, I said, "Okay." I have to say, and this is not humble, but I run a party better than Adrian does. For one thing, I'm funnier than he is. So, I get up and I say the stuff, and I had been running all the galas, I think this was our eighth gala, and I was running it. I said things that made people laugh. One of the things I said was that I had gotten a call from one of our regular calling guys who says, "Well, you know, you do a great job with this but what if you die?" And so I said this to everybody. I said, "Well, I'm not going to die, but this is what we're going to do." So, I said all those things, and then Barb came up and she said, "I'm going to make the first donation," and then I said, "I'm going to donate." And then I said, "Okay, our friends Ann and Laura donated. So, now we have 3,000 bucks. Now you have heard from the lesbians. Where are the gay men?" People started jumping up all over. By the end of the night, I mean people were going, "Five thousand dollars," I mean, they were just like dominos they were just going over and over. And finally, we were writing it down. We thought it was going to be four or five people, we'd have 10,000 dollars, it'd be great. So, I'm like, "Is somebody writing this down?" And nobody was doing it. I'm trying to remember everybody and I'm looking around and people are doing this. And we didn't even know they were, they were just jumping up and stuff. So, at the end of the night, I was awake all night, and in the morning, at about seven o'clock, Adrian goes, "Do you have a list?" I said, "Yeah, I think I have a list," because I'm trying to remember everybody, and we compared our lists, and we had 35,000 dollars. So, we were halfway by then. We actually made the money by -- this was in the summer, why was it in the summer? Yeah, it was in August. And we were actually able to make the money -- I'm pretty sure that's sure. We had the gala in August. No, no, it was in June, and we had the money by August. That was the thing. It was in June because we had it as a Pride thing. And it was a problem because a lot of the high schoolers were graduating, and they were all graduating in the arena, and there was no parking and nobody could find any place to park. So, we remembered as many people as we could and we had 35,000 dollars. And by August, we had the money. Adrian quit his job within a month, and then he did it, and he set it up. So, one of the things was that the mayor said he would give us a building for a dollar. And the city did do this. Now, we're running out of time here. But the city did do this. And they arranged to give us this building on Turner Street, and it was a dollar. It was really neat, because it was only half a mile from our house. And it's a weird-shaped building. And so, in a nutshell what happened was, we investigated that building for a year. And we had architects and hazmat and we did all this due diligence and we figured out there's no way in hell we can use this building. Among other things, it's not just covered with asbestos, it's made of asbestos. It was full of lead and asbestos and Adrian said, "The only thing that was living in that building was dead pigeons." Now, Adrian and I are both scared to death of dead things, particularly rodents. I said, "Don't look down," when we were in the building, because there were all these dead birds because there was no roof. There was no roof, there were no windows. It was going to cost us a million dollars. In fact, it's still there because nobody can afford to take it down, because the remediation of it would be so hard to do. So, we ended up then, it was August and we went to Florida, and Adrian was looking around at buildings, and he said, "I think I found a building. I want you to look at it online." And so, we're looking at it online, and I said, "Adrian, this looks like a mobile home with no windows." Oh, no. We found a building that we really liked. And we tried to get it. It was on Seventh Street. It was close to the arena. It fell through and it was sort of an anti-gay thing that made us very sad. We almost got that building. And then, he had this building. We didn't want it to be in Bethlehem because I wanted to be able to go to work and I really wanted it to be in Allentown. I thought we would get more government support. He wanted it to be in Allentown, too, even though he lived in Bethlehem, then. And there's a lot of reasons for that, and one of them is that there's more people in Allentown, so there's more justification of having it, there's more inner-city youth, that kind of stuff. So, Trish said, "I don't want this mobile home with no windows," which I'm not kidding, it really was only 4,000 square feet. The building that the city wanted to give us was 7,000 square feet. I think the mobile home was 3,000 square feet. And so, Trish found the building that we have online, and she said, "Look at this building. It's great and it's kind of within our price range. It's a little high, but it has an elevator." So, I called Adrian up and I said, "We just sent you a thing, you have to go look at this building today." He said, "I can't go today, but I'll go tomorrow morning." So, he gets Rob Ritter, and he goes to the building, he calls me from the building, and he says, "I love the building. I love this building." I said, "Are you going to put an offer on it?" And he said, "I already have." And we got it. That's the end of that story. Then, there's all this stuff about the center, but other people can tell that story. So, that's what we got. MF: All right. We can conclude today, and then we had talked about maybe with our next interview focusing on some more personal stories, maybe your life history. LB: Sure. MF: Okay. Is there anything else you want to add before we can conclude today's interview? LB: I can talk about the center, and there are things I know about the center that other people, mostly the main stuff that I know about is when Trish and Adrian and I walked into the building and said, "What are we going to have to do to it, and how are we going to fix it up?" And how we fixed it up in the first six months. Adrian was doing colossal efforts to get money, and to make it happen, and get all the other complicated things, including changing over the 501c3, and doing all that kind of stuff. We took the Pennsylvania Diversity Network 501c3 and converted it into the center's 501c3. And getting the board together and doing all the different kinds of things and getting contracts and doing all that kind of stuff, while I was getting 300 different volunteers to prep the building and to clean it and to paint it and to do a few physical changes in tearing up the rugs and rebuilding the moldings and doing all the stuff that we had to do. It was a colossal effort. And it was fun because that kind of stuff I like to do, although it was physically very tiring. And Adrian has no skills in that at all, so I get to do everything. And I just tell everybody what to do. And he told people that. They said, "How did you know what to do?" He said, "Well, Liz tells us what to do and then we just do it." So, I did a lot of work but we also had wonderful, wonderful, wonderful volunteers, hundreds of volunteers. Some of them would just come. We were there all night, and people would come and stay all night with me and help me until three o'clock. "I don't want to come until midnight, is that okay?" You know that kind of stuff. It was terrific. So, I can talk about that. But that seems like other people know about it, compared to me. That was wonderful. MF: All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. It was, again, just such a pleasure. LB: Oh, it was fun. MF: All right, I'm going to pause this now. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:31:12 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liz Bradbury, August 3, 2020 Description An account of the resource Liz Bradbury details the transition from The Valley Gay Press to Pennsylvania Diversity Network, providing the Valley with crucial information, meeting Adrian Shanker, and starting an LGBTQ+ community center for the Lehigh Valley. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-19 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-08-03 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/4012f36fdac6cc66cdf94e62f722238c.png 42d88bb59e103394793744bfde1b65e4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Liz Bradbury OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-17.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 July 13, 2020 Liz Bradbury, July 13, 2020 LGBT-17 2:26:32 LVLGBT Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive Collection Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Liz Bradbury Mary Foltz video/mp4 BradburyLiz_20200713_video.mp4 1.0:|27(2)|62(8)|77(19)|106(9)|129(2)|152(4)|175(13)|202(7)|225(3)|248(8)|271(13)|296(2)|319(10)|344(2)|367(5)|394(8)|419(17)|446(7)|475(7)|498(5)|521(12)|548(4)|569(15)|598(18)|619(3)|648(9)|673(13)|702(5)|731(5)|760(6)|787(7)|814(4)|839(14)|862(12)|893(17)|920(10)|949(2)|974(11)|999(2)|1026(4)|1053(6)|1078(7)|1103(8)|1126(8)|1157(10)|1182(2)|1207(7)|1228(7)|1251(14)|1282(11)|1309(5)|1344(11)|1371(4)|1400(3)|1421(10)|1448(2)|1471(10)|1498(14)|1533(10)|1562(10)|1591(16)|1618(9)|1643(11)|1668(12)|1691(15)|1716(13)|1739(9)|1762(15)|1789(12)|1812(15)|1841(3)|1862(16)|1883(14)|1912(6)|1935(4)|1960(4)|1985(9)|2010(6)|2035(10)|2062(11)|2087(2)|2108(7)|2133(12)|2160(14)|2183(10)|2204(6)|2223(11)|2242(10)|2263(12)|2290(7)|2311(14)|2338(3)|2365(5)|2390(10)|2411(10)|2438(16)|2467(8)|2488(14)|2515(10)|2546(9)|2573(2)|2596(9)|2621(12)|2644(12)|2673(5)|2702(5)|2729(14)|2756(15)|2789(4)|2814(15)|2841(7)|2868(5)|2895(9)|2918(4)|2947(8)|2970(5)|2995(8)|3014(14)|3039(9)|3066(2)|3087(6)|3106(2)|3125(12)|3152(6)|3179(9)|3204(2)|3231(7)|3254(8)|3277(6)|3302(7)|3325(14)|3346(8)|3375(3)|3400(9)|3423(11)|3452(8)|3475(8)|3502(10)|3525(10)|3548(16)|3573(4)|3598(5)|3625(13)|3650(3)|3681(15)|3700(12)|3715(15) 0 https://youtu.be/4gjcd6L933Y YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I’m here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley and this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Center’s Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we’re meeting on Zoom because there is a pandemic going on and today is July 13th, 2020. Liz, thank you so much for being here with me today. &#13 ; &#13 ; LIZ BRADBURY: I’m so glad to be here. 0 109 Origins of Allentown’s Nondiscrimination Ordinance MF: Fabulous, thank you so much. So, we had a really wonderful interview last week about PA GALA and your work on voting guides that sort of lead up to the 2002 passage of the PA Hate Crimes bill. I’ll say we ended that interview with you gesturing towards the antidiscrimination ordinance, and you began work on that in 1998. So, I’d like to focus on that today. Could you give us an origin story of how you started in 1998 to work on this antidiscrimination ordinance? &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah. So, what was happening was now we had PA GALA in place, Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Alliance for Political Action. And we were producing voter’s guides and we were being very successful in doing that, I have to say. And we had a few people on the board, but all of the work was being done by me, and Trish, organizing the Lehigh Valley, and Steve Black organizing the bigger efforts, he was the CEO of the organization. 0 385 Mary Cramsey LB: happened -- a group of people who were running for office said that they were in support of an antidiscrimination ordinance. And one of them was a candidate named Mary Cramsey. &#13 ; &#13 ; And Mary Cramsey was a Democrat, and she was running for the nondiscrimination, so we interviewed her. And she was on. She was pro hate crimes bill ; she was pro hate crimes legislation if it was in the city. She was in favor of domestic partner recognition. She was in favor of the ordinance. 0 756 Finding a City Council Co-Sponsor LB: And at the same time, and I think that this was the same time, yeah, so this was in 1998 and this was when people were running for City Council, and at that time, there were three members of council that were running to retain their seats, Emma Tropiano, Terry Spinosa, and who’s the other one? I guess Todd Stevens. And they had all been on council and they were running to retain their seats as incumbents. Okay, so that stuff has happened. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, they’ve seen in effect that we had a very, very public way of humiliating, and I’m not afraid to get up and say, “I’m gay and what she did was lying and it’s wrong,” and it was hard to not see the community thought it was really serious that she had done that. How do you defend somebody who just lied potentially to both sides of the aisle in effect? 0 1139 Emma Tropiano LB: So, now, on council was Emma Tropiano. Emma Tropiano happened to live across the street from us. Emma Tropiano was notoriously the most anti-Latino person in the entire Lehigh Valley. Though she was a Democrat, she actually was so anti-Latino that she would go to City Council meetings -- and this is documented -- and she would just blatantly lie about the Latino population. &#13 ; &#13 ; She’d say, “Every single person who’s on welfare in Allentown is Latino,” and a person from the county would stand up and say, “Councilperson Tropiano, the statistics show that of the 14,000 people in Allentown that are on welfare, 70 percent of them are white,” and Emma Tropiano actually said to them, in this council meeting, “Don’t try to confuse me with facts,” which was a classic thing that she frequently said. 0 1580 Birth of Valley Free Press LB: So, now we begin to work toward this, decide that we’re going to push and have a City Council meeting anyway. So, one of the things we did was, that was the point where we decided to create the Valley Gay Press, and we created the Valley Gay Press for the sole reason -- the newspaper, it was called Valley Free Press then, this newsletter, newspaper, to create a circumstance where we’d be able to get information to people in a way that really explained stuff because most people in 1998 did not have email, we didn’t any social media, we couldn’t get information people in a very good way, maybe we could get information to 200 people. 0 1758 Finding Speakers for the City Council Meeting LB: But meanwhile, Felix Molina is working on this, too, he’s working with other community members, we’re setting up different people to speak, we’ve spoken to head of Equality Pennsylvania then, it was actually called the Gay and Lesbian Legal Aid Society, or something like that. It was the first permutation. &#13 ; &#13 ; And Andrew Park was running it, he had been an EEOC judge, he’s now a really big national activist. But he came to us and he said, “This is what I think you should do and how you should set up this meeting. You should have people who have been discriminated against, you should have ministers speak, you should have people in the community talk about these different issues,” and I found people. 0 2229 Pushing for a Nondiscrimination Ordinance at City Council LB: So, I speak first, and I say my little two minutes thing, and I say there’s all these people here, we want to see this happen, and people just over and over are saying, “We want to see this legislation introduced.” If you look in the Valley Gay Press, there’s actually a list of everybody who spoke, and it says what they were good or bad and basically what they said. It’s in the Valley Gay Press. &#13 ; &#13 ; And so, we’re having people speak and Felix Molina speaks, and Bob Smith speaks, and there were about 24 speakers. And at one point, and we can see how long the line is, and people are beginning to speak, and Ernie Toth says, “We’re going to have to cut this off.” 0 2604 Counteracting Hate at the City Council Meeting LB: And so, he was going to speak and so he was there, I think he was one of the last ones, and then Felix, and that was the end. And then, a guy got up who was standing behind them, and I went over to Steve and I said, “That guy’s going to be bad and that’s going to be a problem but who else do we have to speak?” &#13 ; &#13 ; And he said, “Do you know that guy?” He was a little person. And I said, “Yes, I do know that guy because Gayle Erich,” remember Gayle Erich who put together our Quark files for the thing, when her father died, we went to the funeral and he was a minister who got up at the end and said some of the most horrible things I had ever heard. 0 2902 Outcome of City Council Meeting LB: So, anyway now Trish has done this, everybody has their hands raised, they have the opportunity to do this, and they don’t. But Frank Concannon who’s sitting on the dais, he raises his hand, and he says, “I move to do this,” and they ignored him. And everybody else on council just sits there, they say no. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, we leave and quite frankly, we are very, very encouraged by this because we didn’t think it was going to pass. We didn’t think anything was going to happen. We just wanted to see if we could pull this off. And we did. 0 3021 Coalition Building for Nondiscrimination Ordinance LB: So, then we recognized -- Steve and Trish and I recognized that we cannot make this happen unless we have our own candidate. And we begin to now build coalitions. So, a couple of things happened that were really significant and the first thing -- just a bunch of stuff. 0 3074 Allentown Human Relations Commission Award LB: So, we’re moving along. We think we need a candidate who is actually going to push this legislation and we need a mayor who is going to speak from it in a positive way. The first thing that happens is that I won the Allentown Human Relations Commission Award. &#13 ; &#13 ; Bob Smith, who was the vice chair, put me up for the award and I won it and I got an opportunity to speak from the stage to a big group of people who were very pro-rights, because this is the Human Relations Commission. So, they’re people from all these different organizations. 0 3209 Relationship with Felix Molina/Puerto Rican Day Parade &amp ; Festival LB: But anyway, so I won that. That gave us a lot of momentum. People were paying more attention to us. There was an article in the paper about it, that was a significant thing. So, now, we end up recognizing that we have to do this. The next thing that happens is that we really developed a pretty good relationship with Felix Molina. &#13 ; &#13 ; Turns out, Felix is gay. He never even told us that. All through the time that we were doing the meeting, he never said he was, but he was. And it turned out that he was in a long-term relationship with the brother of somebody we knew who was at MCC, so then he outs himself to us. 0 3618 Hoover &amp ; Guridy City Council Election LB: Okay, so now things are moving along and we’re thinking we have to have a City Council member who’s going to introduce this legislation and we have to have a mayoral candidate that’s going to be supportive of it. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, we fasten on the idea that it has to be somebody who has a very flexible schedule, someone who works for themselves, so we fastened onto Gayle Hoover, and Gayle Hoover expressed that she would run for City Council if we did all the work for her. 0 4103 Primary Day LB: So, now we’re at the point of the primary where we’re campaigning and during the day of the primary, you’d go to various different sites and you’d hand out stuff, and we had people to hand out stuff for Gayle, and Gayle was working the sites and stuff like that. And I went to the South Side Youth Center, and that’s a big polling place in the city, and I was handing out cards for Gayle. &#13 ; &#13 ; And Candido Garcia, who is a guy I know very well, he’s part of the gay community, was standing next to me handing out cards for Julio. And we didn’t want to admit to each other that there was a big chance that one of them wasn’t going to win because it was against Tropiano, and there were only three candidates that could win, and I think one of them was Howells, and so, he was just going to win. He always won every election. He was this police chief, everybody voted for him. So, there was only two other slots in the primary. 0 4314 Mayoral Election LB: So, time goes along, and we get to the election and Roy Afflerbach is running against, I’m not sure, I don’t think Heydt ran again, then, so he was running against a different candidate. He was running against that guy who worked at Air Products. And he wanted me to endorse him. &#13 ; &#13 ; He was a Republican. I can’t remember his name. He was a nice guy, actually. He worked at Air Products. He wanted us to endorse him, and Afflerbach wanted us to endorse him. I said to Roy Afflerbach, who ultimately won, I said, “This other guy wants me to endorse him.” And he said, “Well, you need to go and interview him.” 0 4469 Electoral Success LB: So, we supported Afflerbach. Afflerbach wins the election, Gayle wins the election, all three of the Democratic candidates win the election. This is true. Remember the Mary Cramsey thing I was talking about in the beginning, we didn’t support her, and she lost the primary to Louie Hershman in her election which was two years before, and Hershman was on Council, I guess these are four-year terms. 0 4564 Getting the Legislation Passed LB: So, now, January 3rd, they’re installed into the position of the legislature, to be on City Council and Afflerbach is mayor, and Afflerbach said to us, “Pass the legislation right away we’re still in the sweetheart period. Don’t wait around for this. You need to pass the legislation now.” &#13 ; &#13 ; So, Mara Keisling comes to us, Mara Keisling is the head, now, of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. She was working for an organization that she ran, she’s transgender and she was running this organization in the State of Pennsylvania. She sits with us in our kitchen, this top person in the state, and she writes the legislation. 0 5118 Citizens for Traditional Family Values Referendum LB: But the next morning, Frank McVeigh with Citizens for Traditional Family Values files a referendum in the city to overturn the past ordinance. So, the ordinance is in place, Afflerbach signs it into place right away, we have the pens, it’s in his signed thing, a copy of it is in our waiting room on the third floor, because I kept it, of the Bradbury-Sullivan Center. And we were happy. But right away, we knew that they were going to do this. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, the City of Allentown has an opportunity for people to be able to create a ballot initiative referendum on the ballot by getting 2,000 signatures of registered Allentown voters saying that they want something to happen. So, McVeigh gets his band of hatemongers -- and they really were -- to put together a petition. They filed a formal petition and they’re required to carry around the legislation itself and then get the 2,000 signatures. 0 6200 Fighting Back Against the Referendum LB: So, we went to have a press conference to say that we were fighting this referendum. So, we went to City Hall, and this is a great story. It’s going to go on for a while, though. So, we go to City Hall, I’m upstairs at City Hall, which is where the City Clerk is, Mike Hanlon. And I think he still is city clerk, he’s a great guy. And we are going to present these 80 documents, or 100 documents that say, “I want my name off the petition.” &#13 ; &#13 ; Now, the anti people also showed up. We had the news there, and we had the TV cameras, and we had the Morning Call, and also the other newspaper that was in Allentown at that time. And I had people to speak. One woman, she was a Catholic mom, she had eight kids in her house, and they’re all teenagers. And I said, “Well, you signed this petition,” she said, “I didn’t sign that.” I said, “No, you did. I have this thing,” and I said, “I can tell you what day it was and the person who signed it, it was a guy named Frank McVeigh, this is what he looks like, here’s a picture of him.” 0 7210 Collecting Petitions/Verifying Signatures LB: So, now we’re getting all of this mail back and we’re being very successful. And we’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of letters back, I think we may have had about 700 of the things back by now. We’ve had enough to nullify their petitions. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, we’re going to Dan Anders, our lawyer, now to support us taking those petitions to Mike Hanlon, who was the City Clerk, to decide whether or not to take the names off based on these letters. So, I said to the city, “Do you need any kind of ability to determine whether or not these are real signatures?” Because after all, how do you know where the petition is? 0 7562 Lawsuit Against Citizens for Traditional Values LB: Okay, so Dan Anders says, “Okay, we’re going to stop this right now.” And I said, “What are we going to have to do?” He says, “We’re going to have you bring a lawsuit,” me, “against those people, against Citizens for Traditional Values, and it’s going to be the first four names of the people on the petitions,” and it was McVeigh, and Hartman and it actually says, “Liz Bradbury versus Hartman,” was the first name. &#13 ; &#13 ; We’d bring a lawsuit against them saying that they were abridging my civil rights by lying to people, and I would represent the rest of the LGBT community because I live here, and I’d be able to speak and stuff like that. I said, “Okay, do it.” 0 8076 Human Rights Campaign LB: So, I want to go back a little bit and say that one of the things that happened during this was the national organizations, particularly the Human Rights Campaign and one factor of the Victory Fund told us, “Don’t challenge the signatures, just let it go into place and let it go for a vote and raise 70,000 dollars and keep people from voting on it.” And I said to Trish, “We are not doing that.” &#13 ; &#13 ; And I’ve said this every time since then, ballot measures, which I am totally against in every possible way, there’s nothing good about a ballot measure because nobody in the legislature is responsible for it, and when people vote for it, they have no idea what the ramifications are. And then, the legislature, whomever the legislatures are say, “Well, I didn’t put it in place, that was a ballot measure. You did it. It’s in place.” They’re never good. They should never be in place. 0 8323 Importance of Passing of Nondiscrimination Ordinance LB: Sure. So, the lawsuit story is shorter because we weren’t fighting it. But it went on for quite a few years. I just want to say one more really important thing. During those 70 days, I actually lost 17 pounds. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I was absolutely hysterically worried about everything. And this is why. &#13 ; &#13 ; If we had lost that, if we hadn’t done what we’d done, because the depositions made it so that they would never do it again because they were afraid. Anti-LGBT people can never get other people, the general public, to be anti-LGBT people unless they lie. They have to lie to be able to get people to hate the minority. They have to misrepresent and lie to be able to do that. And that’s exactly what they did. 0 8520 Next Meeting Scheduling MF: Well, let’s start there. I’ll send a few times that would work for me next week. We’ll start with the lawsuit. You talked a little bit about the Valley Free Press a little bit today, and I’m curious if you have more that you’d want to say about that publication.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, yeah. The paper is a whole other huge thing. I produced that for 18 years. And it had enormous effect for the community. 0 8665 Felix Molina’s Speech at the 1998 City Council Meeting MF: Okay, this is Mary Foltz. I’m back with Liz, and we just thought of a story that needs to be recorded from this period, so I’m going to turn it back over to Liz. 0 8783 Closing Remarks MF: We had to have that story on here.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yes, it was good for his passion. 0 MovingImage Liz Bradbury recalls the inner workings of Allentown’s non-discrimination ordinance, PA GALA’s impact in local elections and national lawmaking, and their lawsuit against Citizens for Traditional Values. INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY JULY 13, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I'm here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley and this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Center's Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we're meeting on Zoom because there is a pandemic going on and today is July 13th, 2020. Liz, thank you so much for being here with me today. LIZ BRADBURY: I'm so glad to be here. MF: And, to start, I'm just going to ask you to state your full name and spell it for me, again. LB: My full name is Elizabeth Bradbury, E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H, B-R-A-D-B-U-R-Y. MF: And, will you please share your birthday again? LB: 6/15/57. MF: Thank you. And prior to this interview we talked about consent, and I just want to return to that for a minute. Do you consent to this interview today? LB: Yes, I do. MF: And you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? LB: Yes, I do. MF: And do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, or things we haven't thought of yet? LB: Yes, I do. MF: And do you understand that you'll have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts you want to delete, or to withdraw the full interview from the project? LB: Yes, I do. MF: Fabulous, thank you so much. So, we had a really wonderful interview last week about PA GALA and your work on voting guides that sort of lead up to the 2002 passage of the PA Hate Crimes bill. I'll say we ended that interview with you gesturing towards the antidiscrimination ordinance, and you began work on that in 1998. So, I'd like to focus on that today. Could you give us an origin story of how you started in 1998 to work on this antidiscrimination ordinance? LB: Yeah. So, what was happening was now we had PA GALA in place, Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Alliance for Political Action. And we were producing voter's guides and we were being very successful in doing that, I have to say. And we had a few people on the board, but all of the work was being done by me, and Trish, organizing the Lehigh Valley, and Steve Black organizing the bigger efforts, he was the CEO of the organization. So, when we had these meetings, Steve would come and we would have these. Now, this was all out of our house. We're doing everything out of our house, and out of Black's Luncheonette, which was Steve's restaurant in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, in Northampton County. And so, one of the things we began to talk about was that we needed to pass an antidiscrimination ordinance in the city of Allentown, and we were serious about doing that and beginning to organize it. And one of the reasons that we were doing that is because we were beginning to see that we were getting more and more indication that there would be support of that. So, through the voter guides, we were interviewing candidates and some of the candidates, as I think I mentioned before, would say things like, "We don't have any gay people in our county," or something. But then, we were beginning to see that that was obviously not true and people were coming forward to say not only that they did have people that they were concerned about, most people didn't know that we weren't even protected by the law and they would come forward and say things like, "Of course, that should happen." So, we had a number of meetings, we talked about what it would have to look like to be able to move forward to create this piece of legislation and we were talking about this as sort of an abstract idea because one of the things you do when you pass pieces of legislation is, you try to be sure that your City Council or your municipal entity is in favor of it, that you have the votes to pass it, or at least you have the people that would support it. And so, some level of support, you have to drum up that support otherwise it's very devastating to try to bring it to a council and have them all say, "No, forget it. We're not going to do it." It's demoralizing to the community. So, we were working on that and one of the thing we were doing in the questionnaires that we were sending out to people with regard to the passage of an ordinance was, we would write to City Council members -- hold on a minute I have to close this because I'm distracted by the view -- and we would say, "Would you support a passage of an antidiscrimination ordinance in the city of Allentown," or candidates who were running for City Council. And we began to see a pattern of groups of people that said they would support this kind of thing. Also, Trish had a talk with Frank Concannon, who was on Allentown City Council and Frank, who's an older man like I think I've mentioned before, was pretty good about it. At first, he was saying, "I don't know anybody that's gay," and then Trish was saying, "Well, you don't know anybody who's gay who would be comfortable enough to tell you that they were gay." And he very thoughtfully, I mean, this guy was in his 70s at the time, very thoughtfully paused and said, "Well, you're right about that. I don't think that they would tell me that they've been discriminated." And people would say, "Well, these people are never discriminated against," and then we'd have horrendous instances of discrimination. So, what happened was that a person -- and I think this was the order of how this happened -- a group of people who were running for office said that they were in support of an antidiscrimination ordinance. And one of them was a candidate named Mary Cramsey. And Mary Cramsey was a Democrat, and she was running for the nondiscrimination, so we interviewed her. And she was on. She was pro hate crimes bill ; she was pro hate crimes legislation if it was in the city. She was in favor of domestic partner recognition. She was in favor of the ordinance. And she said she would actually sponsor the ordinance because that was one of the questions, would you sponsor the ordinance, would you cosponsor it, would you support it, would you vote for it? And she was indicative that she would do that. So, we were preparing the voter's guides and things were happening. And other things happened that spurred the ordinance at the time, but one of the things that happened was that Mary Cramsey had said all these things, and then somebody in the community came to us, one of our LGBT people in the community and said, "Have you seen this newsletter that's coming out from an organization called 'Citizens for Traditional Values,'" which was an the ultra, ultra-far-right organization, "and it quotes Mary Cramsey saying that she does not support the ordinance. Right here in writing." And I said, "Let me see that." I got the thing, and I looked at it and I said, "Well, this is a shock. Maybe they misinterpreted her." So, I called her up and I said to her, "Ms. Cramsey, I have your handwritten and signed questionnaire right here and you said that you would support this ordinance and you said you would support the hate crimes bill, and you'd support all these things. I've just seen this thing from Citizens for Traditional Values and you're saying exactly the opposite, which is the correct thing? You signed this thing." And she said, "Well, I don't support that hate crimes thing." I said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "Well, I think that what gay people do causes them to be victims of crimes and it's their own fault." And I said, "What?" And I said, "So, you're saying if somebody gets beat up because they're gay, it's their fault?" And she says, "Well, yeah, because you do bad things." And I said, "You lied on this questionnaire. You don't support a law that says that people can't be fired or can't be denied housing for public accommodation at all." And she said, "No, I don't." I said, "Well, why did you sign this thing that said you did?" And she said, "Well, I don't want to talk about that." So, in my mode, I immediately called The Morning Call, and because we had already produced the voter's guide and sent it out to everybody. And we'd endorsed her. So, luckily, we did have internet in that we had the ability to send out emails to people, which I immediately did, to say that this candidate didn't support this. But I also said to Bob Wittman, he was a reporter at The Morning Call, as you know, you know Bob, that this thing it happened. So, he came over to the house and he interviewed me. And I showed him the questionnaire and the Traditional Values thing, and I said, "I've got a big problem with this. This candidate lied to get votes. We've produced voter information. What are you going to do about it?" And so, he wrote a front-page, an enormous article with a picture of her, he said, "Where did they get the picture of her? She looks like a pin-up person in the picture," and he interviewed her and she absolutely said, "Yeah, I lied to them." So, she was absolutely clear. He said, "Did you fill this out?" And she said, "Yes, but I didn't mean it." And he said, "But you misrepresented to the voters." Well, up until that point, and one of the things about when you're working on Allentown City Council is that when you're in your own town you can really see if people have yard signs and stuff like that, and we had seen that she had had a lot of yard signs. And this was in the spring, actually. So, at that time, I actually was driving up the street and I had all of these yard signs, and I could see, the next day, after that article came out, the signs were gone. And I was thinking there's two things about that. One of these things is that this person was blatantly a bigot and anti-gay. But also, she blatantly lied just to get people to vote for her. And I don't think anybody is comfortable, any honest person, is comfortable with that level of hypocrisy for a person to run for office and then just say, "Yes," to every single questionnaire they get. "Yes, I support abortion rights, no, I don't support abortion rights." Come on, you can't have both sides. And you can't have no political consequences. So, we did this thing. We did it very, very publicly. And we were actually heartened by that, because this was the primary, and we were very heartened by that because we felt strongly that this was so wrong, and we were glad to see that she was losing support. And at the same time, and I think that this was the same time, yeah, so this was in 1998 and this was when people were running for City Council, and at that time, there were three members of council that were running to retain their seats, Emma Tropiano, Terry Spinosa, and who's the other one? I guess Todd Stevens. And they had all been on council and they were running to retain their seats as incumbents. Okay, so that stuff has happened. So, they've seen in effect that we had a very, very public way of humiliating, and I'm not afraid to get up and say, "I'm gay and what she did was lying and it's wrong," and it was hard to not see the community thought it was really serious that she had done that. How do you defend somebody who just lied potentially to both sides of the aisle in effect? But I think that it made political candidates concerned that we had a voice in the community. So all of a sudden-- So Allentown has a Human Relations Commission because we have a human relations law that was passed in 1965. It was at that time, the only community in the Lehigh Valley that had any non-discrimination law. Everybody else, Easton, Bethlehem, none of them had a non-discrimination law, they all relied on the federal law and the state law. But Allentown had its own law that was passed in 1965, but it did not include sexual orientation and gender identity. But because we have the law, we have a Human Relations Commission that had been functioning with appointed commissioners who were volunteer commissioners, and they'd been functioning since 1965. And this was 1998. And all of a sudden, we get a call from Felix Molina, who was the chair of the Allentown Human Relations Commission, and he said, "Last night, in the commission meeting, in front of the press, I and our assistant chair, the vice-chair, Robert E. Smith Jr., have announced that we are going to work toward the passage of an antidiscrimination ordinance addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to the Allentown Human Relations law." And I said, "You already announced this to the press?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "So, what are you going to do?" And he said, "Well, we're going to bring it up in council in the next meeting." And I said, "Well, have you planned this out?" And he said, "Well, yeah." So, I said, "Do you have a sponsor and a co-sponsor? Because you can't introduce legislation unless you have a sponsor and a co-sponsor." And he said, "We have a sponsor, I think. I think Frank Concannon will sponsor it. We don't have a co-sponsor but there is a clause for Allentown City Council in its bylaws that says that if you can get a bunch of signatures, 35 signatures of Allentown voters, you don't have to have a second, you can use that as a second for the piece of legislation." And I said, "Okay. The meeting's on Wednesday. Do you have everybody?" He goes, "No, I want you to go out and get 35 Allentown voters to sign this list." I said, "Felix, I don't just have these people, it's Monday and you need it by Wednesday and these people aren't sitting in my living room. The bars aren't even open. Who am I going to get to do this?" So, of course we did it. We actually ran out and we got 100 signatures. Felix worked really hard on it. We didn't know Felix then, but he worked really hard on it. I was a little shocked that he didn't really have any preliminary, or that he told us, but now we had announced it to the press and it was in the paper, and now we had to deal with it. So, Felix said to me, "I want you to come and meet with Terry Spinosa who is running for office and he's already on office and we want to introduce the legislation, we should go ahead and do that." And I said, "But you don't have a second." And he said, "Well, we have these signatures," and so, he brought them to council, and Ernie Toth, who was the president of council then said, "That doesn't mean that. You can't just do that." Well, actually you can, but he was lying and he said, "You can't just push this piece of legislation." Anyway, Felix said, "Okay, well we should plan on doing this, on pushing this piece of legislation with these signatures. We should have a big meeting." I said, "After all, we have to have the room full of LGBT people, and our allies, not just show up in a meeting and hope a couple of people there are going to be in favor." He goes, "Okay, well, we'll postpone it. But I want you to talk to Terry because I think he will be the cosponsor." So, I go to meet, right at City Council chambers, and I meet with Terry Spinosa and Felix Molina. And Felix, I have to say, is a wonderful guy, a terrific organizer, English is not his first language, and he was not really understanding what Terry said. So, Terry comes into this meeting with us and I say, "So, would you cosponsor?" And he goes, "Well, I have to be sure about this piece of legislation. I have to be sure that it supports your rights," meaning you gay people, "but it also supports the rights of everybody else." And I said, "What do you mean by that?" And he said, "Well, you know they have rights with regard to this issue, too," and I said, "You mean the right to fire me because I'm gay? That's the thing that you want to support?" And he goes, "Well, I think that's important." So, I take Felix out into the hallway, and I said, "You realize he just said, 'when hell freezes over?' That's never going to happen. You can't say to some people, 'We'll support your right to fire gay people, but we'll also support the rights for gay people to not be fired because they're gay. That's opposed to each other. That can't happen." He goes, "Oh." Felix said, because he's not, and he's hoping. I said, "Well, who else do you think we can get?" So, now, on council was Emma Tropiano. Emma Tropiano happened to live across the street from us. Emma Tropiano was notoriously the most anti-Latino person in the entire Lehigh Valley. Though she was a Democrat, she actually was so anti-Latino that she would go to City Council meetings -- and this is documented -- and she would just blatantly lie about the Latino population. She'd say, "Every single person who's on welfare in Allentown is Latino," and a person from the county would stand up and say, "Councilperson Tropiano, the statistics show that of the 14,000 people in Allentown that are on welfare, 70 percent of them are white," and Emma Tropiano actually said to them, in this council meeting, "Don't try to confuse me with facts," which was a classic thing that she frequently said. She was well-known to say stupid stuff like that. She also furthered and instituted Allentown's law that was the English-only law. And it meant that every single piece of paper that ever was produced by the city could not be in anything other than English unless it was an emergency document. Well, the way they were able to get around that, thank goodness, was they pretty much said, "Everything that comes out of government is an emergency document." But it took a while to do that, and she was very loud about it and there were very many people -- there was not as big a voting population of Latino population in the city of Allentown in that time. She went all the way to Congress in Washington to talk about how important this English only -- she spoke in Congress to talk about how important this English only junk was. So, Felix said, "Well, she's not going to do anything she's horrible. She's really anti-minority." I said, "Well, maybe she's not anti-gay. I don't know. Maybe we could get her to sponsor. Maybe we should talk to her." And Ernie Toth was a really, really curmudgeonly conservative, again Democratic, because there are all Union Democrat types, but he was ultra, ultra-far-right, old-school, I think he was 80 in those days. And then there was also on, Council there's Frank Concannon who also was an old man but he was listening to us and he was very supportive in a lot of ways. And then, a guy named Todd Stevens who was a nonentity in some ways. He didn't say much during council meetings. He was on Council but he didn't say much. And David Bausch, who had been the county executive, he was very conservative. He was Republican. I think he was the only Republican. Maybe Terry Spinosa was a Republican, too, on council. And then, Tropiano. And David Howells, Sr., his son, now David Howells Jr., is a judge, they are all a police family, and David Howells had been the chief of police and then he had retired, but now he was on Council, and he was actually, at that time, I think Ernie Toth was president of council, but David Howells served as president of Council. He was a little bit more willing to listen to people because he was more used to public stuff, but he wasn't really on our side at that point. Later, he ended up voting for it, a long time later, but he was the only one on Council that was still -- well, he and Bausch were the only ones that were on Council when we finally passed it in 2002. But this was 1998. So, David Howells, he wasn't there. We were trying to think, how can we get somebody to do this? And Felix was insisting that this list that we had would allow for a vote, because we wanted people to understand that when they voted for this, they were voting against equal rights, because if we can get people on record -- people don't like to do that, particularly Democrats don't like to publicly vote. So, we met anyway, with Emma Tropiano and Terry Spinosa and David Howells. David Howells, we actually went to lunch. He took us to lunch and we talked about it and he listened to us. Emma Tropiano listened to us. She told another person in the community, "Why would I ever support this because every time you have sex you're breaking the law," because this was before Bowers, or this is after Bowers but before the Supreme Court decision and it was against the law. I said, "It wasn't against the law in the state of Pennsylvania for gay people to have sex, but it was in other parts of the United States," but that's making a presumption of how people are having sex, and that's true for straight people, too. But anyway. So, she said that. She just came out with things like that. She was in her early 70s, I think, at the time. And so, we met with those three people that were running, and Emma Tropiano said to us, right out in the meeting, in front of witnesses, "Okay, look. I will cosponsor this if you wait until after the election." This is the election that Mary Cramsey was running in. I think that's the way it worked. Maybe that Mary Cramsey election was a little bit later, but even so, she said, "If you wait until after the election." So, we said, "Okay. So, you're saying, let me just restate this, you are saying that you will cosponsor this if we wait until after the primary election," because there weren't really any other people running against her. If she won the primary and there was some primary challengers, but if she won the primary she would win the election, and that was pretty much true. So, we said, "Okay, we need to have a sponsor, so okay." So, we have the election. It's in May. She wins the primary. She's one of the people who wins the primary and then we say, "Great, now you're going to go co-sponsor." She said, "No, I'm not going to do it." I said, "So, you lied." And she said, "Well, I don't think it's a good idea." I said, "But you lied. You told us you would do it and we would push them --" so, anyway. Now we're really mad and we're never going to trust anybody. One of the things that happen with regards to Mary Cramsey and Emma Tropiano once they did this was -- and certainly this was true for the Mary Cramsey issue,was that we made a decision through PA GALA that we would never endorse somebody unless we talked to them in person, again. We would never endorse somebody based on just their questionnaire. We might endorse somebody based on their voting record because they'd actually voted in pro-LGBT circumstances, but we would never endorse somebody unless we absolutely knew that they were going to be this. And we would have known that for Mary Cramsey. Emma Tropiano is a bald-face liar, but I don't think that, if she had written the stuff, I think that would have been more serious, as well. So, now we begin to work toward this, decide that we're going to push and have a City Council meeting anyway. So, one of the things we did was, that was the point where we decided to create the Valley Gay Press, and we created the Valley Gay Press for the sole reason -- the newspaper, it was called Valley Free Press then, this newsletter, newspaper, to create a circumstance where we'd be able to get information to people in a way that really explained stuff because most people in 1998 did not have email, we didn't any social media, we couldn't get information people in a very good way, maybe we could get information to 200 people. But we wanted to be able to put this into the voter's guides, we wanted to be able to tell people exactly what was happening with regard to significant circumstances regards to the passage of this ordinance. And when we created the Valley Gay Press, we did it for several reasons. We did it for three major reasons, and I need to say this quickly. We did it to pass the ordinance, to bring political information to people, we did it to bring information in general for people so that organizations would stop having conflicting events. There was a time, right at that time, where Pride and the biggest fundraiser event that FACT had, they accidentally scheduled for the same day, which was a Sunday in June. And they were furious at each other and blamed each other for this enormous -- really, it was a devastating circumstance because you could not go. One of them was at the Berkleigh Country Club and the other one was the Pride Festival, and it was this terrible opposition. And I said, "We're going to create the Valley Gay Press with a calendar in it so people won't do that. They won't accidentally create events that were happening at the same time. We don't have that many events that are big events like that. We can't afford to have them at the same time." And then, the last thing was to answer people's questions, that we'd really be able to bring people information, bring people together that way, by advertising all the different events that not-for-profits were doing, and having articles that people were researching to talk about what was going on in the LGBT community, and how it affected people. But at this point, when we created the Valley Gay Press in 1998, we did that specifically to bring people information about the ordinance issue. So, what we started to do was, we started to try to gather people together by communicating with them and getting them and then picking a date of the City Council meeting, the City Council meets twice a month, and to have that meeting be the time when we would introduce this legislation. So, we did that. And we had a lot of telephone lists. So, we'd really call people up and say, "Can you come to this meeting? It's really, really important. We need to fill the room." So, I'm going to fast forward a little bit. We went through a lot of different steps to do this. But meanwhile, Felix Molina is working on this, too, he's working with other community members, we're setting up different people to speak, we've spoken to head of Equality Pennsylvania then, it was actually called the Gay and Lesbian Legal Aid Society, or something like that. It was the first permutation. And Andrew Park was running it, he had been an EEOC judge, he's now a really big national activist. But he came to us and he said, "This is what I think you should do and how you should set up this meeting. You should have people who have been discriminated against, you should have ministers speak, you should have people in the community talk about these different issues," and I found people. I found a woman whose child was discriminated against in daycare, and they told her that she couldn't call -- the child called their other parent "Poppy," and it was a person who had been identified at birth as female, and the daycare said, "She's not allowed to do that." This three-year-old kid was not allowed to do that in daycare, and this woman said to me, "I felt that was blatant discrimination, LGBT discrimination. I wanted to take my kid out of daycare, but I had paid for the daycare for the rest of the year, and so I couldn't do it," and several other people who had spoken about losing their jobs because they were LGBT, and circumstances like that. So, we're setting up these people to do that. I had ministers, a guy who was the minister of the Saint John's Lutheran Church on 5th Street, he was going to speak, he was great, actually, and a number of other people, heads of organization, a vice president from Air Products, first we were going to have Charlie Versaggi who worked at Air Products, he said, "No, no, I'm going to get the top vice president to have him come and speak." And he came, he was one of the main people that spoke there. And we were setting up this list of people that were going to speak and we figured that even if they didn't let us do this, you can always speak at courtesy of the floor, and so I was telling people, "You cannot speak for more than two and a half minutes, you have to practice doing that. If you go over, you'll lose it." We had people from all different minority groups, different parts of the community, and we also had Julio Guridy, who was, at that time, a young guy who had just moved from the Dominican Republic a few years before, he was working in the banking system, and he really wanted to speak in favor of this. He was actually from a very conservative Latino church, but he ended up saying to me, he didn't speak English really, really well but he said to me, "I really want to do this but I want you to help me write the speech because I can't write this." So, we worked together to write the speech so that it would be what he wanted to say but it would be in a form that he practiced it. And we had a bunch of other people. We had Dr. Elizabeth Goff, who's a pediatrician, and she wanted to get up and say, because people were saying, "That's going to just let pedophiles," because gay people are all pedophiles, so that's going to let people do that. Elizabeth Goff actually got up, she is a pediatrician, she got up and she was ready to speak. And we also wanted to fill the room with our people. We made buttons that said "Equal Rights" on them. They were blue buttons and if you see pictures of that, there's some photographs of those in the newspaper and stuff you can see these people wearing these buttons. So, the day is coming closer, Steve Black is ready to do this, he's going to speak, I'm going to speak, we have this list of who's going to go, and now we're hearing that the far-right side is organizing a little bit against us, and we're concerned about that because the newspaper has talked about us having this meeting. So, now the night of the meeting comes, and Steve pulls up in his car and he says, "There is an enormous rainbow over the," he said, "I was driving into town, I could see this rainbow over city hall." I said, "Well, that's a good sign." So, Steve and I, and Trish was in City Council chambers, helping people to be seated, we were trying to get older people that would sit in the front row because we wanted it to not just look like we've got a lot of young rabble-rousers, although we weren't young at that time, but Steve was in his 20s, then, I was in my 30s. I think, maybe. Maybe 41. And we were working on this stuff, and a lot of our friends were preparing to come and people from other organizations. So, Steve and I are standing outside greeting people that are coming in and we're giving them the button. And Steve was very, very nervous. He often got very nervous. I did, too. I was nervous enough, but he was very, very agitated doing things like that. He's also very, very excited. Because a lot of the people that are coming in were our people and they were thrilled to have the buttons, they were putting them on and our friends were coming, people coming in from ACCO, and Sandy Fluck, and Bev Morgan who ran ACCO, and Sandy's mother who was in her 80s were going to sit in the front row, we're all excited about it. And these people are coming in, there are people coming in and we're giving out the buttons, and we're thinking, "This is really good." Then, a guy comes through, and I go to give him a button and he goes, "No, I'm a Christian." And it was Frank McVeigh, who ended up to be our archnemesis, but he was one of the first ones, "No, I don't want it, I'm a Christian." I didn't even know it was him. But there were a couple of scary people who came in. There was a guy who was in army fatigues who was really scary. He was very edgy looking. He was wearing fatigues, he had camouflage underneath, really angry, wouldn't talk to anybody when he walked into council. So, there's more and more people coming in, they're packing the council chambers, we know there's hundreds of people coming in, and these people coming in. Steve is very upbeat about it, because there's so many of our people there and that's a very good way to push legislation, to fill the room with people who are your supporters. And they were at the City Council chambers, there's doors that go in, it's right along Hamilton Street and a car pulls up across the street and these three old people get out and Steve goes, "Oh, crap." They're very conservative looking people, middle-aged gray hair people, and two much older people. And Steve, in his mind he's thinking, "These are the far-right people." And he goes, "Oh, no. Look at those people. They're going to be trouble." And I grab him by the lapel, I said, "Those are our people. That's Melinda and Don Kohn. That's Harold and Roberta Kreider. Those are our people." [laughs] And he's so excited. He's so excited. And they come over and we're hugging, we're hugging everybody that's coming in, we're giving them the buttons, and we put Harold and Roberta right in the front row. They look like they do now. They were in their 70s then, they're in their 90s now, they're still around folks, if you're watching this, and they're in the archives, so watch their stuff. They probably didn't even talk about this because it's just one of the million things that they've done. But I'd already talked to Roberta, and I knew that she was going to be great. And she was set to talk. So, now we have this line of people signed up and we say that we want to push the legislation. And they said, "No, you can't do that." So, then we're going to be at courtesy of the floor. At that time, courtesy of the floor was at the beginning of the meeting. So, I speak first, and I say my little two minutes thing, and I say there's all these people here, we want to see this happen, and people just over and over are saying, "We want to see this legislation introduced." If you look in the Valley Gay Press, there's actually a list of everybody who spoke and it says what they were good or bad and basically what they said. It's in the Valley Gay Press. And so, we're having people speak and Felix Molina speaks, and Bob Smith speaks, and there were about 24 speakers. And at one point, and we can see how long the line is, and people are beginning to speak, and Ernie Toth says, "We're going to have to cut this off." Now, they're not really supposed to do that. They're not supposed to cut it off. It's supposed to go on forever if they want to. But they didn't want to because Ernie Toth is very conservative, and he didn't want all these pro-gay people speaking. So, we had about 28 speakers, and 22 of them were pro, and six of them were negative. And one of the people that got up that were negative actually had those pamphlets, some of them are in the archives, that say a horrible, horrible things about the LGBT community that says gay men eat eight pounds of feces a year, and they kill children, and they molest kids, all this kind of stuff. And two people had that, Frank McVeigh gets up and he says some kind of convoluted things like the state doesn't have this law and you can't do this and stuff. But our people who spoke about being discriminated, I had talked to them about what they were going to say, I think Lenore Johnson actually spoke about losing her job when she owned Diamonz, and she had a job at a transport company, when there was an article that said that she owned Diamonz and that Diamonz was a gay bar, she lost her job the next day. And she'd been there for 12 years and never had a negative performance review. So, she said, "Clearly, I was discriminated because of that." And so, people are talking about that. And I have to say that we didn't even know what the legislation was going to say. So, people could say, "You were only talking about the gay community," that wasn't really true. We hadn't written the legislation yet. That's one of the things about entering a piece of legislation. You first talk about the possibility of passing it, then you have committee meetings and stuff where they would have -- that's one of the things we should have done before we even brought it into fruition, we should have written the legislation and brought it to them and then had somebody who said they were going to pass it. But anyway, this is happening. All these people going through. And brilliant people are speaking, some people are beginning to say the same thing, though. And people in the room, there were loads of people there, everybody that we knew was there, people from FACT, Hoover was there, everybody, our friends [Laura Terrace?] and Judie Arndt and lots of women from the Girl Scouts who were there, and all sorts of really terrific people. And the people from Pride, I think, were there at the same time. They were really supporting this effort. And the room was packed. They have, I think, 200 seats in there and there was about 300 people. At the same time, the creepy guy in the army fatigues is walking around the back of the room, punching his hands like this, and he's walking up and down the street. And in the back of City Council chambers, I actually went over to security and I said, "This guy is a problem. What's going on? He's really scary," and they actually said to him that he had to stop doing that, or they would eject him. So, he kind of calmed down, although he wasn't that calm. He was scary. So, now the line is going along and our community, every time we hear somebody that's really anti, it's very upsetting, because they say terrible things. The guy gets up and he says all those horrible things about gay people, and Melinda Kohn gets up, and she'd never spoke in public before and her daughter, Sally Kohn, who's a famous person on television now, had come out recently. Melinda had never heard anybody say this, and she started to speak about this, and she just started to cry. She said, "I can't believe that people would say horrible things about people just because you don't want them to have the rights. It's awful." Roberta Krieder was brilliant, it was a very positive. And it's significant to say that when you have horrible, horrible people that say awful things you can point to those people and say, "Clearly these people would gleefully discriminate against somebody who was LGBT. This is evidence that this kind of discrimination exists. You can't say nobody will ever fire somebody or deny them housing if you have people who will get up and say these horrible, not true, cruel things." So, the line's going along, they don't let people speak twice, which is the rule, and Steve says to me, "It looks good because the last person that's going to speak, I think, is [Raphael Coneseres?], or maybe it was going to be Felix, and so he was in line, and he was going to say the summation of it, and that was going to be great. And we actually were saying to people, "Don't get up and speak if you're going to say the same thing as somebody else," and Raphael Coneseres was a brilliant artist, he's in Washington DC, a sculptor, he said, "I want to say that people are saying that we can't use the same turns over and over again that aren't in the state law but the state law doesn't have the clauses that Allentown's law has, and I want to point that out," which was a good point to make. And so, he was going to speak and so he was there, I think he was one of the last ones, and then Felix, and that was the end. And then, a guy got up who was standing behind them, and I went over to Steve and I said, "That guy's going to be bad and that's going to be a problem but who else do we have to speak?" And he said, "Do you know that guy?" He was a little person. And I said, "Yes, I do know that guy because Gayle Erich," remember Gayle Erich who put together our Quark files for the thing, when her father died, we went to the funeral and he was a minister who got up at the end and said some of the most horrible things I had ever heard. He said, "It's too bad that your father isn't going to go to heaven because he didn't take Jesus as his personal savior." I said, "If that guy said that there, he's going to say something horrible, now. Clearly he's ultra-far-right." So, Felix and Steve and I look around and we say, "What are we going to do? We've got to have somebody else speak and we've got to control the message." And I said, "Trish is going to have to speak." Okay, this really freaks out Trish. But I said, "Honey, you have to do it. You have to do it." She said, "Okay, but you have to write what I'm going to say." So, I'm out in the hallway trying to write this down and Felix is saying, "You need to say this, you need to say this," and I say, "Felix, shut up, I have to write this, she's coming to the end," and Erie Toth points to Trish, he goes, "Glasses lady, you're the last one." So, we know she's going to be the last one. So, now there's a bunch of people that still have to speak, so we know we have about 15 minutes, but I'm trying to write this thing that's really going to be punchy, and Felix is so worried that it's going to happen. So, what we decided was we're going to write a speech for Trish that's going to specifically say, "These people here all want you to pass this legislation. We want somebody to suspend the rules and to discuss this legislation and vote on it today. We want you to do that, or to at least let this piece of legislation be introduced, formally introduced." So, I'm writing out the stuff for Trish on like the back of an envelope and we're trying to do this thing and the places are getting closer and then Trish gets up and she's doing this [shakes hands], because she hates to speak in public. But she's also brilliant. She's really brilliant. She spoke in front of the legislature and she's brilliant. She's got a doctorate, for heaven's sake. So, she's getting closer and closer. She gets to the thing. This is what she says, and this is what we'd written out and she says this, and she says it so brilliantly. And the Morning Call reporters were there, and they reported on this. She says, "You have heard all of these people who have spoken in favor of these rights. And you have heard people who have spoken so negatively that it's clear that these rights are necessary. If you look around the room, you can see that there are people that vastly support this piece of legislation. So, I am going to ask everyone who supports this legislation to raise their hand, and then I hope that you will suspend the rules and introduce the legislation." Then she turns to the crowd and she says, "Raise your hand if you support this legislation," and every person in the room, and they said in the Morning Call, "A forest of hands raised across the room." You couldn't see for the hands. And you couldn't see the anti people, because there were hundreds and hundreds of people with their hands raised, and like six people who didn't have their hands raised. And Ernie Toth, when the little person spoke, he was a minister, he goes, "I'm a minister and I'm against this legislation. I don't really know why, and I can't really articulate why, but I'm just against it." And then he sits down. [laughs] And then Trish says this raise your hands thing. But before he sits down, points to him, and he goes, sir -- The first thing the little person said was, "I'm a little person, and I know what it's like to be discriminated against." And then he says, "I don't know why this legislation is wrong, but it's wrong." And then Ernie Toth points to him and he says, "Sir, you may be a little man, but you have a big heart." [laughs] What? After all this, and then that's what you say? So, Ernie Toth, he's a nutcase. So, anyway now Trish has done this, everybody has their hands raised, they have the opportunity to do this, and they don't. But Frank Concannon who's sitting on the dais, he raises his hand, and he says, "I move to do this," and they ignored him. And everybody else on council just sits there, they say no. So, we leave and quite frankly, we are very, very encouraged by this because we didn't think it was going to pass. We didn't think anything was going to happen. We just wanted to see if we could pull this off. And we did. And Andrew Parks said, "This was the best meeting I've ever seen. The orchestrated meeting of these people speaking, and everything was just perfect. You did a perfect thing." And so, Steve called me the next morning and he said, "I think we should call Frank Concannon and thank him." And I said, "I think we should do that, too." So, I call up Frank at his house, and his wife answers, and I can hear him in the background, and she says, "Who is this?" She had a great accent. She goes, "Who is this? Rita Concannon, who is it?" And I said, "This is Liz Bradbury," she goes, "Oh, just a minute. Frank, Frank, it's Liz Bradbury." She sounded just like that. And he comes to the phone, and I can hear him go, "Oh," but he thinks I'm going to yell at him because we lost. And he gets on the phone and I said, "Frank, I just wanted to tell you, we're gay. We didn't expect to win this. For heaven sakes, we don't have any rights. Why would we think that this was going to work? People who are straight who have never been discriminated against might think that this would work, but we knew this wasn't going to work. Don't worry about it. We did fine. We did fine. And we're really grateful for what you did." And we were allies with him pretty much through the rest of the time. He was terrific. He became comptroller. He didn't run for city council again, he ran for city comptroller, and he was city comptroller for years and years, and he was great. He was very liberal and very supportive. So, then we recognized -- Steve and Trish and I recognized that we cannot make this happen unless we have our own candidate. And we begin to now build coalitions. So, a couple of things happened that were really significant and the first thing -- just a bunch of stuff. So, we're producing the Valley Gay Press, we're producing voter information, we're building our list, we now have 700 people on our list of Allentown voters who are registered voters, 700 people could swing any election in Allentown because you put 700 on one side, and you take 700 away, that's 1,400 votes, people don't even have 1,400 votes to win elections in the city. So, it's very, very significant. And these are people who are craving our voter information, they're voting, they're super voters, they're developing voting. So, this is very significant. So, we're moving along. We think we need a candidate who is actually going to push this legislation and we need a mayor who is going to speak from it in a positive way. The first thing that happens is that I won the Allentown Human Relations Commission Award. Bob Smith, who was the vice chair, put me up for the award and I won it and I got an opportunity to speak from the stage to a big group of people who were very pro-rights, because this is the Human Relations Commission. So, they're people from all these different organizations. And when I spoke from the stage, Bill Heydt, who was the mayor, then, came up and gives me the award, he said he would sign the legislation but not unless Council brought it to him, but he had lobbied Council to not bring him the legislation. He was not pro the legislation and he wouldn't speak publicly in favor of it. So, he comes up to me to hand me the award, he's got this smile like that, and I say, "Yeah, thanks a lot, this would be great, but I'd rather have actual rights." And I regret to this day because he said, through his smiling teeth, "Well, they didn't bring me the legislation. I can't change things." Well, actually, he could have changed some things. He could have done executive orders. But he didn't do it. He was never positive, he never really supported us, and he was a Republican. He did very little, actually, as the mayor of Allentown. So, I go and I speak and I say, "This is great to have this but I haven't had these rights, and I am pledging my life to work for this," we had three tables of people there, people were very enthusiastic but I rue the day that I didn't say, "I just want to tell you all that Mayor Heydt whispered to me that he's going to support this legislation for the next three years, let's give him a big hand." I really wanted to do that. I wish I had said that. I just really wish I had said that. And I still wish I had said that because I don't think he could have gotten up in front of these people and said, "No, no, I don't support that legislation at all." He did a couple of really stupid things. He didn't support the Martin Luther King holiday, and he made some very foolish remarks about that in public meetings in front of folks like this where he really looked around the room and realized he made a big mistake, which was kind of funny, actually. But anyway, so I won that. That gave us a lot of momentum. People were paying more attention to us. There was an article in the paper about it, that was a significant thing. So, now, we end up recognizing that we have to do this. The next thing that happens is that we really developed a pretty good relationship with Felix Molina. Turns out, Felix is gay. He never even told us that. All through the time that we were doing the meeting, he never said he was, but he was. And it turned out that he was in a long-term relationship with the brother of somebody we knew who was at MCC, so then he outs himself to us. I'm producing more Valley Gay Presses, and I have the who's who, and he was in the who's who of the Valley Gay Press, that's one of the Valley Gay Press articles. He gets up and he says, "We're going to have the first Puerto Rican Day parade and festival, and I'm going to be the CEO of this. And I want you to have a float in it, and Pride to have a float in it." So, Pride had this float, we were all on it, we all worked together to make this float, and this thing happened. So, this, I think, was a year and a half later, in 2000. So, we're at the parade route, and Felix was a great organizer. He doesn't live in the Lehigh Valley anymore, but he was a terrific organizer. The parade started in the parking lot of the Sacred Heart High School, which is down the hill, down Gordon Street, at the bottom of Gordon Street, and we're going to gather there, gather all the floats, it was going to come up that steep hill on Gordon Street, and then go all the way along 4th Street to Jordan Park. It's a huge festival, way bigger, 20,000 people go to that festival. It's enormous. But this was the first one, and it was very exciting. And Felix had done a great job bringing lots of people together, and sometimes people who were a little edgy, people in the community who were a little edgy, different, car groups, and motorcycle groups, and stuff like that. And it's very, very exciting. We're all there early in the morning getting the stuff ready to go and we're going to be on, I think it was a float, actually. We were in the parade several times. Don Kohn had, in those days, a really terrific antique truck that we used to ride on the back of, we were going to throw Mardi Gras beads, we always had thousands and thousands of Mardi Gras beads to throw to people or to hand out, or something like that when we were doing events like this, or at the Pride festival. So, everybody's getting ready, and Felix is there, and he looks great but he's nervous because this stuff is all happening. I see him talking to some suit, and then he comes over to me and he's standing there, and he has this look on his face of hysteria. I said, "What's wrong?" And he said, "That guy's from the city and he says that I have to give him 1,000 dollars for an insurance policy right now or they're going to cancel the parade and the festival." And I said, "What would happen if you did that?" He said, "Well, look around," meaning that there could be a riot if that happened. And he said, "They're so worried that there's going to be violence and stuff like that because it's Latinos, it's all prejudice and bigotry," and he's just furious. And I said, "Well, can't you give him a check?" And he said, "I don't have my checkbook. I left it at home." I said, "Why did you do that?" And he said, "I didn't expect them to do this. This is a complete surprise. They hadn't said anything to me, but they're going to cancel it. He's with the police, there's a bunch of police over there." I said, "He wants a thousand-dollar check?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "Okay." So, I reach in my pocket where I keep my checkbook because in those days I was in the antiques business, and one of the tools of the antiques trade, and we had just done big shows, is you have a lot of cash in your checkbook, you often carry a lot of cash. I wasn't carrying a lot of cash. So, I opened my checkbook and I have 1,014 dollars in my checking account. I said, "Okay, I'm going to write you this check but you better damn well give me this money because I can't afford to give you this money." And he said, "Oh, no, no, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll give it to you tomorrow, I'll give it to you tomorrow morning." I said, "Okay, okay. I understand how important this is." So, now I've got my shaking hand and I'm filling out this check and the guy from the city, so he goes over to the city guy and goes, "I've got somebody that's going to give you a check." He said, "You're kidding." And the guy comes over and he goes, "Let me see your bank balance." I said, "I'm not going to show you my bank balance. You can't ask everybody what their bank balance is when they give you a check. I'm giving you a check and the check is good, that's all you need to know." Well, it was Sunday morning. So, even if my check hadn't been good, he couldn't have done it. Felix could have written him a bad check, which could have been good by the next morning, he just didn't have his checkbook. So, I write him the check and I hand him this thing, and then the guy is chagrined because he really thought that he was going to cancel the whole parade. And Felix did pay the money back the next morning. We walked along. It was not only that there were 20,000 people that were going to be the thing, but along the parade route, there were thousands and thousands of people. It's an enormous, wonderful parade. Or, it was in 1998. And it was so exciting, because it was the first one. So, we do the whole thing. We actually didn't do the festival because we didn't have a booth there, and we didn't have the money to pay for a booth because they actually charge quite a bit, people really do. It's more like now, with our Pride festival. But we did the parade, and we were happy about it, and that worked out. That was an enormously significant moment to cement our communities together to say, "We're here for you, and we're really supportive." And that was a really good thing. Felix and I were already working together, but this was a big deal that this happened. And also, he had specifically invited us to come. And I have to say that the reception of people on the sidelines was jubilant. People were cheering us from the sidelines. Nobody said anything negative or turned their back or anything like that. It was very, very significant. So, that happened. Okay, so now things are moving along and we're thinking we have to have a City Council member who's going to introduce this legislation and we have to have a mayoral candidate that's going to be supportive of it. So, we fasten on the idea that it has to be somebody who has a very flexible schedule, someone who works for themselves, so we fastened onto Gayle Hoover, and Gayle Hoover expressed that she would run for City Council if we did all the work for her. And so, I said, "Okay, I'll be your campaign manager, we have our big double house now, we will do all the mailings, I will help you with speeches," Gayle doesn't like to read speeches but every time she spoke, she would come over to me and I would say, "Say this, this, and this," and then she could get up and she can speak quite well off the cuff if she knows what she's supposed to say. She was quite good at speaking in situations like that. So, we begin to raise money for the campaign and stuff like that and we introduced the campaign. And you have to get signatures for people. And the people in the community did really support her. They gave money for her. We had to go around get Allentown voters to sign the petition for her candidacy. And so, she was working on it, a couple of other people were working on it, and Trish and I were working on it, and you have to have 100 signatures, so we wanted to be sure that our petition had at least 100 signatures on it so that everybody else's would go together, and we would have no challenges on the circumstances. So the other thing that happened at that time -- we were trying to get national organizations to support us, we asked the Victory Fund if they would support Gayle's campaign, they ultimately did. They were very slow and dragging their feet. One of the things that happened was that, also Julio Guridy decided to run for City Council. And we really liked Julio. He spoke for us, he had been very, very vocal. There was no person on Council who was -- Marty Velazquez was on Council but he was born in the United States and although he was pro Latino, he didn't speak Spanish and Julio would be the first Spanish-speaking person on Council that was really representing that part of the demographic of the city. So, we really supported his campaign. So, I said to Trish, "I'm going to circulate a petition for Julio, too." I think we did it for somebody else, but I can't remember. It was somebody who was running for school board, so we were circulating that petition as well, it was somebody who was LGBT. And Julio, although he's certainly not part of the LGBT community, he has members of his family who are not only gay, but also transgender. And at that time, he had a transgender person who was out in his family. So, now we begin to work with Mara Keisling to write the legislation before we move into the introduction of it. But first, we had to get Gayle to win. Well, we processed 35,000 pieces of mail through our house to make Gayle win this election. We got the voters list of Democratic super voters, it was important for her to win the primary, first of all. We had letters, a letter from Frank Concannon, his people directly, he was already elected as comptroller. We did all sorts of different things to make her -- I created some very good advertising documents. In those days, I don't think you can do this anymore, but you could send just a piece of paper that was folded over and people spent a lot of money on glossy stuff. I don't think that's necessary I think people think that people have a lot of money that they can do that. We were able to raise about, I don't know, 20,000, 30,000 dollars to run her campaign over the time of her campaign. I think Gayle Erich actually served as her treasurer for the election and that's a complicated thing to do. So, we did all of these things and we got her in position to do this. I was also circulating Julio's petition. And we had to get her on the ballot, she got on the ballot with no problem, there was about 300 signatures for her. On the day we turned in the signatures, that was the day that every candidate had to turn in their signatures, and I had 67 signatures for Julio, as well. The morning after everybody had turned in their petitions, Julio called me up and he said, "I circulated my own petition, I had 100 signatures on it, no more that. I had 100 signatures," and he said, "I was sure that Emma Tropiano would challenge my signatures, and all they would have to do is get one person who wasn't currently registered to vote, or who might not have been a Democrat or something like that." And he said, "And then I got in there and I saw 67 more signatures from you." And when he called me, he was laughing. He couldn't even speak. He goes, "I can't believe it, I can't believe it," and he was so happy that I did that. I have to say that Julio is still on Council. He's still on Council and every single piece of legislation, he's voted for us, even though he's from a very, very conservative church, and he stood up to his church and he's spoken for us and everything. I've never regretted that for a minute. But the Victory Fund said to me, "So, you've got a Latino guy and a gay woman. Can they both win?" I said, "I don't think so," because during this time, Emma Tropiano had run for mayor. And this was the time when she ran for the nomination against Marty Velazquez who ended up on Council. He was on Council, and he ended up running for Council and he was on Council at that time. But he had run for Council for the primary against Emma Tropiano. And we had endorsed Marty and we worked hard because Tropiano was a horrible, horrible far-right candidate, even though she was a Democrat. When the votes came in, it turned out that she was three votes ahead of Marty in the primary. But when they recounted the votes, when they counted the absentees, and they removed absentees from people who had actually voted, because once somebody had voted and absentee voted, so they took that out, Marty won the election against Emma Tropiano by one vote. And that was the one vote election, 2,640 to 2,641. And so, I said, I used that for years by saying to people, "If you voted for Marty Velazquez, you cast the winning vote." Now, the bad thing was that when they ran for mayor, Heydt won because Marty was a newcomer, he sounded like he was Latino, he didn't run a very good campaign, and so he didn't win. But we established ourselves very significantly as in the ability to win a candidate, a new candidate, against an old-time candidate. Now, Tropiano at the same time, in the next election, so she was on Council, the next election, she ran for City Council, and State Representative at the same time. Well, she lost both things because people didn't really think that she should do that. But she had an enormous following. So, she's been off Council for two years, but she was going to run for Council again, and she had, what we believe to be an enormous following in the City of Allentown because she'd been on Council for 18 years. But during this time some information would come out, she was a landlord, that she was a slumlord. She really was. And she was. She was a slumlord. She lived across the street from us. So, now we're at the point of the primary where we're campaigning and during the day of the primary, you'd go to various different sites and you'd hand out stuff, and we had people to hand out stuff for Gayle, and Gayle was working the sites and stuff like that. And I went to the South Side Youth Center, and that's a big polling place in the city, and I was handing out cards for Gayle. And Candido Garcia, who is a guy I know very well, he's part of the gay community, was standing next to me handing out cards for Julio. And we didn't want to admit to each other that there was a big chance that one of them wasn't going to win because it was against Tropiano, and there were only three candidates that could win, and I think one of them was Howells, and so, he was just going to win. He always won every election. He was this police chief, everybody voted for him. So, there was only two other slots in the primary. So, there were going to be three people in the primary, and ultimately, those people would probably win because there's far more Democrat voters in the city than Republicans. So, I'm there with Candido, and we're chatting, but we're trying not to be in this adversarial position because we're really in trouble because one of us is going to cut the other one's throat. So, we did this. It was cold. We did the whole thing, and we go home and Candido, he's back at his place. And then there's going to be a victory party at a restaurant in South Allentown, that I think Afflerbach had set up. And he was also running as the candidate for mayor. He was running against Sam Bennett. And after a while, we had figured out that Sam Bennett was not a very good candidate and that we really wanted Afflerbach, who said he would absolutely the passage of the ordinance, he would absolutely do it. And he spoke in favor of it. So, anyway, but this is the Gayle campaign. So, now, it's the end of the thing. So, I have to say, we don't like to go to the party until we already know who's won because we don't want to be there to see everybody crying when they don't win. And this is a tense one, I have to say that. I had worked the whole day ; I think Trish was at a different polling place. So, we'd worked the whole day at the polling places. So, we're watching the thing, we're watching the vote tick, vote tick, vote tick, and Julio and Gayle both won. And Tropiano was kicked off the ballot. So, we rush over to the party, and I go into the room, and I see Candido Garcia, and I throw myself into his arms, and we're jumping up and down chanting, "No more Emma, no more Emma," it was so great. He was crying, we were so happy. It was a wonderful moment. I'll never forget that. That was the City Council thing. We go over to Afflerbach's thing with a whole bunch of our people, and Afflerbach has won the nomination by 125 votes, I said, "I just brought your 125 votes in, and don't you forget where you have to be on this piece of legislation." He said, "I know exactly that I would not have won if you hadn't endorsed me." So, time goes along, and we get to the election and Roy Afflerbach is running against, I'm not sure, I don't think Heydt ran again, then, so he was running against a different candidate. He was running against that guy who worked at Air Products. And he wanted me to endorse him. He was a Republican. I can't remember his name. He was a nice guy, actually. He worked at Air Products. He wanted us to endorse him, and Afflerbach wanted us to endorse him. I said to Roy Afflerbach, who ultimately won, I said, "This other guy wants me to endorse him." And he said, "Well, you need to go and interview him." So, I interview him, and I say to him, and I can't remember this guy's name but, "The biggest problem with your campaign is that you are supporting to have your city solicitor be Robert Daday Jr., and Robert Daday Jr.'s father was a big PPL executive, but Robert Daday Jr. has publicly said that he doesn't support the antidiscrimination ordinance, vehemently. In fact, he even ran for office on that platform, 'I'm anti-gay.'" I said, "Why would you do that?" And so, the guy said, "I want you to meet with me and him, and I want you to [inaudible]." So, we go into the room, and I'm meeting him, and Daday's there and he's a lawyer, probably a little younger than I was, and the guy who wanted our endorsement said, "You don't have to not endorse the other guy, but you can endorse us both." I said, "Well, let me think about it." I said, "But the problem is, you want to have Daday." He said, "Well, yeah. He's going to be my city solicitor." So, I turn to Daday and I say to him, "So, do you support this ordinance?" And he said, "You can't have an ordinance like this unless the state has it," and I said, "People don't agree with you on that. People simply don't agree with you on that. Philadelphia has nondiscrimination ordinance ; how can you say that?" And he said, "Well, that's my position." And I said to Robert Daday , "Would you agree that other people don't have that position?" And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Other lawyers, other people in the state don't agree with you." And he said, "Well, yes." So, I turned back to the guy who's the candidate and I said, "So, get somebody else. Get somebody who supports it because I'm not going to support you if you're going to have a city solicitor that's going to constantly say you can't have these rights. Forget it." And so, he says, "Okay." So, I left. So, we supported Afflerbach. Afflerbach wins the election, Gayle wins the election, all three of the Democratic candidates win the election. This is true. Remember the Mary Cramsey thing I was talking about in the beginning, we didn't support her, and she lost the primary to Louie Hershman in her election which was two years before, and Hershman was on Council, I guess these are four-year terms. So, Louie Hershman was on Council, and Cramsey had lost. We didn't know where Hershman stood on the circumstances, but Louie Hershman had been comptroller of the city for a long time, and now, he was City Council member. It turns out he was also really, really anti-gay, and we probably would have done better with Mary Cramsey. But anyway. So, now, he's on Council. There's a guy named Tom Burke, who's a Republican, Julio's on Council, Marty Velazquez, Gayle Hoover, David Howells Sr. is still on Council, and Louie Hershman and David Bausch, who was another Republican who was also on Council. Bob Lovett was the guy who was running for mayor. He was a nice guy. He just recently died ; I think. But he was supporting a person that -- so, we didn't do it. Anyway, they won. We were really excited. So, now, January 3rd, they're installed into the position of the legislature, to be on City Council and Afflerbach is mayor, and Afflerbach said to us, "Pass the legislation right away we're still in the sweetheart period. Don't wait around for this. You need to pass the legislation now." So, Mara Keisling comes to us, Mara Keisling is the head, now, of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. She was working for an organization that she ran, she's transgender and she was running this organization in the State of Pennsylvania. She sits with us in our kitchen, this top person in the state, and she writes the legislation. She said, "This is all about the definitions, and so we're going to write this legislation, we're going to write the definition of gender identity, as this," and she writes "gender identity is the," and the language in the law is specifically what she wrote on our kitchen table, that language is in every law that has passed since we passed the ordinance in 2002, and Mara has worked on these things all across the country. She's a major, major activist. But she was working for us, there. It was great that she did this. She was out of Harrisburg, actually. And she helped us do this. Now, we do the same thing. We get everybody ready to speak and to do all of these things and to do these speeches in council. And finally, we go ahead and Steve comes to the council meeting and we're working on all of this stuff. And Steve was involved in all of this stuff, too, and he comes and we're at the council meeting, we're standing up to speak, now I have to say the person who was the head of the anti people, now it's called Citizens for Traditional Family Values, they're totally in the way there, and it's Frank McVeigh, he's the head guy. He had been a Muhlenberg Professor. I think by then he was retired, but he had been the Muhlenberg Professor who was tenured, he was so conservative and he said such horrible things that were not true that they told him he could never teach classes again. But because he was tenured, he got to still get paid for the college for years until he finally retired. And he was a horrible person in every possible way. But he was pretty active. He was in his 70s, then, and he was quite well-spoken because he was a college professor. So, he gets up and he says some stuff about they're never really discriminated against, and it's beyond what the law says, and all this stuff. But then there are also horrible people who say pedophile, stuff like that. But we still have really, really good speakers, terrific speakers. and we had talked to each member of council, we had lobbied the members of council, we're going to introduce a piece of legislation that had sexual orientation and gender identity to add to the Human Relations Commission's Ordinances of the City of Allentown. This was the first time that the words "gender identity" would be used in any piece of legislation in the state of Pennsylvania, at all, ever, for civil rights. And so, Philadelphia didn't have it, Pittsburgh didn't have it, it was covered by some legislation simply by the extension of the definition of what it was to be sexual orientation, but there was no use of the words gender identity. And people in our own community said to me and other people, "You shouldn't try to pass this with gender identity, you're never going to get this through. Just go with the gay stuff," and I said, "You know, we get discriminated against all the time based on gender identity. People are really discriminated against on it, it's more likely that's going to be what happens. Everything that people say in terms of discrimination is couched in those terms anyway, so I think we need to do it. I think it's wrong to leave people behind and I don't think we'll ever be able to add it in if we don't do it. So, we have to do it." And the other thing that hit me at that time was a piece of information that I had read someplace. We still didn't have Facebook or anything, we had email then, but I had read a thing that said that our enemies would deny us oxygen if they could, so we might as well ask for all our rights because asking for less is not going to get them on our side. It's not a compromise that's going to make them okay with it. They're still going to find a reason to say no, so ask for everything. Don't leave any part of the community behind. And I agreed with that. So, we went with that description of sexual orientation and gender identity. So, Tom Burke, who was a Republican on Council took the legislation that we have proffered to them and he wrote five amendments to it that would be voted separately by Council. So, Gayle introduced it, I think Julio was the second, he wanted to be the second. We were pretty sure that we could get Marty, although at one point to me he said, "Well, this thing about gender identity is so new and leading-edge," and I said to him, this was 1998, I said, "Minneapolis has had this in place since 1976." And he said, "But that was just two years ago." I said, "No, '76, not '96. This has been in places in the United States for 22 years and there have never been any problem with it, Marty. It's not cutting-edge. It's now. This is what needs to be done." And in fact, Gayle said, "As a real estate agent are we going to update the 1950s house to the 1970s or are we going to update it to the 1990s? We need to be doing this now. This needs to be current. We don't have to go and make this something that's going to appease people from the '70s, that's ridiculous. We need to make it current." And she said that publicly. So, we had the piece of legislation written, Mara had written it great, Tom Burke wrote these amendments to it and some of them we didn't agree with. One of them was that nobody would have to give approximation of marital benefits, or domestic partner benefits based on this legislation. We didn't agree with that. But they had it. And some of them were procedural. And one of them was that mission-driven organizations would be exempt from the law. Well, that's actually a federal thing, mission-driven organizations like churches are always exempt from a law. If you're a mission-driven organization like Cedar Crest College for the mission is to be pro women, they can say, "We're not going to have men in the dorms." It's their right to do that, that's what a mission does it's perfectly okay for mission-driven organizations like the NAACP to say, "We're just going to give scholarships to Black kids," that's racial discrimination, but it's their mission, so it's okay. That's not against the law, it's based on the Constitution of the United States, and we don't have an argument with that. So, that was fine that they were going to put that in. And they had a bunch of other things in there. Okay, it's been 90 minutes now. Do we have to stop? Can we go another half hour? MF: Yes, let's finish this arc. LB: Okay. So, there's all these different things that are happening, but in essence, Steve and I are watching the people on Council and Gayle is doing what she used to call a bend over, which is where they lean back and they try to talk behind the backs of the other people on Council so they can have a conversation and she's talking to Marty, and I can see her talking to Marty, we knew we had Julio's vote, we had one other person's vote, David Howells wanted to do what the mayor wanted him to, so even though he'd voted no before, we thought that he could be a yes vote. We knew that Hershman was anti, and we knew that Bausch was a stodgy Republican, even though many people would suggest that he's part of the LGBT community. Many people have suggested that, allegedly. So, I think he's still around, lives on 7th Street. So, Steve comes over to me and he goes, "They're going to pass it. We've got four votes. I can see them. I can see the four votes up there." So, Gayle says, "Okay, we're going to vote," and then Julio seconds it, and they vote, and we win. We win the legislation and we're just jubilant. And we felt a lot of positive things about that. I wrote stuff in the Valley Gay Press about it. But the next morning, Frank McVeigh with Citizens for Traditional Family Values files a referendum in the city to overturn the past ordinance. So, the ordinance is in place, Afflerbach signs it into place right away, we have the pens, it's in his signed thing, a copy of it is in our waiting room on the third floor, because I kept it, of the Bradbury-Sullivan Center. And we were happy. But right away, we knew that they were going to do this. So, the City of Allentown has an opportunity for people to be able to create a ballot initiative referendum on the ballot by getting 2,000 signatures of registered Allentown voters saying that they want something to happen. So, McVeigh gets his band of hatemongers -- and they really were -- to put together a petition. They filed a formal petition and they're required to carry around the legislation itself and then get the 2,000 signatures. So, they get about 15 people to do this. And one of them was Lou Hershman who was on council at the time. He said he was going to do this. Bausch didn't do it, which I think was good, at least, that he didn't do that. So, this is the interesting part, actually. They had these people, they were running around. The way the procedure works is, they have 50 days, or maybe 40 days, to get 2,000 signatures. Yeah, this is right. They have 40 days to get 2,000 signatures. Then, the other side, our side, gets 20 days to disprove the signatures. Then, they get 10 days to go back and get more signatures to undo the disproved signatures, and we get five days to disprove those signatures. It all comes out to about 70 days, which was 70 days in hell. So, luckily, we have our big house. We know that Frank McVeigh is running around town getting people to sign this petition. And I start thinking, "What are we going to do about this? We've got to get people to not do it." And so, we work hard to try to stop people from doing it. At one point, I figured that he has done this in his own neighborhood, which is in the west side of Allentown, the northwest side, he's on 19th Street, the northwest side of Allentown. And I actually went door-to-door in his neighborhood just asking people to not sign the petition. It was very hard to do. I still feel uncomfortable about going in that neighborhood at all. Some people said, "Oh yeah, I think I signed that." I mean it was horrible. But the thing that happened was we will begin to realize that he was being successful. He was getting a lot of signatures. And I was sitting at my computer one day at my office in my house, because we were doing this all out of our house, and all the sudden, I saw that the Senior Fest was happening in the city of Allentown. And I thought, "McVeigh's going to be at the Senior Fest. He's going to be working the room to get seniors to sign this thing." The Senior Fest is three days. So, I just drop everything, and I run over there, and in the parking lot is Frank McVeigh. He's there. Trish and I are there. So, I said to Trish, "You, keep him busy," and I rushed back to our house and I sent out an email, and that's all I could do, was send an email to my list and I said, "Emergency, we need supporters to come immediately to Ag Hall's parking lot, immediately, to show up. I need people to back me up." I get back there, and by the time I get there, Steven Ziminsky, Joe Canto, and [Tom Andy?] were all big, tall, heavy guys, very sweet guys. One of them is a schoolteacher. Steven Ziminsky was a music teacher in Allentown City School System and he was a teacher then. And they said, "Here we are." And they stood behind me, and every time somebody walked up to McVeigh, he would try to get them, I would follow him up and say, "Please don't sign that." I'd just keep doing that, "Please don't sign that. Please don't sign that. It's really anti," and people would say, "I don't want to deal with this at all." Well, great. That's what we wanted. The next day, we go to the Senior Fest, and we go in and we see that Pat Toomey, who at that time was our congressman, had a Congressional table, and Frank McVeigh was running the table, and I saw him get somebody to sign the petition. Now, that's a completely illegal thing to do. Completely illegal. To push biased legislation from a taxpayer paid table. Trish and I are both there. So, I go over to the Republican table where they were registering people to vote, and I scream at the top of my lungs, "How dare you have my taxpayer money supporting that guy over there. He's working on anti legislation. He's breaking [every law for me?]," and I'm doing it and doing it and doing it, I'm yelling and yelling, and they're like, "What are you talking about?" I said, "There's a guy over there doing that." So, they go over to McVeigh and they say, "You can't do this here. Stop it. You cannot do this here. You're going to get us all in trouble. You're not allowed to do this. You're going to get Pat Toomey in trouble." And McVeigh was actually a Democrat. And by the way, I remember standing at one point at the table keeping people from signing him and I said, "You know, aren't you divorced? And you say because you're Catholic that's why you're anti-gay?" And he said, "Well, I tried to get the church to annul it, but they wanted 10,000 dollars." I said, "You're just so full of crap. You walk out on your family," he goes, "I didn't walk out on my family," I said, "Look, I've never been divorced and you're telling me that my relationship is no good." I would have said anything to him. And at one point, Trish was standing with him, and she says to Frank McVeigh, and remember, this is a 70-year-old guy. She's standing there, and Frank McVeigh turns to Trish and she was older then, it was a while ago, and he says to her, and I think this was the most telling thing, he says to her, "Aren't you embarrassed that you're a lesbian?" See what that means? Because somebody said to me, "Why is McVeigh doing this?" And I said, "Why do you think? Who is the person who has the most hate for LGBT people? It's internalized homophobia. Nobody does this unless it's internalized. Nobody goes this far unless it's internalized." So, we call Steve, who was a brilliant strategist. So, he, that night, goes to the bar. He goes to the Stonewall and he gets all these people at the Stonewall to call Pat Toomey's office on Monday morning, dozens of people, over and over and over again, every office, "How dare you use my taxpayer money to be able to do this. I'm going to bring ethics charges against you in the state of Pennsylvania for allowing people to do this," and I said, "Steve, how did you get all these people?" He goes, "I'm a bar queen. It's one of my strengths." He worked both bars. He went to Diamonz and Stonewall, and he got literally dozens of people. And they were hilarious. [Donna Masara?] was recounting to me how she had called and had just screamed on the phone at Toomey's office, at both their Harrisburg office and their local office. Pat Toomey, he's a congressman, calls Steve up and says, "How can I get people to stop calling my office?" And Steve says, "This is how you do it. I want you to write to us a statement that we can put on a letter to everybody that signed this petition that says, 'Pat Toomey does not support the overturning of this ordinance, and that the current ordinance should stay in place.'' So, we got him and State Senator Pat Brown and State Representative Jennifer O'Mara. Pat Brown is a Republican, Jennifer O'Mara's a Democrat, she was our State Representative. And the mayor of Allentown, and four city councilmembers, and the head of the Human Relations Commission, and the chief of police, and all of them signed this letter. And we had this letters and we were using it to hand out to people. We would say to people, "Look, you know some of these people. You voted for somebody on this list. They don't want you to sign this petition." And that's what it said. And Pat Toomey said, "Yeah, go ahead. Put my name in it. I don't disagree with this to overturn legislation that's already been in place, especially by misrepresenting it in my space." So, okay. Now we begin to find out that McVeigh is lying to people about what this ordinance is about. And all the other people that are working with him, none of them were as good as he. He ended up getting 1,000 signatures, and the rest of them, altogether, got about 1,500 signatures. And there were 14 of them and one of him. And another thing that happened was that one of the days to get people to sign that kind of petition is during the primary because you had to have registered voters do it. So, if you're standing at a polling place that person that's coming into vote is absolutely registered to vote so you can count on them being registered to vote. So, he and some of his people, he had a woman named [Diane Barra?] who was really active in doing this as well, she was involved with Saint Peter's and Paul's Catholic Church [on Saint John's Street] and she was working that area. And McVeigh was working his neighborhood and he was trying to get people. Well, we got 70 volunteers to cover every single polling place in the Lehigh Valley, in Allentown, keep just say, "Don't sign that petition," and to be sure that their people wouldn't be there to get these signatures. Because if they weren't registered voters, their signature was no good. So, they had to get registered voters. And it's hard to guarantee that people are registered voters, or even from Allentown when you're just on the street or something like that. We had an enormous group of people that were doing this, very, very significant. And Roberta Meek trained all of the people who were doing this. She helped us to do that, to train everybody to act in the right way to people in a positive way, so all of these people that were our volunteers were trained to be pleasant to people, but to say, "Please don't do that," to not be aggressive and not be inappropriate. And we began to raise money for this campaign to make this happen. Gayle Hoover was speaking publicly in a positive way for us. So, did Roy Afflerbach, the mayor. But they were telling people, "This will give you a chance to vote in favor of gay rights." Well, we were finding that McVeigh, what he would do is, he would go into somebody's driveway and he'd look at the bumper stickers on their car, and then he would tell them when he'd go into the door, the petition was about that issue, "This is about green space." "This is about literacy." "This is about honoring Jesus." "This is about pro-life." And they were saying, "I'm pro-life, sign this petition." And they were saying this. We were finding, now, that his people were taking it and putting it as the Bingo sign-in sheet at Catholic churches. They were telling people, "If you don't sign this you won't be able to vote in the next election." It was complete voter fraud. It was absolutely illegal to do that. They were saying to people all sorts of different things and the most dastardly was, this would allow people to vote on a ballot for gay people to have rights. Well, we already had the rights, it was to vote against the rights. And Diane Varra was particularly heinous. She was scary. She was a scary person in a lot of ways. So, one of the things was, each weekend we would go to churches because they would hit all the Catholic churches ; both of these people were Catholic, and they really believed that they could get people to sign. So, we'd hit the Catholic churches. We would go to Saint Peter and Paul's. Diane Varra was awful. But one time, she came up to me and she hugged me. I said, "Don't touch me. Why are you doing that? You're going to make people so they can't get housing and their jobs. Why would you do this?" And she goes, "Well, this is about separation of church and state." I said, "No, it isn't." And she said, "Well, if people sign this," she had this whole theory about how the Human Relations Commission are judge and jury, and they're legislative. But I said, "No, they're not. That's not true. And it doesn't matter anyway, because all this is going to do is take the phrase that we added into the ordinance out." And she said, "No, that's not what --" I said, "Look, if that is what it is, will you stop doing this?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Give me your petition." So, she gives me the petition, and the legislation is on it. I said, "Everything that's underlined is what's going to be removed. There's nothing in here that's underlined that's going to remove how the Commission runs. So, you're lying to people to get them to do this." It was very scary. And later, someone told me that she, allegedly, somebody told me this, but allegedly, that she had actually, again, internalized homophobia situation, where she has been involved with somebody, had been thrown out of her church and then some other things. She'd try to have these serious conversations and I didn't want to talk to her. She was scary. And she was lying, too. But they're getting more and more signatures, it's really scary. But our plan was at that point, once they have all the signatures, then it becomes public information. We can get the signatures and we can try to disprove people who may have signed more than once, or may have not been Allentown voters, or not actually lived in Allentown. So, the next thing that happens is that I get a telephone call from a guy named Dan Anders. He lives in Philadelphia and he was a lawyer at Pepper Hamilton, which is an enormous law firm. And he says, "I am going to work for you for nothing." No, he says, "I can help you fight this. I have a lot of experience in doing this. I'm a Constitutional lawyer, I can do all of this stuff. I can help you fight this," and I said, "We don't have any money," and he said, "No, this is a good thing. Not only am I pro bono for you, but Pepper Hamilton will pay me to do it, so it doesn't matter. I'm not losing any money. I can just do it for you, and they'll pay for every aspect of this suit, no matter what we do." I said, "Yay." He said, "Pepper lets everybody do one big, serious case, and this is mine for the year." So, the next step was that he said, "What I'm going to do was, I'm going to create what is known as a legal document that's an unsworn document that you can mail to people, or they can sign, that says they're requesting their name to be removed from the petition. And this is a legal document. It's not notarized, but it's a legal document. And so, now, when you go around to people, you can get them to remove their name in this way. You don't just have to disprove them ; they can remove their name." So, the next stage was that they filed petitions and hundreds of people, literally hundreds of people, volunteered to come into our house, take the petitions and manually enter them into a format where, because they were handwritten, and manually enter them into spreadsheets so that we could track the names and addresses of these people and then write the telephone numbers. Then, we would call the people, ask them if they wanted to have their name taken off the list, and then if they said yes, I or another Allentown resident, would go to their house and have them sign this removal thing. Well, after about three or four days, we had 150 of those things. No, we had about 100. So, we went to have a press conference to say that we were fighting this referendum. So, we went to City Hall, and this is a great story. It's going to go on for a while, though. So, we go to City Hall, I'm upstairs at City Hall, which is where the City Clerk is, Mike Hanlon. And I think he still is city clerk, he's a great guy. And we are going to present these 80 documents, or 100 documents that say, "I want my name off the petition." Now, the anti people also showed up. We had the news there, and we had the TV cameras, and we had the Morning Call, and also the other newspaper that was in Allentown at that time. And I had people to speak. One woman, she was a Catholic mom, she had eight kids in her house, and they're all teenagers. And I said, "Well, you signed this petition," she said, "I didn't sign that." I said, "No, you did. I have this thing," and I said, "I can tell you what day it was and the person who signed it, it was a guy named Frank McVeigh, this is what he looks like, here's a picture of him." She goes, "He didn't tell me what that was about." I said, "That's to remove the rights of gay people." She said, "I would never have signed that. I have nephews who are gay." And then, one of her kids came in, it was a teenager, she said, "Can you believe that somebody would get me? This is terrible." And I said, "Well, would you speak in front of cameras to say that?" And she said, "Yeah, I would. I would. I'm very angry that I did that." And actually, a woman who ended up to being on school board and then on council, Jeanette Eichenwald had signed because she had been told that it was about freedom of speech. And so, she wasn't there for that thing, but I did have another young woman who was told at her church, she was instructed to do it by her priest who believed that it was for gay rights. And it had been misrepresented and she said, "I would not have signed this. I think that's wrong." And she was a young Latino woman who lived on 7th Street, she had a whole bunch of kids, and she came and she spoke. And then this woman, this mom, this Catholic mom. And so, one of the reporters said, "Well, why did you sign it? What did he tell you to get you to sign it?" And she said, "Well, I'm in favor of that piece of legislation," and he said, "What are you talking about?" And she said, "Well, he told me it was about green space." And that was a huge, significant thing, because she's like, "I'm in favor of green space, of course I would sign a petition like that. He told me that's what it was about." So, now that's happened. So, now all the people who are typing, and Beth Goudy was one of the people, Reverend Goudy, they were amazing during the time. Beth went by she, then. They were amazing during that time. And Beth Goudy can type faster than anyone. She could have done that as a job. And she was one of the main people. And she was entering this data, pages and pages, there were thousands of pages of things. She was really good. And [Stott Lobner?] was doing it, and we had a whole bunch of people that were working on that end. And then, we had people who would get the names, they would look up the persons in stacks of telephone books we had around, to get their name and telephone number. Then, they'd get their telephone number, then they'd call them up and say, "Did you mean to sign this?" And if they said, "No," then we'd go get it. Now, that was a very hard thing to do. Roberta Meeks daughter-in-law, Jenna Azar, who works at Muhlenberg, she is straight, and she said, "This is not bothering me as much as the other gay people," but one guy, Earl Schneider, he was there and we had rooms throughout the house set up with phone lines. Because we had four landlines and then people just were beginning to have cell phone so some people could call on cell phones. But you had to pay for cell phone calls, for every call you made. But people would come in with their cell phones to do that, too. But people were on the landlines and they'd have these lists, and then they'd call the people. Every time we finished a list, then other people would look up the telephone numbers, and then that person would take the list, and they would make the calls. If you call one person and they were anti-gay, "I want my name to stay on there, I hate you gay people," and then you called another one, and that person said that, too, and then you called another one, and that person said that, too, you couldn't do it anymore. It was the end of it. It was too devastating. And every person who had that many people in a row do that, made people devastated. It was just devastating. Unless they were straight. And then it just made them mad. So, the straight people allies that were doing this, like Jenna Azar said, "It's not affecting me because it's not me. They're not talking about me it's just making me mad, so it makes me want to call more people." Most people said, "I didn't sign that," and then they'd say, "Well, you did," and then most people we could get on the phone, at least half of them would take their names off. It was hard enough to get people on the phone. But in those days, we didn't have cell phones. We couldn't have done it if it was cell phones, because we can't get people's cell phone numbers. And people don't answer the phone if they don't know who it is. Then, everybody would answer the phone. So, we would just keep doing that and doing that. Sometimes people would call us back. We'd leave a message and people would call us back and say, "I didn't mean to sign that, I want my name off of it," and then we would deal with it. So, now we were getting more of the sheets. But we finally got to the point where we had entered every one of the 2,500 names, it was a little bit over 2,500 into a spreadsheet. And we did a mailing to every one of those people. And the mailing had the unsworn statement, and then an explanation of what happened, and a letter that came from all of those people that they knew, the chief of police, and all these different people, saying, "You should take your name off it." And we mailed out the letter. We had all these people working to make the letter and mail it, and everything. So, we sent it out in a big, bulk mailing with a stamped envelope in it, with a stamp on it, so people could just sign the thing and send it back. And some of the people who were calling, I remember [Carol Pasquale?] she was talking to a guy and she said, "What? Well, donations," and the guy said to her, "Where are you getting so much money to be able to do this?" And she said, "Donations." Some people would be very negative when we'd call them, and they'd be really horrible and we'd be shocked by that. It was painful when that happened. I tried not to do it because it was hard enough when we went to the churches and the people would just say horrible things. I have to backtrack on this. One time, we were at the Cathedral Church, and we would go and McVeigh was there, and he had this guy who was a man who was Black, which is significant, I can't remember his name, but he had worked in the effort in Cleveland to overturn their non-discrimination ordinance that had happened about eight years before. And this guy, who didn't live in Allentown, so he couldn't really do as much activism as a person who was in Allentown, and he couldn't speak to council and stuff like that he looked like a ringer." He had gone to Liberty University where they actually say that white people and Black people are not allowed to marry while they're students there. And he was married to a white woman. The whole thing was so weird. And so, at one point, he told McVeigh -- or he was going to videotape us all as we worked to try to get people to not sign. I think this is important to point out because it's anecdotal. And Steven Ziminsky was there, and he was a teacher. And this guy, and I can't remember his name, but he pans over to Steven Ziminsky, and Zaminski goes, like that. He didn't care. He was totally out. He had written letters to the editor about being an openly gay man as a teacher, specifically about the Boy Scouts and how it was negative for the LGBT community. He was out. We were out. We didn't care. So, apparently when he was doing it in Cleveland, people were uncomfortable about being in the video and he thought we would be, and we weren't. And he's standing up at the top of the steps and he drops the camera, and it rolls all the way down the steps, and I'm like, "Well, you know, I think maybe this is God." But all of the things that were happening there had enormous numbers of devastating things, but positive things. So, three things. I'll give you one devastating thing. This woman comes up to me, she's coming out of the church, and she looks, to me, as a gaydar circumstance, she looks like a lesbian. And McVeigh runs up to her and says, "Sign this thing," and she starts to sign. And I say, "Please don't sign that. Please don't sign that. It's going to take rights away from the gay community." And she turns to me, and she says, "This was bad. This was a bad piece of legislation. They never give anybody a chance to even know anything about this, they just passed it," and she walked away, and she had a leash for her dog, which I don't know why she was, but she was angry, she was really angry. But then, a few minutes later, a man walks down the steps, a middle-aged man, an older, like my dad's age kind of thing, and she walks down the steps, he comes up to me and he puts his arms around me and he's crying, and he says, "I love my lesbian daughter. I would never sign something like this." And then I see McVeigh go around the side and there's a nun standing in the corner, an older nun, looked like one of those big, heavy, stereotypical nuns. And she's standing down in the corner of this thing next to the steps. And McVeigh goes up to her with the petition, and she goes, "Psh." to him, and I said to Charlie Versaggi, who was a big donor to that church, he said, "Oh my god, you know, I've given so much money to this church, I could kick a priest down the steps, and they'd still listen to me here. They'd never give me a hard time. That nun is one of my best friends. She would never sign a piece of this stuff." So, there was that kind of stuff happening every day. These terrible things where McVeigh was saying all these things, saying you can't vote and stuff like that. So, now, we have these letters, and we mail them out to everybody. And we do it through the bulk mail place, so it goes really fast and gets to people by the next day. So, we had a big post office box at the hub mail place in Bethlehem, so Steve and I, it's only two days after we mailed the letter, but he goes, "Well, let's go and check the mail, and maybe we've gotten some checks from people, and maybe there's some of these return letters back." And I said, "Well, it's been so soon." He goes, "Yeah, but if people did it right away, we could have a few." So, he goes into the post office, I just pulled up to the post office because he was going to go get the mail and just come back and jump in my car, so I'm in the car, he goes into the post office. And about five minutes, 10 minutes later, comes back out, and he has a huge thing of envelopes, and he's screaming, "There's hundreds of envelopes in here. There's hundreds of envelopes. These are back to us. These are return envelopes to us." And we're sitting in the car opening them and they're just one after another saying, "I never would have signed this, this is a terrible thing, I'm totally pro," there was about 300 envelopes in that. And every day for the next 30 days, at least for the next 20 days because we needed them soon because I think we only had 20 days to disprove this stuff. So, during that time we're getting this huge number of stuff coming back, many, many envelopes coming back. And it's very significant. We're also finding out that people like Lou Hershman was a total idiot in that he was getting people at his church to sign the stuff, but he was actually filling in the information himself. And in some instances, he would get them to sign and then he would fill in their address at a later time. He was using his signature, bright blue ink fountain pen, so it showed on every sheet. And sometimes, he would forget and write in his own address. And he did it over, and over, and over again because he just wasn't thinking. He was just being nutty. And he wasn't telling people what it was about. He was making them think that it was his petition to be able to run for office. But he had actually signed some people's names. We could tell he signed people's names because you could tell by the pen. And you could tell by the handwriting. And so, I actually went to David Howells Sr., and I said, "Does Lou Hershman know that if he's misrepresented this, he could go to jail for doing this by signing people's names?" So, he actually told Louie Hershman that, and he reported back to Gayle that Hershman was devastated. He actually blanched and was sitting with his head down thinking, because he knew he had done it. At one point, Ricardo Montero who published the Latino newspaper, El Torero, was notoriously antigay. And Montero and his daughter, who was an adult, were very, very vocally anti this and they said some terribly negative things about Julio, really rude things, implying he was gay and implying he was a child molester, and all sorts of things like that. So, Montero was notorious for this. He was very, very conservative, and oddly, because most Latinos are not that conservative. In this city, most Latinos are Democrats. But he wrote in his paper a lot of editorials that were very negative. And we met with him on call about that, because The Morning Call disbursed El Torero, they gave them away free and we went and said, "Now, this is wrong for you to do this," because The Morning Call had a very positive editorial for us, and so, "This guy is doing this and why are you giving out this paper for free?" they weren't paying him. So, they discontinued it. They stopped giving out El Torero for free. There was another Latino newspaper in town, and we contacted them. And [Maria Lavandere?], who did all of our translating for us, was really terrific in being able to do outreach. She worked at one time, with CASA Guadalupe, and then did lots of really good translating because she could understand a lot of idioms that were from various different communities that different Latino communities would use. And she was one of the main volunteers, too. [Laura Guiteras?] worked with us in every part of us and fundraising and everything, so she created a system that we could enter the names of people who took off their names on the sheet and that we could track the people so that every time we were entering their names and taking off the names and saying, "These are the people," and then we'd make a notation, "Name removed," and Trish and I were going for the voter place, and it was a very complicated than that she created but it was easy to use, this instrument that Laura created. We went to City Hall to the voter registration and found that loads and loads of the people were not registered to vote, many, many of them were not from Allentown. You could see by their addresses that they weren't in the city. They lived in Emmaus, or something. Multiple people, because they were told this was different things, they signed many, many times. Trish went to the house of one guy who said that he was a World War II veteran and that he had been in a foxhole with a gay man who had saved his life, and he would never ever have signed this thing. And he was honoring this person. It was very serious stuff. So, now we're getting all of this mail back and we're being very successful. And we've gotten hundreds and hundreds of letters back, I think we may have had about 700 of the things back by now. We've had enough to nullify their petitions. So, we're going to Dan Anders, our lawyer, now to support us taking those petitions to Mike Hanlon, who was the City Clerk, to decide whether or not to take the names off based on these letters. So, I said to the city, "Do you need any kind of ability to determine whether or not these are real signatures?" Because after all, how do you know where the petition is? We had developed a system based on all of the petitions which were physically in their offices, but we had copies of, to figure out how to designate and find the name of each person. Frank McVeigh had maybe 12 petitions, and then most other people had one or two. So, there would be a sheet of names and it would say on it, "This is McVeigh number one," and McVeigh number one is the one that has the first signature is this person's name." And so, if we say that this person is taking their name off, they are on McVeigh number one, line 17. So, what Mike Hanlon did was, he ultimately said, because he had hundreds and hundreds, so he couldn't check everyone, so he checked every tenth one, and every tenth one was absolutely there. The name was there. And so, he figured that they were all legitimate and there wasn't one single one that was a fake petition, because they claimed that we could have faked the petition. And in the meantime, they had done articles and stuff that made them look terribly bad. They'd done an article with a young reporter from the other paper, it was called the Allentown Times. And he had audiotaped all these things, and he'd printed what they said, and then they insisted that he had made up the things, and he hadn't. He hadn't. He had the tape of them speaking and stuff. And Diane Varra wrote a letter to the editor at one point that was so fraught with lies that The Morning Call wouldn't print it. It was just inflammatory and wrong. At one point, I contacted a woman, I called her and she said she wanted her name off of the petition, so I went to see her and she was over in an interesting part of town. She's an older woman. And she said, "A lot of people wanted to tell me stories about how they were not racist," and she was telling me because she didn't believe in discrimination. She said, "I can't understand. I don't know how my name got on this petition." And I said, "Well, maybe you were told it was a Bingo sign-in sheet." She said, "No, that wouldn't have happened." And she said, "I want you to know that when I was 16, I would go to the canteen for the soldiers and I would dance with the Black soldiers, even though I was white, even though none of the other white girls were because I didn't think that people should be prejudiced against them." And I thought that was so cute. And so sweet. And I said to the woman, "Where did you get this?" She said, "I don't know where this signature --," and I said, "Do you know Diane Varra?" And she said, "Oh yeah, I know her very well." I said, "Well, she got you to sign this." And she said, "Really?" Meaning, you know, Diane Varra who, allegedly, anyway. And I had one woman who said that Diane Varra had pressured her into signing because she went to church every day and she said, "She met me at the church, but I want to take my name off, it was just easier for me to sign because I didn't want her to pressure me, just take my name off. I'm very glad to take my name off." It was interesting. So, anyway, now we have all these letters. So, now Dan Anders says to me -- is there any other stories that I need to tell that are significant? Because there's a million stories. This went on for days and days and days. So, Dan calls me up, and he's calling us every day, and Steve's calling me every day, but mostly Trish and I led this effort. We were really doing this effort. Steve was in Pen Argyl. He really worked on the hate crimes bill, but he was helping us, and he would come up with great ideas but for the most part, we were on the ground here. And Steve really wasn't very good at cajoling volunteers. Now, let me say this. This was one of the worst possible things that you could ever imagine. People would come into our house at 7:00 AM, and they would work on these typing things whenever they had free time and they would stay until midnight every day for 70 days. The only time that we could get away from this was when I would read a book in bed at 12 o'clock because every other minute of the day, I was afraid Frank McVeigh was out getting signatures during this time. And we had all sorts of people working for us to make that not happen, but it was very, very hard. Okay, so Dan Anders says, "Okay, we're going to stop this right now." And I said, "What are we going to have to do?" He says, "We're going to have you bring a lawsuit," me, "against those people, against Citizens for Traditional Values, and it's going to be the first four names of the people on the petitions," and it was McVeigh, and Hartman and it actually says, "Liz Bradbury versus Hartman," was the first name. We'd bring a lawsuit against them saying that they were abridging my civil rights by lying to people, and I would represent the rest of the LGBT community because I live here, and I'd be able to speak and stuff like that. I said, "Okay, do it." I said, "Why is that going to stop them?" He said, "Because we're going to subpoena every one of them, and we're going to make them explain why all these people are saying that they lied to them to get their names. We're going to depose them. We're going to depose everyone." So, people who don't know, when you get deposed, it's like being on the stand. You cannot lie. If you lie, it's perjury. You're there with other lawyers, and now, Pepper Hamilton is paying for all this, and they produced these enormous lawsuits with these booklets and books and stuff, and all this stuff, it's going to cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. The actual cost of it, for Dan's hours and everything, was about 150,000 dollars that Pepper Hamilton ate for us. At least that much. He would normally get 350 dollars an hour, in those days. So, they had a lawyer, too, and their lawyer was part of that Focus on The Family group where they train lawyers to do this kind of anti-gay effort. It was really gay in those days, to be anti-gay laws. And I want to say the thing about Louie Hershman, so don't forget about that. So, he was advising their group of people. And their group of people came to him and said, "We just got these deposition requests. We're going to be deposed." And he said, "Yeah, you better get a lawyer." And they said, "Well, you're our lawyer," and he said, "Well, I can't do this for every one of you. There's 15 of you. I'm working for myself here, nobody's paying me. I'm just working pro bono. I'm not charging you, but nobody's paying me. But you don't have to worry because you didn't lie to these people, did you?" And they said, "Well, what do you mean?" He said, "Well, you didn't tell them that this was about something else, you just said this was to get this on the ballot to remove the law," and they said, "Well, what if we didn't say that?" And he said, "Well then, you may have broken the law. She could win. She could bring a huge lawsuit against you and make millions of dollars. What the hell? Why would you lie to them? That was wrong. You can't do that. You can't lie to people on this kind of thing." Well, McVeigh had lied to hundreds and hundreds of people. But every one of them had lied. And we actually had a guy who's first name was Mark, he was a Methodist minister, I can't remember his last name, and he was one of our spies. And he would go in his minister garb to all their meetings, and then he would tell us what was happening. And he said, "I saw these people and they were as blanched white as could be. They were scared to death. One woman started to cry. And one of the women took her name, signed the thing," she was a petitioner, she took her name off of her own petition by sending in the form from Dan Anders. It was her own thing. She, in effect, is admitting that she lied. And every one of them had had people take their names off. So, we had the ability to prove that they had done this. Well, now they're absolutely petrified. They're absolutely petrified. And the lawyer says, "I can't help you. If you lied to these people, you're really in trouble." Now, we did that because Mike Hanlon did take, just from those letters, and that didn't even count this huge amount of detective work we found, it didn't even count sending him lists of people who weren't Allentown voters, who didn't live in Allentown, who had voted more than once, he didn't even count those. And that was probably another 200 people. So, we were well within that. So, he was going to take all those names off. The next step was, though, that they got another 10 days or whatever it was to go out and get more signatures. Luckily, Frank McVeigh was on vacation, and he went out of state, so he didn't have an opportunity to do that. And the guy who was from Cleveland, the self-loathing guy from Cleveland, allegedly, said to the newspaper, "Well, he's like my best player and he's out of commission," he was out of town. So, they tried to get more signatures. They would have needed, at the very least, to get 150 signatures, and they got 50. Or they got 60. We disproved about, with those letters, we rushed in, set it up, did a mailing to them all, and we were able to disprove another 20 of those. So, they didn't have the number of signatures. And Mike Hanlon presented that to City Council. There was a guy named Ken Kirker, whose initials were KKK, by the way. PATRICIA SULLIVAN: Kirshner. LB: Kirshner. His son and his grandsons' initials were KKK, as well. PS: Karl LB: Karl Kirker, Karl Kirshner. And he was there and he was so angry he ran up the aisle like he wanted to punch Mike Hanlon. Luckily, he didn't live in Allentown, either. But he was so angry he had to be restrained because he was so angry. And they lost. So, they lost. And there were a load of other issues. One of the things that Louie Hershman did at one point, and I want to point this out because this was so based on discrimination, Louie Hershman at one point was at a church in East Allentown, and we went there and he was there. There weren't very many people. He wasn't really getting people to sign this petition, but he was trying to get people to sign the petition. And I went up to him and I said, "Hershman, why are you doing this? You said you would support this." He goes, "Well, you didn't talk about that gender thing." And I said, "But why are you doing this? People would be discriminated against, and you think they should be?" He goes, "Well, I want to protect the Boy Scouts." And I said, "What do you mean by you want to protect the Boy Scouts?" He said, "Well, the Boy Scouts," which had a policy that was anti-LGBT, "they wouldn't be protected." I said, "Give me your petition." And he gives me the petition, and I open it up to the amendments, and I said, "You see this amendment? This amendment that Tom Burke wrote, it says right here, including the Boy Scouts that would be exempt from this ordinance. And you voted for this. You voted for this. So, that's not even an argument. They're exempt from the law." And he looks at it and he goes, "Well, that wasn't on there before." I said, "Lou, you voted for it. You're a bad legislator for this city." He believed that this kind of work would guarantee that he would be elected in every subsequent election. He was never elected again, for any position. Even though he ran, many times, he was never elected again. So, we were successful with that but the next day --. PS: [inaudible] LB: So, I want to go back a little bit and say that one of the things that happened during this was the national organizations, particularly the Human Rights Campaign and one factor of the Victory Fund told us, "Don't challenge the signatures, just let it go into place and let it go for a vote and raise 70,000 dollars and keep people from voting on it." And I said to Trish, "We are not doing that." And I've said this every time since then, ballot measures, which I am totally against in every possible way, there's nothing good about a ballot measure because nobody in the legislature is responsible for it, and when people vote for it, they have no idea what the ramifications are. And then, the legislature, whomever the legislatures are say, "Well, I didn't put it in place, that was a ballot measure. You did it. It's in place." They're never good. They should never be in place. And at one point, I went to take a person's name off who was a prominent Black family in Allentown. I was talking to this woman, she was about my age, and she said, "Take my name off, but I really do think that this should have been voted on by the people." And I said, "No, you don't. You don't think that. Why would you say that?" And she said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Look, you understand about civil rights. Do you think people who -- If you're in a place where everybody that votes is white, do you think they should be the ones who determine whether or not you get the vote? That's not right. You should have the vote, you should have the rights, because everybody has rights in Allentown. Everybody has rights in the United States. This is a Constitutional thing. This is a civil rights thing. This isn't something that's decided by the majority, because the majority is always in power." And she says, "Yeah, you're right. You're right." Anyway, we ask for money from the Human Rights Campaign because we're fighting this on the ground, and Human Rights Campaign rarely does anything. They've never really done anything successfully like this. They've never passed a piece of legislation. The only thing they ever did was, occasionally, they'll give money to other organizations to fight for rights. And I'm very negative about the Human Rights Campaign, and here's why. The day after we passed this ordinance and kept it in place, both the day after we passed it and we won to keep it in place, the Human Rights Campaign sent out a fundraising letter saying, "Allentown has passed this antidiscrimination ordinance, we are so proud that these rights have passed, please send us money." And they did it on both instances. Now, the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce did send us two people who had fought this kind of effort in Maine, and they were working on a campaign of another legislature, and they came to us. They came in our kitchen and said, "Do not let this go to a vote because you will be at each other's throats. You will hate this city," and it's true. If you're walking down the street, even if you win, if six out of 10 voters voted for my rights, when I'm walking down the street, every time I pass by 10 people, I'm going to think four of those people didn't vote for my rights. I wouldn't want to stay in this city if that's the case. And that kind of stuff happens all the time, if the city has barely voted for your rights. And then, we went into the next phase, and that was the lawsuit. Should I stop here, or should I go on? MF: I think we should stop, but I'm curious about the lawsuit and I wonder if we could schedule something for next week and maybe start there. LB: Sure. So, the lawsuit story is shorter because we weren't fighting it. But it went on for quite a few years. I just want to say one more really important thing. During those 70 days, I actually lost 17 pounds. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I was absolutely hysterically worried about everything. And this is why. If we had lost that, if we hadn't done what we'd done, because the depositions made it so that they would never do it again because they were afraid. Anti-LGBT people can never get other people, the general public, to be anti-LGBT people unless they lie. They have to lie to be able to get people to hate the minority. They have to misrepresent and lie to be able to do that. And that's exactly what they did. We needed to make it so that they couldn't do that again. They couldn't lie. And we needed to show everybody in the state, "You cannot do that." You can't tell people that this is about using horses for dog meat, or using horses for dog food and have people sign a petition and get away with it. And so, we made it so they couldn't. So, that effectively stopped any petition effort, any referendum effort like this in a local circumstance. And all the time that this was happening, since I was really leading this effort and, for the most part, I was the person who made all of the decisions. We had about 10 people who were absolutely essential to make this happen. Certainly, Trish was one, Nadine Anderson was a major component at the churches, Beth Goudy, Steve Black, Laura Gutierrez, Roberta Meek, and certainly Dan Anders, who was stellar, he's a judge now, in Philadelphia. And by the way, when he was successful in this, all the partners at Pepper Hamilton came out of their offices to shake his hand because he was successful in making this happen and it was a big deal because the thing is, it changed precedence across the state. And so did the lawsuit. And all the time that I was worried about this, I thought, "If we fail, every community that gets a nondiscrimination law in place will be at risk. If we succeed, they won't be." And so, I felt like this really, really mattered because it's really easy to pass an ordinance in a place where everybody's for you. But if you're passing one where you have an undercurrent of negativity, you need to show that it can't just be easily overturned. And we did that. But it was really hard. Okay, so that's what I want to say about that. But yeah, the lawsuit stuff, I'm happy to talk about that. That was very significant. And it dovetails into a bunch of other things, including marriage equality. It has to do with marriage equality, too. MF: Well, let's start there. I'll send a few times that would work for me next week. We'll start with the lawsuit. You talked a little bit about the Valley Free Press a little bit today, and I'm curious if you have more that you'd want to say about that publication. LB: Oh, yeah. The paper is a whole other huge thing. I produced that for 18 years. And it had enormous effect for the community. MF: Yeah, so I think we should definitely talk about that, too. If you could just think about this week what a nice arc would be, is the lawsuit a whole 90 minutes, or if the lawsuit leads into something else, maybe you could just think about the structure that would work best for that next one. LB: I think the lawsuit and the paper go together pretty well. MF: Okay. Let's do that, then, next week. I just want to say this was so fabulous to hear this story. You know I've heard it before, little pieces of it at your house for dinner, but this was nice to hear the whole thing. I'm so grateful that you talked with me, today. LB: I'm so glad to talk to you. It was wonderful. I'm very happy that people will be able to hear this story and how significant it is for not just our Allentown community or our Lehigh Valley community, but it really had an enormous impact on the state because I want to say that before the passage of the antidiscrimination ordinance in Allentown, there were six communities, Erie passed it about the same time we did, but they didn't have gender identity in theirs. When we passed this, only six communities had nondiscrimination ordinances that included sexual orientation, none of them included gender identity. Within three months of our passage, Philadelphia passed theirs, immediately addition of gender identity because they were embarrassed that Allentown did it. And since then, 50 communities in the state of Pennsylvania have passed ordinances that have been inclusive. It was really a cascade after that, including three other communities in the greater Lehigh Valley. MF: Well, thank you so much. I'm going to pause on record and then we can talk for a minute. LB: Okay. MF: Thanks, again. [break in audio] MF: Okay, this is Mary Foltz. I'm back with Liz, and we just thought of a story that needs to be recorded from this period, so I'm going to turn it back over to Liz. LB: This is really a definite story, the wonderful Felix Molina who was such an important activist at the beginning part in 1998, when we were trying to pass the ordinance and he was really leading the Human Relations Commission and instigated the first effort to do this, and so, Felix, when he was speaking at the City Council meeting and he gets up to speak, you only get two and a half minutes, and he gets up and he's so angry because council had been doing this long, long meeting after meeting after meeting to discuss the circumstances where a person in the community had a potbelly pig, and they had it as their pet. And literally, four council meetings had been devoted to that issue. And Felix gets up and he goes, and he has a very strong Puerto Rican accent, and he was saying, "You can't even talk about this, you can't even introduce this piece of legislation and you spent weeks and weeks and weeks describing whether pork is a pet or a farm animal, and it's ridiculous." He was furious. And it was ridiculous, because the issue really was, if it was a farm animal, you can't keep it in your house in Allentown. But if it's a pet, you can keep it in your house in Allentown, as though that really mattered. And it had been front-page news. He was furious. He went on and on about it. It was hilariously funny, and brilliant, actually, because it pointed out the absurdity that happens in council all the time. MF: We had to have that story on here. LB: Yes, it was good for his passion. MF: I'm going to thank you again and I'm going to pause the recording. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:26:32 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liz Bradbury, July 13, 2020 Description An account of the resource Liz Bradbury recalls the inner workings of Allentown’s non-discrimination ordinance, PA GALA’s impact in local elections and national lawmaking, and their lawsuit against Citizens for Traditional Values. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-17 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-07-13 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.