2 10 64 https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/4368c3e3b419e97f753f60a1c09ba65d.png c12c48404e378b35e44fb1c67c167c0c 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 of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Adrian Shanker 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-30.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 March 4, 2022 Adrian Shanker, Part 2, March 4, 2022 LGBT-30 01:24:43 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 Adrian Shanker Mary Foltz video/mp4 ShankerAdrian_20220304_video_edited_FINAL.mp4 1.0:|39(2)|66(13)|89(8)|114(10)|137(12)|162(8)|187(6)|206(9)|227(10)|252(12)|277(6)|300(9)|323(3)|348(15)|373(8)|396(6)|423(11)|448(13)|471(14)|494(7)|517(10)|538(15)|561(16)|584(11)|607(12)|630(4)|651(14)|678(2)|705(6)|730(17)|755(5)|782(9)|811(3)|834(13)|855(12)|884(3)|905(8)|932(3)|955(10)|982(3)|1009(4)|1034(10)|1059(6)|1082(8)|1109(6)|1134(7)|1155(8)|1180(13)|1201(10)|1222(10)|1247(3)|1268(15)|1295(10)|1318(14)|1343(15)|1366(13)|1393(5)|1418(10)|1441(8)|1464(15)|1487(14)|1512(8)|1539(7)|1566(3)|1591(4)|1616(6)|1639(8)|1664(11)|1689(2)|1710(15)|1737(13)|1762(11)|1793(7)|1826(11)|1853(4)|1876(12)|1903(6)|1928(5)|1951(12)|1970(12)|1989(13)|2014(11)|2037(6)|2060(3)|2081(4) 0 https://youtu.be/oro7sK8zntc YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions Mary Foltz: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Adrian Shanker to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley, as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS. And Adrian and I are meeting at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center on March 4, 2022. First, I just want to say thank you so much for being here today.&#13 ; Adrian Shanker: Thanks for doing this.&#13 ; MF: And I’m just going to ask quick consent questions, and then we’ll jump into the interview. So do you consent to this interview today? 0 84 Starting a LGBT Center in Lehigh Valley MF: So I want to start with this question. How did you decide to start the center?&#13 ; AS: Yeah. Well, after I’d been leading Equality Pennsylvania as the board president, which was a volunteer position, for at that point three years, and I was on the board for four years. And it was a time in Equality Pennsylvania where my role as the board president was still -- it was a pretty small staff, so it was a pretty significant role, and one that required a lot of statewide travel. And I knew that I wanted to do LGBTQ work full time. And I had been, you know, driving around Pennsylvania for Equality PA, and kept coming back to the Lehigh Valley feeling like, how come I had to keep driving elsewhere to access the basic cultural programs that I really wanted for my own life? You know, they just weren’t happening here on a regular enough level, or thea small stipend, but it was really an all-volunteer effort. 0 181 Role of Pennsylvania Diversity Network AS: Pennsylvania Diversity Network was the predecessor organization to Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. And basically, Pennsylvania Diversity Network, the plan was for it to restructure into the center, with me as the executive director, and to move forward with a plan to open a physical space in the Lehigh Valley for LGBTQ people that would be a cultural hub, and a resource space, for our community.&#13 ; MF: Could you talk a little bit more about Pennsylvania Diversity Network, what they were doing before you got involved in visioning the center?&#13 ; AS: Yeah. So Pennsylvania Diversity Network was founded by Liz Bradbury and Patricia Sullivan, and it was pretty much an all-volunteer effort. 0 248 Importance of LGBT Centers AS: And as a result, it wasn’t an open-to-the-public community space, and there was really a need for that community space. And Liz and Trish and I, and others, had conversations about the need for a physical center for our community. I grew up going to an LGBT center in White Plains, New York. After my parents were divorced, I remember, when I was a kid, my mom took me and my brother to -- the LOFT LGBT Center had a gay parents with kids meetup in the ’90s. Later, there was an LGBT youth center, also in White Plains, New York, called Center Lane, that I went to in high school. So I knew the value of an LGBT center. And I was, kind of, surprised that we didn’t have one. And in my travels across Pennsylvania, I saw how important they were in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, for example, for the LGBT communities there. And a short-lived center had opened in Wilkes-Barre, and it didn’t last very long. But when that center opened, it was, like, Oh, if they can do this in Wilkes-Barre with a much smaller LGBT community, we can do this in Allentown, without question. 0 379 Obtaining a Physical Space for the Center AS: And at that announcement, we announced that the city of Allentown was going to sell us a building for one dollar that we could renovate. &#13 ; &#13 ; We had a design team already assembled of pro bono architects and engineers who were pledging their services to help us get the building ready. And we pitched to the community what the vision was. And it was very clear that we needed to raise a minimum of $75,000 from individuals in three months, so that we could demonstrate that the community was behind us. By the end of that three-month period, we had raised over $115,000. The average donor gave $400. So people did make stretch gifts -- what I mean by that are gifts beyond what they might normally donate in a year -- because they really did share the passion and the vision for having an LGBT community center. And from there, then, we started having conversations with corporations. And there was actually seven local-ish corporations who, together, provided additional funds needed to help us get into a physical space. 0 552 Problems with the First Space AS: That building we had been offered for a dollar from the city was on 11th and Turner. The exact address was 1021 West Turner Street. And it was a long-vacant building. It was a former, like, dairy building? And it had been in very poor condition. It was owned by the Allentown Redevelopment Authority. And we were able to work with Barry Isett &amp ; Associates, an engineering firm, who actually donated the cost of a Phase I Environmental Assessment. The assessment confirmed that there was over 1500 square feet of asbestos, and as a result, the construction cost was going to be much higher than we had anticipated, much, much higher. We already knew the building needed a lot of work, but now there was going to be major environmental remediation. 0 606 Looking for a Safer Building 0 806 First Two Grants So the first grant that we received was a very small grant from CenterLink to do a program called My 2024, where we had a community visioning session about people’s hopes, fears, and dreams about the next 10 years, after winning marriage equality nationally through the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. After winning marriage equality nationally, what did the Lehigh Valley LGBT community want to see for the next 10 years of the LGBT movement? 0 887 Creation of the LGBT Health Needs Assessment AS: And we were able to get funding to create an LGBT Health Needs Assessment, that we did as a pilot project in 2015 and ’16. In ’15, it was in the Lehigh Valley and central Pennsylvania. And then in 2016, it was expanded to four other regions in Pennsylvania, southwest PA, southeast PA, northeast PA, and, I believe, Philadelphia. And then after that, it actually became a biannual needs assessment. But that grant was very significant for us. At the time that we got it, it really allowed us to build up our credibility, and also, it gave us the funding we needed to really get off the ground. After we saw the data, though, that came back, I knew, and frankly, so did the Department of Health, that more work would be needed. And they awarded us other grants to do tobacco prevention and control. 0 979 Coming Together with the Community AS: I mean, we had so many volunteers here. The volunteers were so passionate. And really, it was the entire community coming together. We had churches and synagogues doing volunteer groups. We had corporations, like Air Products and Olympus, coming to do volunteer painting together. And we had individuals who were just coming and building community while they were volunteering. And Liz Bradbury actually led a lot of the volunteer activities, almost all of them. She oversaw the volunteers, really, as we were getting into the space, while most of my time was focused on continuing to fundraise, and making decisions about what the building would look like, and how we would pay for the building to look like that. So dealing with supplies, trying to get some pro bono support. For example, Habitat for Humanity Lehigh Valley came and retiled the floors in two of our bathrooms. Home Depot sent employees over to retile the floors in our front vestibule and our elevator, and donated all the supplies needed to do that project. So part of it was figuring out, like, what we were going to need, because we were really trying to not spend too much money to get open. 0 1067 Grand Opening of the Center AS: And our grand opening, in addition to remarks from dignitaries, it was just a momentous occasion. It was a rainy Saturday. I believe it was a Saturday. It was definitely on the weekend. And we had four hundred people show up. Everyone was really excited. We had a short VIP part for our founding donors, the people who gave five hundred or higher in that initial event that we hosted back in June 2014, right before the grand opening. And we had initially, right from day one, we said, founding donors will get the first view. And they came in a little bit before. We also had a volunteer recognition event that week for all the volunteers who helped us get the building ready, and that was a really exciting night, as well. You know, and from there, after the grand opening, it really moved very fast. So from that moment on, it was pretty nonstop. At the grand opening, we actually announced 10 programs that we’d be starting right away. And it wasn’t long before there was many more. 0 1185 Pulse Massacre AS: And really, throughout 2016, that continued. But something changed in the world in June 2016, which was two years after we announced our founding, which was the Pulse massacre. And so, you know, on the morning of Pulse, we all got the news just like everyone else did around the world. And we knew that we needed to respond, because we knew that our community needed us to respond. But in all of the work that we put into opening the building, we really hadn’t thought about security. And the Pulse massacre let us know that we needed to add security to the building, and we needed to do it pretty quickly. So we actually went to Air Products and PPL, and between the two companies, they gave us $16,000 of emergency grants to pay for security that we needed right away. And that was a challenging conversation, really. It was, we just hadn’t thought about it. And for good reason. We hadn’t had to have thought about it. &#13 ; 0 1262 Community March for Orlando AS: [...] and we organized, within just a couple hours, a march from Candida’s to Stonewall. Hundreds of people showed up. And we marched. The police chief, at the time, joined us. Government officials, Republicans and Democrats. Congressman Charlie Dent was there as a Republican leader. We had many Democrats, as well. The owner of Candida’s, Candida Affa, joined us for the march. We started at Candida’s for some opening remarks, and then we marched over from her bar, which was on 12th and Chew, over to Hamilton Street, and then we marched down Hamilton Street to 10th Street, and then we turned to go on 10th Street over to the Stonewall. And in front of the Stonewall, people gathered on the steps of the Stonewall, hundreds of people. And we stood strong and resolved that love was stronger than hate. Our community would not keep from dancing. We would continue to do the work that was needed. We also, as a community in the Lehigh Valley, even though we were very new as an organization, raised about five thousand dollars to send down to the Orlando LGBT Center to support their urgent needs. And the next year, on the Pulse anniversary, we sent some additional money down to support the Pulse memorial. 0 1391 Programming Offered by Bradbury-Sullivan AS: But our programs continue to evolve. So in February 2017, we opened Project Silk, our LGBTQ youth program in partnership with Valley Youth House, through a grant. It was a quarter million dollar grant we received with Valley Youth House to start this program as a recreational-based safe space program for LGBTQ youth, specifically queer youth of color, and that it would be HIV-prevention focused. So the program started in February 2017, but we got the grant in the end of 2016 to be able to get started. And that was a really big win for our organization, to be able to get that kind of funding pretty early on. 0 1607 Gaining Support for the Center MF: [...] How does that happen in Pennsylvania or in the Lehigh Valley, where you and others involved in making the center able to motivate and activate wide support, from corporate support, governmental support, and then, of course, volunteer community support? &#13 ; AS: I mean, we had to make a strong and compelling case for support, every direction we went. When we bought this building, we had to go appeal to Lehigh County to get property tax exemption, and we had to make the case that Bradbury-Sullivan Center was going to relieve the government of specific burdens in the types of services we would provide here. When we talked to the city of Allentown’s Redevelopment Authority earlier about receiving a one dollar Redevelopment Authority building, we had to make the case that having an LGBT center would not only serve the people in our community, but that it would beautify the neighborhood, it would provide economic benefit back to the community, and it would serve the entire community’s cultural needs, as well. And that’s what we’ve done. Even though we didn’t take that one dollar building, we have done that here in what was a vacant building. And this building, I didn’t talk about what it was. But historically, it was a warehouse. It was, at one point, a guns and ammo place, to my knowledge. The last thing it was before it was vacant for two years before we bought it was, the second floor was a law firm, the first floor was an architect office, and the third floor was the Lehigh County Drug and Alcohol building. And so it wasn’t conducive to one organization taking over the whole building. We had to do some work to make that, kind of, seamless. And it really felt like three different organizations, just the way the building was structured. And so we had to change that around a little bit and make it feel like one space, one community center. 0 1761 Vision for the Community: My 2024 MF: You talked about doing a community visioning, getting people together to envision what the center would be. And I’m just curious what some of those visions were that community members shared, and how that mapped out.&#13 ; AS: That wasn’t specific to the center, actually. It was just about, really, what the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ community wanted from the LGBT movement for the next ten years. And that was back in October 2014, so looking 2014 to 2024. 0 1944 Results of the LGBTQ Health Needs Assessment MF: I want to ask a little bit more about the public health programming, because you had that first big grant for the Health Needs Assessment. I’m curious. What did you uncover in that assessment in the first year? How has that shifted over the years that you’ve done it?&#13 ; AS: So we learned right from the beginning with the first LGBTQ Health Needs Assessment that LGBTQ people in the Lehigh Valley experienced health disparities through all aspects of their lives, except for one, which was access to health insurance. But in every other area of our lives, we were faring a little bit worse off from a health and wellness standpoint than the majority of the population. 0 2211 Impact of Public Health Programming on LGBTQ Community MF: I have some ideas about this, but I just want to ask a basic question. What is the impact of a statewide health assessment? What is the impact of public health programming from a local LGBT community center?&#13 ; AS: Yeah. So every community deserves an LGBT center. That’s what CenterLink says, and that was a mantra we used at the beginning. And we need our local community-based LGBT centers because community-based organizations are the first line of defense. So it’s where you go when you need to build community. You’re new to an area and you want to meet people. It’s also where you often turn when you need a referral for a doctor. It’s an organization you trust to get information. And so as a trusted messenger to our community, we were a great organization to provide health promotion programs. 0 2402 Making the LGBTQ Health Needs Assessment Statewide MF: Could you talk a little bit about the collaborative nature -- like, how you developed that Needs Assessment across the state?&#13 ; AS: Yeah. So the way that we made it a statewide sample was that we went to the Department of Health, and we said, It would be much easier, and less time consuming, and frankly, less expensive, if we did this as one statewide project instead of six separate projects, where you’re working with six different agencies in each different community. So the model we did was that we got one state grant to do this on a statewide basis, and then we collaborated and funded LGBT community-based organizations across Pennsylvania to be partners in that project, and actually, we partnered with over 30 organizations in Pennsylvania, and funded them to help us with the data collection. 0 2483 Combining Bradbury-Sullivan and Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley MF: You talked a little bit about other public health programming, the public health -- the Needs Assessment. Can you talk a little bit about other programming, like your merging with Pride, and Pride programming that you put on?&#13 ; AS: Yeah. So Lehigh Valley Pride, as we call it, was previously known as Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley. And it was an all-volunteer organization since the early ’90s. And courageous and dedicated volunteers that really made Lehigh Valley Pride happen every year. In 2017, Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley merged with Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. So I facilitated this merger. And we worked for many months with the board of Pride to consider how this might work. 0 2618 Making Pride Accessible AS: We also prioritize access and inclusion for people with disabilities, by bringing sign language interpreters to the stages, reserving parking and seating in the front of the stages for older adults and people with disabilities, ADA restrooms, large print programs, to really try to make for a more inclusive festival. Because Pride is for everyone, and that’s really important to us. I think that there were some skeptics over how it would work at the Jewish Community Center, but it really has worked pretty well to have a large festival. We also increased the faith programs at Pride by bringing them onsite. 0 2711 Arts and Cultural Programming MF: In addition to Pride programming, you have arts and cultural programming, and you have gallery programming. But you --&#13 ; AS: Yeah. I’ll talk a little bit about the galleries. So I talked about the library earlier, but our art galleries, for me, have been so exciting and important over the years. Really, the only queer art space in the Lehigh Valley, where that’s its mission, is to exhibit and celebrate LGBTQ artists. And we’ve balanced between local artists and not-so-local artists. And we’ve brought some exhibits that are museum quality. Mariette Pathy Allen, who is a major photojournalist, who has documented trans communities for decades, kicked off her newest book of photographs of trans people in Southeast Asia from our center with an exhibit here. 0 2840 Reacting to the Trump Presidency MF: You mentioned Trump, through this art gallery exhibit. What was it like to be a community center executive director during that presidential campaign and that presidency?&#13 ; AS: Well, you know, we’re a nonpartisan organization, so as all nonpartisan organizations, we don’t engage directly in electoral politics. We don’t tell people who to vote for. However, the day after Trump was elected, the morning after, when we all woke up to that news, we knew that it was going to be very challenging for our community, not because a Republican was elected president over a Democrat, but because a person who made such challenging comments about diverse communities, LGBTQ people, people of color, Muslims, transgender people in particular, there was a lot of very strong words and rhetoric that was spewn throughout the campaign. And so we wanted to make it clear to our community that we were a safe space for everyone to come and be, but that we would also resist when needed. 0 2966 Litigation Against Donald Trump AS: And of course, once Trump issued rules that were going to directly harm LGBTQ people, we took a different approach, which is, we actually filed lawsuits to block three Trump administration rules that would have caused direct harm to LGBTQ people. The first one was the denial of care rule, where Trump’s Health and Human Service Department issued a rule, a final rule, that would have invited discrimination from health care providers by saying that health care providers could, essentially, deny care to an LGBTQ person if it violated their moral and religious beliefs. In fact, the rule was so problematic, it didn’t even require the health care professional to notify their employer that they were doing so. It didn’t require a warm handoff to a different provider. It didn’t require a referral to a different provider. It didn’t require anything. It was such a harmful rule, designed specifically in a way that would have harmed people living with HIV and transgender people, as well as people who may need abortion care in the future. So we were very concerned about this rule. And in coalition with some other LGBT organizations and a couple doctors, we were a plaintiff in a lawsuit led by Lambda Legal, and were able to block the rule from going into effect. 0 3202 Navigating COVID-19 MF: There’s another big thing happening during the Trump administration, which is COVID-19. &#13 ; AS: Yeah.&#13 ; MF: So here you have these three lawsuits, but you also have the global pandemic. How were you navigating in that time?&#13 ; AS: Well, nobody, including me, could have predicted the pandemic that has now been ongoing for -- we’ve just entered the third year (laughs) of the ongoing pandemic. That’s, certainly in my lifetime, unprecedented. At the start of the pandemic, like every other LGBT center, like every other nonprofit, it was just about navigating uncertainty. It was about, we don’t know what’s to come, but we have to adapt quickly. So in an effort to keep our community safe as well as our staff, we announced that staff would be working from home. We were shutting down our building. 0 3405 Making COVID-19 Data Inclusive AS: They were all reasonable changes given the uncertainty. In addition to what we were doing directly for our community in terms of programs, and in terms of what we were doing to manage staff transition to a virtual office, we were also directly engaged in advocacy from the very beginning. In March 2020, the CDC, under the Trump administration, put out a directive requiring all states to collect demographic data with regard to race, ethnicity, age, and gender. They did not include sexual orientation or gender identity. In April 2020, we sent -- we organized with the National LGBT Cancer Network, and 26 organizations joined us -- a letter to then-Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine, asking that Pennsylvania be the first state to mandate collection of sexual orientation and gender identity data for COVID infection, mortality, and hospitalization. One month later to the day, we were able to get Pennsylvania to collect COVID-19 infection data. 0 3564 Lehigh Valley's First Virtual Pride Festival AS: But really, it was a journey of health activism through that time, as well. And in terms of our programs, I mean, we had to continuously pivot. So I didn’t want to be canceling in-person programs too far out, because we kept being told, Oh, it’s just a couple more weeks. Oh, it’s just a couple more months. So we had to make decisions continuously. And moving Lehigh Valley Pride to a virtual Pride for the first time in its history was a heart-wrenching decision, but it would not have been possible to have an in-person Pride in 2020. So we ended up with a televised Pride festival on RCN, a star-studded event. Celebrities that participated included Michelle Visage, Carson Kressley, RuPaul Drag Racers like Silky Nutmeg Ganache, Jujubee. We had Peter Paige from Queer as Folk. We had Theo Germaine from The Politician. We had Holly Near, you know, iconic musician Holly Near. We had a whole bunch of really amazing folks. 0 3625 Pivoting to Virtual Programming AS: And we continued to pivot. We produced a virtual queer novel miniseries on our Facebook that ran as Facebook Live events, where we had, instead of in-person author talks, we had author talks on Facebook Live. We tried to curate content for our community to keep our community connected through a period of quarantine and uncertainty. And we started delivering healthy food packages to the youth program participants that we were serving, because they couldn’t come here, so we brought stuff there. As a resource to our community, we actually developed a subpage on our website for LGBT-specific COVID-19 information. We wrote guidances for the city of Allentown, county of Erie, Montgomery County, and the state of Pennsylvania about safer sex during the pandemic. 0 3716 Work as a Publisher/Author/Editor MF: I would say also during this time, you were moving into publishing. And I know this is, sort of, adjacent to the community center, but you’re publishing on public health, editing collections. You have another book coming out soon. Could you talk a little bit about how that work as an author, as an editor, is connected to your work with the center, or just a little bit about your publication?&#13 ; AS: Yeah. So after we did our first Needs Assessment in 2015, I became very passionate about LGBTQ barriers to care and access to care. When it comes to accessing, the unmet dream of health equity, defined by the US government, is the attainment of the highest quality of health for all people. That’s the definition from Healthy People 2020. LGBTQ people don’t have that. So I actually went and enrolled in a graduate certificate program at George Washington University in LGBT health policy and practice. 0 4028 Role in Continuing Scholarship MF: I can’t wait to see that book. I just want to say that. And it’s recorded. I can’t wait to buy that. Beyond publishing those two, curating those two collections, one of which will be out soon, is Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center participating in other kinds of publications, research publications, or --&#13 ; AS: Yeah. So something that’s, kind of, unique to Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center is our work to make contributions to the literature more broadly. So we actually conduct original research. We’re so lucky to have a data and evaluation department. We present the results of our programs at state and national conferences, for example, American Public Health Association, Society for Public Health Educators. That’s just two examples. And we have also worked to try to publish some of the results from our Needs Assessment, or programmatic results from our archive, or from some of our health programs, in either peer-reviewed or other academic journals. That really allows us to demonstrate the role that Bradbury-Sullivan Center plays, and more broadly, the role that LGBT community centers play in all communities, because the work that we do here is not so dissimilar from other communities. And so our contribution to the literature, I think, has been really important. 0 4185 Work on Legislation Banning Conversion Therapy&#13 ; MF: You mentioned the bans on conversion therapy, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how that worked in Bethlehem, in Allentown, and Easton. Can you just describe that a bit more, what that process was like once you had the legislation drafted?&#13 ; AS: So National Center for Lesbian Rights drafted the legislation, and shared it with local elected officials in our community. We built a strong coalition, though. So our role was that we were doing public education and awareness in support of ending conversion therapy in our communities. So for example, we partnered with KidsPeace, which is a mental health hospital here in the Lehigh Valley, who shared in public meetings that their operating rules don’t allow conversion therapy for their clinicians. The director of the Allentown Health Bureau spoke out, saying that she had talked to local pediatricians, who have confirmed that they have seen the harms of conversion therapy in our community from their patients. So we mobilized our community, is really the role that we played, as grassroots organizing. And we were able to see these three laws passed very quickly in each municipality. 0 4369 Starting the Archival Collection MF: Well, I want to ask a question about the archives, because we haven’t talked about that yet, and you really, from the beginning, were focusing also on archival collection when you were envisioning the center and when it was opening. So could I ask about that?&#13 ; AS: Yeah. &#13 ; MF: Why did you (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible) --&#13 ; AS: It was one of the first programs of the center, actually. So very early on, I approached Tina Hertel, the library director of Muhlenberg College, and we set up a meeting with her, and with Susan Falciani Maldonado, special collections archivist. And the meeting was really -- we had some stuff already. There was stuff in Liz and Trish’s basement. I had some stuff in my house. And we didn’t want to be holding onto it. And we also knew that there was a lot of stuff in the community. We looked at similar archives in central Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. But something that was really important to me was community ownership. So our agreement with Muhlenberg is the only one we’re aware of in the country where an LGBT center maintains ownership of the archival materials, and it’s professionally housed and preserved at a university library. And Muhlenberg was willing to do that with us. And it’s been an incredible partnership. 0 4554 Exceeding Goals for the Center MF: The center does so much educational programming, training, arts and culture, galleries, reading groups, film series, archival collection, public health. You’re involved in lawsuits when needed to protect our community. Was that part of the original vision that we started with today? Did you think, when you were starting --&#13 ; AS: We have far exceeded the original vision. I mean, the original vision was getting a physical space. We said we were going to revolutionize the programs and services available to the LGBT community. That’s language we used in 2014. I think we have absolutely done that. And that does not mean that there’s not more that’s needed. Absolutely. There is always more we can do for our community. Our current director of development, Matt Easterwood, likes to say, “More money, more mission.” So as Bradbury-Sullivan Center continues to grow, more can be done for the community at large. But, you know, part of my decision to move on from Bradbury-Sullivan Center is because I feel like sometimes I can be clouded by my original vision. And I think leadership changes are good over time. And there’s an opportunity for new ideas, for new leadership that comes with different expertise, different backgrounds, different passions. And actually, I think that’s good for organizations over time. We have absolutely grown past my wildest dreams. 0 4710 People Important to the Formation of the Center MF: Well, we’re right about at the end. You ended with this lovely statement about, you know, it will continue with new leadership and wonderful people that are still here. And it leads me to, maybe, a final question or two. Do you want to talk about the people that have really made this organization into this incredible support for our community?&#13 ; AS: Yeah. Why don’t you pause for a minute and give me a minute to think about that?&#13 ; (break in video)&#13 ; AS: Throughout the journey of opening the center, there’s been so many people who have been part of that journey, and there’s no way I could possibly name every single person. But I do want to share some names of folks that were critical to the start, the opening, and the growth of the center over time. So from the very beginning, Liz Bradbury and Patricia Sullivan, and Liz Kleintop, original board members of Pennsylvania Diversity Network, at the time, that really were willing to go with me on this journey. 0 MovingImage Adrian Shanker recounts the inception of the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the work it does to continue to serve the LGBTQ+ community in the Lehigh Valley and Pennsylvania as a whole.&#13 ; INTERVIEW WITH ADRIAN SHANKER MARCH 4, 2022 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Adrian Shanker to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley, as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS. And Adrian and I are meeting at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center on March 4, 2022. First, I just want to say thank you so much for being here today. ADRIAN SHANKER: Thanks for doing this. MF: And I'm just going to ask quick consent questions, and then we'll jump into the interview. So do you consent to this interview today? AS: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? AS: I do. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, like short films, articles, websites? AS: I do. MF: Okay. And I just want to remind you that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, decide if you want to redact any material, or if you want to pull the interview from the collection. Do you understand that, that you have time? AS: Yes. MF: Okay. Great. So last time we did an interview, we really talked a lot about previous organizations that you've been a part of. But today, we're really going to talk about the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. So I want to start with this question. How did you decide to start the center? AS: Yeah. Well, after I'd been leading Equality Pennsylvania as the board president, which was a volunteer position, for at that point three years, and I was on the board for four years. And it was a time in Equality Pennsylvania where my role as the board president was still -- it was a pretty small staff, so it was a pretty significant role, and one that required a lot of statewide travel. And I knew that I wanted to do LGBTQ work full time. And I had been, you know, driving around Pennsylvania for Equality PA, and kept coming back to the Lehigh Valley feeling like, how come I had to keep driving elsewhere to access the basic cultural programs that I really wanted for my own life? You know, they just weren't happening here on a regular enough level, or they were not easy to find when they did happen. And so the desire was to open an LGBT community center for the Lehigh Valley. And I knew that I had the skills and the background to do it. But what I wasn't sure of is if other people in the community felt that it was needed. So the process to start the center started with some visioning, and some private community meetings with key individuals or potential stakeholder groups. And then it was launched publicly at the gala for Pennsylvania Diversity Network in 2014, in June 2014. Pennsylvania Diversity Network was the predecessor organization to Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. And basically, Pennsylvania Diversity Network, the plan was for it to restructure into the center, with me as the executive director, and to move forward with a plan to open a physical space in the Lehigh Valley for LGBTQ people that would be a cultural hub, and a resource space, for our community. MF: Could you talk a little bit more about Pennsylvania Diversity Network, what they were doing before you got involved in visioning the center? AS: Yeah. So Pennsylvania Diversity Network was founded by Liz Bradbury and Patricia Sullivan, and it was pretty much an all-volunteer effort. Liz drew a small stipend, but it was really an all-volunteer effort. As a regional advocacy organization for LGBTQ people. It operated out of their home. And as a result, it wasn't an open-to-the-public community space, and there was really a need for that community space. And Liz and Trish and I, and others, had conversations about the need for a physical center for our community. I grew up going to an LGBT center in White Plains, New York. After my parents were divorced, I remember, when I was a kid, my mom took me and my brother to -- the LOFT LGBT Center had a gay parents with kids meetup in the '90s. Later, there was an LGBT youth center, also in White Plains, New York, called Center Lane, that I went to in high school. So I knew the value of an LGBT center. And I was, kind of, surprised that we didn't have one. And in my travels across Pennsylvania, I saw how important they were in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, for example, for the LGBT communities there. And a short-lived center had opened in Wilkes-Barre, and it didn't last very long. But when that center opened, it was, like, Oh, if they can do this in Wilkes-Barre with a much smaller LGBT community, we can do this in Allentown, without question. So it started with visiting some of the other centers, getting some ideas, talking to stakeholders, meeting with individuals, some potential funders, some community leaders, both LGBT and from the broader community, to get a sense of what might be possible. We also met with elected officials to try to get a sense of what kind of support there would be from the government, potentially, for a new community center in the Lehigh Valley. And by the time that we were ready to launch publicly, we used the annual gala for Pennsylvania Diversity Network, which was the LGBT Community Leadership Awards. And at that time, it happened in June every year. And it was about 180 attendees. And it was at Allentown Symphony Hall in the Rodale Room. And so we had told people, "there's going to be a very special announcement, and you're going to want to be here for this announcement". And at that announcement, we announced that the city of Allentown was going to sell us a building for one dollar that we could renovate. We had a design team already assembled of pro bono architects and engineers who were pledging their services to help us get the building ready. And we pitched to the community what the vision was. And it was very clear that we needed to raise a minimum of $75,000 from individuals in three months, so that we could demonstrate that the community was behind us. By the end of that three-month period, we had raised over $115,000. The average donor gave $400. So people did make stretch gifts -- what I mean by that are gifts beyond what they might normally donate in a year -- because they really did share the passion and the vision for having an LGBT community center. And from there, then, we started having conversations with corporations. And there was actually seven local-ish corporations who, together, provided additional funds needed to help us get into a physical space. Those corporations were Jerner &amp ; Palmer law firm in Philadelphia ; Gross McGinley law firm here in Allentown ; Capital Blue Cross, our health insurance company located in Allentown ; the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce ; OraSure. I may be missing one. It will come back to me. Oh, and ESSA Bank &amp ; Trust Foundation, as well. So those local funders gave us the corporate funding to be able to balance that. I left my last job in September 2014 to do this work full time. We had raised enough money for me to come on board full time. And it really was going to require full-time fundraising to be able to get into a physical space and build up an organization. I had been working in marketing while I was leading Equality Pennsylvania. I worked in marketing for a local LGBT-owned business called Wolper Information Services, and they were based in Easton. And actually, the owner at the time, Susan Wolper, let me continue working out of their space. She donated office space, basically, to start the center. So I continued working out of that building in Easton until we had acquired a space, which was about a year and a half. But from the moment that I started doing the work full time, the focus was fundraising and really trying to get into a building. That building we had been offered for a dollar from the city was on 11th and Turner. The exact address was 1021 West Turner Street. And it was a long-vacant building. It was a former, like, dairy building? And it had been in very poor condition. It was owned by the Allentown Redevelopment Authority. And we were able to work with Barry Isett &amp ; Associates, an engineering firm, who actually donated the cost of a Phase I Environmental Assessment. The assessment confirmed that there was over 1500 square feet of asbestos, and as a result, the construction cost was going to be much higher than we had anticipated, much, much higher. We already knew the building needed a lot of work, but now there was going to be major environmental remediation. And so we made a decision to walk away from that building, and instead, we found a real estate agent, Rob Ritter, a local Weichert real estate agent, who is part of the LGBT community. And he helped us to look for other properties. We looked at a whole bunch of properties together. And finally, we found 522 West Maple Street. We bought this building on September 30, 2015, so only about a year and a quarter after announcing publicly to the community, and only a year after I was doing this work full time. We were able to acquire this building. And that acquisition is complicated for a nonprofit, any nonprofit, to acquire property. It's more complicated for a brand-new nonprofit, essentially. We really only had one year of finances behind us, even though we had restructured from Pennsylvania Diversity Network. The budget at Pennsylvania Diversity Network was about $22,000 a year. So we really only had one year of financials that included staff to show to banks. And we were turned down initially by traditional banks. And we ended up getting a mortgage through People First Federal Credit Union. And they took a risk on us as a small nonprofit. We had a very compelling business plan and were able to make a strong case for how we'd be able to pay off the mortgage, and not only provide essential services to the community, but what our funding would look like. So, yeah, September 30, we closed on the building. The building had been for sale for about $369,000, I believe. And we bought it for $340,000. It's 13,000 square feet. And it needed a good amount of work. Not the kind of work that would require major construction. It needed some aesthetic improvements, and it needed a little bit of repairs. So we were able to manage those repairs, and we had volunteers assist with aesthetic support, repainting, removing the carpet from the floors, scraping the glue off the floors that was underneath the carpet, that kind of stuff. And we had 3100 volunteer hours from more than 300 volunteers over a six-month period before we opened to the public on April 9, 2016. For our grand opening, we had more than four hundred people in attendance. We had remarks from the lieutenant governor at the time, Mike Stack ; the CEO of CenterLink, the association of LGBT centers, Denise Spivak. She flew in to speak at the event. It was a moment for our entire community to celebrate. And really, every donor who gave any amount of money, five dollars to five thousand dollars, felt like they were part of it. Every volunteer who participated in some aspect knew that they were part of it. You know? So it was really, the community came together to support and open an LGBT community center. At the same time, though, we were also building up what our programs would look like. So if we go back a little bit, right after I started, in addition to raising money for the building, we also had to start doing programs, because you can't only fundraise, right? So the first grant that we received was a very small grant from CenterLink to do a program called My 2024, where we had a community visioning session about people's hopes, fears, and dreams about the next 10 years, after winning marriage equality nationally through the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. After winning marriage equality nationally, what did the Lehigh Valley LGBT community want to see for the next 10 years of the LGBT movement? We also then received a grant from the Women's 5K Classic. These were the only two grants we received in 2014, actually, our first two. And the Women's 5K Classic provided a grant to have us host a women's health fair, and start some education around gynecologic cancer screenings. And that was our first health grant. And shortly after we did that, we were able to work with the Pennsylvania Department of Health with the support of one of my mentors, Dr. Scout, who at the time worked at CenterLink. Currently, today, he leads the National LGBT Cancer Network. And he facilitated an introduction for me with the Pennsylvania Department of Health's Division of Tobacco Prevention and Control, and provided technical assistance, as well, to me, to teach me how to work with government funders. And we were able to get funding to create an LGBT Health Needs Assessment, that we did as a pilot project in 2015 and '16. In '15, it was in the Lehigh Valley and central Pennsylvania. And then in 2016, it was expanded to four other regions in Pennsylvania, southwest PA, southeast PA, northeast PA, and, I believe, Philadelphia. And then after that, it actually became a biannual needs assessment. But that grant was very significant for us. At the time that we got it, it really allowed us to build up our credibility, and also, it gave us the funding we needed to really get off the ground. After we saw the data, though, that came back, I knew, and frankly, so did the Department of Health, that more work would be needed. And they awarded us other grants to do tobacco prevention and control. I mean, we received some significant funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, first through the Needs Assessment, and then to start doing health promotion around tobacco prevention and control. And those grants really allowed us to start building as an organization at the same time as we were physically trying to get into a space, and once we got into the space, to start planning what our programs would look like. The time period in between purchasing the building and opening was so exciting. I mean, we had so many volunteers here. The volunteers were so passionate. And really, it was the entire community coming together. We had churches and synagogues doing volunteer groups. We had corporations, like Air Products and Olympus, coming to do volunteer painting together. And we had individuals who were just coming and building community while they were volunteering. And Liz Bradbury actually led a lot of the volunteer activities, almost all of them. She oversaw the volunteers, really, as we were getting into the space, while most of my time was focused on continuing to fundraise, and making decisions about what the building would look like, and how we would pay for the building to look like that. So dealing with supplies, trying to get some pro bono support. For example, Habitat for Humanity Lehigh Valley came and retiled the floors in two of our bathrooms. Home Depot sent employees over to retile the floors in our front vestibule and our elevator, and donated all the supplies needed to do that project. So part of it was figuring out, like, what we were going to need, because we were really trying to not spend too much money to get open. I'm sorry. I need to pause again. TIERSA CURRY: I'm good. AS: Okay. So, yeah. I mean, as we were preparing to open, it was just so much exciting momentum here at the building. And our grand opening, in addition to remarks from dignitaries, it was just a momentous occasion. It was a rainy Saturday. I believe it was a Saturday. It was definitely on the weekend. And we had four hundred people show up. Everyone was really excited. We had a short VIP part for our founding donors, the people who gave five hundred or higher in that initial event that we hosted back in June 2014, right before the grand opening. And we had initially, right from day one, we said, founding donors will get the first view. And they came in a little bit before. We also had a volunteer recognition event that week for all the volunteers who helped us get the building ready, and that was a really exciting night, as well. You know, and from there, after the grand opening, it really moved very fast. So from that moment on, it was pretty nonstop. At the grand opening, we actually announced 10 programs that we'd be starting right away. And it wasn't long before there was many more. I think none of us quite predicted how much momentum there would be. And it was a constant balancing act between saying yes to everything that the community needed, and saying no, because we didn't have the resources to do everything at once. So we started with our LGBTQ library, and we started offering HIV testing, and we had a bereavement group. And we had partnered with other nonprofits. Like, Turning Point of Lehigh Valley was one of our first rental partners. Lehigh Valley Humanists was also one of our first rental partners. And so we had this space, and it was really exciting. And we wanted to start utilizing it as best as we could. And really, throughout 2016, that continued. But something changed in the world in June 2016, which was two years after we announced our founding, which was the Pulse massacre. And so, you know, on the morning of Pulse, we all got the news just like everyone else did around the world. And we knew that we needed to respond, because we knew that our community needed us to respond. But in all of the work that we put into opening the building, we really hadn't thought about security. And the Pulse massacre let us know that we needed to add security to the building, and we needed to do it pretty quickly. So we actually went to Air Products and PPL, and between the two companies, they gave us $16,000 of emergency grants to pay for security that we needed right away. And that was a challenging conversation, really. It was, we just hadn't thought about it. And for good reason. We hadn't had to have thought about it. But the Pulse massacre really reminded us that we needed to be thinking about that. At the same time, we needed to be thinking about our community's needs, and we organized, within just a couple hours, a march from Candida's to Stonewall. Hundreds of people showed up. And we marched. The police chief, at the time, joined us. Government officials, Republicans and Democrats. Congressman Charlie Dent was there as a Republican leader. We had many Democrats, as well. The owner of Candida's, Candida Affa, joined us for the march. We started at Candida's for some opening remarks, and then we marched over from her bar, which was on 12th and Chew, over to Hamilton Street, and then we marched down Hamilton Street to 10th Street, and then we turned to go on 10th Street over to the Stonewall. And in front of the Stonewall, people gathered on the steps of the Stonewall, hundreds of people. And we stood strong and resolved that love was stronger than hate. Our community would not keep from dancing. We would continue to do the work that was needed. We also, as a community in the Lehigh Valley, even though we were very new as an organization, raised about five thousand dollars to send down to the Orlando LGBT Center to support their urgent needs. And the next year, on the Pulse anniversary, we sent some additional money down to support the Pulse memorial. We've really rarely done fundraising for other communities, but that was a moment where it felt very needed, and our community wanted to do that. They really wanted to give as a Lehigh Valley LGBT community voice. Later in 2016, that's really -- we really started to grow pretty quickly in 2016 and in 2017, and we were able to bring on more staff. Really, to get us through the grand opening, it was a very lean team here at the center, and we started to grow. We started to have more and more employees. And that trend has continued, certainly through today, where our growth has been pretty unprecedented. But our programs continue to evolve. So in February 2017, we opened Project Silk, our LGBTQ youth program in partnership with Valley Youth House, through a grant. It was a quarter million dollar grant we received with Valley Youth House to start this program as a recreational-based safe space program for LGBTQ youth, specifically queer youth of color, and that it would be HIV-prevention focused. So the program started in February 2017, but we got the grant in the end of 2016 to be able to get started. And that was a really big win for our organization, to be able to get that kind of funding pretty early on. Our health programs really had been the strongest-funded part of our organization, and then when we received the youth program, that added to it. Also, our library and our art galleries were doing very well, engaging the community. We partnered with Lehigh University to be able to offer community reading groups. We were able to bring in a professional curator, Deborah Rabinsky, who curated most of our exhibits in our galleries, and was really able to help us to develop the gallery. We, at some point, launched the Reel Queer Film Series to be able to provide free screenings of art house, independent,and documentary films that celebrate LGBTQ lives. And as we continued to grow, more was possible. You know, more became possible. One former employee who was really pivotal to that growth was Oliver Reilly, who goes by Ollie. And Ollie was the first development staff person here. And it's very hard for a new nonprofit to hire a development staff person, because it's a big amount of money to commit to, and you're really relying on that person's ability to raise the money, so it's a little scary. But I knew, as a fundraising professional myself, I knew how necessary it was for our growth. And when we brought Ollie in, fundraising really continued to grow beyond what it was before when it was just me doing the fundraising. And by the way, I should mention that from day one, we've had interns, volunteers. Some of them have helped with fundraising. We've also had staff members with various roles in fundraising, as well. But Ollie was the first full-time development employee, other than me. And that was pivotal, in terms of our growth as an organization. From there, I actually think that the community really started taking us seriously after we bought the building. That was the moment where people really saw us as -- we went from being a dream to being a reality for a lot of people. Including me. But I think that people that weren't willing to invest early on, by making donations, including large ones, to a startup, once we had the building, they were really willing to be part of it. MF: Can you go back a minute to -- I mean, we're still, kind of, in those first years. I mean? , you talk about corporate support, governmental support. Even though you didn't go with the one dollar building, you had an offer out there from the city of Allentown. How does that happen in Pennsylvania or in the Lehigh Valley, where you and others involved in making the center able to motivate and activate wide support, from corporate support, governmental support, and then, of course, volunteer community support? AS: I mean, we had to make a strong and compelling case for support, every direction we went. When we bought this building, we had to go appeal to Lehigh County to get property tax exemption, and we had to make the case that Bradbury-Sullivan Center was going to relieve the government of specific burdens in the types of services we would provide here. When we talked to the city of Allentown's Redevelopment Authority earlier about receiving a one dollar Redevelopment Authority building, we had to make the case that having an LGBT center would not only serve the people in our community, but that it would beautify the neighborhood, it would provide economic benefit back to the community, and it would serve the entire community's cultural needs, as well. And that's what we've done. Even though we didn't take that one dollar building, we have done that here in what was a vacant building. And this building, I didn't talk about what it was. But historically, it was a warehouse. It was, at one point, a guns and ammo place, to my knowledge. The last thing it was before it was vacant for two years before we bought it was, the second floor was a law firm, the first floor was an architect office, and the third floor was the Lehigh County Drug and Alcohol building. And so it wasn't conducive to one organization taking over the whole building. We had to do some work to make that, kind of, seamless. And it really felt like three different organizations, just the way the building was structured. And so we had to change that around a little bit and make it feel like one space, one community center. And, you know, the support that we started receiving, we received because we asked for it. We made a compelling case for support. With corporate support, we would engage employees of those corporations and ask for their help to make the case to the company. We would talk about what we would be able to accomplish from cultural and economic lenses. So what would be our economic benefit back to the Lehigh Valley, and what would be the cultural benefit for the people who live here? MF: You talked about doing a community visioning, getting people together to envision what the center would be. And I'm just curious what some of those visions were that community members shared, and how that mapped out. AS: That wasn't specific to the center, actually. It was just about, really, what the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ community wanted from the LGBT movement for the next ten years. And that was back in October 2014, so looking 2014 to 2024. And it was right after we won marriage equality nationally at the Supreme Court. So some of the things people talked about were, you know, a final end to the AIDS epidemic. You know, that with how many years had gone past, that that needed to be reprioritized. They talked about winning nondiscrimination protection, so that LGBTQ people didn't fear discrimination from landlords or employers based on who they are. People talked about creating more opportunities for parents of LGBT kids, and for LGBTQ parents in general. People talked about, you know, navigating family building as an LGBTQ family, or as a couple, or even as an individual. They talked about a variety of things. And some people did talk about the need for a community space. But really, we weren't thinking local as much as we were thinking from a national lens. We did, however, at Lehigh Valley Pride in 2015, we did some informal surveying to get people's ideas about what a center might be. It wasn't a scientific survey the way that our LGBT Health Needs Assessment is, where it's professionally analyzed, and it goes through an IRB process, like university researchers would do. This was more just for our own programmatic knowledge, so that we could start to build the programs that our community would respond to. MF: What did people write down? What were they interested in for the center, and how did that influence your development of programming? AS: It was clear that people wanted arts and culture programs. Some of the words that community members use are not necessarily the words that funders use to describe what is sometimes a similar thing. So people would talk about social programs, or fun ways to connect with community, and we talk about that today as community building and cultural programs. But that's really what we're talking about. People talked about a place for support groups. They talked about a film festival or film screenings. There was a variety of ideas. And not every idea was something that was able to be operationalized. Even seven and a half years later, we haven't been able to with everything. And needs change over time, as well. But we did really think about some of those initial thoughts that we heard, and to try to operationalize many of them. MF: I want to ask a little bit more about the public health programming, because you had that first big grant for the Health Needs Assessment. I'm curious. What did you uncover in that assessment in the first year? How has that shifted over the years that you've done it? AS: So we learned right from the beginning with the first LGBTQ Health Needs Assessment that LGBTQ people in the Lehigh Valley experienced health disparities through all aspects of their lives, except for one, which was access to health insurance. But in every other area of our lives, we were faring a little bit worse off from a health and wellness standpoint than the majority of the population. And in some health areas, significantly worse off. And health insurance is often the primary indicator of one's health, but for the LGBT community, it wasn't the primary indicator. We had greater access to health insurance, and worsened health outcomes, lower screening rates. And ultimately, what that came down to is people having negative reactions from healthcare providers, many people not having a primary care provider at all, and only really getting care when it was absolutely necessary. You know, going to the emergency room when something really serious is happening. So we learned that there was specific disparities, especially around tobacco, cancer, HIV. So we started doing work in those areas, health promotion work. And we were able to go back to the Department of Health to get some funding that was able to really let us hire more staff, or at that point, really, hire staff, and to start these health promotion programs in the community. And what those programs looked like at the beginning -- we were learning as we were going. There was no roadmap, really, for us. We had great funding partners that taught us a lot, and that also took some chances with us, let us explore what might work for our community. And we created some great programs. We went into schools and did tobacco prevention workshops. We did presentations at LGBTQ churches. We stickered people at gay bars with stickers that said, "LGBT Smoke Free." We actually paid Pride festivals across eastern Pennsylvania to go smoke free. By 2018, we had 10 Pride festivals in Pennsylvania that had committed to be smoke free, with really only a couple years of that work. By 2019, it was 14 Pride festivals. So our work really continued to grow, and especially the health promotion work really took off. We had some other grants around cancer prevention that let us continue some of that work around anal cancer, around breast cancer, cervical cancer, to let us continue some of that, as well, and to grow it. In 2018, when we conducted our Needs Assessment in 2018 -- which was the first time we did the assessment statewide, as opposed to separate assessments in six different regions of the state. The results -- we did a data tour where we went out around the state to present the data to the community. And one of the people who came to the Pittsburgh presentation was from the Network of the National Library of Medicine. And she came up to me afterwards and said, "This data is really impressive. We have some funding that you should apply for." And we did. And we were able to get -- one of our most prestigious funding sources has been the Network of the National Library of Medicine. And they have continued to be a funder to this day, to fund some of our really incredible health promotion work. They've funded work around training health providers. They've funded work around cancer screenings, flu vaccines. So we've been able to explore a lot, to the point where today, you know, our health programs manager has a doctorate in public health, which would have seemed unfathomable to us, certainly in 2014, and even in 2016 and 2018, to be able to bring on staff with credentials like that to lead our programs. I mean, we've really built up, as an organization, our credibility, not only for the funders but for job applicants, as well. MF: I have some ideas about this, but I just want to ask a basic question. What is the impact of a statewide health assessment? What is the impact of public health programming from a local LGBT community center? AS: Yeah. So every community deserves an LGBT center. That's what CenterLink says, and that was a mantra we used at the beginning. And we need our local community-based LGBT centers because community-based organizations are the first line of defense. So it's where you go when you need to build community. You're new to an area and you want to meet people. It's also where you often turn when you need a referral for a doctor. It's an organization you trust to get information. And so as a trusted messenger to our community, we were a great organization to provide health promotion programs. The Needs Assessment -- one of our early funders, United Way Greater Lehigh Valley -- actually, they weren't somebody who funded us early on, but they were an organization that we were trying to get their funding. And Marci Lesko, who was the vice president of the United Way, used to tell me, "Without the data, the chatta don't matta." And she said it just like that. And so we went out to get the data. You know, we needed local data to make the case for what the challenges affecting our community were. Health is broad. So health is not just about your visit to your doctor. It's also about a person experiencing social isolation and loneliness. It's about barriers to care. It's about a variety of things. So yes, it's about cancer screenings, and it's about behavioral risks. But it's also about how we care for each other as a community. So the Needs Assessment really has given us a kind of guiding force to our work, to our programmatic development, and it's actually been utilized for every grant we've applied for, almost every single grant here at the center, including arts programs grants, to make the case for what our community needs. It's hard data. It's legitimate data. It's data that's professionally analyzed. And we have a very large sample size. The data stands up. We're able to utilize those data to achieve results. It's actually probably the most consequential program that we do-- (Video interrupted) AS: So, you know, we were talking about public health. And one of the things that, really, Bradbury-Sullivan Community Center has worked to create, the Pennsylvania LGBTQ Health Needs Assessment is a biannual measurement tool of health disparities and barriers to care. It's become one of the most consequential things that we do here, possibly the most consequential thing, because it's the largest state-level LGBTQ health data in the US in any state. And it's actually been cited as a major data source by researchers, by hospitals. It's used by hospitals for programmatic improvements. Other states have even looked at it as a model for what they might do in their state. And so it's something I'm really proud of having created here, and having really grown. And it has supported every other program at the center. MF: Could you talk a little bit about the collaborative nature -- like, how you developed that Needs Assessment across the state? AS: Yeah. So the way that we made it a statewide sample was that we went to the Department of Health, and we said, It would be much easier, and less time consuming, and frankly, less expensive, if we did this as one statewide project instead of six separate projects, where you're working with six different agencies in each different community. So the model we did was that we got one state grant to do this on a statewide basis, and then we collaborated and funded LGBT community-based organizations across Pennsylvania to be partners in that project, and actually, we partnered with over 30 organizations in Pennsylvania, and funded them to help us with the data collection. We then share the data back with them. So it's a collaborative project. It's one where we all feel a sense of ownership in it. All the other centers are named in the report. And they have access to the data, as well, including the local data for their region. And I think that's one of the reasons it's been so successful, is because we all work together in Pennsylvania to achieve this unified goal. MF: You talked a little bit about other public health programming, the public health -- the Needs Assessment. Can you talk a little bit about other programming, like your merging with Pride, and Pride programming that you put on? AS: Yeah. So Lehigh Valley Pride, as we call it, was previously known as Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley. And it was an all-volunteer organization since the early '90s. And courageous and dedicated volunteers that really made Lehigh Valley Pride happen every year. In 2017, Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley merged with Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. So I facilitated this merger. And we worked for many months with the board of Pride to consider how this might work. And ultimately, it was mutually agreed upon that we would merge together, and we would take over the planning of the festival going forward. That merger was important, because for an event of this size to continue to grow, it really needed professional staff support. And that's what we were able to do, dedicate a full-time employee to the production of Lehigh Valley Pride, as opposed to relying only on volunteers, which is challenging, because volunteers change frequently year to year. And this gives the event more stability. Also, we've been able to grow the event. The first year after the Pride festival merged with us was a bit of a comedy of errors, in the sense that four days before the event, there was a flood at the Pride venue, the longtime Pride venue. It was to be the 25th anniversary, and we knew that the festival really needed to happen, but the entire park flooded. And we were told by the city that we could not have the event there. And so with four days to go, we redesigned the entire festival, moved it over to the grounds of the Jewish Community Center, where Pride has continued to be today, in Allentown. And put on an amazing festival. The event continued to grow year by year. We added a second stage. We added music performers. We've added the opportunity to have an artist promenade. In 2021, we even added a festival mural. We also prioritize access and inclusion for people with disabilities, by bringing sign language interpreters to the stages, reserving parking and seating in the front of the stages for older adults and people with disabilities, ADA restrooms, large print programs, to really try to make for a more inclusive festival. Because Pride is for everyone, and that's really important to us. I think that there were some skeptics over how it would work at the Jewish Community Center, but it really has worked pretty well to have a large festival. We also increased the faith programs at Pride by bringing them onsite. Because previous to it, when it was at Cedar Beach Park, there wasn't a good location where it could happen onsite. And by moving it to the Jewish Community Center, we're able to use the indoor space in the morning. So we actually brought together an interfaith Pride service that kicks off the day at 10:30. The festival starts at 12. And that has been a great addition to the festival, as well. So really proud of the growth of Lehigh Valley Pride since it merged with us. I should say that the merger itself meant merging two nonprofits different ways of operating. Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley was a membership organization. Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center is not. So we actually had to have a membership meeting of all the Pride members, who were notified of the vote to merge. We went through a process to do that. MF: In addition to Pride programming, you have arts and cultural programming, and you have gallery programming. But you -- AS: Yeah. I'll talk a little bit about the galleries. So I talked about the library earlier, but our art galleries, for me, have been so exciting and important over the years. Really, the only queer art space in the Lehigh Valley, where that's its mission, is to exhibit and celebrate LGBTQ artists. And we've balanced between local artists and not-so-local artists. And we've brought some exhibits that are museum quality. Mariette Pathy Allen, who is a major photojournalist, who has documented trans communities for decades, kicked off her newest book of photographs of trans people in Southeast Asia from our center with an exhibit here. We've had incredible, incredible exhibits over the years. And it's brought the community together. We've had group art shows. We had one show, for example, Art Against Trump's Misogyny. It was called Nasty Women: Art Against Trump's Misogyny, where artists made artwork responding to Trump calling Hillary Clinton a nasty woman. We also have had exhibits that celebrated Elton John's final tour, which kicked off two blocks from our community center in downtown Allentown at the PPL Center. At the same time, we were having an exhibit here in our galleries of LGBTQ artists that made artwork utilizing Elton John lyrics. And it was called To Sir Elton, With Love. You know, Elton John is unquestionably one of the most high-impact LGBTQ musicians of the last century, and when he was kicking off his final tour in Allentown, we knew that we wanted to give artists in our community a chance to honor what they loved about Elton John, as well. So many different exhibits have happened here in our galleries, and it's been really incredible. MF: You mentioned Trump, through this art gallery exhibit. What was it like to be a community center executive director during that presidential campaign and that presidency? AS: Well, you know, we're a nonpartisan organization, so as all nonpartisan organizations, we don't engage directly in electoral politics. We don't tell people who to vote for. However, the day after Trump was elected, the morning after, when we all woke up to that news, we knew that it was going to be very challenging for our community, not because a Republican was elected president over a Democrat, but because a person who made such challenging comments about diverse communities, LGBTQ people, people of color, Muslims, transgender people in particular, there was a lot of very strong words and rhetoric that was spewn throughout the campaign. And so we wanted to make it clear to our community that we were a safe space for everyone to come and be, but that we would also resist when needed. So that April, April 2017, we hosted an exhibit called The Queer Art of Resistance, LGBTQ artists making art as resistance to Trump's anti-LGBTQ agenda. The next year, we hosted Nasty Women: Art Against Trump's Misogyny. So we gave artists a chance to use the artistic freedom and create a work of art that could be exhibited, that could be part of the resistance. After Charlottesville, we cosponsored a rally in downtown Allentown against the hate that was spewn in Charlottesville. And we were very clear that hate has no home here in the Lehigh Valley, and LGBTQ people stand with other vulnerable and marginalized communities, who were really feeling attacked by the former president. And of course, once Trump issued rules that were going to directly harm LGBTQ people, we took a different approach, which is, we actually filed lawsuits to block three Trump administration rules that would have caused direct harm to LGBTQ people. The first one was the denial of care rule, where Trump's Health and Human Service Department issued a rule, a final rule, that would have invited discrimination from health care providers by saying that health care providers could, essentially, deny care to an LGBTQ person if it violated their moral and religious beliefs. In fact, the rule was so problematic, it didn't even require the health care professional to notify their employer that they were doing so. It didn't require a warm handoff to a different provider. It didn't require a referral to a different provider. It didn't require anything. It was such a harmful rule, designed specifically in a way that would have harmed people living with HIV and transgender people, as well as people who may need abortion care in the future. So we were very concerned about this rule. And in coalition with some other LGBT organizations and a couple doctors, we were a plaintiff in a lawsuit led by Lambda Legal, and were able to block the rule from going into effect. We then filed another lawsuit, again with pro bono counsel from Lambda Legal -- pro bono counsel from Lambda Legal is consistent with all three of the cases. And in the second case, the Trump administration's HHS promulgated a rule that would have removed Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which is the section that provides for nondiscrimination in health care, through both insurance and health care providers. And it mandates nondiscrimination. And the removal of the nondiscrimination language specific to our community would really put LGBTQ+ people at risk. So we also filed a suit to block the removal of 1557 from going into effect, and again, we were successful. And then at the very end of the Trump administration, the former president, kind of, went off on a different tangent, and decided he wanted to ban diversity training for federal contractors and grantees. And so we filed suit, again with Lambda Legal as pro bono counsel, to block what we considered to be a racist and sexist ban on diversity training. As an organization that provides diversity training to organizations that receive federal funds, it would have had a direct impact on our budget and our ability to provide trainings to school districts, for example, possibly to state government agencies, certainly to some corporations and nonprofits. Anyone receiving federal funds would not have been able to receive diversity training. And there were specific words you weren't allowed to say in trainings. So we were able to successfully block that rule from also going into effect. I'm really proud that throughout the Trump administration, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center stood up and stood strong to stand up for our community and to block these harmful rules from going into effect. And we wouldn't have been able to do it without pro bono counsel at Lambda Legal. Also, it was a lot of work to be a plaintiff in these cases. But we were part of history in protecting our community from some of the direct harm that the administration tried to inflict. MF: There's another big thing happening during the Trump administration, which is COVID-19. AS: Yeah. MF: So here you have these three lawsuits, but you also have the global pandemic. How were you navigating in that time? AS: Well, nobody, including me, could have predicted the pandemic that has now been ongoing for -- we've just entered the third year [laughs] of the ongoing pandemic. That's, certainly in my lifetime, unprecedented. At the start of the pandemic, like every other LGBT center, like every other nonprofit, it was just about navigating uncertainty. It was about, we don't know what's to come, but we have to adapt quickly. So in an effort to keep our community safe as well as our staff, we announced that staff would be working from home. We were shutting down our building. It was a few days before the governor made this decision for the whole state in March 2020. At the time, we had 10 staff. And so we thought it would be for nine weeks. The governor, his shutdown was, I believe, for four or five weeks. Our shutdown, which was before the governor did that, was nine weeks. Obviously, it lasted a little longer [laughs] than that. But at the time, we were doing the best we could with the information we had. Right? And it was certainly a scary time. We had to very quickly pivot to new technology. We pivoted almost all programs to virtual within a matter of two weeks. We were able to maintain almost all staff positions. We did end up receiving a paycheck protection loan, a PPP loan, that allowed us to maintain staffing for a longer period of time. But we had a lot of technology expenses right away to be able to pivot to virtual programs. And these were unbudgeted, because the pandemic really came about pretty quickly, at least in the scope of how nonprofits budget out a year in advance. It wasn't something that we would have known to plan for the previous November, you know, to plan for, Oh, we need enterprise Zoom licenses, and we need to change -- we needed to get DocuSign for our entire organization so that we could sign invoices and grant contracts. And we needed to have Slack, so that we could do interoffice communication. And it was both learning how to be a virtual office and learning how to support our community and care for our community. At the beginning of the pandemic, we called most of our donors, just to check in and ask how they were during the time of uncertainty. We weren't asking them for money at that time. We also had to call our funders, and say, We have to change the grant that we said that we would do, because we can't do any in-person outreach right now, or we can't do this thing in person. We need to shift how we're doing this. And luckily, every one of our funders stood by us and said, We understand. It's unprecedented times. Just let us know what changes need to be made. And we made them all. They were all reasonable changes given the uncertainty. In addition to what we were doing directly for our community in terms of programs, and in terms of what we were doing to manage staff transition to a virtual office, we were also directly engaged in advocacy from the very beginning. In March 2020, the CDC, under the Trump administration, put out a directive requiring all states to collect demographic data with regard to race, ethnicity, age, and gender. They did not include sexual orientation or gender identity. In April 2020, we sent -- we organized with the National LGBT Cancer Network, and 26 organizations joined us -- a letter to then-Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine, asking that Pennsylvania be the first state to mandate collection of sexual orientation and gender identity data for COVID infection, mortality, and hospitalization. One month later to the day, we were able to get Pennsylvania to collect COVID-19 infection data. And then we continued advocacy. And the journey of health advocacy throughout the pandemic for our organization was that every six weeks, it felt like we were starting from scratch. Every six weeks, there was a totally new process that didn't exist six weeks ago. And somehow, LGBT people were left out again. So we had to start over again when it came to the contact tracing process, to get LGBT demographic data into Sara Alert, which is used for contact tracing, and into the COVID Alert App Pennsylvania. And we then had to train all the contact tracers. We were able to train all of Pennsylvania Department of Health, Erie County Department of Health, Philadelphia Department of Health, and Allentown Health Bureau's contact tracers on how to ask LGBTQ questions. We ended up working on the vaccine distribution plan and provided public comment, signed on by many other LGBT organizations across the state, to prioritize people living with HIV in Phase 1A, the early days of the COVID vaccination schedule. In fact, our public comment was accepted in January, at a really good time, because we were able to ensure that people living with HIV could get their vaccines in that 1A period, right when vaccines were being made available to non-health care workers. But really, it was a journey of health activism through that time, as well. And in terms of our programs, I mean, we had to continuously pivot. So I didn't want to be canceling in-person programs too far out, because we kept being told, Oh, it's just a couple more weeks. Oh, it's just a couple more months. So we had to make decisions continuously. And moving Lehigh Valley Pride to a virtual Pride for the first time in its history was a heart-wrenching decision, but it would not have been possible to have an in-person Pride in 2020. So we ended up with a televised Pride festival on RCN, a star-studded event. Celebrities that participated included Michelle Visage, Carson Kressley, RuPaul Drag Racers like Silky Nutmeg Ganache, Jujubee. We had Peter Paige from Queer as Folk. We had Theo Germaine from The Politician. We had Holly Near, you know, iconic musician Holly Near. We had a whole bunch of really amazing folks. We had professional athletes, like Kurtis Gabriel. We had a really tremendous virtual Pride festival. But it wasn't the same as in-person Pride. So it was as good as it could have possibly been for our community, but it was not the same as an in-person Pride festival. And we continued to pivot. We produced a virtual queer novel miniseries on our Facebook that ran as Facebook Live events, where we had, instead of in-person author talks, we had author talks on Facebook Live. We tried to curate content for our community to keep our community connected through a period of quarantine and uncertainty. And we started delivering healthy food packages to the youth program participants that we were serving, because they couldn't come here, so we brought stuff there. As a resource to our community, we actually developed a subpage on our website for LGBT-specific COVID-19 information. We wrote guidances for the city of Allentown, county of Erie, Montgomery County, and the state of Pennsylvania about safer sex during the pandemic. These were published guidances by our governments, and that was really important. We continuously did work throughout the pandemic to ensure that LGBTQ people had the information to make risk-aware decisions, that they had the access to community through virtual means, and that our staff had jobs to continue to do the essential work for our community. (break in video) AS: Good? Okay. MF: I would say also during this time, you were moving into publishing. And I know this is, sort of, adjacent to the community center, but you're publishing on public health, editing collections. You have another book coming out soon. Could you talk a little bit about how that work as an author, as an editor, is connected to your work with the center, or just a little bit about your publication? AS: Yeah. So after we did our first Needs Assessment in 2015, I became very passionate about LGBTQ barriers to care and access to care. When it comes to accessing, the unmet dream of health equity, defined by the US government, is the attainment of the highest quality of health for all people. That's the definition from Healthy People 2020. LGBTQ people don't have that. So I actually went and enrolled in a graduate certificate program at George Washington University in LGBT health policy and practice. And that program really was very helpful in getting me to think more about the role that our center could play as a community-based organization. But also during that time, I struggled to find any published works written by LGBTQ people that told stories in our own voices about the health care experiences that we had. There was writing by researchers, and writing by health care providers, but there wasn't really writing by actual LGBTQ people telling our own stories. Around the same time, I had a negative experience with a local dermatologist. I went in for a skin cancer screening, a baseline screening, and at every step of the way, I just felt that the care that was being provided wasn't care to patients like me. And I didn't go back for the follow up that the dermatologist recommended. And it took me about a month, but I mustered up the courage and made an appointment with a new dermatologist in Bucks County. It was about an hour away in New Hope. And I received the care that I needed there. But that was a really big transitional moment, as well, that even as a full-time advocate and activist for LGBTQ people, I could even have a negative experience with a doctor. And so I ended up collecting other people's stories. I talked to some friends and some colleagues who had other challenging experiences accessing the care that their bodies need. And I ended up compiling a book, which -- I like to say curating a book. It's an edited anthology called Bodies and Barriers: Queer Activists on Health. And it collects the stories of 26 queer and trans people from around the world, telling our stories about the health care challenges that we've experienced. And the book was published March 2020, right at the start of the pandemic. But I was able to do some prelaunch events in January, which I was glad to be able to do. My last event, right before the pandemic shut everything down, was the Lehigh Valley TEDxLehighRiver, where they had a local authors expo, and I was able to be there and talk to some Lehigh Valley folks. But the book actually was launched at the Creating Change Conference in Dallas, Texas, in January 2020. And I did book events in DC, and San Francisco, and Oakland, and a big event here in the Bethlehem Area Public Library. But then the pandemic hit and changed the course of what a book launch was going to look like. The book, though, is also something that continues to evolve, in terms of how we think about improving care. So it's been a book that health care providers have been able to read to understand patient needs. It's been a book that has been cited by researchers, to be able to think about some of the broader societal shifts that are needed in terms of public health and access to care. And it's been a book that's been utilized by LGBTQ community members to maybe consider how to speak up to their doctors and ask for the care that their bodies need. So it's something I'm really proud of. The book has done quite well, actually, and I have another book called Crisis and Care: Queer Activist Responses to a Global Pandemic, that is coming out in June 2022, that's about how LGBTQ people responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. It's not about COVID-19 as a virus. It's not about how the government responded, or lack thereof. It's not about Dr. Fauci. It's not about Admiral Levine. It's about how queer people responded to a crisis with care, how we cared for our community in a moment of crisis, and what we can learn from this pandemic to move forward in our world. And I do outline how Bradbury-Sullivan Center led the way as a health advocate in Pennsylvania during the first year of the pandemic. MF: I can't wait to see that book. I just want to say that. And it's recorded. I can't wait to buy that. Beyond publishing those two, curating those two collections, one of which will be out soon, is Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center participating in other kinds of publications, research publications, or -- AS: Yeah. So something that's, kind of, unique to Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center is our work to make contributions to the literature more broadly. So we actually conduct original research. We're so lucky to have a data and evaluation department. We present the results of our programs at state and national conferences, for example, American Public Health Association, Society for Public Health Educators. That's just two examples. And we have also worked to try to publish some of the results from our Needs Assessment, or programmatic results from our archive, or from some of our health programs, in either peer-reviewed or other academic journals. That really allows us to demonstrate the role that Bradbury-Sullivan Center plays, and more broadly, the role that LGBT community centers play in all communities, because the work that we do here is not so dissimilar from other communities. And so our contribution to the literature, I think, has been really important. And from a nonacademic standpoint, we've also been fairly active in media advocacy, to generate op-eds and letters to the editor on key issues that our community really needs to be concerned about, from ending the harmful practice of conversion therapy -- and our organization has led that. After Trump took office, actually, when it was looking like the Trump administration may even publicly fund conversion therapy, because Tom Price, his first HHS secretary, Betsy DeVos, his education secretary, and Mike Pence, his vice president, all publicly supported conversion therapy. We quickly worked with the National Center for Lesbian Rights to draft legislation that we were able to encourage the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Reading to adopt. And that ended the legal practice of conversion therapy by health care professionals against minors here in these three cities. You know, but basically, we will generate op-eds on issues like conversion therapy or nondiscrimination, or other issues, as well. Our team here has constantly -- I've encouraged staff members to consider their CV, to submit proposals to conferences, to consider writing to get published, because it helps them, but it also really helps the organization be the leader that we know we are. MF: You mentioned the bans on conversion therapy, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how that worked in Bethlehem, in Allentown, and Easton. Can you just describe that a bit more, what that process was like once you had the legislation drafted? AS: So National Center for Lesbian Rights drafted the legislation, and shared it with local elected officials in our community. We built a strong coalition, though. So our role was that we were doing public education and awareness in support of ending conversion therapy in our communities. So for example, we partnered with KidsPeace, which is a mental health hospital here in the Lehigh Valley, who shared in public meetings that their operating rules don't allow conversion therapy for their clinicians. The director of the Allentown Health Bureau spoke out, saying that she had talked to local pediatricians, who have confirmed that they have seen the harms of conversion therapy in our community from their patients. So we mobilized our community, is really the role that we played, as grassroots organizing. And we were able to see these three laws passed very quickly in each municipality. MF: Did they happen simultaneously in each municipality? AS: No. It started with Allentown, and then Reading, and then Bethlehem, I believe. It was definitely Allentown first. MF: Yeah, Bethlehem was a little slow. AS: Well, Bethlehem happened quickly. It was our timeline. We're limited in terms of our resources, so we started in Allentown, and then we either went to Bethlehem or Reading next, and then the third one. And the Reading ordinance we did in partnership with the Reading LGBT community center. MF: That's a lot happening, COVID, (laughs) suing an administration, publishing books, working on the bans against conversion therapy. Was there anything else happening in that time period (laughs) that you could load onto your plate? AS: The reality is that there's always been so much happening. We are a fast-growing, rapidly-growing, growth-minded organization, and we have been since day one. And the result of that is that we are able to always do more for our community than we could the previous year. The other result of that is that there's a lot going on. We've built a complex organization here, in the sense that we're running a community archive, but we're also doing public health programs. We're running youth programs and also running supportive services for adults in our community. We have professional art galleries, and we're also trying to figure out a lending library system. So there's a lot going on in our organization. We're running a huge Pride festival. All of these things are happening, kind of, throughout the year at the same time. And that's why it's been so important that we've been able to create a really amazing team here. MF: Well, I want to ask a question about the archives, because we haven't talked about that yet, and you really, from the beginning, were focusing also on archival collection when you were envisioning the center and when it was opening. So could I ask about that? AS: Yeah. MF: Why did you [overlapping dialogue ; inaudible] -- AS: It was one of the first programs of the center, actually. So very early on, I approached Tina Hertel, the library director of Muhlenberg College, and we set up a meeting with her, and with Susan Falciani Maldonado, special collections archivist. And the meeting was really -- we had some stuff already. There was stuff in Liz and Trish's basement. I had some stuff in my house. And we didn't want to be holding onto it. And we also knew that there was a lot of stuff in the community. We looked at similar archives in central Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. But something that was really important to me was community ownership. So our agreement with Muhlenberg is the only one we're aware of in the country where an LGBT center maintains ownership of the archival materials, and it's professionally housed and preserved at a university library. And Muhlenberg was willing to do that with us. And it's been an incredible partnership. But it started with, we had very specific things. We had all the Gaydar magazines. Liz had the records from the voter referendum that tried to repeal nondiscrimination in Allentown. I had a whole bunch of stuff from my time with Equality PA. We had some random things. But we knew that we also needed to start a collection and then let it grow, and that's really what's happened. And the archive today has, you know, oral history collection. It has a document collection. When our gay bars closed, when Candida's and Diamonz closed, we were able to get memorabilia. When Stonewall closed, we got memorabilia, and we also did a project called the Stonewall Memories Project, where people could submit their memories about their time at Stonewall. Memory collection as a form of archival work is really important. But, you know, I'm not an archivist, just like I'm not a health care provider. And so my role was really to think creatively about how we can best support our community today and also in the future. And one historian that we were so lucky to bring here to Bradbury-Sullivan to do a book talk, actually, in our library, was Hugh Ryan, who wrote When Brooklyn Was Queer. And in that book, Hugh Ryan says, "Without a past, we don't have a future." And I think that's why local community-based archives are so important. It gives us access to our community's past, so that way, we can collectively consider what the future needs of our community are. MF: The center does so much educational programming, training, arts and culture, galleries, reading groups, film series, archival collection, public health. You're involved in lawsuits when needed to protect our community. Was that part of the original vision that we started with today? Did you think, when you were starting -- AS: We have far exceeded the original vision. I mean, the original vision was getting a physical space. We said we were going to revolutionize the programs and services available to the LGBT community. That's language we used in 2014. I think we have absolutely done that. And that does not mean that there's not more that's needed. Absolutely. There is always more we can do for our community. Our current director of development, Matt Easterwood, likes to say, "More money, more mission." So as Bradbury-Sullivan Center continues to grow, more can be done for the community at large. But, you know, part of my decision to move on from Bradbury-Sullivan Center is because I feel like sometimes I can be clouded by my original vision. And I think leadership changes are good over time. And there's an opportunity for new ideas, for new leadership that comes with different expertise, different backgrounds, different passions. And actually, I think that's good for organizations over time. We have absolutely grown past my wildest dreams. I didn't say at the beginning, but before starting the center, when I was in my first year at Muhlenberg College as a student, I remember asking if there was an LGBT center, and there wasn't. And I was really wanting it. I was looking for ways to access community, and I couldn't find it. And we have that now. So opening the center was really a dream fulfilled, a dream realized, and I think not just for me, but for a collective community. And now it's time for new leadership to chart the next part of that journey. And I'm really excited to continue to see the organization thrive. I also know that we have an amazing team here of staff members, board members, community members, volunteers, program participants, people who are just so dedicated to seeing this organization continue to thrive, that I feel good about leaving, because I feel like the organization is in good hands. MF: Well, we're right about at the end. You ended with this lovely statement about, you know, it will continue with new leadership and wonderful people that are still here. And it leads me to, maybe, a final question or two. Do you want to talk about the people that have really made this organization into this incredible support for our community? AS: Yeah. Why don't you pause for a minute and give me a minute to think about that? AS: Throughout the journey of opening the center, there's been so many people who have been part of that journey, and there's no way I could possibly name every single person. But I do want to share some names of folks that were critical to the start, the opening, and the growth of the center over time. So from the very beginning, Liz Bradbury and Patricia Sullivan, and Liz Kleintop, original board members of Pennsylvania Diversity Network, at the time, that really were willing to go with me on this journey. We had a community center creation committee that also included people like Basilio Bonilla, and Patrick Fligge, and Kari Kirchgessner, now Kari Alvaro. We had volunteers like Don Kohn, who was our design team chair, and brought together a design team of pro bono folks willing to work with us to try to get into that original building. Robert Sandoval was an architect who did all of the architectural work pro bono for that first building that we ended up not taking. Rob Ritter. Rob Ritter was our realtor who helped us to get into this space. We had pro bono lawyers at the beginning, like Tim Brennan and Mike Recchiuti, who helped with the real estate transaction and the zoning needed for us to get into the space. Hundreds of volunteers who -- I cannot name all the volunteers. But I would say we had specific volunteer groups from IBEW Local 375, to Air Products and Olympus, to Habitat for Humanity and Home Depot. I mean, really all corners, right? Churches and synagogues. So many groups came together. We had a coven who came, and also we have humanists, and people of all religions and none that were helping us to get into this space. Over time, though, in this organization, as we continued to grow, yeah, there's absolutely been some really pivotal folks. Judy Ochs was the director of the Division of Tobacco Prevention and Control, and she really took us under her wing and championed us, and gave us the infrastructure that we have today. Dr. Scout of the National LGBT Cancer Network taught me so much that let us work with government funders. Other community center partners like Denise Spivak at CenterLink, who has been with, really, since day one. One of the first calls I made was to her, saying I wanted to start the center. Chris Bartlett in Philadelphia at the William Way LGBT Center, who called me right after he heard that we were opening, and gave me some incredible advice right from day one. Louie Marvin, who was at the Central Pennsylvania LGBT Center at the time, was also super supportive. And then, you know, as we continued to grow, folks like Rob Hopkins and Shawn Bausher, who were with Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley, were instrumental not only in supporting the start of the center, but then in having Pride merge in with the center. The two of them, as well as Mark Stanziola, who was very supportive as well. Rob and Shawn, though, were really the leaders of Pride who were really pushing for the merger to happen. And they really made that happen. Some of our early board members -- Barb Baus. Barb Baus was an incredible leader in this organization at a time when we were just getting into the building. And then Liz Kleintop was board chair after her. And as the organization continued to grow, so many more people got involved. We have so many current staff, board members, community members. And there are some highlights of visitors, special visitors, too, to the center. Governor Wolf signed a bill into law here in our first year. Former Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has visited our building. Admiral Rachel Levine. Senator Casey came and took a tour of our building. Former Congressman Charlie Dent. You know, we've had a lot of wonderful visitors and guests over time. And that's been part of, also, building credibility in our community. People are really seeing that what we were doing was really important here. We've hosted public hearings here for the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, for example. We had a town hall here with the former Pennsylvania Secretary of Aging, Teresa Osborne. There's been some just incredible, incredible moments over the years here at the center. MF: We're at the end, but is there anything that we didn't talk about today that you just think, Mary, we've got to talk about this, I really wanted to address this today? AS: I think I'm all set. MF: Okay. I just want to say at the end of this interview that I think everyone here is wishing you well in California, and you are beloved by so many of us. And I know you won't be a stranger. I'm so glad you did this interview today. Thank you very much. AS: Thank you. 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.) 01:24:43 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 Adrian Shanker, Part 2, March 4, 2022 Description An account of the resource Adrian Shanker recounts the inception of the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the work it does to continue to serve the LGBTQ+ community in the Lehigh Valley and Pennsylvania as a whole. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-30 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-03-04 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/93854068c987960c0ce59af67fd7a1f9.png a9871ff816f86937fd6a504d4056117f 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 of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Adrian Shanker 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-29.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 February 4, 2022 Adrian Shanker, Part 1, February 4, 2022 LGBT-29 01:22:12 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 Adrian Shanker Mary Foltz video/mp4 ShankerAdrian_20220204_video_trimmed.mp4 1.0:|31(14)|76(14)|99(7)|118(4)|139(15)|160(4)|181(7)|200(7)|225(11)|254(5)|275(11)|296(5)|315(17)|336(9)|363(14)|386(2)|407(5)|424(8)|447(14)|470(4)|489(4)|510(4)|533(6)|554(6)|575(10)|596(12)|617(4)|642(2)|661(14)|686(5)|707(8)|736(5)|755(5)|780(7)|807(11)|832(7)|857(5)|880(13)|903(9)|926(8)|951(6)|974(14)|997(7)|1018(10)|1039(10)|1068(3)|1093(13)|1118(8)|1141(11)|1164(6)|1185(15)|1208(11)|1233(4)|1264(5)|1289(9)|1318(2)|1337(10)|1360(8)|1385(4)|1410(7)|1435(2)|1454(11)|1475(9)|1498(13)|1527(3)|1552(7)|1577(2)|1598(2)|1623(9)|1646(4)|1669(16)|1692(3)|1717(11)|1738(13)|1761(8)|1784(4)|1803(14)|1826(15)|1845(3)|1870(2)|1897(14)|1922(16)|1931(4) 0 https://youtu.be/ba_jW5pae2o YouTube video English 4 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I’m here with Adrian Shanker to talk about his 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 ACLS this year and we are meeting today at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center on February 4th, 2022. So first, Adrian, thank you for talking with me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; ADRIAN SHANKER: My pleasure.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: And I just want to start with a few business topics. Could you please state your full name and spell it for me?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: Adrian Shanker. He, him pronouns. A-D-R-I-A-N S-H-A-N-K-E-R. 0 95 Early Years of Life / Growing up in Westchester, New York MF: Okay, all right, business is out of the way. So I just want to start with a question. Would you be willing to tell me a little bit about the early years of your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: I was born in Manhattan and was raised in Westchester, New York in an activist family. My grandfather was the president of the American Federation of Teachers. My other grandfather was a gender theorist, is a gender theorist and psychologist who studies masculinity. And so I grew up in a very interesting home where -- very socially aware as a kid. I remember we had a family meeting about Magic Johnson’s AIDS diagnosis. We talked about Keith Haring’s Crack Is Wack mural in New York City that we passed all the time. &#13 ; &#13 ; 0 497 Values / Education &amp ; Activism MF: So you have a supportive family life. Imparting a variety of different values. Kindness, respecting people, navigating the early years of an epidemic with kindness for others and a sense of urgency that we’re talking about in family spaces. What’s happening to you in your educational experience?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: I’ll also just add for the earth as well. And other sentient beings. Today I’ve been -- I call myself an herbivore, but a vegetarian, for a long time. And I remember when I was a kid -- my mom tells me I was born to be a vegetarian, and that I remember going to a Chinese restaurant and they had a fish tank and there was also fish on the menu and I looked through the menu and I pointed to the tank and I said, “Fish.” Like people would eat those beautiful creatures, I can’t believe that. And so as a kid I ate like very little meat. Only the kind of stuff that you don’t always have control over your diet as a young kid. But in high school I became vegetarian. It’s also the same time I became an activist. And environmental justice has always been pretty important to me but at some point I made a decision to prioritize LGBTQ activism for my own career. But I definitely grew up in a community and a family where we talked about these as kind of in some ways intersecting issues, although we didn’t use that language. 0 920 ''Coming Out'' / Fox Lane GSA AS: [...] And remember going back to my school feeling like we can do this, we can become activists here. I also remember being surprised that I didn’t really lose any friends in high school when I came out. And I thought that I would because it was a time before mass acceptance for a lot of LGBTQ people, we’re still like early 2000s, so in terms of representation in mass media it still wasn’t there. I think Will &amp ; Grace was on. But that was probably it.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Do you remember what it felt like before you came out? Were you anxious about it or --&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: Not really, because it was really a self-realization more than a coming out. It was really a this is who I am and now I’m just going to tell people. It wasn’t an internal struggle. I had a very supportive family. And I was kind of in the group of students that would be self-defined as like punk rockers. So at the time many of them identified as bisexual which was fairly common among like punk rock-identified high school students in the early 2000s. Some of them still identify as queer or bi. But some don’t. 0 1155 Claiming Jewish Identity AS: [...] High school by the way is also where I claimed my Jewish identity. &#13 ; &#13 ; So I grew up culturally Jewish. I would say like Jewish heritage but religiously atheist, a secular family. But after my parents got divorced when I was in second grade, shortly after that I asked my mom if I could go to Hebrew school. And my mom was a very supportive mom, but I don’t think it’s what she was going for. But she did find one. We joined a Reform synagogue in Bedford, New York called Shaaray Tefila. And my mom was actually back in school studying to become a teacher, so she ended up teaching in the religious school there while she was in her graduate program. And I really loved going to Hebrew school. And I’m not sure why. But I really did. I loved learning about something I actually wanted to learn about. 0 1465 Life &amp ; Activism at Muhlenberg College MF: So let’s move a little bit further. What happens after high school to you? Where are you going next? How does the activity journey, your spiritual journey continue into the next years of your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: Yeah. So after high school I went to Muhlenberg College in Allentown, which is how I ended up in the Lehigh Valley as well. And I came into Muhlenberg basically expecting to eventually become a rabbi. And I was very excited about that actually. And there was a lot of reasons why I chose Muhlenberg for that reason. But I came in ready to go as an activist. And I had all the angst and all the passion and really no know-how for how to operationalize queer activism. &#13 ; &#13 ; And I remember early in college, probably my first month, there was a series that Muhlenberg has called Center for Ethics where they have a theme for the year and they bring guest speakers throughout the year, and they’re often tied to extra credit in classes if you attend and then do a write-up or things colleges do. And Kate Bornstein was one of the first speakers. And I didn’t know who she was, but I went, and it was recommended by one of my classes. And I also had the attitude that I really wanted to learn everything queer, so I was going to go. And she did kind of part talk and part performance. And I felt very inspired. And I still remember some of the things that she said in that talk my first year of college. 0 1847 Meeting Liz Bradbury and Trish Sullivan AS: [...] Another thing happened when I was in college, which is that I got connected with -- so the Hillel director at Muhlenberg, she’s no longer alive, but her name was Patti Mittleman. And she was a very important influence in my life. And one of the things that she did was she actually told me -- well, before that I had asked the community service office on campus if they could help me find an LGBT organization I could volunteer at. I had grown up going to the LGBT center in White Plains, New York for the youth program, and before that for a program they had for parents with gay kids. And when I moved here to go to college in Allentown I was looking around, there was no LGBT center. &#13 ; &#13 ; And I asked, “So is there an organization I can volunteer with?” And they took two weeks and came back and said, “We can’t find one.” And I remember complaining about this to Patti Mittleman, the Hillel director. And she basically said, “You have to meet these two people, Liz Bradbury and Patricia Sullivan.” And she connected me to them. We actually had one of the first events that I organized as a college student was for Liz to actually come speak on campus. And we did an exhibit of a photography series that she had created at the time about marriage equality, believe it was called Faces of Inequality. And as a student I actually in 2007 joined the board of directors for an organization that Liz and Trish had founded called Pennsylvania Diversity Network. 0 1940 Lobbying in Pennsylvania &amp ; Important Takeaways AS: [...] And before that in 2006 my first time lobbying in Pennsylvania was against the Pennsylvania Marriage Amendment in March 2006. And I got on a bus with some people who had become close friends and fellow activists. Reverend Goudy from Metropolitan Community Church [inaudible] Donna Cruciani from PPL Corporation, the head of their LGBT resource group before she retired, Steve Black, who had led PA-GALA, he’s unfortunately no longer alive. There was a few other people on that trip as well. And we met with legislators and as a college student it felt very empowering. &#13 ; &#13 ; It was also NRA lobby day in Harrisburg that day and I remember coming back and talking to one of my professors, Gary Jones, who taught a class I was taking called “Radicalism in American History.” And I was so upset that there was all these NRA people in the capitol. He said to me, he said, “Adrian, if you want to be effective working on gay rights in Pennsylvania you have to let them have their guns.” And he said, “What I’m telling you is pick your issue and stick with it.” So that was really when I started really thinking I have to pick my issue and stick with it and that issue is going to be LGBTQ issues. And it was a time before I was thinking about cross-movement solidarity and thinking a little bit about intersectionality. But in terms of movements like gun control and gay rights for example, seeing them as separate. 0 2177 Work with GenderPAC (GPAC) MF: You talked about the GenderPAC. You talked about working with PDN, Pennsylvania Diversity Network. Could you talk a little bit about GenderPAC? Was that a transformational moment for you? Did that prepare you to work with PDN? Were there specific things you learned at the GenderPAC?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: A little bit. Yeah. My internship with GenderPAC was actually through the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. They had a summer program for college students where you could take two classes and be part of a cohort and also do an internship. And so I did that. And being at GenderPAC I was very excited to go, before I got there I read Riki Wilchins’s two books at the time, Read My Lips and Queer Theory, Gender Theory. And I went in so excited. And then I was given the responsibility of working on this gender-neutral housing campaign. &#13 ; &#13 ; One of my supervisors there was Tyrone Hanley who is now at National Center for Lesbian Rights. And he was somebody who was very engaged in queer and trans activism and probably a little bit more radical than I was at the time as a college student. And the other staff there was also very very engaged and interested. 0 2496 Changing Municipal Policy with Pennsylvania Diversity Network (PDN) / Work in Local Politics AS: [...] When I was at college though, towards the end of my time at Muhlenberg, I started working through PDN, Pennsylvania Diversity Network, on municipal policy change. I had been involved in local politics here as a college student. I led the College Democrats at Muhlenberg as a student. During the Obama campaign I led the College Democrats through that with registrations, 80 percent of students showing up to vote in Allentown. &#13 ; &#13 ; We hosted events with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, all during that election. And I was the organizer of all of those. So I was very visible and engaged in the Democratic Party efforts as a college student. I volunteered on Sam Bennett’s congressional campaign in 2008. A very involved volunteer. I became really active with the Lehigh County Democratic Party as a college student as well. So I was engaged politically, and had helped to elect a number of city council people, and had good relationships with a number of people on city council in Allentown. And after getting them elected I really wanted to do something about LGBTQ rights in Allentown. &#13 ; &#13 ; And so I talked with Liz and Trish and Liz encouraged that the thing that was needed was domestic partner benefits. And at the time it didn’t feel like the most compelling issue to me. But she made a good case. And I definitely felt passionate about it. And we ended up working with -- he’s now a judge but then he was a city council person and council president, Dr. Michael D’Amore. And we asked if he would introduce legislation which we were going to provide. 0 2954 Other Work in the Lehigh Valley / Equality Pennsylvania MF: As you’re sharing the story, that whole project starts in college, starts with work with PDN, but then continues into 2011.&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: I graduated college in 2009 and I stayed in Allentown. I stayed in Allentown actually because -- two reasons. One, I didn’t get the job that I wanted elsewhere. And two was I thought I could actually make a difference here. So I ended up working professionally in Civic Theatre of Allentown where I was on their fundraising team. I was the only person doing fundraising there. And I ended up leaving that at some point to go work for SEIU Local 32BJ, where I organized in support of food service workers for a company called Sodexo that paid the workers very very poorly. And so I was working on a campaign to unionize these employees and I was their faith organizer, so I worked with Lutheran and Jewish clergy to help them take action in support of food service workers. &#13 ; &#13 ; Around that time I also joined the board of Equality Pennsylvania, which had just been restructured by one of their funders. Basically they had a complete restructuring. The entire board and staff except for one board member and one staff member that stayed. And it was a rebuild. And so I was brought on to the board and was very excited. And the person who recruited me for the board was Brian Sims, who is now a state representative, but then he was a policy attorney for Gay and Lesbian Lawyers of Philadelphia, called GALLOP. And so a whole new board was being built. And there was early conversations at Equality Pennsylvania about where do we go from here. 0 3402 Invitation to the 50th Anniversary of the National March on Washington / Exit from Equality PA AS: [...] In 2013 it was the fiftieth anniversary of the national March on Washington, which was called the National Action to Realize the Dream. And I was actually invited to speak at it as one of six out queer speakers. It was actually very important for me because my grandfather was very close friends with Bayard Rustin, who organized the original 1963 “I Have a Dream” March on Washington. And Bayard was not allowed to speak at the march because he was gay. &#13 ; &#13 ; And there were six LGBTQ people invited to speak at this one at the fiftieth anniversary. I was so thrilled to be one of them and really the only state-based leader. All the others were national leaders. Randi Weingarten, the current president of American Federation of Teachers. Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU. There was leaders from Human Rights Campaign. And there were other LGBTQ people. But I was the only one from a state equality organization. 0 3486 Getting Married &amp ; Legally Validating Relationship AS: [...] . Before I go into starting the center, I want to talk about what it was like to get married during that time. So my ex-husband and I, his name is Brandon, we decided to get married right in between Windsor and Obergefell. So this was a time when Pennsylvania Diversity Network used to have annual freedom to marry rallies at usually the Lehigh Courthouse. One time we did it at the Northampton County Courthouse. But annual rallies. And people would go in and they would actually request a marriage license. &#13 ; &#13 ; I think it’s important just to remember what it was like in that moment first. So it was a moment where there was a lot of excitement and energy for marriage equality and still an enormous amount of lack of public support, including from Democratic politicians. Barack Obama when he ran for president originally didn’t support marriage equality. So it was this time period where there was a lot of energy and still lack in public support. After the Windsor decision which granted basically full faith and credit to marriages for the benefit of federal benefits, so if you were a resident of Pennsylvania but lived in Connecticut and you got married in Connecticut you could get federal benefits, even if you didn’t get state benefits in Pennsylvania. So not full faith and credit, but actually just federal recognition. 0 3882 Important Issues Targeted by Equality PA / Candidate Endorsements MF: [...] Were there other issues that were really important for you either at PDN or moving into the Pennsylvania Equality?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: Equality Pennsylvania.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Equality Pennsylvania organization.&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: Yeah. So I designed the candidate questionnaire for Equality Pennsylvania and really led the endorsement process for candidates that were seeking our endorsement. And in that questionnaire we asked about do you believe people who are incarcerated should be housed based on their gender identity or their sex assigned at birth. We asked questions. We were really trying to make sure that we were finding people who really understood our community and the way that we define ourselves. We asked about bullying in schools. We asked about nondiscrimination. We asked about marriage or other forms of relationship recognition. We probably asked about hate crimes legislation. And we asked about stuff that wasn’t legislative as well. We asked about people’s connection to the LGBT community in the area where they lived in Pennsylvania. We asked about their volunteer work with LGBTQ issues. 0 4120 Moving from Volunteer Work / Creating a LGBT Community Center MF: After you move from Equality Pennsylvania so you’re looking for a full-time position in this line of work, how do you make it from Equality Pennsylvania into a full-time position?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: So at the time I had been here for a while in the Lehigh Valley. But my LGBTQ activism was really statewide. And later during that time with Equality Pennsylvania one of the races that I got involved in was the Bethlehem mayor’s race. And Equality Pennsylvania played a pretty significant role in supporting Willie Reynolds when he ran for mayor of Bethlehem the first time. He had been our champion for nondiscrimination. &#13 ; &#13 ; And he was running against Bob Donchez, who was elected mayor, who was really not our champion. He ended up being supportive, I would say like lukewarm supportive, but was certainly not a champion when it came to LGBTQ people. And I worked with Willie on a number of his statements, and one of them was a mail piece he put out where we had a whole bunch of LGBTQ leaders standing behind him. And it said, “As mayor I pledge to not marry anyone until I can marry everyone.” He would only officiate at weddings for any residents once Pennsylvania gave him the legal authority to officiate gay weddings. And that was a really big statement for somebody in the Lehigh Valley. This wasn’t Philadelphia. This wasn’t Pittsburgh. It’s the Lehigh Valley. And before Pennsylvania had marriage. 0 4352 Reflection on Early Activism MF: Well, we’re just about at the end of our time. And we’re going to do a follow-up interview where Adrian will tell the origin story of Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. But since we’re nearing the end, and we’ve talked about your early years of activism, perhaps we could conclude with a question like looking back on all of that early work what mattered to you the most, is there anything you wish you would have focused on more during that time period. How do you reflect on those early years of activism in your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: Yeah. I’m really grateful for my time at Muhlenberg because it really kind of let me learn how to be an activist. It let me test out my activism in different ways and try different things. Learn also what didn’t work. It gave me an opportunity to become a better activist. And in many ways with my time in Equality Pennsylvania as well I was really young when I became the board president. I was 24. And there was a lot that I thought I knew that I didn’t. There certainly are things I would do differently now that I have had experience leading organization on the staff side. But I will say that that moment in time felt so important and so urgent. It felt like such a strong sense of urgency. And I’m really glad that I had the opportunity to be an activist then. 0 4621 Journey in Faith and Activism MF: Can I ask one follow-up question? I know we’re moving to the end. We had started this discussion of activism, especially at the college level, as being very much connected to your faith. Very much linked to your burgeoning, developing, or evolving understanding of yourself and Judaism in your life as being connected to politics and activism. It felt like hand in hand at the college. How did your faith journey move along with your journey into activism?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: So in college I really changed how I identified as Jewish. Again. I changed in high school and I changed again in college. In college I was working at the Reform synagogue in Allentown, Congregation Keneseth Israel. And I was teaching in the religious school. And that experience was really important for me because I met a couple people there. One, her name is Janet Hogan. And she was a religious school director. A straight woman, but a mother of an adult gay son who was married to a rabbi named Victor Appell. And she kind of invited me to her family events, like some family dinners. And I really had a really important -- she was my boss but became a mentor in many ways. 0 4909 Closing Remarks MF: Well, at the end I just want to thank you and give you the opportunity. Is there anything that you think we missed in this first oral history that you want to return to or something you want to say at the end of the interview today?&#13 ; &#13 ; AS: No. 0 MovingImage Adrian Shanker recalls his life growing up in Westchester, New York, fighting for non-discrimination laws and the repeal of bans on same-sex marriage, his Jewish faith, and his activist work in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. INTERVIEW WITH ADRIAN SHANKER FEBRUARY 4, 2022 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I'm here with Adrian Shanker to talk about his 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 ACLS this year and we are meeting today at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center on February 4th, 2022. So first, Adrian, thank you for talking with me today. ADRIAN SHANKER: My pleasure. MF: And I just want to start with a few business topics. Could you please state your full name and spell it for me? AS: Adrian Shanker. He, him pronouns. A-D-R-I-A-N S-H-A-N-K-E-R. MF: Thank you, and will you please share your birth date? AS: April 4th, 1987. MF: And then a few questions about consent. I know you just signed a consent form with me before the interview began. But just to orally have that consent, do you consent to this interview today? AS: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed? AS: I do. MF: Digitized and made publicly available online? AS: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats? AS: Yes. MF: Okay. And do you understand you'll have 30 days to review the transcript of the interview? AS: Yes. MF: Fabulous. And you can identify parts that you want to delete or you could even withdraw the full interview if you wanted. AS: Yeah. MF: Okay, all right, business is out of the way. So I just want to start with a question. Would you be willing to tell me a little bit about the early years of your life? AS: I was born in Manhattan and was raised in Westchester, New York in an activist family. My grandfather was the president of the American Federation of Teachers. My other grandfather was a gender theorist, is a gender theorist and psychologist who studies masculinity. And so I grew up in a very interesting home where -- very socially aware as a kid. I remember we had a family meeting about Magic Johnson's AIDS diagnosis. We talked about Keith Haring's Crack Is Wack mural in New York City that we passed all the time. I just remember growing up in a family that was just very socially aware. I remember my dad telling me stories about getting arrested protesting nuclear power or things along those lines. At one point my mom took me to a museum in New York City that had a worm exhibit. I was scared of worms at the time I guess. And I got the pleasure of holding them. I wasn't scared of worms after that. But it was very much about like -- we celebrated Earth Day as a holiday in my family. Grew up going to the Clearwater Music Festival, an environmental justice festival and music festival in Westchester, New York. And so my childhood was very much grounded around social awareness. I wouldn't say activism as much as social awareness in making individual decisions that keep the earth and the community around us in mind. I was definitely taught as a kid about kindness to other people and creating a kind world. And I grew up in a secular Jewish home. Would say culturally Jewish but atheist or nonreligious. And the values that I was taught were very much just about being a community citizen, being somebody -- I remember in 1992 the presidential election. My mom took me to vote with her. And so just some lessons I was taught really early. My parents got divorced when I was seven. Which was in 1994. And my mom came out to me and my brother, who was five years younger. So he was two and I was seven. And my brother and I moved in with my mom and her then partner. And so from a young age I was really aware of social differences in terms of LGBTQ people, although we didn't have that exact acronym yet. My dad was able to get remarried, within a year, legally remarried. And my mom couldn't. And I was very aware of the distinction and the difference. I also grew up with a lot of cultural context around what it meant to be an LGBTQ person because of my mom and some of her friends. Grew up going to Cape Cod in the summers for example. And we'd be camping in Wellfleet and going to Provincetown and so my childhood was definitely in a place where I was aware of -- at the time the word I would have used was gay and lesbian people. And that was just as a kid. MF: So you talk a lot about the kind of values of your family. And then how your mom's relationship and your dad's experience post-divorce introduced you to discrimination and structural homophobia frankly. How did you and your mom or you and your dad talk about LGBTQ people in a more personal way? Or was it really more about context? AS: It was more about context. I remember for example -- I don't remember how old I was. But I was young. I went to the Katonah Museum of Art with my dad. I come from a family that has always really appreciated and loved art. And the exhibit was by Pavel Tchelitchew and there was this painting that was like of the rear end of some animal. And I remember my dad saying something about like how Tchelitchew was a gay artist. A gay Russian artist. And he used some symbolism to let people know of his identity but he couldn't be as public and out when he was painting. So just contextual comments like that. Or comments like when we discussed Magic Johnson for example. And that was fairly early in my life. And relatively early in the AIDS epidemic. So it was more contextual conversations, more than personal ones. MF: How did you discuss Magic Johnson? What was that conversation like in your family? AS: I don't remember the details of it as much as I remember that it happened. But I remember that the conversation included a sense of like respect for people with AIDS at a time when that was not always discussed. And I'm pretty sure that this was before 1994. Because I think it was before my parents' divorce. But I don't remember 100 percent. And so as someone who was younger than seven years old, just the conversation about what it meant to respect people with whatever was happening in their life at a time when a lot was unknown. Certainly looking back a lot was unknown right at that time. But it wasn't like a family where we can't talk about things that are maybe hard in the world. My family has always been a family that talked about what was happening in the world. MF: So you have a supportive family life. Imparting a variety of different values. Kindness, respecting people, navigating the early years of an epidemic with kindness for others and a sense of urgency that we're talking about in family spaces. What's happening to you in your educational experience? AS: I'll also just add for the earth as well. And other sentient beings. Today I've been -- I call myself an herbivore, but a vegetarian, for a long time. And I remember when I was a kid -- my mom tells me I was born to be a vegetarian, and that I remember going to a Chinese restaurant and they had a fish tank and there was also fish on the menu and I looked through the menu and I pointed to the tank and I said, "Fish." Like people would eat those beautiful creatures, I can't believe that. And so as a kid I ate like very little meat. Only the kind of stuff that you don't always have control over your diet as a young kid. But in high school I became vegetarian. It's also the same time I became an activist. And environmental justice has always been pretty important to me but at some point I made a decision to prioritize LGBTQ activism for my own career. But I definitely grew up in a community and a family where we talked about these as kind of in some ways intersecting issues, although we didn't use that language. MF: You're moving in a way that -- this is where my question was going. What was your educational life like? AS: Oh, sorry. MF: No, no need to apologize. And I think that's an interesting segue because you're thinking about activism maybe in high school. So could you reflect a little bit upon your educational experiences? AS: I was an okay student in high school. I struggled a lot as a student actually in high school and earlier. I got bullied a lot in middle school including for having gay moms and so for me as someone who struggled a lot in those ways I also -- when I became an activist in high school, it was very much about claiming my own identity but also claiming my place in the school as an activist. And I found ways to be involved. So I really had a lot of negative feelings about going to gym class for example. Which felt very traumatic. And so sometime in high school I found a way I could volunteer on a high school committee that happened to meet at the same time as gym. And I never had to go. But it let me also become an activist. And I had a lot of support. So in high school I co-started a gay-straight alliance. And I graduated from Fox Lane High School in Bedford, New York in 2004. I think 2004. And I started with some other people a gay-straight alliance that was the first time that high school had one. And I remember actually when I was in middle school we had a meeting with a guidance counselor in high school to transition each family. And I remember my mom asking the guidance counselor, "Is there a gay-straight alliance here?" And I remember being like, "Mom." And the answer was no, there isn't one. And I had heard about this other student who was gay and kind of picked on and ended up going to an alternative school. And I was a little concerned about "am I going to a place that's not welcoming". But in high school coming out and becoming an activist were very intertwined. And it was also 2003 so it was the time when -- so I might have graduated in 2005. We'll verify. But 2003 was the start of the Iraq War or the invasion of Iraq. And March 19th, 2003 I led a student walkout of class to a sit-in in the front of the school, 150 students. And a couple teachers joined us. I don't think the school was thrilled about that. And nobody got disciplined. But for me becoming an activist was very much am I an activist for animal rights, am I an activist for ending the death penalty, am I an activist for stopping -- we knew we were going to stop that war, Bush's war. And then I was very passionate about LGBTQ rights. At the time President Bush used an hour of his State of the Union in 2004 to condemn families like mine and prioritizing a Federal Marriage Amendment, a full hour. And it was right after the Massachusetts decision on marriage, Goodridge decision, where John Kerry and every other major national Democrat except for Barney Frank condemned the decision. And so I was coming into my activism at the same exact time. And feeling very angry. Feeling very -- it's like teen angst mixed with like animosity towards Bush. And really found my activist voice. But like most people that age I really didn't know what to do with that. Me and a couple other students, we were invited to a staff meeting for the teachers where we got to talk about some issues for gay students. We had our meetings. We did ask the school to change one of their policies. I don't remember if they did. Their nondiscrimination policy to include sexual orientation. And I actually started going to -- my mom had always gone to this conference in White Plains, New York. It used to be called the Healing the Hurt conference. But it was run by GLSEN the Gay, Lesbian &amp ; Straight Education Network's Hudson Valley chapter. My mom is a teacher. So she always went as professional development because teachers could get continuing ed credits. But they also allowed students to come as well, and when I was in high school I actually went with my mom one year. And I brought some teachers from my high school, I convinced them to go. And that was really transformative for me because I ended up meeting the leader of GLSEN Hudson Valley, her name is Mary Jane Karger. Actually she's from the Lehigh Valley originally, which is cool, she's from Hellertown. And went to Muhlenberg College as well. One of the first generations of women there I believe. And so she became a really important activist for me. She was a straight woman, a parent of a gay kid, and she was really the first major LGBTQ activist I knew. And I was very inspired by her and by the other activists that I met at this conference. And remember going back to my school feeling like we can do this, we can become activists here. I also remember being surprised that I didn't really lose any friends in high school when I came out. And I thought that I would because it was a time before mass acceptance for a lot of LGBTQ people, we're still like early 2000s, so in terms of representation in mass media it still wasn't there. I think Will &amp ; Grace was on. But that was probably it. MF: Do you remember what it felt like before you came out? Were you anxious about it or -- AS: Not really, because it was really a self-realization more than a coming out. It was really a this is who I am and now I'm just going to tell people. It wasn't an internal struggle. I had a very supportive family. And I was kind of in the group of students that would be self-defined as like punk rockers. So at the time many of them identified as bisexual which was fairly common among like punk rock-identified high school students in the early 2000s. Some of them still identify as queer or bi. But some don't. But my friend group was kind of alternative. Which was perhaps helpful for also my own self-realization. And I will say that like while I'm too young to have been there during punk, right? Punk rock was my first understanding of queerness and I was really into some of the music and photographs. And I actually don't enjoy that music at all now. But then I did because it was kind of public queerness. And it felt very affirming as a high school student. Pictures of Billy Idol. Or listening to words of Iggy Pop. Or like folks like that. Lou Reed, who were just so queer and so public about it. Felt very affirming. MF: With the GSA you described working on a nondiscrimination ordinance or promoting that at school, did you have any other specific things that the GSA was doing? Was it more social? Was it -- AS: It was a mix. It was a mix of social and also a little bit political. And it was about political but with a small p. It was like political for the school, it was like trying to make our school inclusive. So it was thinking about well, how come health class doesn't include us, or how come gym classes feel very unsafe, or things along those lines. So we would try to bring guest speakers into the school. Or we would do things to try to make those kinds of changes. It wasn't thinking broader. I do remember though I was invited as an out student to speak. My first public speaking thing was actually with Planned Parenthood in Westchester County where they invited me to speak as a student voice about comprehensive sex education. They were doing a panel at the public library. And so that was very empowering for me because I was asked to share my own experience about why the lack of comprehensive sex education was so challenging and so problematic. High school by the way is also where I claimed my Jewish identity. So I grew up culturally Jewish. I would say like Jewish heritage but religiously atheist, a secular family. But after my parents got divorced when I was in second grade, shortly after that I asked my mom if I could go to Hebrew school. And my mom was a very supportive mom, but I don't think it's what she was going for. But she did find one. We joined a Reform synagogue in Bedford, New York called Shaaray Tefila. And my mom was actually back in school studying to become a teacher, so she ended up teaching in the religious school there while she was in her graduate program. And I really loved going to Hebrew school. And I'm not sure why. But I really did. I loved learning about something I actually wanted to learn about. And in high school I got very involved in youth group kind of programs that really helped me solidify my identity as both Jewish and as a queer Jew. Although I wouldn't have used the word queer in high school. I went to Jewish summer camp and met other LGBTQ Jewish students and got very engaged in activism from a Jewish lens. Progressive activism. And actually I remember in high school I went on a weekend trip or a small trip with my synagogue's youth group to Washington, DC where we were meeting with members of Congress on a variety of issues. And it was through the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. And the issue that I was able to talk about was the hate crimes bill that hadn't been passed yet. And actually it was in a meeting with Congresswoman Nita Lowey, she's now retired. But I came out during that, while I was speaking to the congresswoman, it was the first time that my rabbi learned that I was gay. The rabbi I grew up with. And I just had never told him because he didn't have -- he had never said anything from what Jews would call the bimah but Christians would call a pulpit that made me feel like he was super embracing. We were the only gay family I knew in my synagogue. It was a very large synagogue. He had never talked about gay rights or marriage equality or anything along those lines. I couldn't remember a single instance of that happening. And so I didn't really know. And he was somebody who was seen as very powerful, very tone-setting, for what people would think or believe in. And I used that opportunity to speak directly to my congresswoman about an issue that was important to me as a gay high school kid and I didn't care that my rabbi was there hearing it. And afterwards he said something to me. He said, like, "I didn't know you were gay." And I said, "Well, you didn't ask." But it just came out naturally. It wasn't an internal struggle as much as it was self-realization and becoming an activist. MF: What happened after that with your rabbi? Did he start speaking about inclusivity? Did that change your relationship? AS: It changed our relationship a little bit. But mostly -- in a positive way. I also worked at the synagogue as a Hebrew tutor when I was in high school. And I was very very involved there. It's also around the time I started wearing a yarmulke all the time in the middle of high school as well. It was after Daniel Pearl was murdered. There was a book of essays that was published called I Am Jewish. People were writing about the importance of being visible as who you are. And so for me it was connected also to being visible as a gay person. As a high school person I had like rainbow belts and there was like pins and stickers and buttons everywhere. And also before that I had liberty spikes and then a very poorly kept Mohawk that turned into a mullethawk and then that was kind of replaced with a yarmulke at some point. And it was about being visible. And it's probably when I started to identify more spiritually or religiously as Jewish as well. MF: So let's move a little bit further. What happens after high school to you? Where are you going next? How does the activity journey, your spiritual journey continue into the next years of your life? AS: Yeah. So after high school I went to Muhlenberg College in Allentown, which is how I ended up in the Lehigh Valley as well. And I came into Muhlenberg basically expecting to eventually become a rabbi. And I was very excited about that actually. And there was a lot of reasons why I chose Muhlenberg for that reason. But I came in ready to go as an activist. And I had all the angst and all the passion and really no know-how for how to operationalize queer activism. And I remember early in college, probably my first month, there was a series that Muhlenberg has called Center for Ethics where they have a theme for the year and they bring guest speakers throughout the year, and they're often tied to extra credit in classes if you attend and then do a write-up or things colleges do. And Kate Bornstein was one of the first speakers. And I didn't know who she was, but I went, and it was recommended by one of my classes. And I also had the attitude that I really wanted to learn everything queer, so I was going to go. And she did kind of part talk and part performance. And I felt very inspired. And I still remember some of the things that she said in that talk my first year of college. And I went to hear other people speak as well. And some of them also queer in different ways. And I joined the college's gay-straight alliance, which I didn't create, It existed before me, right away. And I remember the first meeting they were like making stickers and doing like erotic writing group and things like that. But it didn't feel activist-y to me and I kind of spoke up and I said, like, "Can we do some activism?" And people were like, "Yeah, sure, go do it." So I ended up doing that, and a lot of other folks' interest was about like let's get a group together to go dance at the Stonewall on Thursday nights. Stonewall in Allentown. Or things that were more social. And my interest was more political. Six weeks into starting as a student I was in the president of the college's office demanding that the nondiscrimination policy be updated to include gender identity and I e-mailed him and I was like, "I noticed in the code of conduct that it does not currently include this and I would like this to be changed." And I got this e-mail back saying, like, "Why don't we sit down and talk about it?" And we did. And about six weeks later I got an e-mail from his assistant or from him saying that it was going to be changed and that the board had approved it. And I think they thought like okay, he's good now. And I turned around and within like a couple weeks or maybe a couple months with the gay-straight alliance we were petitioning the college to create gender-neutral housing. It would have been the first college in the Lehigh Valley to do so. And that summer I took an internship at the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, GenderPAC, founded and led by Riki Wilchins, no longer in existence. And my work there was focused on gender-neutral housing actually as a national -- this was before it was very common. This was in summer of 2006. And so therefore I started college in fall 2005 and graduated high school in fall 2004 by the way -- spring 2005. So yeah. Interning at GenderPAC. Coming back to Muhlenberg. And really fighting for gender-neutral housing. And it became a fight that outlasted my time at Muhlenberg. We won small victories. This dorm building can be gender-neutral. Or as long as it's not for first year students. Or case-by-case basis. So yeah, the fight for gender-neutral housing in Muhlenberg College was a really critical part of my activist journey. It's kind of how I learned how to be an activist in a more effective way. I learned how to pick my battles better. I learned how to pick targets better when it comes to activism, who can actually make the changes we want. It also taught me how to build strong coalitions and bring in the right voices. There was other parts of that activism on campus as a student whether it was about policy changes like housing policy or about other types of things to ensure that LGBTQ students had the kind of college that we all really deserved. And again it was a time that's a little different than now where that's common. At the time I actually remember the president of the college who was someone who I now consider a friend, but at the time one of the first things he said was, "Well, do we have any transgender students?" And my response to him was, "Where do you think people would want to sleep? You haven't created a space that people would feel comfortable being out as trans." And I don't actually remember any out trans students then at the time in 2006. There were obviously trans students. Today there's many. It's a college with a trans student activist club. But that I think happens in part with a college that came to embrace the policies that needed to happen to make people feel included. Another thing happened when I was in college, which is that I got connected with -- so the Hillel director at Muhlenberg, she's no longer alive, but her name was Patti Mittleman. And she was a very important influence in my life. And one of the things that she did was she actually told me -- well, before that I had asked the community service office on campus if they could help me find an LGBT organization I could volunteer at. I had grown up going to the LGBT center in White Plains, New York for the youth program, and before that for a program they had for parents with gay kids. And when I moved here to go to college in Allentown I was looking around, there was no LGBT center. And I asked, "So is there an organization I can volunteer with?" And they took two weeks and came back and said, "We can't find one." And I remember complaining about this to Patti Mittleman, the Hillel director. And she basically said, "You have to meet these two people, Liz Bradbury and Patricia Sullivan." And she connected me to them. We actually had one of the first events that I organized as a college student was for Liz to actually come speak on campus. And we did an exhibit of a photography series that she had created at the time about marriage equality, believe it was called Faces of Inequality. And as a student I actually in 2007 joined the board of directors for an organization that Liz and Trish had founded called Pennsylvania Diversity Network. And before that in 2006 my first time lobbying in Pennsylvania was against the Pennsylvania Marriage Amendment in March 2006. And I got on a bus with some people who had become close friends and fellow activists. Reverend Goudy from Metropolitan Community Church [inaudible] Donna Cruciani from PPL Corporation, the head of their LGBT resource group before she retired, Steve Black, who had led PA-GALA, he's unfortunately no longer alive. There was a few other people on that trip as well. And we met with legislators and as a college student it felt very empowering. It was also NRA lobby day in Harrisburg that day and I remember coming back and talking to one of my professors, Gary Jones, who taught a class I was taking called "Radicalism in American History." And I was so upset that there was all these NRA people in the capitol. He said to me, he said, "Adrian, if you want to be effective working on gay rights in Pennsylvania you have to let them have their guns." And he said, "What I'm telling you is pick your issue and stick with it." So that was really when I started really thinking I have to pick my issue and stick with it and that issue is going to be LGBTQ issues. And it was a time before I was thinking about cross-movement solidarity and thinking a little bit about intersectionality. But in terms of movements like gun control and gay rights for example, seeing them as separate. MF: You used this interesting phrase earlier, which is related to what you just shared. You said something like, "I learned how to pick my targets and think about effective ways or effective strategies." I'm just curious if you could maybe expand on that. During your college activism years what did that mean for you? Learning effective targets, effective strategies. What did that look like during that time period? What were some of the most important lessons that you were taking from that time period? AS: Looking back I can remember getting responses from people around our gender-neutral housing campaign that might not have been positive, and reacting to them, without really thinking through how important is it to win over that specific person. They're not the decision maker. So learning how to figure out who actually needs the time and energy devoted to winning them over, who has to be won over to be part of a strong coalition, who has to be brought in as a clear advocate. So for example the college didn't have any kind of LGBTQ resource center, director, or anything like that. And we had petitioned the college to appoint someone as an LGBT liaison. And they did and her name was Anita Kelly. And we ended up going to Anita and saying, "You have the administrators' ears. We need you as a staff person to really be our advocate here." And we went to the housing folks, Jan Schumacher and Aaron Bova, and asked them, "You're the people they're going to ask about how this will be operationalized. How can we help you understand this? Here's the other colleges that have it. Can you call your counterparts there and see how it works for them?" So learning how to win over the right people instead of what in the political world we would call a blank canvas. Trying to go and just get anyone we can, but those may not be the most influential people or most necessary people to win on the issue we need to win on. MF: You talked about the GenderPAC. You talked about working with PDN, Pennsylvania Diversity Network. Could you talk a little bit about GenderPAC? Was that a transformational moment for you? Did that prepare you to work with PDN? Were there specific things you learned at the GenderPAC? AS: A little bit. Yeah. My internship with GenderPAC was actually through the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. They had a summer program for college students where you could take two classes and be part of a cohort and also do an internship. And so I did that. And being at GenderPAC I was very excited to go, before I got there I read Riki Wilchins's two books at the time, Read My Lips and Queer Theory, Gender Theory. And I went in so excited. And then I was given the responsibility of working on this gender-neutral housing campaign. One of my supervisors there was Tyrone Hanley who is now at National Center for Lesbian Rights. And he was somebody who was very engaged in queer and trans activism and probably a little bit more radical than I was at the time as a college student. And the other staff there was also very very engaged and interested. One thing I learned from being at GenderPAC though was that there was kind of a dismissiveness of the so-called like mainstream LGBTQ activism. And I wasn't really sure that I agreed with that. But I also wasn't sure I disagreed. And I felt like I didn't know enough. When I was at GenderPAC though they let me go to -- one of the requirements of the program at the Religious Action Center was to go do a day on the Hill, a legislative day. And so GenderPAC let me go and meet with Pennsylvania legislators. And Rick Santorum was one of them. And so I got a meeting with Rick Santorum's staff person, and what GenderPAC sent me in to do with each of the meetings was to ask if they would sign a pledge saying that they wouldn't discriminate against LGBT people in their offices. So just their office staff. And Santorum signed it. And he signed it right in front of me. And then I got a picture with him. And so I came back to the office next morning and they were like floored. And this was the guy who -- I don't need to explain who Rick Santorum was. MF: But you can still explain for other people. AS: There's enough people can google. But he was a very conservative, very very conservative senator, later became a presidential candidate. He was awful, he really hated LGBTQ people. And he signed this thing. His chief of staff was gay by the way. A gay Black man actually. But Rick Santorum was very homophobic. And he signed this pledge. And so the next day GenderPAC puts out this press release. And a couple days later I get a call from a reporter at Agape Press, a genuinely Christian press, and the reporter says, "Are you the homosexual from Pennsylvania who got Rick Santorum to cave on the family?" And I was like, "Who are you?" But it made national news, Rick Santorum signing this pledge. He then rescinded his signature. And actually tried to say he didn't sign it. But we produced the photograph of him with me and it kind of was hard for him to say he didn't sign it. He then said he didn't understand it. So it was a formative time in terms of becoming an activist. I also think that I still didn't really know what I didn't know. But being in DC, I spent that summer and the next summer in DC. The next summer I was at Faith in Public Life, which was a program at the time of Center for American Progress, a Clinton alumni think tank. So a slightly left of center think tank. And as this was 2007 I was working with faith leaders to help them take action on progressive social justice issues. And basically to get them to stop talking about abortion and gay marriage and talk about instead hunger and homelessness and ending torture. And one of the issues at the time was the farm bill, which includes SNAP funding, nutrition funding. And so Jim Wallis, Pastor Wallis, famously said that here at a protest at the Capitol when I was doing that work, said, "The budget is a moral document." And that's something I've always thought about for my activism going forward. The budget is a moral document. And so that summer was equally formative because I started to really think about the intersection between faith and queer rights. Even though my work there did not include LGBTQ issues, it was about how do we utilize people of faith to help tell a story that's compelling for the broader public. And that's something that I really have continued to use in my activism. When I was at college though, towards the end of my time at Muhlenberg, I started working through PDN, Pennsylvania Diversity Network, on municipal policy change. I had been involved in local politics here as a college student. I led the College Democrats at Muhlenberg as a student. During the Obama campaign I led the College Democrats through that with registrations, 80 percent of students showing up to vote in Allentown. We hosted events with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, all during that election. And I was the organizer of all of those. So I was very visible and engaged in the Democratic Party efforts as a college student. I volunteered on Sam Bennett's congressional campaign in 2008. A very involved volunteer. I became really active with the Lehigh County Democratic Party as a college student as well. So I was engaged politically, and had helped to elect a number of city council people, and had good relationships with a number of people on city council in Allentown. And after getting them elected I really wanted to do something about LGBTQ rights in Allentown. And so I talked with Liz and Trish and Liz encouraged that the thing that was needed was domestic partner benefits. And at the time it didn't feel like the most compelling issue to me. But she made a good case. And I definitely felt passionate about it. And we ended up working with -- he's now a judge but then he was a city council person and council president, Dr. Michael D'Amore. And we asked if he would introduce legislation which we were going to provide. Liz was able to work with Suzanne Goldberg at the Columbia University gender and sexuality program, who was able to get us a draft of legislation. And then I brought in some local Democratic Party-affiliated lawyers, especially Tim Brennan, who really understood the municipal law process in Allentown. And we were able to get this passed through with unanimous support in Allentown. And I think it passed after I graduated. It passed I think in January, either 2010 or 2011. And from then I was really set on working on municipal policy for a while. I started to actually work on the same issue with the city of Easton. So we were able to get domestic partner benefits for city workers in Allentown and Easton. What's important to remember as a lookback is that before marriage equality if you worked for an employer that provided spousal health care, if you were a gay couple you could not put your spouse on health care unless they had domestic partner benefits policies. Even if you could get that you had to pay federal tax on the value of the benefits. But the ability to actually access health care was such a big challenge. It was before the Affordable Care Act as well. So the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. But it wasn't fully implemented for a little bit after that. So it was a very propulsive movement. We were in the movement for marriage equality and it felt also that winning partner benefits was kind of a vote in support of marriage equality. And that actually came up during these council meetings saying, like, "We wish we didn't have to do this, Pennsylvania should have marriage equality." So after winning in Allentown we started, or around that same time we also introduced identical legislation in Easton. And with each of these we did something that wasn't common in the Lehigh Valley, where we did public signing ceremonies. We had public events for the mayors to sign these laws, and to generate a lot of press on this issue. Press was really important because we were trying to win hearts and minds on marriage. So I worked on the Allentown ordinance very closely with Liz. I kind of led the effort on the Easton ordinance. And also on passing nondiscrimination in Bethlehem, which passed in 2011. Bethlehem at the time was the largest city in Pennsylvania that did not have a nondiscrimination law. And it was an entirely Democratic city council with a Democratic mayor. And the mayor, John Callahan, supported the legislation but wasn't moving on it. He said he supported it and he had this big press conference and then nothing was happening with it. And so of the entire city council only two were supportive. Karen Dolan and Willie Reynolds. And the two of them became our only two very strong champions. The rest of council was lukewarm at best or at the beginning even a little bit negative. And we were able to bring them all around but it was a very challenging time that actually included really really really having to work against -- the Catholic diocese sent a lobbyist to try to change the legislation. They knew we would pass the legislation, so they put all these poison pill amendments in, a sunset clause that would end the ordinance automatically after three years. An amendment that would gut all the powers of the human relations commission. So the ordinance would exist but nobody could be held accountable by it. Amendment after amendment after amendment. The city solicitor in Bethlehem also made major procedural errors and we had to redo an entire city council meeting. Each meeting was over four hours long. Hundreds of people testified. And it was mixed between pro and con. The people who testified against us were using some horrible anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and language. Suggesting that all gay people are child molesters or things like that. It was really really beyond the pale, especially for 2011. And to be honest we did not expect it to pass unanimously. The council president at the time, Bob Donchez, who then became mayor, ended up voting for it. But he was the last person in Bethlehem to decide how he felt about this issue and many other issues. And Dave DiGiacinto, who was on council, he's no longer alive, he was not sure if he was supportive. And then we had two council members who were, one of them had Parkinson's, Gordon Mowrer, the former mayor, and the other one had other health issues that really made it difficult to determine how aware she was of the issues that she was voting on, Jean Belinski. There was really no way we could communicate with her directly and it was a really big challenge actually. So what we ended up with was a unanimous nondiscrimination law that really set the table for starting to pass these again. At the time Pennsylvania had I believe 17 municipalities that had nondiscrimination laws. Today in 2022 it's more than 60, might even be 70. But at the time we were talking about less than 20. And that kind of helped to transition into some future activism as well. MF: As you're sharing the story, that whole project starts in college, starts with work with PDN, but then continues into 2011. AS: I graduated college in 2009 and I stayed in Allentown. I stayed in Allentown actually because -- two reasons. One, I didn't get the job that I wanted elsewhere. And two was I thought I could actually make a difference here. So I ended up working professionally in Civic Theatre of Allentown where I was on their fundraising team. I was the only person doing fundraising there. And I ended up leaving that at some point to go work for SEIU Local 32BJ, where I organized in support of food service workers for a company called Sodexo that paid the workers very very poorly. And so I was working on a campaign to unionize these employees and I was their faith organizer, so I worked with Lutheran and Jewish clergy to help them take action in support of food service workers. Around that time I also joined the board of Equality Pennsylvania, which had just been restructured by one of their funders. Basically they had a complete restructuring. The entire board and staff except for one board member and one staff member that stayed. And it was a rebuild. And so I was brought on to the board and was very excited. And the person who recruited me for the board was Brian Sims, who is now a state representative, but then he was a policy attorney for Gay and Lesbian Lawyers of Philadelphia, called GALLOP. And so a whole new board was being built. And there was early conversations at Equality Pennsylvania about where do we go from here. There was a lot against us. It was a conservative legislature, Republican governor, Governor Corbett. And a real propulsive need to ensure that we could demonstrate impact to funders. So I said, "Let's win municipal policies. We're not going to win at the state level." And so we did. So that was the push for Bethlehem, it was actually through my role with Equality PA. And then Equality Pennsylvania ended up getting some grants to work on municipal policy change around the state, passing nondiscrimination protections around Pennsylvania, and building public support for nondiscrimination through that process. About a year into my time on the board at Equality Pennsylvania I was on my way to a board meeting in Erie, and I got a call from Brian, who said, "I'm going to be stepping down from the board because I'm running for the state house against Babette Josephs," who was one of our champions on the issues, champions in the state house. And he was going to run against her because she was becoming less and less effective at winning the change. She was very vocal and very effective at getting media and public support, but not always as good at actually working with the other side to get results that we needed. So Brian said he was going to run against her. And I let him know that I would be running for the president of Equality Pennsylvania's board. I was unanimously elected and I was 24 years old. And the organization, we were also creating a PAC. And a 501(c)(4) entity. So (c)(3) entity is charitable, tax-deductible. Equality Pennsylvania Educational Fund, that's technically what I was president of. And then the (c)(4) is a political organization, can endorse in elections, etc. And then the PAC can actually give money to candidates. So three separate legal entities. And I was the president of the educational fund side but also on the board of the others. And so we were kind of building our political arm up. We were starting to make a real impact and build power for LGBTQ Pennsylvanians. We talked with candidates. I remember Det Ansinn was running for Bucks County commissioner. And at one point he said, "What are you looking for in candidates?" And we said that we wanted candidates who would talk to -- we wanted front porch Democrats, not back porch Democrats. We wanted Democrats that would talk to us, talk about our issues, when they're sitting on their front porch, not only in a private party in the back of their house where their neighbors can't see them. We wanted them to talk about LGBTQ issues everywhere they talked, not just when they were talking to us. We wanted them to be public about their stances, not private about it. It wasn't going to be like a little pinkie swear, I promise I won't vote against your rights. It was going to be on your website as part of your platform. And we started working with a lot of candidates across the state. One of them, for example, Erin Molchany, was running for the state house in Pittsburgh, and we were her first endorsement, or one of her first endorsements. And she became one of our strong champions. Eugene DePasquale was running for auditor-general in 2012 and we were very heavily involved in his race. I ended up on his transition team, where I drafted rewrites to the personnel manual around LGBTQ inclusion for auditor-general staff. And that was the role that Equality Pennsylvania was playing, was victories where we could find them. Some of them were behind the scenes. Not an issue I worked on, but the former executive director of Equality Pennsylvania, Ted Martin, worked with Governor Corbett's team to actually get a change in the driver's license policy to change a person's gender on the driver's license in a more simplified way. And part of the agreement was that there wouldn't be a press release, it would just happen. So it was changes where we could make the changes happen. Sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes very public. That was really the goal. My time at Equality Pennsylvania overlapped with the fight for marriage in Pennsylvania. Because I was on the board from 2010 to 2013. I served as president 2011 to 2013. And it was a very propulsive time for LGBTQ rights. Literally every day we were seeing different things happen in the national news around LGBTQ rights. On marriage and on other issues. Around "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Whole bunch of issues were changing. We were watching history as we were making it. It felt so energizing. But I was doing that work as a volunteer. And I was driving across the state as a volunteer. Not receiving reimbursements for mileage or covering my costs of this travel. And I was also just a couple years out of college, I didn't have a lot of money. But this was what was so important to me. And it definitely felt like a second full-time job. And I wanted to do this work full-time at some point. A couple other things happened during my time with Equality Pennsylvania that were pretty formative. In 2013 it was the fiftieth anniversary of the national March on Washington, which was called the National Action to Realize the Dream. And I was actually invited to speak at it as one of six out queer speakers. It was actually very important for me because my grandfather was very close friends with Bayard Rustin, who organized the original 1963 "I Have a Dream" March on Washington. And Bayard was not allowed to speak at the march because he was gay. And there were six LGBTQ people invited to speak at this one at the fiftieth anniversary. I was so thrilled to be one of them and really the only state-based leader. All the others were national leaders. Randi Weingarten, the current president of American Federation of Teachers. Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU. There was leaders from Human Rights Campaign. And there were other LGBTQ people. But I was the only one from a state equality organization. And that was just a very powerful opportunity in my activist career. Yeah. The decision to leave Equality Pennsylvania was in large part because I really wanted to do this work full-time. And yeah, I really wanted to do this work full-time. Before I go into starting the center, I want to talk about what it was like to get married during that time. So my ex-husband and I, his name is Brandon, we decided to get married right in between Windsor and Obergefell. So this was a time when Pennsylvania Diversity Network used to have annual freedom to marry rallies at usually the Lehigh Courthouse. One time we did it at the Northampton County Courthouse. But annual rallies. And people would go in and they would actually request a marriage license. I think it's important just to remember what it was like in that moment first. So it was a moment where there was a lot of excitement and energy for marriage equality and still an enormous amount of lack of public support, including from Democratic politicians. Barack Obama when he ran for president originally didn't support marriage equality. So it was this time period where there was a lot of energy and still lack in public support. After the Windsor decision which granted basically full faith and credit to marriages for the benefit of federal benefits, so if you were a resident of Pennsylvania but lived in Connecticut and you got married in Connecticut you could get federal benefits, even if you didn't get state benefits in Pennsylvania. So not full faith and credit, but actually just federal recognition. And it was also a time when the federal government was interpreting every single marriage benefit that they could as either state of celebration or state of residence. So for every guideline you could imagine, Social Security Administration says they'll recognize marriages based on state of celebration, where you got married. Federal Election Commission says state of celebration for if you can count as a spouse for higher ability to donate to campaigns. Every single agency, every single rule was making an interpretation after Windsor. And it was a time when there was just a lot of energy. My ex-husband Brandon and I decided to get married during that time. Then we had two weddings. The first one was a legal wedding where we started at the Lehigh County Courthouse and we were joined by our parents. Actually our parents didn't. I think Brandon's parents were here. My parents lived in New York, but I think they met us up there. But we were also joined by a reporter from Morning Call, Colby Itkowitz, who's now at Washington Post. And Jen Colletta, who was then the editor of Philadelphia Gay News. So they started with us, recorded us not being able to get a marriage license. It was not a shocker. We knew what the law was. But we paid the fee. We got a marriage rejection certificate which I still have, stamped. It says rejected or denied and it says the reason why we were denied, because two people of same gender. We got in the car, drove to Darien, Connecticut. Went into the town hall. Darien was the closest place to Lehigh Valley where you could get married in one day without a waiting period. And many people from Lehigh Valley got married in Darien for that reason. Got our marriage license there. My mom and her partner and I believe my dad joined us there as well. And then we went to a beach, Pear Tree Point Beach, right in Darien. Got married on the beach, very quick ceremony, officiated by Reverend Debra Haffner, one of the most vocal faith leaders nationally for sexual freedom and LGBTQ rights. And then as we were driving back, as the reporter Colby Itkowitz described it, when we crossed from New York to New Jersey, our relationship was given -- it was demoted to civil union. And when we crossed the free bridge into Easton we were sitting in a car together as complete strangers. And so that was the experience of getting married then. We then had a Jewish wedding ceremony as well, but the experience of getting legally married at that time was also really formative to my activism because it was such a hurdle. I remember that we got estate plans drawn up that we had to have 14 documents between the two of us, 14 documents. Because of being able to protect each other. HIPAA release forms. Things that are automatic for people who are legally married, but that we knew since our marriage wasn't going to be recognized in Pennsylvania, we had to have all these additional documents drawn up by lawyers. And that's just something that's important to remember now. Sometimes it's easy to criticize movements in the past for not going far enough. And frankly there were valid criticisms of the marriage movement. But one thing that we shouldn't forget was that for people who wanted to get married there was real serious reasons why they needed to. And it wasn't only about stigma, and it wasn't only about feeling equal in the eyes of the law. It was also about being able to take care of your partner with legal rights. And so I had criticism of the marriage equality movement. And also I was part of it. Because both were possible at the same time. We could simultaneously believe that health care shouldn't be tied to whether you're married or not or immigration shouldn't be tied to whether you're married or not, and we could also believe that people should be able to have the legal relationships that allow them to take care of their families. And so that was a very galvanizing moment in time. MF: In your description of that, both in terms of your college activism and then into your postcollegiate activism, you talked about housing issues on college campus. Then you talked about nondiscrimination legislation at the civic level. And then the fight for marriage equality. Were there other issues that were really important for you either at PDN or moving into the Pennsylvania Equality? AS: Equality Pennsylvania. MF: Equality Pennsylvania organization. AS: Yeah. So I designed the candidate questionnaire for Equality Pennsylvania and really led the endorsement process for candidates that were seeking our endorsement. And in that questionnaire we asked about do you believe people who are incarcerated should be housed based on their gender identity or their sex assigned at birth. We asked questions. We were really trying to make sure that we were finding people who really understood our community and the way that we define ourselves. We asked about bullying in schools. We asked about nondiscrimination. We asked about marriage or other forms of relationship recognition. We probably asked about hate crimes legislation. And we asked about stuff that wasn't legislative as well. We asked about people's connection to the LGBT community in the area where they lived in Pennsylvania. We asked about their volunteer work with LGBTQ issues. I remember one person who's now on the state supreme court, David Wecht, judges have to be careful about how they answer questionnaires. But we asked him to describe his judicial philosophy when it comes to historically excluded populations. And we asked about his past connection to LGBTQ communities in Pittsburgh where he lived. And he told us that he volunteered at an AIDS organization I believe in the '90s. Well, that was very telling for us because it was a time when not every lawyer wanted to volunteer with an AIDS organization. So we were looking for hints from people's past involvement, how they might be once they were elected. I remember there were some really interesting races that we were involved in. One of them was the attorney general's race between Kathleen Kane and Patrick Murphy. And Patrick Murphy when he was in Congress led the effort in the House to pass "Don't Ask, Don't Tell's" repeal. And we ended up endorsing him. And I remember one of Kathleen Kane's staff members calling me and saying, "I can't believe you're endorsing Patrick Murphy." And we said, "He kind of repealed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'" And they were like, "Oh yeah, that thing." We were like, "That thing? That was like a very significant thing." What it also is, is it's proof of his commitment for somebody who's never held public office before where we don't have any proof. There's no proof we could get. And so sometimes we were endorsing against people that both said they were good on the issues but one had record and one didn't. And so we were always looking for that. Also with Equality Pennsylvania we were trying to be very aware that Pennsylvania was very key nationally. And during the Obama administration, those eight years, I was invited to numerous briefings at the White House or other types of ways to engage with national leaders. And I remember the Obama administration's LGBTQ liaison, Gautam Raghavan, who's now the director of the Office of Presidential Personnel in the Biden-Harris White House. We would ask and we would say, "What LGBTQ Pennsylvanians really want to see is the president come out for marriage." And he would always say, "I'm not here to make news today. Here's what I can tell you." And they were always very clear about what the White House was willing to support. And we were always saying, "There's one thing that's missing. And our voters, our people, are very aware of that." MF: After you move from Equality Pennsylvania so you're looking for a full-time position in this line of work, how do you make it from Equality Pennsylvania into a full-time position? AS: So at the time I had been here for a while in the Lehigh Valley. But my LGBTQ activism was really statewide. And later during that time with Equality Pennsylvania one of the races that I got involved in was the Bethlehem mayor's race. And Equality Pennsylvania played a pretty significant role in supporting Willie Reynolds when he ran for mayor of Bethlehem the first time. He had been our champion for nondiscrimination. And he was running against Bob Donchez, who was elected mayor, who was really not our champion. He ended up being supportive, I would say like lukewarm supportive, but was certainly not a champion when it came to LGBTQ people. And I worked with Willie on a number of his statements, and one of them was a mail piece he put out where we had a whole bunch of LGBTQ leaders standing behind him. And it said, "As mayor I pledge to not marry anyone until I can marry everyone." He would only officiate at weddings for any residents once Pennsylvania gave him the legal authority to officiate gay weddings. And that was a really big statement for somebody in the Lehigh Valley. This wasn't Philadelphia. This wasn't Pittsburgh. It's the Lehigh Valley. And before Pennsylvania had marriage. And so that campaign, which he didn't win, but he lost by only a very small amount of votes, it kind of let me know that I really liked doing work here in the Lehigh Valley. And I had also been involved with some other campaigns in this area. Including Matt Cartwright when he ran for Congress around that same time actually. And Congressman Cartwright, he wasn't a congressman yet, he called me to ask for LGBTQ community support. And I told him that we were concerned that he didn't support marriage equality. And he said something like, "Well, I'm just not sure that the area is ready for it." And I told him that he should go talk to his son and then call me back. And he called me back a little bit later and he said, "I talked to my son and he says that his entire generation thinks of this as a nonissue and that I should get with the times and support marriage. And so I'm going to." And I really started feeling like this is an area, and at the time his district included Easton. It now doesn't. He lived in Scranton. He's become a very strong champion for LGBTQ rights in Washington. But I felt like I liked being involved locally. And I also felt like I didn't have to keep doing elections and campaigns. I wanted to just find community. And so when I decided to leave Equality Pennsylvania it was to start Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. MF: Well, we're just about at the end of our time. And we're going to do a follow-up interview where Adrian will tell the origin story of Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. But since we're nearing the end, and we've talked about your early years of activism, perhaps we could conclude with a question like looking back on all of that early work what mattered to you the most, is there anything you wish you would have focused on more during that time period. How do you reflect on those early years of activism in your life? AS: Yeah. I'm really grateful for my time at Muhlenberg because it really kind of let me learn how to be an activist. It let me test out my activism in different ways and try different things. Learn also what didn't work. It gave me an opportunity to become a better activist. And in many ways with my time in Equality Pennsylvania as well I was really young when I became the board president. I was 24. And there was a lot that I thought I knew that I didn't. There certainly are things I would do differently now that I have had experience leading organization on the staff side. But I will say that that moment in time felt so important and so urgent. It felt like such a strong sense of urgency. And I'm really glad that I had the opportunity to be an activist then. I also think that in terms of the issues that we prioritized we weren't necessarily setting the agenda. The agenda was being set by national actors and national media around okay, :Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Okay, marriage equality. These things were happening. And state equality organizations don't exist in a vacuum. Because the state doesn't exist in a vacuum. So Pennsylvania is part of the US. And what's happening in the US affects Pennsylvania. So we weren't necessarily setting the agenda the way we may have wanted to or not. We were responding and leading in our state. And we can always look back on time periods and say, "Well, we should have done more on this." Or we could look back now and say, "Equality Pennsylvania should have done more on trans inclusion. Or more on racial justice. Or more on cross-movement issues." And we did some. For example Equality Pennsylvania got behind UFCW's campaign, United Food and Commercial Workers' campaign, to prevent the privatization of state liquor stores. Because as state employees liquor store employees are protected by a state executive order for nondiscrimination. We don't have state legislation that would protect private sector workers. We got behind an effort against school vouchers because it would provide tax dollars to schools who don't have antibullying rules in place. And they don't have nondiscrimination protections for students or teachers. So there were some cross-movement issues. But we always had to make that very clear LGBTQ case for it. And I think that looking back now we can look back to that time period and say we should have just been better at solidarity in general. But in that moment LGBTQ issues were considered deeply controversial. And front and center in the media. And most of us were doing it as a volunteer, with limited capacity. And doing the best and making the best decisions we could at the time. I do think that we helped to change Pennsylvania, although winning marriage in Pennsylvania came through the court. It came through the Whitewood decision. The ACLU of Pennsylvania represented a bunch of couples. And a Bush-appointed judge, Judge Jones, who also ruled in the case related to evolution in schools, the Dover case, he gave his ruling that Governor Corbett didn't appeal that granted marriage in Pennsylvania in 2014. And to get to the point where a Republican governor didn't appeal a ruling on marriage was in large part because of trying to make this issue propulsive in our state and really broadening public support for it. So I do think that our work at Equality Pennsylvania made a tangible difference. MF: Can I ask one follow-up question? I know we're moving to the end. We had started this discussion of activism, especially at the college level, as being very much connected to your faith. Very much linked to your burgeoning, developing, or evolving understanding of yourself and Judaism in your life as being connected to politics and activism. It felt like hand in hand at the college. How did your faith journey move along with your journey into activism? AS: So in college I really changed how I identified as Jewish. Again. I changed in high school and I changed again in college. In college I was working at the Reform synagogue in Allentown, Congregation Keneseth Israel. And I was teaching in the religious school. And that experience was really important for me because I met a couple people there. One, her name is Janet Hogan. And she was a religious school director. A straight woman, but a mother of an adult gay son who was married to a rabbi named Victor Appell. And she kind of invited me to her family events, like some family dinners. And I really had a really important -- she was my boss but became a mentor in many ways. And Ellen Sussman, who was the cantor at this congregation, who was also very supportive. And I really loved that job but I realized that it wasn't where I felt any kind of spiritual connection. And so I joined a Reconstructionist congregation in the Lehigh Valley called Am Haskalah that had a lesbian rabbi and many LGBTQ congregants. It was small and very grassroots. But that community was really important for me as well, especially in college and afterwards. I was still wearing my yarmulke all the time at that time period. And both in college and then throughout my time with Equality Pennsylvania. And I do think that how people read other people based on religiosity has always been really interesting when it comes to the queer movement. Some people have tried to paint -- some people meaning of a different ideology than mine -- have tried to paint it as God versus gay. And I think that when the leader of a state equality organization is wearing visibly religious symbols that are personally meaningful to them and that are not performative it does change that conversation a bit. When I would speak at rallies and people would see a visibly religious guy speaking about marriage equality, it made an enormous -- or when I would testify in front of local governments from Philadelphia City Hall to Bethlehem to small towns, Cheltenham Borough, Springfield Township, I would go to these small towns and testify for nondiscrimination, or for in the case of Philadelphia passing a couple other bills that weren't related to nondiscrimination. It did change the conversation a little bit. It undercut the opposition. Remember in Bethlehem, some people tried to suggest that religious people were against nondiscrimination. And it was like are you kidding. I do remember at one of the meetings, Bethlehem city council would always have a religious leader give an invocation at the beginning of the meeting. Which was an issue we actually -- we were going to pick our battles on. But that wasn't going to be our battle. I did feel very uncomfortable. And we were always concerned about who was going to give the invocation on the nights our issue was being voted on. Were they going to invoke council members, to pray for them to make a decision against equality? And there was a pastor who we didn't know. I looked him up and it was like an evangelical church. It was like uh-oh. And he got up and he spoke and gave his invocation. He said, "I didn't know what was going to be on the agenda tonight. But I'm so," these aren't his exact words. But he said something along the lines of, "I'm so pleased to see that the city council is poised to take action to support the equal rights of all residents. That's what my faith teaches. And it's what most faiths teach." And we were like sigh of relief. So for me it was a little bit symbolic and also very much personal religious decision to continue to be visibly Jewish through that time period. MF: Well, at the end I just want to thank you and give you the opportunity. Is there anything that you think we missed in this first oral history that you want to return to or something you want to say at the end of the interview today? AS: No. MF: No? Adrian, this is such a pleasure, I'm so grateful that you took the time today. Thank you so much. AS: Thank you. 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.) 01:22:11 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 Adrian Shanker, Part 1, February 4, 2022 Description An account of the resource Adrian Shanker recalls his life growing up in Westchester, New York, fighting for non-discrimination laws and the repeal of bans on same-sex marriage, his Jewish faith, and his activist work in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-29 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-02-04 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/c4011648f142a3edc068ec1cdcd922cc.png 7fb23edc9e846228d296767709efad91 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 of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 David Moyer 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-24.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 February 11, 2022 David Moyer Part 2, February 11, 2022 LGBT-24 1:23:25 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 David Moyer Mary Foltz video/mp4 MoyerDavid_20220211_video_trimmed 1.0:|33(7)|56(15)|73(9)|92(11)|113(16)|132(4)|147(5)|162(8)|185(4)|204(9)|227(5)|248(3)|267(4)|286(2)|307(10)|330(14)|351(10)|374(7)|395(12)|414(11)|431(11)|450(8)|475(13)|490(12)|507(11)|526(10)|547(8)|562(18)|583(11)|600(6)|615(13)|632(7)|651(2)|666(12)|683(10)|700(13)|721(6)|740(13)|761(6)|776(4)|791(17)|810(9)|827(3)|844(3)|863(13)|882(12)|899(6)|920(13)|937(2)|954(10)|971(15)|988(8)|1003(7)|1020(2)|1035(4)|1054(10)|1075(2)|1092(5)|1111(9)|1126(10)|1145(11)|1160(10)|1177(18)|1188(3)|1205(3)|1226(10)|1247(3)|1258(15)|1279(8)|1294(16)|1307(18)|1324(12)|1341(6)|1356(10)|1375(14)|1392(14)|1405(15)|1418(10)|1433(7)|1452(5)|1473(2)|1486(3)|1503(9)|1514(6) 0 https://youtu.be/yzjoiwcuTtk YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MF: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with David Moyer to talk about his life and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS, and David and I are meeting at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College on February 11, 2022. So, David, thank you again for speaking to me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; DM: My pleasure. 0 73 First Year of Marriage / Daughter's Birth MF: Great. So this is our second interview, I’m so excited to be back with you today and we ended our last interview with a discussion of your marriage, so I thought we’d start there. Could you tell me a little bit about your marriage and that first year of married life? &#13 ; &#13 ; DM: Oh, sure, yeah. The main reason that we got married was because my former wife was pregnant, and that was a long story I think, which is part -- in the first part. But what I didn’t get to say was we had -- well, we had a military wedding. It was a Lakehurst, New Jersey, and it was the Chapel of the Air on the base. 0 422 Finding a New Job / HIV/AIDS Work with the Allentown Health Department DM: Now, I had started at Olin Corporation in 1972, and they closed in October of 1988, it was just a few months after our daughter was born. And the bad thing about that was the day I lost my full-time job at Olin, I also lost my part-time job as an aerobics instructor and fitness instructor with the Body Factory, and they were located in Whitehall at the time, so I had no income. &#13 ; &#13 ; Well, the only income I had was my reserve time, and that was once a month, so it wasn’t very much. The interesting thing is that one of my aerobic students at that time had worked for the Morning Call, and she was one of two reporters, health reporters for the city. And Rose knew about my medical background, that I was a nurse, and all that so she said, “There’s a position that’s opened up at the -- in the city of Allentown at the health department that you might be good at.” She’s like, “And I don’t know that you might -- ” she says, “I know you’re really good at it,” so she gave me the information of who to go see in that. 0 830 Allentown in the Early HIV/AIDS Crisis DM: Let me take you back to the start of HIV/AIDS, and this may help paint a better picture of what was happening in Allentown back in the day. On June 5th of 1981, the CDC, Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, reported a few cases of a rare disease in young, gay men and intravenous drugs users. The symptoms such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis pneumonia, they’re generally usually seen in older individuals. &#13 ; &#13 ; The pneumonia is typically seen in patients who were static from surgery, so they have to be flat and not moved, and that they would develop this Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is in the lungs. And then the other form with the Kaposi, it’ a form of cancer that is usually seen in elderly, Mediterranean men, now -- and that can be internal or external. What happens is it leaves these -- looks like black and blue marks on the body like the person was beat-up, and those black and blue marks can be either internal or external. 0 1087 Formation of Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT) / HIV/AIDS Counseling &amp ; Testing at Rainbow Mountain DM: So fast-forward to 19 -- the years 1985, ’86 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A group of concerned citizens mostly from the Stonewall Bar, Candida’s Bar, and Jeff’s City Line Pub, and the patrons who supported these establishments, these people live and work in Lehigh Valley formed what is known as FACT, Fighting AIDS Continuously Together. &#13 ; &#13 ; They held an event called The FACT Bar Games, which was held in the gay resort in the Poconos at Rainbow Mountain. That was the summer of 1986. This was all due to the AIDS crisis in the Lehigh Valley. I had heard about FACT, but I really didn’t know or participate in any of their fundraising events. 0 1384 Joining the FACT Board DM: So I think it was about 1992, I went to -- I was asked to come to a board meeting, which is what I did, and that time they were meeting at -- in one of the meeting rooms at what was then the Hilton at Ninth and Hamilton, and they had probably 25 people on their board at that time. We’re down to 13 now at present. &#13 ; &#13 ; So they asked me if I wanted to join the board, and I said, “Sure, why not?” By now, I have lost some people and -- but my first -- first person I had lost even before I got into -- with the city, I was still working at Olin, and a good friend of mine, his name was Chuck, would always go to Atlantic City for the summer. 0 1737 FACT Beginnings and Events DM: Yeah, oh, thank you. Well, FACT, like I said, started -- was really started in 1986 -- ’85–’86 with our -- for the LGBT community because nothing was being done for their friends that were passing from AIDS. So their first events -- first event was this game up in -- a bar game up in -- at Rainbow Mountain in the Poconos. And at that time, we had a lot of bars, so we had the Stonewall Bar, we had Candida’s, we had Jeff’s City Line Pub, we had the Red Star from Reading, we had the Glass Door, we had Blue Bugle up in the Stroudsburg area. 0 2158 Educating through FACT DM:And like I said, the education component, we always have that at an event. Whether we’re doing bingo for Pride, we always have an information table along with condoms and dental dams and lubrication and all that good stuff that -- for safe sex. We’re still promoting safe sex. Even this day and age, we still need to do that. &#13 ; &#13 ; One of things that I had incorporated in was being that I work for the health department, I was able to go more places, and one of the big educational components for me was in the prison. And we were in the prison every Thursday to do education on a different unit because they had 12 different units in the local prison here, and then we would get people to sign up for testing, then we would go in on a Friday with our crew and just do testing. 0 2431 FACT Board Diversity / Assisting People with Contingencies through FACT DM: Another thing that’s -- that -- and I need to say this, is that even though we support -- FACT supports the LGBT community, we are not recognized as an LGBT organization because we have both straight and gay people on our board, and that’s important for people to know. I mean the majority of us are gay but -- well, because we don’t know. &#13 ; &#13 ; One of the things too is that especially with the contingencies, which I’ll start talking about now, is that the -- what the contingency request is case managers at Lehigh Valley Hospital in St. Luke’s, they both have an HIV/AIDS department, and they have case managers in those departments, and they have clients -- obviously, they have clients. 0 2808 Work with the AIDS Outreach Buddy Program DM: The one major one that I really was involved with was AIDS Outreach, and they were the first organization to do -- and they were the first religious organization to do anything and that was -- they -- that stemmed out of the Episcopal church. And they started down in Easton before they moved to Allentown, and they had what was called the Buddy program. 0 2944 Other Related Organizations in the Area DM: Gilead House, which was on the state hospital grounds of Allentown, they just had gotten started and then they closed down. Berks AIDS Network, which is called BAN, they’re out of Reading, they’ve changed their whole dynamics and I think they’re doing just more than just HIV/AIDS. We used to have a Latino AIDS outreach, which we don’t have anymore. They were located -- they started in Bethlehem, they moved to Allentown. We still have HAO, Hispanic AIDS Organization. I think they’re located down where the old -- where the original Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, it’s at Fifth and Walnut. I’m trying to think if we have any other organizations. 0 3074 Longtime Companion DM: One of the things that I do in my presentations is I always end my talks with one of my favorite movies is, and one of the first Hollywood big movies was called Longtime Companion, and it takes place in New York and primarily like in Fire Island, in that area. And the main character, his name is Willy, and there was a whole group of his friends that always would get together and like people still do. But he was the only one left, all his friends had died, and he’s walking on the beach in Fire Island, and the last line of the movie is, “All I want is a cure and my friends back,” and that’s how I feel. I hate this disease. I’m sorry, but [sighs] it’s tough. 0 3153 Dating Culture / The Damron Book / Gulfport, Mississippi DM: Back in the day, you had to know somebody or know where things were if you were to go and meet somebody or hook up. We don’t have that now. We have -- maybe I shouldn’t say we don’t have that now, we don’t. I’d say that we need it now, but we have the internet. The internet has changed everything for everybody, not just the gay community, but for everybody. You’d go to the bar and hopefully you meet somebody and maybe get lucky and go home. Now you can sit in the comfort of your living room in your pajamas or underwear or naked and cruise somebody on a website and have cybersex, which is safe, but it’s not fun. [laughter] 0 3472 Thoughts on the Future of the LGBT Community DM: I mean we thrived here in the Lehigh Valley, we had all these bars, we had -- the cruising places is still there, but you would have to be careful there because of the police now. It wasn’t like it was back in our days. We would drive around and around, and I’d mentioned this before with my friend Tommy and Eddie, we would drive around for hours just cruising, yeah, not necessarily picking anybody up, but you can do that. You can’t do that because you see the signs, no, no cruising 7:00 to 10:00 pm. on this street or no cruising 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. on this street. &#13 ; &#13 ; &#13 ; So I don’t know where it’s going, I really don’t. I know that for ME as a gay man, I have lived through a lot. I’ve done a lot, there’s still more for me to do. I said when I get into this line of work with HIV that I will never stop, I won’t -- going as long as I can. I don’t want to let my friends down because I promised them that I would do this. 0 3661 First Experience with the AIDS Quilt DM: One story that I really do want to give to you is my first experience with the quilt, and it was here at Muhlenberg College, and that was, I’m going to say ’95 or ’96 when it was here. I’m not exactly sure, I think it was ’95 or ’96. We had all the organization that were still going were involved with that, and there was a training on how to display the quilt because there’s a whole ceremony. &#13 ; &#13 ; If you haven’t seen it, Google it because it’s something that is really it’s intense. And we had it at the -- it was the Field House here on the campus. We were in the small palestra and they had these huge boxes, there must have been 30 of these boxes if not more with the quilt panels. They come and they’re folded, so they’re telling us, “This is what you need to do. Once you have the panel, to fold the panel down it takes eight people to do it, a section.” So they said, “Go over and get one out of the box,” so we go over and get one out and put it down. And we each have our space where we’re at, and we’re opening it and it’s -- you do it very slowly. 0 3891 FACT’s Relationship to Other AIDS Organizations in the Lehigh Valley MF: I’m wondering about FACT’s relationship to other AIDS organizations?. Because you’re working in two different fields, you’re also part of the Buddy -- the Buddy program, but there was a program out of the Lambda center that I think became AIDS Services. But how are all of those organizations working together or were they not? &#13 ; &#13 ; DM: No, they were, -- &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: working together? 0 4057 Coming out with His Husband DM: I have another story that’s not really AIDS related, but it’s about my husband, about my late husband. And I guess his and my coming out -- we were together for, I’m going to say, seven or eight years, at least seven or eight years if not more. And one of the goods things is that his whole family is just great, absolutely great. But his mother and his older sister -- because his younger sister was living in Florida for like 25 years, and she’s back here now -- but they would go to a lot of the events. 0 4578 Feelings of Safety &amp ; Security DM: My faith community is by far the best. I have two parishioners who are originally from -- well, [Haley?] has risen from here, but her husband is Filipino, but they lived in California for years and they -- because he has -- he still has family out there, so they go out occasionally. And when Will died, passed away, somebody let them know that he had died, and they called me immediately, and they canceled the rest of their trip and came home just to help support me. Who does that? &#13 ; &#13 ; You hear so many horror stories in the LGBT community, getting kicked out or being spit on or being assaulted or being murdered, I feel -- there’s times where I feel guilty because I haven’t had any of that. I mean I’ve had some looks and some comments but few and far between, not by anybody in my immediate circle. 0 4857 Closing Remarks DM: Oh, I think we’ve covered... I mean I could’ve talked a bit more about my sexual experiences, but I don’t know. [laughs] That’s for the book. I’m grateful to you for wanting to do this. I’m open, I try to be as open as I can. I think we covered -- I really wanted to get in there about my husband and my marriage, which never should’ve happened, but it did. That soured me for a few years because it wasn’t -- it wasn’t me that wanted to end the divorce, it was me that ended the divorce, but it wasn’t me that was at fault. 0 MovingImage David Moyer details his marriage, work in HIV/AIDS healthcare and activism with Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT), and personal relationships. INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MOYER FEBRUARY 11, 2022 MF: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with David Moyer to talk about his life and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS, and David and I are meeting at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College on February 11, 2022. So, David, thank you again for speaking to me today. DM: My pleasure. MF: We signed a consent form before we began, but I just want to go back through just a few consent questions. Do you consent to this interview today? DM: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? DM: I do. MF: Do you consent to the archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats like films, articles, websites, presentations? DM: I do. MF: And do you understand that you'll have 30 days after I give you the transcript of this interview to identify parts that you want to delete or to withdraw the interview from the project entirely? DM: I do. MF: Great. So this is our second interview, I'm so excited to be back with you today and we ended our last interview with a discussion of your marriage, so I thought we'd start there. Could you tell me a little bit about your marriage and that first year of married life? DM: Oh, sure, yeah. The main reason that we got married was because my former wife was pregnant, and that was a long story I think, which is part -- in the first part. But what I didn't get to say was we had -- well, we had a military wedding. It was a Lakehurst, New Jersey, and it was the Chapel of the Air on the base. It was small, we were only supposed to have a hundred people there -- well we had about a hundred people for the wedding itself, and it was only supposed to a hundred people for the reception, but unfortunately, it also happened to be a weekend that my unit that I was still a part of was drilling that weekend as well. So there were probably about, close to 300 other people there, and they just casually crashed the reception, which was fine, I mean nobody got upset at that. But one of the things too that you don't see in traditional weddings is that my then sister-in-law and brother-in-law, my wife's sister and brother-in-law, they really -- their wedding gift was the wedding. They paid for everything other than the marriage license, the blood test, and the rings. But they also paid for the honeymoon, and the entire wedding party went to Atlantic for the honeymoon. We got down there, Betsy and I were supposed to have the bridal suite, and Will and Donna were going to just have the other room. Betsy could've cared less about the wedding suite, so she said, "The two of you take it, we're fine where we are, we'll do that," sorry for [inaudible]. That's what we did and then we met down in the casino, and I -- there's a lot of things that I know remember. I don't remember the name of the casino that we stayed at. It was not Trump, and it wasn't any -- it was some awful mall one. But anyway, so we went down in their dining area, and we had something to eat, and Betsy wanted to go gamble, so her and Donna went gambling, and Will and I went barhopping because we knew the bars. So that's what we did and then I don't know what time they got back to their room, but Will and I got back later, pretty well lit. We slept in and get up in the morning, met downstairs, checked out, and then we found a diner. We didn't want to have food in the casino area, so we just did that and then we drove back to Lakehurst, and they got in their car and went back up to New York, and we came back to Pennsylvania. So that was the honeymoon adventure. Well often, Will and I would go up to New York because they were living in Yorktown Heights at the time in Upstate New York, and we would go up for the weekend. We spent a couple of times there. I would go up more than Will would because he had to work sometimes on the weekends, and that went on until -- that was March of '88. Our daughter was born April 4th of '88, and she was premature, and she was supposed to have been born in October, I don't remember the time. She was like eight or nine weeks early, she was really a preemie, so she spent several months in the hospital before they'll let her home, well until she reached the right weight. So we would go up on weekends. We didn't go to bars. I don't think I was in any gay bar up in the area where they lived because there weren't any that we knew of. And we didn't need to go to the bars because we would drink at home, and that was it. And that went on for -- the marriage was -- ended in 1996, and that's another story in itself, which I really don't want to get into in here. But in that time frame, I was still working at Olin. Now, I had started at Olin Corporation in 1972, and they closed in October of 1988, it was just a few months after our daughter was born. And the bad thing about that was the day I lost my full-time job at Olin, I also lost my part-time job as an aerobics instructor and fitness instructor with the Body Factory, and they were located in Whitehall at the time, so I had no income. Well, the only income I had was my reserve time, and that was once a month, so it wasn't very much. The interesting thing is that one of my aerobic students at that time had worked for the Morning Call, and she was one of two reporters, health reporters for the city. And Rose knew about my medical background, that I was a nurse, and all that so she said, "There's a position that's opened up at the -- in the city of Allentown at the health department that you might be good at." She's like, "And I don't know that you might -- " she says, "I know you're really good at it," so she gave me the information of who to go see in that. So I walked in, and at that time, the health department was located above the central firehouse on Chew Street between Seventh and Eighth, and they were on the second floor. So I went in, and I spoke to the clerk -- one of the clerks that was there because they had a whole bank of clerks for different departments there. And I said, "I was told that there's a position open in the city that I might be interested in, it was in HIV/AIDS," and they said, "Well, Ann isn't here at the time," -- she was the director, Ann Taylor, not the clothing designer, I know, -- "but she'll be back after lunch." I left, I came back, and I was just coming in to inquire and sat down with Ann and just that brief talk wound up being a three-hour interview, and I said, "I don't have a resume." I had a resume, but I had it for being a fitness instructor because I also had that, and that's really what I wanted to do, I wanted to continue being the aerobic instructor in that because you never -- look at me now, but anyway. So she said, "Well, [Linnie?] if you can get a resume to me by such and such a date, we can consider that." So I had to go home, and at that time, we didn't have the computers, we had the regular typewriters, and I had to go and make a resume, which I took back. And then she said, "Are you available to talk to another person here?" and I said, "Sure," so there was another two-hour discussion. Now, they had already hired one person for the department because they were just starting up their HIV counseling and testing. The health [inaudible] was counseling and testing with all the nurses that were there because they didn't have an HIV/AIDS department at that time. So they had another Hispanic woman, Linda, and they had another person in mind who was also a Hispanic man, and they really wanted somebody who can speak Spanish because of the population. Unfortunately, I don't speak any Spanish -- well I do, but they're all dirty words but that's neither here or there, but I knew how to draw blood. That was the thing that got me in was that I could do that and I had that medical background, so, and we were hired. At that time, we were hired as independent contractors for the city, and the city was union. So I got hired, and I guess about two years into the job, somebody in the union got word that all these people -- because a lot of the people that worked for the health department at that time were considered contract employees, most of them were, and that was a no-no. And the union said that "You either need to make these people employees or you need to get rid of them." And these are all grant-funded programs, and they're not about to lose all this grant money, so they hired us. They grandfathered most of the thing, but they didn't grandfather the time that we had there, so I lost two years of that, so I was a city employee. And prior to that, I knew what was going on with -- I knew that -- I knew about HIV and AIDS, but I didn't know a whole lot of what was going on because we really hadn't started testing yet in the military. And one of the things that really helped me and my coworker Linda is that they actually sent us down to the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, for our formal training of how to do that -- how to do testing -- counseling and testing, which was excellent. I'm working and I'm doing counseling and testing but not really knowing a whole lot, still learning more about this transmission and all that good stuff because now we can test. So really what I'd like to do before I get further is to go back and give a little history about HIV in the area. And I do apologize, I have this written down, and I really want to get it right, so bear with me if [inaudible] here, so... Let me take you back to the start of HIV/AIDS, and this may help paint a better picture of what was happening in Allentown back in the day. On June 5th of 1981, the CDC, Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, reported a few cases of a rare disease in young, gay men and intravenous drugs users. The symptoms such as Kaposi's sarcoma and Pneumocystis pneumonia, they're generally usually seen in older individuals. The pneumonia is typically seen in patients who were static from surgery, so they have to be flat and not moved, and that they would develop this Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is in the lungs. And then the other form with the Kaposi, it' a form of cancer that is usually seen in elderly, Mediterranean men, now -- and that can be internal or external. What happens is it leaves these -- looks like black and blue marks on the body like the person was beat-up, and those black and blue marks can be either internal or external. No one knew how or where it started ; we just knew it was beginning to spread. Everyone was scared, hospitals were starting to see more and more young men with these conditions. There was no definite treatment or medications available. Doctors were not even certain how it was being transmitted, so a lot of quarantine procedures were set into place. Some hospitals were using full-body suits to go into patients' rooms. A protocol of no physical contact with patients was placed -- put into place and -- with big signs on the doors. Food trays and even bed linens and gowns were placed just outside the doors, and the patients, if they were able, had to fend for themselves if they were not bedridden, and a lot of times, the patients were dying, and they were dying alone. No one wanted to go near those people. The first few years of HIV were the worst for everyone. There wasn't a name for it at this time for this condition, as yet a blood test had not been devised, and they were starting to call it HTLV-III, later that was renamed GRID, gay-related infectious disease. And at the time, the gay people were starting to be discriminated against even more. We were the carriers and the cause of this disease. It was God's wrath because we were all bad people, and we deserved what God had placed upon us, all gays and all drug users deserved to die. Organizations were starting to spring up in response to the AIDS crisis, ACT UP, which was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and the GMHC, Gay Men's Health Crisis Center, and they were located primarily in New York. And they were all working to help find out more about this condition and to help those infected -- and affect -- infected men affected by HIV/AIDS. Because of these organizations and their push to find out more about what was happening to this -- to their community, we now had a test to determine what we were fighting -- a virus, specifically HIV, human immunodeficiency virus. We had our first medication, AZT, we know definitely how this virus is and is not transmitted, and yet, people were still getting infected, people were still dying, and now the virus had crept into the mainstream heterosexual population. Straight women, straight men, and babies were getting infected. We were seeing more progress -- some progress, but we still did not have enough. Our friends were dying, and there was no one there to intervene for them. So fast-forward to 19 -- the years 1985, '86 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A group of concerned citizens mostly from the Stonewall Bar, Candida's Bar, and Jeff's City Line Pub, and the patrons who supported these establishments, these people live and work in Lehigh Valley formed what is known as FACT, Fighting AIDS Continuously Together. They held an event called The FACT Bar Games, which was held in the gay resort in the Poconos at Rainbow Mountain. That was the summer of 1986. This was all due to the AIDS crisis in the Lehigh Valley. I had heard about FACT, but I really didn't know or participate in any of their fundraising events. So I knew about them, but I didn't participate because I wasn't out-out with that part, but I had friends. And back then, you had a group of friends that you had dinner with, you partied with, you went here and there. Occasionally, you'd go to the bar, but if you were single and didn't have anybody, that's who you leave when you went to the bar, that's when you had the bar scene but... So I knew about it, and now we were testing in the military, and it scared the hell out of me because the first time I got tested, because I was very promiscuous, very promiscuous. To this day, I still don't know how I dodged the bullet, so to speak. I was tested last year just for the sake of getting tested even though I haven't been active in quite a few years. But I know I needed to get more involved, so... There were people that were coming in to the health department for testing who knew about FACT, and they had said that maybe I should go to a meeting or something, an event or I should go to an event, that's what it was. Eighty-six, I think it was the fourth or fifth Summer Games that was up at Rainbow Mountain, so I was invited to come up and have a table -- a display table from the health department and promote it. A lot of gay men didn't want to go to the health department because we were looked at as the health police, still are. It's gotten better, but I think one of the things that helped is that they had a gay man working in the health department doing this that they could trust. And I think that really helped at least get to where that we, hey, there's somebody there that you can go to, you could ask for, and you could feel comfortable with. So I decided that we need to do testing up at the Summer games. It's a safe place, everybody's -- there is an LGBT part of the community, and what a better place to do this, so I started doing testing up there. The games always started at noon and always ended at 6:00, and that first year that I had tested, I was still testing at ten o'clock at night, and back then, it still took two weeks for test results. Now we're up in Rainbow Mountain, up in Carbon County or Monroe County, I'm not sure where -- yeah, Monroe County but you had to come back to Allentown to get your test results, so, which is what they did. We tested up there and like the following week I said, "If we're going to do this, I need help." I said, "We need more than just me doing the counseling and testing," and I said, "We really need to have somebody that's just going to be able to draw blood," so that's what we did. So we started just having a phlebotomist full time with us even though we could all draw blood, which just makes it so much easier when you have that amount of people that you can just keep testing and educating and doing that stuff. So I think it was about 1992, I went to -- I was asked to come to a board meeting, which is what I did, and that time they were meeting at -- in one of the meeting rooms at what was then the Hilton at Ninth and Hamilton, and they had probably 25 people on their board at that time. We're down to 13 now at present. So they asked me if I wanted to join the board, and I said, "Sure, why not?" By now, I have lost some people and -- but my first -- first person I had lost even before I got into -- with the city, I was still working at Olin, and a good friend of mine, his name was Chuck, would always go to Atlantic City for the summer. My late husband and I were walking into the Rendezvous bar down in Atlantic City, and Chuck was coming out of the bar, and this is in the daytime around noon or so. And he had all these black and blue marks all over him, and I said look, I said, "Wow," I said, "you get into a fight?" He said, "No," he says, "they're -- it's called Kaposi's, and the doctor thinks that I need to be more in the sun" and then like two months later, he was dead. And I think this is really, really what got me more into the activism part was the Lark Inn, which was one of the big bars in Atlantic City, they knew Chuck, and they did a fundraiser for him to help pay for funeral and all that good stuff. I think this is something that I can get behind and that I -- not that I can get behind, that I need to get behind. So that's probably the first part of my activism, which is small steps. So I joined the FACT board, and they were still not sure if I was gay or straight because I didn't say I was gay or straight, they knew I was married and had a daughter. And it happened to be at one of the Summer games that we were up at -- and we were all having dinner together, and I started talking about my partner Will. And they just tilt their head like, "Well," -- [coughs] -- excuse me, "what -- what's the story here, are you gay, are you straight, are you bi?" I said, "Well, I've been all three," but I said, "but I'm gay, I'm gay," and I said, "the person that I'm with is the person that I'm with," which is Will. My wife and I got divorced in 1996, and like I said, that's another story maybe for another time, but... So then he started coming to events with me and he -- we would decorate, and he was part of the -- excuse me [coughs] -- part of the decorating crew. And they called him Balloon Man because he had the helium tank, and he had all the balloons, and he would just whip these all out and get balloons all over the place. So I joined the board, and then one of the members of the board had passed away from AIDS, and he was the education chair, that was, that was Tom. And I said, "Hey, if you need a new education chair, here I am." I said, "It's what I do, it's one of the jobs that I do in my job description." So I've been doing all of the education for FACT since 1992. Of course, I'm still on the board, and they would not let me go. And then we had a former president -- a former board member, and she passed away -- not from AIDS, but she had passed away. She was the treasurer of the organization which she was also what was called a contingency chairperson. And the contingency chairperson is the one that does all of the funding for clients, and I'll explain that a little more down the road here. So I said, "Let me do that." MF: Hi, I'm Mary, I'm back with David Moyer. We just took a quick break, and David was telling us a little bit about his work with FACT on the -- directly the educational mission for that organization. And I'm going to turn it back over to him to talk a little bit about FACT's organizational structure and his work with that. DM: Yeah, oh, thank you. Well, FACT, like I said, started -- was really started in 1986 -- '85--'86 with our -- for the LGBT community because nothing was being done for their friends that were passing from AIDS. So their first events -- first event was this game up in -- a bar game up in -- at Rainbow Mountain in the Poconos. And at that time, we had a lot of bars, so we had the Stonewall Bar, we had Candida's, we had Jeff's City Line Pub, we had the Red Star from Reading, we had the Glass Door, we had Blue Bugle up in the Stroudsburg area. So they would all compete for a trophy but also to raise money. I think it was like $15, which is still a steal today. We have not raised our prices since 1986 for the Summer games itself. It's a good event because you do -- you have vendors, all different kinds of vendors, you have organizations, the other AIDS organizations at that time. And we had plenty of them back in the day who would bring in their literature and things that they would sell like T-shirts or ads or things like that as did FACT, we had our own. We would sell these shirts like I'm wearing, we have hats, we have keychains, we have all kinds of stuff. And one year, AIDS Outreach, which is no more, they sold tree saplings, and you could plant the trees, so there's a lot of trees that are planted up at Rainbow Mountain that are still there, and you dedicated them in somebody that you knew that had passed from AIDS. So there's trees planted there, there's trees planted up at my house, I have two there, and at some of the gay campgrounds, Camp Oneida, which is up near the border of Pennsylvania and New York State, I have trees planted there, there's trees planted at Hillside. I don't think there's planted any at The Woods Campground because this -- that was way too early for that. So there's different committees in the organization. We have structure, we have a president, we have a vice president, we have a secretary, we have a treasurer, those are the four main. At present time, we have two co-chairs for the vice chair and then we have, like I said, the others there. Personally, I have been president twice, I've been vice president twice, I have been secretary three times now because I'm now the current secretary besides being the -- contingency and education chairperson. I've never been treasurer and I'm -- never will be because I can't balance my own checkbook, but anyway, that's neither here nor there. But FACT itself, we became incorporated as a 501[c][3] nonprofit. We are the only agency still alive today that receives no city, state, or federal funding. All the monies that we raise are raised through grassroots efforts, and that can be through -- back in the day, we did house parties. Like I would have a house party at my house, and maybe it was the start for that night of the house parties. Maybe we would just do hors d'oeuvres and you'd go from there to maybe your house where you would have drinks and then go somewhere else for -- or you do the whole thing. You had the option of saying, okay, I'm going to charge $5, $10, $25, $50, or you just put a big fishbowl out and put in what you can, and then all that money comes back to FACT. That was one way of doing it. And then there's bingos that we have ; we continue to do bingos, we have wise -- wine tasting events, we still have the Summer games. There may be things during the year like Pride. We would rent a bus to go up to Pride in New York, and you could do whatever you want. We also have that in December for pre-Christmas. You can go out in December and holiday shop or go to a show or do whatever you want to do. We had one board member who was very creative in writing murder mysteries, and they were interactive murder mysteries, really, really good, Bruce Brown. And Bruce still does radio shows here in -- at the Red Door from Muhlenberg College, and he's done several of those. The highlight of our year is our Snowball, and that's always in -- around World AIDS Day. We had not raised the price on that either in years, but we're looking at that now maybe upping some things. Membership, we've [inaudible] our membership. There's different levels of membership that you can get there as well. And like I said, the education component, we always have that at an event. Whether we're doing bingo for Pride, we always have an information table along with condoms and dental dams and lubrication and all that good stuff that -- for safe sex. We're still promoting safe sex. Even this day and age, we still need to do that. One of things that I had incorporated in was being that I work for the health department, I was able to go more places, and one of the big educational components for me was in the prison. And we were in the prison every Thursday to do education on a different unit because they had 12 different units in the local prison here, and then we would get people to sign up for testing, then we would go in on a Friday with our crew and just do testing. And then if we had tested the week before, then one of us would just go to the unit and do the test results in the unit. Unless there was a positive, then we had to bring that person down and do that in the medical department area because everybody will be warned about this is going to happen in case the person freaked out or whatever, and so, and luckily, that never happened. And then one of the big things in the last couple of years, of course the last couple of years because of COVID, we were able to do this, is that two of the State Reps Pete Schweyer and -- oh, my goodness, his name just went out of my head -- Mike Schlossberg, they hold a senior fest over in the east side of Allentown, and they've invited us -- FACT to be there for education because just because you're old doesn't mean you're not frisky. [laughs] So we have condoms available there too, and it's amazing the amount of people that stop. But one of the things that we did also to entice people to come in at our table is we do blood pressures so we -- because we can't do testing there. But we do blood pressures, so we can do that, and we can talk to the person. And even if they're not active, if they have grandchildren, we say, "Here, take a party pack for your grandson or granddaughter or whatever." And then I've also done several programs for -- at the Bradbury-Sullivan Center for their Silk group, their teens. And I've also done programs at William Allen High School and Dieruff. In fact, I was doing educational programs outside of Lehigh County when I was with the city and then that had to stop because we're encroaching in somebody else's territory, unless we get permission from the county to come in and do that, so... So the education is -- still is ongoing. I have a good friend Hollis who is part of the NAACP here in Lehigh Valley, and we did a very big program for their group. So where we're needed, we go. Probably around 1992, '93, we -- not us but a FACT Bucks County chapter was formed, and they're in New Hope, located in New Hope. So they're our sister chapter, they're still going strong, and sometimes we do events together, but most of the part, they do their thing, and we do our thing. Another thing that's -- that -- and I need to say this, is that even though we support -- FACT supports the LGBT community, we are not recognized as an LGBT organization because we have both straight and gay people on our board, and that's important for people to know. I mean the majority of us are gay but -- well, because we don't know. One of the things too is that especially with the contingencies, which I'll start talking about now, is that the -- what the contingency request is case managers at Lehigh Valley Hospital in St. Luke's, they both have an HIV/AIDS department, and they have case managers in those departments, and they have clients -- obviously, they have clients. So FACT was designed to help people who are infect-- that were infected by HIV/AIDS. [We do not know who we are helping. All we know is that the person is either infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. So you can be straight, you can be gay, you can be asexual, you can be black, white, male, female, doesn't matter who you are, if you need help and we can help, we do. Now early on in the disease, we had a lot of different categories that we were -- would fund. And in fact, we had a lot of money early on that we were able to help support the -- not necessarily the hospitals, but the other AIDS organizations with grants so that they could expand their organization. But with the way things have been occurring, we don't do that anymore. But we would help with rental, insurance, mortgage, drugs and medications are drugs and medications covered by the special pharmaceuticals benefits program that the state puts out, household items like maybe in the summer you need an air conditioner, and we always had a supply of air conditioners handy at the office they'd just take one, heating. And that's changed now because we have the LIHEAP program, which is energy conservation for people with low income or no income. Auto repair, some forms of transportation like for a person to get from -- they have bus passes to get from their home to an employment because they didn't have a car, and then the big one was the funeral expense, and we have all of those categories for years. And we're in the process of changing -- well, we've changed a lot of those. There's a lot of those that we don't fund anymore because we don't need to. And now when COVID hit, nothing was being funded per se, nothing was being funded. The only thing that we were funding were funerals. And when we look at what's happened over the last two years plus, there isn't a need for any of those other categories anymore other than the funeral expense. So that's the only thing that we're going to be funding are funerals, and we'll be upping the amount because each category had their amount. You could apply to FACT twice in one calendar year and then you could come back the following year if you needed something, and we could do that again. The clients really are encouraged to find ways of being able to support themselves because we're -- we really are considered the funders of last resort. They'd go, the hospital would do some things because they have special funding for their clients whether it's for HIV or AIDS or it could be a whole bunch of other things, but they have those. Or they can go to AIDSNET, and AIDSNET serves a six-county area. They do Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon, Monroe, Schuylkill and Berks County, and they'll fund some things too that the hospitals won't be able to fund, and if they can't fund them, then they come to FACT. But none of those organizations will -- are able to fund funerals and so we're -- that's where we're going to be at right now is funerals. And I know that we're in the beginning of 2022, and we've already had four funerals this year that we're funding. So that's pretty much where FACT is. We're the only organization left. We had tons of organizations in the area, which were needed at the time, and now with how the face of AIDS has changed, they really weren't -- aren't needed anymore. The one major one that I really was involved with was AIDS Outreach, and they were the first organization to do -- and they were the first religious organization to do anything and that was -- they -- that stemmed out of the Episcopal church. And they started down in Easton before they moved to Allentown, and they had what was called the Buddy program. The Buddy program was you were trained -- you would come in, and you were trained. You had -- it was like a two- to three-week course, usually on the weekend, and you learned different aspects of HIV/AIDS and care, and that was one of the things that I did. I did the education part for their clients. Once they finished and were graduated, then you would be assigned to somebody that was diagnosed with HIV or AIDS. You stayed with that person -- not physically stayed with that person but you stayed with that person until they died. You would take them to appointments, you would -- if you had to feed them, bathe them, whatever you had to do, that's what you did for that patient. Once that patient died, you couldn't do anything for a year. You needed to have that year off to regroup yourself and then you can come back if you wanted to. And they were located then out of -- when they moved from Trinity Episcopal Church in Easton, they moved to Grace Episcopal Church which is my home church here. And they were there until 2000 and--either 7 or 8 is when they closed, so, yeah, they closed. Gilead House, which was on the state hospital grounds of Allentown, they just had gotten started and then they closed down. Berks AIDS Network, which is called BAN, they're out of Reading, they've changed their whole dynamics and I think they're doing just more than just HIV/AIDS. We used to have a Latino AIDS outreach, which we don't have anymore. They were located -- they started in Bethlehem, they moved to Allentown. We still have HAO, Hispanic AIDS Organization. I think they're located down where the old -- where the original Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, it's at Fifth and Walnut. I'm trying to think if we have any other organizations. There is still a couple, but we had back -- back in the day, we had the AIDS Task Force, and we had about 30 different organizations that were part of that, a lot of church, the hospitals. [Rick Hoss?] was part of that, the blood banks were part of that. There were so many organizations back in the day, which were needed. And then you had the upspring of the AIDS organizations here, the -- not the AIDS organizations, the LGBT organizations. Le-Hi-Ho, Lambda, and finally with the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, which has done a lot of great stuff for the area here of -- they've helped me a lot especially with the loss of my husband. Then we just keep going. One of the things that I do in my presentations is I always end my talks with one of my favorite movies is, and one of the first Hollywood big movies was called Longtime Companion, and it takes place in New York and primarily like in Fire Island, in that area. And the main character, his name is Willy, and there was a whole group of his friends that always would get together and like people still do. But he was the only one left, all his friends had died, and he's walking on the beach in Fire Island, and the last line of the movie is, "All I want is a cure and my friends back," and that's how I feel. I hate this disease. I'm sorry, but [sighs] it's tough. Back in the day, you had to know somebody or know where things were if you were to go and meet somebody or hook up. We don't have that now. We have -- maybe I shouldn't say we don't have that now, we don't. I'd say that we need it now, but we have the internet. The internet has changed everything for everybody, not just the gay community, but for everybody. You'd go to the bar and hopefully you meet somebody and maybe get lucky and go home. Now you can sit in the comfort of your living room in your pajamas or underwear or naked and cruise somebody on a website and have cybersex, which is safe, but it's not fun. [laughter] We had in the day -- this was our internet, I wanted to show this. It's called The Damron Book, address book. If you were gay and in the know and you were a traveler, that this is what you wanted because if you were going to go to... I'm just going to pick out one in here -- Massachusetts, and I was going to go to um, uh -- where we could go here, oh jeez -- Brockton, Massachusetts, there's an area that says cruisy areas, so this is where you can go, and that's where you would look at. Or you go to Chelsea, Massachusetts, there was only one bar John's, and it was mixed, but it was mostly men, some women, and there's a code. So you could tell if you -- let me see if I can get in here. There's a key code, if you were looking for alcohol, beer, and wine, if there was a B in there, it was multiracial clientele ; if you were into leather, there would be an L there for leather ; N, nudity because there are some bars that you could be nude in, I know that for a fact, it's down in New Orleans, SW had a swimming pool, okay, yeah. So let's see or YC, young and college type. You could know where to go and what you're going to be looking for. And I always had mine with me because I travel a lot. Especially in the military, it's something that I had to hide, I really had to keep that hidden because if that would've come out, I would've been out. But then we get to a point where I would go to -- my unit would go a lot to Gulfport, Mississippi. There's a base down in Gulfport, and it's only like 70 miles from New Orleans. And fortunately, I had a friend who lived in Quakertown, and he had moved to New Orleans. His daughter was there, she opened up a -- her version of the Christmas trees store, and so was all Christmas, right, just a bunch, she was also a lesbian. And he was very creative, so he would make stuff for her to sell in the store. When I knew that my unit was going to be going down there, I would contact him and say, "Pete, I'm going to be in the area, do you got room for me?" So he says, "Yeah, yeah, just let me know when you get here and then -- so he would take me to all the places that I didn't have to -- I didn't need the book because he had it firsthand in that. But there were some wild bars down there that's -- I was very bad and very, very bad. It's just changed, and I don't know how the younger crowd is really coping with that. This is something that we lived through and had to find our way through because we didn't have the stuff that we have now. And I don't know if that's -- for me, I don't think that's fun, you need to be out there and experience. So for the future of the LGBT community, I have no idea what it's going to look like in 10 years. I mean we thrived here in the Lehigh Valley, we had all these bars, we had -- the cruising place is still there, but you would have to be careful there because of the police now. It wasn't like it was back in our days. We would drive around and around, and I'd mentioned this before with my friend Tommy and Eddie, we would drive around for hours just cruising, yeah, not necessarily picking anybody up, but you can do that. You can't do that because you see the signs, no, no cruising 7:00 to 10:00 pm. on this street or no cruising 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. on this street. DM: So I don't know where it's going, I really don't. I know that for ME as a gay man, I have lived through a lot. I've done a lot, there's still more for me to do. I said when I get into this line of work with HIV that I will never stop, I won't -- going as long as I can. I don't want to let my friends down because I promised them that I would do this. I have two diseases that I'm very passionate about, HIV and AIDS and ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. My husband died from Lou Gehrig's disease seven and a half years ago, another horrible disease. Those are really the only two organizations that I helped and I'm staying with. And it's hard to get the younger generation involved in any of those type of work or even an interest. I do have to commend, and I can't remember her last name was. Her name is Rachel, she does a lot for -- she's a teacher at Allen High School and she's the one that runs the GSL groups. And probably about five years ago, we had -- the Bradbury-Sullivan Center had the -- a portion of AIDS quilt on display down there, and she asked me to come in and speak to the kids about my life as a gay man and work in HIV and that. And I think the thing that grabbed them, the kids -- I mean they were interested in the quilt, but there were people on that quilt that I knew and I think that was really meaningful for -- to them, and it really kept their attention. One story that I really do want to give to you is my first experience with the quilt, and it was here at Muhlenberg College, and that was, I'm going to say '95 or '96 when it was here. I'm not exactly sure, I think it was '95 or '96. We had all the organization that were still going were involved with that, and there was a training on how to display the quilt because there's a whole ceremony. If you haven't seen it, Google it because it's something that is really it's intense. And we had it at the -- it was the Field House here on the campus. We were in the small palestra and they had these huge boxes, there must have been 30 of these boxes if not more with the quilt panels. They come and they're folded, so they're telling us, "This is what you need to do. Once you have the panel, to fold the panel down it takes eight people to do it, a section." So they said, "Go over and get one out of the box," so we go over and get one out and put it down. And we each have our space where we're at, and we're opening it and it's -- you do it very slowly. It's like working with the American flag, you -- it's -- you do it, that's how you do it. And I had the last corner of the one that I have, opened it up, and looked at the name. His name was Steve [Kalisky?]. He was the one who was responsible for me meeting my husband... I lost it. And what were the chances of that, me getting that panel? It was meant to happen. I just -- I lost it, I said -- I still get... And I brought Will out that night, so he could be with me when it was opened, and that -- [sighs] I don't know where to go from here. MF: You're describing a lot of moving events that occurred in our community, the bringing the quilt here to the Lehigh Valley. You've also talked about the Snowball, you talked about the Summer games, and you've talked about the public health piece of your work both with the Allentown Health Bureau and also with FACT. DM: Mm-hmm. MF: I'm wondering about FACT's relationship to other AIDS organizations?. Because you're working in two different fields, you're also part of the Buddy -- the Buddy program, but there was a program out of the Lambda center that I think became AIDS Services. But how are all of those organizations working together or were they not? DM: No, they were, -- MF: working together? DM: -- they were. And I say this at conferences that I've gone to. Me personally, I have been so blessed and honored to work with the amount of organizations that we have in the Lehigh Valley. They all work together, they always have, they always will. When one fails, it's like a failure for all of us whether that failure is good or bad. It's good that we don't need the Buddy program anymore for as much I loved it, we don't, I mean the people are living a lot longer. Yes, people are still dying, but they don't need that, that extra kick or whatever it is. And the thing that really, really impresses me, we have two major hospitals here in the Lehigh Valley. We have St. Luke's and we have Lehigh Valley, and they're always at odds with each other, they are. Well, let's build a bigger one here, let's build -- let's put two together here. The AIDS organizations or AIDS department in each of those two hospitals are like this. You don't see that, you don't see that in Philadelphia, you don't see that in New York, you don't see that anywhere. You see it here, and that's -- that impresses me, and that is something that I tell people. We are all in this together, we are, and if you can't work together, it's not going to work. You're setting yourself up for failure really is what it is, so... I have another story that's not really AIDS related, but it's about my husband, about my late husband. And I guess his and my coming out -- we were together for, I'm going to say, seven or eight years, at least seven or eight years if not more. And one of the goods things is that his whole family is just great, absolutely great. But his mother and his older sister -- because his younger sister was living in Florida for like 25 years, and she's back here now -- but they would go to a lot of the events. One of the events that I didn't mention was called Summer Solstice, and we always did it around the twenty-first of June, and we always had it at a private home somewhere. Our former vice president who just passed away several months ago, Carl he had it -- he hosted it at his place and he had the entire meal up in -- off of 512 for a couple of years. But there was a prominent New York doctor who had a place down in Coopersburg, Center Valley, a private area, jeez, and huge pond and -- but a huge house in this. But we had it down there and we took his sister and his mother along down there. His mother was always the center of attraction, a little woman, crazy for her, loved her. And so we're getting pretty lit, and we're coming home, and we got back to the house, opened up some more champagne and or whatever, we're still drinking. And Will decided he was going to go to bed, so he went to bed, so it was just the three of us, me, Fern, and Vicky. And somehow, it came up about me or Will not being married yet. And Vicky looks at his -- at her mother, she says, "Think, Mom, they're gay." And she said, "What do you mean gay?" "They're gay, they've been together -- living together for almost 10 years now," and she said, "Oh, my son's gay." [laughs] Now, neither one of them were able to drive home because they wanted to go home, called the cab, and Vicky says to me the next day, "Oh my God, I can't believe Fern, I can't believe her" -- because she called her Fern -- "all she kept saying to the cab driver is, 'My son's gay, my son's gay.'" [laughs] and she said, "Everybody knows." Well, she didn't know, and Dad didn't know either. He may have suspected, but he never said anything, and he's one of these... But we always got along, nothing was ever said about -- you know. They were at my wedding when I get married to Betsy. I mean nothing was said that -- to Dad that well, you know, your son's gay or whatever, and we still didn't say it because we never -- when we would be together for dinners or parties or something at their house because it was always -- we either met at their place or we met at our place, depending on what the holiday was because we would always do Mother's Day and Father's Day for his parents, Christmas and Thanksgiving was always at their place but anyway. I don't know where I'm going with this ; there was something else I was going to say about that. Oh, gosh, what was it? Oh, when Will passed, and that was September of 2014, and we did everything at the church. His dad was there, he didn't go to the cemetery, but he was there for the viewing, he was there for the funeral mass and that. And they were taking everything out to the hearse, and they said he didn't want to go to the cemetery, but I get up and I stood in front of him, and I said, "You know I loved your son," and he said, "I know," and that's where we left it. So now we can talk, we talk up -- if we're together, but this one's gay or that one's gay or whatever. My great-niece's best friend is gay, still in high school yet. Everything is good, everything is good. Now I couldn't have asked for a better family than his, all of them, all of them. There wasn't anybody in his family that looked down on us because we were gay, every one of them. When Will and I were going to have a commitment ceremony at our church because it still wasn't legal in Pennsylvania. It came a couple of months later, but we had been married in California, but we wanted to do something at our church. I had not been out to -- my only two relatives, really relatives that are alive and my -- were alive on my side were my aunt and uncle, my mother's brother, and I called them up -- no, I asked them to come over for dinner. So they came for dinner, and I said, "I -- we have something that we want to tell you, and we want to ask you and you can either say yes or no," and I said, "Will and I when we were in California, we were -- we got married, and we want to have a commitment ceremony at our church, would you come?" They knew, we never discussed anything but we -- they knew, and they were so grateful that we included them in because that's -- they were the only relatives on my side. When they died -- I'm the last on my side, when I die, blood line ends. My daughter doesn't count, I shouldn't say it that way, but she doesn't count, she's not a boy so she can't carry on my name. Indirectly she could but it's all messed up, so... But, yeah, I wanted to get that in there, so... I have been very blessed to have the support that I've had over these years. My faith community is by far the best. I have two parishioners who are originally from -- well, [Haley?] has risen from here, but her husband is Filipino, but they lived in California for years and they -- because he has -- he still has family out there, so they go out occasionally. And when Will died, passed away, somebody let them know that he had died, and they called me immediately, and they canceled the rest of their trip and came home just to help support me. Who does that? You hear so many horror stories in the LGBT community, getting kicked out or being spit on or being assaulted or being murdered, I feel -- there's times where I feel guilty because I haven't had any of that. I mean I've had some looks and some comments but few and far between, not by anybody in my immediate circle. Even some of the guys in my military unit knew I was gay. You do your job, and that's what I'm there for, I do my job, what I do on my own time is my own time. Yeah, I would go out and party with them, and I would go to the strip clubs, and I'd get up on this stage with the girls and do all kinds of things, not sexual but have a good time. I think they really appreciated that, that I'm not the typical faggot for lack of better words. I am who I am ; I can have a good time with anybody. I just don't know. I pray that the next generation, upcoming generation, is going to be okay and not have a lot of negativity or stuff because there's just way too much of that now. You didn't see that back in the days. You didn't see drag queens getting killed or transgender people getting mugged or killed or -- it's just it's like an epidemic. That shooting down at the Pulse nightclub in Florida that -- a couple of years ago, you don't see that. And I think that's another good thing about the area here, maybe we're just special. There was very little trouble in any of the gay bars here or even at the events. Early on in the Pride festivals that we had at Cedar Beach and that we would have protestors, not a lot, but there'd be some there, but it was peaceful, peaceful yeah. Nobody was flaunting anything, well some of the drag queens were, but that's a given. So I don't know if we're just fortunate to be where we are and have what we have, I don't know. MF: So, David we're right up almost at the end of our 90 minutes, and before we close the interview, I just want to give you some space. Is there anything we didn't talk about today that you really wish we would have and that you'd like to share now? DM: Ohm, I think we've covered... I mean I could've talked a bit more about my sexual experiences, but I don't know. [laughs] That's for the book. I'm grateful to you for wanting to do this. I'm open, I try to be as open as I can. I think we covered -- I really wanted to get in there about my husband and my marriage, which never should've happened, but it did. That soured me for a few years because it wasn't -- it wasn't me that wanted to end the divorce, it was me that ended the divorce, but it wasn't me that was at fault. There's little tidbits here and there of things that I may have missed that are okay, but I think for the most part, that I've answered what you were or gave you whatever you were looking for. If there's anything that I think of, I'll let you know, but at this point I think we're good. Just use what I gave you to include, yeah, paper-wise, and if there's anything else that you need from me, just let me know, and if I can find it, I will gladly help out any way I can because this -- this is just so important. I mean I don't know how many others like this are going on in the country. Hopefully, there's more because we can't be swept under the carpet. We're here, we're queer, get over it, I'm ending there. MF: What a wonderful way to end. Thank you so much, David, for speaking with me today. I'm so grateful to hear your life story. I'm really, really moved by what you shared today. Thank you. DM: You're welcome, you're welcome. 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.) 01:23:25 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 David Moyer Part 2, February 11, 2022 Description An account of the resource David Moyer details his marriage, work in HIV/AIDS healthcare and activism with Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT), and personal relationships. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-24 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-02-11 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/afda33f8b8f48d8702683efbefb6c916.png 6e7a8d3ab1dc5806ea995402225fd3c0 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 of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 David Moyer 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-23.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 January 21, 2022 David Moyer Part 1, January 21, 2022 LGBT-23 1:42:38 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 David Moyer Mary Foltz video/mp4 MoyerDavid_20220121_video_trimmed.mp4 1.0:|19(3)|52(7)|73(11)|92(6)|107(13)|128(5)|143(9)|158(14)|181(2)|198(3)|215(19)|228(3)|245(8)|262(12)|281(12)|296(9)|315(15)|336(5)|353(9)|372(12)|389(8)|406(2)|417(20)|432(11)|447(11)|464(3)|481(13)|498(17)|515(5)|536(13)|557(8)|576(18)|591(4)|602(11)|617(11)|634(7)|651(11)|668(10)|685(14)|698(14)|717(9)|730(10)|745(2)|760(9)|773(7)|790(11)|805(6)|822(15)|837(5)|856(2)|871(10)|890(13)|909(13)|934(2)|957(11)|978(4)|995(11)|1012(18)|1031(10)|1046(15)|1063(18)|1082(14)|1099(4)|1118(2)|1131(9)|1148(2)|1165(19)|1184(10)|1205(8)|1224(16)|1241(11)|1260(18)|1275(14)|1294(12)|1315(6)|1332(12)|1355(5)|1374(14)|1395(2)|1408(10)|1425(11)|1442(15)|1459(3)|1480(13)|1499(2)|1516(14)|1533(11)|1552(4)|1567(16)|1586(12)|1603(15)|1618(18)|1633(8)|1646(6)|1663(14)|1700(14)|1723(17)|1744(3)|1761(8)|1780(5)|1793(7)|1810(12)|1825(9) 0 https://youtu.be/Q1Wsr0F1Dbo YouTube video English 36 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with David Moyer to talk about his 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 ACLS this semester, and David and I are meeting at Muhlenberg College in the Rare Books room. The date today is January 21, 2022. So, David, thank you so much for being here with me today, and to start, I just have a few quick questions. Could you please state your full name and spell it for me? &#13 ; &#13 ; DAVID MOYER: Okay. David Kenneth Moyer, D-A-V-I-D, K-E-N-N-E-T-H, M-O-Y-E-R. 0 119 Childhood in the Lehigh Valley MF: Fabulous, all right, so let’s go ahead and get started, and, David, I thought I could -- we could begin by you may be sharing a little about your childhood. &#13 ; &#13 ; DM: Well, with all these I dos, I feel like we’re married now, so. (laughter) Well, thank you for asking me to do this. It’s my pleasure, and anything that I can help, I’m more than willing to do that. I don’t know where to start because there’s so much, so here we go. Well, it was a cold and stormy night -- no, that’s not right. 0 448 Exploring Sexuality DM: My first encounter with anyone sexually was with Nicholas, and we would do pretty much the same thing that Bobby and I did. And then later on, I kind of got involved with Gene, the Italian, and he was the older, older one, and he was the first one that I actually performed oral sex on. Now I was about eight or nine I’d say at the time, and I thought, wow, this is great, I like this, but I never said anything to anybody about it, and I just -- we always kept this to ourselves. But then Gene did say to me, he says, “Don’t you dare say anything to anybody.” I says, “No, why would I? I want to keep this all to myself, I’m not going to share this.” 0 578 Weekends in Catasauqua/First Love DM: So I guess later on, as the years were going up, I was going to school, and I would spend weekends with my grandparents up in Catasauqua, they live in Catasauqua. My grandmother’s name was Esta, E-S-T-A, and my grandfather’s name was Paul, and my grandmother had a brother whose name was Abner, and he was -- he had been in the Army, but he had been discharged, he had done his 20 years, so he was home. He took a liking to me, and I always thought that he was really nice and whatever. And I had spent a lot of time out there especially in the summer months when school wasn’t in, so I had a lot of free time. But my grandparents always liked to throw Friday night or Saturday night parties, and they had done that one weekend. 0 905 Time at Camp Greenwood /Navigating Sexual Relationships DM: So now, I’m getting into my teen years, and I had a job as a newspaper delivery boy when they used to deliver newspapers -- well they still do, but not the way that they used to. Every summer if you were a newspaper boy, you were able to get a free week at a boys’ camp up in Carbon County at -- it was called Camp Greenwood, and it was on Greenwood Lake, which was -- right next to Lake Hauto. The first two years I went up as a camper, and it was fun because it was all boys. Boys camp was eight weeks’ long and then the first -- last two weeks in August was girls. The girls always got the short end of the stick because it’s just the way it was then -- still is now when you look at things, how things are going. But it was quite interesting. 0 1662 Time in the Navy Reserves DM: Like this time now, I’m in the military, I’m gone. I went to boot camp in Philadelphia when they had a boot camp there for the reserves, and nothing happened at boot camp. I was too scared for one thing but not -- but just that what have I gotten myself into? Because I know I didn’t want to go into the -- I didn’t really go into the Army, and I knew that I wasn’t going to be Marine Corps material, and I really didn’t know anything about the air force, so I thought I had -- even though I had an uncle who was -- my uncle Abner was in the Army, I had -- my cousin Jimmy was a Navy man, and he looked really good in uniform, but he had nothing there. I had gone for my Army physical ; this is in 1962 because I was already graduated from high school, I was working up to Wilkes-Barre and we went through the whole thing, the written test, you have to do an exam, and then you always a full physical. 0 2155 Being Stationed in Gulfport, MS / Spending Time in New Orleans DM: So, I now go to Gulfport. Now, there was a guy in my A school in Great Lakes, and his name was David, the same as mine, and he and I were vying for the same guy that I wound up getting, so we were kind of like at odds with each other while we were there. I don’t know where David went. Like I said, I went to Philadelphia, and Ron went to St. Albans. So, I get down to Gulfport, Mississippi, and I’m checking in, and the first person that meets me is David, and I’m thinking, oh, no, this is not going to go well because we didn’t like each other. 0 2521 Serving in Vietnam DM: I know, I know that when I was in Vietnam, the group of us that were gay hung around together, and everybody knew that we were gay, the commanding officer knew that we were gay. But because the job that we did was important, we didn’t flaunt our sexuality, and as long as we did what we were there to do, who cares what you are. I mean we had one guy, and he was the commanding officer’s personal driver, so whenever he had this -- he had to go somewhere off the base, he was the one. He was the only one that was discharged -- not for being gay. He had contracted sexually transmitted disease six times while he was in country. Two is it, and he overlooked that, they said, “That’s it, you’re out.” So he was the only one that was discharged for -- and not even being gay but for having that many sexual transmitted diseases in the time that we were there, so... But in the time that I was in country, you were given a week of what’s called R&amp ; R, rest and recreation, so I decided to go to Japan for my R&amp ; R. 0 2888 Returning to Civilian Life / Attending Nursing School / Coming Out / The Gay Scene in Allentown&#13 ; DM: So, I come back, and now, the wild days are starting, and I am back at the state hospital and then these two women came in from Northampton County Community College and did an in-service for the orderlies, because we were considered orderlies, about a new program that were starting up with the college of nursing program, a two-year nursing, and was anybody interested. So I thought, why not? I went to nursing school. That was from ’68 to ’70. I was the first male to graduate from the nursing program, and I got a job at St. Luke’s. I was the first male nurse to work in labor and delivery. I was there for 65 deliveries, three sets of twins, and a set of triplets. 0 3610 Allentown's First Male Go-go Dancer&#13 ; DM: So, he opened up this -- the bar, and he asked me because he knew I knew how to dance and stuff like that. He says, “I want to have some entertainment in here, and I’d like to have like a go-go boy-type thing to bring in patrons,” so he said, “Are you interested?,” and I said, “Yeah, yeah.” The pay wasn’t great, but tips were good. And I got to tell you that he had been involved with -- one, two, three, four -- four different bars, okay. Every bar that he had, that he had me work at, he had sex with me on the bar after the place closed, and so... So I said, “Yeah,” so I was the go-go boy, and I was the first go-go boy in Allentown when that stuff was starting to get up because you had the go-go girl dancers and all this other, but you didn’t have guys doing that stuff. And then if there was guys, they were in the straight bars where a lot of the women would go, almost like the Chippendale type thing, but I wasn’t stripping. 0 3878 Trips to Atlantic City / Taking in the Nightlife DM: So from that time prior to all of that, we now have Atlantic City. Atlantic City was exciting ; It was like another version prior to me going to -- well no, I take that back. Atlantic City to me was like the New Orleans of the East Coast, right? The gay life down there was so much fun. Now I had graduated from nursing school, I’m working where I’m working, and I was living with a friend of mine who just passed away four months ago, he was older than me. 0 4858 Meeting Will / Death of Mother DM: So one of the women that I worked with at Olin, her name is Donna, and she had a partner who eventually became my wife but... So she would go to these different things, but they got laid off and then they moved from Allentown to Delaware, and then from Delaware they moved to -- back to New York because my ex-wife was originally from New York. Donna is from -- it’s either Pottstown or Pottsville ; I always get those two mixed up. Anyway to make a long story short, I am now -- I have now moved out of Mother Vern’s house, and I am living in Terre Hill, the trailer park ; I became trailer trash. 0 5403 Getting Married DM: So she came down, and she was with me for -- getting the arrangements and the lawyer and all that good stuff, the funeral, and she went back on Christmas Eve. We buried my mother on Christmas Eve and then her and Donna were coming down for New Year’s Eve, to spend New Year’s Eve with us, which is what they did. And Will was a smoker, a cigarette smoker, and had run out cigarettes, so he and Donna went to the store to get cigarettes and some more booze. I had just gotten out of the shower, and Betsy had given me a bottle of Calvin Klein Obsession, which I loved, loved. So I put some on, and I’m still not dressed yet, and she comes over to me and puts her hands under my robe and gets me all excited, and she drops her pants, and we had sex under the Christmas tree. 0 5695 Other Items to Cover&#13 ; MF: We’re at 90 minutes if you can believe it, and so this is typically where we’d start to wind down in the interview. I think we have a lot more to talk about, and perhaps we should schedule a second interview.&#13 ; &#13 ; DM: Oh, okay. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: But I don’t want to stop you abruptly. So we’ve talked about a kind of first, maybe even the half of your life. And before we close the interview today, I’m just wondering if there’s anything about what you’ve shared so far -- and we’ll do a second interview, so we’ll get into more it -- 0 5828 Relationship with First Love, Robert DM: What I really wanted to talk about also was my first love -- my other first love between my uncle and William, and that was Robert. I met Robert in the bathroom of Arner’s Diner, which was in Allentown. The diner is still the diner, but it’s not in the spot that it was originally. It’s now at the corner of Ninth and Linden, and I think it’s the city something or other. But anyway, we had been in Rube’s, and after Rube’s closed, the only places you’d go to was the diner, otherwise you went home because there was no bookstores or anything like that at that time. 0 6144 Closing Remarks MF: Okay. Well, I want to say for the day, David, thank you so much. It’s so wonderful to hear your stories today. I’m so grateful that you took the time, and I can’t wait for our next interview. &#13 ; &#13 ; DM: We’ll get a date together and see what’s up, and we can do it again if they don’t mind doing it again. (laughs) 0 MovingImage David Moyer recounts his early years, sexuality, and his experiences with gay community in Allentown and Atlantic City. MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with David Moyer to talk about his 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 ACLS this semester, and David and I are meeting at Muhlenberg College in the Rare Books room. The date today is January 21, 2022. So, David, thank you so much for being here with me today, and to start, I just have a few quick questions. Could you please state your full name and spell it for me? DAVID MOYER: Okay. David Kenneth Moyer, D-A-V-I-D, K-E-N-N-E-T-H, M-O-Y-E-R. MF: Thank you very much, and will you please share your birthday? DM: Ah, oh. (laughter) April 23, 1943, I'm very old. MF: Thank you for sharing that. Before we started this interview, you signed a consent form, but I just want to review briefly some questions on that form. Do you consent to this interview today? DM: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made public available online? DM: I do. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats including films, articles on our website, conference presentations? DM: 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 that you might want to delete, or to withdraw the interview from the project? DM: I do. MF: Fabulous, all right, so let's go ahead and get started, and, David, I thought I could -- we could begin by you may be sharing a little about your childhood. DM: Well, with all these I dos, I feel like we're married now, so. (laughter) Well, thank you for asking me to do this. It's my pleasure, and anything that I can help, I'm more than willing to do that. I don't know where to start because there's so much, so here we go. Well, it was a cold and stormy night -- no, that's not right. MF: (laughs) DM: In the beginning, it was the -- no, that's not right either, uh-uh, anyway, my little humor there just to get me going. Like I mentioned, my name is David Moyer, I am 78 years old. I was born in the Allentown Hospital at 17th and Chew, which is now Leigh Valley Health Network -- something or other, I don't know, they keep changing their names. My mother's name was [Alma?], my father's name was Kenneth. We lived in -- originally in Fullerton on Quarry Street -- Fullerton is now part of Whitehall -- and we were there until I was approximately four years of age when we moved into Allentown. Prior -- well [Linnie?] also. Other than the names there, I need to give you a little disclaimer here. For a lot of things that I'm going to be saying with names, the names may or may not be the real names of the people that I'm talking about, and some of the things are not meant to have a shock value, but some of the things that I'm going to say are pretty out there. So, I just want to get that out there in front so that there's nothing, yeah, because I have nothing to hide. But anyway, my first encounter with another male, I was approximately the age of four. I don't remember a thing -- anything up till four. But I had a friend Bobby who lived in the neighborhood, and he and I would play a lot together, but for some reason one day, we had built a fort over the back of our sofa at the house, and one thing led to another, we had our pants down, and we were looking. And I thought this is interesting, and he thought it was interesting because our penises looked different. One of us was circumcised, one of us was not, and we thought that was interesting, so we didn't know. But all we did was just touch each other, and we would get erect, and I'd think, this is really cool without knowing what that all meant. And that went on for about six months or so and then we moved from Fullerton into Allentown into a single house. We were in a single house in Fullerton, but we moved into another single house, which is four stories. And I was sad to leave because I didn't know if I was going to see Bobby again, and I didn't know what to expect moving into a new neighborhood with the people. I knew that I liked people, that like -- I was an out-there kid. It wasn't long and then I met -- made some friends with the neighbors. There was a lot of boys in the neighborhood, and there were some girls. My best friend then, the first person I met back then was Nick and then he had a brother Danny who was younger, and then there was my friend Jim, and Jim had two older brothers and a sister. There was Tony and Gene, they were brothers, and they had a sister Grace. Now, Nicholas and Danny were Irish, Jim, his two brothers and his sister was -- were Irish, Tony and Gene and his -- and their sister Grace were Italian. And then there was another neighbor that lived next door to us, they ran the corner luncheonette, [Herb's?] Luncheonette, and they had a daughter Lucille, and they were Italian. My first encounter with anyone sexually was with Nicholas, and we would do pretty much the same thing that Bobby and I did. And then later on, I kind of got involved with Gene, the Italian, and he was the older, older one, and he was the first one that I actually performed oral sex on. Now I was about eight or nine I'd say at the time, and I thought, wow, this is great, I like this, but I never said anything to anybody about it, and I just -- we always kept this to ourselves. But then Gene did say to me, he says, "Don't you dare say anything to anybody." I says, "No, why would I? I want to keep this all to myself, I'm not going to share this." So was it was Gene and Nick were the two that I would become involved with over the years. I never did anything with the Gene's brother, I never did anything with my other friend Jim, although we had talked about it. We were the only non-Catholic family in the neighborhood, everybody else was Catholics, so everybody went to Sacred Heart down in Center City there. And my first inkling about something not being as it should be was Jim had called the priest at the church and wanted to know about what masturbation was, and if it was a sin or not and any other type of thing, and then of course the priest says, "It's a mortal sin, you're going to go to hell if you do these things." So that scared me, and then of course, Jim and I never did anything. So I guess later on, as the years were going up, I was going to school, and I would spend weekends with my grandparents up in Catasauqua, they live in Catasauqua. My grandmother's name was Esta, E-S-T-A, and my grandfather's name was Paul, and my grandmother had a brother's whose name was Abner, and he was -- he had been in the Army, but he had been discharged, he had done his 20 years, so he was home. He took a liking to me, and I always thought that he was really nice and whatever. And I had spent a lot of time out there especially in the summer months when school wasn't in, so I had a lot of free time. But my grandparents always liked to throw Friday night or Saturday night parties, and they had done that one weekend. Everything was done, cleaned up, and everybody was in bed. My grandparents were in their room, and my uncle Abner was in his room, and I was in my room, and something just said to me, you need to go over and talk to your uncle. So I was very quiet, I crept over to his bedroom and crawled in bed with him, and he was -- he gets a little startled somewhat. And he put his arm around me, I had my hand in his chest and just listening to him breathe, and I was getting excited, and my hand just started to move from his chest down to his crotch. I was, I guess, amazed that when I got down there, he was already erect. And I started massaging him, and he was moaning and groaning, and he started playing with my penis and put his finger around my anus. And the more I'm massaging him, the more he's groaning, and I went down on him, and then all of a sudden, this liquid came out -- I wasn't sure what it was -- and then he kind of sighed. And I felt the urge to ejaculate, but of course I couldn't because I was still too young, but I had felt that. So that was my really first experience with an adult, and it was my uncle. And I know a lot of people are going to look at this and say that he should have been arrested or it was child abuse or whatever, and for me, I didn't see that at all because it wasn't him that initiated this, it was me that initiated it. And they were going to say, well, he should've known better anyway, but I knew -- and my response to those people is that you love who you love, and I loved him. He was probably my first love, I knew that he loved me. And then he got rushed to the hospital with appendicitis, and complications had set in, and he developed a condition called peritonitis, and that killed him, and he was 49 years old, and I was devastated. I thought my world had ended because the person I loved has now died, and I never got over that. Still to this day, I miss him, and I still love him, I mean I always will. So that was my first experience with an adult, and again a family member, but he was just so handsome. He had been an Army cook. I don't know where he worked when he was discharged, but I know that when he cooked, he would cook for an Army. There was only four or five of us eating, but there was always so much food. And he was just so handsome, especially when was in his uniform, it was just -- I have -- I really only have one picture of him in his uniform with three other of his people that he was in the Army with. So that's my first part. I knew I was different, but I didn't know what as yet. So now, I'm getting into my teen years, and I had a job as a newspaper delivery boy when they used to deliver newspapers -- well they still do, but not the way that they used to. Every summer if you were a newspaper boy, you were able to get a free week at a boys' camp up in Carbon County at -- it was called Camp Greenwood, and it was on Greenwood Lake, which was -- right next to Lake Hauto. The first two years I went up as a camper, and it was fun because it was all boys. Boys camp was eight weeks' long and then the first -- last two weeks in August was girls. The girls always got the short end of the stick because it's just the way it was then -- still is now when you look at things, how things are going. But it was quite interesting. I had some activity but not a whole lot until I was brought in as a counselor, and I was given a cabin with seven other kids, and I was the leader for that group. But anyway, we would go up for two weeks prior to the camp opening up so that we could go and get the camp ready. So that when it was time for the campers to come in, everything was set. They'd come in, they were assigned cabins, so we had -- the upper cabins where the older kids were my age and then the lower cabins were where the littler kids were. I think they were under 10, 10 and under. Everybody else was up in my area. There were six upper cabins and six lower cabins. The lower cabins were two cabins and then in this -- there was a center section, and that's where the counselors were. So there was three sets of those two of two, then the upper cabins were all single cabins, and they were all double-bunk beds. You got to know who you were going to be able to have fun with and who you just wanted to let go. So, there were times where we would get together, and we would just masturbate together or touch each other. There was no oral going on, there should've been, but there wasn't. And that went on for about four more years. I started getting up there when I was in late junior high school into high school year. Like I said, I was a camper for two years, and I think it was three or four years I was on staff. The way that I got on staff is because I had gone to the Red Cross and got my swimming certificate as an instructor and how to do a canoe, so I was hired for the waterfront staff. And we went down in the morning, and we would brush our teeth and wash our face in the lake because there was nothing -- you couldn't shower, there was no showers for any of us up there. And then in the evening, you went down to the lake. You had your morning thing and then you would go down again after breakfast and have swimming lessons because you could get your swimming lessons when you learn how to swim. And then you went back again later in the afternoon for an afternoon swim and fun time and then you went back down again, and that's where you took a bath in the lake. That's how we did it back then because there were no showers. But like I said, that went on up until I think the -- my last year was the year after I graduated, and I was -- by that time, I was working. When I graduated from high school, I was working at the Allentown State Hospital. Of course, then, I went into the military, but that's coming later on down the road here. So, the activity was going on for -- every time we went to camp, and there was two guys. When I would go up for the pre-opening season, I would stay either with my friend Art and they -- he lived in Lansford, I never did anything with him. And then his friend Bob who lived in Coaldale, Bob and I would hit, we'd connect, and we would have sex every chance we got. I think from there, I was having -- still having sex with Gene and Nick, and I was also having sex with -- even though I was a newspaper boy and had my own route, we had to have a newspaper boy deliver our newspaper -- go figure why was, but that's how it was -- and that was Frankie. And Frankie and I would get together, and that went on for a while until even after graduation. There was another guy that I went to school with, his name was Jim, and Jim lived in this south side of Allentown, but I would go down because -- and his parents worked, but he had younger brothers. So, I would go down there sometimes on a Friday night during school and stay with him while he was watching his brothers. And then once his brothers were tucked in and were asleep, he and I would get together and have sex. So, I was very, very promiscuous at an early age. From there, I was -- and I started working at the state hospital after I graduated from high school. My mother worked there, she was an LPN, and I got a job there as an orderly, and I was there for -- from '61 until '65 and then I had to go into the military my -- Navy, Navy reserve part. There was a guy that was our -- we had -- on the ward that I worked on, I worked in the male violent ward, but we had a charge nurse, and we had a charge attendant, and the charge attendant's name was Bruce and then there was Jim. Bruce and I were going up to Tamaqua to do something at night. I thought we were going to look for something, I'm not exactly sure what it was, and on the way back, he said, "Let's get some beer," and so we got some beer and parked somewhere, and one thing led to another, and he and I had sex. Bruce was married, as was Jim, and Jim lived in Bethlehem, Bruce lived in Allentown, and there were nights where I would go over to Jim's house. And usually, his wife was up for a while when I would get there because I would see her, but their son was already in bed, who I've never seen, I've never seen his son. And then Jim just started putting the make on me and, oh, okay, let's do this. So that went on for the whole time that I worked there. There was a neighbor in Allentown who was married and really good-looking, and he lived in that apartment complex right across the street, he, his wife and his kid. And he asked me to help him with something down in the basement, which is what I did, and again, one thing led to another, and I said, "You want me to go down on you?" and he said, "Sure," so I seduced the neighbor. I did a lot of seduction in my days. And then I get into the military. Now -- oh, before I go back to the military, all these years from early on to where I was then, it's only been sex with men or boys. I never had sex with a woman, so I was still a virgin, yet. There was a woman that worked at the state hospital, her name was Darlene, and she was a very attractive blonde, young, and was married. And she had asked me, she said she wanted to speak to me, but she wouldn't talk to me there, and did I know a place that was more private that we could go and talk to, and I said, "Yeah.". And so we made arrangements to meet, and I was kind of hesitant, but why not? So, I went to this parking place where I used to go to park with the guys. It was very secluded, and there was never anybody there. And we started talking, and again, one thing led to another, and before you knew it, we're naked, and I was just so excited that something's going to happen with a woman that I was so excited that I had a premature ejaculation. And I thought to myself, ah, this is not the way I want my first encounter with a woman to go. So, we never really did anything, I never penetrated her, let's put it that way, cleaned up and took her back. And then I found out -- this is just before I had gone into the Navy -- that her husband had found out that she was doing something with other people. And if he ever found out who it was, they were dead, and I thought, okay. Like this time now, I'm in the military, I'm gone. I went to boot camp in Philadelphia when they had a boot camp there for the reserves, and nothing happened at boot camp. I was too scared for one thing but not -- but just that what have I gotten myself into? Because I know I didn't want to go into the -- I didn't really go into the Army, and I knew that I wasn't going to be Marine Corps material, and I really didn't know anything about the air force, so I thought I had -- even though I had an uncle who was -- my uncle Abner was in the Army, I had -- my cousin Jimmy was a Navy man, and he looked really good in uniform, but he had nothing there. I had gone for my Army physical ; this is in 1962 because I was already graduated from high school, I was working up to Wilkes-Barre and we went through the whole thing, the written test, you have to do an exam, and then you always a full physical. So, I passed the physical, and I failed the written test. I thought, oh, I'm safe, I'm not going to have to go anywhere. So I said to the person, the recruiter, I said, "Well, I guess that's it," and he says, "Oh, no," he says, "just because you fail the test doesn't mean that -- they'll retest you again and then they'll put you where they want to put you." And I thought, oh, no, I don't really want to go in the Army, and that's when I decided to go in -- well, I came back and I thought, okay, I'm going to join the Navy. Well, we're in the height of Vietnam here, so the quotas for the Navy were full, and like I said, I knew I wasn't Marine Corps material. Air force was -- quota was full, and I know didn't want to go into the Army, I know I didn't want to do that, so somebody said, "Well, why don't you try the Navy reserve?" And at that time, the Navy reserve was over on Vultee and Lehigh Street ; now there's a CVS there. So I went, walked in, and I said what the circumstances were and they says, "Yeah," they says, "there's openings here. We can test you now and then if then if you pass the test, we can bring you back in the evening, get your physical exam, and we can swear you in that same night." This is all done in Tuesday. So I took the exam, I scored like 30 points higher than what I had in the other one. So I went back that night, I got my physical exam, and I was sworn in, and that was either September or October of 1963. And I stayed there for 30 years, so I did, but most the time was in the reserves, but then I had several years of active duty, I retired in 1993. I had gone to boot camp, which I mentioned earlier, come back, and did some time at the reserve center, and then I went for two weeks -- it's actually three weeks, and I was still working at the state hospital. My first ship that I went on was the sub tender in Key West, the USS Bushnell, and I went down with our commanding officer and two other guys and so there's four of us, we all took turns driving down and driving back, and I still hadn't -- I still was not given a billet, what am I going to do? Well, I was an orderly at the state hospital, so there's medical there, and fortunately when I was -- did the written test, I had qualified to be a yeoman. A yeoman really is a clerk, clerk duties ; I thought, I don't want to do paperwork and that stuff. One of the lieutenants that was in the unit was a -- not physical therapist -- was a therapist at the hospital, and I used to talk to him. I said, "Is there any way that I can become a corpsman?" because that's really what I wanted to do. And they said, "Well, you're --" I didn't have enough points to qualify, point-wise, but he did a letter of recommendation as did the commanding officer, and they accepted that. So, I get into my A school, which was in a Great Lakes at the station there. So, in '65, I go to Great Lakes for my A school and still not having any sex with anybody. I met Alan, and he and I became good friends, and we went into Chicago one Sunday, we had gotten a room or it was Saturday. Saturday, went into Chicago, got a room for the weekend, and bingo, we had -- he's the first person I had sex with, and that went on while we were in our A school, then you graduate from A school and you're going to go somewhere. So, he got stationed at the Naval Hospital in St. Albans in New York, and I get stationed at the naval hospital in Philadelphia, so there was still a distance there. And I was in Philly for -- I was there for about six months or so and then I had gotten orders to go to Gulfport, Mississippi, to the CBs, that's the construction unit of the Navy. But while I was in Philadelphia, there were several gay bars that I would go to. I didn't go with anybody else because nobody knew. Back then if you knew, you were out. If somebody outed you, and you were court-martialed, you were out, and you lost everything, so I was secretive about my sexual activity. But there were a couple of bars that we'd go to. There was the Allegro, there was the Zebra, there was the bus -- Bike Stop, there was a lot of bars there. There still are in Philly, but I don't go to Philly. So, I now go to Gulfport. Now, there was a guy in my A school in Great Lakes, and his name was David, the same as mine, and he and I were vying for the same guy that I wound up getting, so we were kind of like at odds with each other while we were there. I don't know where David went. Like I said, I went to Philadelphia, and Ron went to St. Albans. So, I get down to Gulfport, Mississippi, and I'm checking in, and the first person that meets me is David, and I'm thinking, oh, no, this is not going to go well because we didn't like each other. Well, as it turned out, we became best friends -- again, David and I never did anything -- we said, "Hey, it's all water over the dam, this is a brand-new start, okay." I had a friend that lived in Quakertown who had moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. He was gay, and his daughter he was gay, and she opened up a -- what she called a Christmas store. All year-round it was Christmas stuff like ornaments and knickknacks and all that that crap that we have lying around all over the place. Anyway, so I knew that he was down there, and I contacted him, and I said, "Hey, I'm at Gulfport at the base, what's going on in New Orleans?" because I had never been there, and he says, "Come on down." So, I went down, and I stayed with him, and he had a couple of roommates, again nothing with them, and they were older than I was. He showed me around to the different bars and, oh my God, it was like whole new world, yes it was just -- you had sex everywhere. You could go to a bar and grab a drink whether it was a bottle of beer, or it was a margarita or whatever, and you could leave with it and go to another bar, you could drink on the streets in there. I guess that's how New Orleans was and still is to my knowledge. I haven't been there in -- for a very long time, but... So, I did my tour. My unit went, did a tour in Vietnam for a year, so my... I had two guys that were in my unit that I was hooking up with, and David had his own guys that he was with and so we never -- we stayed friends that way. There was Benny, and he was a good old southern boy, and there was Joe, and he was a badass, and he was from Pittsburgh. I mean they were both secretive about what was going on, but Joe was really -- he was more of a risk taker, and we almost got caught once or twice, but it was all smoothed out. But Benny was the one that I really, really liked. My time with the unit was almost up, and I was going to be shipped back home. The unit still had another I think, like two months or so before the whole unit was coming back. I said to Benny, I says, "I really like you, and I'd like to stay in." He says, "I like you too, but when I get home, I'm going to get married, I'm going to have a family, and this is all going to be behind me." He says, "This is -- it was good while we were here, and we had fun," and he says, "I love the way you work my body and --" which was -- made me happy but. So, I said, "Okay," so home I came, got off active duty, went back into the reserves. I stayed with the CB unit just about my entire 30 years with the exception of my A school and my time in Philadelphia, the naval hospital, and a year and a half with all the medical MASH unit, everything was with the CBs. And by that time, we had had -- Don't Ask, Don't Tell was in place, so a lot of the guys knew, suspected that I was gay, but nothing was ever discussed. I know, I know that when I was in Vietnam, the group of us that were gay hung around together, and everybody knew that we were gay, the commanding officer knew that we were gay. But because the job that we did was important, we didn't flaunt our sexuality, and as long as we did what we were there to do, who cares what you are. I mean we had one guy, and he was the commanding officer's personal driver, so whenever he had this -- he had to go somewhere off the base, he was the one. He was the only one that was discharged -- not for being gay. He had contracted sexually transmitted disease six times while he was in country. Two is it, and he overlooked that, they said, "That's it, you're out." So he was the only one that was discharged for -- and not even being gay but for having that many sexual transmitted diseases in the time that we were there, so... But in the time that I was in country, you were given a week of what's called R&amp ; R, rest and recreation, so I decided to go to Japan for my R&amp ; R. Me and my other friend, we went together, we shared a room, and he was gay also, but we didn't do anything, and he was from Connecticut. We went to this bar, a bunch of us, and all of a sudden, all these women are lined up behind us in the bar, and they all come over to each one of us that was there and picked us up. They were hookers, so okay, that wasn't my plan, but I went home with this Japanese woman, I believe her name was Judith, she had an American name, Judith, spoke very good English and also very good Japanese. But I thought, okay, one night ; I was with her for five days. She hid my clothing ; I was naked the whole time I was there. We had so much sex, I was -- I hate saying it, but I was sore, I was sore, (laughs) and I know I needed to get back because I had to get back to my unit. Fortunately, she had to go out and do -- meet somebody or something and so I was able to retrieve my clothing, got myself dressed, and got the hell out of there, and I got back to the hotel that I paid for that I didn't have any time to spend there, so... The other crazy thing about that incident is also that her pimp lived in the same apartment building but on a different floor, and he wanted... Of course I paid her yen or however much it was, and he wanted to learn how to play poker. I know some poker but not very good at it, so I'm teaching what I know, and of course, I'm winning, so I got all my money back. (laughs) That's just a side story for that, so... So that was my real first, full sexual encounter with a woman. It was good, I'm not going to say it wasn't, it was good, it was different, but it was good. So now I'm back in country, and we're out on patrol, and this little village that we were going to, some of the guys that were within patrol wanted to get laid. So they find a whole bunch of willing women and says, "Come on, Doc, come on Doc, get in this, get in this too," so I went, "ah, I really don't want to." But I did get this one girl -- woman, a Vietnamese woman, and we went into her hut, and I gave her some money, and I says, "I don't want to have sex," so she was okay with that. We just laid there, we cuddled with each other and talked, and I think she was fine with that -- we didn't do anything -- and I was definitely fine with that. So that was my sexual encounters there in country and in there. So, I come back, and now, the wild days are starting, and I am back at the state hospital and then these two women came in from Northampton County Community College and did an in-service for the orderlies, because we were considered orderlies, about a new program that were starting up with the college of nursing program, a two-year nursing, and was anybody interested. So I thought, why not? I went to nursing school. That was from '68 to '70. I was the first male to graduate from the nursing program, and I got a job at St. Luke's. I was the first male nurse to work in labor and delivery. I was there for 65 deliveries, three sets of twins, and a set of triplets. One of my best friends who happens to be a lesbian, her name is Froggy, and then she would not care if I'm using her name or not, she's still in the area here. She wanted to have a baby, and she got pregnant, and I was there to help deliver her daughter [Tanya?], and Tanya is a grandmother, which means that Froggy is a great-grandmother. This could be another story maybe for another time, unless we have time during this time, but how I met Froggy, that's another interesting story, which I may get to because it happened in Atlantic City, which I haven't even gotten to yet, so... And that's where this is taking me now. The early days for me of gay life really occurred after I had come out. So, my coming-out story is -- I graduated from William Allen High School in 1961. My best friend there was Tommy, and Tommy is -- unfortunately, he is dead, and there was a tragic story for that too, that's another story. But he and I would eat lunch every day together, it didn't matter if it was snowing out or raining out, we would sit on [Mrs. Souter's?] porch at 17th and Linden Street. The place is still there, but I think she's long gone. Anyway, so we graduate, I go to work at the state hospital, Tommy goes to work for what was then the Globe-Times newspaper in Bethlehem. And he calls me up, and says, he and a friend Eddie were at this bar in New York, and they thought that I would like it and would like to go sometime. I said, "Yeah, sure." So, we made arrangements, they picked me up after work, we went up to New York City, we get out into the Village. The name of the bar was the Cherry Lane, it was in an alley. The place is no more, also another tragic thing there, that place burned down. But you went into the bar, and it was very dimly lit, a long bar, a lot of people, mostly men, in fact I think it was all men, but it's just not clicking with at the time. And I'm hearing the music and -- but I don't see a jukebox anywhere around. So, there was a big, dark velvet curtain that was alongside of the bar, and if you paid two dollars more, you could go behind the curtain, and you could dance. So, we paid our two dollars, we'd go back, people are dancing, again the guys. Still, it's not resonating with me. Duh, I'm still naïve, and we're having a good time. We're dancing together, guys are dancing with guys, guys are dancing by themselves, just really good. So, we leave, and on our way home, Tommy says to me, "Well, how'd you like the bar?" I said, "Oh," I said, "it was really fun," I said, "we should come back again." He says, "You know it was a gay bar," and I thought, okay, what did they know about me? Did somebody say something, or did I say something or whatever, I had no idea, I said, "Oh, okay." So back in Allentown, we used to get together Fridays and Saturday nights, right, Eddie, me, and Tommy. Sometimes Tommy would drive, sometimes Eddie would drive, sometimes I would drive depending, whatever it was. And we would just be cruising down Hamilton Street and up and around the streets, just doing the loop because that time Hamilton Street. -- up and around the streets just doing the loop because at the time Hamilton Street was both ways as were all the other side streets and that. So we had parked the car, and we were walking at Ninth and Hamilton where Hess is, Hess Brothers used to be. And they had these huge windows -- display windows and, oh, the mannequins in there, and it was always whatever time or the season it was, that's what they were dressed up for. So we're looking at the windows, and we're posing like the mannequins in there, doing goofy stuff, and across the street was this restaurant, it was called Rube's. It was the only Chinese restaurant in town, and it was owned by a Jewish man, (laughs) best Chinese you'd get anywhere other than Chinatown. And these two women were over there in front of the place, and they're yelling at us, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" and we said, "Oh, no, stuff, just fooling around." They said, "Hey, you want to come into the bar?" and we said, "No, we're not 21 yet." And that was the reason why we went to New York because you could drink at 18, so we were old enough to drink in New York but not in Pennsylvania. And we said, "No, no," we said, "we're not 21," they said, "Ah, don't worry, we can get you in, not a problem." So, in we go, and they introduce us to all of their friends, and all of their friends were gay, and we thought, oh, this is good. And Beverly said, "Well, welcome to Rube's, it's the gayest spot in town," and it was the gayest spot in town because at nine o'clock every night when Hess is closed, everybody congregated in Rube's, and a lot of the male workers were gay, and that was the only place they could go, so that's how it was. So, I had met my friend, Ron -- I'm not sure if Ron's alive or not yet -- another stunning guy, and I went home with him, and oh -- well, anyway. But not that night, that was another time. So, we leave the bar, I go home, I'm living -- at this time, I'm living with my grandparents because I'm kind of estranged from my mother. We had an outing, and I didn't want to -- even though we still worked at the same place, I didn't see her, she really didn't see me. I go home, I'd go into my bedroom, I took all my clothing off, I stepped in front of the full-length mirror, and I said, "Welcome, you're gay," and I never looked back. It's who I am today, so I accepted the fact that that's who -- I knew there was a reason why I like boys, men, it's who I like, yeah. That's my outing of how I -- two straight women, but three of us out. I'm still friends with Eddie ; Eddie is still alive, Eddie is a little older than I am, and he lives in Quakertown with two other older friends of mine that are friends of his. I see them every once a while, but I get emails every once in a while, from Eddie. So now, we have... I'm out of the military, and this is before or -- this is just prior to me going into nursing school. Let me jump back a little bit. There was a bar on Six Street -- on Sixth Street in Allentown between Hamilton and Linden, it was called The 23 Bar. A lot of people went there, but it was mostly women and mostly lesbians then. Three of the women that I worked with at the hospital were lesbians. One, her name was [Ronnie?], again I don't know if she's alive or now, she -- if she's alive, she's got to be in her eighties or nineties. The first time I seen Ronnie at the hospital, I thought Ronnie was a guy. Oh, my God, I mean I looked at this person, and I immediately got aroused. I thought, oh, wow, this guy is so freaking good-looking, so... [Gina?], who was the other lesbian, now her sister also worked at the hospital, and she was a nurse, but Gina was an orderly, and she said, "Let's go to the -- let's go to The 23 after work." So we went to The 23, and who's in there but Ronnie. I said to Gina, I says, "Oh, my God, who is that guy? He is so good-looking." And she said, "David, he's a lesbian," I says, "No," I was so brought down, but anyway. So that was that bar and then you had Rube's where the guys went. Now, I'm out of the military, and prior to starting nursing school, there was a new bar that was opening up, and it was called The Rendezvous, which was The 23 Bar, and I think I had mentioned that you before. And [Larry John?] who is deceased, he and a friend of him who was a German and spoke very little English, opened up this bar because we needed something more than Rube's, right? So, he opened up this -- the bar, and he asked me because he knew I knew how to dance and stuff like that. He says, "I want to have some entertainment in here, and I'd like to have like a go-go boy-type thing to bring in patrons," so he said, "Are you interested?," and I said, "Yeah, yeah." The pay wasn't great, but tips were good. And I got to tell you that he had been involved with -- one, two, three, four -- four different bars, okay. Every bar that he had, that he had me work at, he had sex with me on the bar after the place closed, and so... So I said, "Yeah," so I was the go-go boy, and I was the first go-go boy in Allentown when that stuff was starting to get up because you had the go-go girl dancers and all this other, but you didn't have guys doing that stuff. And then if there was guys, they were in the straight bars where a lot of the women would go, almost like the Chippendale type thing, but I wasn't stripping. So, he had that bar for a while and then the co-owner, the German guy decided that he didn't want to be any part of this, so he got out of the business. So somehow, Larry gets hooked up with the owners of what was then the LeHiKhai, and that was on Hamilton Street between Eighth and Ninth -- no, Ninth and 10th, Ninth and 10th, and he asked me to go-go up there, which is what I did. Now the pay was increasing a little more, and the tips were really good too, and then he again had sex with me there after it closed. And then now around '69 or so is when you had the Stonewall riots in New York. So he decided that he wanted to do something to keep the spark alive of the bar, so he -- and now he has a partner, Frank, and they open up the Stonewall on 10th Street, the Moose Lodge, that's what it was, the Moose Lodge, four floors. The top floor was apartments, the... There was the bar, and then there was the Moose Lounge, and then above that was the apartments. So you had the basement, he converted -- the basement had a bowling alley in it, and he converted that into a bar. He wanted it to be like a leather-type bar for bikers and that stuff. Well, it lasted for maybe a year and a half, two years, and that fizzled out. Then you had the regular bar where you would come in, then the second floor was the Moose Lounge with a big bar and then a dining area because they used to do breakfast after the bar closed. And then you would go-go up, and there was a go-go -- you could go-go upstairs or you could go-go on the main floor, either in the corner of the bar or they had -- they also had a stage where the deejay was, and money was really good. Of course, the bar closes, Larry has sex with me there. I lose touch with Larry after X amount of years, and so let me revert back. So from that time prior to all of that, we now have Atlantic City. Atlantic City was exciting ; It was like another version prior to me going to -- well no, I take that back. Atlantic City to me was like the New Orleans of the East Coast, right? The gay life down there was so much fun. Now I had graduated from nursing school, I'm working where I'm working, and I was living with a friend of mine who just passed away four months ago, he was older than me. I lived with him for 10 years, again nothing between the two of us, but I thought of myself as a whore, he was a real whore, let me tell you. He would pick up -- there was a place in Pembroke, it was called the [Rainbow Luncheonette?]. It was a straight place, it was owned by a married couple, an older couple, and they had pinball machines in there, and a lot of young guys would come in there. And we were in there one night, it was him and me, and he -- we called him Mother Vern. He drove only Lincolns, big Lincolns. His parents lived in Freemansburg ; they're gone. And so he would pile in all these kids in his car, and we'd drive down to his parents' house. His parents were in bed, they were very sound sleepers, we'd be entertaining all these guys in the kitchen. Vern would be in the living room with one, he'd finish with that one, and he'd yell, "Next." The next one would go in. He did all 10 guys in one night, I didn't do any of them, I was just -- I was the entertainment. But I said we lived together for 10 years until I moved, and that was in 1980 when I moved from where we lived to the Trailer Court, which is another part but we would go... Now I was no longer working at the hospital, I was working for Olin Corporation in their medical department. And Memorial Day weekend, Fourth of July weekend, and Labor Day weekend were our weekends in Atlantic City. We would go the day before the weekend started, and we would come back the day after the weekend was over, and we would stay at different places down there. Mostly the travel lodges where you had your own kitchen and that little dining area and two beds and a shower and all that good stuff, balcony. We would go down there, and we would get all set up, we get changed around, go out to what was -- the first bar we would go to would be the Lark Inn. The Lark Inn was right on New York Avenue, but it was right off the Boardwalk. It was the first bar if you were coming off of the Boardwalk, and New York would be on the left-hand side. And above the Lark Inn was the Cell Block, that was the leather bar. But you would go in there, and it was just -- it was almost like a peanut bar. They had big things with peanuts, and you put it and you just throw the shells on the floor and that stuff. So, we would go in there, we'd have a drink ; I'd have a beer, he'd have a highball. And then he would go his way, and I would go my way. And there were weekends when we were down there, we didn't see each other at all until it was time to go home because he was after the young ones, okay, and I was the dance queen. I needed to hit the discos and all that good stuff. Also, the Lark Inn was the place to go to for tea dance after the beach. Everybody was -- the place was packed, and they had stadium seating in the back, then they had the dance floor, then you had the bar and the peanuts, and all that other good stuff, so... But that's what we would do. And then I would go either to the M&amp ; M disco, and I'd be dancing there for -- till maybe 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and then I'd leave there and I would go to the Grand Hotel. The Grand Hotel had -- for lack of better words, it was like a porno shop, movie house, and you paid five bucks, you could stay long as you want. You'd go in, and to the left was like a corral where you just stand around and guys will be having sex standing up, somebody would be on their knees, or whatever. And then to the right was like a theater -- seats and then a huge screen. They'd be showing porn 24 hours, it didn't matter, 24 hours. And then to the back, there was lofts, there was three levels of lofts with cushions, and big cushions and pillows. And you could go up, and that's usually -- I went up there, and I'd lay down, and I'd be naked, and guys would come up and just have sex with me or I have sex with them, you could smoke pot. I wasn't introduced to poppers there. I was introduced to poppers with the first black man that I had sex with, and that was in The Drake Hotel. But anyway, so I would be in there for a good 24 hours, didn't eat, didn't do anything, just have sex. I'd come out, and it's daylight, I thought, oh, my God. That didn't happen all the time, but some of the times, we would go -- we'd go to the bars together and then we'd go to dinner. We would take food with us, and we could cook in our area. If you're looking down New York Avenue from the Boardwalk, on the left side was the Lark Inn and the Cell Block. You went down, and there was Ruby's. Now Ruby's was kind of like a drag show bar, and the bartender just happened to be Larry. So he says, "Oh my God," and we're talking and that, and I said to him, I said, "I need to go to the bathroom," he says, "Well, I'll show you where it's at." So he took me back, he had to and I had to, it was like a thing, but then that was that one. And then you went down, further down the street, and you had on the same side, left side, you had the Cameo. Cameo was a hotel, restaurant, disco. They had the original stainless steel dance floor, ah, it was wild, and they had an in-ground pool. It was the only one in the area that had an in-ground pool, and then next to that was the Grand Hotel, which was a hotel, and then the porn shop. On the other side of the street looking down again from the Boardwalk was the Chez Paree. The Chez was three or four stories, and they had a dance floor that would raise up to all three levels, it was pretty cool, and that was the lesbian disco. That's where I met Froggy, okay ; I won't go into that story. And then you go down a little further on the side was the Saratoga. The Saratoga was -- they had the laser beam, the show, and then you went to the Holiday House, which is one of the places that we would stay. It was just a room and then you had a communal bathroom, you didn't have a private bath in that. And then the Rendezvous that was two floors. The downstairs was a big bar with just people just milling around, then you went upstairs, and there's another nice-sized bar, but it was more quiet up there. The music was downstairs ; there was no music upstairs. And then at the end of that block of New York and Atlantic Avenue was [Corn Finds?]. That was the restaurant that was open 24 hours, and they had served the best breakfast, and it was cheap. It was like two bucks for bacon, eggs, and all that, whatever you wanted. Now, if you're next to where Ruby's was on the left side, it was called Snake Alley, and you went that way, and on the right-hand side was Luisa's. Luisa's was a piano bar that was really more for the older crowd, which would be my age now. So if you were young and good-looking and you went in there, your drinks were always free. And then down a little further on the same side as Luisa's was the Frat House. That was a house-type thing for college kids, college guys that were gay that stayed there, and across the street was The Drake Hotel, but it was the back entrance for the M&amp ; M Disco. You walk in through there, mirror just all over the place, and then you went to the piano bar first, and then if you took a right and went down some steps, then you went into the disco, dance floor area. It wasn't a huge place, but that's where they had the fog machines, so sometimes you couldn't see who you were dancing with, and it really got... But part of that was the hotel itself, The Drake Hotel, and that was a very cruisy area. My first experience with poppers -- and for those who may not know what poppers are, they're something that you inhale, and it gives you an instant high. And it's something that you do on the dance floor to make your dancing more intense, or if you're having sex, to make your orgasm really out there. So, it was the day that we were leaving, but it was earlier, it was early in the afternoon. We usually didn't leave there till about 5:00 or 6:00 at night. And I'm walking through the hall, cruising the halls and this tall, black -- sorry, this tall black man spots me, and he says, "Hey, you, come here," so I thought, okay. So I went into the room with him, and we're having sex. And he knows that I'm getting very close to climax, and he breaks these ampoules because it was -- that's what they were at that time, they were ampoules, and he stuck one on one nose and one at the other, he's not taking it, deep breath, and I went [inhales], and -- I didn't think I was ever going to stop coming, sorry. It was just so intense, and that was the first black man that I had -- ever had sex with, it was great, it was fun. So, then we come home, but -- oh, and then off of Atlantic Avenue in the alley -- I can't remember what the name of the alley was -- was a place called the Brass Rail. That was the true lesbian bar. You couldn't get in there if you were a guy, it was girls only, girls only, so, which is fine, I mean I'm a girl, so. So that was really Atlantic City. There were some other little places here or there that you could go to, but basically, everything was concentrated in that, on New York Avenue -- New York Avenue and Kentucky Avenue. And then that all went down the hill when Trump opened up his casino, so all gay life -- the last bar that closed was -- actually was the Brass Rail, and they only closed maybe two years ago. It's either prior to or right in the first year of COVID it got closed, so there is nothing, nothing there anymore but, uh... Everything then moved to Rehoboth, I mean Rehoboth is nice, but there really isn't anything going on in Rehoboth, hardly anymore, which is sad. So that's the Atlantic City story. I was working at Olin, I worked at Olin from '72 to '87, and we all lost our jobs because the company was sold to somebody else, and they didn't want to keep any of us, so... At the time I was working there, I -- now all these times I was still in the reserves because I didn't retire until '93. I would go to military events, but I always took a woman with me, and then of course, the women that we went with me were lesbians, so, and they were always the -- what we called the lipstick lesbians, the glamorous, all that stuff. Sorry, I don't mean to offend anybody, but that's how it was back then. So one of the women that I worked with at Olin, her name is Donna, and she had a partner who eventually became my wife but... So she would go to these different things, but they got laid off and then they moved from Allentown to Delaware, and then from Delaware they moved to -- back to New York because my ex-wife was originally from New York. Donna is from -- it's either Pottstown or Pottsville ; I always get those two mixed up. Anyway to make a long story short, I am now -- I have now moved out of Mother Vern's house, and I am living in Terre Hill, the trailer park ; I became trailer trash. But the reason I moved there was because I was dating a guy who was the bartender at The Rendezvous in Atlantic City. His name was Don, and I thought this is going to be great, wow, I'm finding somebody, it's going to be good because all these years was just willy-nilly. And it just turned out to be not a good situation, so -- I don't want to get into that. So here I am, I have a trailer that I thought was going to be for the both of us, and now it's just me. January twenty-third, two days from now, I was at -- Froggy's grandmother had died, and I was one of the pallbearers, so I was with her all the afternoon till the early evening. And I said I needed to go because I was going to this Christmas party because at that point, I was starting to pledge for a leather club, and it was the Reading Railmen that were out of Reading, and it was being hosted by a friend of mine, Steve. So, I went home, I get changed around, and I go to Steve's place, and he lived at 16th and Turner in an apartment building. He had the second and third floor, but you had to get his place on the side and you slung. So, I ring the bell, I open up the door, and there's this cute guy standing at the top of the stairs. I didn't think anything, just that he was cute. So, I went up and said hello to him and then I went and put my coat where it had to go and start milling around. I get myself a drink and then I ran into my friend Kevin who I had known for -- since he was a teenager, and he was there with his boyfriend at the time Michael. Kevin had worked at the Hotel Traylor prior to that. I'm not sure where he was working at the time that I met him, he wasn't working there anymore when they had a restaurant there, and Michael worked in Philadelphia somewhere, but anyway. So they introduced me to this guy that was there at the top of the stairs, his name was Will, and I thought, okay. So I talked to him for a little bit and then I went to mill around again. Now there was another guy there, his name was Keith -- no, Kenneth, Kenneth. He was quite drunk, and he was coming through the narrow hallway, and Will was still standing at the same spot as he was, and this guy bumps into him, spills his drink all over Will. So I see this, I said, oh, this poor guy. So I went and I got some towels and some paper towels, I brought it to him and helped pat him down and got rid of that stuff, and I started talking. I got him a fresh drink, because his drink was spilled too, and myself a drink, and we started talking. And I said, "If you're not doing anything, if you want to come home, come home," and he did to the trailer park. That was January 23, 1981, and he never left. When I met him, he was working for what was then the Holiday Inn out on 309 and 78. I'm not sure what it is now, but anyway, he was working as a painter, and he was quite a drinker and quite the druggie. And I had just gotten over -- January seventh, I had gone into the hospital for a hemorrhoid operation, okay, so I had all kinds of drugs in the house that were not helping me. The only thing that was helping me was pot, and I didn't have any pot, but anyway. So he started taking some of the drugs, but anyway, he wiped out my entire drug thing and all the alcohol that I had too, but of course, I was a drinker back then too. So we were there at the trailer from '81 until '84. And my mother had to move from where she was, I'm talking about -- by this time I'm back with -- I'm okay with my mother, we're friends, and all this other good stuff. Because the landlady where she lived had died, and she needed to go somewhere, so I said, "Well, we're looking for house, so we found a house," I said, "you can have the trailer if you want it." So we moved us out into where -- the house that I still have, we moved my mother into the trailer, and the rest was history from there on, but she was there until 1987. Now, my ex-wife prior to her being my wife, we had gone to a couple of military functions, and we had, over the course of those years, intercourse. I guess I was kind of in a bisexual phase, I don't know. So, anyway that being said, December 21, 1987, Will gets a phone call from my mother to wish him a happy birthday, we were having a birthday dinner at the house, and she hung up, and we started eating dinner. We're just about finished dinner and then I got -- I was on the phone with somebody else -- I don't know if it was somebody else -- and I get an interruption from an operator saying you have an emergency phone call from the woman that lived down below, the trailer girl who was friends with my mother. So I talked to her, I said, "What's up?" She says, "There's something wrong with your mother, what should I do?" I said, "Well, call 911, I mean, duh," which she did and I said, "I'll be right out." So we flew out, and by the time I got there, she was gone, but she was the last person that talked to Will on his birthday. And that's still difficult for me because I lost her, and of course, I lost my husband, but... So I didn't know what to do, and I had called my ex-wife and said, "I need help, I've never had to do any of this before." So she came down from New York. She had a job that she could -- she worked for an insurance company, so she was able to do what she needed to do. So she came down, and she was with me for -- getting the arrangements and the lawyer and all that good stuff, the funeral, and she went back on Christmas Eve. We buried my mother on Christmas Eve and then her and Donna were coming down for New Year's Eve, to spend New Year's Eve with us, which is what they did. And Will was a smoker, a cigarette smoker, and had run out cigarettes, so he and Donna went to the store to get cigarettes and some more booze. I had just gotten out of the shower, and Betsy had given me a bottle of Calvin Klein Obsession, which I loved, loved. So I put some on, and I'm still not dressed yet, and she comes over to me and puts her hands under my robe and gets me all excited, and she drops her pants, and we had sex under the Christmas tree. So we got cleaned up just in time for them to come back, and we had New Year's Eve, okay. Mid-January, she calls me, and she says, "I'm late." I said, "Yeah, late for what?" She says, "I'm late." I said, "Oh, you're late?" She said, "Yes." "What do you want to do?" I said. "I don't know" because we had -- the four of us had talked about having kids and a family and who was going to do what. So I said to her, "Well, let's get married," which is what we did. We had a military wedding, a full military wedding at the Chapel at Lakehurst, the naval base. We were only supposed to have a total of a hundred people there, but it wound up that I was there -- it happened that I was there. Our wedding was on our -- a weekend that my drill unit was there, and they all knew that I was getting married, and they all crashed the party, (inaudible) not the wedding but the reception stuff, but anyway, all is -- it was -- all is well. The only thing that I had to pay for was the rings, the marriage license, that was it. Her sister and her brother-in-law paid for the entire wedding, the food, open bar, everything, and the honeymoon, the entire honeymoon crew or the whole wedding party went to Atlantic City for our honeymoon. Betsy and I had the bridal suite for the honeymoon suite and then Donna and Will were going to have the other room. Well, my ex-wife didn't want to have anything to do with the bridal suite ; the deed had already been done. So Will and I had the bridal suite, a big, heart-shaped, bubble the --ah, God, it was so gaudy -- and they had that, so... We met down in the -- at the -- we were -- we sit at the casino, and I can't remember what the name of the casino was, it wasn't Trump's. But my ex-wife and Donna wanted to go gamble -- well, Donna really didn't want to go gambling, but she went to gamble, so they went to gamble, and Will and I went to the bars, so... That was how that happened. MF: We're at 90 minutes if you can believe it, and so this is typically where we'd start to wind down in the interview. I think we have a lot more to talk about, and perhaps we should schedule a second interview. DM: Oh, okay. MF: But I don't want to stop you abruptly. So we've talked about a kind of first, maybe even the half of your life. And before we close the interview today, I'm just wondering if there's anything about what you've shared so far -- and we'll do a second interview, so we'll get into more it -- DM: Okay. MF: -- but if there's anything about what you've shared so far, that you thought, oh, I wish I would've shared this or I missed this story. And I just want to give you the opportunity to -- DM: I need to go back -- MF: -- have something that you feel is really pertinent to what you shared so far? DM: Oh. ANTHONY DALTON: While you're doing that I'm going to switch this card out real quick just in case. MF: Okay. So we'll just -- DM: What we may need to redo is when I -- when I looked at myself in the full-length mirror, I said, "Hello world, I'm gay," that's what I wanted to say, and I don't think I've said that. MF: I love that story so much. And what a powerful coming-out story because of -- it's not in the public way. I mean certainly you were out in a public way at the bars and with your friends and then with Will. But what a personal coming-out story, like to see yourself and this is me. DM: This is me, yeah. I didn't look back and I just -- I'm me, take me as I am. MF: Yeah. DM: Well I didn't get to talk about my first love after my uncle's death, and that would've been Robert. MF: Do you want to share some about Robert now before we close the interview? DM: Yeah, we can, yeah, because I -- yeah, we can do that if we want to. MF: Okay. DM: What I really wanted to talk about also was my first love -- my other first love between my uncle and William, and that was Robert. I met Robert in the bathroom of Arner's Diner, which was in Allentown. The diner is still the diner, but it's not in the spot that it was originally. It's now at the corner of Ninth and Linden, and I think it's the city something or other. But anyway, we had been in Rube's, and after Rube's closed, the only places you'd go to was the diner, otherwise you went home because there was no bookstores or anything like that at that time. So we went to the diner, and I was -- I had gone into the bathroom, and my friend Tony was in with Robert, they were talking, there was nothing going on between them. But he introduced me to Robert because he didn't introduce me to him at the bar at Rube's because it's -- Rube's is where we were all at. And I looked at Robert, and Robert looked at me, and -- now it was just the two of us. His hands went right down my pants, and my hands went down his pants. I thought, oh my God, this is a Marine, and he is so good-looking. So I wound up taking him home because he didn't have a car because he was still in the Marines. We had mad, passionate sex in the back seat of my car in front of his mother's house. (laughs) And we were together for almost seven years and then he had finished his tour and came home and had gone to -- there was a business school in Easton at the time, I can't remember what the name of it, but it was a business school. And he decided this was not the career path that he wanted to go on, he wanted to go back into the military. So he asked me if I would take him down to Washington, DC, because he was going to re-up again, and I said, "You're choosing the Marines over me?" and he said, "Sorry." So I dropped him off, I cried all the way home, went to see some friends, and they were consoling me, and I thought, oh -- I was just so down. I didn't talk to him for a while and then I had heard because then he was -- he went back to Vietnam, and he is the recipient of three Purple Hearts. He should be dead, should've been dead, not that I'm wishing that, but he made it through. We are best friends now, and I remind him all the time, Bobby we've been together 60 years. He has a husband who is Mexican, lives in Palm Springs, so I go out to Palm Springs every year during -- usually the first week of November because it's the last Pride in the United States for the year was in Palm Springs, and I stay with he and his husband. Will and I when we were married, we were married in their living room. He is my best friend, he is going through -- he has prostate cancer and Agent Orange, and he is still going through chemo treatments for over 10 years. He goes every other Monday for chemo. He is the only living member of his clinical trial group that's still alive, and they don't know why he's still alive, so... But I love Robert to death, and he loves me. We talk at least once a week on the phone, and he wants to come back to visit because he has not been to -- he was not able to get back here for his mother's funeral years ago, but he wants to go back for that and go up to New York and do some traveling there but... So I'd just like to leave with that for now. MF: Wonderful. Well, I want to say for the day, David, thank you so much. It's so wonderful to hear your stories today. I'm so grateful that you took the time, and I can't wait for our next interview. 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.) 01:42:38 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 David Moyer Part 1, January 21, 2022 Description An account of the resource David Moyer recounts his early years, sexuality, and his experiences with gay community in Allentown and Atlantic City. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-23 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-01-21 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/032be941dec66d395effa039323c0608.png 6d37fe9762d7a4d362ddede5e5f0ee67 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 of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Thomas Duane 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-36.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, 2022 Thomas Duane, June 12, 2022 (Part 4) LGBT-36 1:46:29 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Thomas Duane Mary Foltz video/mp4 DuaneThomas_202202612_video_trimmed.mp4 1.0:|29(13)|60(8)|81(5)|104(3)|125(5)|146(8)|165(12)|186(14)|209(3)|232(4)|253(16)|276(11)|303(2)|318(9)|339(6)|358(18)|377(13)|396(10)|419(7)|440(17)|457(4)|472(9)|489(8)|516(4)|537(3)|560(8)|575(12)|596(4)|615(3)|640(7)|659(5)|678(15)|705(9)|724(4)|751(2)|768(15)|795(3)|816(13)|835(12)|852(5)|863(14)|882(13)|903(3)|920(5)|937(4)|958(6)|979(9)|996(11)|1013(8)|1036(17)|1059(5)|1082(13)|1101(4)|1118(12)|1139(9)|1166(9)|1183(10)|1204(4)|1227(9)|1244(14)|1261(13)|1280(7)|1301(4)|1322(4)|1341(10)|1362(15)|1385(2)|1404(4)|1427(10)|1450(7)|1477(5)|1492(3)|1509(16)|1534(9)|1551(10)|1574(15)|1599(9)|1618(16)|1641(15)|1660(11)|1675(11)|1698(10)|1717(15)|1742(5)|1759(13)|1778(15)|1801(4)|1816(15)|1837(9)|1860(5)|1883(12)|1908(7)|1929(7)|1954(10)|1981(8)|1996(17)|2017(10)|2032(12)|2057(10)|2084(12)|2111(3)|2132(6)|2153(7)|2180(14)|2203(2)|2226(14)|2239(14) 0 https://youtu.be/3SK7Ws54klc YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MF: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Senator Tom Duane to talk about his life and experiences as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year our project has funding from ACLS, and Senator Duane and I are meeting on Lehigh's Campus because he came back for the reunion. &#13 ; &#13 ; TD: My first one. 0 129 Transition from City Councilman to State Senator MF: I can also give you digital copies if you wanna share with family, so we'll talk more about that later. So we talked last time, I'm just gonna jump right in about all of your work with city council. And I'm curious if we could move to this sort of transition from city council and your movement into a state Senate. So I'm just gonna start with a basic question, how did that happen? Why were you interested in the Senate? Can you share a little bit of that story? 0 478 Relationship between Democrats and Republicans in Assembly TD: So then Senate majority leader just let it go through, but Senator Bruno, when he became leader, eliminated it, domestic partner benefits. So, I never want to waste an opportunity, I requested that he reinstate it. Because it wasn't just for me, I didn't even have a domestic partner, but the employees, some of whom had already signed up for it, mostly Democrats. I'm not sure about the Republicans at that time, staff members, but it was grotesquely unfair. 0 814 Hate Crimes Legislation TD: Anyway, [coughs] one of the things that had languished in the Senate for a long time was hate crimes legislation. And I believe I talked about my history of -- I had been beaten up in the parking lot of a gay bar. And severely, it was more certainly -- I bruised ribs, bruised a little bit bloody, but the scary thing was I didn't know what they had a weapon or not. And I went to the hospital reported it to police, and they caught the perpetrators. 0 1267 Fighting HIV Misconceptions TD: So before shot person, they had these bills that for -- these past before I got there for police officers, state police, firefighters that if you had to retire because you were ill with AIDS, it was presumed that you got it on the job. Also correctional officers. I think that was the bill where I first it came to the floor. &#13 ; &#13 ; Now these bills had even passed the assembly with Democrats where you would think they would be more enlightened and, it enraged me. And one of the bills said that if someone needed to be transported from a nursing home to a hospital or a hospital to a nursing home. The medical staff from the emergency services were entitled to have the patient tested for HIV and I really couldn't believe it. And actually, this senator was a pretty intelligent senator in this scheme, and I -- so I started debate and I was like what would be different? 0 1873 Work with Incarcerated Individuals / Creating a Rapport with the Other Side of the Aisle TD: So anyway. I've never thought of myself as a very good debater. But I could compete, I found out. And one time there was this bill that said that if someone who – oh they loved incarceration bills. My God, sex offenders, incarceration like all the time. Oh, they had to like -- what else, where else can we put a higher penalty or something, anyway. This bill said that if someone broke parole that they had to no matter what, serve out the entirety of their sentence. &#13 ; &#13 ; And the time, the New York prisons were overcrowded so they were letting people out earlier. People will get out early. If you got a 15 year sentence you could probably get out years before. But if you broke parole you would have to stay. So, I said to the Senate, well how many people would this impact? How many -- well of course he had no idea about that, but he should have. I would have, he had no idea. 0 2165 First Couple of Years in the Senate TD: So, that those first couple of years, a little bit of a blur I guess. And also we, the legislature was always unable to agree on a budget that the governor who then was Governor Pataki, a Republican. They could never agree on a budget. So we would be there all year long at least once a month, we would have to go up for a continuing resolution or sometimes we had to stay for a few days. And in retrospect, I think there was an awful lot of senators that had additional families there. And I think they liked staying there a while longer. 0 2310 September 11th Attack / Primary Day in New York City TD: So, in 2001 was the bombing of the Trade Center and that was in my district, and it was a Democratic primary day in New York City. And I had been out handing out cards for a candidate that I was supporting. And then a little before nine, someone sorta – someone relieved me at that location. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, I went back to my apartment to have a cup of coffee or whatever because she started six in the morning, when the polls open. And I was listening to the radio, and they said the plane had crashed in the trade center. And they said it was must have been just a small plane and then it was, no it’s a huge plane. And then I turned on the TV and so it was happening. And then I had a view ; I could look out my window and see it. And I really don’t quite know how to talk about it. 0 2860 Other Relationships Made during Time in Senate TD: And my district also has this museum, the Intrepid, it's an old battleship. And the executive director, who my gaydar, that meter was went off the rails with him, couldn't go high enough. He offered to me to offer to Senators to take a boat and go down and look at it from the river, so I did that. He was on my grudge list later on for other reasons, he did eventually come out, you're welcome, I'll tell you what it was. 0 3196 Sexual Orientation Nondiscrimination Act (SONDA) TD: So, after my – so our terms are two years. So, my second term, I was determined to get SONDA to pass, which was Sexual Orientation Nondiscrimination Act, I guess ; it was a gay rights bill. And, I was also determined to include gender identity and expression in it and the bill that passed the Assembly for many years, but it never passed the Senate, even without gender identity/expression. 0 3882 Work Improving Women and Children's Welfare TD: But this senator who was the county exec who did lock us all in because I asked that question, not of him, but of another senator. I asked him to come to New York with me. And I wanted to show him, -- Mayor Giuliani had this policy that if you were on public benefits, you had to work. So, there were, especially women with children who were going to school to try to -- because education is key. But maybe they're going to school at Manhattan Community College or Brooklyn Community College. But they were assigned to clean a park in the Bronx, and children go to school and doing it was impossible. It was impossible for them. And it made it so they just couldn't -- 0 4152 Other Work in the Senate TD: So that's the kinda -- those are the – he voted for hate crimes, he didn’t vote for SONDA. I was very upset about that. And then someone said to me, “Well did you ask him?” And I said [laughs] no because I thought -- it never occurred to me that he wouldn't vote for it. His daughter had a huge influence on him, and I don't think he asked her about SONDA, he asked her about hate crimes. He wasn't in office when marriage came up, but he said that she would have like [swipes hand]. 0 4663 Experiences with Addiction TD: I just hesitated because we haven't talked about this, but there's something very personal that happened with me when I went to Albany that I did. You can decide whether or not you want to use it, I'm fine with it. So I'm in recovery from drugs and alcohol for now 39 years, and I have issues of food and money and people. Not gambling except, I have no problem with slot machines or things like that. But anything involving skill, because I'm an ADHD, I would -- if It was poker or 21, I would never leave because I would have to think about it. 0 5138 Fighting against Abuses of Power TD: One of the bills that I fought very hard for was to make it possible for people who had been abused by persons in positions of authority. And this was not popular among my colleagues, and everyone thought it was, there were a lot of people who said, oh you're just anti-catholic. I'm like, no, and this isn't even just about that. It's about boy scout leaders and coaches and the person down the block, this is not particular, it's not not about them. 0 5976 Mental Health Parity (Timothy's Law) TD: So anyway, parity for mental health not to sell this. You know, when you're in the minority, you really have to can't do like a lot of bills. Because when I was in the majority, I just shoveled out bills for two years. I just, I passed more bills in the assembly health committee. So he couldn't get -- he couldn't keep up with me because –“We can’t pass because the Republicans won't do it”. Well, I was literally shoveling out these bills. 0 6208 Closing Remarks / Reflections&#13 ; TD: It was well, you know, well, I -- I went to a reunion. I took a picture of me holding this sign because it was three classes because of the pandemic and I left in ’75. I finished over two of my courses about class of ‘76, but it took me until ‘77 to complete those two courses. 0 MovingImage Thomas Duane recounts his time in the State Senate fighting for legislation like the Sexual Orientation Nondiscrimination Act (SONDA) and Mental Health Parity (Timothy's Law), as well as his personal relationships with HIV and addiction. MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Senator Tom Duane to talk about his life and experiences as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year our project has funding from ACLS, and Senator Duane and I are meeting on Lehigh's Campus because he came back for the reunion. THOMAS DUANE: My first one. MF: For which I'm so happy about, and today is June 12, 2022. So, before we begin the interview, I want to say first thank you for joining me today. And then I just want to go back through some consent questions which you already know, but I'll do them again, so do you consent to this interview today? TD: I do. MF: Do you consent to having the interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online and in other formats? TD: I do. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Community Archive using your interview for educational purposes and other formats, and that could be in articles, on websites, and in presentations? TD: Entertainment too? MF: But you are entertaining. TD: [laughs] Yes, anything, it's an open book, I can send to it all, the only secrets I don't tell are the ones I don't remember. MF: Okay, [laughs] that's probably the same for me. And then do you understand that you'll have 30 days after I give you electronically the transcript of this interview to review it, to identify any parts that you would like to delete, or you could withdraw the whole interview from the project? TD: I wouldn't do that, but I do have to be honest, I did not read the other one yet. So, there's a part of me that's like, oh just let it go, but I responsibly, I probably should read it, so I'm sorry, I haven't done that. MF: You can let it go if you want or review it and just tell me what you wanna do with it. TD: I mean, it's nice to have my own copy of it too so. MF: I can also give you digital copies if you wanna share with family, so we'll talk more about that later. So we talked last time, I'm just gonna jump right in about all of your work with city council. And I'm curious if we could move to this sort of transition from city council and your movement into a state Senate. So I'm just gonna start with a basic question, how did that happen? Why were you interested in the Senate? Can you share a little bit of that story? TD: I had been in the city council for I guess six going on seven years, and my local state senator, a woman named Catherine Abate, was going to give up her seat to run for New York State attorney general. So, there was going to be an open state Senate seat, and it's great that I get to tell my own story. There had been a term limits referendum that won twice in New York City, but I had a few years left that I could have stayed in the city council. So, I just wanna say I did not run for the Senate because term limits were you know, because I love being on the city council, but there was an open state Senate seat. And so much of New York City is controlled by the state. If we passed and this happened -- recently the council passed a plastic bag ban. And because of the rivalry between then Mayor De Blasio and former Governor Cuomo put forward a bag to supersede the city plastic bag ban with different dates, just to, you know. And some of it has always been the case is that way in many states, but some of it was because of the fiscal crisis in the 70s. And at that time, New York City needed the state to help bail them out. Now, the state needs the city to bail it out all the time, but anyway. An open seat and my council district was wholly within it. And people said, why would you ever wanna be in the minority in the Senate, you can't get anything done? And I thought to myself, if you think you can't get anything done, you're not gonna get anything done, and I was like, I'm gonna get stuff done. So, a little outrage in that, right? But I thought that was such a poor attitude, and there had never been an openly gay member of the state Senate. There had been Deborah Glick was in the assembly from 1990, then I got elected in 1990 went to the council, but she was the only out legislator. And I thought it was important to have representation, and I knew that there would be other openly queer people coming into the council very soon, and there's always more work to do. But a number of things which we've talked about had happened and advancement had been made, so I ran for the Senate, and I was unopposed. So that was easy, and I raised money just in case because the best offense is a good defense. And Catherine, the person who I was gonna succeed, she said that they were all asking what's he like? What's he like? Because they knew I had been a member of Act Up, and she said, oh you'll see when he gets there. And so I had to hire staff there. So, I went up a little bit in advance with my then chief of staff to interview people. And there was a state Senator there, who I sort of bumped into as I was, sort of taking a tour around, who didn't wanna shake my hand. Now, it could have been because of HIV. Could also be that he just wasn't a very nice person. He wasn't shaking the hands of Democrats, but it was very off putting, and I was to find out that there was tremendous ignorance about HIV, really shocking. Because I've already sort of gone through it in the city council, and now from 1992, now in 1999 with a whole new group of people, I was gonna have to go through that. And also I'm sure they had all met gay people before, but they weren't on an equal footing, so that was different. And so off I went and I didn't know no better, so I just went. In fact, the first day I was there, I went over to the majority leader, Senator Joe Bruno, and I said, "Hi, I'm Tom Duane a new state Senator succeeding Catherine Abate," And I said "Senator Bruno, I'm hoping that you will restore domestic partner benefits to the state Senate". The reason I had to say that, that I needed to say it was important to say that was that former Governor Mario Cuomo had instituted domestic partnership for all state employees. And because the legislative branch is separate, they can create their own rules. So then Senate majority leader just let it go through, but Senator Bruno, when he became leader, eliminated it, domestic partner benefits. So, I never want to waste an opportunity, I requested that he reinstate it. Because it wasn't just for me, I didn't even have a domestic partner, but the employees, some of whom had already signed up for it, mostly Democrats. I'm not sure about the Republicans at that time, staff members, but it was grotesquely unfair. I think it was very good that I went in without a lot of preconceived notions. Except that I didn't know the Republicans ran the show, but there were some things I was unprepared for. One of them was that the Republicans treated the Democratic senators really badly and under-resourced us, and I could never understand why they were so nasty and mean. And I found -- what I realized was when the Republicans had been in the assembly, they're usually more than 100 Democrats and 50 Republicans. And the Democrats were terrible to the Republicans in the assembly. So the Republican assembly members, their life's ambition was to get into the Senate. And once they got there, they were determined to do back exactly what had been done to them. So I blame the assembly Democrats and their leadership for creating that kind of poisonous atmosphere. And since we have just gone through a new redistricting year in New York State, because the Democrats controlled the assembly, and the Republicans controlled the Senate. Democrats drew their own lines for their assembly districts, Republicans drew their lines. They made them as winnable as possible for their people, both of them. And then they would come together to draw the congressional lines, and they would protect the incumbents. And then there'd be two or three districts where it would be a toss up, where's a fair fight I guess. And the Republicans did everything to stay in power. The way the constitution reads, there's a certain formula by which -- or a range within which the number, the population can be for a Senate district. So many of the Republicans would have say, 270,000 people, I had 330,000 people in my district. So, they made their district smaller, they split up cities, they counted people who were incarcerated in their districts, so that was one of the ways they maintained power. Another way was they flipped Democrats in marginal districts promising them everything. And I was always happy when they lost to tell you the truth because it was greediness that made them, you know. Of course, people want things to resources to come into their district, but I don't think people vote, they should be voting on bringing home the bacon and as it were only. So, the other thing they did was they added an extra seat one year. That must have been the next redistricting year. [laughs] They just added another seat, so they did everything. And when I was still there, six Democrats became independent Democrats, and then started to vote with the Republicans, so they did everything to stay in power. And much later on, I did get to be in the majority for a couple of years, and I treated them like senators. But there was another council member who a couple of years later joined the Senate. We'd been colleagues in the city council he's a conservative Republican, but we liked each other, we worked well together. He wasn't mean to me, I wasn't mean to -- I wasn't mean to anybody by the way, I just found that ridiculous. And another person and I was really -- a Republican that I very much admired that was just a really, really good guy. His name is Senator Ray Meyer, and he represented the Utica area, and he had been a county executive, Oneida County. So, he hadn't been in the assembly, so he didn't have that hatred. And I actually got a bill passed through him. I have to say, when I talk about some of the things that got passed while I was there or maybe some budget things or policy changes. My name was never really on the documents, my name was never the lead sponsor on anything, my name wasn't even on anything. Many things that I fought for would be stuffed into a budget bill or put into some other bill where everything but the kitchen sink was put in there. Because the Republicans did not like the Democrats to ever be able to say I was the lead sponsor on whatever bill it was that was going through. Anyway, [coughs] one of the things that had languished in the Senate for a long time was hate crimes legislation. And I believe I talked about my history of -- I had been beaten up in the parking lot of a gay bar. And severely, it was more certainly -- I bruised ribs, bruised a little bit bloody, but the scary thing was I didn't know what they had a weapon or not. And I went to the hospital reported it to police, and they caught the perpetrators. And a couple weeks later, I called the local police department, and I said, what's happening with my case? And they switched me to the DA's office, and the DA said, they pled out on a misdemeanor. And I was shocked, because I didn't get to confront them, so to speak. And it's not that I wanted them to have a felony, but I wanted to be face-to-face with them. And anyway, so the bill languished for a long time in the legislature because the legislators of color in the assembly and in the Senate, would not remove sexual orientation from the bill. And because of that, the Republicans in the Senate would not pass it. So my first year, 1999, I gave a speech on the floor about what had happened to me and in great detail, which I don't talk about. I was -- this is the Hamptons, which I -- not exactly lovely, but I was visiting someone, it was a Thursday night, we're visiting some people. And I had driven, I probably borrowed a car from my parents or something to a disco as we had then and loud disco as they always are. And there weren't a lot of people there, so the parking lot wasn't very full or anything. But anyway, at a certain point, midnight, 1 o'clock or something, I had decided to leave and I left and I was walking towards my car. And the car pulled up and two of the people got out of the car and they said saying you fag, on and on with epithets, but menacingly. And then they started to hit me, punch me, kick me. And I had some, I guess training about this, I was afraid if I fought back, well maybe they'd pull out a knife or a gun then. So I protected my head as best as I could and I started yelling, but the music was so loud, no one inside could hear. And so they continued to do until someone finally came out and then they ran back to the car and they drove away. And, I was so upset, not only because I didn't get to confront them, but it was as if it never happened, because the state didn't collect data on hate crimes. And that's all I wanted, because I don't think you can really fight. I hate to say hate, because I don't think, the opposite of love isn't necessarily hate at all. But ignorance and intolerance and I guess an entitlement to beat up people that are different than you, or be violent towards them. Boy, think about the gun violence perpetrated today. But anyway, I gave a very, very impassioned speech on the floor about what had happened to me. And it was a really good speech, if I must say so myself, because I pulled it out. Anyway, there weren't cameras in those days in the Legislature. They didn't want cameras. So it's probably a transcript of it. But I say that they were in the City Council there's any film of me making these speeches that I made that were Tom Duane speeches, I call them. But a couple of the senators wept. There was a very conservative Republican senator, an older man who stood up and said we must do something about this. He voted against the bill, when it came up by the way. But in the moment, he was moved by it. And the next year and I think because I was on it, the legislation passed. It didn't have, I was not, my name wasn't anywhere on it, but your name doesn't have to be on something to be associated with something. And really whoever fights the hardest for something, I think is the person who's you know -- the legislation, if you passed the bill in, your name was the first name on the bill, you got a -- and the governor signed it, you would get this sort of frame thing. It was like a diorama of the signature of the governor, the bill, and then a fancy pen and it's framed with glass. It's like a box, and there would be legislators who had them all over their offices. Honestly, I mean, I really didn't care about that at all. I just wanted the bills passed, which was just funny. I'm happy for people that, -- and I'm saying this sincerely that it was something that they were proud of. And so they could hang up something that was, but people couldn't understand why I didn't care about that. So anyway, my name wasn't on it, but it passed. And it was interpreted to include gender identity and expression, fortunately because I hadn't written the bill. I had my own version of a bill, but that wasn't the one that got passed. And the only way the Republicans would pass it was if it increased penalties. And I again, that was not that important to me at all. But if it helps to get it passed then good. But it made the state division of criminal justice keep statistics on hate crimes from around the state. So I was very happy that, that was the case. And that was in my first two-year term in 2000. And, The other thing that happened before I got there-- [coughs] [coughs] This is allergies not COVID. [laughs] [coughs] Snapshot in time. So before shot person, they had these bills that for -- these past before I got there for police officers, state police firefighters that if you had to retire because you were ill with AIDS, it was presumed that you got it on the job. Also correctional officers. I think that was the bill where I first it came to the floor. Now these bills had even passed the assembly with Democrats where you would think they would be more enlightened and, it enraged me. And one of the bills said that if someone needed to be transported from a nursing home to a hospital or a hospital to a nursing home. The medical staff from the emergency services were entitled to have the patient tested for HIV and I really couldn't believe it. And actually, this senator was a pretty intelligent senator in this scheme, and I -- so I started debate and I was like what would be different? Like what would be different, would you ever go to a dentist that didn't wear? This is pre-AIDS, where they didn't wear protective gear. Would you ever be in a hospital where someone was not wearing a mask and washing their hands? I mean ridiculous. AIDS, HIV doesn't spread like that. And at one point you have to stand behind your seat, and you have to talk to the president of the Senate to keep everything civil. So through you Mr. President if I could ask the sponsor -- anyway. But at one point I moved over to hold the hand of another state Senator. And then when I reached for her hand, I moved away from my seat. And they started an -- arms started to come forward because they thought I was gonna hit the Senator whose bill it was, which I would never have done. But I didn't mind that they thought that, in fact the leader of the Democrats said, "oh yeah, Duane took out a couple of people when he was in the council". But I also, and I said this, this is I think what stopped these dreadful bills from happening. I said according to the New York State Department Health AIDS Institute there are only four ways that you can get HIV. Breast feeding, blood transfusions, sharing needles with an injection drug user, or unprotected oral, vaginal, or anal sex. And I think I was probably the first person to say something like that on the floor of the Senate. And the bills passed anyway, but eventually they stopped bringing these bills forward. I don't think they really understood, they just didn't want me to say that anymore. [laughs] I really think that's what it was, because they knew it was coming any time these bills came to the floor in the Senate. In fact, when I left I said and I just want to say one last time [LAUGH]. I got that unprotected oral, vaginal, or anal sex, again, unprotected -- anyway. This is 1999, 2000. And these bills were passing. And because I kind of made fun of these bills, there are other bills that unions wanted. It was sort of like a free giveaway to their members that wasn't getting an increase in their wages or other benefits, but sort of a freebie benefit that it would be presumed that you got HIV on the job. So their unions that came forward that were like the City University of New York guards, or taxi inspectors. And I shouldn't have, -- I wasn't making light of the professions or I was just pointing out how ridiculous this was. And it was particularly ridiculous, because I had fought to get the division of AIDS services bill passed. These bills made it so that if you retired because you had AIDS, you got to kept making three quarters of your salary and got your benefits etc etc. So which I'm in favor of, of course I'm in favor of that. By the way, no police officer, firefighter, or correction officer ever had AIDS. At least they didn't claim they did. So, but it was a benefit of throw away. And so I actually almost had a primary based on my questioning why a taxi inspector or college security officer would need to, why would we presumed that they got AIDS on the job. And because it implies you can get it through the air. And in New York and other places, people who, like someone who was in a correctional facility, if they spit at a correction officer, the correction officer was entitled to have that incarcerated person tested for HIV. And it didn't even actually have to be in the correctional facilities. It could happen just when you were with law enforcement in the outside world. That was something that people went to jail for that. For spitting or just absurd. But then at least this was, -- well I'm just thinking back on that. It was so shocking to me that people didn't get that in 1999 and 2000 that you couldn't casually contract HIV. Anyway, the candidate who was being put up against me didn't qualify for the ballot. So, I end up not having a primary and we became friendly. And I made peace with the union. I explained to them, look, I just think you need to prove that you got it on the job, then I'm fine with it. But I would say, what is the taxis, are they breastfeeding? Are they sharing needles? Are they having unprotected oral, vaginal, or anal sex? Like, what is in their job description is there that would make it so that they would contract HIV? I did eventually do a bill that was sort of an omnibus bill that said that, in order to get the benefit, you had to get basically a note from your doctor, that you got it on the job. Which maybe if you were a nurse or a doctor or a physician's assistant, in a commercial facility maybe, but still very unlikely. So, and then the other thing I did was I introduced a bill that said that if there's some sort of a dust up between incarcerated person and a correction officer that the incarcerated person was entitled to have the correction officer tested. Which of course was not in favor of either, was to make the point of how absurd it was. But I just, I remember saying that that bill got the emergency, I was like what would be different, what would be different? I mean, I could sort of understand if you would want to know before, though that's ridiculous also. Because you should always be wearing protective gear and people were already transporting people with HIV all over the place, all the time. Maybe that would make a little bit sense. But after the fact, and this was to come up again, by the way, in a sexual assault. If someone was accused of a sexual assault, they were subjected to mandatory testing. And first of all it's wrong because innocent till proven guilty. But also what you would immediately have to do is to give the person who's been assaulted the prophylactic drugs right away. Before you would even have the results of the test, that was the most important thing. And I did later on, as part of HIV/AIDS bill, get in that the state would pay for that. Because prior the victim would have to pay to have their prophylactic treatment and their testing being done. So it was just very very illogical, their approach and of course it also criminalized people with HIV. And in the same way that incarceration is not treated appropriately as often a mental health issue, they were mistreating HIV as well. And I hope they weren't doing it just to pander but I also hope or wish that they knew better. So anyway. I've never thought of myself as a very good debater. But I could compete, I found out. And one time there was this bill that said that if someone who -- oh they loved incarceration bills. My God, sex offenders, incarceration like all the time. Oh, they had to like -- what else, where else can we put a higher penalty or something, anyway. This bill said that if someone broke parole that they had to no matter what, serve out the entirety of their sentence. And the time, the New York prisons were overcrowded so they were letting people out earlier. People will get out early. If you got a 15 year sentence you could probably get out years before. But if you broke parole you would have to stay. So, I said to the Senate, well how many people would this impact? How many -- well of course he had no idea about that, but he should have. I would have, he had no idea. So, the senator that I like so much was actually the acting as the president of the Senate and he banged his gavel down. And he said we're locking the doors. He said we were all being punished. And we all had to stay locked in this [laughs] chamber and if you wanted to go to the bathroom you were escorted by a sergeant at arms. And I would like to be remembered as the person that made them close the doors. But I was remembered for asking if I could choose which sergeant would accompany me [laughs] the bathroom. I just didn't know that something -- in my -- as an elected official I have some, in that role I have some control over my blurting. But sometimes it just gets away [laughs]. So that got in the papers. Listen to me still now, I'm like [sighs deeply]. Like I -- But something else interesting happened with Senator Joe Bruno who changed rather dramatically. While I was there, but he liked me in the same way that Peter Vallone, and the council of conservative Catholic elected official maybe open their eyes. And one time he called me into his office and he said you're pretty smart, but sometimes your tongue is a little sharp. Because I would ask senators questions, Republican senators questions about their bills and they were so used to not being challenged and they were all one house bills or mostly of one house bills. So, they didn't pass the assembly, but they were so used to not having questions asked. They usually couldn't answer my questions and I was prepared for every bill that came up on the agenda with lots of questions, especially when I was gonna vote against it. And so he said your tongue is a little sharp, and what he was saying was "Don't make my guys look stupid". That's mean, he didn't say that's mean, but I have said that is being mean. So from then on -- by the way none of the Democrats picked up on this. They continued their questioning, I just would stand up and I would speak on the bill. I would just list all the reasons why I was opposed to it. I would -- I guess RBG, not that I'm comparing myself, but she always said that she would start off with what she thought the other side would say when arguing a case. And she would answer those questions first. So that's kinda what I did was I answered my own questions, that either would have tripped up the Republicans or would have maybe pointed out the absurdity of it. And I -- so I just spoke, but in a very polite manner. And then my relationship with the Republicans became much much much better. And so he gave me very good advice and I was very fond of him. Even though I believe he tried to entrap me later on, when he was in trouble with the feds over something. But he was senator of his word. And if he couldn't do something, he would say it's just not the time. But he would tell me he was honest about that and I appreciated that. So, that those first couple of years, a little bit of a blur I guess. And also we, the legislature was always unable to agree on a budget that the governor who then was Governor Pataki, a Republican. They could never agree on a budget. So we would be there all year long at least once a month, we would have to go up for a continuing resolution or sometimes we had to stay for a few days. And in retrospect, I think there was an awful lot of senators that had additional families there. And I think they liked staying there a while longer. And I also think that people that came from underserved neighborhoods, food deserts, etc. That they got some extra time than to do shopping and all that because I did. I bought my toilet paper and paper towels and because it was cheaper than Manhattan. Remember one time pulling -- I had a shopping cart in the trunk of my car and a senator said, "why do you have that shopping cart?" and I wanted to say to him "because I'm smart". But I explained to why I had it, so that I could buy bulk items more inexpensively not at Walmarts, but I did go to Kmarts and Targets. There was a huge target in Saratoga, it was like a Super Target. And unlike in New York City, everything's always picked over, the shelves were always full and pristine. I had to -- I was not chasing interns around their desk. And I was also unfortunately eating at receptions and then eating also. So I started to gain weight, which made me unhappy and I look -- and my exercise, it just disappeared. I just, worked all the time, and when I didn't work, I once a month I would go to Target once a month, TJ Maxx once a month or have to [laughs] parcel it out for these little adventures. And living like an American, unlike a New York City person. You know with cars, you throw it in the trunk ; I lived in my car. I still have that habit, snacks, beverages [laughs] in my car, an extra toothbrush, anyway. But we were there all year long. So, in 2001 was the bombing of the Trade Center and that was in my district, and it was a Democratic primary day in New York City. And I had been out handing out cards for a candidate that I was supporting. And then a little before nine, someone sorta -- someone relieved me at that location. So, I went back to my apartment to have a cup of coffee or whatever because she started six in the morning, when the polls open. And I was listening to the radio, and they said the plane had crashed in the Trade Center. And they said it was must have been just a small plane and then it was, no it's a huge plane. And then I turned on the TV and so it was happening. And then I had a view ; I could look out my window and see it. And I really don't quite know how to talk about it. And New Yorkers, you -- the only time we really talk about it is right around 9/11. Even though we all experienced it and it was terrible. I didn't know a lot of people that worked there. They're mostly people in financial services who lived in the suburbs, but I knew some of the law enforcement people. Some of my local firefighters, I knew Father Michael, who is sorta famous. Who was the chaplain to the firefighters, and gay. And probably should be canonized. There's a movement, but they probably won't because he was gay. He's a lovely man. I remember, you know I was in Chelsea, but at a certain point I saw the second tower go down. I was still in my apartment, but then I went out on the street and there were people just covered with 9/11 dust and there were phone booths or street phones in those days. There was no cell service because they were just too jammed or, so people were waiting [in] line to call their families to see that they were alive. One of the things that I did at one point was, and I don't know how we did it, but I got the other elected officials, we came together, we tried to reach out to as many people as we knew who lived down in Tribeca and Battery Park City in the financial district. And we, we sorta made a gathering in a city owned park. It was asphalt or basketball courts just above Canal Street. And it was very moving, because that was the first time that a lot of these people saw each other. And I guess it was a week later. Time is very-- I remember in the way day by day. In retrospect I wish kept a diary. But earlier the sound of the sirens. Of course there were no survivors. So there was but the police sirens and ambulances, fire trucks and just went on and on and they were posters up all over, just 8.5 by 11 printed out sheets. Have you seen this person all over Lower Manhattan? All over the Village, all over Chelsea? Have you seen this person? This person. It was really, really heartbreaking. I had, I would call a particular cousin of mine who lived in New Jersey. And she and her husband knew people in the Trade Center and asked me if I could help to find them, it was not finding anyone. And I heard an NPR announcer on the radio say a couple days later, she said it's another achingly beautiful day in New York City. Because it was every day was bright and sunny and cool and beautiful New York City days. And this terrible smell of this thing that was burning. And I went down there. And there were people, -- the Trade Center was so huge that the firefighters are just volunteers who were like digging through the rubble. They almost look like ants on an ant hill. That's how huge the footprint was, of how this had happened. And you could see, the particles in the air. And anyway I didn't -- it was a very stressful time. And we were called back to Albany. We hadn't done a budget yet. We didn't do a budget at all that year. We never got a budget done at all, kept going back all the time. But the first time, yeah, we went back in the same way that the US Congress passed the Patriot Act bills that only Barbara from the San Francisco area, for the Bay Area, Barbara Lee voted against them. We have been seeing similar kind of bills like roving wiretaps and I voted against all of them. I was the only one that voted against all them, a couple people had voted against like one or two of the bills. But I really, -- why are we restricting our freedom when allegedly what everyone is saying they hate us because we were a democracy and freedom. Which is debatable also, but why are we passing those to restrict people's rights? And the minority leader of the Senate made a speech about how the Trade Center was in his district and I know this isn't a -- yeah, not a big deal, but he did used to represent it, but in a redistricting year and the democratic leader, got to choose their own leader, their own district. Everybody else was just whatever the republicans gave them. So he had opted to not have the Trade Center to have more of Brooklyn in his district. And I was really furious about that, you could say I used to, I know people -- whatever and I was just shocked. And I didn't say anything, but I did lose my temper with him after. Ordinarily I wouldn't lose my temper about something like that, but it was a very difficult time and that primary day was canceled. The canidate I was supporting who had the momentum would have won the council seat and ended up not winning when they voted again. But the smell was still going on. That primary day, it was raining and, and so the smell was still there, but it was different. And I remember someone on his palm card, he was saying to me, can't you do something about that smell? And I was like, no I can't do anything about that. I was gonna say something else I think about the whole, that it was on primary day and so I ended up voting for the primary day that didn't count. The one that did count, then there was a runoff. I voted a lot that year, but we also went to Albany a lot that year, as I say, we never passed another budget. So, we just worked off the budget from the year before. And my district also has this museum, the Intrepid, it's an old battleship. And the executive director, who my gaydar, that meter was went off the rails with him, couldn't go high enough. He offered to me to offer to Senators to take a boat and go down and look at it from the river, so I did that. He was on my grudge list later on for other reasons, he did eventually come out, you're welcome, I'll tell you what it was. I think let's, we'll take a moment from the heaviness and I'll tell a lighter story, so he came out eventually. And, when Governor Paterson stepped in, when Governor Spitzer stepped down, there was an email exchange between Governor Paterson and this guy where he said, "I'll do everything, anything I can to help you, especially if you end up running against Andrew Cuomo," and he said, "because I'm a gay and I can be helpful and I'm a gay, but I'm not a gay like Tom Duane". Not a gay like Tom Duane. And I said, I have that, he deleted it. Probably not because of the, "I'm not a gay like Tom Duane," probably because it was an anti-Cuomo thing, and little did he know that actually Andrew Cuomo at some point just started to completely control what Governor Paterson, the worst governor New York City has ever had, was doing. So anyway, I'm not a gay like Tom Duane. And because I was a Senator, when marriage passed, because of my involvement, I got invited to some classy weddings. And I went to a couple of them, but I was invited to his wedding and I did not attend and I did not send a gift. And the other thing about him was that, I had a bad feeling when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were running for president and people would say to me, "Well you don't think Donald Trump could really win," and I would be like "I -- yeah, no I do," but people would freak out. So, I stopped saying it and I just said. [shurgs] But he was every news, TV news thing led off with him, every newspaper, there was something about him on the front page. And he was, as the president of Viacom said, he was paid a lot of money for the networks and for you know. And Americans are very -- I would say you know, TV is the beginning of social media and its evils. Because and especially by then there were all these other news stations that people were watching. But I was invited to her victory party which was very close to where I lived. It was at the New York convention center, and I lived just a few blocks from there and I didn't go, I just had a bad feeling. With the point of the story is, so this newly married couple were at Hillary's headquarters, when they realized that she lost, they walked over to the Trump headquarters and said whatever you want. And they got stuff. And a little later on I was walking down my block and it was fairly quiet day and they lived in a loft building just a half a block away from me. And there were all these cars parked, all these secret service looking and police cars, and I realized that they must be having some sort of a party or something. They were having a party for this Ambassador Grenell that was appointed one of the only openly gay people in Trump administration. Who was just a right wing, like he was sent to Germany too. Where he loved, the President of Austria. Loved all these despots and he was our-- Angela Merkel was like the beacon of the free world at the time, and that's where they sent him. So they were having a party for him. That's another point of that story. Maybe we'll come back to 9/11, but I am very upset still about those bills that got passed because they can be so misused. And we see on the federal level, I mean that everyone gets to see that. Everyone gets to see how those laws have been just used to do terrible things, and to really take away civil liberties. That the president can say we're at war without even going to Congress, if the president wants to. Unheard of in our democracy. So, after my -- so our terms are two years. So, my second term, I was determined to get SONDA to pass, which was Sexual Orientation Nondiscrimination Act, I guess ; it was a gay rights bill. And, I was also determined to include gender identity and expression in it and the bill that passed the Assembly for many years, but it never passed the Senate, even without gender identity/expression. So, the assembly built didn't have that wording in it, and this is a case where money is poisoned politics. A lot of wealthy, New York, white guys started spreading money around. They made a deal with Governor Pataki that they would make no endorsement in the gubernatorial race if he would be supportive of SONDA passing. I guess Joe Bruno was on board. By the way, in the meantime, I got to meet and became a little bit friendly with Joe Bruno's gay brother. And, later on I did a couple of things where they weren't really getting along and I got them, I put -- got them sort of back together, speaking with each other. But I -- my bill included gender identity/expression. The bill that moved through the Assembly, that landed in the Senate did not have that in it. And I believed that the bill could pass that would not make any difference, if it includes gender identity, no vote, not one vote would change. Mostly people wouldn't even notice it was in there and if they did, they were gonna and there were no voters they were voting no anyway. And the yes people were not gonna not vote for it because it was in there. So I was very upset, and I went to Joe Bruno and I said we need to put this in because if we don't put it in, it's gonna be a decade before it can't -- it won't go on its own. And he said to me you have a point there and I think he would have done it. But these rich guys were too afraid that it might not pass, they didn't wanna have to, the assembly, have to pass the bill again with extra language in it. And so I put an amendment on the floor when the bill came up, something else terrible had happened. No, no, what is it? Well, but he was not a party, I'm telling you. I was playing chicken with the bill. I wouldn't commit to supporting it if it didn't include gender identity and expression, which is not. And Marty Connor, who had been our leader, was dethroned and David Paterson became the new minority leader and these three gay men asked if I would sort of make an introduction to him officially. And one of them was something I've known for many years. It had not been a perfect relationship, it was a political relationship. He represented real estate interests, but he also helped a lot of queer organizations. Then there was the head of the statewide LGBT Organization, it took me a minute to think of it. It's not just [inaudible], but I blocked it out, The Pride Agenda, it was called The Pride Agenda. It was -- I think they had like used a brand or something to come up with that name so that--anyway, just put the initials in. But anyway, The Pride Agenda. The head of The Pride Agenda and this other wealthy gay man, and on the way up, Ethan said to me, "Well, but if the bill comes up, will you vote for it?" I said, "Of course I'll vote for it, of course I will". And one of them went to the press to the New York Times and they called me and asked me, so it made me look like a liar. I was so upset, like why did they do --? It was terrible, I was very -- I knew it was a tactic, Of course I would vote for it, but I did put an amendment on the floor. Most of the democrats voted for it, but I was very angry. I knew it was going to pass anyway, there was no, it was going to pass. The deal had been made, the deal had been cut. So I said, I think some angry words about people that didn't wanna put gender identity and expression. And when the celebration afterwards, there were some people that wouldn't shake my hand, you know congratula -- Mind you, I was the one that you know -- I was the only Sen -- I like -- hate crimes. My name was not on the bill, but there was no doubt, that I was pushing it the force behind it, yeah, other people wanted it, but I was annoying about it. And then one of them started to call my campaign donors and told them not to give me money anymore. It's all right, there were enough people in the world that I could raise enough money to keep going. But I just thought that was -- because for as long as I can remember, I had been, I'm passionate about the rights of people who we would, now say non-binary, regardless of their gender identity/expression. It was just something I always, I don't know I can't imagine any other -- feeling any other way. And so I was really upset. It took 20 years, not 10 years. It took 20 years to get it passed. And there was something wonderful that happened. I was out of the Senate, and it got passed when Governor Cuomo was governor and he was signing at the LGBT center. And I had stuff with Governor Cuomo prior to this which I'll probably talk to you about. A lot because he broke my heart. Anyway the Executive Director Glenda Tessa, who I love, of the center was making introduction to assembly members. And senator so and so, and council member, borough president. And then our own former New York State Senator Tom Duane and they're like, [inaudible] gave me a standing ovation. And even though I couldn't get it passed, they knew how much I fought to try to make it happen. I'm very grateful for that. All right let's move out of this. So then when the governor with whom I'd had stuff with and had not spoken to me at all for years, he saw the reaction so he couldn't not say something. So he said "I know Tom Duane. We go way back, you know my father had AIDS." and I thought -- because I'll tell you there'll be more -- this big relationship, and non-relationship with Andrew Cuomo and I was a supporter of his father's. What about us? But anyway when they do the ceremony thing and he does a letter. And he gives a pen away as he's signing his name and somebody go up there and get a pen. So I went up and I got a pen from him and as I was walking away, he turned and he said, "Are we okay?" I said "Yes governor, we're okay". I had to forgive him. I didn't know about all the stuff that was to come out afterwards. But at that time, I forgave him for the way he had treated me really after marriage passed in New York. But sometimes say for some elected officials, it's just business and I know that and I wouldn't take things personally. But I work better with people that had a core, even if they were for the death penalty or they're anti. If this was something, well then we could talk about it. But if someone's just doing it because they were pandering or afraid for their district. They're not gonna change their mind if they already know better. The fact when marriage passed, there were many Republicans hugging and kissing me who hadn't voted for because they were afraid to. But they were so happy that it passed. And so a whole other story with the governor to wanting to make the 11 o'clock news. I kinda have lost my place in the world now. SONDA, everyone mad at me. You know later on when I was in the majority I passed our safe schools act. It was called the Dignity for All Students Act which I couldn't get passed when I was in the minority unfortunately. But it included gender identity and expression, and no one said a word about it. The couple of people who were voting against it were voting against it anyway. And just to prove my point that it really -- not a story except for the people who were impacted or wouldn't be held by anyway. So my second term was SONDA. Now it sounds like that's all, [laughs] I didn't only do queer stuff. I did a lot of other stuff too. I used to say I spent 85% of my time doing you know, when I get 15% of press for it. The 15%, I just spend it on queer stuff. I get 85% [laughs] of my press on that. But this senator who was the county exec who did lock us all in because I asked that question, not of him, but of another senator. I asked him to come to New York with me. And I wanted to show him, -- Mayor Giuliani had this policy that if you were on public benefits, you had to work. So, there were, especially women with children who were going to school to try to -- because education is key. But maybe they're going to school at Manhattan Community College or Brooklyn Community College. But they were assigned to clean a park in the Bronx, and children go to school and doing it was impossible. It was impossible for them. And it made it so they just couldn't -- I used to see women they jump, they run into McDonald's on the way to their classes at Manhattan Community College. And I guess they must have asked a family member to watch their children or something like that. So, how anxious they were to have a better life. But there was a program -- so Mayor Giuliani said they have to go work in par -- not even with working in parks or anything of course. But not because you're poor and you need money to get by on. And mothers would make the best choice. Sometimes they wouldn't make money so they could keep the whole family on Medicaid. Otherwise, they would lose their benefits, they'd lose their food stamps, they'd lose their rental assistance. So they were kinda trapped. But going to school, which is work would not have threatened their remaining having benefits for the family while they went to school. Anyway, I asked Senator Mayer to come to New York because I knew he would understand this. And I brought him to -- there's a group at Hunter College Welfare Rights [Initiative] that really got me engaged in this issue. So we visited with them, we went to Bronx Community College, we went to Hunter, we went to private university as well. And also, we had a meeting with this group called the New York [City] Partnership which is the umbrella group for New York business people. And he was very engaged in what was going on and what people were saying. And when we met with the partnership people, they said look, nothing wrong with cleaning parks, but work study and internship is giving people skills for jobs that we actually have and wanna fill. So, they were very supportive of it. And I remember Senator Mayer saying, are these real jobs? And they are real jobs. They got real jobs, challenging jobs, important jobs. But work that does help to move along in your work life and your career. And he said at what point, "Well aren't we like giving them an extra advantage? What about Joe at the gas station?" Well Joe he can go to community college that's-- but we're making it impossible. So he said, so are we giving this special treatment? I said no we're just not holding them back. And it was like a light, and then he really really got it. And he liked it so much that he started a program up in his district, up in Oneida. And I met the people who were running it and of course they were lesbians. I don't know if he knew [laughs] but yeah, my gaydar was off the charts. But that was thrilling that he liked it so much and he believed. So he was a conservative Republican, but he believed that government actually could help people because he was county exec. Not a mistreated Republican assembly member and he brought it to his county because it really helped people. So that's the kinda -- those are the -- he voted for hate crimes, he didn't vote for SONDA. I was very upset about that. And then someone said to me, "Well did you ask him?" And I said [laughs] no because I thought -- it never occurred to me that he wouldn't vote for it. His daughter had a huge influence on him, and I don't think he asked her about SONDA, he asked her about hate crimes. He wasn't in office when marriage came up, but he said that she would have like [swipes hand]. But there's a whole story about who convinced senators to vote for marriage. And often times it was the spouse, and the family, the kids. In fact, there was this show on Showtime about first ladies and for years and years I said to people -- because Barack Obama, he was in favor of marriage equality when he was a Senate, state senator in Illinois. He checked the box with the gay organization you know, the political group asked a question. But then he backed off when he was running for president. But I said, I'm sure there was some morning when Michelle said "Barack, me and Malia and Sasha. We are not gonna talk to you until you come out in favor of this and on this." You know it's fiction. But it's a very similar saying that it's exactly the way it was with Michelle Obama saying, one of the kids, you know. Not understanding, how could you not vote for civil rights. How could you not be for this? It was a very similar situation. So I know what's going on the White House and I always thought Joe Brun -- I'm sorry, Joe Biden just blurted out that he was for marriage. This television fictional makes it seem as if he was sort of-- that Michelle went to him and asked him to do it. Who knows what really happened. Anyway. Because who doesn't love Michelle Obama, who would never run for president, but I would vote for her in a heartbeat. After 9/11, similar to how veterans got special benefits in New York State, different tax breaks. And also, the spouses of police officers and firefighters who died in the line of duty. I'm applying men, mostly men. That a whole other story of women fighting to get into the fire department particularly. But there are a lot of bills that gave benefits to spouses. And the senator who was the chair of the committee, was the codes committee, that the bills would go through before they came to the floor. He was very conservative. He was very much in favor of the death penalty. I believe he was a former state trooper, and he was a lovely man, and a gentleman, and would listen to critique. So, for instance, there'd be a bill about something having to do with sexual assault, but it never made it never made a differentiation. That's not the right word, but. An 18 year old, and a 16 year old or a 15 year old, is different than a 40 year old, and a 13 year old, but the laws never would make any -- there was no delineating in any way. And when I raised that with him, he -- it gave him pause for thought, and he started to modify the bills a little bit when he could. So, I was happy about that because I knew kids, you know, [inaudible] kids that -- stories like -- this one boy was having a relationship with another boy who was -- one was 18, the other one was 15, lived with his grandmother and his grandmother turned in the 18 year old. He went to Rikers, he went to serve time and get on the sex offenders list. And the level of the sex offender list that you get with the 1, 2, or 3, it depends on how much money you have and what lawyer you have. There is no -- and in New York City, it's impossible to not live near a school, it's impossible. And they're not allowed to live in public housing. And believe me, I do know something about sex offenders and some can go into remission and not reoffend, but you kind of never know. So, a sex offender should never be in a room with a child alone ever. And if they are then it's trouble. But there are ways that people can not reoffend. In fact, I visited a New York State correctional facilities where they had a program for sex offenders. And I was very prepared to think it was not going to be a good program. And in this particular facility, which was run by a woman, it was in Oneida actually, was really, really good. And I got to see the men who first arrived and first started the program and the denial they had about what their offense had been. And then I got to see a group that was ready to finish, and about how they took responsibility for what they had done and new tools to use to help them to not reoffend. But they were all concerned about getting jobs and a place to live when they got out. And the other interesting thing was none of them were victimized when they went back into general population and their other facilities if they had been through this program. There was another program which I didn't get to visit, which I heard wasn't that good, but I was very, very impressed. And it's an area that I know about, and I'll probably talk about. The other thing that I did was I would vote for these bills that gave benefits to the spouses of people who were killed in 9/11 [coughs]. And now of course it's also people, the long term effects of the spouses. But I said, look, I'm voting for the bill, but next year could you add domestic partner in? And he said yes, just don't tell anyone else. I was like fine with me. So there are a lot of things that I made no noise about, but I just got it done. I mean, they had money for HIV/AIDS that came from the federal government. They don't know what to do with it, so they would give it to me to help them to give it around the state where I knew groups, but they would give me money to give away. So, I recall when I say, "Someone is gonna call you and they're gonna tell you how to get $100,000. It's gonna come to you from the state, but do not thank me, just do whatever they say". The Republi -- really all but one liked me, but nobody liked him either. And anyway, so I was able to do things quietly and that was fine. I just wanted to get things done. And by the way, the SONDA, the gay rights bill, my name was not on that bill. It wasn't my bill, but a Republican was the lead sponser. There were no Democrats on the bill. It was always given to a moderate Republican to make them seem moderate, that they with the lead sponsor of these bills. Didn't always help them, but just a funny way to do business, very un-senatorial. I just hesitated because we haven't talked about this, but there's something very personal that happened with me when I went to Albany that I did. You can decide whether or not you want to use it, I'm fine with it. So I'm in recovery from drugs and alcohol for now 39 years, and I have issues of food and money and people. Not gambling except, I have no problem with slot machines or things like that. But anything involving skill, because I'm an ADHD, I would -- if It was poker or 21, I would never leave because I would have to think about it. And I know that because I'd never been to the track before, and Saratoga is a big, you know. They have trotters and we all went on a trip there all the senators and a couple of them knew how to read the score cards. What race is the horse in, they knew who the jockey was, what was the place where they had competed before. And they explained it all to me and I went and I bet and I won, I won and I won, and I placed and I won and I won. I was anxious they weren't gonna get -- because they came to the tables that they were going to get there in time and I didn't want to leave. And as I went out I said, I must never come here again [laughs]. So gambling fortunately, I mean there's no skill involved buying lottery tickets fortunately [laughs]. I guess they share their strategies with those cards to see whether or not they won or not. Anyway, I am also a recovering sex addict, sex and love addict, romantic obsessive, but I'm a garden variety sex addict. When I got elected to the Senate, I said to myself, I don't want to take this with me, I don't want to take this with me. And so I went to a five day outpatient program and I learned a lot, and was able to not completely recover, but it was, let's say harm reduction was much better night, so to go to 12 step meetings. And then I went to, it was my first week in Albany, my staff person, my counsel Mark, who I just love and miss. So, the first week I have to say, I won't be here next week because I'm going to a five day workshop on sex addiction because I'm a sex addict. Anyway, yeah, he went along fine. But that summer, that September, I went to a two week program in Los Angeles and when I finished that program, I never -- I've been sexually sober since then. And sometimes with anorexia, they went from being not an anorexic to being anorexic. But the people at this place when I was talking about what happened in the correctional facility. The place that I went to, they had all trained in the hospital in California called Delano. And there are two tracks in Delano, one was for sex offenders, and one was for garden variety. And at one point they just said, "We're only gonna do sex offenders, so the garden variety people had to go someplace else". And so they started this institute where they also trained therapists, so that's where I went. But they were very tough, you had to say the things that -- I mean, I did not -- my behaviors were not particularly offender behavior. I did have sex with people, but I always used condoms, which of course laws often don't differentiate between [inaudible]. But I was very rigidly since 1983 about safe sex with anyone I had sex with. Anyway, one of the groups, there were just three of us. They were very small, and the place was just starting out, so it was affordable. But there was a man there who molested some of his children and some of his grandchildren. And I have a history of abuse in my family. And he got to hear from me, the impact it had on me, but I also heard his story and his grandfather had molested him. So hopefully he would break the chain, anyway. But the good thing was I was in Albany and I would go to anonymous drugs and alcohol meetings, and I would go to anonymous help group, to help, to say recovery from my sex addiction. And they didn't know who I was, which was great because most of the meetings in New York City, many of them are at the center where people would-- So I was anonymous and it was great. It wasn't until much later on that they found out. And being a senator from Upstate is a much bigger thing than New York City because they would say, "You're a senator like Joe Bruno?" But anyway, they did not know, and I didn't say what I did for work and it was great. The good thing about going to this place was when I left there, the shame that I'd been feeling my whole life lifted, and I realized that I had been living my whole life with carrying this burden of shame that I didn't realize I had until I didn't have it. So right now what's happening is I'm feeling shame because I'm talking about this at all. There's nothing to be ashamed of, there's no reason, but it's a physical thing, it starts here goes up and my face turns a little bit red, and I can feel that I'm having a shame attack, but there's nothing I said to be -- and I'm glad I know that so I'm not carrying that burden. It was such a great burden to be able to unload, you know because-- anyway. So that's why I -- when I went to the correction facility with the people that had been offenders, I kind of had a lot of knowledge about it. It became very -- actually, I thought I might go into the field when I left office. I haven't, but I might still someday. But anyway, it was a great place to recover. And then when I was in New York City I didn't care who saw me go into whatever room. If they saw me they saw me, they didn't, you know what I mean, maybe it was meant to be that way and it's a disease. And I don't know why I was too ashamed to go for such a long time and I was in other groups where people are anonymous. So, I mean who else is there, the same anonymous people. Who are they going to say -- So I don't know why I wasn't able to do it sooner, but I was able to do it when I was able to do it, and I was very glad about that. One of the bills that I fought very hard for was to make it possible for people who had been abused by persons in positions of authority. And this was not popular among my colleagues, and everyone thought it was, there were a lot of people who said, oh you're just anti catholic. I'm like, no, and this isn't even just about that. It's about boy scout leaders and coaches and the person down the block, this is not particular, it's not not about them. I think it does make you crazy and saying, Well, this has bankrupted a lot of diocese. No, they go into bankruptcy on purpose to delay having to give depositions and things. It's a tactic, they transfer the money to a high school or a cemetery, that's how they say it's their bankrupt. They don't go bankrupt because they're paying anything out there, they're delaying that. So since then, New York, they actually did pass it, and I'm really happy about that. But then it was a huge celebration, my God, I was like, -- everybody hated me, but they're all these heroes. Again, I am thrilled that it passed and it gives you a year window opportunity. I don't know actually what my bill said from the time that you reasonably could have recovered the memory. So like a therapist would have to certify sort of, that you recovered the memory and it was for a year from then that you were able to take some action. And it was very important bill, and it did get me on the O'Reilly Factor. Bill O'Reilly, who I was eligible to be yelled at by him. And it's funny because at the time, the irony, that I was on the show about positions, people in positions of authority misusing it with power and sexual inappropriateness. But he sits higher than you do. And then I said, yeah, your eyes is so much bluer in person than in TV, which kind of threw him off his game. So in that one he said, "Well, I agree with you, but some would say you're only doing this because," -- like I said, "Well, then you did just say that". And you'd be surprised at the number of people who I didn't think would be Fox News watchers that actually said, I saw you on TV. I went on something else against the first Iraq war and I signed some advertisement, a full page in the newspaper. Remember newspapers, full page in the newspaper, and there was something in it that said something about Nazis and if I had seen that, I wouldn't have signed it. So anyway, I went on his show because I was opposed to the first Iraq War, and he said "What, why did you sign that letter?" And I literally said, "I don't know, why did I sign that letter?" An then he got a little bit thrown off, and the guy who he had on who was very opposed to this group that was the anti-Iraq War was like a wacko. And so I seem perfectly normal so that went pretty well. But I did notice some things, in Fox there were attractive women in knit dresses, and they seem sort of important, and I would introduce myself, and I didn't know their names and they were very annoyed that I didn't know their names. Because many of the women political experts are very attractive women which was then is still the case. But one of the shows with O'Riley, I heard that this very low level employee, it was her birthday. So, Bill wanted a cup of coffee. So she came on the set with a cup of coffee and I said, "Bill, it's her birthday today". So what could he? He didn't even know she existed. His coffee appeared cause he wanted it, but he made him say, happy birthday [laughs]. And I was asked to go on another time, and I didn't know why the producer was hysterical that I wouldn't go, and she really wanted me to go. And it turns out she was the woman that came forward, that had been horribly harassed ; the last one in a long line of harassers. So that's why she was so -- and I don't know, there's a certain energy that people who have been victims have that I can tell. And they would often come to discuss some issue. Not that issue but I knew what they really wanted to do was talk about that issue. But the other thing is that New York just passed a bill, adult survivors of sexual abuse by persons in positions of authority. And when I first went to the Senate, all the assembly members in the Senate went to Albany Medical Center to get a physical. I was like, why are we getting special treatment? I thought, why doesn't everyone get a physical? Well, I found out because senators and so many people were not necessarily dropping dead in their seats, but there's a lot of older people, but they wanted to have everyone's medical records in case they had to be brought there for treatment while they were in Albany. So I went to get my physical assessment and everything and talk about, yeah, you know all the things. Mental health, HIV, the list goes on and on, HPV. So, I am sitting on the examining table with the doctor and telling him my health history and all of a sudden, I felt an erect penis pushing up against me and I did exactly what textbook, I made believe it wasn't happening. I just -- like it couldn't be happening, but it was happening. And when I went back to my office, I immediately told my council about it. So, I did tell someone right away and then I raised it in therapy, in a group therapy, I brought it up. And then when I left office, I was on the board of the anti-violence project but nearly at a fundraiser for them, I might tell a story about what happened in the parking lot at the gay bar and at this particular fundraiser, I started to tell that story and I said, wait, I wanna tell you a different story. And I told that story, and the executive director -- and I said, I've always regretted that I didn't go up and confront him because I'm sure he's doing it to other people and it escalates. And I didn't do it, so shame on me. Anyway, she said, I'll go with you. So when this bill passed, I called her, she's [inaudible]. I said, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go do it, I'll do it publicly because I can, because anything that I could be shamed about and that I might even feel shamed about, my way to deal with it is to just yell it out kind of. And then other people, I feel like it might give them courage too to do it and why can't I -- I'm able to do it. I'm very grateful for that gift. And so of course I don't talk about my addictions. [laughs] Of course it's on film for the world, but I'm very selective about who I tell, and sometimes I tell someone that I think needs to hear it. So not only do I recruit people to be open about their queerness, but I sometimes recruit people who I think they need the help of a support group to deal with an addiction problem. So that's very important. That said, so I've moved twice since then, and I kept his name and the papers and I knew exactly where they were. And in the most recent move, I had no idea what boxes they were in. This move was a very bad experience in the middle of the pandemic. And I looked and I looked, and I finally found it. And so I know, now I have his name and he's still in Albany and he's still practicing so I can still -- I don't know what I'm gonna do with it. Whether I'm gonna go see him first. I don't know what I'm gonna do. But I'm gonna do something with it because -- this is the other thing, Republicans didn't let Democrats have hearings, but they let me have forums, which for all intents and purposes were exactly like hearings. They filmed them and witnesses, just no other senators would ever go to them because there was controversial topics. One of them was on survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and story after story after story. And yeah, this is not absolutely true, but it's sort of a kind of thing, that men are so angry and would yell at me, why isn't this bill passed? And the women would usually weep. And as an anger and a sadness, two of my big emotions, I understand that. But it turned out also my counsel Mark had been the victim, he recovered the memory, he was the victim, horribly victimized by a priest, horrible. Like taken away to a cabin with other boys, and they would all be afraid he was gonna have them sleep with him, and he would take them to porn stores, just terrible, terrible. And he's so bad that he was defrocked before it was being done, but it was very rough for Mark to deal with it. And the gift is that because he was there, he helped me a lot to have these things because these stories needed to be told. But he went to the priest to the cemetery where he was buried, and he was standing by his grave and his nose started to bleed and he never had a nosebleed before. So anyway, the democratic assembly member who carried my bill with the one year window of opportunity to report in addition to going forward, her son had been a victim of abuse. So now interestingly she had a daughter who was a lesbian, but she was against marriage. Anyway, but she kept weakening the bill and weakening the bill, and she was very upset. She'd come to the me and I would say, "Did they tell you it would pass if you weakened it?" And she said, "no," so I said, "Why are you weakening it?" Maybe if something was gonna pass. Because it's a whole story about how parity for mental health got passed, which I may rush through later on but I said, "Marge, why are you doing that?" And the most vocal opponent in the assembly who, I'm Pollyanna, I never think anyone's ever doing anything wrong. He turned out he was horrible, everybody who had worked for him, he had to not run for re-election. He was --nand then I realized why they were all opposed to it, because of the statute of limitations. If you eliminated that for this crime. There were so many of these guys, maybe women too, but guys that were liable to be -- and that's why they were blocking it. And I also think, spoiling my book, that marriage, when marriage finally did pass. I believe that Governor Cuomo went to the cardinal and said to the cardinal, you know what you let marriage pass, I'll never let this bill go through. And conveniently the cardinal was out of town when marriage passed and the bill went nowhere until in the Senate the Democrats had a majority large enough so that even if the governor vetoed it, they could override his veto and that's how it got done. No, I don't know that's true. Like I don't know that Michelle Obama at the breakfast table story is true, but I believe that that was that he made that deal. So anyway, parity for mental health not to sell this. You know, when you're in the minority, you really have to can't do like a lot of bills. Because when I was in the majority, I just shoveled out bills for two years. I just, I passed more bills in the assembly health committee. So he couldn't get -- he couldn't keep up with me because --"We can't pass because the Republicans won't do it". Well, I was literally shoveling out these bills. Anyway, I'm still a minority and I wanted parity for mental health and in New York was called Timothy's Law And every day on the floor of the Senate, you know, there'd be like 10, 20 pieces of legislation that we would vote on and my council and I we always we did our homework, and I knew what I was gonna vote yes and no on and why. But I would pick out one bill, and make it about Timothy's Law because it had to be germane to the issue at hand what the bill was addressing. So say it was a veterans bill, I would stand up and I would say, you know, "Veterans, they deserve respect and of course we should provide this benefit. But you know, when a veteran passes away in the line of duty, people in the family are very sad and they can get depressed, but unfortunately they can't get any help because we haven't passed Timothy's Law". And it became like a guessing game, people try to guess which bill it was. I was gonna do that on, and usually it wasn't the one they thought, but I did that every day, every, every day that I was there, I did it and finally it passed, and it just didn't have enough behavioral health and didn't have substance abuse treatment, that was to come later. But at least it had parity for general mental health and as a consumer, although my insurance did cover it, but not all insurance covered it. So anyway, he had a press conference and he invited me to it. And never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever did the Republicans when the bill passed, invited a Democrat to stand with them. And I was invited with three other -- well Joe Bruno and three other Republican senators who ostensibly where, you know, the powers that wanted the bill passed, and there was me. And he really had to, you know, he, he said thanks to Tom Duane basically. Not thanks to Tom Duane being so annoying, but you know it worked. And that's how I got things done and all that, I just did things differently. You know, I just -- I would figure out some way to get it done and that was a good one, and it got the job done so. MF: Well I wonder if that's not a good place to stop for today-- TD: For all of our mental health. MF: I just also love that story because it really shows your tenacity. TD: Nothing if not. Some would say stubborn, I would say dogged, determined, and tenacious. Yes, thank you. It's sometimes stubborn. MF: Well, that's a good quality too. Well, I just want to say thank you again for meeting with me and hopefully we can do this again and talk a little bit about marriage. Yes, because it's a tragedy and a cele --, it's everything. MF: It's a big story. TD: And it's Andrew Cuomo too. It's got everything. MF: Well we have to do another one of these. So thank you again. TD: It was well, you know, well, I -- I went to a reunion. I took a picture of me holding this sign because it was three classes because of the pandemic and I left in '75. I finished over two of my courses about class of '76, but it took me until '77 to complete those two courses. So, it was perfect for me, and I was a griffin, so, I did know students from '77, which was the thing, I think I love being in griffin, which is a residence hall counselor. I really loved that that duty or whatever -- wasn't -- didn't feel like work. Let's just say that. It was, it was great. But I did feel out of place in the beginning and then, you know, as I did in the Senate, I just, I just made it comfortable in my own way. I made it comfortable, and a lot of it was about revealing things about myself which sort of opened the door for them to reveal things too. So I may come back to some more reunions. MF: If you do you should -- I hope you'll call me. TD: Oh 100% yes. Are you kidding? Yes, absolutely. Well, I did talk about you, I said I'm here to do an interview with Mary Foltz. I said, I can't believe it. She's a lesbian feminist and gender studies in the English department and she has tenure. Because when I asked if you had tenure, and you said, "yes I have tenure," I almost fell out of my seat. I couldn't -- at Lehigh, what? So, but it's not a bit -- I mean they're better, but there's still a lot of work that needs to be done here, well everywhere. But you know, it starts from the conservatives. But anyway, I had my picture taking holding the sign, and then I -- the President was watching the whole thing. So I did -- I nod and walked over to him, and I said, "Can I have a picture with you?" Because my older brother is very active in the alumni association, and he was on the board here. And if he goes around, you know, there's a traveling show with other graduates to help alumni to loosen up their checkbooks. And so, I made sure that I had that picture and I sent them to him just to prove that I was here because I had never come before. Maybe Lehigh/Lafayette game from time to time back -- I told you in '85 I think when the Ethan Felson tried to start something but-- and I didn't come for the game, I came to be [inaudible]. Like you want to go to the Lehigh/Lafayette game. Yes, absolutely. So anyway-- MF: Well, we will schedule another interview, and again, thank you so much. So glad that you came to visit us at Lehigh. TD: [goes to shake hands] We'd better do that first right. Remember gloves? 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.) 01:46:30 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 Thomas Duane, June 12, 2022 (Part 4) Description An account of the resource Thomas Duane recounts his time in the State Senate fighting for legislation like the Sexual Orientation Nondiscrimination Act (SONDA) and Mental Health Parity (Timothy's Law), as well as his personal relationships with HIV and addiction. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-36 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-06-12 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/1ba89b61c5f191fa57e377fb1a2a305b.png d73647cc46d7e6470862f7ff22f9ccd7 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 of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Thomas Duane 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-31.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 April 2, 2022 Thomas Duane, April 2, 2022 (Part 3) LGBT-31 1:38:15 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Thomas Duane Mary Foltz video/mp4 DuaneThomas_20220402.mov 1.0:|31(5)|64(14)|87(11)|114(5)|139(3)|168(5)|187(9)|208(6)|231(7)|250(7)|269(17)|294(4)|313(17)|334(16)|353(4)|380(9)|401(5)|422(14)|451(5)|472(16)|495(13)|520(7)|547(6)|576(12)|601(8)|622(12)|643(11)|664(13)|687(10)|706(9)|727(6)|752(7)|769(13)|792(14)|821(7)|846(7)|869(6)|892(10)|921(6)|944(5)|965(5)|984(4)|1009(6)|1032(5)|1055(5)|1078(6)|1097(5)|1116(13)|1141(3)|1160(12)|1185(12)|1210(16)|1237(7)|1260(7)|1287(4)|1304(10)|1327(3)|1352(13)|1373(3)|1392(5)|1417(6)|1438(13)|1461(10)|1484(14)|1507(13)|1534(16)|1557(11)|1580(16)|1603(4)|1628(9)|1649(4)|1678(17)|1709(13)|1740(11)|1769(7)|1790(8)|1817(11)|1834(15)|1861(9)|1884(10)|1911(11)|1940(6)|1967(5)|1994(16)|2019(9)|2046(12)|2071(5)|2094(15)|2119(4)|2144(2)|2177(2)|2206(4)|2227(11)|2252(13)|2277(17)|2300(15)|2333(4)|2366(16)|2377(10) 0 https://youtu.be/uMdnRN9RYm8 YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here again with Senator Thomas Duane to talk about his life and experiences as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from ACLS, and today we are meeting again at his offices in Manhattan, and it's April 2nd, 2022. So earlier we signed a consent form. I'm just going to go back through some consent questions. Do you consent to this interview today? &#13 ; &#13 ; THOMAS DUANE: Yes. 0 364 Motivation for Running for City Council&#13 ; MF: Well, we're so glad to talk to you again today. And yesterday we ended in 1991. We talked about your runs for city council and your successful run for city council. And I want to start today, I know we're going to move into your work on city council, but I just I wanted to start with why did you run for city council? What were the issues that mattered to you that inspired that run? Could you talk a little bit about, you know, why city council? Why did you decide to run? &#13 ; &#13 ; TD: Well. There was no openly gay member on the city council when I ran in ‘89, you know, sort of around ‘85 and somebody actually ran very many years before that, Jim Owles is his name, and also lost. But the person who ran before me, David Berg, did very well. And, I just thought it was important that there be an openly queer person on the city council and the district after ‘89 was drawn to make it more… to give a better shot -- to give to make the odds better for a gay person to win. 0 906 Joy of the Journey TD: And this is a terrible way to talk about this, except for it's kind of the right way, but it's inappropriate, but it's perfect, you know, and I even say this to my students, oh, my gosh, if anyone ever sees this. But I do preface it by like, I know this is inappropriate and I just-- but, you know, I need to explain something to you as you move forward in life. I said it's the joy of the journey, which is a which is a 12-step slogan. 0 1100 Concentrating on Supporters TD: And I oftentimes tell people running for office that, you know, we can always talk about the orgasm part, but I do say, like be present in the moment while you’re doing this because this really is like the, you know, this is -- I mean, it's best to win, it is better than losing, but it's really being present, you know, as it goes through. And just concentrate on the people that are unexpectedly for you, not the people that you thought were going to be for you, but aren't, you know, focus on the ones that are for you. 0 1451 Unfair Press Coverage / Fashion Sense TD: And I just I complained at one point, I believe, about how, you know, I always noticed that when women elected officials are covered in the press, even though they're trying to be better now, but the press would always talk about what they were wearing or what their hair was like. And I used to get that, too. 0 1590 City Council Endeavors / Setting Regulations MF: You do have that cool factor. I want to talk about -- So you get into office 1991. What's happening on city council at that time? What are the big issues that you're facing with city council? What are you fighting for at that time? &#13 ; &#13 ; TD: Well, I think people. Like me, maybe originally think that you get elected to house the homeless and feed the hungry. And that is something that is always there. It's something, you know, I'm always fighting for. But it was also about sidewalk cafes and discothèques and, you know, quality of life issues, which was [inaudible] because there were things that I hadn't really noticed before, for instance. Whether you call them peddlers or vendors, but people on the street who would put their wares out on the sidewalk, some people really hate that. I never even really noticed. I just thought, you know, it came with the territory. In fact, right across the street from where I live, there were people who would put things out. 0 1921 Discothèques TD: Noise complaints at the time, discothèques, discos were very big and they were both gay and non-gay and they tended to be concentrated in my district and some of them, many of them, you know, absolutely no problems and nobody complained about them. But sometimes when a place would become less in and say sort of a way that these places where first it would be gay, then it would be slowly but surely more heterosexual, white, heterosexual, and then it would mostly become people of color, be it was, say, urban youth. And but the responsibility for how a disco was many, many owners of these places licensed it out to promoters. 0 2161 Loftdwellers / Ensuring Habitable Real Estate/Living Conditions for New Yorkers TD: Again, I had a lot of especially, I then, but in my district I had a lot of loft dwellers who had moved into manufacturing or commercial spaces and had fixed them up and they had to fight landlords to be allowed to stay. So, there was a whole battle over saving tenants who were lofts. And I got even more when I was elected to the Senate because I got all of SoHo and TriBeCa where there were, you know, even more of these lofts. 0 2642 Fighting for Tenants TD: But, of course, I was fighting for a lot of other, you know, you know, on behalf of tenants. And I got you know, I passed a bill and again, this has been improved upon after I left, but it made it illegal for a landlord to discriminate against someone based on how they paid their rent. So people are probably familiar with the Section Eight program. So it would be illegal to discriminate against someone because they paid their rent with a Section Eight voucher. 0 2754 Division of AIDS Services (DAS) TD: So I like that bill a lot, actually, and I'm glad that it got built upon. You know, another bill to make it so that buildings would have the lighting outside to make the streets safer. And but, you know, the two -- maybe the two things that I'll be most remembered for. Maybe the two biggest things. One was, I'm putting -- there was an agency that was started by Mayor Ed Koch and continued through Mayor Dinkins. And it put within our city human resources department where people get their entitlements or their benefits, government benefits, something called the Division of AIDS Services, DAS. It’s now called HASA, [HIV/AIDS Services Administration]. At the time, it was DHS, and when Mayor Giuliani was running for office, he said that he'd heard from people that it didn't work that well. 0 2947 Speaking Against Homophobic Comments in Council TD: And really, I was able to only because of my press visit, you know, when I said earlier where, you know, because it was the case, but it's also having a seat at the table. I'm sorry. I should have said that. That's maybe the most important thing that changes everything to have a seat at the table. And so my being there was very helpful. And I had had a. When I first got elected to the council, the chair of the health committee had been there for a very long time and was kind of an old fashioned gentlemen, I’ll say. He was quoted in the papers as saying that gay rights caused AIDS. 0 3341 Creating Fair Treatment for HIV/AIDS Patients TD: Well, the battle continued to stop the you know, reconfiguring, reforming the Division of AIDS Services, you know, and one of the things that happened was by… Well, every year in the budget, everybody in the council would fight to stop the mayor's cuts to the Division of AIDS Services. So that was very important and they were very sensitive to that. And that was very you know, that's no substitute for a seat at the table kind of thing. So not just because of being gay, but the HIV was very powerful for making that be a reality that everyone then cared a little bit. I mean, many of them did care about the Division of AIDS Services, but they cared maybe just a little bit more now that they understood the stakes are so high that, you know, there was a possibility of under, you know. 0 3847 Battling for Domestic Partner Benefits TD: The other thing that I'm probably very known for was a battle to provide domestic partner benefits, which would only go to city employees. You couldn't mandate that private employers would provide domestic partnership benefits. But previously there had been a bill where there was just a registry, and that entitles you to visit whoever it was in the hospital and I don't even think you got benefits, but it was just a place to sort of recognize your relationship in some way. 0 4131 Advocating for Community-Created Land and Zoning Plans / Attempting to Create Affordable Housing TD: But, you know, I also was a big champion of communities being able to create their own land use and zoning plans. So there was in the new city charter which made 51 city councilman was there something in there that said that a community board could bring forward their own land use and zoning plan. They had to go through, you know, reviews and hearings and everything for the plan. And then the City Planning Commission would have to decide whether or not to accept it. 0 4365 Chelsea Planning Committee TD: And the Chelsea Planning Committee had been, it was a combination of, like, small business owners and people who cared deeply about preservation because we expanded the Chelsea historic district and housing activists and just, you know, average citizens in Chelsea that all wanted to sort of preserve the character of the neighborhood. And everybody got everything they wanted except for the people who were fighting for low income housing, really, more or less my team, are the ones that got blocked out. 0 4633 Keeping Records / Sign-on Letters TD: Oh. I'm trying to think if there's -- I mean, I could list, you know, a whole number of things that I did that were, you know, really very good things, just not very high profile. But let me say I also did something. There were a few things that I started. We used to cut out – this is me with scissors -- cut out newspaper articles if I was in it, and we kept them in scrapbooks, and we also kept every letter that we wrote about anything, because a lot of them could be, you know, reused in a way. 0 4745 Community Boards TD: And the other thing I did was elected officials go to these community boards, which I've talked about. Over 50 members from neighborhoods that make advisory just, you know, resolutions to be sent to elected officials and to the city government, sometimes even to state. And I would -- and what would happen is a good staff member who you would send to that community board, would they say, and the council member did this, the council member did that. 0 4984 Learning New Things While on Council / ConEd TD: And I, I feel strongly -- I want people to be able to do that. And one of the reasons I love being on the city council is we had lots and lots of public hearings on the city council. And I loved learning new things. And, you know, I know a lot about a few things and a little about a lot of things but I know not very much at all about a lot of things. And I would learn things in a [inaudible] they worked in the constituent issues where if they were focused on an issue, I would say go for it because I could be the mouthpiece for it. But it made me smarter too. 0 5174 Transforming Real Estate for Community Organizations TD: You know, there was a, you know, real estate wasn't doing that well in the early nineties. And there's this city owned building. It had been a library and the city wanted to sell it. And the local community board… and I supported this wholeheartedly because it had to go through city government, set aside for some kind of social services group. So, I mean, you could be the coalition for the homeless. It really could have been -- it turned out to be God's Love We Deliver, which is fine. And so they've been there ever since. They don't just -- God's Love We Deliver is a food delivery program for people with AIDS, that was much needed. And, you know, in the days of HIV and AIDS where there is -- when it was wasting disease. 0 5411 Closing Remarks MF: Well, I apologize, but we're going to have to stop because our video camera has -- we've taken up all of storage space.&#13 ; &#13 ; TD: This is what happens with my relationships, too. They get tired of me. [laughs] &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: But we're not tired of the you we just ran out of the ability to save the interview. &#13 ; &#13 ; TD: Well. 0 MovingImage Thomas Duane describes his time in the New York City Council, advocating for the LGBTQ+ community, fighting for the Division of AIDS Services (DAS), and working to ensure habitable living conditions for New Yorkers. MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here again with Senator Thomas Duane to talk about his life and experiences as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from ACLS, and today we are meeting again at his offices in Manhattan and it's April 2nd, 2022. So earlier we signed a consent form. I'm just going to go back through some consent questions. Do you consent to this interview today? THOMAS DUANE: Yes. MF: And do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized and made publicly available online and in searchable formats? TD: Absolutely, yes. MF: And do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes that could include films, articles, websites, presentations or other formats? TD: Does that mean they'll know I'm gay? MF: Yes, it does mean that. TD: All right. All right. MF: So that's a yes. TD: Yes. MF: And then just like the yesterday, you'll have 30 days to review the transcript and then decide if you want to pull the interview. We'll just delete it. You could delete parts of the interview or you can contribute the whole thing. Okay. TD: Yes, I got this thing. Will, I really read it? You know what I mean? Right. You know, let's say best efforts to read it, but I doubt I'll take anything out. But you never know. MF: Well, you'll have the opportunity to do that. And we won't post it -- TD: Read like, a couple of hours about me, but I mean. MF: Well, you'll have that offer. So we ended -- TD: Call my therapist like "hello?" MF: Yeah, well, your therapist could review the draft. [laughs] So yesterday I was just so grateful to talk to you yesterday. And thank you so much for talking with me again today. TD: I think it's important that people know that every day that I've been filmed, I have been late. I have arrived late. I do have a lateness issue, but it's been a little extreme so. Usually it's best to tell me an hour before, like lie about the time. But then I'm not always that way. It's just it's an occasional thing. It's part of my ADHD, which I didn't find out I had til I was in my forties. I don't know what I have talked about that, but my therapist at the time said, you know, you might have ADHD and his wife, who is an art therapist, has ADHD. Or A.D.D. or whatever. It's, you know, it's a spectrum, I guess. And he's said why don't you go see Dr. so and so, he's an expert in the field. So, I went to see him and he gave me a test. Fortunately, no homework. He just asked me questions. I answered them and then he said that is the highest -- or you are off the charts. It was like the best grade I ever got in an exam. And but it just made -- then I was like, oh. Because my default is "I'm stupid and lazy and can't follow directions". And that's, you know. It's because of my, you know, the way I learn things. And, you know, I'm not stupid. I mean, I don't think I'm the smartest person in the room usually, but, you know, I can compete. I'm not lazy. Like I got elected to office, it's not, you know. But I don't really follow directions very well. That is true. I mean, sometimes I do, but I mean, like, you know, how to set up something, you know, a new TV or something just to tear it up because it's written by people who already know how to do it. Like, I need someone to write it who's, like, doing it, you know, learning how to do it. Like, I am. So as soon as I, you know, explain to me, show me. Don't do it for me, but let me do it and, you know, make mistakes. And then once I got it, I got it. But it just takes me. I don't know whether you should. I could stay longer. I need to look at it in a different way. But did -- because the first year after that, I really I cried a few times. I think, you know, that's what it is. Because, you know, my family used to say, you don't stick to anything, which I guess is which is a combination of all of, you know, I didn't get as good grades as my brothers and, you know, I get an A in something and they'd be like, oh you're going to get an A in that, why don't you get an A in everything. Like, you don't know how hard it was to get that A. And I, by the way, I did like I was -- I just wasn't the top class. It was like this second class out of nine. But, you know, so it was a -- you know, even though it was very good, it was a self-esteem issue that I couldn't, you know, measure up. And I sometimes say, you know, I exceled at everything that my parents hated. So, you know, anyway, but that was important information for me because then I knew sometimes when someone tried to explain something to me that I would say, you know, we'll tell you a little bit about it and let me ask questions. And then after, if there's more that you think I should know, then tell me then. But if you just keep going, I'm just going to get lost and, you know, keep stopping this question. So let me just do it this way. We'll save a lot of time. It really, you know, it helped. And then people got used to my way of figuring things out, you know, anyway. MF: Well, you were on time today, I just wanna say. So, and we were the ones that were behind. TD: Because I took the subway, which is just one stop. Although I don't want to support the subways and boost the ridership. Ordinarily, I would walk here, but then I'd be all sweaty when I arrived. So I thought it would be better if I was cool, calm, and collected when I got here. Anyway... MF: Well, we're so glad to talk to you again today. And yesterday we ended in 1991. We talked about your runs for city council and your successful run for city council. And I want to start today, I know we're going to move into your work on city council, but I just I wanted to start with why did you run for city council? What were the issues that mattered to you that inspired that run? Could you talk a little bit about, you know, why city council? Why did you decide to run? TD: Well. There was no openly gay member on the city council when I ran in '89, you know, sort of around '85 and somebody actually ran very many years before that, Jim Owles  is his name, and also lost. But the person who ran before me, David Berg, did very well. And, I just thought it was important that there be an openly queer person on the city council and the district after '89 was drawn to make it more-- to give a better shot -- to give to make the odds better for a gay person to win. And, it's a tough question in a way, because I'm going to sort of preface it with something else. I had a -- he's still alive, but he's just not living in New York. Had a very good friend who is a police officer. And when I was campaigning in 1989, I bumped into him on the street. I knew him a little bit from the neighborhood, but I didn't know he was a police officer and he asked me a lot of questions. And I guess I did okay. And then he said, you know, I'm a police officer. I said, oh, no, I didn't know that. And he you know, in the course of the conversation, he said, you know, I was called to do this work to be a police officer. It's more or less a vocation, like some become a priest, or a minister, or rabbi. It just it called me, it pulled me. I didn't really have any choice. And that made a lot of sense to me. And it's not that I had never run for something before, obviously I'd run for district leader. And I'm sure I think I ran for, I may have run for something at Lehigh, but I wasn't like [inaudible]. Well, I would -- I always thought of myself as not very competitive, but actually I think I'm bloodthirsty competitive. I mean, I don't know if I could have hurt people, but like, I'm, you know, focused and determined. But I did have all this community experience, you know, neighborhood issues and also the LGBTQIA things and the HIV crisis, the AIDS crisis was still raging. So, I feel as if I was called to do it. And on some level, I just knew that I could. And it's hard. I talked about, you know, I ran and then I lost, but I ran again. And it is a special, you know, club of people who are willing to do it again. So, I feel like the pull was very strong to do it. And so I think that's why I feel like I had no choice in a way. But I also was very aware that, you know, I could get a lot done and everyone could do an awful lot without a title, you know, without a public office. But it's a helpful tool, you know, so that was -- I also factored that in that it would be a good way to bring attention to things that I cared about. And I like people. And actually, I was a painfully, pathologically shy child. And whenever I started school and really, you know, elementary school and high school and Lehigh, in the beginning I would be very shy, not -- I don't know whether I was afraid or not as time went on. But until I got the lay of the land and then I could, you know, come out as myself. But there is something a little, you know. I mean, I have a few very good friends that know everything about me. And if they don't, it's just because, you know, I forgot. You know, we just didn't talk about it, but I would speak with him about it. But I think I was able to overcome this shyness. And it's sort of easier if there's just something between me and you. I don't have to be on a stage or something. But, you know, if I'm campaigning and I have to go up to strangers like I'm going to hand them a flier or someone else is going to like the reason that I'm doing it. So, it's not just, oh, all of a sudden, you know, we're really good friends, although I really like people a lot. So, the shyness, it's a paradox, you know, and I -- and it does account for some when I talk about my sort of intimacy issues and, you know, close sort of romantic relationships, you know, it does kind of make sense then also. But I also have this, you know, I said I've said that, you know, children, teenagers, animals feel safe around me. And I feel I love that about myself. I feel like it's a gift. And I also, I'm very empathetic and I can take in people's pain like I'm someone that people can talk to about something painful in their lives. But, in a way that I want to say, it doesn't take a toll like I'm able to do it. It does a little bit take a toll on me when I think back on it. But it's more the toll is more like, you know, it's like sort of like an even deeper empathy in a way, you know, with how brave it is for people to go through the things that they go through. And, you know, I am the keeper of many, many, many, many secrets. And I'll go to my grave, you know, people who are queer, people who maybe -- people living with HIV, people who had a person in their family who died of AIDS. But they don't tell people. But that also translates into other, you know, people who are, I don't wanna say outliers because there's never just one person. But you know someone who there's something unique and special and you know about them or, something that's happened to them or someone in their family that they. It's painful for them to share, but it's important. And I'm open to hearing about that. And I don't, I won't ever tell anybody about it. I'll sometimes if I see you again, I'll repeat back to you what you told me. And I realized some people would get startled and I would be like, No, no, no, no. I'm just telling you, you know, I just want you to know that I remember what you said. Like, I saw you. And I'm only telling you that I remember our conversation and what that was. And sometimes that impacted what I ended up fighting for in office too, things that had happened with people and I think I was always that way. And I think it's something my, certainly my mother, you know, in her good moments, of which there were many, but not all. Something that she did reference about me, that she did know that about me and, so I feel fortunate also. And I brought that into my political life, my community activist life, and then my my political life and running for office. So, I was called to do it. And really, I feel like I had no choice. I just had to do it the next thing that I was supposed to do. And this is a terrible way to talk about this, except for it's kind of the right way, but it's inappropriate, but it's perfect, you know, and I even say this to my students, oh, my gosh, if anyone ever sees this. But I do preface it by like, I know this is inappropriate and I just-- but, you know, I need to explain something to you as you move forward in life. I said it's the joy of the journey, which is a which is a 12-step slogan. And it really is the joy of the journey. And I see, you know, if you have a goal and you're going towards it, they be present and like enjoy your way to it and maybe you end up going in a different direction because something has happened along the way. But when you achieve whatever it is that you wanted to achieve, it's kind of like having an orgasm. Like the good part is the foreplay. Then, you know, when you get there, when you have the orgasm, it's over. So, and then you have to think about what's next. So, I just urge you to, you know, enjoy this part of it as you go towards whatever it is that you are going towards. And I'm not sure I always did that, you know, that I stopped to do it and I have kind of learned, or I'm better at not giving advice when it's not asked for. And, you know, there are two kinds of advice. Someone might ask, do they want confirmation of what they already think, or do they really want advice? And I often ask them, do you want me to, you know, agree with you? Or say, that's fine, you know, or do you really want my advice? But I got to meet Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and I talked with her a little bit and she's just as amazing as you would think she is. And she didn't know who I was, and she talked to me anyway. She's just so smart and just so nice and open and, like, I love her. And, when we stopped talking, she was kind of walking, we were on a platform together. And I went over to her and I said, You know, I don't I really I don't usually give people unsolicited advice. But I said, you know, ask some your staff to make sure that you put aside a half an hour or an hour to write down what's happened in that day, because you'll probably remember it, but I always wished I had kept a diary of what happened. And because it's going to be very important in you're living during amazing times. So, I don't know whether she did it or not. And, you know, I didn't even know, I kind of knew I should. So it's fine if she doesn't, and she actually because of social media and many other things, there'll be more of a record of, you know, what her life is like, but, there's also always an internal thing that goes on and like, I'm very good at sharing that about myself. She's very good about sharing personal things about herself, but there is always sort of another level to everything. So that was it. And I oftentimes tell people running for office that, you know, we can always talk about the orgasm part, but I do say, like be present in the moment while you're doing this because this really is like the, you know, this is -- I mean, it's best to win, it is better than losing, but it's really being present, you know, as it goes through. And just concentrate on the people that are unexpectedly for you, not the people that you thought were going to be for you, but aren't, you know, focus on the ones that are for you. And, you know, you have to be kind to the ones that for have a reason, you know, aren't. But don't worry about them right now. Just focus on the people that are supporting you, especially the people who are. Don't take for granted people who are, you know, of course, what they would be for you. But, you know, also concentrate or give, you know, I've taken the feeling good about the people who support you, who you never thought were going to support you or came to help you just -- and you don't know why. That and, if you don't believe what you're saying about an issue, people -- I believe people can tell you're not telling the truth. And so the only thing is that I also learned is that I usually wouldn't take it unless there's a press conference and take a question from a reporter. But in those cases I would practice before, but I had a very good consultant later on. His name is Margot and he, whenever I ask him about a difficult issue, he would always start off with, What do you think? What do you think? You know? And then we could talk about a way to frame it in a way that people could hear it. So I didn't change my position at all, but I was able to explain, give my, you know, position and explain it in a way that people could hear it. Because I also had another wise professor at the JFK School who said, I only do that, just I mean, I'm honored to have gone there. It was a wonderful experience. It really was. And just there was so much wisdom. And he said, and I can't remember why. Okay, I'm a ground. Oh, that politics is oftentimes like the art of telling people something that they can't hear or that they don't want to hear in a way that, you know, they are able to hear to the best of their ability, that you can say it to them, you know, in a way that they can hear it, even if they don't agree with you. So there's a way to tell people things that they may not agree with, that you know, makes it easier for them to hear. And I think that I did that because I had that big experience with, like, the national press when I was running in '91 that whenever possible, I knew what my positions were on things. But I did try to think of the best ways to say it so that people could hear it and understand it. And, you know, many times it's something that, you know, it's personal, the reason that I feel a certain way and I was fortunate my district was pretty progressive in some ways. I think I was more progressive than they were, but I think they liked that I was a little bit more progressive than they were, you know, because they had other responsibilities, you know, protecting whatever their families or, I don't know, their businesses or whatever it maybe I did something that might not seem like it would be in the best interests of their family. But on the other hand, I think that they sometimes wanted to be altruistic and wanted me to do that on their behalf, even if they themselves couldn't do it and I was in a position to do it. As I say, my face is turning red. For some reason I'm having a shame attack about I'm saying good things about myself. So this is what happens. I have a shame attack, which is something. Thanks, Dad. It starts here and it comes up, and then my face turns red. And I didn't say anything I should be ashamed of, but it just it's an automatic, you know, response. And I lived with a lot of shame in my life. And it wasn't until there was an absence of shame in my life because of work that I had done and myself to get, you know, psychologically, spiritually better. It wasn't until I had a lack of shame or that I realized when I was feeling shame because I lived with shame almost all the time, which is kind of a heavy burden. But I, you know, I moved on through it, but I am glad that I figured that out, that, that I don't have to take on shame that doesn't belong to me, even if my body doesn't always reflect that like I know here. But this just red, you know, I'm Irish, so, you know, red. You can really see it. Anyway. MF: I can't see it. You're a little flushed, but you're glowy. TD: And it's because I of my COVID beard, which I never had before. I was, you know, the clean shaven, wholesome, dressed like a Republican elected official. Even though I was for [laughs] -- some of my best friends -- I know people are no - I know people who are Republicans. But you know, I'm a very, very liberal Democrat. So, but I dress you know, I dress like every other elected official, you know, dressed. And, you know, I think it's a nice tie. Right? I have pretty good taste in ties. MF: I love your tie. TD: And I said it's a little too fall-ish for this since we're talking in the spring but still I think I hope it's popping. MF: It's popping. TD: And I just I complained at one point, I believe, about how, you know, I always noticed that when women elected officials are covered in the press, even though they're trying to be better now, but the press would always talk about what they were wearing or what their hair was like. And I used to get that, too. You know, people would comment on what I was wearing and my council, nobody who I love. I just loved him. He is a heterosexual. And he noticed very early on that that was something that happened. And, you know, it's not something that I didn't push back against it. It just was -- it wasn't worth the fight. But it made me very, again, you know, empathetic towards what women have to go through. And it also I mean. Well, I mean. Comments about things like that. I often -- people of color get comments like that, too, you know, like heterosexual white males, men who I realized have stuff too. Sometimes their lives are not easy, but that's not really usually commented on what their tie was, what shirt they were wearing, you know what I mean, or what if they got a haircut? It's not -- but anyone who's not, it's something that comes up as a description of them as if, you know, I want to make sure that it's presumed that you're, you know, a heterosexual white male unless you, like, say things to make it obvious that the person is not that, you know, anyway. I digress. But I was called to do it because I have such a great fashion sense. No, I did represent FIT, Fashion Institute of Technology, which I love, but, oh. One time I was in the elevator at FIT going to a community meeting and there was some students from FIT and I just get to, like, an off-price store and bought a pair of shoes and I -- so I was out with these kids, and I said to him, What do you think of these shoes? They're like, Oh they're cool. And I -- yes. That made my day. Yes, I could still have, you know, that cool factor. So, anyway. MF: You do have that cool factor. I want to talk about -- So you get into office 1991. What's happening on city council at that time? What are the big issues that you're facing with city council? What are you fighting for at that time? TD: Well, I think people. Like me, maybe originally think that you get elected to house the homeless and feed the hungry. And that is something that is always there. It's something, you know, I'm always fighting for. But it was also about sidewalk cafes and discothèques and, you know, quality of life issues, which was [inaudible] because there were things that I hadn't really noticed before, for instance. Whether you call them peddlers or vendors, but people on the street who would put their wares out on the sidewalk, some people really hate that. I never even really noticed. I just thought, you know, it came with the territory. In fact, right across the street from where I live, there were people who would put things out. And it's a bit of a complicated issue, which you can never say never say something is complicated because. Even if it is. There are laws covering which you can vend and where you can vend. But if you are selling used books or magazines that's protected by the First Amendment, you can't tell someone like that to move. You can say you have to be a certain number of feet away from a door to a store or a subway grate. So there are regulations about where you can do that. And, you know. A lot of these people are, you know, somewhat marginalized. And I was not -- and I was empathetic towards everyone to put them out of business. But I remember going out with a measuring tape with some people from a block association, you know, to be sure that they're within the regulations. And I had to be, you know, the law is the law, you know, and if I don't like the law, then I should, you know, fight to change it. And so quality of life issues was, you know, a huge thing. There's an area in my district, the meatpacking district, which for it was really exactly what it's called, Meatpacking district. You would see, you know, cows was hanging from these things outside, which is now a historic district. So they've kept these sort of overhangs over the buildings in many places. But the only people who were there were the people who worked in the meat industry. And many of them were in the butchers union, I know. And but there were also a couple of gay bars opened in that area so then there were gay people there and then sex workers and I'll just say in this case, predominantly non-binary sex workers, whether they still had male genitalia or not, sort of started to move away from Times Square because this is an issue that came up. Tom Duane and Rudy Giuliani [inaudible] which I'll get to, but a lot of the sex industry stuff was moved out of Times Square and moved into the Meatpacking District and the area right around it, which is 14th Street and that part of Village got gentrified even a little bit more. And more people started to live in Manhattan who had children, used to be they weren't that many children who lived in Manhattan. And so there are people who probably didn't like seeing that, you know, transgender sex workers. You know, providing their services in a place where their children might be able to see it and you know, I understand that. And I have empathy towards the sex workers because no one does that because that's what they want to do. They're doing that because that's all. It's the only way to make money. And but the law is the law, you know. So that's really how I would respond to it. And I would torture young people who I was hiring. And I would ask them that question if a constituent calls to ask what can be done about sex workers, you know, near where I live and my children see it and, you know, they would always start off at the place that I would have started. Well, you know, job training programs, and [inaudible] is available to transgender -- I mean, maybe slightly better now. But, you know. And yes, I agree. However, the law is the law, you know. And so that was tough that that kind of issue. Noise complaints at the time, discothèques, discos were very big and they were both gay and non-gay and they tended to be concentrated in my district and some of them, many of them, you know, absolutely no problems and nobody complained about them. But sometimes when a place would become less in and say sort of a way that these places where first it would be gay, then it would be slowly but surely more heterosexual, white, heterosexual, and then it would mostly become people of color, be it was, say, urban youth. And but the responsibility for how a disco was many, many owners of these places licensed it out to promoters. And so it was very much the responsibility of the promoters on how the clientele was that they brought in. And sometimes they just didn't care, you know? And that was when problems, of course, but there was a just a huge movement to get rid of discos. But of course there were a lot of people in my district who went to discos too. So that was very difficult and I had to sort of try to craft legislation that would have enough for everyone to hate and enough for everyone to like. And it was -- one time when Debra Glick, my friend, who had been elected to the assembly, so she was the first openly gay person elected to the state legislature, had an article because -- or an op-ed I think or something. There was a news story on SONDA, I think the nondiscrimination law had passed. And in the times and the same day, there was an op-ed for me, it was a Saturday. And, you know, you don't write the headlines, but the headline was Save Our Discos exclamation point. Oh, did I get letters like he or she's doing this really substantive stuff and you're trying to save the discos? You know, it was like, couldn't you have run my op-ed on a different page? And I did go after bad disco operators. So, but the weird thing is now, and you had to have a cabaret license and if you had just a normal bar and you didn't have a cabaret license that would permit dancing, you could be fined, etc., you know, and too many fines and you could be knocked out of business. Now you can dance anywhere. Like they eliminated the entire cabaret part of the licensing laws. You can -- because big discos are no longer like a thing, you know? And that what people really objected to was the loud noise that young people made when they were leaving. And it would be late because, boy, stay open until 4:00 in New York. So they were you know, that was disturbing to people and I understand that. And more and more decided to have children in these lofts because they were large. They were mostly in Flatiron or the far west side of Manhattan, where there's a lot of brownstones and families who didn't. So, you know, their children would be awakened. Anyway. So, I did have some of course, I feel badly for them also, and their property values are tanking. And I'd be like, Oh, if only I had some money, I'd buy it from you. You know, prices are terrible. No one's real estate ever went below what they bought it for, but it just stopped going up. But I did think sometimes, like, did you look out your window when you moved in? Like, did you not see this was like an industrial block before you moved in and you know, now and that is a big problem in New York. Again, I had a lot of especially, I then, but in my district I had a lot of loft dwellers who had moved into manufacturing or commercial spaces and had fixed them up and they had to fight landlords to be allowed to stay. So, there was a whole battle over saving tenants who were lofts. And I got even more when I was elected to the Senate because I got all of SoHo and TriBeCa where there were, you know, even more of these lofts. But for many people, they moved in when it was cheap, you know, but then the different things happened. You said people would maybe when a new tenant came in and the people who had been living there would sell everything that they had done to fix up the loft to the incoming tenants, they might be more well-heeled than the original artist or whoever who had moved in, so they had paid more in a way for their space. And also as these buildings became legalized, because there were certain things that a landlord would have to do. So, this is an issue that I have to work on, and I'm glad to do it, though it was complicated. Landlords had to bring the building up to residential code, which is different than, you know, commercial or manufacturing. And at that point, then the tenants up until that point, tenants would have to would not be given a rent increase and they would only get rent increases that went along with all other apartments that were rent regulated at the the rent increases would only ever be the same percentage as regular apartment units. And the landlord was required to keep the building habitable. Anyway, so that that -- I can come to Lehigh and give a whole lecture on loft dwelling and what happened with lofts in New York City. Because, you know, in New York City, just many of these places are just not used for manufacturing anymore. In fact, right here where my office is, this building I think was always an office building. And Chelsea was like this along Sixth Avenue. And now we're on Eighth Avenue where the nicer real estate would be on the corners, and the mid-block was where the factories were. And that's a throwback from the 18th century because, you know, fancy people or, you know, would be on the avenues and the stores would be nicer and the avenues and the offices would be nicer. And the avenues of mid-block is where manufacturing everywhere in the garment center. And they actually made a lot of garments here. There's not quite so much of it anymore and a lot of these buildings have been converted to office buildings and some were converted to residential buildings. So but it is important that every place is habitable for people, whether they live someplace and they work someplace. I mean, I represented -- you know, factories have to maintain certain standards. It was in New York City where there was the terrible fire where the ladies garment workers were locked into there. They couldn't get out. And that's what led to some of the the making sure that there was, you know, egress for everyone and that they were habitable, that there was water so people could wash up and use the bathroom. And, you know, many different rules and regulations came into place after that. So, you know, there is -- I represent an area where there is that history also, and I represent even more of that area when I was a state senator. I picked up even more territory. So, you know, that terrible, horrible tragedy did lead to better working conditions. But the truth is, I can look out the window here and there's still some sweatshops here and I can tell where they are by the windows. And we could go into greater depth on how, you know, I can tell that. But it's also similar to places that are, you know, they're... They seem to be massage parlors, but they don't say they're massage parlors. They say they'll, you know, rub down or they used other words. They don't say massage because you need a license to be a massage therapist. And they really just to cover for people where people are doing sex work and many of them have been trafficked or... There's a whole host of reasons why women, not only women, but mostly women get trapped into that and, when I was in the Senate, I was able to pass a bill that did something positive for the people who had been trapped into really indentured servitude. And to have to do whatever it is they were told to do, and we'll talk about that at another point. But, you know, people also didn't like to have prostitution in their buildings. And I did just say prostitution. I sense that people [inaudible] one of the floors of this building is used for prostitution. So, there'll be sex workers there and people appropriately didn't like that there were strangers coming in and out of the building. So, you know, I don't even want to say legal -- In a way, I feel like there should be no laws about sex work except when someone is harming someone. It's the same way I feel about choice. Like there should be no laws. The laws should be silent, but there should be laws to protect people who are being hurt. And there already are, but there should be more. And that's the way we should do things that are very important to me, that people have autonomy over their own bodies. And if they're being forced to use their bodies in a way that they don't want to or they're not being protected. You know, sometimes I've worked with the people organizing, people worked in the house, wants to make sure that they had appropriate safety gear, masks. And anyway, I feel very strongly about that. But we should be silent on the way anyone is using their bodies aggressively go after we mostly go after women almost completely to try to control what they can do with their bodies. And I think the law should just be silent on that. I don't think that was a particularly popular view in my district that I probably never led with that because the law was the law and you weren't supposed to be, you know, having sex work going on in a building. I had constituents who -- RASP, residents against street prostitution. And I was just saying like, So you don't care if it's indoors, you just don't want it on the street? Yes, that's what they didn't care. They just didn't want the sex work happening on the street. They wanted it behind closed doors. So they're very, you know, a lot of gradations of like, so many levels of like where people are on on sex work. And of course, nobody ever wants to talk about sex. It's a whole big issue, like how you really shut things down or off as soon as I start to say something about sex. Like just stop, we're not talking about sex anymore. Not that I did that often, but I did it more of this in the state Senate than on City Council. But, of course, I was fighting for a lot of other, you know, you know, on behalf of tenants. And I got you know, I passed a bill and again, this has been improved upon after I left, but it made it illegal for a landlord to discriminate against someone based on how they paid their rent. So people are probably familiar with the Section Eight program. So it would be illegal to discriminate against someone because they paid their rent with a Section Eight voucher. But also, we have a program for seniors that, depending on what their income is, the rent in their apartment is not allowed. When the rent is increased, the city will make up the difference of the seniors' income, which it offers is very static. And then people from the Division of Aid Services, which we'll talk about also, they're paid the city pays their rent. So this bill needed that. Now, no one can discriminate. The law that I was able to get passed said, if you got any kind of city tax abatements or any kind of favorable, the recipient of, you know, something from a city program that, you know, made your cost less, they were the ones who couldn't discriminate. So the city gave them something or the state gave them something that brought down their cost. Well, they are not allowed to discriminate now. No one's allowed discriminate based on who how people pay their rent. But at the time that was it was sort of the first step towards prohibiting discrimination against people who were poor. So I like that bill a lot, actually, and I'm glad that it got built upon. You know, another bill to make it so that buildings would have the lighting outside to make the streets safer. And but, you know, the two -- maybe the two things that I'll be most remembered for. Maybe the two biggest things. One was, I'm putting -- there was an agency that was started by Mayor Ed Koch and continued through Mayor Dinkins. And it put within our city human resources department where people get their entitlements or their benefits, government benefits, something called the Division of AIDS Services, DAS. It's now called HASA, [HIV/AIDS Services Administration]. At the time, it was DHS, and when Mayor Giuliani was running for office, he said that he'd heard from people that it didn't work that well. That's true. You know, like many government agencies, it was a little slow to action. And, you know, maybe people with AIDS were in more dire need of services. I'm not sure that's 100% true. I think it might also have been kind of empowered gay white men who had never had to be involved with entitlements or benefits that way. But for whatever reason, it was not running smoothly. So when Mayor Giuliani got elected, he wanted to totally eliminate the division of AIDS services. So huge battle demonstrations, arrests, ACT UP. And I was on the council to save DAS. And even though they said, Oh, we [inaudible] it didn't really work that well. But the thing that Mayor Giuliani, first of all, he beat an African American person. And I believe there was... There was definitely racism involved in that, similar to the backlash, I think from President Obama where people are like, oh my God, you know, we have a black mayor, or we have, you know, a black president and that like whips them up into a frenzy, anyway. But Mayor Giuliani backed off eliminating the Division of AIDS Services, not because he cared about people with AIDS, but sort of people who consider themselves moderate to liberal. You know, Democrats, some of them had voted for Mayor Giuliani and he didn't want to lose their votes because they know, That's terrible. He's cutting a program for these people who are suffering and poor. So he backed off and then he started to have meetings on how to restructure the Division of AIDS Services, which was just another way to get rid of it. And we had to fight against that. And on the city council every year, I actually get everybody in the council to -- there was a committee that had dealt with the General Welfare Committee to push back against making cuts to the agency. And really, I was able to only because of my press visit, you know, when I said earlier where, you know, because it was the case, but it's also having a seat at the table. I'm sorry. I should have said that. That's maybe the most important thing that changes everything to have a seat at the table. And so my being there was very helpful. And I had had a. When I first got elected to the council, the chair of the health committee had been there for a very long time and was kind of an old fashioned gentlemen, I'll say. He was quoted in the papers as saying that gay rights caused AIDS. And it was it was maybe April when it started that January. And I remember because I remember I was going to the Museum of Natural History and it was that that lovely pastel green and pink that everything is before, you know, it pops out. So I was at the Museum of Natural History is very close to Central Park anyway, so I was enjoying how beautiful Central Park was before going to the museum to meet with government people. And I think we had beepers in those days, but my office had called ahead to the museum and you know, to telling the story. So by the time I left, I had to have like a, you know, something prepared to respond to this and the speaker of the city council, someone named Peter Vallone who's old fashion man, but he did allow the gay rights bill to be voted on before I was there. But he always wanted all the council members to get along. He you know, he was the kind of person very nice, never swear or anything. He would often be home, you know, he'd have dinner with his family every night. Just an old fashioned guy. And I'm sure the people around him, I'm sure they said this is a problem. So he got the council and everything was, you know, Williams. So he got Councilmember Williams to back off that. And Councilmember Williams was to have a press conference where he would say that he was whatever, sorry. He said that he didn't -- he misspoke, that gay rights didn't cause AIDS or whatever. So the press conference happens and I'm watching, and he backs right back into gay rights caused aids. And he didn't really disagree with that. So then I was left with, you know. And, you know, Peter Vallone he just wanted it to get [inaudible] was, you know, and-- Well, I couldn't let that sit. Yeah, of course. I mean, I just couldn't. And I remember going to ACT UP and they were very angry with me. I mean, of course, they spoke out against it publicly, but they wanted him thrown out of office. And, uh, anyway, what happened in that case was, this is before the days when there are cameras in the legislative body, so there wasn't a camera. Or if there was, it wasn't -- the local public television station would have a camera crew there, maybe covering the council meetings. But I'm not sure that the tapes even exist like it would today be on YouTube, but nobody ever moved away from their seats to make a speech in the council. Even voting you voted from your seat. Even the speaker didn't move away from his seat except for to stand at a podium right next to his seat with the council. President ran the show. He was the parliamentarian or she was the parliamentarian. It happened to be a he. It was someone actually who I knew and who had been supportive of me when I ran for city council. And I reached out to his office and I said, look at the beginning of the meeting, I want you to recognize me because I'm going to come to the front of the council chamber and make a speech. And he did that and there were no microphones or anything. And there are ways to see speeches made by time to read when he's angry. But this was one of those speeches about what a terrible thing it was to go after a community that and this is, you know, 1992, like people were still dying. There was no cure, very few treatments. And it really, you know, you know, I think I said it, you know, how dare you kick people when they're already down? Anyway. I was angry and I made a very angry, impassioned speech about it. And, you know, actually the same something which happened to everyone like. Applauded. You know. And he never said that again. Yeah. Somehow the I guess the speaker of the council, they just found out I was going to do something because ACT UP was always doing something and I was a member of ACT UP. So they had the council staff, many staff. It was going to fill up all the seats in the balcony so that there weren't enough seats for the public. But some ACT UP people still got in there and when I finished my speech and then they started throwing condoms. This was not my -- like I said, this is not part of my plan. And I remember there was one of the counselors, the Reverend Wendell Foster came up to me and he said, you know, like you make a great sermon and, you know, everybody likes it. They're moved by the issue. Just leave it like that. I was like, I agree, you know, and I'm going to be very happy. I won't be shy to tell you, other occasions like that don't make Tom mad moments in legislative bodies. [break in audio] MF: We are back. We just had some technical difficulties with our video camera and Senator Duane had just finished telling us about Councilperson William's homophobic comments about HIV, to which he responded powerfully. And we're in the middle of a conversation about what he's most known for as a councilperson in New York City. So I'll turn it back over to you. TD: Well, the battle continued to stop the you know, reconfiguring, reforming the Division of AIDS Services, you know, and one of the things that happened was by-- Well, every year in the budget, everybody in the council would fight to stop the mayor's cuts to the Division of AIDS Services. So that was very important and they were very sensitive to that. And that was very you know, that's no substitute for a seat at the table kind of thing. So not just because of being gay, but the HIV was very powerful for making that be a reality that everyone then cared a little bit. I mean, many of them did care about the Division of AIDS Services, but they cared maybe just a little bit more now that they understood the stakes are so high that, you know, there was a possibility of under, you know. You know reforming it they would possibility of its being eliminated and I think it was 1997. I was able to -- I had written a law at some point that put the Division of AIDS Services, which was a sub agency of our human resources agency. To put this Division of AIDS Services in law two enshrined in law and two have very specific elements to it, timeframes for when someone could get services. At the time, Mayor Giuliani was making people who got public benefits or entitlements. They had to go to this place for a health check up, in this place for see if they were employable. So they had to go to all these different places before they could get help, you know, even food stamps, but any kind of public benefit. And so people with AIDS had to do all of those things, too. So this made it so they didn't have to go to all these places. Now I'm trying to remember the thing that he's made, he was something reviewed for that employment review, something which he, of course, contracted out to private people who were not sensitive to people who were having difficulty surviving at all. You know, this is true. It's a whole history that people who were women who needed public benefits. They were required to work for it. Which. Just despicable and something that actually was able to make a little bit better when I was in the Senate. But they had to fulfill a work requirement. And basically, as you say, it made it really hard for them to go to school and to, you know, to get ahead. It was just grotesquely unfair and it's punitive anyway. You know, an advisory committee. And, you know, if you are entitled to Medicare or Medicaid, which everybody was because they were generally poor. All of that happened in one place. You know, find a place to live, find a place to get health care. And it had to all be done within a certain time period. And the places that they were set to live had to be in good shape. And then also clients were given a stipend of $200 extra a month, of which the thought was $100 of it was for food because HIV/AIDS was called wasting disease. It was very hard for people to keep any weight on because they had gastrointestinal issues that came along with it and other things. So an extra dose for food. And then the other $100 was to buy tokens. I think this was pre-Metro cards. So tokens to take the subway to doctor's appointments or, you know, whatever. But it was just a little extra money to live on because their needs were, you know, great. And so anyway, Mayor Giuliani, at some point, I guess he finally gave up trying to, you know, get rid of the Division of AIDS Services. But I wanted to make sure no one could ever try to do it again. And I did get that bill passed, and it was passed by the council unanimously. And it's actually a model like every agency, like a child services. Everyone should have, you know, these benchmarks that they have to meet and, you know, the level of care that they had to me. The other thing was the ratio of clients to caseworker. We also put into the bill and so it was a, you know, collaboration between, you know, the, the activist community, my colleagues in government, but also the unions, because the people who provided these services in agencies were union workers at various levels, the caseworkers were one union, the support staff was another local in the same union. So anyway, everyone had to sign off on it. And we did do that and it passed unanimously, which meant that even if Mayor Giuliani had vetoed it, we would have just overridden his veto. So he didn't even bother. So that was a very important victory. And the agency's still there today. I mean, it's been changed in certain ways, and I don't follow it, you know, precisely. Maybe I just, you know, I'm a control freak, so I have to let things go, you know, even with the way things are, but not that anything was wrong with it or anything. But there could be and I would be upset. But anyway, another thing that I was able to do and Christine Quinn and people from ACT UP were very helpful with this. There was a time in the nineties, probably '92, '93, when there was a tremendous number of people from Haiti who were trying to get to the United States. And, you know, the rule for Cubans is if they touch, you know, land, they're allowed to stay here. But no, that didn't go for Haitians. So, Haitians who came and however they were detained, you know, had to go through a process to be allowed to stay here or in which I don't know what percentage were allowed to. It was a lot of people I know, but the people with HIV were sent to Guantanamo Bay. And of course, women have families, too. So there were all these Haitian people in Guantanamo Bay, because they had HIV. And so we went to Mayor Dinkins, first as a political person, I believe, and then we went to the person who headed up Human Resources Agency to ask if they would say to the federal government, We'll take them in New York and let them come to New York, get them out of Guantanamo Bay. We'll get them here. We'll put them up with benefits. And, you know, you know, people were -- many people like me were able to work at everything. And just because HIV did mean that you were, you know, going to be a burden on, you know, society. But anyway, we did it and they came to New York. So, you know, it was quiet because it wasn't something -- just better to get it done. We didn't have to write -- I don't know. I don't know whether, you know, there was any press around it or anything. But it wasn't-- it certainly wasn't a huge story. We just wanted to get them out of there to bring them to New York. So it was really just a very good thing, you know, for people all around. My chief of staff, Chris, other people in the office and people in ACT UP and, you know, the mayor's people and just, you know, the unions, everyone just came together and made it happen. And so, that was something I'm proud of. Am I turning red yet? The other thing that I'm probably very known for was a battle to provide domestic partner benefits, which would only go to city employees. You couldn't mandate that private employers would provide domestic partnership benefits. But previously there had been a bill where there was just a registry, and that entitles you to visit whoever it was in the hospital and I don't even think you got benefits, but it was just a place to sort of recognize your relationship in some way. But I introduced a bill that said whatever married people received in terms of public benefits or whatever responsibilities they had as a result of being married, domestic partners would be treated equally. Now, it just -- it was sweeping. It just said if it says marriage, it's domestic partnership also. So I had that bill and I actually got everyone, including the speaker, Peter Vallone, to sign off on it. And Mayor Giuliani got wind of it, and he substituted a bill where he had his staff go through the entire -- all of New York City laws and all of the administrative regulations. And so what he did was anywhere it said married, he put in domestic partner. And the problem with that is any time anything new happened, you would have to make sure that they remember to put domestic partner in, whereas mine was just it was presumed. But anyway, he put his bill in and that's the one that we passed. So I'm not quite sure what the politics of that was. My bill is better so but anyway, it was sweeping domestic partnership for city, and they said all the benefits that married people got now were provided to domestic partners. And the thing that people -- and I had to explain to my colleagues, in some cases to the public, you know, for instance, health benefits. Health benefits aren't like a reward you get for being married. Health benefits are something that's part of your compensation. It's so people who had domestic partners and didn't have spouses were being discriminated against because they weren't getting the same benefits and they weren't able to bring their loved one, or family onto their benefits and pay for it the exact same way that married couples do. So it wasn't without its complications because, of course, you know, any compensation it's complicated [inaudible] IRS or state and city tax people. But, you know, there are certain tax advantages to being married and what compensation and how much money you're making. You know, it's factoring, you know how much money you make, and with tax free, with domestic partners, it was more complicated than that. And so, as I recall, I think we made it. Maybe it was, I hope what happened was that, whatever that penalty was that people would have to pay because they had someone on their health care plan would be absorbed by the city. I'm pretty sure we did put that in as well with whatever maybe even Mayor Giuliani put it in. I can't remember it. I'm sorry that I have to go back and research, but it was a good bill because there were people that tried -- they just wanted to expand a little bit, the registry thing. And I was like, No, no. Like everything, everything that we'd already gotten a little bit. We'd already got the registry so you could visit someone dying in the hospital, which is great, but it's not. It's not everything by anything, you know. So, it was very helpful. And even though Brushy for rent regulated tenants was in existence, it was helpful for people who lived together in any kind of housing, you know, co-ops and condos or, you know, anything. So I was very happy about that. And again, it didn't mandate the gender of the person. Heterosexuals could be domestic partners. In fact, many, many, many heterosexuals signed up to be domestic partners. So it was a non-discriminatory domestic versus bill. And so there was that one and the Division of AIDS Services those would the kind of two big sweeping things I guess that I would be maybe known best for. But, you know, I also was a big champion of communities being able to create their own land use and zoning plans. So there was in the new city charter which made 51 city councilman was there something in there that said that a community board could bring forward their own land use and zoning plan. They had to go through, you know, reviews and hearings and everything for the plan. And then the City Planning Commission would have to decide whether or not to accept it. Because in the past, all zoning, land use and zoning changes sweeping or tiny were only done by the City Planning Commission. So this wasn't at the grassroots get involved in it also and I had helped author this thing called the Chelsea Plan and that was-- it was the first one written. It wasn't the first one passed, but it was the first one written. But I was very pleased when that passed the city council and I had to make some compromises on it which, you know. It's not that I won't answer them, but it's not entirely relevant to this. But there was a give and take on it. Let's just say that. if something was going to be [inaudible] and there had to be areas that had to be [inaudible]. So that was the battle. But I also -- there weren't any programs to create housing, affordable housing for very low income people. And so there was something in this that if there should ever be such a program that that kind of housing would be built on city owned land, which, regrettably, after I left office, the community. One of the things it did was, all of the these buildings in Flatiron that were used as garages or that were lots used for parking. The owners of those buildings could build residential housing on those sites. So there were lots of empty lots in the in Flatiron between let's say Sixth and Seventh Avenues in the in the high teens and the twenties. So, it was high income housing that was built there unless you know someone took the public benefit. But most of them didn't take a tax break from the city or anything. So now there are all these sort of more well-heeled people in the first sight that came up was in that area where they could build, where the city -- was the promise was that they would build low income housing and people in the neighborhood did something incredibly dishonest of these new people who moved into those nice places that were only living there because the zoning had been changed and the residential buildings went up there. And they had, you know, thousands of people sign a petition that says, you know, do you want a park? Like there was no description of what the park -- you know, what it was. So, of course, who doesn't want a park? But it was on the site where this housing should be built in. It was terrible. Just terrible because, yeah, we always need more open space, more green space, but they said, Oh, it's such a long walk to parks. Well, this is on, uh, 20th Street. And just three blocks south is the beginning of Union Square, and three blocks north is Madison Square Park. And then there's two huge parks on the west side now, like, you know, could we build some new housing here? And by the way, Chelsea was the kind of neighbor that would want that in Hell's Kitchen also. So it was I don't know, I guess there were, you know, concessions made where they were going to build housing for low income people elsewhere. But it was like they just don't want been living here, you know, and I'm not going to torch the park or anything, but I try not to go down that block because it just makes me mad because it was -- I made a good deal, you know, it was a it was a very good pact. And the Chelsea Planning Committee had been, it was a combination of, like, small business owners and people who cared deeply about preservation because we expanded the Chelsea historic district and housing activists and just, you know, average citizens in Chelsea that all wanted to sort of preserve the character of the neighborhood. And everybody got everything they wanted except for the people who were fighting for low income housing, really, more or less my team, are the ones that got blocked out. And when I talked earlier about Jane Wood's Way, Jane Wood was like, I'm sorry, Jane, because you stuck with the coalition and we got the plan through and we didn't get this affordable housing. And that was really, really it was really important. Anyway. The people, they were so weird. They're like, well, there are all these other sites where you get of affordable housing. And yes, there were a couple of city-owned sites that the city was going to eventually renovate that were kind of eyesores, that some of them had people living in them and they weren't in great condition, but they were going to -- in fact, they are now -- make them, you know, make the buildings better or. And the families that leave will, you know, be able to go back in. But they also had this is building at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 14th Street called the Vermeer, and they had that as like an affordable housing site. And there are lots of other places. This was just like a huge example because this gigantic building and I was like, I don't -- that is not affordable housing. It was an eviction co-op. We used to have non-eviction co-ops where you couldn't get rid of the tenants if they didn't want to buy when the building was converted to a co-op. This was not one of those buildings you either bought or you were thrown out. So this was not affordable housing. You couldn't -- these places were going for hundreds of thousands of dollars, these apartments. This is just one example, but there are other buildings like that and I'm like, This map is a lie. Also, not only is it do you want a park a lot, you know, so too is this map. And then when they came to me, I bet you think we're just hideous gentrifiers. And you know what the truth is? I did lie. I said, Now, why should I think that, I'm open? I wasn't. I wasn't. So, yes. But I didn't want to not meet with them. And I didn't. But I didn't have an open mind. I was angry with them, you know. But I still met with them and I tried. And I didn't try that hard. And I had a staff member who that was his area that he -- his responsibility was to... That part of the district was one that he served on behalf of my office. And, you know, he felt the way I did. He didn't bother hiding, he didn't bother to try, you know, make believe that these people were, you know. That there was something terribly wrong with these people, from my point of view, I certainly felt there was something terribly wrong with me, but I was like, You would not be living here but for this planet. This is like the only concession we got for this, because other places we had to accept bigger buildings, you know, but in order to get, you know, maintain more low-rise areas in Chelsea and also to expand the historic district. So, you know, the trade off in those days was that you had to give some other places where you could build larger buildings, of which one is, say, 23rd Street, where you can build taller buildings, anyway. I don't know. So, but I did love getting the Chelsea plan passed, and I did it by bringing all of the members of not all that it, but several members of the Lanier Studio City Council gave them a tour of Chelsea, where it's so important to us, you know, to be able to see the sky and have light and air, etc. And also a few members of the New York City Planning Commission, including the city planning commissioner, who was familiar with the area. But he's the person with whom I actually had to negotiate so that it would be acceptable to the City Planning Commission and then get passed by them and then go on to the city council and get passed. So and then other communities have done that since then. So it's kind of a missionary feel, missionary to help people to come out and missionary people to, you know, to create their own land use and zoning plans. Oh. I'm trying to think if there's -- I mean, I could list, you know, a whole number of things that I did that were, you know, really very good things, just not very high profile. But let me say I also did something. There were a few things that I started. We used to cut out -- this is me with scissors -- cut out newspaper articles if I was in it, and we kept them in scrapbooks, and we also kept every letter that we wrote about anything, because a lot of them could be, you know, reused in a way. You know, if we were writing, I'm ready to express my extreme dismay with something or I'm writing to, you know, support in the strongest possible manner. But so there was a certain, you know, style that you could copy. So, on many different topics, so the people in the office didn't always have to be reinventing the wheel when they wrote letters on my behalf. And I also invented sign on letters where I would write a letter about some issue and I would get all of the other elected officials that represented whatever area or building or whatever institution that was to sign on to it. So, they would be more powerful that all of our names are on it. And that was kind of in its time doing maybe, but I didn't invent it, but I certainly used it an awful lot. And sometimes funny things happen, sometimes a staff member in another office would like try to rewrite it and someone else would rewrite it. And then it would be incomprehensible after everybody made their edits and I would just rewrite it. They couldn't -- that was it. Like you sign it that the way is now, or not it all. So anyway. And the other thing I did was elected officials go to these community boards, which I've talked about. Over 50 members from neighborhoods that make advisory just, you know, resolutions to be sent to elected officials and to the city government, sometimes even to state. And I would -- and what would happen is a good staff member who you would send to that community board, would they say, and the council member did this, the council member did that. But I always said Councilmember capital 'C', [inaudible] capital 'M', I didn't say councilman, councilwoman, council member because I -- to the best of my ability, I tried to make things gender neutral. Sometimes it's impossible, you know, like, if you're a fellow at a university like, what's the, you know. But, you know, firefighter, police officer, Medicare, you know, there's many -- most things you can make gender neutral. Anyway, instead of having the staffers to say that the councilmember was this. One of the things that we did since the last time here, since last month when you had your last meeting, I would have everyone write a report on like what they had done in the area that they covered for me or the issues that they specialized in. And it served two purposes. Well, of course, everyone in the office then could see what everyone else was doing in a formal way, and also, if they needed to use something like that in the area, they had it. But also we would hand it out to everybody in the community board. There was eventually, you know, people who were like, I don't want to do paper. I would have it on my website, so they didn't have to. But you know, people still like paper those days and they were planting two trees for everyone they cut down, I'm sure. I hope so. I promise. So all the wonderful and amazing things I have done in there would be in this report. And then, you know, the staff member, you know, I'd ask them maybe to just go into more detail on one or two things, so they didn't have to, you know, just be saying. And I would do the same thing because I would take -- and then there'd be questions and answers, but it saves a lot of time and people could read it at their leisure, and people loved it. And then all the other officials that are doing it and I'm not sure that the staff members of these other elected officials are so fond of this this sitting but that was the other thing you know. I just, I always felt it was so important to be really very respectful and really, you know, try to be nonhierarchical to the best of my ability with staff members of an agency, with the city or government or who works for another elected official. And I do know that there was something special that accrued to me because I had a title and, you know, which people used in different ways. But I used it mostly, I think as a megaphone that people sort of had to listen to what I had to say. So there was that. But, you know, it's a problem with sexual harassment. Like people, it could be that I don't know the power I have over someone, you know, and they don't know if they could say no or that, you know, I'm being inappropriate. So, but I mean, I tried never to do that either. And I don't know whether I always said this even when I was in the council, but I felt very strongly that. And now even when I teach, I see, you know, if I say something that's insensitive or that you seem, you know, that you don't like what I said, I want you to please tell me because I want to be able to either apologize or say I could have said a better way or say, you know, this is how I made it. But, you know, I want to be able to address it and not just leave it there. And I, I feel strongly -- I want people to be able to do that. And one of the reasons I love being on the city council is we had lots and lots of public hearings on the city council. And I loved learning new things. And, you know, I know a lot about a few things and a little about a lot of things but I know not very much at all about a lot of things. And I would learn things in a [inaudible] they worked in the constituent issues where if they were focused on an issue, I would say go for it because I could be the mouthpiece for it. But it made me smarter too. I learned something new and it was to become very important later on in my senate district, a power plant was being repaired. Like I really didn't know that much about how power plants were being retooled, which, you know, probably are again now. But I learned, you know, I could tell you all of that particulate matter and the percentages and it like beyond all of that. And I will tell you, -- it's when I was in the Senate. But I will tell you anyway. So the law puts aside money for a community to argue with the utility to make a fair playing field, which of course it's not. But still, there's money to fight back against a power company, a utility company. And there was a ConEd plant, and I don't hate ConEd as much as everyone else in the -- the city's old. All the infrastructures old, things happened. But, you know, it's not -- it's their fault, but it's not like, you know, deliberately making things fall apart, buy anyway. But I appreciated people's anger at it. But I also appreciated the other side that, you know, we don't know what's happening with every pipe and everything in the city anyway. We couldn't get one of the like the environmental organizations to help us because many of them were attorneys who worked for law firms, which in this case, ConEd hired all of those law firms to be to work for them. So there was a conflict and they couldn't do it. And I remember before I started yelling at someone, I said, this is like so bogus, like you're on the board of the, you know, the Natural Resources Defense Fund, and you can't help us. I mean, come on. Like, don't you see what's happening here? And we did finally find, you know, a not-for-profit legal group that did help us. But, you know, we were, like, hanging out there because they couldn't these other groups couldn't take positions on things because they were compromised. Very smart of ConEd, you know, when many times an issue or the thing no matter what, they'll hire like all of the good lobbying organizations and in a way co-op the -- not co-op but, you know, it's there's usually a power imbalance in these kinds of situations. And even well-intentioned people who wanted to do good things for the environment, they have now put themselves in a position where they can't do anything. So that was a lesson I learned. And that was when -- it could have happened when I was in the council, it just didn't. I just happen to have a power plant that really impacted my Senate district. But there are other things. You know, there was a, you know, real estate wasn't doing that well in the early nineties. And there's this city owned building. It had been a library and the city wanted to sell it. And the local community board-- and I supported this wholeheartedly because it had to go through city government, set aside for some kind of social services group. So, I mean, you could be the coalition for the homeless. It really could have been -- it turned out to be God's Love We Deliver, which is fine. And so they've been there ever since. They don't just -- God's Love We Deliver is a food delivery program for people with AIDS, that was much needed. And, you know, in the days of HIV and AIDS where there is -- when it was wasting disease. And now they provide meals for other people as well that have, you know, difficult health issues, cancer or something. So anyway, they're a good group and they took it. And I really, you know, like that. That community board that I represented the area where they were the community board did this and said something. So I mean, not every neighborhood would do that because, you know, who knows who would want to move in there. But it turned out to be some of the people that wouldn't reject you, but even if it was, it would have been okay with this community board. So there were those kinds of things. You know, sometimes it would be, you know, a facility for a -- not a facility that's a terrible word. There was-- oh well, on the same block. I was very supportive of a place called Safe Space, which is on 46th Street. At the time, Port Authority was still a place where young people lived ; runaways, throwaways. And John Wright, who is part of this organization, came forward with a proposal where a church that wasn't using one of their buildings was willing to give it to this organization Safe Space so that kids could drop in there during the day. It was not zoned so they could stay overnight, but they could go there during the day and shower and get a meal. And there were, you know, social services, if, you know, to try to help these kids because they did whatever they could to survive and find some place to spend the night, you know, and they used to call the Port Authority the port. It's not really the same there. Kids aren't there in the same numbers that they were then. But I was very happy to support their putting Safe Space in. And then there was another building I supported where, you know, it was sort of like a "no must, no fuss" place for people with AIDS where, you know, they would bring meals in to people. It was not like the most luxurious place, but it was certainly way better than a SRO, which is single room occupancy which oftentimes, was just dreadful. I mean, sometimes they were okay, but mostly they weren't. So this was a nice place and I supported that being put there. So I like being able to help bring social services into neighborhoods and to work with them. Whether they were willing to accept it off the bat or were they a little bit reticent or, you know, and I was generally very supportive of them. And a couple of times they were for whatever reason, there was a reason that I couldn't support it and I wanted something different. But mostly I was helpful in helping organizations get their projects through if they were helping people with problems, basically. MF: Well, I apologize, but we're going to have to stop because our video camera has -- we've taken up all of storage space. TD: This is what happens with my relationships, too. They get tired of me. [laughs] MF: But we're not tired of the you we just ran out of the ability to save the interview. TD: Well. MF: So what I'm going to I'm going to just end on the audio and then what we'll do is we'll transcribe the audio and then we'll have the video as our backup, which has a majority of what we talked about. I think we have room for another interview or two because we haven't really gotten to the Senate yet. And I'm hoping you'd be willing to do another interview. TD: Yes, when, it's my reunion? Was it May or June? I don't know what your deadline is or-- you know. MF: No we have no -- we're ongoing, so yeah. TD: Oh so definitely around that I'll try to make my way a little bit earlier and we can do it then. But also I think now I don't have to make that vlog anymore. It's all here my whole life. [laughs]. So, you know, that as told to book is totally unnecessary now. I don't need the ghostwriter anymore because I used to that book that I'm never going to write with all your -- should I name names? [laughs] Anyway, when you come here, next time I'll have a plan. If you bring your son too we'll make sure it's something that, you know, he would enjoy, too, because, you know, he's my demography. MF: He would love to come. I mean, he's been asking us all kinds -- what did you do? Where did you eat? Where do you go? You know? So he would love that. TD: And there's, you know, lots of on Broadway off-Broadway stuff. We'll do something . MF: That would be wonderful. We would love that. Okay. So I'm going to be in touch with you and Bruce to set up something. And I just want to say thank you so much. This was wonderful today. TD: Well, thank you. It's been great. Like, it's been great. I'm very glad we're doing it. And even though it's very hard to talk about myself. Like I felt a little hung over when I got home last night, you know, spending so much time to talk about my stuff, I was like, ugh. And the person I'm dating is a flight attendant, so I couldn't really discuss it with him. And so I was. Anyway, it's just weird to, you know, speak at great length about how wonderful I am. But I'll have to put in some things when I wasn't so wonderful. I'll have to definitely find some of those things. Things that I -- well, right when I stop teaching one class in a public high school when I was in office. Right towards the end instead of asking about sex and drugs, which they were always asking about, this question ; Was there ever a bill that you regretted, you know, that you voted for? And I was stunned by the question. Like nobody -- kids ask the greatest questions, like even reporters when they'd asked me about my HIV disclosure, they never asked as good questions as the kids did on World AIDS Day when they would ask me questions. For instance, when did you find out you had HIV? 1988. But, they didn't ask, how long have you had HIV? And the kids knew to ask that, you know, how long do you think you had been infected with HIV and, you know, definitely before 1985, but I think before 1982. Well, 1983 is when they started to say to use condoms, and it's all use from then on. So it was probably before 1983. Anyway. But kids knew how to ask, you know, better questions. So was ever -- like who asked that? It's a great question. And I was like, whoa. And I really, really, really had to think about it. And I finally was like, no, but I did change my mind about a couple of things, you know, and the truth is, is in those cases, I don't know which was the right position, you know. And many of them, not many, there weren't that many -- guns. I changed my position on guns and crossbows, because there was a bill that came up that said that like 15-year-olds could hunt with crossbows, they could get a license to do that. And I would vote against -- well actually I love animals, you know. And maybe the third time I did, a Republican came over and he said, [inaudible]. And I said, Why? He said, Because they're doing it anyway, and in this way, they have to take a class. And I thought to myself, they are doing it anyway. And this way they do have to take a class. So now they learn you don't injure the animal. That's the worse thing. Kill it. You know what I mean? But it was, Are we encouraging people to do it? I don't know. But they were doing it anyway. So at least now, if they hadn't taken the course, they would get in trouble for that. So anyway, so it was a couple of bills like that, you know, and sometimes gambling is a tough one, also. You know, I hate gambling. I don't have that addiction because it's not here. And actually slot machines, that sort of thing, you know, that it'll be like you're going to spend $30, you know, win or lose, you know. But if it was 21 or poker, like, I would be one of those people that would see the sun because, you know, I have that ADHD. It's because it's uneven focus. That's what it really is. It's so, you know, and sometimes even when I'm looking at stuff on the computer, like I can't, like it's 2 hours later so. [laughs] No, that's for me. You know, Saratoga is right by Albany, and they have pon -- the trotters. And, you know, the riders and all this. So anyway, all the Senate Democrats, we all went to the track and I had never been to the track before. And on the way there, there are a couple of senators who knew a lot about gambling and knew a lot about horse racing. And they showed me there's this --I haven't looked at it since it's been maybe 15 years now. I only looked at it once. But they had little things at the top that tell you like where the horse has won, or how long it's been in, who the jockey is. Like, I can't remember all the little pieces of information that they tell you. So it's time to start betting, and I bet and I win, and then I win, and then I win, and then I place and then I'm scared that the person isn't going to get to our table in time to take my bet. And then, you know, after nine races or something, well, time to go. And I didn't want to leave. And as I walked in, I was like, I must never come here again, because I, you know, I picked that, you know, of course, the first time you do anything, you know, I don't know what it's the second time, but because it was my first time, you know, the universe made it so that I would be a winner. But because it had, you know, there was focus involved. Well, this is better cold, but it has a couple of unnatural things in it. But it's delicious. Like three calories. MF: Oh, yeah, we love it. We have it at our house. TD: Oh, you do. You do. MF: Oh, yeah, Sparkling Ice is delicious. And then we will take this on the ride home now, and guzzle it with glee. TD: It's incred -- I mean, who knows? Well, one time there was a frozen yogurt. They said a pint was 90 calories. Well, as it turned out, that actually was not true about this particular -- they went out of business like. And I think they did less than the amount of fruit juice in it at some point. I didn't really notice but I've noticed people commented on it. It's still tastes lemony to me. MF: Well, I'm going to I'm going to stop the interview now. TD: Oh, me too. I'm talking about Sparkling Ice. MF: We're talking about Sparkling Ice, people in the future are going to want to know what you and I both enjoy drinking. TD: I don't mean for it to be a commercial and I am sorry if I -- that I badmouth it because I really don't know the facts, but it is delicious. MF: I'll just say thank you again. TD: Thank you. Thank you. MF: I can't wait for the next interview. TD: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too. Thanks. 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.) 01:28:56 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 Thomas Duane, April 2, 2022 (Part 3) Description An account of the resource Thomas Duane describes his time in the New York City Council, advocating for the LGBTQ+ community, fighting for the Division of AIDS Services (DAS), and working to ensure habitable living conditions for New Yorkers. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-31 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-04-02 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/c2a0cb49c8e1529cfd726b62d890ec78.png fc3454762486db53faa1723afdebd34a 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 of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Thomas Duane 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-37.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 April 1, 2022 Thomas Duane, April 1, 2022 (Part 2) LGBT-37 02:11:22 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Thomas Duane Mary Foltz video/mp4 20220401_DuaneThomas_video_edited.mp4 1.0:|26(13)|49(11)|67(20)|79(4)|89(9)|100(14)|112(10)|123(13)|134(7)|146(6)|159(14)|172(15)|182(12)|194(6)|208(8)|220(15)|230(16)|241(4)|256(5)|269(7)|283(8)|296(3)|307(16)|320(11)|331(7)|342(13)|357(5)|368(5)|382(17)|392(14)|406(15)|417(16)|428(6)|438(14)|453(10)|467(8)|481(3)|491(10)|503(3)|515(5)|528(6)|541(12)|551(12)|562(9)|577(6)|589(4)|601(13)|613(8)|624(9)|638(13)|651(15)|664(19)|678(4)|694(15)|705(12)|719(7)|732(10)|743(6)|758(5)|773(4)|785(7)|800(17)|816(7)|828(15)|840(9)|850(11)|862(15)|876(12)|889(17)|899(16)|911(15)|928(7)|941(13)|958(4)|975(8)|988(15)|1001(13)|1017(7)|1028(2)|1040(7)|1053(22)|1065(5)|1079(3)|1088(12)|1101(5)|1110(16)|1122(7)|1136(11)|1147(8)|1160(15)|1175(3)|1188(8)|1201(13)|1216(4)|1229(9)|1238(18)|1250(9)|1267(11)|1281(7)|1292(4)|1305(18)|1318(8)|1329(9)|1341(19)|1355(6)|1368(8)|1383(15)|1398(13)|1412(8)|1425(3)|1437(12)|1450(3)|1460(17)|1471(3)|1482(8)|1495(10)|1509(9)|1525(14)|1536(17)|1551(11)|1562(17)|1578(10)|1590(9)|1603(12)|1618(8)|1632(10)|1649(15)|1662(13)|1677(12)|1694(18)|1718(11)|1724(15) 0 https://youtu.be/hYIjUzZjMtA YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Senator Thomas Duane to talk about his life and experiences as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS, and we are meeting at the offices of Senator Duane in New York City in Manhattan, and it is April 1st, 2022. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me today. &#13 ; &#13 ; THOMAS DUANE: I'm happy to. I mean, I like that Lehigh likes me now. You know what I mean. Because they didn’t like me so much before. So now it’s like, they like me, they really like me. 0 141 Life after Lehigh University MF: Oh, me too. So last time we talked, we really spent a lot of time talking about your youth and then your college career at Lehigh, so I thought we could start today. Maybe you just tell me a little bit about post-graduation. What was your life like once you graduated from Lehigh University? Tell me about that time period in your life. 0 452 Joining the Chelsea Gay Association And I continued to work at that ad agency. But in 1977, so I had lived there for maybe a year or so. And I saw fliers go up on telephone poles, not trees. I knew not to do that. But you know, any place where you could tape a flier and it said lesbians and gay men and meet your neighbors, and it was this small group of people who were starting something called the Chelsea Gay Association, which is the first neighborhood based lesbian and gay organization in the city, in the world. 0 795 Community Organizing in the Chelsea Gay Association So, anyway, you know, our existence was, I think, important. And one of the things that had gone on was there were gay bars along the waterfront on the west side in Chelsea. So in the high teens and the low twenties, and gay men would walk through Chelsea and also up through the Village and then west to these bars. And there was a New York City public housing project, Fulton Houses and the people who live there, many of them had originally lived in Chelsea and through urban renewal, they ended up living there. 0 1004 Serving on the Local Community Board/Importance of LGBTQ+ Representation in Community Organizing So that was pretty, you know, amazing. And I just love that story because she was also a member of the local community board, which was with like these planning boards. Then they were advisory and in the [inaudible] 50 in each of them. And so the one that covered Chelsea in Hell's Kitchen, Clinton was board for, and Helen Gilson was on that board and another woman whose husband was the president of the Longshore or had been president of the longshoremen workers, longshore workers. And she lived in a, you know, a low rise building on 10th Avenue in Chelsea. You can see the building she lived in. 0 1200 Working with the Chelsea Coalition on Housing/Jane Wood/Tenant's Rights And anyway, I also got active in other things in the neighborhood. There was a very powerful tenants rights group called the Chelsea Coalition on Housing and, different than Michael McKee's group, and they didn't always get along that great. But Chelsea Coalition on Housing was associated with the Metropolitan Council on Housing, which still exists. 0 1425 Bella Abzug/Organizing with the Local Democratic Club And in 1982 my Democratic club would have been a very strong Bella Abzug supporter, was a very strong Abzug supporter. And for instance, I didn't work on her ‘76 campaign for the Senate. I'm sure I voted for her, but I knew people – I actually knew one of the people who ran her campaign, an openly gay man who became a journalist Doug Ireland. 0 1690 Running for District Leader So anyway, so the West Side is reform. And I worked on Bella’s campaign and then she lost, and the club went for Cuomo, but Koch won that race. And then in 1982 there was a gubernatorial race. I may be getting my years a little confused. Maybe, I'm not sure anyway. Because I feel like Ed Koch was in office for maybe two terms already. 0 1906 Struggles with Addiction [...] The only thing that was going on that really nobody or very few people knew about was that I drank every night and I smoked a lot of pot also. And I had used a lot of drugs and I had – I drank a lot in college and I continued to do that ‘till 1983 ; I got sober. So, because I just couldn't do it. I couldn't hold down a job, be the, you know, district leader and do community activism, you know, gay and not gay, and then go out at night and, you know, drink and smoke pot or whatever. Something had to go. 0 2191 Forming the Gay Democratic District Leaders/Importance of Terms as District Leader It was actually pretty convenient to be working for my father and to be a Democratic district leader. And I think there were three other openly gay district leaders in Manhattan and all guys because it's a male and a female. So. Well, there were women who were lesbians. They were now. &#13 ; &#13 ; But anyway, the four of us put a group together called the Gay Democratic District Leaders. 0 2773 Selling Ads for Gay Publications And there was another line of story that I was going to tell you, but I'll tell you about [Brashear?] and maybe the other one will come back to me. Well, when the AIDS crisis began — actually, when it first began, I was working for a gay publication, two publications actually, the New York Native, which was a fledgling gay newspaper, and Christopher Street, which was kind of a premium, was a literary magazine. It was great. It was one of those publications like Gay Community News out of Boston that I just loved and I couldn't wait for it to arrive in my mailbox. I read every word. 0 2993 Assisting with Stage Productions So I learned a lot about print production and then I worked for a TV production company. I had a lot of jobs, a lot of jobs. I had a lot of jobs, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. I was going to say that and there was nothing to be ashamed of, but I paused for a second. And it was because one of the jobs I had, which actually was really a great experience and this was through, his name is [Lyle Salgas], and he was the person that I was with. 0 3218 Proudest Moments/AIDS Crisis//Chelsea AIDS Committee MF: Well, you were going to talk about one of your most proudest moments. &#13 ; &#13 ; TD: Oh, yes, am I leading up to the Braschi decision? &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: You are.&#13 ; &#13 ; TD: So anyway, [inaudible] suggested I go work for my father, which I did. 0 3555 Braschi v. Stahl Associates Co. I have a [inaudible] story to tell. It's also kind of – I'll tell you the story. So I was very good at – No, I was very good at helping judges get elected. And once they got onto the civil court, to then get elected to the Supreme Court. So every once in a while I would go to court to sit next to my friend Jim West when one of his clients was at risk of losing their apartment. 0 4179 Marriage Equality/Life After Office And so. One of the judges, actually, his son is an openly gay assembly member, from Staten Island, and now I believe he's a surrogate court judge out of Staten Island, Matthew Titone is his name. And his father, was on a court of appeals. So it was amazing that we won that case, you know, But we did. And it's been very useful. And I don't want it to go away because of marriage, because I think we should be able to, queer or non queer it doesn’t matter, say, choose our own families. And, you know, put it together, you know, build it however you want to, using whatever institutions there are or not, you know. And I don't want that to go away. 0 4425 LGBTQ+ Openness in Media/Scouting Potential Donors &amp ; Campaigning Anyway, although I just have to say, I was recently looking at The Times, Sunday, and like there was gay stuff all over, of course, there was the Academy Awards and it was gay gay gay. You know, I don’t know whether it was the gayest. Certainly wasn’t the least gay there if there was. But and like many stories of, you know, the the real estate section, they always had a gay couple fixing up the country house or, you know, or a designer who acknowledges that they're gay. 0 4744 City Council Run So I'm a community activist and Braschi, that case – we won that case when I was running for the city council the first time. The race that…this is a race that my friend David Rothenberg had run against an incumbent council member – four years… in 1985, and at the time there were 35 councilmembers in New York City, and the council districts were like huge. They were like between the size of, say, a state Senate district or a congressional district, they were like big. 0 4956 Discovering HIV Status But I found out my HIV status. Which didn't surprise me at all, but it was not something I, you know, I didn't tell people, Oh, I'm sure I have HIV or anything, but I was sure I did. And then when I actually got confirmation that I did have it, I really only told a couple of very close friends. 0 5881 Disclosing HIV Status So in '91, anyway, I decided that I was going to disclose my HIV status when I ran in 1991, and I started to put things in motion. It was sort of like, you know, a snowball effect. I told more people, I like joined the HIV positive caucus of Act Up. I know it's anonymous, but I went to HIV recovery meetings, you know, people of substance abuse and that but specifically for people living with HIV. 0 6857 Effect of &amp ; Reactions from Disclosing HIV Status And there was a tremendous media… it got a lot of press, you know, nationally even. So, you know, I got from like this little, you know, neighborhood kind of, you know, city council race to like, all right, now you have to learn to talk to the national media, you know what I mean? So it was – so I'm not – I became very unafraid to talk to the press after this, you know, because nothing could have beaten this. So – well marriage maybe, not beat it, but equal it. 0 7684 Closing Remarks MF: Well, I felt like this was a good place to end. We sort of have talked about your movement post-graduation, work in tenant associations, advertising and magazines a little bit, and then really your political career through a city council run and loss to a city council win. Tomorrow could we start with what happens with the win? What are you doing on city council? Would that be a good place to start? f 0 MovingImage Thomas Duane talks about his life after Lehigh University organizing in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, time in office as a district leader and city councilmember, and his experiences as the first and only openly gay, HIV-positive member of the New York State legislature. INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS DUANE APRIL 1, 2022 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Senator Thomas Duane to talk about his life and experiences as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS, and we are meeting at the offices of Senator Duane in New York City in Manhattan, and it is April 1st, 2022. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me today. THOMAS DUANE: I'm happy to. I mean, I like that Lehigh likes me now. You know what I mean. Because they didn’t like me so much before. So now it’s like, they like me, they really like me. MF: It's true. We do really like you. And really we're very grateful to speak with you. And I want to just start today by -- you signed a consent form before we're starting the interview, and I just want to ask a few questions verbally about consent. Do you consent to this interview today? TD: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized and made publicly available online? TD: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes and other formats that might be articles, websites, presentations? TD: My reality show? MF: If you make one. TD: Yes, I consent to all of it. MF: And then I just want to remind you that you'll have 30 days after I send you -- I'll send it electronically, the transcript of this interview for you to review, and you can decide then, Oh, Mary, I don't want this in the collection and we'll just delete it. You could say I want most of it. Just delete this part and then we'll do that. Or you can contribute the whole interview. TD: Thank you. I can’t think who I'm angry with right now, you know, because I might say something that I would want to take out later on, but no one's coming to mind right now. But you never know. You know, it's like pushing the send button when you're angry, you know, with an email without showing it to someone first, you know. MF: So you have time. You'll have time to review the whole thing. TD: And I'll try not to be catty, you know, grudgey -- MF: Well, you’ll have time to review it TD: -- because I'm Irish, so that's a thing. MF: Oh, me too. So last time we talked, we really spent a lot of time talking about your youth and then your college career at Lehigh, so I thought we could start today. Maybe you just tell me a little bit about post-graduation. What was your life like once you graduated from Lehigh University? Tell me about that time period in your life. TD: Well, the truth is I left Lehigh in 1975, so I'm class of 1976, but I didn't get my degree until of 1977 because I left in ‘75 and I had two more courses to do. And it just it took me a little while to get those done. But, I consider myself class of ‘76 and there's a big reunion this year. And my oldest brother -- also went Lehigh -- is, when I was a freshman, he was a senior, but he's going to be there because they're doing a whole bunch of classes, I guess because of COVID. So he told me that ‘75,’76 and ‘77 will be there. So I'll see maybe some of the freshmen that I was a Gryphon too. I'll see some of the people I was in class with, you know, the graduates of ‘75. And then I'll see so many 1976 people, possibly. It would be my first Lehigh reunion. Yes, it would be. See how far we've both come me and Lehigh. So what happened? You know, I wanted to leave Lehigh. You know, I like a good fight. So in retrospect, you know, I may have been, oh, woe is me. You know, they treat us poorly, or whatever. But, you know, that's not how I am. So I don't believe that's actually what it is. I think what it is is I want it to go to work. And I wanted to live in Manhattan and I wanted to be gay. Really, you know, like big gay, like a lot of gay and… I’m just I'm headstrong that way. And, you know, in my early life I have a brother between my oldest that went to Lehigh and then I have a brother who's sort of my Irish twin who's a year and a half older than I am. And I probably was continuing this thing of wanting to not fall too far behind his progress in life. And I did have a younger brother who passed away, which I'll talk about at some point, because that was part of my later life anyway. I think I just wanted to work and I went home that summer and I got a job at an ad agency and for $175 a week -- no excuse me, $135 a week. That matters just because of something else that happened. And I save money because I really just wanted to get out of my house. So first I shared an apartment with someone that had gone to Colgate with my older brother John. And it was like a six story walkup, but it was like seven flights up. I don't know how they worked that out. The building is still there, actually, it’s on East 49th Street. And I paid $100 a month for that. And it was, you know, the sink was the shower, it was one of those old buildings. But it was fine. It's great. I wasn't great. But I mean, I was like 20, I guess. And then I saved up some more money and I got an apartment in Chelsea. And the reason I took this apartment in Chelsea, because I looked in the East Village and I looked in the West Village and I looked in Chelsea. And in the East Village, the only apartments I saw either had the bathroom in the hallway. I guess I was just a little too suburban, you know, to do that. So. And then there's another one was just when I saw that you couldn't pick up your mail and mailboxes would get stolen, I thought, I think maybe, you know, in retrospect, they probably might have done it. But, you know, things work out the way they’re supposed to, and I couldn't really afford anything decent in the West Village. And then I found this studio apartment in Chelsea for $175 a month and, I was home. And I continued to work at that ad agency. But in 1977, so I had lived there for maybe a year or so. And I saw fliers go up on telephone poles, not trees. I knew not to do that. But you know, any place where you could tape a flier and it said lesbians and gay men and meet your neighbors ; and it was this small group of people who were starting something called the Chelsea Gay Association, which is the first neighborhood based lesbian and gay organization in the city, in the world. I don't know whether in the world, but there's nothing else like it. And I was not a founding member, but I was a founder because the fliers were actually for the first meeting. And I went to it and I immediately became active in it. And we were not political, not political, but of course our existence was political. It's just that we existed, but we did a lot of amazing work. And just to please my friend Lillian, actually, who I convinced to move to Chelsea, my friend Phil, who I went to Lehigh with, he was one of the students who'd been thrown out of Theta Chi and. [Bert Lazar?] and Arthur Goodman and Michael McKee. And they were all organizers in various ways, but Michael McKee was a tenant organizer. So I learned a tremendous amount from them on how to organize just by organizing with them. And the truth is, we would have our steering committee meeting because we were nonhierarchical and we would do everything by consensus. And then we would smoke pot and we would go around and put out fliers for the next meeting. And we did some incredible things. We had raps at the police station so people would go every Saturday morning. I know Saturday morning, early and there'd be maybe four of us and four or five of them or three. Anyway, and we would just talk. It was the 10th Precinct, which was the Chelsea precinct, which was almost lost at the time. We fought to keep this police precinct is very, you know, as Chelsea's own police precinct. But when I think about that, you know, years later, when my friend Christine Quinn was the executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Violence Project, now the Anti-Violence Project. They had had a good relationship with the police and actually that the Anti-Violence Project was an outgrowth of something that happened with the Chelsea Gay Association, which I'll tell you about. But anyway, there had already been a little bit of a relationship being built between the police -- the New York Police Department and the gay community. I will probably would use whatever the words that we were using at the time. Although, you know CGA just sounded better. That's why we kept it as the Chelsea Gay Association. We really didn't want, you know. Anyway, they started to have a pretty, you know, an okay relationship with the Bias Crimes Unit and with the Sex Crimes Unit. And then when Christine Quinn came in, they had a really good relationship with the NYPD. But when I think about it, we were already developing like this little relationship with them way back then. And we did something like game night where we would play board games just kind of just to bring people together. And we all marched on Washington. There was, you know, I should remember this. It was either for the ERA or was pro-choice Washington march. I believe it was the ERA, actually. Anyway, but we marched as a group. So even if this nonpolitical group would march with our banner. And we had a street fair every year and we put out a newsletter and I may think of other things that we did. And then there were a couple of -- an Upper West Side Group was formed and then an East Village group was formed. It was really just -- this is in the 1977-’70. They weren't that many LGBTQIA organizations at all. You know, there'd been a lot of splits… the GAA and, you know, LFL. I should say, the Gay Activists Alliance, Lesbian Feminist Liberation was an outgrowth of that in New York City. But they were not really functioning the same way anymore, for whatever reason. You know, the activism seems to go on its own cycle. So, anyway, you know, our existence was, I think, important. And one of the things that had gone on was there were gay bars along the waterfront on the west side in Chelsea. So in the high teens and the low twenties, and gay men would walk through Chelsea and also up through the Village and then west to these bars. And there was a New York City public housing project, Fulton Houses and the people who live there, many of them had originally lived in Chelsea and through urban renewal, they ended up living there. There's also a big Latinx population in Chelsea, Latinx people. Which people don't think of [inaudible] development as having white people, but they actually they did. In Brooklyn there are a lot of Italian people that, you know. Well, they were very -- they weren't as segregated as they seem to be now. Anyway, the head of the Tenant’s Association was a woman named Helen Gilson, whose husband was a longshoreman, or what I would say these days, a longshore worker. But she was the president of Tenant’s Association and she was, you know, a big, you know, tough woman who, like many other Irish people, vacation in the Rockaways in the summer in those -- in these shacks, which there aren’t that many left. But anyway, I just remember that I read the Irish teenagers and I mean, I don't know up until what age they were, but they were beating up the gay men who were walking to the bars and, you know, pretty seriously. So under the auspices of the Chelsea Gay Association, I organized, and everybody helped, a forum on like crime in Chelsea. And we invited Helen Gilson to come to this event, this forum. And people talked about how, you know, the police, of course, we talk about how, you know, this history of gay people being beaten up who were, you know, walking at night, late at night to these bars. And I guess and what probably coming out of the bars to or walking in the other direction. And Helen Gilson, who we invited, was there. And I cannot say that she was like a big gay liberation situation at all, you know, And towards the end of the forum, when after she heard all these stories, she stood up and she said…something. She said, Well, you're not my cup of tea, but I don't think you should be beaten up either. And that was huge, huge. And I love that because it's an old fashioned you know, my grandparents used to say not my cup of tea. But when she said that it was a very powerful moment and she was the head of the Tenant’s Association. So she put the word out, no more beating these guys up, and it stopped. So that was pretty, you know, amazing. And I just love that story because she was also a member of the local community board, which was with like these planning boards. Then they were advisory and in the [inaudible] 50 in each of them. And so the one that covered Chelsea in Hell's Kitchen, Clinton was board for, and Helen Gilson was on that board and another woman whose husband was the president of the Longshore or had been president of the longshoremen workers, longshore workers. And she lived in a, you know, a low rise building on 10th Avenue in Chelsea. You can see the building she lived in. And the first openly gay person actually served on that board, Jean O'Leary was her name, who was of kind of legendary in the New York lesbian and gay history. She was a first in a lot of ways and a complicated person as well. But when she stood up at the community board and said, I'm, you know, a lesbian, right. Yeah. Rosemary and Helen, really, you know, but it was huge progress that she was on that board. And then, you know, other – I eventually started serving on that board in 1982, I think. And you know, it made a difference that there was a gay person even on this neighborhood sort of advisory thing on land use and zoning and who should get permits for like liquor licenses or outdoor cafes or just a whole host of different things, they make advisory opinions on. Elected officials listen to them. You know, they don’t always do what they say, but they listen to them. And other gay people were on it, this time with it. There are also some closeted gay people on it, and I may have bragged about my lesbidar and my gaydar in an earlier interview, but it's pretty good. So I was – I think I would say 100% accurate. As time went on, people did come out, some of them took a very long time. And you know, similar to what happened at Lehigh. I think maybe there are also, in retrospect, maybe some of them or a couple of them didn't want to get that close to me. I think they were friendly like any board member would be, but they weren't. They didn't want to seem to be too much of my friend, or something, I guess you could say. And I’m trying to remember when someone else gay joined. I can't remember right now. And I may have mentioned it, I [inaudible] around. And I think I'm still having that – I know I'm still having a memory thing. And I'm sure that I saved papers and, probably, I don't know how much of it was saved. But the minutes of every board meeting and the attendance and, you know, all those things. And anyway, I also got active in other things in the neighborhood. There was a very powerful tenants rights group called the Chelsea Coalition on Housing and, different than Michael McKee's group, and they didn't always get along that great. But Chelsea Coalition on Housing was associated with the Metropolitan Council on Housing, which still exists. It's called Met Council and it's a tenants rights organization, and it was led by a woman named Jane Benedict. So the Coalition on Housing was led by a woman named Jane Wood, though they would both say we do not lead this group. You know, there's a big membership here, and yes, you know, you maybe you know our names, but that we have no leaders. And that is true except for they had a wonderful way of organizing. When I ran for office, they both supported me. The groups couldn't make it, you know, a political endorsement. But personally they did. And other people from that council and also the Chelsea Coalition on Housing. And they're gone now. And the friends that I know who were giving that I knew from then who were active in the tenants rights community, you're talking about how when the Janes were gone, like they were the greats. And actually on 19th Street, there's a street renamed Jane Woods Way. And I can’t remember whether I did it, or whether Christine Quinn did it when she was in office. It was probably Christine Quinn, I think Jane was alive for a lot of the time that I was in the city council. But anyway, she's memorialized there. And I still walk – If I’m with someone that maybe I haven't walked by or anything before. I always point it out. And when I was in office, when I would – I would often think, like, ‘What would Jane do, you know?’ And I was also a very good friend of a woman named Susan Cohen, who is active and who eventually went to law school and then worked for a judge who was, of course, fair, but if you were a tenant, you wouldn’t want to appear before him. And she went on to become a legal services attorney helping poor people with their housing. And she also was a tremendous influence on me. And, you know, Michael McKean, we didn't really get along with Met Counsel. His group was. Neighbors and Friends, I have to check the name of it. But later on they joined together and it was their Tenant Unit Coalition. And at the same time, Mario Cuomo, the governor at that time, put together a group called the Tenant Advisory Council. So TUC stayed together in order to get people out TAC. And we used to laugh about that. But actually I got appointed to that to the governor's – then Governor Cuomo's Tenant Advisory Committee. And that is important for, something I’ll talk about in a little while called the Braschi decision, which is actually the thing that I worked on that I'm most proud of. And it was before I was even elected to public office, I was in a party office at that time, and then I got active in my local Democratic club. And in 1982 my Democratic club would have been a very strong Bella Abzug supporter, was a very strong Abzug supporter. And for instance, I didn't work on her ‘76 campaign for the Senate. I'm sure I voted for her, but I knew people – I actually knew one of the people who ran her campaign, an openly gay man who became a journalist Doug Ireland. Previous to this, she had been elected to Congress. And there's an old story about Bella and through redistricting, she was thrown into a district with another progressive Democrat. She'd beaten a sort of hacky kind of conservative Democrat, Farbstein was his name, and she beat him. And then. Ryan was the name of the progressive one who was the Congressmember for most of the West Side. And in the redistricting, I guess it must've been in 1972 to probably take effect in ‘74 or something like that. They were thrown into the same district and she had to run against Ryan and she lost. And it turned out that Congressmember Ryan was dying of throat cancer. So when he passed away, then there was a race between his wife, Priscilla Ryan, and Bella Abzug, and Bella won that race. So then she had a congressional seat, although it divided people on the West Side. It divided the progressives and the reformed clubs, Democratic clubs, which were very important in those days on the West Side. For years to come, people wouldn’t know what side each club was on and in some cases clubs, you know, broke into two were called reform clubs, which. [Inaudible]. Reform clubs – we believe that, reformers, that people shouldn't wear two hats. So if you are a council member, you should not also be a Democratic district leader, Democratic state Committee member. And the same holds true for the Assembly and for Congress. And so to be endorsed by the reformers, you were not allowed to wear two hats. Regular clubs, someone could have brought in as many hats as they wanted, and they would pitch battles between the regular and the reform clubs on the West Side. Most of the West Side, with the exception of Hell's Kitchen, Clinton, was reform – became reform. The reforms being the regular Democratic clubs, and Hell's Kitchen being the only one that wasn't. And that was the advice of Jimmy McManus, whose family beat Tammany Hall and that's a real big... I worked on Bella's ‘77 campaign for mayor and the runoff in that mayoral contest because Bella ran and Herman Badillo and – there was actually – it was a very multicultural race in many ways. But the two winners were Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch. So, you know, until very recently that there would be a runoff and so was Cuomo against Koch in the runoff. And Bella and her supporters were with Mario Cuomo because Bella didn't like Ed Koch very much, even though was from the Village, and from a reform club that had beaten a regular club down there, in fact it had beaten like one of the most famous regulars of all time, Carmine DeSapio was his name, and Ed Koch, and it could have been the woman that I had been running against for the city council the first time Carol Greitzer, would be defeated the regular. So anyway, so the West Side is reform. And I worked on Bella’s campaign and then she lost, and the club went for Cuomo, but Koch won that race. And then in 1982 there was a gubernatorial race. I may be getting my years a little confused. Maybe, I'm not sure anyway. Because I feel like Ed Koch was in office for maybe two terms already. Anyway, he announced he was running for governor and Mario Cuomo, who had been lieutenant governor to Governor Hugh Carey at the time, who wasn't running for reelection, also was running. They ran against each other in the Democratic primary. And my club had elected and gotten elected because the former leader of the club ran for a civil court judgeship in one. So they elected someone in the club who is gay but not really out. He was gay, but not really out. And he became a Koch supporter and tried to pack the club for Koch supporters. So the leadership of the club were desperately looking for someone to run, and they asked me to run. But it's interesting. I'm not going to say that the membership of my club were – let's say it was made up of people who would have been members of the American Labor Party and people who were reformers. And they made up the membership of this club, which had defeated a regular club years before, and they lived in a three way race one time with the regular club, which was run by Social Democrats. And for anyone who is a student of this kind of history, the Social Democrats are not Democratic socialists. The Social Democrats were in favor of the United States being in the Vietnam War. They are, still are virulently anti-communist. And they ran this other club, Chelsea [inaudible] Democrats. And there was even a third group that was the old regulars, and they were supported by, of all people Roy Cohn. And so there's a three way race, but our district leaders won. One of whom is the person who went on to become the judge. And anyway, they were just looking for someone to run for district leader. And the other person's name was, [Ardale Brown?]. And he ran, and I ran, and I beat him. So then I became district leader in 1982 and I served as a Democratic district leader until 1988, I guess, or ‘89 when I ran for the city council the first time. And I have to say I turned it into something like I would go to a meeting and I'd say, I'm the Democratic district leader, and nobody really knew what that was, but it was something. And, you know, use what you got. That's my – that's the philosophy I live with. And I advise other people if they ask me if I used to do the same thing, if you got it, use it. I was just, you know, I had a day job. The only thing that was going on that really nobody or very few people knew about. Was that I drank every night and I smoked a lot of pot also. And I had used a lot of drugs and I had – I drank a lot in college and I continued to do that ‘till 1983 ; I got sober. So, because I just couldn't do it. I couldn't hold down a job, be the, you know, district leader and do community activism, you know, gay and not gay, and then go out at night and, you know, drink and smoke pot or whatever. Something had to go. So, I actually was just telling someone about this who thought she might have an issue with drinking this thing that she said, you know, If I have one, I can't stop. And I very much know about that. When I first started working, if I had a drink at lunch, which sometimes people did even, you know, what I was at that time, which is called a group assistant, was like an administrative assistant. Like if I had a drink, like I could focus on nothing. But when was I going to have another drink after that? So I knew not to start drinking ‘till I finished all of my chores and tasks for the day. So that's when my drinking would start later on. And I drank maybe slightly earlier before I was the more active I became, the later my drinking would start, anyway. And I was in a relationship with someone. And I -- Who, to this day I love and you know, I think many politicians, many people, but I think many politicians have some intimacy issues. You know, I’ve had some rough things happen in my childhood, and so in a way, I don't think I was able to fully commit to him in the way that I wish that I, I just wasn't able to. And we're friends to this day, but he left right around the time, about a year into my sobriety. And it's funny because I go to a support group about it, and remember hearing this Irish guy from New Jersey speaking of a time and he's like, and I was a year sober and I thought, I had nothing in common with this guy, you know. He lived in New Jersey, he was, you know, was working on Wall Street. But I haven't worked on Wall Street but he was married and had kids and he said, yes, I you know, I feel great. You know, it's been a year. I haven’t been drinking and I feel great. And she said, yeah, that’s because you're the same goddamn son of a bitch now than you were when you were drinking. And I thought to myself, Oh my God, I am the same the same goddamn son of a bitch that I was when I was drinking. And so he – eventually he left, which was the smartest thing he ever did. And he also told me that I should go work on Wall Street because my father had a very small brokerage firm. It was like three people, four people, and I did. So I started to work in Wall Street for my father, which, you know how much I wanted to please my father. I went to Lehigh, I, you know, I went to work for him and I thought I was nothing like him, but I'm very much like him. But there was some stuff between this and childhood in which I have long ago forgiven him for. And I know he loves me. And sometimes I'm still very angry with him because he made it difficult for me to be really present and, you know, all-in on a relationship. And so, you know, I feel like for the most part, I probably hurt most of the people that I was in relationships with. And I wasn’t always such a great person when I was using and even after I stopped for a while because I actually picked up other addictions, which I may or may not talk about in this interview, but I probably will because I just can't help myself. It was actually pretty convenient to be working for my father and to be a Democratic district leader. And I think there were three other openly gay district leaders in Manhattan and all guys because it's a male and a female. So. Well, there were women who were lesbians. They were now. But anyway, the four of us put a group together called the Gay Democratic District Leaders. Like we created an organization which is really just a letterhead. And we had a meeting with the governor and we got him to appoint some people to positions in his administration. As I say, like, you know, I was very good at making something out of nothing. And I, like the others of us, are as well. Sadly, you know, two of them have passed away. One is still alive, he's a professor at Hunter, actually. So, I have to tell you why being on the governor’s task force is important. And I'll say now why the district leader thing was important. So the leader of the Democratic Party in Manhattan was an assembly member named Denny Farrell. Obviously not a reformer because you couldn't be a district leader or assembly member if you were a reformer. But he ran against Jimmy McManus, who I mentioned before, who is the regular from Hell's Kitchen. And this is right before I got elected in a very hotly contested race, Denny became the leader. He was an African-American man from I believe Inwood. But anyway, from the way Upper West District there. So but the deal he made with the reformers who supported him was that he was going to put together an independent judicial screening committee. And so this screening committee was made up of people from bar associations. Two thirds of them were from bar associations, and one third were from community organizations. But the way it worked was, say, if it was someone from the, you know, African-American – I’m sure it’s called the Black Bar Association, the whoever was president of that would appoint someone. So they sort of arm's length to try to take some of the politics out of it. Which later on it didn't matter, politics would creep in. That’s the women's bar, Italian bar, Irish bar, the every bar, you know, had members. But there was a fledgling lesbian and gay bar. So I fought to get them on. And then I also fought to get a gay community group on as well. And because I asked to serve on the Judiciary Committee of the New York County Democratic Committee. So I sat on this Judiciary Committee with other district leaders, and there was a woman from the Lower East Side, Ruth Bekritsky. I mean, I don't know whether I should…There’s actually a story that goes with that too. Anyway, she was a conservative Democrat, but still a conservative. And she said something about abomination when we were discussing the bar association. And I was like, well, that would mean I'm an abomination. But she didn't she didn't say No you’re not, you know, but she didn't say you are. She is – she became a little bit neutral at that point. Years later, her granddaughter worked for Andrew Cuomo when he was attorney general. And I did some forms with the attorney general at that time. And she was coming out of his office, and I told her the story about her grandmother. You know, My how things have changed because, you know, she's a young woman, not at all like that. But, hey, maybe I didn't change this woman's view, but maybe I gave her a little something to think about. And I worked with her. You know, I worked with her. I spent my whole life working with people that necessarily weren’t the most queer-friendly people in the world. And the club she came from was actually the club from which Shelly Silver, who was the speaker of the Assembly for many, many years until he was convicted in a corruption thing and went to jail, and he recently died. Anyway, he was actually a pretty liberal speaker of the Assembly, but that was his club and it was based down in Grant Street in Manhattan, where the apartments, the very same kind of apartments as the apartments I live in now. Anyway, it made a difference, and I helped manage the campaigns, especially with my friend Susan Cohen, of many kind of – I just can't have a political point of view. So instead of saying very, very liberal or very, very progressive, I would just say very, very, very fair. That was my code for... So we started to be able to elect some openly gay judges, which made a tremendous amount of difference and really a tremendous difference in Manhattan. And Manhattan was kind of led in that way. And also, we elected some very, very good judges, some smart, progressive judges, including this woman, Carmen Ciparick, who was until recently on the Court of Appeals and who was the first Puerto Rican American woman to serve on the Court of Appeals. And Governor Cuomo, former governor should have made her the chief judge, because the chief judge, you know, she retired ; she actually passed away. He should have put Carmen in that spot, but he didn't. He put a man in that spot and she was only – she was going to have to retire in probably less than a year. So why didn't he just let her have another.. you know. Will not even le – I don’t even want to say let her, let us have someone else, you know, to look up to. Anyway, interestingly, I had not worked on her civil court case, but the next civil court, I mean. The next level up is Supreme Court in New York State. Those sort of housing court and then there's civil court, Supreme court, which handles larger cases, Appellate division court of Appeals. And the court of appeals is the highest court. And then there's another track of criminal court judges and family court judges as well. And we have a hybrid system of elected and appointed judges as well. Anyway, when she ran to be Supreme Court judge, it's a complicated process, but the judicial delegates are elected in Democratic primaries and they all meet and they decide who to put on the Democratic line to run for Supreme Court in Manhattan ; basically combined with the Bronx, but there are too many people throwing chairs at each other, so they wised – they decided to break it into two different court districts. Anyway, whoever is on the Democratic line wins. But the attorney for the Democrats forgot to put these three people, their names on the Democratic line in time. So we really had to hustle. We got them elected on the Liberal Party line, which doesn't even exist anymore. So she was one of those judges. And interestingly, before that, when I had been called to jury duty, I served on a case where she was the judge and actually it was after that, because they ask, Do you know anyone here, the A.D.A. or the judge. I did. She said, Oh yes, I know – yes I know Mr. Duane. They ask if anyone was ever been a victim of a crime. And because I had been the victim and survivor of a violent anti-gay attack, so. But anyway, I stayed on that case. So I was active in politics getting Democratic judges elected. Good Democratic judges elected, I think. Or at least I was one of the people that worked to make that happen. And that was to become very important later on. And there was another line of story that I was going to tell you, but I'll tell you about Braschi and maybe the other one will come back to me. Well, when the AIDS crisis began — actually, when it first began, I was working for a gay publication, two publications actually, the New York Native, which was a fledgling gay newspaper, and Christopher Street, which was kind of a premium, was a literary magazine. It was great. It was one of those publications like Gay Community News out of Boston that I just loved and I couldn't wait for it to arrive in my mailbox. I read every word. Anyway, I was working there as I was selling advertisements and selling advertising sales. I had had – the first ad agency I worked for was a huge ad agency called [inaudible] International. And, you know, they had all these clients that, you know, were horrible, like the Army and Nestlé and De Beers Diamonds. And anyway, I worked for a group of six creative people, three copywriters and three art directors, and they were all women. And I was their administrative assistant and they loved it and I loved it. It was great. I mean, it's just the whole concept of it, I thought was just, you know, I just – I loved it. And eventually, you know, a couple people left and men came on, but that's how it was when I started. Now, I worked for another ad agency in print production, which is totally different then it is now. In those days, people put actual typed print down as the ad copy. There were no computer-generated suitable for publishing print. It was done by hand with X-Acto knives and had to fill in the page. And the photos because this place I worked, they had many different things, but including Eastman Kodak, although we had their fabric division. Smile, it's easier with Kodel. And at one point we showed the models and I had a one day modeling career, which I'll try to track it down and hold it up in front of the camera. I look pretty good too. I was in my early twenties, so yeah I was a model, and Cody Cosmetics. Anyway, you actually had to send plates, you know, to print off of, around the country to all the magazines. And you had to send these other things called proofs, which were the primary colors, but they would use those to match the color that – as it was supposed to appear on the air. And we had to, you know, figure out how to get it to everybody in time for their deadlines. Because the deadline for a magazine is not, you know, it's like six weeks before, you know. So anyway, I got a lot of experience doing that. It's nothing like that, of course, anymore. People won't even know what I'm talking about. But it was pretty challenging. So I learned a lot about print production and then I worked for a TV production company. I had a lot of jobs, a lot of jobs. I had a lot of jobs, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. I was going to say that and there was nothing to be ashamed of, but I paused for a second. And it was because one of the jobs I had, which actually was really a great experience and this was through, his name is [Lyle Salgas], and he was the person that I was with. We lived together for six years and I – He knows that I'm sorry that I wasn't present for him because he really did a lot to help me in my life in many ways. And he really loved me and I really did love him. I just couldn't, I just couldn't maintain it. Like I still loved him, but I guess with the intimacy I just couldn't maintain. Anyway, his best friend was a lyricist for Broadway shows, and at one point, whose name is Robert Lorick, who's passed away, sadly, Robert Lorick and a musical – a composer Henry Krieger, who wrote the music for Dreamgirls. But they were working on a show called Tap Dance Kid and, I worked for them as a, not as an assistant producer, though I did get a couple people to invest in the show, but is it really a production [inaudible] gopher? But I got to watch the whole process and one of the things I had to do is to help them find a space to practice in, and I found a studio on 48th Street called Act 48 and they had studio spaces, you know, at the piano so people could rehearse. But the other part of it was a dance school for tap, jazz, and ballet. And so Tap Dance Kid was rehearsing there and Dreamgirls was being created at the same time also. So, I got to know two of the women who were to go on to be in the Dreamgirls Broadway show because they helped with the demo and Tap Dance Kid. So this place I got the Act 48 Studios. At one point, they were looking for a night manager. So I signed up for that job. I loved that job, of course. And because I could still work on the show during the day and do this job at night, and I got free jazz and tap, and I would have gotten ballet lessons, but I did not take those. But I did take the jazz lessons for a while. I long ago hung up my shoes, given them away. No it was not the career for me, but it was fun, you know, and night manager and it was above a topless bar on 48th Street, which is so New York, you know. So I really had a lot of great experiences in New York. I think at that time I think I was actually still drinking, etc., during that time, but functioning. I was going to tell a story about – this alcoholism in my family, we’re Irish. Other groups, too, I’m just saying. As my friend Chris [inaudible]’s father used to say, You know, they're Irish, they drink, they're gay, they have HIV. He was funny, not – it's funny in the moment. It's funny, I promise. So, where was I going with that? I’m having an [omicron?] moment. MF: Well, you were going to talk about one of your most proudest moments. TD: Oh, yes, am I leading up to the Braschi decision? MF: You are. TD: So anyway, [inaudible] suggested I go work for my father, which I did. So, I was working the Native and Christopher Street, and that's when the news started to break about this cancer that gay men were getting and the papers started covering it. The Times didn't cover it until much later. It was history about that. The writer who wrote the first article was Lawrence Altman, the writer about it for the Native was Larry Mass ; he's a friend of mine. And whose partner Arnie Kantrowitz, I just found out passed away from COVID. So I need to send a note to say I really loved him and he was ahead of his time writing about AIDS. And you know, it was when they didn't know how it was transmitted and, you know, people with AIDS, they were - many of them would like die immediately and then maybe it would be a couple of days. But there were very few treatments for them, and it was a terrible time. And many hospitals didn't want people with AIDS. So emergency rooms would get backed up with gay men on, you know, gurneys and health care professionals wouldn't go into their rooms. And if they did, they like, wore hazmat suits. And anyway, I mean, things got marginally better over time when people found out how it was transmitted, and you couldn't get it casually. People still think you can get it that way but, medical professionals pretty much knew that's not how you get it. Although if you brought food to someone who was in the hospital because they had AIDS, like, you know, lots of times it’s like a big like fruit basket or something, and the patient obviously can't eat all of it. So, you know, they put out the nurse's station, but nobody would eat it, you know, if it had been in the room. Even later on, there's such fear around it. But many times in rent-protected apartments, rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments, if the person whose name is on the lease died, the surviving life partner was not entitled to stay in the apartment. So a couple of things would happen. The family of the deceased would come in and take everything because everything would belong to them. And the landlord would be nailing an eviction notice to the door. And, you know, it was terrible. And I remember a lot of families that they found out they're gay, he died of AIDS because they hated – they would think that this was the person who gave it to them. It's just terrible. And so there was an attorney at the local legal aid office, Russell Pearce, and he called me up one day and he said, I hear like you're a good person to go to organize stuff in Chelsea. And he said, we're going to mount legal challenges to this and try to protect the rights of surviving, who he then called life partners, to remain in their apartments when the person whose name on the lease dies. So, you know, I was all in and I created a very small group called the Chelsea AIDS Committee, and we put together a demonstration on this issue. There was someone in Chelsea who is being evicted from his tenement, his walk up. Michael Brown was his name. And one of our members Franklin, which he is no longer with us unfortunately, on sheets in big blood red letters, we put ‘Chelsea AIDS Committee’ on it and we organized and we got a lot of people and groups in the neighborhood to support it. And I went to the police station and Oh it's just a little neighborhood, you know, demonstration, but, you know, we're going to need a permit to use. He needed a permit for any amplified sound. But, you know, you just need an amplification permit just for the Saturday afternoon, whatever it was. Anyway, so we have this demonstration, we closed down the street. It was the front page of Newsday, which used to publish in New York City at the time, and it was in all the other papers. It was the lead story in all the local network news, you know, all the networks had local news stations. So at the time there wasn't cable or anything, so it was the lead story on all the news, it was huge. And that although Michael lost his – he lost his case, but there was another case. There are many cases and another there was an attorney who specialized in these cases ; his name was Jim West. And he would take on these cases even though a lot of the people were, you know, had too much money to be eligible for legal aid, but didn't have a lot of money. And he took on these cases and… I have a [inaudible] story to tell. It's also kind of – I'll tell you the story. So I was very good at – No, I was very good at helping judges get elected. And once they got onto the civil court, to then get elected to the Supreme Court. So every once in a while I would go to court to sit next to my friend Jim West when one of his clients was at risk of losing their apartment. And what happened actually, in one case, a woman who I had helped to elect to the civil court when this case – one of these cases went before, she recused herself. She said to me, you know me, my brother died of AIDS. But why should you recuse yourself for that? If later on there would be a lesbian – there was one lesbian judge in particular who recused herself because it was a gay case, which...what, so, you know, heterosexual white men should recuse themselves, I mean that's ridiculous. But anyway, but it was a you know, queer was still kind of marginal, maybe a little less so on the West Side of Manhattan, but still. And anyway. So all of a sudden judges start ruling on these cases because they were all getting – when there was a ruling, they would get appealed to the next level. So some of these judges just start making rulings on these cases, waiting for the case to go all the way to the top court. Which it did in 1989 in a case at Braschi versus Stahl Associates and the court, the state Court of Appeals ruled that nontraditional family members should be treated as family members and should be allowed to succeed to rent-regulated apartments. It only works because of, you know, New York’s… if you're like a landlord or a tenant attorney in New York City and you want to practice someplace else, you're useless because there's still a million rent regulated apartments, there are even more than in New York City. And it only worked for well, actually, it's worked in other ways since then, but it worked for rent-regulated apartments and what it said, because it wasn't just gay people. I mean, the AIDS crisis is what really brought it to a head. But there are many reasons why people may not get married. Two people living on disability may not want to commingle their finances because it might lessen their benefits or all kinds of reasons. You know, maybe that, you know, they're divorced. Who knows? But there's many different things sometimes I – the Golden Girls ; now I mean, I'm fine with polyamory, you know. But I think all of us – who could deny that they were family, not that that's what – but there were, you know, lots of kids. Two women who lived together, they weren't necessarily lesbians, but they just, you know, from college on, they lived in a two bedroom apartment and neither had, you know, moved away. And, you know, one had signed the lease over, at least, you know, 20 years ago, and if they should move or pass away, the other one now could succeed to the lease. And it really it said, if you say you’re family, you’re family, that's really how it worked. And there's some things that you can use to prove that you are family, like get magazine subscriptions together, the joint checking account, you have a pet together, the super know, your neighbors know. You know, you hold yourself out to be family. And so this is a whole laundry list of things that you could use in this including but not only I think. Sex, cannot ask about sex. That's the one thing that can’t come up in a landlord-tenant case that had to do with Braschi. But Miguel Braschi ended up succeeding to the rent-controlled apartment of his partner. And I never met him, but marriage passed. He sent me a congratulatory email. I don't know why I never met him. I actually kind of do know why I never met him ; maybe the same reason why I am always late for you, because it's hard for me to… I don't know. I guess maybe I both crave, like, someone thinking I'm a good person, but I also like, want to push it away? And even after years and years and years of therapy, when someone says something nice, you know, just say thank you and shut up. But I never met him ,and I actually was supposed to meet his sister and I ended up, you know, canceling. And I shouldn't really.. I don't know. You know, that's why I've been in therapy my whole life. Not even with the gay stuff, it's with this. All this other stuff that I have. But that case became the basis for the first case in New York State, where a surrogate judge ruled that the non-biological parent of a same sex couple could adopt the child. And Braschi was the part of the basis of her decision ; it was a surrogate court judge named Eve Preminger, who I supported just saying, in a Democratic primary. But it affected a lot of laws for nontraditional families going forward. And it's my proudest thing because everyone said, You have no chance. So this is what happened. At the time, the largest AIDS services organization was called the Gay Men's Health Crisis. And… I'm just thinking of something which I don't know whether I talked about here, but which I very much want to talk to you about. But if I haven’t, then I'll talk about that down the line having to do with – one of the founders of GMAC was Larry Kramer. So, there's a story that I want to tell, or it's more than a story. But anyway, AIDS helped a lot of people come out or helped force a lot of people to come out. And there were a lot of... maybe formerly closeted or in some cases still in a closet at their law firm, but who volunteered at GMHC with, you know, legal issues, because wills and…but one of the things, of course, for these landlord-tenant cases. And there's a thing that you can do in New York housing court where the landlord will give you… they’ll hand something called the stipulation to you. And I'll say something like, You can stay in your apartment for six months and we'll give you $10,000, and then you go, then you're out. Just sort of to end the case. And so there were these corporate attorneys that were representing tenants and landlords who knew nothing about that and who were allowing people to sign those. And anyway, you know, some of them called me over here, you know, don't sign anything, like do not sign a stipulation. Do not let the tenant sign the stipulation. The thing is, you know, the court is really smart, you know. Many of them, of course, went to great, you know, law schools and everything, but they knew nothing about landlord-tenant court or anything like that, that, you know, they were just like… What is you know? And I don’t wanna say [inaudible], like the fox things with the hens, you know, the landlord attorneys. Most, many landlords have an attorney full time in housing court. They, you know, the landlord has a lot of buildings and depending on what the landlord’s like. So they're like, you know, sharks. And they were just picking these, you know, lawyers off with their poor clients and getting thrown out of their apartments. Anyway, so but Braschi was going on and the largest legal, gay legal organization and probably still is the Lambda Legal Defense and Education. And the head of it then, who actually I became friends with, other people said, Don't fight this. Don't do this because it'll create bad law. You're never going to win. You're never going to win. And he’s like, But they're getting thrown out anyway. Like, what do we have to lose? It's already bad case law. You know what I mean? It's already stacked against us, so why not fight? But they were very afraid about it. And I understand, you know, there's strategies about many things, you know, you want to get the right case to be the one that goes up to, you know, for the highest – for the biggest decisions in New York State, the Court of Appeals and this the Supreme Court. And it can be distracting if other people bring cases that might, you know, jump ahead of yours. But anyway, Tom started, He said, don't do it. And other people said, You ever going to win. Anyway, I didn't listen. And in 1980, the state court of appeals ruled that nontraditional family members should be allowed to succeed to appointments. And much later on, it was really a beautiful thing because Tom said that I – you know, I was one of the many people who just, you know, revered – he was brilliant, brilliant. And he said to me, you know, I just want to make sure that I said you were right. And I could have been very wrong, but I was right. And so. One of the judges, actually, his son is an openly gay assembly member, from Staten Island, and now I believe he's a surrogate court judge out of Staten Island, Matthew Titone is his name. And his father, was on a court of appeals. So it was amazing that we won that case, you know, But we did. And it's been very useful. And I don't want it to go away because of marriage, because I think we should be able to, queer or non queer it doesn’t matter, say, choose our own families. And, you know, put it together, you know, build it however you want to, using whatever institutions there are or not, you know. And I don't want that to go away. I understand why marriages, you know, legally, makes things very easy in some ways. And I kind of feel now almost like, maybe everybody should be getting married because I'm very afraid the Supreme Court is going to – and I always tell people, you know, they can take it away. They can take it away. They can take it away. In New York State, after the marriage equality law passed, the political organization went out of business. And I’m like what? What? Like our job is not done. And the job wasn't done. I mean, I left. I didn't leave because of that. I did leave after marriage passed, but that wasn't why I left, but – which I want to say, which is very important for me to say. Of course, I'm proud of the work I did on marriage and it almost killed me. But of course I'm proud of that. But I'm proud of a lot of other things, as proud that, you know, people don't know about, which I probably won’t be able to help myself, but to talk about here. But that happened in 2011, and I didn't run for reelection in 2012, but not because, you know, [dusting hand motions] my work is done here. Like I had wanted to leave there – I was there 14 years. I never thought I was going to be there 14 years. Like everybody thought I was going to be there ten years. But I was there for 14 years, and it was just time to go for a whole host of reasons. For a whole host of reasons. Anyway. So, you know, the AIDS epidemic blessing and a curse. You know, a lot of people came out. It did exponentially move the, you know, the gay rights movement forward. But it also has, you know… in fact, you know what, because I'm teaching [inaudible], I get a free subscription to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. So I used to get The New York Times delivered, even though when you get the actual paper, you also have access to the digital. But when I got the [inaudible] subscription – except on Sundays, I still get The Times – I missed turning the pages and there was a time when I stopped reading the obituaries because I had read them too early in age. And I never get up to the now because by the time I finish with Ukraine and COVID and well during the Trump years, whatever nightmare he did, but you know, really like, how is Biden doing? I have no time for it. I don't get beyond that because, you know, the bottom of every story says you should look in this story, you should look at this story. I missed going like this [page turning motion] with the newspaper. And I keep saying that I have to get my apartment in better shape, you know, and stop saying that and just get the goddamn newspaper Tom. And I get it on Sunday because there's certain sections in the Sunday paper that they don't keep online for long. But there's reasons why I keep some of them, which is a Tom Duane strategy and a secret, which I am not going to say here. But I may tell you offline, something that – there's a reason that I get it. That I continue to get it on Sunday. Anyway, although I just have to say, I was recently looking at The Times, Sunday, and like there was gay stuff all over, of course, there was the Academy Awards and it was gay gay gay. You know, I don’t know whether it was the gayest. Certainly wasn’t the least gay there if there was. But and like many stories of, you know, the real estate section, they always had a gay couple fixing up the country house or, you know, or a designer who acknowledges that they're gay. Or like in the sports section, you know, a woman who, like casually mentions, you know, her life, like it's nothing. Like it’s nothing. Of course I think it's like nothing now too. What?! It was – are you kidding? I’ve lived during the most amazing times. It was never nothing for a very long time. It was like a big deal. And you had to read between the lines. And honestly, when I first ran for office, like, that's how I found out. That's how I figured out who might be gettable as a donor. Was reading about them somewhere and being like, I think that person's gay. Like not because they said they were gay, but just because of – I don't know. Not just because they were like single or something like that ; you know, at a certain age a man or woman was single. But, you know, sometimes you just – anyway. Like you just figure it out. And of course, some of the lesbian and gay people and actually trans and bi people who contributed to my campaign, and they tell me other people that I should ask, you know. So I didn't there – wasn't much fundraising that kind of fund raising a community political fundraising at all. In New York, running a campaign is very expensive. So I think I raised a lot of money. And the guy who'd run before for me, David Rothenberg, who I will call back to, who founded the Fortune Society and ran for the city council, he raised money. But he actually had, I think, an easier time raising money cause he's kind of more – way more famous and he'd worked in the theater. And so anyway, but, you know, raising money was not something that the gay people did. You know, people started to give because of GMAC or because of other things. And that also made, you know – more people gave to Lambda. And then the ACLU started their – they used to have an AIDS project ; I don’t know if they still do but they have a, you know, the lesbian and gay wing of the ACLU. So people have started and we have national organizations that are national political organizations that people give money to. But it wasn't something that people did. It was a very… so, you know, an organization like GMAC that people started to give money to and. It was a relatively new thing in the 80s and... You know, when I ran in 1989, the city council and I lost. Your donors are listed at the Board of Elections, and now it's online. I think at the time you probably had to go to the board of elections in the – I think that's the only way you could find them. But you could look at people's donors list and steal them for your campaign so… or for other reasons. And after I lost the ‘89 campaign, think a few months later, my mother called me up and she begged me, begged me – just because all of her friends, because some of their friends, my parents friends gave in and they were getting like advertisements, you know, for hotter, you know, sexier sex with this condom or this lube or something. And my parents’ friends, my mother was like, We’ll fund the campaign but just stop them. But I had no control over it. You know, I actually – people you know, I would say steal my list, but it's public, so they didn't steal it. But they you know, they took my donors and they used them for their own purposes, for, you know. And, not, you know, maybe some of my parent’s friends, they’re having hotter healthier sex now. Anyway, of course there did come a time when I would always – I think it was – I'm sure I said it when I was – my father's life, but I would also say to my mother, Oh, every family's got one. They would mention some, you know, a friend of theirs for years that they knew, however ; my mother worked at American Airlines with them, and my father knew some of them. And I would say, Yeah, their daughter is a lesbian. Every family's got what I would you know, because every family practically does. There should be a support group for families that don't. Anyway. But, I mean, that's a – it could all be taken away, so maybe everybody should be getting married. I don't know. I don't know because I don't want that. We could go back. I mean, if abortion goes, like we're next on the list, you know? And having two sexual assaulters on the Supreme Court, anyway. So I'm a community activist and Braschi, that case – we won that case when I was running for the city council the first time. The race that…this is a race that my friend David Rothenberg had run against an incumbent council member – four years… in 1985, and at the time there were 35 councilmembers in New York City, and the council districts were like huge. They were like between the size of, say, a state Senate district or a congressional district, they were like big. And anyway, he ran, he did very well, maybe a 46% or something like that, 45, 46%. And he lost, but it was a great race. And I love David, but I did go to him, and I – He didn't like politics. A lot of people say they don't like politics, and sometimes people that don't like politics are the best of politics. I used to be like when I was a babe in the woods and I was just nice to everybody, like I did really well. But it is important sometimes to know the history. Like once you start learning about people, you know, sometimes it's important to know the history. So anyway, I went to him and I asked him if he was going to run and he said No, that he wasn't. I considered running for the actual the Senate seat I eventually ran for and won in 1988, but I decided not to. I wasn't really ready to. And the senator who had the seat was kind of wounded with a legal issue, which he was deemed innocent of. And I kind of didn't want to – just didn't feel right to run against him. And it did it to be the right decision. But they did put together a campaign in 1989 and ran for the city council and… It must be … – And I lost. But I did very well. I won a lot of areas, but I lost some areas also. It was a, you know, elections are a funny thing. I – and there's a joke, you know, you run against someone if it's raining, my supporters are staying home, if it's sunny theirs are all coming out to vote. But there had been something that happened in – there was race-based issues that occurred in New York City. And the mayoral race was between the two major candidates, who was running for reelection and David Dinkins, who actually eventually won the primary. But it was a much larger turnout than usual. And so I actually hadn't.. my mail plan would have been different because it was different and more people who came out to vote. And, you know, you never see what's coming. You know, the primaries in September and it was the summer is when, you know, things happened in the – maybe very late in the summer. So it's kind of too late to – everything's already in motion – anyway, lost. I did get interested in The New York Times, and I lost by the same amount that David did. I got like 45, 46 or something like that percent and did very well in some areas. I know I’ve jumped way ahead here, but I just found out at the end of 1988 and I will have to go back and talk about this. But I found out my HIV status. Which didn't surprise me at all, but it was not something I, you know, I didn't tell people, Oh, I'm sure I have HIV or anything, but I was sure I did. And then when I actually got confirmation that I did have it, I really only told a couple of very close friends. And so, I really wasn't ready to be public about it during that – I actually kind of put it out of my mind when I ran into, you know, just because, I think for me it was kind of a natural thing to do. I had to do that in order to focus on race. And I was to disclose it. And it is a very important story that I want to tell you about where they disclosed HIV status. But… I was going to jump back or something for a reason, but oh, how did I find out about my HIV status. In 1984 maybe… there was a study being conducted out of Columbia, the [Irving] Medical Center, regarding gay men and AIDS and depression. And so I had a bunch of friends who all volunteered to take part in this study. And we said, you know, we were all interviewed in depth by people. And then they did eventually, when they had a lot of the data, they – anyone who was part of it was invited, you know, to go to a presentation about it. And then we were invited to another one because they probably – I think they kept in touch with us and kept asking us questions. And it was around 1985, they said, we would like to take – if people who are willing to take an HIV test and give, you know, blood for a test, you know, you don't have to, but this could be a part of our study and we know we're not going to get as many people for this. But we still… it's very worthwhile for us. And I of course… there's never, you know, a test, case, a trial that I don’t signed up for. So of course, I signed up for it. And it was in 19’, probably 1988 when it was when people were starting to live a little bit longer. I'm not sure exactly the year that AZT came out. I'd have to check that. But there was some treatments that people could have for, you know, the pneumonia and for the Kaposi sarcoma and all of the things that… I forget what it’s called but it causes blindness. Anyway, there were things that could be done to treat those things, to treat the symptoms anyway, so people would live longer and. And in 1988, the word was that, Well, okay, get your results now. Because before that they said, Don’t bother because there's nothing that can be done about it anyway you know till you have something so you know, don't. But then there were… so I went and I got my test results and the woman that I… who told me, who was, you know, also the counselor. You know, kind of trying to… you know, How do you feel? You know, to try to [inaudible]. But I... I just so I knew, you know. So I said, no, I… you know, I know my history. I am not surprised. And I was already… I was a member of ACT UP, I wasn't a leader of ACT UP, but I was a body to get, you know, arrested. The only thing I did ask their help on was Braschi to write a campaign, a postcard campaign to the governor, to, you know, work on the legislature to pass something that would be like Braschi, which didn't happen ; it happened through the courts. But the state actually, they didn't have to promulgate regulations. And there has been legislation regarding who's entitled to succeed to apartments because it included all surviving family members like children and grandchildren ; if they lived there for two years or if they lived there for at least a year, if you were sick and they were living in it. But you still have to hold yourself out to – people had to know you were there, you know, it was less difficult to prove your family, but it also included nieces and nephews and, you know, extended family, which some of which was shrunk later on. But it's still, you know, grandchildren, etc. But anyway, I don't know, I you know, I guess in some ways I think I felt a little bit defensive about not having had disclosed it in ‘89, but I just wasn't ready. I just, you know. And the thing about it, I mean I was going to be running for office and it just wasn't time to go around to people that I would need to go around to tell, you know, so that they wouldn’t find out. But more so, I just wasn't ready to put that on the table as part of the campaign or anything. Anyway, I lost. And that year New York City passed a new charter and the size of the council changed from 35 to 51 members. So the districts became smaller and... There – because the Supreme Court ruled that the way government was done in New York City was unconstitutional. So we had to change the way our government was. I teach this to my students, even though it's irrelevant because, you know, the old system doesn't – There used to be five borough presidents. They each had a vote on the board of estimate. There was a mayor, there was the president of the city council and a comptroller, and they each had two votes. And almost everything went through the board of estimate. The mayor created the budget that the board of estimate… really they would move things around. If it was land uses, zoning, they did it. So it was, you know, six votes for the citywides and five for the four presidents. And, you know, there'd be different alliances. And it wasn't a terrible way. It was, you know, no matter what kind of government, there's always going to be backroom stuff. So it probably was more backroom stuff. Some ways, I think it was fairer in some ways, but it was unconstitutional because, you know, having one person in Staten Island and having all that power and, you know, Brooklyn having whatever, six times that population having one person, on the board of estimates, so. And also something else. The reformers had done a lot of reform through the years for things that the sort of permanent government that, you know, what I – a term I learned during the marriage, grass tops people, you know, influential people. Anyway, where am I going with this? They’re always trying to reform the city council because the city council was always democratic and they didn't like that. So they you know, they tried proportional representation to try to get more Republicans and more conservative. Well, they got a couple, but they also got like communists and socialists, so. And so everything that they did, it didn't turn out the way they wanted to. They made it so that every borough could elect two borough wide city council members and they couldn't be from the same party. So every, you know, borough had one Democrat and then some had a liberal and some had a conservative, like Staten Island always had a conservative, but Brooklyn and Queens, they would go back and forth. Manhattan and the Bronx, always elected a liberal, but they really a Democrat. So anyway, it didn't work really in their favor either. But that was ruled unconstitutional too. That they got extra council members and with unequal populations. So we had to create a new – I say we. There was a charter commission and they made this new power of 51 new council members and they divided all that power up between the mayor, who was already very, very powerful, even with the board vested and the city council. And so… and this is what, when I teach this to my students now, I really realized for the past couple of semesters how ludicrous this sounds, but districts redrawn to enable certain underrepresented groups to win. So for instance, the district that I ran in was considered to be the gay winnable district, not that it was majority gay. Of course, it wasn't that there was a sizable lesbian and gay community, so it was thought, well, people might vote for a gay person there. Downtown there was an Asian winnable district. Was it majority Asian? No, it was... but there is a sizable Asian community. And there was a district drawn for a Dominican-American person to win. There was a district run for a Caribbean American to win. So the reason I, you know, I say it's like… At a time, I thought it was very important, I thought it was a very good idea and actually the gay community kind of worked closely with the Asian community in drawing districts so that we could each have a district. Anyway, now the Asian winnable district had not been represented by an Asian person till very recently, and then she served either eight or maybe 12 years because term limits were extended. But she had to run like five times before she won – four times before she won. And it's now represented by a non Asian person. But Flushing is represented by an Asian-American and the district where the St. Pat's for All Parade is, which includes Sunnyside, where Jimmy van Bramer, who’s actually more Irish than Van Bramer, was the councilmember, openly gay councilmember. Someone who is a friend and who worked on my campaigns and who also is able to start a gay organization at St John's University, which did not last after he was gone. But I don't know how he did it, but he snuck it in and it wasn't very big. He asked me to come and speak to them, and one of the women on it was from Ireland, and she actually turned out to be like an Olympic track star in Ireland when she went back from St John’s. Anyway, they don't allow that in Catholic Universities to this day, but he got it done at St. John's. So you know, no wonder he won the council seat. Anyway I thought it was, you know, a good idea, but this district in Sunnyside is represented by an Asian-American woman. But it's a very small Asian community there, you know. And, you know, other places are represented by gay people, even though they're not, you know, considered to be gay. There's a 22 year old now who represents a district in Brooklyn that includes like Crown Heights, which is predominantly Caribbean American and African-American and Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish people. And he's the councilmember there. So in a way, there's not really the same need for it, but at the time there was a need. And so I ran in the gay district and… in 1991. And this is a sort of an important story that I want to talk about because it's important for me to tell my own story. Yes. So let me beautify before I do that. So the new districts were created after the citizens of New York voted in this new form of government. And they voted in 1989. And there was to be an election in 1991 with new council districts that some of which were identity oriented. Make them winnable for various communities to win again, not because they were majority, but just because there was a substantial number of people who lived in the district who were of that group, the Dominican, gay, etc. So by this point I had decided to run again, I have to -- I need help finding a better analogy than this. But like it is a very special club. People who've lost an election and run again, because it had been like childbirth, like you only remember the good parts because some people are like, I'm never doing this again. But then there are some people like me that were like… not that it was -- actually, it's a sickness. In a way it's great, it has problems with it because you have to put your whole life on hold. And then after whether you win or you lose and I tell candidates all the time, I hope you win, but whether you win or lose, you're going to be depressed right afterwards. And I'll be there for you because all of a sudden everything comes on top -- everything that you have put off during the campaign because you're so focused, like all the bills you didn't pay, all the, you know, family stuff that you didn't take care of, like every other part of your life. You know, like, I don't know if you're watching The Real Housewives, you got to let that go like… you can't do anything because you're raising money, you're meeting people. So -- and I am a [inaudible]. So you could tell towards the end, I didn't have very many competitive races. So in 91, anyway, I decided that I was going to disclose my HIV status when I ran in 1991, and I started to put things in motion. It was sort of like, you know, a snowball effect. I told more people, I like joined the HIV positive caucus of Act Up. I know it's anonymous, but I went to HIV recovery meetings, you know, people of substance abuse and that but specifically for people living with HIV. I told more people, and it's actually something I always wanted to -- I thought this would be a good StoryCorps thing. My friend Laura Morrison, who worked on my -- as a paid staffer on my first campaign, who I met when I went up to Columbia Teachers College to speak before again when I was just a district leader and activist. And I remember she was very active in ACT UP, more active than I was. She got arrested at NBC and actually CBS, ABC and Public Television ; ACT UP people were able to get out in front of the cameras and say that ACT UP, Fight Back, Fight AIDS. But her group got caught. Apparently someone had to use the bathroom. And, you know, people on set heard that noise. She got arrested, well they all got arrested. She just didn't get a chance to go out and in front of the camera. Anyway, she was more active than I was in ACT UP, but a very good friend of mine. And she worked on my second campaign. And where, Christine Quinn I asked to be my campaign manager and, [sighs] I think some people will understand this, but not everyone will understand this. But we were -- I wanted to tell her, it was early on when I started telling people and I said, you know... In a way I -- You know, I'm.. I would prefer to have it. Like not that I wouldn't be, I was already an AIDS activist, I was already doing the work. But I felt a little bit like if there were people who had HIV and who were, you know, I wanted to be, you know, of them, and I didn't wish that I already had AIDS, really, I wouldn't have gone out and tried to get it or anything. But I guess I wanted... I don't know. I wanted to -- I can't quite explain it, but like, if people are going to be suffering less, and of course, a lot of people in recovery because they were injection drug users and non-gay people, I knew also who had it. So, you know, a lot of these people who I knew, many of whom I have loved, many of whom I like, some I was just acquainted with, if they were going to live with this, that I wanted to be part of that. And I would have been, you know, any way, even though I never, you know, it didn't matter whether you had it and you got arrested, whether you had HIV or not. But I don’t know. as I say, it's the way I feel, sort of the way I feel. And I think -- I’m not so sure everybody would think it's so great. But as I say, I wouldn't be going out to get it. But I wasn't surprised I had it. And I -- and by that time I was used to having the absolute knowledge that I had HIV. So I started to tell more people. And what happened was that because of the way they drew the districts, there was a woman, who was…her name was Liz Abzug. And I don't know all the facts on this, but there was a chance that she was going to run in this district. And she was not, not out as a lesbian. She wasn't really a political lesbian, if you know what I mean. She was a social lesbian, sort of. Anyway, she decided to run in the gay, winnable district. So now -- and it was also a time when… it was really an important time to empower women because of things that were happening in the country at that time. And so that I was a guy was, you know, kind of a disadvantage. Anyway, Liz Abzug is the daughter of Bella Abzug, the very progressive woman who I had worked to get elected to office, you know, And so the daughter of this, you know, feminist icon I’m running against, she's like, We're running against each other. And there was nothing else happening in New York City, so I’ll talk more about that a little bit later. Anyway, I asked Chris Quinn to be my campaign manager, and after she said yes, I sprung on her that I was going to announce my, not announce but disclose my HIV status. She was a tenant organizer and really, she was a great campaign manager, very smart, very good friend for a very long time. And my campaign consultant, when I told him I thought he was going to have a heart attack. And first, I'll have to talk about this thing that comes around, I was like I had a very active, too active sex life. And which I told him about. You know, I gave him all my negative research and he said, Oh, I think they're all going to vote for you, they're on a midnight registrations in my apartment. Anyway, then I think he was excited. And he was like, Oh, I might be able to work on the campaign if it's successful, you know, person. And there was only one other elected official in the country ; there was only one who was open about his HIV status. His name is Brian Coyle, and he's passed away. He actually passed away during that campaign and I knew him from meetings hat I went to for gay elected officials. He was a wonderful community organizer and just a really good guy. And anyway, because he had disclosed his HIV status. I called him and I said, Brian, how did you do it? And he said, Well, he said, I had a camera crew like from a local news station follow me around. And what would be like your New York magazine in Minneapolis followed me around. And it was just to see, like we said, it was just a story day in the life of a councilmember, but it was really leading up to disclosing his HIV status. So the story was embargoed and right before the story was going to come out on TV and in this newspaper, he thought to himself you know, the people in my district need to hear it from me especially, not the way everybody else like -- I have to you know, they’re my constituents, they like they deserve to know personally from me. So, he said, I wrote a letter and I sent it to everybody in the district. And I thought to myself, Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Because thank you… he was so -- He doesn't know -- maybe he does know how much he helped me, my mentor he was. But so I was like, that's it, I'm going to write a letter, you know, to the voters. To tell them so they would know that as they made up their minds who to vote for. And so that -- the campaign was like there was nothing else, literally. There was no mayor, no governor, no nothing. There wasn't even much happening nationally ; it was an odd year, an odd numbered year, ‘91. And so Liz comes out as a lesbian, like in a political way. Now I'm already like, like I'm a gay billboard. You know what I mean? But then I announce my HIV status, and there were people who thought that was like, you know, you can only imagine what Fox News would have done with that. I mean, it wasn't that bad. And a lot of people -- it was a very serious thing so. But there was some of the other stuff, which is, of course, the stuff I remember, not the good stuff. You know, the difficult stuff. Anyway, I know it was very, very difficult for her and she was not a good friend of hers, but we were friendly with each other. We liked each other. And I also knew her sister, who worked for an elected official. And I do have to do just a shoutout. The year between running for the city council and losing and then running and winning. That year I worked for another elected official. I worked for Elizabeth Holtzman, Liz Holtzman, who is another one -- an icon to me. She had been -- she was a member of Congress. She was fortunate enough to be on the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon Watergate time, and she was really a star that because she's so smart. And then she ran for the Senate and should have won, but because of the way New York is, you know, we have, you know, all these parties in addition to Democrat and Republican. And she won the Democratic primary, which was a tough race, but she won it. And Al D'Amato, a Republican, conservative Republican, beat a long time liberal Republican, as New York had Rockefeller, Javits left, which is… there were candidates that people in office had both the Republican and the liberal line. They were a certain brand of Republicans. Anyway, Alfonse D'Amato beat Jacob Javits, who remained on the liberal line, and Elizabeth Holtzman, similar to like a bad break that Bella Abzug had when she ran for the Senate. But some of that because Jacob Javits was still on the liberal line, she just fell short and she should have been a senator. She just should have been the senator. But New York is horrible for women, and maybe it's getting better now. But it was -- it's been a boys town. And, you know, people didn't like her. You know, she's does that whenever -- she's the smartest, the nicest, and has a great sense of humor. She's kind of shy, and actually a lot of times -- I was a shy kid. But we compensate. Oh, I overcompensate, maybe she doesn’t overcompensate as much as I do, but you could just -- But people really, you know, liked her, respected her. Anyway, I loved working for her for that year. All right, so back to the race. There's that sniff again. So I had enough people volunteering on my campaign, this is before the HIV disclosure, that we did our own poll. We didn't have to use an outside firm. We, you know, were able to make all the calls ourselves to get at random sampling. And one of the questions was, do you know someone who has AIDS? Maybe another question was or someone who is HIV positive? So based on that, that people -- this is something that people don't know a lot about because we live I don't know it. I think if I told this at the time, when you see what -- I would have seemed like craven or something, the way I did this, but I wanted to win, you know, there's no point in disclosing my status and losing. Anyway, actually. And then again, there's nothing wrong with this. We did focus groups. I didn't see any of them. The campaign did focus groups with some of these people and they showed them two letters. One was a professor who was up for tenure and telling the department head about their HIV status. And then the other was someone running for office. Just talking about if they were HIV positive and they would ask the people what they thought of that, Should the professor do that? Should this guy do this, who’s running for office? And apparently in the focus groups, older people who vote a lot. The older someone is, the more likely they are to vote. They were like a politician would never do that. But of course I'd vote for them. And the gay men are all saying, Oh, don't tell anybody. But I’d already decided to do it, you know, so it could have cut either way. It didn't seem like it was a big negative, you know. And it could have been a little bit positive, too. But who knows? But I wasn't, you know, I didn't know when I was going to send out the letter, but my campaign manager and, you know, people that I trusted, and my consultant is John [Houston] is his name. You know, they said, this has to be the first thing you send out to everybody. So I, along with John Astin, wrote a letter to the voters in the district disclosing my HIV status and telling him that I wanted them to know that before they made up their mind about who they were going to vote for. So, you know, I had a plan on how to disclose my HIV status because I wanted to win, and I wanted to disclose my HIV status. And I, you know, I talked about this and, you know, who knows what the futur – I think older people especially, but also gay men, like who knows what the future holds? Who knows when someone's – you know, I can't promise I'm not going to get sick. You know, I might. But right now, I'm very healthy and vigorous. And I think there's some other things that, you know, came from my heart, I think that also would indicate that like who I am and just, you know. Maybe you could read between the lines that I was an empathetic person. I'm not I'm not quite sure. But anyway, we put these plans in place, you know, and… So the time comes for the letter to go out, and we knew that there would be some press attention to it. And so we wanted a newspaper to do the story ; we wanted the New York Times to do it. And I had heard about, oh, I have to go see him. Phil Gutis, who I – lives in near New Hope now, had worked at The Times, and then he was working for the ACLU. And I asked him if he would help us and in particular, help us to plant a story in The New York Times the day that the letter was going to come out. Similar to what Brian Coyle did with the magazine and, you know. So he helped with that. He went to one of the editors who assigned a reporter who I spoke with before. And so the night that the letter went out, some people receiving it was also in the newspaper in The Times. And there was a tremendous media… it got a lot of press, you know, nationally even. So, you know, I got from like this little, you know, neighborhood kind of, you know, city council race to like, all right, now you have to learn to talk to the national media, you know what I mean? So it was – so I'm not – I became very unafraid to talk to the press after this, you know, because nothing could have beaten this. So – well marriage maybe, not beat it, but equal it. What happened was, then right after that, Larry Kramer and this guy named Roger McFarland, who worked for, uh, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, which is a theater group. They don't – they’re just called... I think they dropped the – I think they’re just called Broadway Cares now. I'm not sure they have Equity Fights AIDS as part of their name anymore. But anyway, he was the co-chair of it with this other guy, Tom Viola. But, Larry and Roger were in some sort of relationship and they planted in the paper that I was forced to disclose my status, which is exactly not what I did. And that story appeared in the Post. And then, so that narrative exists out there that, you know, I was forced to do it and I was not forced to do it. Like I made it so that I had to ; I had no choice but to do it. But that was of my own doing to, you know, you know, force myse – And I remember, you know, when I went for an interview at The New York Times, like I couldn't – I didn't feel like I could tell them that I had, like, been so intentional about how I was going to do it because – and I think probably they had it, you know, in their minds, because the endorsement meetings were after all this happened, that, you know, I was forced to do it. And they did it really, really, really, really, really upset me. And you can see now I – and it's sort of like leached into stories about me. And I – it's so terrible that it sort of tainted something that was only meant to do good. Like I didn't want people to think they should be forced to disclose their HIV status. Like that was not the message at all. But I think most people did get the – not everybody reads the Post, you know, of course. But I was angry about it, and Larry Kramer kept calling me up. He wanted to apologize, and I would not take his call. When I get angry my way, I close down and I’m like, Leave me alone. Don't try to make it better. I'll come back to you when I'm ready. And he kept calling and calling, and I wouldn't take his calls. Like if he had stopped calling me it might have been different. And then I got a letter ; I got lots of letters and phone calls and, you know, letters of support and everything, both, you know, in the district. But people I knew and just random people with HIV or people with whatever, people who had – people with chronic illnesses. So anyway, there was a letter that came in from a therapist, a woman, lesbian, who was a therapist. She was a friend of mine, had her return address, was addressed to me, and I opened it up and it was an apology letter from Larry Kramer. And I was so angry about that, too, because he forced, you know what I mean? Like it was a smart thing to do, I guess. But I was so upset about that, too, you know.. And I actually didn't forgive him for a very long time. And then years later, I called. I said, You know what – because he was sorry. I said, You know what Larry? I’m sorr – I said, We’re good. You know, not like I forgive you., but yeah, I forgive you. You know, I'm not mad. I don't want you to feel terrible about this anymore, you know? I want us to – it's okay. I never confronted Larry Kramer about it because it's just… I don't know why I didn't. I just feel like it would have been.. It might’ve just made it worse, you know? But they were supporting. Larry lived in the same building as Bella Abzug. They were supporting of Miss. Abzug, and that's why they did that. And the other thing that's happened, is so upsetting also. Many, many years later… Oh you know, so there was – anyway. So, many years later, Liz called me and she said, You know, I'm not the one that put that in the paper. I didn’t – And I said, Oh, my God Liz. Like I knew – I never thought she did. And I thought, Oh, my God, all these years she thought that I thought that she was behind that. And I never thought that. And I really felt terrible for her that she thought that, you know, I thought that she was to blame for that. And I knew she had nothing to do with it, you know. She was asked to comment in The Times and she made a very good comment. She said it shouldn't really make a difference in a campaign. People should vote for who they think is the best candidate. But, I think she got bad advice from someone. I actually know who probably gave her this advice when she was asked by the press the next day like that, the electronic media, as we called it then, and she said that she thought that it was opportunistic. And so a reporter at this big press conference said, Your opponent says that your disclosing your status is opportunistic. I couldn't have got a better question and she couldn't have said it you know, more... I don't know, slow pitched or whatever. And I was like, Well, it's an opportunity that I'd rather not have. She shouldn't have said that. She should have left the other thing. But it gave me a chance to say… even though I kind of told you that it's not something I’d rathe – but I did. But a normal thing would not want to have it – to not, you know, have that opportunity to, you know, have HIV and be able to disclose it. And by the way, I think that the… I don't know. Anyway, she got addressed by the Times that time, two years before I got addressed three times. And I just think that the [inaudible] meeting that happened after that. So I'm just telling this story because I – and I don't always tell it because I'm still upset about it, but it's out there and that's why I say I need to tell my own story. So that's why I'm telling you this story. But I don't know. You know, I hope you know, a hundred million people see this, but even if it's ten, it doesn't matter. I just, you know, on the record. And I think Larry died recently and I, you know, I forgave him. We never had – he doesn't even know I was mad. Well, he must have known I was angry with him, but he doesn't know that I forgave him or whatever. But anyway, I went on to win and I won, you know, pretty decisively. And, you know, I have deeper roots in the community. And, you know, there wasn't – it actually didn't have a lot to do with it. I mean, it got a lot of attention like that day maybe, and the national press covered it more. But the local press, you know, they move on to something else. And then from then on, it really was, you know. What… you know, our race between the two of us, and people have decided and I had deeper roots in the community than she did, you know, both in the queer community and, you know, just in neighborhood things. I had more things that I could point to, you know, a land use and zoning plan that I helped to write for Chelsea. And I was on, you know, the group that helped to decide what tenant should live in this development. But anyway, I was, you know, I couldn't help myself. It, you know, so they have talked about. I feel like – I just all that stuff just calls to me. So I have deeper roots in the community than she did, and I won decisively. I mean, I'm really sad about that, she thought she had – I knew she had to do with it. I'm not even sure she really wanted to run that much. But I think her mother wanted to, you know, serve, you know, a legacy. So anyway, what I can say this, you know, I won that race. It was actually much more arduous than the race in 1989. It was not fun, really. It was, you know, tough. And it was you know, I think global warming showed itself very much. So, it was really hot all summer long. And I – by rights, I should have lost weight because I'm a weight loser. But then they said, no, no, you can't lose weight, people will think you're getting sick. So every day I had to eat a pint of ice cream. It was so unfair, I didn’t get to lose weight. Anyway, you know. So then I was, you know, the first openly gay person to run with having had disclosed their HIV status in the United States. And Brian was the first to disclose – well, he was in office. And so certainly in the council and then again in the Senate, you know, the like the gay caucus was always meeting in my head. You know, the HIV caucus was always meeting in my head. But there were a lot of things that were to come where I really had to fight hard on behalf of people living with HIV. And it was actually… I think it gave it more strength because I was a person living with HIV. At one point, someone sent out postcards to Republicans in the Senate and that said, Does Tom Duane we really have HIV ; he's never been sick and he's gained like 500 pounds. They didn’t say 500 pounds, but they said like 100 pounds or something. And I had gained weight. I was more happy about that, but I know the HIV probably was... And I found out who did it ; I never did anything about it, but that was, you know. I had other things like, people signed me up for blood drives, someone took down my sign. So I did have some stuff like that, unpleasant things, but well, all of HIV is pretty – you know, the medication is, you know, pretty unpleasant. I don’t – you see these commercials everyone’s really happy. You know, they have great jobs and all these friends. I’m like, who wouldn’t want to – No, no, no. I'm telling you. The stuff I take is powerful and poisonous. And, you know. No, you don't want it. But I don't – there isn't anyone with HIV in the legislature, in either house, in Albany still. And I don't think there's anyone on the city council. I mean, there may be. Actually, I know someone who does have it in the assembly, but he has never – he doesn't disclose it. So, which I actually encouraged him to do it, but he didn't. Anyway, you know, the AIDS crisis is still not over now, it's just it's a disease of poverty now, you know. And I'm still on a state advisory committee and I want to get off and I've been on it for so many years, but I'm like the only one that, like, refuses to say that it's okay to test people without their knowledge, without doing like just at least a little bit of counseling, at least to ask them if they want the test, you know, I mean? And there really is a stigma. Like you have to tell people like they're laws against discriminating against you and you're entitled to health care like all these things. But most of the people on this advisory committee work in AIDS organizations. So, of course they don’t feel stigma. But if they ask any of their clients, Is there stigma in their community, they'll say, yes, there is stigma. Like who would hire me? I'm expensive, you know, I mean, now Medicare, they have to take you. But I mean, corporations…are they gonna hire someone who's HIV – no! The medications are very expensive. Maybe they will if it's a huge corporation, but it's not an advantageous thing, you know. It is something I'd rather not have, except that's not completely true. But, you know, if I was an average person and I used to say that and they said it like, who would hire me? You know, this is like and I said – I would say to tell the people, yeah, you don't have stigma because you work in the field. Although maybe you do have a little stigma but you wouldn’t admit to it. Like don’t we all? Don’t I even – everybody has a little homophobia, everyone has a little sexism, racism. Everyone is you know AIDS-phobic a little bit even if you work in the field. There's still stigma. Maybe you're not a perpetrator of that, but there's stigma and there's discrimination. And it's something that you really have to talk to people about. And most people will decide to take the test. You know, most people will because then they can stay alive, anyway. So. Yes, I disclosed my HIV status and then everything from that happened. MF: Well, I felt like this was a good place to end. We sort of have talked about your movement post-graduation, work in tenant associations, advertising and magazines a little bit, and then really your political career through a city council run and loss to a city council win. Tomorrow could we start with what happens with the win? What are you doing on city council? Would that be a good place to start? TD: Yes. Yes. MF: I loved this interview today. I felt like I learned a lot. Thank you so much for speaking with us today. TD: Well, I think there's... The truth is, I think there's a part of me that's like, a little reticent about like, I do want to tell my story, but it's also – it's. I don't know, it's. There's a lot to pull out. And there are other things that were happening which I… which we'll talk about that were happening at the same time in my life. In my personal life, too. Everyone should know that I do. I do have a time management issue. It's a part of my ADHD, and I know it sounds like an excuse. It is an excuse, but I usually have coping mechanisms to making that so. But, for purposes of this interview. I was very late today and I – it was terrible that I was so late to this interview. And I don't – I mean, maybe it was a little bit like I'm a little [cough heard in background], but I signed up for it and I'm glad that I did it, have done it. And I will be on time tomorrow, I promise. I'm on time to my therapy appointments, to my recovery. Like I'm usually – I don't know what happened today. Is there MF: It’s totally fine TD: – And we must be moving up towards a full moon because that's a bad time. And then when the moon is full, things are kind of good on the slide down. I have to check and see where exactly where we're at on the whole... anyway. MF: We were just happy to drive into New York and we're happy to sit with you here today and we look forward to tomorrow. I'm excited about it. TD: Your president was here for a couple of days. MF: Oh, really? TD: And he invited – in fact, he invited…even I was invited to go meet him up atTavern On the Green, but I couldn't do it. So it’ll be the another opportunity, maybe when I go back. MF: Are you coming for the graduatio – Are you coming for this reunion? TD: I think so. My 50th high school reunion is tomorrow night. MF: Oh, my gosh. Fun. TD: So I won't be full hair and makeup here. But yes, the last one I went to, you know what I found out? Even the popular kids, it was very stressful for them because apparently it's very hard to keep that status. Who knew? Everybody was a mess. And it was funny because a lot of the, Who did you have a crush on? You know, and I did have a couple of crushes and I probably mentioned a couple names, but I always would put their name, And of course you, which wasn’t always true. Boys like to be, you know, they want admirers too, even from gay guys. So, anyway. MF: Well, I look forward to tomorrow morning and thank you so much again. 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.) 02:11:23 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 Thomas Duane, April 1, 2022 (Part 2) Description An account of the resource Thomas Duane talks about his life after Lehigh University organizing in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, time in office as a district leader and city councilmember, and his experiences as the first and only openly gay, HIV-positive member of the New York State legislature. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-37 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-04-01 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 Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and 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/9da88d4fce60ea80a28b5c88e77a6418.png e1a24fa045d97e1a511b28538f2e0ac1 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 of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Thomas Duane 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-22.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 February 17, 2022 Thomas Duane, February 17, 2022 (Part 1) LGBT-22 1:52:55 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) 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 Thomas Duane Mary Foltz video/mp4 DuaneThomas_20220217_video_trimmed.mp4 1.0:|27(15)|46(10)|79(14)|106(3)|123(2)|140(5)|159(5)|176(2)|197(2)|218(17)|239(7)|262(5)|279(15)|292(13)|311(10)|330(11)|351(14)|372(12)|391(14)|416(7)|439(16)|460(4)|489(13)|506(5)|527(4)|546(11)|565(10)|586(11)|611(7)|630(16)|651(8)|670(9)|691(10)|710(7)|727(13)|752(13)|773(16)|790(14)|811(16)|834(8)|859(10)|876(3)|891(15)|908(16)|933(4)|956(14)|971(3)|988(9)|1003(14)|1022(10)|1043(4)|1064(9)|1087(12)|1104(9)|1119(6)|1142(14)|1165(7)|1190(11)|1207(11)|1232(10)|1251(12)|1272(15)|1295(7)|1318(15)|1335(6)|1352(13)|1369(16)|1388(2)|1405(11)|1428(5)|1449(8)|1462(4)|1485(12)|1500(9)|1521(3)|1540(6)|1557(13)|1580(10)|1603(7)|1626(7)|1645(18)|1666(10)|1685(16)|1708(13)|1727(11)|1746(13)|1769(9)|1790(5)|1807(9)|1824(8)|1841(14)|1860(4)|1875(10)|1896(13)|1921(16)|1940(14)|1969(3)|1990(3)|2011(9)|2028(10)|2055(5)|2074(8)|2093(2)|2114(9)|2133(5)|2154(12)|2177(13)|2208(11)|2225(14)|2256(16)|2279(16)|2306(12)|2325(12) 0 https://youtu.be/zRHi6rmXYA0 YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Senator Thomas K. Duane to talk about his life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley and beyond -- including New York, importantly -- as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year our project has funding from ACLS and we are meeting today at the Senator’s office in Manhattan on February 17th, 2022. So, thank you so much for your willingness to speak to me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; THOMAS DUANE: It’s a pleasure and I’m glad that -- I think I’m the more difficult person to tie down but I’m glad we were all able to get tied down together. I’m very happy to be here and talk. 0 221 Early Years of Life / Catholic School Days TD: I was actually born in a hospital in Chelsea, a French hospital. It’s now affordable housing, so I’m happy about that. But it was a hospital, and it had the maternity wing. I only say that because when I ran for office, I could truthfully say I was born in Chelsea. But my parents at the time lived in Queens, in an apartment that my aunt had formerly lived in. But I was the cause of them moving to Flushing. 0 1261 High School / Early Explorations with Sexuality TD: So, I went to an all-gay high school -- no, it was an all-boys high school. Actually, my freshman year, there was a student, Richard Sullivan, who I think he was more sophisticated and more worldly than I was. I think he had a girlfriend, like a real girlfriend, in his freshman year. But he knew there was something different about me, and I knew there was something different about me. 0 1638 College Prospects / Early Experiences with Politics TD: I remember one of the reasons I came home from having had left home when I was an adolescent was that I was like, “If I can just make it to going away to college, then I’ll get out of here, and so I better go back so I can leave.” And I applied to a bunch of different schools. Some, I think, were reaches. One, I applied to Dartmouth. I didn’t go up to the school to have an interview but I was interviewed by the alumni in an office building in Midtown Manhattan and I got on the elevator to go to the interview and the elevator started to go, and it dropped 30 floors right before the interview. 0 2012 Attending Lehigh University TD: Anyway. So, I knew that if I started to smoke cigarettes, I would be smoking cigarettes. If I started to drink, I would drink. If I started to smoke pot, I would smoke pot. And if I started to have sex, I would have sex. And 17, that’s when the dam broke. And I don’t think this is the reason I went to Lehigh, but Lehigh was not known as a druggie school. It wasn’t. It was not, not a druggie school, let’s just say that. But it was more well-known for its consumption of alcohol. It was a big frat school. And I guess, honestly, I think I was trying to please my father by going there. 0 2518 Relationships at Lehigh TD: So, that was all wonderful. But at the age of 17, I came out sexually and politically, started to. Politically slowly, sexually pretty, in a way, slowly, also. But I’m actually a little bit bisexual, and I actually was out at one time as a bisexual in the Columbia Spectator, which is the Columbia University newspaper because I went to a pro-bi rally and so, they said, “Openly bisexual councilmember.” And I think bisexuals have it really hard. So, I always identified gay, but I don’t have a perfect Kinsey score. And I knew I would end up with a man, but I have to be -- anyway. So, I was sleeping with men and women then. 0 2964 Joining Social Justice Organizations / Getting Politically Educated&#13 ; TD: So, I started to go to Gay Activist Alliance meetings in New York City. I would take the bus into the city. I both went for the politics and to meet boys, truth be told. There’s nothing wrong with combining that. I think that’s one of the reasons ACT UP was so very successful. And I met these two, Rick and Ron, I think, and they were librarians and they had an organization they founded called Le-Hi-Ho, which is both a great name and an unfortunate name, all at the same time. 0 3279 Coming Out to Parents / Being Out at Lehigh TD: &#13 ; Oh, I told my parents I was gay -- oh, I can’t remember now, was it freshman or sophomore year? I will remember this but can’t remember now. I think it was after my sophomore year. And they were very upset about it. And actually, my younger brother also said he was gay, but I was the older, I was probably the bad influence on him or something. The brother a year older than me at one time thought he wanted to be a Maryknoll missionary. 0 3678 Staring an LGBTQIA+ Group at Lehigh TD: As I recall, I think Phil might have been, or he was threatened one time, pretty much. We got threatening phone calls. I wrote letters to the Brown and White, “How dare you presume that everyone is heterosexual,” these lines that I picked up from all these political books that I had read. And I asked to create, I think it was Lehigh Homophile. Homophile, what kind of word is that? I guess it was just a word that I just -- actually, Le-Hi-Ho, which was Ron and Rick’s group, it’s both a great name and kind of a funny name, homophile is just not a great name at all. What are we, in Greece? They wouldn’t even say it there. I don’t even know where it came from. 0 4608 Organizing at a Young Age TD: Anyway, you know what? In my life, now, people have said to me, “How do you organize?” Because I was, from a very early age, organizing. And I said, “Well, you just start doing stuff and you try to get others to do it with you. That’s basically how it’s done.” In addition to joining every club in my high school, I was thinking back on this, I also was very active in my parish team clubs, not because I was so into the parish, but it was just another way to not be home and my brother, John, of course, was the head of it but I was the program director, so I was in charge of putting together dances. And I did things like that. 0 4837 Graduating from Lehigh / Returning to Be a Speaker TD: But I wanted to leave. And so, I really tried. The first summer, I didn’t want to go home and I wanted to be with my then-boyfriend for that first year so I took classes. And then, after my sophomore year I took classes that summer, also. And I was thinking about the various jobs. I worked at a luncheon in New York when I was 17, which I actually loved. I have to be around people when I work. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, I took six courses or something. I tried to take additional courses so I could get out sooner. I took courses, summer courses. And I just needed to take two more classes. It took me two years, but I did. So, I left at the time of the students in the class of ’75 were graduating, but I’m actually class of ’76, and I got my degree in 1977, and my parents were very happy I got that. 0 5300 Leaving for New York / Political Beginnings TD: I had to leave Lehigh. I needed to get out. And I came to New York. But I continued on a path of working during the day and doing community and LGBT. I think it was miracle we started to say lesbian and gay, which was a step up from saying gay and lesbian, but anyway. I continued being active in the queer community and non-queer community and my life went on. &#13 ; &#13 ; There’s something that happened a little while ago and I think it started with when I was telling you about acting gayer than -- maybe I’m ashamed to say that I was acting gayer than I would normally act. I feel in a way that’s a terrible thing to say, because another thing that, from my childhood or my adolescence that I remember is to be very, very careful about how I walked. 0 5767 Choosing Battles TD: Because as a gay person -- and this was big when I was in elected office -- you have to choose your battles because I was always the only one. If there’s two queers, well, then they can take turns and then other people start to do it. When you’re the only one, I would talk to everybody. When I talked with people, “We’re the only people. We have to decide every day whether or not to come out.” And I mean that. 0 6056 Being Out Unapologetically&#13 ; TD: I do want to talk about all the rest but it’s amazing to me that at Lehigh now, that there would be an affirmative effort to get queer people into fraternities and sororities, like unbelievable to me. Even when they started having the lounge for the LGBTQ community, I can’t imagine the people were joining fraternities and sororities up until very recently, being open about who they were with their sexual orientation. 0 6277 Impact on LGBTQ+ Community at Lehigh University MF: I just want to say, listening to you talk about it, you were compelled at Lehigh, to be an out student, it felt like a calling to you. And I just wrote a brief history of LGBTQIA-plus activism on campus and I went through the Brown and White and I went through the yearbooks. &#13 ; &#13 ; To my mind from what I’ve been able to find, Rick Balmer, James Hopkinson were involved with that early Le-Hi-Ho, but what I’ve been able to find, you were the first out person on campus that was advocating for a public group, not a support group, public group for gay students at that time, at Lehigh. 0 6611 Closing Remarks TD: I think that’s great. I’m thrilled. Really, the world is changing, and I tell students, “You’ve got to hang on to what it is and build on it because it could slip away. It could slip away and don’t let that happen.” What I say about Lehigh, even though it wasn’t a real recognized group, “Never give up the franchise,” but I did give up the franchise. But if I could have, I would have, even if there was one member, just to keep it alive. Maybe there’s no need -- there is still an ACT UP, but there’s a lot of organizations that I’ve been a part of, Queers for Economic Justice is one. 0 MovingImage Thomas Duane recounts the early years of his life, his relationship with sexuality and time at Lehigh University, as well as his early interactions with activism and politics. MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Senator Thomas K. Duane to talk about his life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley and beyond -- including New York, importantly -- as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year our project has funding from ACLS, and we are meeting today at the Senator's office in Manhattan on February 17th, 2022. So, thank you so much for your willingness to speak to me today. THOMAS DUANE: It's a pleasure, and I'm glad that -- I think I'm the more difficult person to tie down, but I'm glad we were all able to get tied down together. I'm very happy to be here and talk. MF: Me, too. Thank you so much. And just a few -- TD: Talk about me. Me, me, me, me. MF: That's what we're here to do. TD: Who doesn't want to talk about...? MF: To start, would it be possible for you just to state your full name? TD: Sure. Thomas K. Duane, D-U-A-N-E. The K stands for Keen. And I was born January 30th, 1955. My mother was born January 31st, 1925. And when she had me the woman in the next bed said, "Couldn't you have waited another day?" And she said, "Oh, no. I couldn't." But anyway, so I'm very much like my mother in many ways. So, I am 67 which I cannot believe. That I'm even alive is completely miraculous but I love Ariana Grande, and Taylor Swift. I don't act my -- in my head, I'm younger. But I'm on Medicare, I'm firmly ensconced in Medicare at the age of 67 now, which I am very much in favor of. Which, when I saw some people who supported a former president, they said, "What do you think about the government running Medicare?" And they said, "That's terrible. The government will mess up Medicare. That's an awful idea." Here I thought to myself, "Why don't they teach civics in school anymore?" Okay. MF: I want to hear more about that. But first, I just want to go back over consent. Before we started the interview, you signed a consent form. TD: Yes, absolutely. MF: I just want to confirm, do you consent to this interview today? TD: Yes. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed and digitized, made publicly available online? TD: Yes. MF: And do you consent to our LGBTQ Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats such as articles, websites, publications, et cetera? TD: Yes. I was going to make a joke, but I'll just say yes, absolutely. It would be my pleasure. MF: And I do want to remind you that after we transcribe the interview, you'll have 30 days after I deliver it to you electronically to review it. And you can identify things you want to delete, or you could withdraw the whole interview from the project, if you wanted to. TD: Let's hope we don't go down that road. [laughs] MF: We won't put it online until we get your final approval. TD: If I don't say a name and then I think, "Oh, I'm just going to go and use the name," maybe you could flash that name up? [laughter] Okay. MF: Well, I think we're ready to start. Since oral history is a life arc, I'm going to ask you if you'd be willing to tell me a little bit about the early years of your life. TD: I was actually born in a hospital in Chelsea, a French hospital. It's now affordable housing, so I'm happy about that. But it was a hospital, and it had the maternity wing. I only say that because when I ran for office, I could truthfully say I was born in Chelsea. But my parents at the time lived in Queens, in an apartment that my aunt had formerly lived in. But I was the cause of them moving to Flushing. I was raised a Roman Catholic. And for various reasons, I've had to say that I may not be the poster boy for Roman Catholicism, but I'm infused with it, let's say. Actually, one of the classes that I teach, I talk about whether religion belongs in politics and government and public policy. And everyone says, "No, no, no," I said, "So, no giving money to churches that have pantries? No programs run by religious institutions for formerly incarcerated people?" So, it's a very complicated issue. Anyway, and so I think my Roman Catholicism did, and continues to inform my worldview because I moved from masses being said in Latin. I have two older brothers, I had one younger brother who has passed away, who's also gay. He died of a brain tumor in his mid-thirties. So, we were four boys. My two older brothers were kind of perfect. Great grades, lots of friends, very good at athletics. And then, there was me. Maybe this is telling about my personality, my brother who's an Irish twin, he's a year-and-a-half older than I am, when he was moving from first to second grade, I was really only eligible to go to kindergarten, but I was born in January of 1955 and I did go to kindergarten in a public school -- Catholic schools didn't have kindergarten -- for a few days. But I demanded to go to first grade and somehow, I don't know how I convinced my parents to do this, but my local parish, which is St. Andrews, did not have any room, so I went to a neighboring parish called St. Michael's to their first grade. And it was incredibly traumatic. It was -- the nuns there -- I was in the first grade. I remember the uniforms we wore. But every day, there were children crying, and children being hit, and having their hands hit. It was just a nightmare. And fortunately, my local school had an opening so I went to St. Andrews. I don't know whether you can tell, I got all tense talking about that, like I remember that so clearly how sad it is for the kids that were stuck there. But I got out and I went to St. Andrew's where, not that no one ever got hit, but I think my parents made it clear that none of us were ever to be struck or anything. The classes were huge. There were 53 children in my class and there were three first grade classes. And I think it was ranked in smart, medium, not so, which is horrendous. But fortunately, I was at least in the smart class. Both my brothers were really high achievers, and I was above average, but I was not a rockstar. And I'm an ADHD, which will become clear as this interview goes on. [laughs] Of course, I didn't know that. I actually did know until I was in my forties, but it explained an awful lot about my life. I'll tell one story of something that happened. It was maybe the fifth grade, I believe. And we were supposed to do an art project over weekend of making a clown face and we were supposed to -- and I missed the instructions, I think -- it was supposed to be tiny little pieces of construction paper glued down so it was made a mosaic clown face. But mine, I tore big pieces of paper. And I do love contemporary and modern art, so maybe I was a little bit ahead of the rest of my class. That's what my clown was made of, big, torn pieces of construction paper. But I was called in front of the class, shown to everybody this is wrong and terrible. And then, this particular nun said in a voice that kids who went to Catholic school will recognize, in a very loud whisper, allegedly only so I would hear it, but such that the entire class heard it, she said, "You come from such a nice family, and none of us know what's wrong with you." And that has stuck with me. It's one of the things I have in my head. I had it in my head, even though I loved doing art and drawing and crayons and paint, after that, I didn't, until I was in a therapy group and the co-director was an art therapist. I guess I recounted this story and she said, "There's no such thing as doing art wrong." I was in my forties or my fifties. And so, then, I went to see her a few times, not because -- I mean, I love art therapy, but I was already in therapy, I had plenty of therapy my whole life -- but if I could sit there and make art while I talked with her, so I could speak with her. And so, it was, "Oh, no such thing as making art wrong." And of course, I kind of knew that because I love museums. And in fact, at Lehigh, they had a borrowing program where you could borrow paintings from the library, I guess? I don't know, I guess they were from the library, and you could hang them up in your dorm room. And I did. It was a Degas, I believe I had, in my freshman year. I guess I was a little non-binary as it came to my approach to art. Anyway. Of course, I also tried out to be an altar boy and you had to memorize everything in Latin and I failed the first time. I didn't make the cut. So, it took two tries for me to pass the altar boy test. Which is true of a lot of things. It takes me a while to get things, but once I get it, I've really got it, because I think I learn a little bit differently. Of course, it was kind of a disgrace that I didn't make it right away. And then they got rid of Latin anyway, so seriously. I'm not going to go through the whole thing of what altar boys would say in Latin. I could, but I'm not going to. But the place I'm going to is, just packed with children in Flushing, Catholic, Catholic, Catholic. Actually, the closest Catholic high school where I lived is a school called Holy Cross, where I ended up going. But I actually didn't want to go there. I wanted to go to Fordham Preparatory School, which was in the Bronx, which was a subway and two busses away, and my parents, they did not want me to go. It was a good school, and so, I got in, but they wouldn't let me go there. My home life, my family looked really good on the outside. We were one of our parish's first families, in a way. We were really well put-together when we went to mass on Sundays and other things. I mean, except for me. I probably wasn't in lockstep with everyone else. But anyway, my home life internally was not particularly happy. My parents had a very difficult marriage, and this is one of those things in therapy where I now have to get over talking about some of the things in my childhood is not telling secrets or telling on my family. So, they liked to drink, my parents. And they caused problems in our household. And my parents were also very controlling and I was very hard to control. I actually tried to run away when I was little, on more than one occasion. I actually did run away from home, if that's what it's called when I only stayed away for a few weeks, when I was maybe a junior in high school, I think. And I did finally come home, and I made amends to my parents because I realized how horrible it must have been for them, no matter what was going on at home, awful it must have been for them to not know where I was and what was happening to me. So, as an adult, I realized that. But my home life was not that happy. And the other thing is, my father was a coach of all things athletic. And the Catholic church was so virulently in the lives of families and children who went to Catholic school, that we had our own sports league, the Catholic Youth Organization leagues, and my father coached baseball and we all played -- my brothers and I -- every Saturday, sometimes Sundays, we'd play in season, baseball, basketball, football. It was like another day of school for me. I mean, sports, it's one of those things it took me a while to get good at it. I never really got really good at it, but I got okay at all of them. It just took me awhile, like with everything else to get good at it. But it was difficult. There wasn't much freedom and being in organized sports leagues. And I actually was not bad at all, but when my father was around, for some reason, I kind of know in retrospect what the reason was, but I would be really terrible at sports when he was there. It had to do with some shame stuff that was happening with me, which I'm sure was compounded by my, though I didn't know it, being gay and different than everyone else. So, I was pretty good when he wasn't around, when he was around, I was terrible. But it was sort of valuable that I learned how not to be afraid of the ball as a boy, and not to throw like a girl, and all these things. And I also learned to make sure that I walked in a way that was like the way the other boys walked, as well. And in elementary school, and in high school, it took me a couple of years, always, to get comfortable and to make friends. I really had to get the lay of the land first, before I could step out and be myself. I was just going to say, "shine," so I'll say shine. Did I shine? I don't know whether I shined. There were eight or nine classes of each class, so there'd be eight or nine freshman sophomore classes, and there was an honors class which both of my brothers had been in. And yes, you guessed it, I was not in the honors class. I was in the second honors class, such a disgrace. But I manipulated my way around that one, too, because I decided to take Latin for four years. And so, that separated me from my class in some ways. And so, I took some classes with the boys in the honors class. I'm pretty good at -- I should say, how do you think I got elected? That's how I got elected, doing things like that. But I actually strongly believe that my grades improved when I was with the more higher achieving, more expected to be high-achieving students. And so, I strongly believe that it's important that there be a diversity of students in every way, including how quickly they pick things up. The thing is, Catholic school, now that I think about probably impacted my experience at Lehigh and how I learn is that for instance, the clown story, remaking the art, if the nun -- I'm pretty sure her name was Sister Mary-Margaret, God rest her soul, or Sister Margaret-Mary. I can't remember which. But anyway, she may have given the instructions of the tearing of little paper, but I may not have gotten it. And I didn't know that you could ask to have an assignment, or directions repeated. But even if I did, in Catholic school, you couldn't ask anyway. But often, I would come into class having had done the wrong pages in the math book because I didn't always catch the assignment. I broke my leg in the fourth grade -- I'm telling too much about my life story, you'll never get out of here. This interview is going to go on forever. Anyway, I broke my leg in the fourth grade, and I had a near public elementary school teacher come to my house every day for an hour, and when I went back to school, I had finished all the books of that grade within that one fall month. It was probably October, maybe September or something, because I broke my leg at the end of the summer, early fall. So, I was already done with everything. So, the fourth grade was a breeze because I'd already done everything. But because I was with -- that's the other thing I strongly believe, because everyone learns differently, and lots of students, including myself, it would have been helpful if I always knew that I could count on being able to sit with someone one-on-one, just for a little bit of time to catch onto things. And I'm not sure, I try to make sure that to do that because I do some teaching. And I always say, "There is no stupid question. The only stupid question is the one you don't ask. But really, you can ask anything and I'll repeat anything. It's fine. It's fine." And I really do feel that way. Anyway. And it can be done without holding back the class, but I digress. So, I went to an all-gay high school -- no, it was an all-boys high school. Actually, my freshman year, there was a student, Richard Sullivan, who I think he was more sophisticated and more worldly than I was. I think he had a girlfriend, like a real girlfriend, in his freshman year. But he knew there was something different about me, and I knew there was something different about me. I don't think I was really fully aware that it was that I was gay. But anyway, he caught on to it and he started to pick at me a little bit. And this was something I had learned at a much younger age, I challenged him to a fight. And so, out we went one day after school to the Carvel, right by Utopia Parkway, only Queens would have Utopia Parkway, and we had a fistfight. And I feel like, I don't know whether it was the whole school there, but there was a big crowd watching this fight. And we fought and fought and punched and wrestled and whatever until we were just too tired to do it anymore. And he had a bloody lip, and I had a black eye, and that was it. We became sort of friendly after that. But nobody ever picked on me either, because -- and I know this is wrong and I would never advise this to children, I would never say -- sometimes it's just better to have the fight, even if you're going to lose because nobody wants to fight. So, if you fight with one person even if you lose, no one else wants to fight with you because no one really wants to fight. That's not true in every case, and I know there are better ways to diffuse problems. But anyway, that's what worked for me. And it worked for me when I was in elementary school, too. But one of the things -- and this is from when I was very young in elementary school because I was a big kid and I learned how to stand up and fight for myself in the play streets or wherever it was, but I was a little kid. I felt terrible for the children. It wasn't necessarily that they were gay, but overweight, or, I don't know, didn't dress -- when they got made fun of or pushed around, I was a little kid, I was kind of helpless to do anything about it and it just really stuck with me about how horrible and unfair it was for them. So, I would try to be friendly, but I couldn't really protect them. Or, I didn't know how to, I guess. But I felt some kinship with them. But I was able to pass and hang out with the normal boys. Four years of high school. When I was a freshman -- okay, we're going into an R-rated territory, here. Maybe it's only [PG]. There was a football player who, to this day, I can remember that I had a crush on him, and I think he had a crush on me because one time we were alone in the locker room after having showered, and he started chasing me around the locker room with a towel and fooling around. He was running after me and I think, oh, I should have let him catch me. What was I thinking? But from then on, at a school dance, he would bring his childhood sweetheart -- he actually married her and they had many children and he worked with the New York City Uniformed Services. My older brother John was an assembly member from the part of Queens we grew up in and I know where this person lives. I always hoped that my brother would send me door knocking on his block so I could knock on his door. [laughs] But when I would see him at the school dances, he would introduce me to his girlfriend who has become his wife, and I'm not going to say her name, but let's just say her name was Mary. It wasn't Mary. "This is my girlfriend, Mary, it's nice to see you." But he would turn beet-red. And I think he continued to a combination of both like me and was has a little embarrassed that he had maybe shown his cards, if you will, that we liked each other. The things I remember from high school. He was very popular, too, in the school. Very popular. Academically, he did well, but he also was a good football player. So, I was playing sports on Saturdays all the time still through high school, but I also joined a lot of different clubs and organizations in the school because I didn't really want to go home that much. And as I say, I also picked up swimming. So, in the CYO, Catholic Youth Organization, I was on the swimming team and my best thing was distance swimming. I loved it. I loved the water. But when I think about it, sometimes I say I was really great and everything my parents didn't like, so I was best at the sport that my father was not that involved with. I'm always a little rebellious, that Tom Duane. I'm sure there's more to say about high school. I remember one of the reasons I came home from having had left home when I was an adolescent was that I was like, "If I can just make it to going away to college, then I'll get out of here, and so I better go back so I can leave." And I applied to a bunch of different schools. Some, I think, were reaches. One, I applied to Dartmouth. I didn't go up to the school to have an interview but I was interviewed by the alumni in an office building in Midtown Manhattan and I got on the elevator to go to the interview and the elevator started to go, and it dropped 30 floors right before the interview. So, I went into the interview in not really peak condition, but I didn't say anything about the elevator. I probably should have. But they said to me, "Well, if you got into Dartmouth, would you go?" And I'm like, "I'm not sure." Well, I wasn't sure because the goddamn elevator -- it had nothing to do with Dartmouth. [laughs] It was a near-death experience. Anyway, But Lehigh was on the list, and Colgate, and Oberlin, and Middlebury, although I also really kind of wanted to go to Hunter, but it was more important that I should leave home. And so, I got into these schools, but I decided to go to Lehigh. And I don't know I decided to go there because I knew what it was like. Oh, the thing I was going to say, I was fortunate enough to live from Latin mass, and then folk masses, and revolutionary theology, the missionaries that would be in Latin America that were politically organizing, as well, and they really -- so, now there was something in my Catholicism that I really could hold on to. And I guess I didn't really have a political point of view. My father was Republican. He was an Independent who voted Republican, and my mother was -- Kennedy was a saint on that side of the family, and the Kennedys, they also for a long time -- many of them still do it for me. I admire them. Every family has terrible stuff, I guess. I guess even then, I was interested in political -- where was I going with this? I just got sidetracked. Oh, liberation theology. The thing that changed me dramatically, and I wish I could say it was a raid on the Black Panther Party or something, but what it was, was the shooting of the students at Kent State had a huge impact on me. I thought, "Oh my gosh, soldiers will shoot students?" My whole worldview changed. And that was, I think, the biggest thing. I also loved Bobby Kennedy. I said I was born in 1955. I would listen to a transistor radio under my pillow, and not just pop music, which to this day, I like, still. I like other kinds of music, too. Look at me defensively saying that. I like pop music, what can I say? I still like pop music. I sometimes still listen to American Top 40. I want to keep up and I like that music. Anyway, but I was huge for Bobby Kennedy Jr., and I was listening under my pillow with the transistor radio when he won the California primary, and I was listening when he got shot, and all alone in my room -- well, I shared a room with one of my brothers -- but with the transistor radio, and again, that had a huge impact on me. And then, Martin Luther King's assassination, Bobby Kennedy, and JFK was huge. When he was assassinated... My grandmother, my mother's mother, who was the adult in my life who saved me, but for her I don't know what would have happened, but she was the one with completely, totally, unconditional love. And I would say I could do no wrong with her but that's not accurate. I did do things wrong. But the way she corrected me was to say, "Well, maybe this would be a better way to do it." She was so gentle with it. And my mother's mother lived pretty close to us. There'd be lots of times when my grandmother would say to my mother, "Why don't I take Tom to my house for a few days?" And that was like, I was on my way to heaven then. It was really great. They say one adult -- I really believe this -- can make all the difference in a kid's life. She was the one. Anyway, she passed away right after JFK died, of cancer. She had breast cancer, but we were told it was throat cancer, just because that's how it was done. I didn't realize for years and years later, no, she didn't have throat cancer, she had breast cancer. And it was terrible. I remember, it was awful. Because the way they treated breast cancer then was just horrendously -- just awful. Of course, because it was women -- I now know if it had been a man, they never would have treated someone the way they treated women who had breast cancer. It was just awful. Anyway. So, I knew that if I started to smoke cigarettes, I would be smoking cigarettes. If I started to drink, I would drink. If I started to smoke pot, I would smoke pot. And if I started to have sex, I would have sex. And 17, that's when the dam broke. And I don't think this is the reason I went to Lehigh, but Lehigh was not known as a druggie school. It wasn't. It was not, not a druggie school, let's just say that. But it was more well-known for its consumption of alcohol. It was a big frat school. And I guess, honestly, I think I was trying to please my father by going there. As one therapist said to me, "You should stop worshipping at the altar of your father." And so, I guess I was worshipping at his altar. So, off I went to Lehigh. I requested to live in a dorm that was mixed classes and that was co-ed. That meant that the girls, the second year that women were admitted to Lehigh. So, there were maybe 300 women and 3,000 men on campus. But I lived in a dorm where some of the women lived. There were other dorms that were women only. But anyway, they lived in one half. M&amp ; M was the name of the dorm. And the men were on the other side. It was mixed classes. I kind of thought, "No one here is going to smoke pot or anything." The first day, literally, as I was going into my first dorm room, I was walking by a door two doors away from mine and walked by someone who you just knew he was a football player and he said to me, "You want to come in and smoke a joint with me?" I wasn't even there an hour. So, first of all, he was someone I should be terrified of, right? But of course, I was down to smoke a joint. It was unbelievable. I was like, "I didn't think there was any marijuana in all of Lehigh." That's not true. In fact, one time later on, I was sitting in the room and there was an article in the Brown and White that said, "There are no drugs in the Engineering School," and I was sitting in the room, and everybody was an engineering student except for me and they were all smoking pot. So, that stereotype didn't really work. It was not that true. I was from the get-go a problem drinker, although you couldn't tell. I had, I guess what you would call a wooden leg, and just much later on in my life I did go into recovery which I've been in now for almost 40 years, 30 something years. It saved my life. But I was just getting started then. And generally, in college, I did well. Some things I did really well in and some things not so much. And as I now know, it's that ADHD thing, if I was interested, I did great. If I wasn't interested, I got by. And I was an American Studies and an Urban Studies major. I had a double major. I don't know how, but I didn't have to take statistics. I don't know how I made it that I didn't have to take statistics as an Urban Studies major, but I did not. I would love to take statistics now as an adult, but I think I knew it wasn't going to be a match made in heaven then. But anyway, I didn't have to take it. And my oldest brother, Jimmy, my father is Jim, my brother is Jimmy, and he has a son named James who went to Lehigh, was a Griffin, which people at Lehigh know the Griffins are residence halls counselors, I was a Griffin, which was so much easier. I was a Griffin. And I made it. I got in. Now, my brother was head of the Griffins but I don't think he got involved in my -- of course, I had the same last name but I mean, I think, as I said, drugs were -- you could be thrown out for smoking a joint, I think. But as I say, I was pretty good at -- I mean, look at me. Do I look like someone who would smoke a lot of pot and drink too much and maybe experiment with -- no, I have an angelic face. So, maybe that got me. Anyway, I was chosen to be a Griffin and I chose the floor, it was the dorm at the very top of the hill. This is something that I hope someone will flash the name of this dorm, it was the dorm at the very highest, it was above Richards, and not near M&amp ; M, it was as you're facing the mountain to the left. I have great calves as a result. I had pretty good calves to begin with, but they really got great there. Anyway, there were two smaller floors. And so, my brother suggested that, if I was going to get that floor, that I ask that this other guy, Bruce, be a Griffin on the floor above me. He was a year older than I was. And I actually loved being a resident hall counselor, a Griffin. And at the time, freshman had to write themes. All their freshman year, every semester, they had to take an English class where they had to write a theme every week, I want to say. It didn't matter what school they were in. And they would come to me to help with their grammar and their spelling, because I took Latin, I was pretty good at that stuff then. Maybe I'm still okay at it. But I was pretty good. And so, I helped them with their writing. I think back on that, because I wanted to be a teacher, which I didn't become for a very long time, but maybe that started to show then. And they really liked me and trusted me. This is going to make me start crying, because I didn't know whether they were going to, because I'm different. And something that I know now that I'm kind of proud of is that kids and adolescents and young people and animals feel safe around me. And I could have not been that way at all, but it is that way. And I think they felt really safe around me. And in fact, a couple of them wanted to experiment with pot, and they asked if they could smoke pot with me because they felt safe doing that, which was another -- I mean, if Dean Quay is -- oh, he doesn't care anymore. But in a way, it's a huge compliment that they wanted to smoke pot, but they wanted to do it safely, and they asked if they could smoke pot with me. So, I helped them with their themes. I don't know. And I also participated in a dance marathon, which I came in third or fourth place. But I lasted the whole time. I came back, and they were the most amazing cheering support group ever for me in that. So, that was all wonderful. But at the age of 17, I came out sexually and politically, started to. Politically slowly, sexually pretty, in a way, slowly, also. But I'm actually a little bit bisexual, and I actually was out at one time as a bisexual in the Columbia Spectator, which is the Columbia University newspaper because I went to a pro-bi rally and so, they said, "Openly bisexual councilmember." And I think bisexuals have it really hard. So, I always identified gay, but I don't have a perfect Kinsey score. And I knew I would end up with a man, but I have to be -- anyway. So, I was sleeping with men and women then. But I'm going to go back to freshman year because there was something huge happening. So, also on my floor there was someone who had transferred in as a junior from another school. And he lived in the Valley, but he stayed in the dorm. And he'd been to another college, and he had had a girlfriend there. But we hung out together. There was a little group of us, freshmen, and people of all classes, we hung out together. And at some point, I realized that I was falling in love with him, and as far as I knew, he was straight. And I remember walking on campus with him the first semester and I said -- I don't know what to call him, let's say his name is Larry. That wasn't his name. I don't know how I got the courage to do this but maybe this is just how I am. I said, "You know, Larry, I think I've started to develop some feelings for you." I knew it was risky. And then he said to me, "Oh, well, I'm starting to have feelings for you, too." And we went on to have an affair. So, it was my first relationship. And I was really in love with him. I was, unfortunately, incapable of sustaining a relationship. That was on me. But he really loved me. And I really loved him. I just, for reasons that had to do with why I've been in therapy since the age of 21, was just unable to sustain the relationship. And we had to hide it. So, if my roommate was not there, then we would, you know, and if his roommate was not there, if someone went home for the weekend, one of our roommates, who knows whether we were -- actually, one time, I thought I saw -- I did see his roommate when I was campaigning for the city council, and walking along right by Manhattan Plaza, which is where a lot of people in the Performing Arts live. I don't think he lived there, and I'm forgetting his name right now, which is just as well. And he was walking down the block and I said "will you sign the petition" and I realized I know this guy and I think he might have been gay, but it didn't occur to me then. My gaydar is pretty good. My lesbian-dar is pretty good. My bi-dar is all pretty good. Not the best in the world, but I can compete. But I just never gave it any thought. We were so afraid. And he was kind of shy. Anyway, it's just how ironic. And who knows, maybe he did -- he probably did -- I'm sure people knew. Dorm room doors were not that thick anyway. So, I fell in love. But I never went home during the summer. I took courses at Lehigh. I didn't want to go home. And my goal was to try to graduate in three years, which I almost made it, but not quite. And I guess it must have been the summer after my sophomore year, but it was during -- let's see, I got there in '72-'73, so '74-'75 was when I met Phil, and Bruce, and Craig. So, the other Griffin who was upstairs and had a small floor, but we treated him like we were just one happy family, was gay, and I helped him come out. I actually do recruit. I do. Or at least I invite. So, he actually is gay, and actually, there was girl at Lehigh that I said something about, that maybe it was too much for people, and I remember her saying, "No, I don't think so." And of course, later on, after I left school and I had kept in touch with her, and she came out as a lesbian, so maybe I -- I was able to be out. I always think about this. Not everybody was able to be out, and I was able to be out there. It was a gift. I'm never critical of people's struggles about coming out, but for me, it was almost like I had no choice. Anyway, after my sophomore year, our relationship didn't last past that first summer, unfortunately. And again, it was on me. Have I said that enough, that it was my fault that we didn't last? But it was that summer that I started to become gay, politically, way more than I had been. And I did a lot of things. There was a gay bar in Allentown, go figure, which I went to when I was in what turned out to be in my final year at Lehigh. I went there with Craig, and Bruce, and Phil, and maybe Cindy, who was the only woman in our group. We were lucky to have any women since there was so women there in our little queer group. So, I guess I need to separate a few things, even though they were happening at the same time. So, I started to go to Gay Activist Alliance meetings in New York City. I would take the bus into the city. I both went for the politics and to meet boys, truth be told. There's nothing wrong with combining that. I think that's one of the reasons ACT UP was so very successful. And I met these two, Rick and Ron, I think, and they were librarians and they had an organization they founded called Le-Hi-Ho, which is both a great name and an unfortunate name, all at the same time. But because they were librarians, they had every gay book imaginable, and they had lots of contemporary political books that had been written by gay activists. And I read them voraciously. Actually, these books were actually the -- I'd like to think of myself as a feminist, I like to think of myself as someone who's tried to both fight against racism, though I know I made mistakes, but my intentions I think have been good. I started to read. I read every feminist book I could get my hands on. One of them was Jill Johnson who is very funny, and she had a column in the Village Voice, and she wrote, she never capitalized any letters, and I don't know, she was not that great with sentences, but she was so funny, both her column and the books that she wrote. And many years later, I met her at a literary agent's house because she was Jill Johnson's agent and I was in the city council at the time. And she was with her partner, who was from Denmark, and I was like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I'm meeting you," because I get kind of gushy with people. I was like, "I love you," whatever. And she said, "And the most important thing to me is that we can get married," and I was like, "Oh my God, Jill Johnson wants to get married?" She was totally opposed, are you kidding? I was shocked. But of course, it was so they could be together. But I was like, "I can't believe this, I thought we were post-marriage." But anyway, it was still a thrill to meet her. And she just stands out. I read Kate Millett books, and I want to say Audre Lorde, yes, I did, but there was a white woman, I can't remember her name. And I listened to records that were produced by Redwood Records, which was a lesbian record label. I hope I'm ascending towards becoming a lesbian, that I haven't peaked and I'm on my way down now, because I'm a girl boy, I call myself. You know some women are more comfortable around men, and some men are more comfortable around men, I am a man who is most comfortable when there's lots of women around. In fact, my first job in New York City was working for six creative people at an ad agency, six women. It was all women copywriters and art directors, and I was their administrative assistant and I loved that. Of course, they loved it, too. I don't think I caused that to happen, but it was a happy coincidence. I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, that just really stands out. Manchild in the Promised Land, many other books having to do with Black liberation. I was aware of the Young Lords, which was a Puerto Rican, it was like the Black Panthers, but they were for people who were Puerto Rican in New York. So, all of this liberation literature, I just devoured it. And then, who knew there was a whole treasure trove of gay stuff, too. And so, because of Rick and Ron, I got to read a ton of those books, too. And it all informed my point of view in the world. Very important to me, all those books. Anyway, so that was happening the summer before -- this will be my third year at Lehigh. Oh, I told my parents I was gay -- oh, I can't remember now, was it freshman or sophomore year? I will remember this but can't remember now. I think it was after my sophomore year. And they were very upset about it. And actually, my younger brother also said he was gay, but I was the older, I was probably the bad influence on him or something. The brother a year older than me at one time thought he wanted to be a Maryknoll missionary. So, the Maryknoll priest used to send someone to visit our house on a pretty regular basis, and as my mother tells the story and this is true, it became very clear that my brother John did not want to be a Maryknoll missionary, that I wanted to be a missionary. I have met priests from that order who are gay, but they're not very gay positive. There are other Catholic priest orders who are more positive. I digress. But it maybe just tells you something about my character -- not character, but where my interests -- because again, it was liberation theology. [Inaudible] So, I told my parents that I was gay and they said, "Well, if you continue to be gay then we're not going to pay for you to go back to school," and I said, "Okay." And I went out and I got a cab driver's license and I rented an apartment in Jackson Heights, and all of a sudden, they realized that I really wasn't going to go back. So, then they went, "Well, wait a second, okay, we'll pay for you to go back. [laughs] But under three conditions." And the three conditions were, I had to speak with the chaplain at Lehigh, I had to go see a psychiatrist, and there was a professor at Lehigh who was sort of a liaison to students who thought they might be gay. And so, I agreed to that. I went to psychiatrist and he was like, "There's nothing wrong with you." I mean, there was, but gay was not the thing. And then, the chaplain at Lehigh... MF: [Duke Lusher?], I think it was. TD: Yes. Not a big deal to him, either, so I passed that test. And then, I went to see the professor who was the liaison to the gay students and I seduced him. I wasn't really interested in having -- it was just a one-night stand or a two-night stand, but it wasn't a match that was going to be made in heaven. Again, that's something else that all of us would have been thrown out of the school for. But anyway, I'm not sure, maybe he had sex once when he was much younger until I came along. But a few months after that, he met another professor from another school, and as far as I knew, they lived happily ever after since then so you're welcome, Professor. So, I passed that test, too, a little bit too much. I got an A-plus there. [laughs)] But in my senior year, I was out, out, at Lehigh. And I cannot say it was particularly well received at any level, administration, faculty, or students. And ironically, there were two associate deans of student affairs both of whom were gay. One was African American, one was white, and they were both gay. In the closet, but gay. And I'm not saying that they couldn't have, they would have lost their jobs. And I'm pretty sure that my freshman English teacher was a lesbian. I am absolutely sure that she was a lesbian, actually. So, no one go back and look at my transcripts to see who all these people are who was in the administration. Or maybe they don't care, but I don't want to out them. And I know that this woman, she was, of course, a woman not tenured. She taught writing and English. Her favorite book was Moby Dick. She loved Moby Dick. I think I took another English course with her besides the course where we had to write themes. But I lived off campus with Bruce and Craig and Phil and a couple of other people, women, who were friends of ours. I'm jumping ahead, but we used to have great parties with disco music, and everybody wanted to come party. The same people who might have wanted to beat us up under other circumstances wanted to come to the party and they would be doing the Bump with whoever would bump with them. And she came to a couple of those parties. I made sure to invite her and she came. She was a very serious woman, but she still came to the disco parties that we had. But the reason Craig and Bruce and Phil and I lived together was -- I don't know why I didn't continue as a Griffin, because I did love it. I left, probably, while people still liked me. So, it's best to leave when people are sorry to see you go than pushing me out the door. So, I lived off campus with them because Bruce and Craig were thrown out of their fraternity, Theta Chi, which was half ROTC and half hippies. It was a very non-binary fraternity. But they threw them out. And Phil was being a fraternity brother where you don't live there but you socialize there, so you go to parties and you take your meals there, you just don't live there. And he was banned, also, from that fraternity. And we hung out with each other openly but it was the first time that I experienced a bias crime, I guess you could say. I was never physically assaulted. As I recall, I think Phil might have been, or he was threatened one time, pretty much. We got threatening phone calls. I wrote letters to the Brown and White, "How dare you presume that everyone is heterosexual," these lines that I picked up from all these political books that I had read. And I asked to create, I think it was Lehigh Homophile. Homophile, what kind of word is that? I guess it was just a word that I just -- actually, Le-Hi-Ho, which was Ron and Rick's group, it's both a great name and kind of a funny name, homophile is just not a great name at all. What are we, in Greece? They wouldn't even say it there. I don't even know where it came from. Anyway, the name was not the reason they turned it down. The mission was the reason they turned it down. There was one lesbian member, Cindy, and another person who's gay, but at the time he was saying he was bisexual. Meanwhile, I was a little bi boy who was saying he was gay. But really, I am gay. I'm gay with just little bi overlays. We wouldn't get to have an organization. We weren't allowed to. And I can't even remember all the ways, but there were lots of ways that I tried to make the point that I was gay, like bringing it up in class when it wasn't really -- oh, and one time, Margaret Mead came to Lehigh and spoke in that hall where the wrestling takes place, that wooden -- it's a beautiful old building. It was the athletics center and they had wrestling in it. I think, in retrospect, why wasn't I going to wrestling matches? I mean, that would be like soft porn for me. But I rarely went to them. Lehigh was known as a great wrestling school. Who knew? Who knew? It's a good thing I didn't know. [laughs] Where was I going with that? Oh, Margaret Mead came. So, she was speaking and it was packed. And it must have been around an alumni weekend, or lots of parents there also. And then, she was taking questions from the audience, and of course, I threw my hand up, and I said something like, "What do you think about the way gay communities are growing around the country?" And something, whatever it was, she had gay in it, right? And she was a little flustered by this question and there was [gasps] from the audience. But me, I just put it right out there. And of course, in retrospect, she was a lesbian and she came out. You're welcome, Margaret. You're welcome. [laughs] MF: So, this is Mary Foltz, and I'm back with Senator Duane and he was just telling us a little bit about trying to organize a group for gay students at Lehigh, Dean Quay shot that down, that group didn't come to be supported by the university and sharing some stories about his friends at Lehigh, and I'm going to turn that back over to you. Are there other Lehigh memories that have come to mind? TD: Lehigh, the community of women was very small, still, compared to men, and for parties, women had to be imported. It's a terrible way to say it, but basically, there just weren't enough women to go to the fraternity parties, that sort of thing. But Phil in particular and I, not so much Craig and Bruce, they were African American and so there's a whole other layer of, I want to say discrimination is not really quite the -- it is appropriate but there's probably a more appropriate word to use, which maybe I will later. But Phil and I, we did things that were gayer. We did more stereotypical gay things to make the point than we were, just to make the point that we were gay. And we had a lot of fun doing that. [laughs] There was a certain kind of jeans that gay guys wore that had this yellow stitching. I got my hair cut in New York with this feather cut. There were also these cork shoes, they were sandals with a heel, but they were made out of cork with straps. We would wear those, or we'd take turns. Someone had a pair ; I think maybe Craig did. Anyway, we would wear gay clothes. I know that sounds weird, what's gay clothes? But I don't know. As I say, whenever I had the chance, I brought up something gay, especially in that last year when I was at Lehigh. And when I was a freshman, there was some other freshmen that I was kind of friends with and I think they wanted to be friends with me. I hadn't sought them out, but I knew that they wanted to be my friend. But what happened by being open about being gay is that there were some students who would continue to hang out with me or with us but then there were other students who would not. And the ones that would continue to hang out were both gay and not gay, and the ones who -- it's funny, I don't know what's happening, because now my face, I feel like it's having a shame attack, for some reason. I didn't say anything shameful, so thanks, Dad. But I can just feel all of a sudden it goes like this and my face turns red. You know what I think? I think it was I had a shame attack about dressing up and acting gay, which is just such a historic thing. So, it's hard to be gayer than I am, but I still have stuff around it. Anyway, where was I going with that? And so, there were students who would not be seen with us because they were gay and they thought by being near us they were -- and there were straight people that thought that people might think they were gay if they hung out with us. But then, there were gay people who may not have been out, but they hung out with us, came to our parties, or whatever. And heterosexuals, too. Maybe there were lots of questioning people, too, I don't know. But that is something I've noticed in my entire life, like when I was first elected to city council and I put together -- I'm always making groups. I tried making a group of city council employees who were gay and we didn't get many people to come. And I remember saying to them, "Has it been your experience that you sometimes don't want to be seen with me because people will think you're gay?" And they were like, "Yes, it's crossed our minds." And this is in 1992 in New York City working, and I'd been openly gay since, what, '74, whatever it is. Anyway, maybe schools that have gay-straight alliances maybe have helped with that, but I'm pretty sure it continues to happen. And I've also been thinking, even when I talk about any opportunity to bring up gay -- and I say "gay" because that's what we said then. When I move into the future, I say -- I actually prefer to say, "queer," which when I learned to say queer, I was so good with that because it's so inclusive. But because of gay-straight alliances, and I would have younger staff members at the newspaper and they're like, "That's an awful thing." So, then it was back to LGBTQIA-plus, which I always thought meant HIV-positive for years, but it doesn't, it just means et cetera, et cetera. So, sometimes I say LGBTQIA-plus-plus, because I'm living for a very, very long time with HIV, probably since 1982. Anyway, but I say gay, which I would never say now, contemporarily, but then, yes. We were sexist and I'm sorry about that. But that's just the way -- I'm educatable, let's say that. But I do know some of these students that I was acquainted with who were a little more reticent about being my friend. And when I think back on it, it didn't really hurt my feelings. I think I instinctively understood that they just weren't there yet. And there would be students that, for whatever reason, we might bump into each other on campus or something, and I'd know if a student asked me questions -- and this is something later on, in the '70s, actually, when I was in New York, I was a member of this organization called The Chelsea Gay Association, which I may or may not get up to, but we used to have rap sessions with police officers in the '70s. Saturday morning, we would get up and go to the precinct and we would talk with the police officers about what it was like to be gay, to try to make sense of it because the cops were not so great with the gays, you know what I mean? They were not our best friends. But we did that. And I would say, "If someone asks you, 'How did you tell your parents?' they're asking that question because they're wondering how are they going to tell their parents?" So, chances are -- maybe a person can say, "I have this friend who wants to tell their parents," or something. But it's a tell, I guess. And so, I was militantly, avowedly, determinedly gay in so many ways, but I was also not always that way. And I was approachable. But our group never really got bigger. We were tops, maybe five people. And we had meetings. Even though we weren't recognized we had meetings, we just created them ourselves. One time, we invited a group of lesbians from Reading to come and all of us be together. And I remember this so clearly, because I had read all this feminist and queer literature -- we didn't call it that -- well, actually, some people did say "queer," I guess. But anyway, I remember asking, "What do you read?" And they said, "Well, we meet and we read Ms., and we discuss it." And that's what lesbians in Reading, Pennsylvania, could do at that time. And they were, God bless them, hedging my bets, or Goddess bless them, that they were out enough to see us. I don't know how out they were in Reading, but they found each other. There were five or six, maybe. And we were all kind of desperate to find kindred spirits. And Lafayette started a little gay group, and we met with them, and it also was mostly men, male. Thank heavens, because we all got to sleep with someone different. [laughs] We'd all been through each other so we had to move out to new territory. It was a lonely existence. Oh, there was that bar in Allentown. We didn't go there that often. No one had a car. Anyway. The gay bar in Allentown. There was no Uber. I'm not saying that there was some romantic liaisons between Lehigh and Lafayette queers, I'm not saying that. There might have been some, let's say that. Perhaps there was some interaction. Anyway, there was Moravian, Muhlenberg, there was the Cedar Crest, and the unfortunately named Beaver College, which eventually, thank someone that they changed their name. I mean, you can only imagine at Lehigh -- the testosterone. But anyway, I know that we met students from all of those schools who were gay, but I can't remember whether they had any organized or sub culturally organized, or under the radar organizations. I kind of think they don't but maybe they did. I hope they did. But if they didn't, I hope they found each other. Anyway, you know what? In my life, now, people have said to me, "How do you organize?" Because I was, from a very early age, organizing. And I said, "Well, you just start doing stuff and you try to get others to do it with you. That's basically how it's done." In addition to joining every club in my high school, I was thinking back on this, I also was very active in my parish team clubs, not because I was so into the parish, but it was just another way to not be home and my brother, John, of course, was the head of it but I was the program director, so I was in charge of putting together dances. And I did things like that. From the age of 15, 16, put together ski trips to Vermont with two busloads of teenagers, and I'd arranged for the rooms and the ski lift ticket. How was I doing that? I don't know. I was just doing it. I don't even know whether I could do that now, but I did that then. So, I would create organizations and I did that later on in life, too. And I did that in high school with some people, we founded an organization called "Students for a Christian Society." We couldn't have it SDS, so we made it SCS. It's just liberation theology, that's what we were using as our blueprint for how the organization and what we were going to be for. But we used to do a reading and recreation program at a Catholic school in Harlem on Saturdays. We would go when we were in high school and we'd work with these elementary school kids and help them with reading. I put that together. And I worked. I worked for my father some of the time when I was younger. He was a stockbroker. But I also worked at a camp for developmentally disabled children, so it was mentally retarded children, who were called emotionally disturbed children, who I now know were autistic, but at the time, they were referred to as emotionally disturbed, which seems like it was their parents' fault, if you said that. But anyway, it was these two populations of kids and I was a counselor at that camp. They didn't really belong together, there was no reason to put them together. But anyway, we all had one, and I liked that. That was, again, under the auspices of the Catholic diocese and I met some people there. And I combined those people with the people from my Catholic team club and my high school friends, and that would be these groups that would be going and doing things. That's just what I did. And so, at Lehigh, I was a Griffin, I was a DJ, and I'm sure that I talked about gay stuff on my show. I played, obviously, records, too, it was a big thing. But I had to get a license. I don't even think you need a license to do it anymore, I had a radio license. One night a week I had a radio show. And I also joined an organization that went out and volunteered all over the place. I was a very active person. And as I say, I got some really good grades, and I got some really not so great grades. But I wanted to leave. And so, I really tried. The first summer, I didn't want to go home and I wanted to be with my then-boyfriend for that first year so I took classes. And then, after my sophomore year I took classes that summer, also. And I was thinking about the various jobs. I worked at a luncheon in New York when I was 17, which I actually loved. I have to be around people when I work. So, I took six courses or something. I tried to take additional courses so I could get out sooner. I took courses, summer courses. And I just needed to take two more classes. It took me two years, but I did. So, I left at the time of the students in the class of '75 were graduating, but I'm actually class of '76, and I got my degree in 1977, and my parents were very happy I got that. I believe Henry Kissinger spoke at the commencement when I actually graduated, which fortunately there was no Q&amp ; A. Fortunately for everyone there, there was no Q&amp ; A with Henry Kissinger at that graduation. And I was happy that I graduated also. I took a psychology course at NYU and I can't remember what the other two courses at NYU were -- anyway, I got my degree. I'm privileged. My parents paid for my college education and they paid for my books. But in terms of spending money, my parents were very strange. I also worked. I worked at the Lehigh University Bookstore. And I think I owe them an amends because I may possibly have taken a few things without paying for it from there. Oh, Julie Brinker. So, I went back to Lehigh around 1985 because my brother, my parents were going to a Lehigh-Lafayette game and I was like, "I want to go," and they were shocked. Like, "You never want to go to Lehigh," because I heard about this guy there who was trying to start a gay organization. So, they all went to the game and I sought him out. I just don't remember his name, now. Oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I'll think of it at some point. Anyway, same thing happened with him. There was a little group and then he graduated and there was nothing. That was the '80s. I don't really know. It wasn't until I was contacted by this woman in the alumni office, Julie Brinker, who is a lesbian, and she reached out to me, and I think one time before, I was invited to speak at a class at Lehigh, which is a very interesting experience. But shout out to Julie Brinker. She's left. She works, I think, for the public television stationed there, now. But she reached out to me so I have signed a thing, Lehigh is going to get at least 15,000 dollars when I die, no rush. But I'll add whatever was it that I may have taken from the bookstore. I just know I did. I don't even remember, maybe was a few albums, I can't remember. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But I worked there to make money to, I guess, smoke and drink pot and party. I was very busy. It's really hard to drink and use drugs and organize at the same time, which is one of the reasons I gave up. I just didn't have time for it. When I spoke at Lehigh, maybe it was two times before I went with Julie Brinker, maybe when I was first elected or something to the council, I don't remember the circumstances, but Lehigh was the first place I ever went and spoke at. It was the early '90s where if it's a queer audience, I would sometimes say, "How many of you have been the victim of a hate crime, a homophobic hate crime, or had someone yell epithets and you were afraid that you might be physically," and everyone raised their hand. I don't think I've ever experienced someone who didn't raise their hand that that didn't happen to them. And I asked the same question at Lehigh, but I said, "How many have done that?" And several students raised their hands. And that was the first time I had ever experienced that, these students actually acknowledged that they had beaten up gay people or had verbally threatened gay people. And I don't really know how I handled it. I think just by them doing it and me being there maybe made them think again about not doing that, but I don't exactly remember. It was a little hazy. I was sober and everything by then, it's just it was a while ago, so I don't remember. But anyway, Julie Brinker, many times she would come to New York, we would have breakfast together, we would talk and talk about Lehigh and what was going on. And no one from Lehigh ever reached out to me with the exception of when my father, my brother. I have stuff with my father, but I love my father. I've forgiven him for all this stuff and I love him and he taught me many great things. And I love my brother, Jimmy, but I don't think he's ever smoked pot in his life. I know he's never smoked pot in his life. He doesn't have the same kind of history as I have, let's say that. Until you all reached out to me to do this, since Julie left, I haven't heard a word from Lehigh. And I'm not sure, I don't want to speak on her behalf, but she was good. She got me. If she'd stayed on, we still had plans to try to put together a bigger people that had come out after they left Lehigh to try to get us all together, but I think they didn't know, in that office, how valuable she was. And I'm not surprised. So, Lehigh, they have a lounge where everyone if they're not he/him, or she/her, and his, and hers, or they/them, which is just mind-blowing from the way it was when I was there. Which, of course, interestingly -- I shouldn't say -- it's a heterosexual student body, administrative people, many of them, I think, were heterosexual [inaudible] the ones that I was there that wouldn't let us have a gay group. It wasn't they wouldn't let us have a gay group, but two of them were gay guys. Ironic. I had to leave Lehigh. I needed to get out. And I came to New York. But I continued on a path of working during the day and doing community and LGBT. I think it was miracle we started to say lesbian and gay, which was a step up from saying gay and lesbian, but anyway. I continued being active in the queer community and non-queer community and my life went on. There's something that happened a little while ago and I think it started with when I was telling you about acting gayer than -- maybe I'm ashamed to say that I was acting gayer than I would normally act. I feel in a way that's a terrible thing to say, because another thing that, from my childhood or my adolescence that I remember is to be very, very careful about how I walked. And I'm a very stiff walker because I was terrified to walk gay. And I came out as a relatively young age for a time, but sometimes, I think that people who, they couldn't or wouldn't hide that they were too fem or too butch, if they were gay, or lesbian, or nonbinary, that they just were who they were, are, have an easier time later on in life because they get the bad stuff over with when they're younger. As I say, dancing, it's hard to dance when you're trying not to dance gay. And I didn't want to dance gay in front of the football player and his girlfriend. And that's true. It is absolutely true that I really did everything I could to minimize that. And I'm sure that lasted through my early days in college, even as I was coming out, there was some shame in the community, I think, while there's such horrible discrimination against, particularly people of transgender experience or expression, and non-binary people. So, I'm feeling a little ashamed of myself both because, thanks Dad, because I dressed and acted gay, more gay, more stereotypically gay, for a while. Not every day, every once in a while. I'm not saying that defensively, just sometimes you just had fun with it, but we didn't live to do it or anything. But the way I explained it, I feel there's that, "Oh, my father wouldn't approve of that," but it's also that I think I feel terribly that I was disrespectful towards people who were able to be who they were and didn't -- so, I'm sorry about that. And I've noticed since I said that that it's been hard for me to make eye contact, which is something I do. So, I'm a 67-year-old queer, I've been gay since I was 17, and militantly gay since I was 18-and-a-half or something, and yet, I still have stuff. My life went on. I became active in politics and I became the Democratic leader for the area that I lived in, it was an elected position, I had to run in a primary, an actual election in. And I ran and lost for public office. And I ran for the city council and I disclosed my HIV status. It was really sort of the first thing I sent out to people in the district, and there's a much longer story that goes with that. So, I hope I get a second chance to keep going because there's a big part of my life with that. And I went on. I think the same thing holds true for when I was at Lehigh, people went, "Why did you do that? Why did you try to start a homophile, why did you do that?" Because I had no choice. It was my calling. I don't think I really understood this until I have a friend who was a police officer and openly gay, which is tough. I also have one of the first female firefighters who is part of the lawsuit, and these are very, very brave people to be out in uniform services many years ago. But anyway, my friend Don said to me -- because, politically, you would think that I would be someone who didn't like the police at all, but I'm not. I'm like, "Listen, most police, they want to get the guy, they want to help people. I want to help people. And most elected officials are good and some are terrible. Most cops are good and some are terrible. And some ditch diggers are good and some are terrible. Some doctors are good and some are terrible. It's just the way it is." And he has a very interesting story because -- I can't remember whether his mother or his father had a blood transfusion and passed it to his other parent, and they died of AIDS. So, he was gay but his parents died of AIDS as a result of a blood transfusion. I was explaining to the students in a class that I teach how people divided the world between innocent victims and non-innocent, so they were innocent victims. He wasn't like that. We weren't like that at all, at all. But that would be it, they were innocent. Anyway, he said, "I became a police officer because it was a calling. It was like a vocation," like a person wanted to become a priest or a rabbi. It was a calling. And I think it was my calling, too, where I was able to do it so I did. But I had no choice. [inaudible] well, maybe, yes, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It's just, I can't imagine not doing it and I regret any of the times when I had an opportunity and I let it go by for whatever reason. Because as a gay person -- and this was big when I was in elected office -- you have to choose your battles because I was always the only one. If there's two queers, well, then they can take turns and then other people start to do it. When you're the only one, I would talk to everybody. When I talked with people, "We're the only people. We have to decide every day whether or not to come out." And I mean that. Even when you're out, you have to decide to come out. If you say something at work, "I have a date tonight with," or, "I went to see my partner's family," or, "I went to see whatever play it was," and say something to indicate -- but you have to think about whether or not we should say -- and I hope that's not the way it is for younger people, that they don't have to think of it that way. But people in my generation, I think we do think about it. And I when I was younger, I was, absolutely, like, "Is this the moment that I choose?" And Lehigh, I sought them out, but I let some go by, too. I couldn't do it all the time. But I would have to be like, "Is this that important?" And I also would have to make the decision when I was -- and this is particularly true -- in the city council and in the Senate, when I was in the minority for most of the time, the Democrats were in the minority. So, for instance, I represented the Trade Center at 9/11, and bills were getting passed for the spouses of people who were killed. And I voted for those bills but I went -- there was a particular Republican senator who, as much as I'm against the death penalty, it's as much as he's for, but he was a real gentleman. And these kinds of laws would go through his committee. And so, I went to him and I said, "Next year, could you add domestic partners to this list?" And he said, "Yes, but let's do it quietly." And I just wanted to get it done. I didn't have to make a big thing. I knew he was gettable. I don't mean that in a good way, that he would understand. Even if he'd never vote for gay marriage, but he thought that was fair. I knew he would think that was fair. So, there were times when I did things like that, just to get it done. But then, there were other times when I had to make a scene. And I'm an anger, not a fear. There was a time when there was this thing where people would choose the colors that they were, "I'm a fall," or "I'm a spring," "I'm a winter," there's certain colors of clothing that people would wear? We went through amazing times. Maybe that still happens. Anyway, some people are a fear, some people are -- I'm an anger. I'm not a fear. I'm an anger. I'm an anger and I'm a sad. Those are my two predominate -- behind my anger is a lot of sadness, I would have to say. I can't even get to fear because the other stuff is so big. So, I am pretty fearless. I just am. Oh my God, I'm about to say something good about myself, but I used it. I was able to, so I did. Not everybody was and I did even at Lehigh. And I tried to stop, sometimes. I'm never going to stop. I can't help myself. I think I ran for the student government at Lehigh, by the way. I lost, but I ran. And I lost. What was it called? Was it senate? Was it the Student Senate? Which was one of the demands when my brother, who was three years -- when everybody else was demonstrating against the Vietnam War they were demonstrating that freshmen didn't have to wear this little cap called dinks and they were demonstrating to be allowed to have a student government. That's what their thing was. So, yeah, I ran for the senate but I was overreaching. But I did lose the first time I ran for public office. So, maybe if I had run again, I would have won the second time around. But I was openly gay at the time that I ran. Anyway, I don't know. I must have run a very bad campaign. I do want to talk about all the rest but it's amazing to me that at Lehigh now, that there would be an affirmative effort to get queer people into fraternities and sororities, like unbelievable to me. Even when they started having the lounge for the LGBTQ community, I can't imagine the people were joining fraternities and sororities up until very recently, being open about who they were with their sexual orientation. I may be completely wrong about that, but I don't think so. People came out once they were there but I think even that would be hard to come out in some fraternities. Because there's a fear. And sororities, too, there's, "Oh my God, we let a queer person in. Now everyone's going to think all of us are." I'm sure that goes on to this day. I live in New York City and there is discrimination and there is stigma attached to being queer here, and certainly HIV, which is a whole other thing. So, it happens here. And Lehigh is a little behind New York City, I think, politically, in many ways. So, people say that what I did was brave and how did I? But people that are doing what they're doing at Lehigh now that are going to join a fraternity or sorority being open about who they are, good for them. That's brave. And I think, New York, if I really was going to really continue to be active? I'm a left-wing, they barely let me stay in the Democratic party. I'm very, very, very progressive and I always got endorsed by the socialists, even though it's not as large as it is now, the group that AOC -- where am I going? So, I would go to Alabama or Mississippi where it's much harder to be gay, that's where you can get married and the next day get fired. I'm not even sure Pennsylvania has a Civil Rights bill. I don't know. So, people, they take risks. Sometimes before I go to bed, I might watch this TV show called "House Hunters," and once in a while, they have a gay couple. But they're living in Texas. I think, "Oh, are they out to everybody in Texas?" You know what I mean? Maybe they work in places where it's no big deal, but still, it's braver to be gay in Texas -- I've been to Texas -- than it is to be in New York City. I love New York, what can I tell you? And I have an affordable apartment, so I don't think I'm going to go to Mississippi. But those are the brave people. And a young person who will still come out, it's a political act. It's a big deal. And yeah, I came out sexually, yes, but the bigger thing was to come out politically. MF: I just want to say, listening to you talk about it, you were compelled at Lehigh, to be an out student, it felt like a calling to you. And I just wrote a brief history of LGBTQIA-plus activism on campus and I went through the Brown and White and I went through the yearbooks. To my mind from what I've been able to find, Rick Balmer, James Hopkinson were involved with that early Le-Hi-Ho, but what I've been able to find, you were the first out person on campus that was advocating for a public group, not a support group, public group for gay students at that time, at Lehigh. And for me, you and others in your friend group, Rick Balmer, and Hopkinson before you, you laid the foundation for that inclusivity that comes into our present twenty-first century at Lehigh. We have the Pride Center, we have Spectrum. I see a direct line from what you did at Lehigh to what my life as an out professor has been like at Lehigh. And I'm so grateful to actually be sitting with you today, face-to-face, and hearing you talk about what it was like for you to be there. I just want to say thank you at the end of the interview, today. And I hope I get to do a second interview because I want to hear about politics in New York City. TD: Absolutely. You're welcome. And thank you for saying it. And one of the reasons it's so important, I knew when I left there wasn't going to be anything anymore. And I was sad about that. And that's why I went in the '80s to see that guy, and when he left, there was nothing. But I couldn't stay there forever. I couldn't stay in office ; you have to leave it to someone else. But you're saying that, I don't -- not that I let people down by leaving, because that's what you're supposed to do, but thank you for saying that. I didn't really ever think of it in those terms. MF: People remember you. In other oral histories, "Oh, have you talked to Tom Duane?" "There was a student that was trying to get this group going, you might know him. He was a New York City Senator." Your name keeps coming up, for Bob Wittman, for Frank Whelan, for Rick Balmer, certainly, they've mentioned you. And the students that came after that started the Human Diversity League, I think that was [Jonathan Glennon?], maybe Ethan Felson. TD: Yes, yes. MF: It was Ethan Felson? That group was around, then it got resurrected. And then, in the '90s, there was a Les-Bi-Gay group that was there in the '90s. TD: Vaguely remember that. MF: So, people kept trying. And they really were building, whether they knew your name in terms of your Lehigh history -- I'm sure everyone knew your name because you were a New York State Senator -- but whether they knew your history at Lehigh, they were building on that. You were pushing the administrators at that time to sanction a group, to support a group on campus, and that did eventually happen by the time it was the twenty-first century and other students came building on what you did to make a reality. And Lehigh is absolutely transformed and changed, today, because of your efforts and other students' efforts that came after. TD: I want to say thank you. Thank you. It was also -- I want to say it was my privilege. But I'm happy to hear that and it makes me happy that I did what I did. So, thank you for saying that. You're going to come up in therapy next week. [laughter] And it's so thrilling -- are you tenured? Oh my God, that's -- because women at CUNY -- that's a whole other story. I have to be observed because I'm not a tenured professor and the woman who was going to observe me, I was like, "I'm so thrilled, a tenured woman professor from the school," and she said, "I don't have tenure." And I said, "Oh." I hope she's on the tenured track. I'm not going to get to vote on it. But actually, when I disclosed my HIV status -- which we'll talk about -- it was one of the things that we tested about coming out was whether a professor should tell the head of the department they had HIV when they were being considered for tenure. That's for another day. MF: Oh, yes. I can't wait to hear more about it. TD: It's a big thing. When did people start telling the head of the department that they were queer? When did that start? MF: I put it right on my resume. TD: Good. MF: Like, "I did a lesbian organizing project, and here I am." TD: I'm sure you thought about it, because you were coming out, but you were going to do it no matter what, right? There was no stopping you. But it still was a decision that not everybody makes. MF: Yeah. TD: I think that's great. I'm thrilled. Really, the world is changing, and I tell students, "You've got to hang on to what it is and build on it because it could slip away. It could slip away and don't let that happen." What I say about Lehigh, even though it wasn't a real recognized group, "Never give up the franchise," but I did give up the franchise. But if I could have, I would have, even if there was one member, just to keep it alive. Maybe there's no need -- there is still an ACT UP, but there's a lot of organizations that I've been a part of, Queers for Economic Justice is one. They went out of business. I'm like, "No. Don't do that. Even if you're going bankrupt, just reorganize and don't give it up." It was something I started when I was in office, which if you read the history of it, my name is not mentioned because I'm an establishment -- am I bitter and angry about it? [laughs] There were three of us who did it, someone else in my office, and suddenly, he's the only one, the one who wasn't working for government -- the three of us created it and then we sent it on its way and it went, but if you read about its founding, we're not in there. That's why I have to write that... MF: You have to write that book. TD: I have to write that book. I have to write that book. MF: Well, I'm going to be in touch with Bruce, and maybe we can schedule a follow-up. I know you have a busy schedule, but I loved that. TD: And how is that possible? I'm the busiest, retired, unemployed mostly person that I know. I don't know how. I think I just can't help myself. I remember Gloria Steinem saying this one time, she was speaking at some event, I can't remember what it was, and her thank you for whatever award, and then she started giving us phone numbers to call about this and that, and then she said, "I just," and I thought, "I know exactly what that's like." [laughs] She couldn't help herself. Good for people like us. MF: Yes. We need people like you. TD: Like us. MF: Like us. Like us. I will be in touch and I just want to close the interview by saying, once again, thank you so much. TD: It's been a pleasure. It was great speaking with you. 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.) 01:52:56 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 Thomas Duane, February 17, 2022 (Part 1) Description An account of the resource Thomas Duane recounts the early years of his life, his relationship with sexuality and time at Lehigh University, as well as his early interactions with activism and politics. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-22 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-02-17 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/07e7dbe33ece0e9656ab8cec3f4f5a92.png 8df612f28cfae09eece3c64f941a0436 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 Patricia Sullivan 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-03.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. PA-GALA 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 19, 2019 Patricia Sullivan, July 19, 2019 LGBT-03 01:21:27 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 PA-GALA PA Diversity Network Patricia Sullivan Mary Foltz video/mov SullivanPatricia_20190719_video.mov 1.0:|21(5)|46(10)|59(15)|80(6)|95(8)|110(15)|131(3)|148(5)|167(8)|182(6)|203(8)|222(4)|241(2)|258(5)|279(7)|296(11)|315(2)|334(5)|351(14)|372(15)|391(3)|408(9)|427(17)|446(9)|465(16)|486(7)|505(8)|526(3)|545(20)|560(5)|579(14)|600(17)|619(18)|638(5)|657(6)|674(17)|693(18)|712(8)|731(10)|752(8)|771(6)|788(2)|807(3)|828(3)|845(9)|866(4)|885(3)|902(11)|923(15)|942(16)|961(7)|980(9)|997(15)|1014(7)|1033(4)|1054(5)|1075(7)|1092(2)|1109(7)|1134(10)|1163(4)|1186(14)|1205(2)|1222(5)|1245(11)|1264(14)|1287(2)|1310(2)|1329(10)|1350(11)|1371(2)|1386(18)|1409(15)|1428(14)|1449(13)|1472(13)|1493(7)|1512(11)|1533(11)|1556(2)|1575(17)|1586(8) 0 YouTube video &lt ; iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rkA0R7UFiCo?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"&gt ; &lt ; /iframe&gt ; 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, I’m here with Trish Sullivan in her home in Allentown. Today is July 19th, 2019. We’re here as a part of the LGBT Community Oral History Project and Trish has so graciously agreed to be the first person that we’re interviewing for the oral history project. The project is sponsored by the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and we did receive funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium for which we’re also very grateful. So to begin I’m just going to ask Trish could you introduce yourself?&#13 ; &#13 ; PATRICIA SULLIVAN: I’m Patricia Sullivan.&#13 ; 0 73 Early Childhood / Family / Life in Florida MF: Fantastic. Well as I said, we’re just so grateful that you’re willing to sit here with us today and tell us a little bit about your life, and I thought we could start by just asking you to tell me a little bit about your childhood. Where are you from?&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well I was born on a barrier island, the first barrier island off the coast of Florida, Amelia Island, Florida. And I lived there for a part of my childhood, and then I moved inland, but I was born on an island which was pretty great. Liz and I are fortunate enough to still have a place there which is nice. 0 840 Leaving Florida / Schooling MF: So you had said earlier I couldn’t wait to get out of this town, describe for me how did you do that, how did you get out of Florida, where did you go?&#13 ; &#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well, when I graduated from high school I went to a college in North Carolina, Montreat Anderson College, it’s a Presbyterian college. And it basically it’s a liberal arts college, but it trains people to be music educators and missionaries basically. And my parents wanted me to go there, I wanted to go to the University of Florida, they didn’t want me to go there, they was afraid I’d party too much, and they wanted me to go to a little school where it would be controlling, and it would be very moral and upright and all of that. 0 1122 Early Interactions with LGBT People MF: I want to go back to when you talk about being at the first, your first college experience and feeling that you were different. I have a question about how were people at that college or people in your family, or just communities in which you sort of moved through -- how were they talking about lesbian, gay, or bisexual, or transgender people at that time?&#13 ; &#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well, when I was a kid and we would go visit family friends there were gay people there. I remember going to visit a family friend that rented an apartment to a gay man who was obviously a drag queen. 0 1425 Career Path / Life in New York / Gay Scene MF: Why were you drawn to physical therapy as a career path?&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well it was because I took a -- when I was in college I took one of those placement tests and it said I should have been a like a park ranger or something like that and or a camp person or something like that. And I thought eh, and my “little” sister at college from the class behind me had had polio and she said to me, “You should be a physical therapist.” 0 2094 Meeting Liz MF: How did you meet Liz?&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: I met her through mutual friends, one of my former partners and her former partner were doing a workshop together on a special technique that used to treat children with cerebral palsy. And they were in this month long workshop and they got to know each other, and we all went out to dinner at a café and they introduced me to some other friends that knew Liz and then those friends decided we’d make a good couple and set us up to go into New York City to see a play and meet. 0 2471 Starting PA-GALA / Mission &amp ; Work PS: And our friend Steve Black, who was a part of the group, was just a political mastermind, just an incredible person said let’s start our own organization and we’ll call it PA-GALA and we’ll provide the voter information, and we’ll do it right, because this other organization was giving good information but they just weren’t doing it in the right way, according to us. So we did this, and Steve ran it with Liz, and we continued to do the mailings and interviewed candidates for office, everything from school board right through to senator. Adrian Shanker ; PA-GALA ; Steve Black 0 3018 Anti-LGBT Petition / Anti-Discrimination Ordinance PS: And there was a fanatic in town who worked at Muhlenberg College, and he actually -- his name was Frank McVeigh and he’s no longer with us, but when he was at the college he said such outrageous things in his classes, he was a, not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, he taught psychology. And he said such outrageous things in his classes and students complained about him so much that they took him out of the classroom, and they couldn’t fire him because he was tenured, so they just sat him in an office. 0 3621 Building Political Community / Voter's Guide MF: There’s also a piece here that I think I want to ask a question about which is you’re building political community through the organization, could you talk a little bit about that?&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well, that was what was so great about PA-GALA and that’s why I say it’s so sad we don’t have it anymore, because we would send out those voter guides and we encouraged people to become super voters which means they voted in the general and the primary election every year, because those are the people that elected officials listened to, they know they vote. PA-GALA ; Voters Guides 0 3856 How PA-GALA Influenced Other LGBT Organizations in the Lehigh Valley MF: Before PA-GALA there were a few other organization like Le-Hi-Ho--&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Right.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: --but how do you think PA-GALA really changed what LGBT organizations were doing in the valley?&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well Le-Hi-Ho, those were organizations were a lot further back in time. I think when we were doing PA-GALA it was a Gay Men’s Chorus and F.A.C.T. and Pride and there was ACCO which was a women’s group, but it had a large lesbian group that participated in it, but it was a women’s choral group, and there were a few other groups. But the thing we changed was getting people politically active and getting the laws changed, that was what our goal was to make fair laws. ACCO ; F.A.C.T. ; Gay Men's Chorus ; PA-GALA ; Pride 0 4000 Photo Project &amp ; Marriage Equality MF: Just to give some context to people that photo project that you started was prior to -- it was about sort of moving up to marriage equality.&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Right.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: I was actually in that -- you took our photo and that was an incredibly powerful experience to have those photos put in the state legislature, so you had to look at all of these couples that were denied the right to marry. Marriage Equality 0 4155 End of PA-GALA MF: I want to ask a little bit about the publication you put together, but I’m curious about how PA-GALA came to an end, because you describe sort of sadness that it isn’t here anymore.&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well, it’s kind of sad -- it was that we had been doing this for a long time, we’d been doing it with Steve and Steve was very hard to work with, I mean he was a genius and I loved the work that Steve did, but I did not have a good relationship with him, I could not work well with him at all. Liz could work with him very well, but he just was difficult to work with and I finally reached the point I just couldn’t do things the way he wanted them done PA Diversity Network ; PA-GALA ; Steve Black 0 4353 Start of Valley Gay Press MF: So while you’re getting involved in PA-GALA you also are at some point starting one of, to my mind, one of the most important publications in the Lehigh Valley that focused on--&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Oh the Valley Gay Press?&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Yes, so could you talk a little bit about the origin of that and what your mission was?&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well Liz wanted to do a newspaper, Liz always wanted to do a newspaper and with her art background she could create it on -- and we started it at the time of the anti-discrimination law work. Adrian Shanker ; F.A.C.T. ; Gay Men's Chorus ; PA Diversity Network ; PA-GALA ; Valley Gay Press 0 4705 PA Diversity Network&#13 ; MF: You’ve mentioned the PA Diversity -- is it network on the end? How did that come to be, your participation in PA Diversity?&#13 ; &#13 ; PS: Well when we left the voters organization we created that, we had to write a 501C and create a new organization for us to run, because we didn’t want a political organization, the rules are different for them. We wanted an educational organization and so Robert Roush who was in the community and had been one of the people who developed the Gay Men’s Chorus wrote the 501C3 for us and we just created a new organization. Gay Men's Chorus ; PA Diversity Network ; Valley Gay Press 0 MovingImage Patricia Sullivan talks about her life growing up in Florida, her journey to creating crucial LGBT organizations, and it's impact on the LGBT community. MARY FOLTZ:My name is Mary Foltz, I'm here with Trish Sullivan in her home in Allentown. Today is July 19th, 2019. We're here as a part of the LGBT Community Oral History Project and Trish has so graciously agreed to be the first person that we're interviewing for the oral history project. The project is sponsored by the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and we did receive funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium for which we're also very grateful. So to begin I'm just going to ask Trish could you introduce yourself? PATRICIA SULLIVAN:I'm Patricia Sullivan. MF:Wonderful and I'm hoping that you, could you spell your name for us? PS:P-A-T-R-I-C-I-A J. Sullivan S-U-L-L-I-V-A-N. MF:What is your birthdate? PS:January 28, 1945. MF:And then I am just going to ask, before we started this interview you and I read a -- or talked about a consent form, and do you consent to this interview today? PS:Yes. MF:Fantastic. Well as I said, we're just so grateful that you're willing to sit here with us today and tell us a little bit about your life, and I thought we could start by just asking you to tell me a little bit about your childhood. Where are you from? PS:Well I was born on a barrier island, the first barrier island off the coast of Florida, Amelia Island, Florida. And I lived there for a part of my childhood, and then I moved inland, but I was born on an island which was pretty great. Liz and I are fortunate enough to still have a place there which is nice. MF:What was it like to grow up in Florida? PS:Well Florida it's a mixed thing, it's a lot of old people and a lot of conservative people particularly in the northern part where I was from, I was right on the Georgia Florida line and it was a very, very small town. And I have to say I grew up in the segregated South, I went to segregated schools all my life and I unfortunately witnessed lots of bad things, you know. And so when I was very young I decided that I had to get out of there and I decided very early that education was my way to do it. So I worked very hard to get a good education and be able to leave there and never go back except to visit. Because the politics is just very hard in Florida. MF:Well I'm curious about that, I mean it sounds to me like you're talking about how your childhood was shaped by sort of seeing institutionalized racism or racism in the South. PS:Well I have to -- maybe I should start by saying something about my parents, because my father was a World War I veteran, he served under King George. And he left the country as a seventeen-year-old to go join the Canadian Army before the United States got in the war, because he felt so strongly about what was happening to the country, and he lost his citizenship as a result of it. And he was gassed in the war, and he came back, and he obviously had very strong feelings about politics. He met my mother on the day she was born, he held her in his arms, and he told the family, "I'm going to marry this person." And he did and he was with her for seventy-five years and she was Canadian, and they left Maine in Canada, he'd actually been born in Maine. They left Canada and came back to the United States during the depression and drove to Florida and stopped in the first town they came to in Florida and made a home for themselves. And my family always had very diverse friends, I recall in my childhood we had a family that we were very close to that was from Persia which is currently Iran. We had several Jewish families that were friends and at least two of them had tattoos from concentration camps. And so my family was very, I wouldn't say they were progressive, but they were very oriented toward diversity. And when I was a kid they made a real point of trying to help me understand that the place we lived and the way we lived, we couldn't overlook the things that were happening there. Like you know if -- when I was young and it was segregated if a person of color came to your house they came to the back door, and they would take a hoe and tap on the steps they wouldn't even come up the steps to the door. And yet my parents had black friends who would come to the back door and come in the house and I'd play with the kids. And my mom would sit and sew and cook with the parent or the grandmother who was there for the day. But that wasn't something you did, so they were very brave about that, my father would go do business for black households, he was an electrical contractor and he would actually go into the community and do services for them. People wouldn't do that, they wouldn't let them use the bathroom, they wouldn't let them -- anything, you know. And so I was very fortunate to have a family that appreciated diversity and made me realize that I shouldn't fall into these habits of things that went on around me. At one point I lived across the street from the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and I learned very young not to just trust everything and everybody, because I sort of had my own personal "Scout" moment when I discovered that this person was the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. It was very scary. And yet I didn't have those problems, I didn't experience those problems, I experienced bullying and things because I was different, I was an outsider, but I saw that happening, I saw all the injustice of that. And it made me want to leave there because I couldn't, I felt I couldn't live that way, I couldn't live in a place where you know there were such strong divisions between people. And so I -- as soon as I graduated from high school I left, and I never went back. But my parents were very, very amazing that way. MF:What was your relationship like with your father, what was your relationship like with your mother? PS:Well, my father didn't say much, he was a very quiet person, he was a very gentle person. He spent a lot of time reading to me. My whole life he read to me, he read me stories, he wrote poetry, he read me poetry. That was the biggest contact I had with him. My mom I was with almost all the time since my dad had been gassed in the war and when I was very young he got sick and they thought he had TB because there was TB all over. And they put him in a sanitarium for a year and isolated him, took him from us, my mom didn't have a job, we had no income because we only lived on my dad's salary. And so my mom took in children to take care of children to make a living and she tied tobacco at the farm where they raised tobacco. She would go at tobacco harvesting time, that was a very skilled chore to do that, you had to be very good to do it. And I used to help her take care of the kids, and so I spent a lot of time taking care of little kids. I could like take twins and diaper both of them at the same time, and wash diapers and all those things you had to do back in that day. And then we discovered after he had been in the sanitarium for a year that he didn't have TB it was the effects of the gassing during the war. And so we lost that whole period of our life where we had to readjust to all these things because he couldn't be with us. And then he came back, he always had a job doing something, you know, he would go into places, people would pay him with chickens or pay him with vegetables, or money. He didn't care whatever, he would do work for anybody that would pay him for things. It sounds so rural doesn't it, but that's the way it was. And he was very educated he -- not formally educated, neither of my parents went to, got to go to school, he was, my dad was an Anne of Green Gables type kid. He was raised in a Catholic orphanage and they sold him to a family to run their store as a young boy. And so he got all his business experience running the store, and making change, and part of his education he memorized the dictionary from cover to cover, so he had an incredible vocabulary, and he was incredibly well-spoken, but had no formal education. And my mom was similar, she was self-educated, I was -- my one sister graduated from high school, but I was the first one in our family to go to college. But I had a good relationship with the both of them, they were great parents, you know, they worked very hard and made do with everything, I never felt as a child that we didn't have anything, but I guess we really didn't, but you know they always made me feel like you know really special and everything we had was just what we needed and we made do with it, it was great. So no trauma there. MF:What were your relationships like with siblings? PS:Well, my two older sisters one was twenty-four years older than I and the other was twenty-three years older or twenty-two years older than I. And between us there were four children that we lost, and the only reason I'm around is because they discovered clotting factor and vitamin K, and while my four siblings died because that medicine wasn't available, I didn't. And so there was, when I was born, my mother and my sister each had a child within three months of each other, so I was sort of raised with one of my nephews as like a sibling. But my sisters weren't at home when I was at home, so I was raised very much like an only child. MF:So you had said earlier I couldn't wait to get out of this town, describe for me how did you do that, how did you get out of Florida, where did you go? PS:Well, when I graduated from high school I went to a college in North Carolina, Montreat Anderson College, it's a Presbyterian college. And it basically it's a liberal arts college, but it trains people to be music educators and missionaries basically. And my parents wanted me to go there, I wanted to go to the University of Florida, they didn't want me to go there, they was afraid I'd party too much, and they wanted me to go to a little school where it would be controlling, and it would be very moral and upright and all of that. And it was a horrible experience. It was -- you had to go to church services and you, Billy Graham lived on campus, his wife's father was the president of the college and he and his wife lived on the mountain on the campus. And they would come to services at the college every week and bring all their kids, and you know Franklin Graham who is being such a ridiculous person now sort of shaming his father's history. Those kids would go to the nursery school and I didn't like to go to the church services so I'd volunteer in the nursery school, and so I always say well you know I knew he was a bad kid because he would always say, "You can't tell me what to do my daddy's Billy Graham." And we just were so used to seeing the Grahams on campus, but it was religious school. There were a lot of gay people there, but nobody was, nobody talked about it, no-one really knew they were gay. I mean I just, I'm assuming they were, I'm really clocking them because I don't know for sure, but seemed to me. But I wasn't really out then and although I knew I was different, and I knew I didn't fit in I just hadn't found a name for it yet. And the best thing I got out of that school was that when I wanted to transfer to the Medical College of Virginia, they let me transfer my old testament as history and my new testament as philosophy. And so I had all the credits to get into the program at the Medical College of Virginia, so it was wonderful and that was easy. It was a beautiful campus and I loved the area, I was president of hiking club and I played soccer and you know fun things like that, but it was every bit was a little bit too religious to me and most of the kids there came from missionary stations around the world where their parents were stationed and they sent them back there to go to school. So they were all geared up to go save the heathens of the world and I was one of them. And then I went to the Medical College of Virginia in physical therapy and that was a great program, one of the best programs at the time I went to it. And I think there were only about twenty-five physical therapy programs at that time, and when I graduated from there I went to -- on all my internships around and then I took a job in New York, just outside of New York City, up by WestPoint and I spent my whole working career at that hospital, it was a rehabilitation hospital run by the State of New York Health Department. That was a great job. MF:I want to go back to when you talk about being at the first, your first college experience and feeling that you were different. I have a question about how were people at that college or people in your family, or just communities in which you sort of moved through -- how were they talking about lesbian, gay, or bisexual, or transgender people at that time? PS:Well, when I was a kid and we would go visit family friends there were gay people there. I remember going to visit a family friend that rented an apartment to a gay man who was obviously a drag queen. And he would come in and out while we were there and everything, it was totally -- no-one paid any difference to him, it was just like he was just there, and no-one said anything about it. My sister, who was a lesbian, when she grew up her best friend, you know, was a lesbian, she was this real tall person who wore cowboy outfits all the time, they called her cowboy. And people talked about that, but they didn't use the words, but it was like nobody paid any attention. And then my mom told my dad she didn't want him to take me to work with him because she wanted me to be different, because he -- my sister worked with him and became a licensed electrician and then she went into the marine corps and she was one of the first women marines that was an electrician. And I think my mom was concerned he was going to teach me all these tasks that would turn me into a dyke or something, but they never said that. And I recall people saying I was queer, I remember hearing that a lot from people, but it was difficult to put that into context, you know. And the friends that I had were all sort of outsiders and we got along well, and I never heard anybody say anything about gay people at all. Let me think there was one instance, I was out having lunch with a friend when I was a teenager and we were at a little barbecue spot and we sat down at a table and there was a napkin on the table, and somebody had written something on it. And I remember her saying to me look at this, and I looked at it and I can't remember exactly what it said, and she says, "That's because they're lesbians, they wrote this on here." And it was I don't know if it was like, "less ben" or, you know, something weird some little code-y thing like that or something. But I remember that person brought it to my attention and I'd never heard anyone use those words before, and this was like one of my best friends. But you know I never heard any talk about it when I was in college I never heard any talk about it. But like I said a college that was segregated when I was a sophomore they finally allowed a black woman from the community to come to classes, but she couldn't stay on campus. And my roommates and I said well she could be on our suite we gladly have her in our suite and they wouldn't let her stay. They would only let her come for day classes. And it wasn't until I was in New York that I really started being out and knowing I was out and why I was out so to speak. I mean when people say to me when did you think you were gay and I always do this, (mimes a doctor holding a newly born baby by the feet and lightly spanking it to get the baby to get its first breath) because I just always had -- now that I know what it is I've always felt I was that way. But I didn't have the experience or the background to know what it was and then in physical therapy there were so many lesbians in the field. It was like being a coach, you know, everybody was a lesbian, you would go to conferences and it was like going to a pride fest, you know, it was great. MF:Why were you drawn to physical therapy as a career path? PS:Well it was because I took a -- when I was in college I took one of those placement tests and it said I should have been a like a park ranger or something like that and or a camp person or something like that. And I thought eh, and my "little" sister at college from the class behind me had had polio and she said to me, "You should be a physical therapist." And I had no idea what it was, but I went, and I looked at the catalogue and I matched my credits to it, and I thought I can do this, and the government was giving scholarships to go because there were a lot of war injuries and they needed people to be physical therapists. And so I was able to get a scholarship and so it was all very mercenary I didn't even know what I was doing, but they took my philosophy and my history from bible class and I thought this is what I'll do, I'll do this because I knew I couldn't go home. I knew if I couldn't take care of myself, you know, there wasn't a -- I wasn't in a situation where there was going to be a man in my life I could look to to say support me, and I couldn't go home to my family because they weren't able to support me, I actually was supporting them once I got a job. And so I thought I have to be able to support myself and I can do this in two years, I can get a scholarship, it's a great paying job and I actually liked it. I really loved working with the patients and I ultimately became an instructor and my job was to run the training programs in the hospital for all the students that came through from the colleges around the country and to train the clinicians how to deal with them and to work with them with patients. And I really loved that, that was one of the best parts of my career. MF:After college you go to New York City and you accept this first job, can you talk a little bit about your career in New York City with some more detail? PS:Well I wasn't actually in New York City, I was in Rockland County which is North and West of New York City, between West Point and New York City, it was about an hour drive. And that's where I was a physical therapist and then I became a clinical instructor and one point I was administrator and then I had been there close to twenty years and I applied to be the deputy director of the hospital which is like the second in command. And I got that position, it was a terrible position, and it was terrible because I'd been a clinician and people who are clinicians will tell you that when you get into administration it's really hard because they're only concerned about the bottom dollar and you're concerned about the patients, and that's really true. But I did that, it was sort of a career move, and the director of the hospital was never there so I ended up basically having to run the hospital, I was on call twenty-four hours a day and it was a very very stressful job. And then I had -- New York didn't have a non-discrimination policy yet, and I had a person on the staff who was creating problems for me by making people not want to deal with me because I was a lesbian. And he was doing this intentionally because he knew there were people that would be bothered by that. And I went to the director and asked the director to deal with it, and the director's response was, "Well the two of you have to get along and if you can't get along I'll just fire both of you." That was how he dealt with it. Well I couldn't go anywhere with my complaint because the person I had the complaint against was the personnel director and he was the head of the committee that reviewed discrimination complaints. So I was stuck, you know, so I thought I can't deal with it I'm going to -- you know I've got to get out of here. And I also had found out I had lupus and it was hard for me to do that job, it was very stressful because I would work all day and into the night and then on the weekends I would just be in bed because I was sick. And so I decided to leave the job, and that was when I met -- I had met Liz and we talked about it and the director was going to leave and a new director was coming in. And so I was really happy about that, I liked the new director and I negotiated with her to work part time and train her and then I would leave. And so while I was working part time I was moving here. MF:Well before we get to discussing your movement to the Lehigh Valley, I maybe have one more question about Rockland and your time in New York State which is what was your social life like? You have a career that's taking off, you're moving into administration, what was your life like after that work? PS:Well like I said there were a lot of people in my circle who were lesbians, but they were so closeted it drove me crazy, because once I knew I was a lesbian I wasn't closeted, I was never closeted about it once I really knew. And I couldn't get over why they were being so closeted because everybody knew they were lesbians and it was so frustrating to me, but they were good friends and you know, and I put up with it. And we would go into New York and we would go to the bars and we would have parties, and you know our whole staff in our department was very very social, and did a lot of social things together. But we used to go into New York City and at the time there weren't many bars, there was this horrible horrible bar, I'm making everything sound so horrible, but it was a horrible place called The Duchess. And it was at the basement of this building and it did have a sign out front, but you know you went in and you thought do I really want to go in here and people would say, "Only drink the beer they don't wash the glasses." You know and it wasn't much bigger than these two rooms, and the whole bar down one side it was dark and it was filled with every imaginable person you could imagine who could be a dyke you know was in there. And some of them were scary, particularly to people who were just coming out, but it was the only place to go, and you would go in there. And it was still in the days where you know they would do raids and you know they would tell you don't dance if you see the lights flash or if you see this thing happen don't -- separate yourself so that they won't bother you if the police come in and things like that. And they would tell you don't use your credit cards in these places because the FBI will track you and I mean they did, you know, they did that kind of thing. But you still went because it was the only place to go. I used to love to go to drag shows and things like that, and there were other places. There was a place in Rockland County where you could go to drag shows, but it was one of these bars that it was like one night they would have it and a lot of us would go there for that and just sit and drink and you know have something to eat and party. But there weren't bars like there are today in the city. It's a long time ago, it's before Stonewall. MF:Did you have your first sort of longer term relationship when you lived in Rockland County? PS:Yes, I did, and I learned a lot from those relationships. I learned that I always seemed to be interested in the wrong type of person for me. And it took me three of those relationships to realize that it wasn't the other person it was that I was choosing the wrong person. And so at the end of the third one I was doing graduate school, this was my doctorate work at Columbia. And so I didn't want to be in a relationship, I wanted to get my work done and I knew I couldn't do both. So I said I'm not going to worry about it, I'm not going to worry about dating or anything like that I'm just going to wait. And then Liz came along and so I couldn't let that go by, and that was the perfect one. MF:How did you meet Liz? PS:I met her through mutual friends, one of my former partners and her former partner were doing a workshop together on a special technique that used to treat children with cerebral palsy. And they were in this month long workshop and they got to know each other, and we all went out to dinner at a café and they introduced me to some other friends that knew Liz and then those friends decided we'd make a good couple and set us up to go into New York City to see a play and meet. And that's a really long story. MF:I'd love to hear it. PS:Liz tells it much better than I, but we went into New York City for this play and the play was interesting, but Liz had seen it before, and she wasn't that interested in it and I hadn't seen it and I was enjoying it. And then at the intermission this woman comes up to her and it was one of her former students, and she takes off with her former student to talk, I tell the story this way, she says that's not the way it happened. She takes off with the student and I think this is great, you know, here we're going to do this then she takes off with somebody, but it was someone that she had known for years in her program she had taught them. And so got to talk to them and then we left, and then we went to -- we were in the train station and we spent a lot time quizzing each other about relationships and what was good in a relationship and what wasn't and what our likes and dislikes were. And this went on for about two hours, and everything we were like really in agreement on because we had both been in situations where we'd been with people who were partially closeted, and we didn't like that. And, oh, there were all kinds of other things we talked about, I can't remember them all, it just went on, and on, and on. And so we find out we were very compatible and that was good, but you'll have to let Liz tell that story, she tells it so much better. MF:I love your version too. Okay, so then what happened, you meet Liz and your-- PS:Well, I was trying to leave my job and I had -- I couldn't really retire because -- I could vest my retirement, but I couldn't actually retire for about five more years. So, we spent a lot of time deciding how we would live, whether we would live in my house in New York, or in her house in Allentown. And we talked about which would be the best to rent as a rental property, we finally figured out the best thing would be to sell my house and buy rental properties here and so that's what we did, we sold my house and bought a couple of rental properties, in fact right across the street from your house (indicates the camera person). And we had those for about five years and while we were renting the properties we also started in the antiques business and sold antiques. And antiques is a really fun job because you learn about all kinds of things, but it's nothing anybody needs. So you know the -- but the great thing about the antiques business is the more you know the more money you make, because you have to be able to find things. You have to be able to find things cheap and sell them high. So we actually loved it because it meant spending a lot of time researching things and collecting things. So I left my job, I came here, we rented the buildings, we did the antiques, and then it wasn't enough for us because there was nothing about the community. We had trouble meeting people and finding people in the gay community, and they hadn't had a pride fest then. And so finally they did, there was a pride fest and so just said well we'll go to it. We went to the pride fest and we're thinking look there are all these groups we can volunteer with one, what'll we do, we need to do something. So, we found this political group which was a voters information group, and we really liked it because we really believed in getting people to vote and vote for the right reasons and so on and getting them information. So we volunteered to be a part of that organization and that we would do mailings for them. We would stuff envelopes and seal them and address them and do all that because we didn't have computers. And it grew until we were running the organization, and the first organization we were involved with we didn't -- we had some philosophical differences with the person who was running it. And our friend Steve Black, who was a part of the group, was just a political mastermind, just an incredible person said let's start our own organization and we'll call it PA-GALA and we'll provide the voter information, and we'll do it right, because this other organization was giving good information but they just weren't doing it in the right way, according to us. So we did this, and Steve ran it with Liz, and we continued to do the mailings and interviewed candidates for office, everything from school board right through to senator. And we made up a scale and we created a booklet which are in the archives, that would tell you how facts to place your vote on, how they voted on pieces of legislation. We interviewed then and we'd ask them questions and I remember interviewing Frank Concannon who was a city council candidate here and he said, I was asking him about gay issues, and he says, "No-one's ever told me they were a lesbian before." And he was so supportive, and you know, and he worked with us, he helped us do a lot of legislative work and he was -- but he said, "No-one's ever talked to us about this before." Because people were so afraid to and we didn't have that risk, we didn't have jobs to worry about, we didn't have family who weren't supportive so we could be out there. And so we took the risk because we could do it and Steve was just an amazing person, I'm so sorry he's not around to be doing this stuff now, because he knew every legislative district. He knew the addresses, he knew the people who were in them, he could negotiate with those people, he was just an absolute mastermind, and we learned so much from him. And we ran that organization and it created tremendous change because it made people vote, it let us get in legislators and city council people and mayors that supported our rights and would deal with our legislation and that had never happened before and it's a real loss to our community that we don't have an organization like that now that does that. Because people don't know who to vote for and they don't realize the value of voting in the primary election and voting for school board and those positions, and how it influences our community. So we did that and then at a later point we would produce the newspaper and I would do the mailings for that, a lot of us wrote articles for the newspaper but mainly I took care of all the paperwork surrounding it and Liz published the newspaper. And then we moved from that into the center, you know we met Adrian -- he was actually on our board, we met him first as a student, he came to Liz to ask Liz to help him deal with an issue at the college, and she was so impressed with him and so she asked him to be on the board. And then he said you know what I really want is to have a community center and we were at the stage where, you know, we couldn't do this forever and we needed someone with that kind of energy and expertise to come in, and it was time to pass it off to a younger person so to speak and he was just the perfect person and we said, "This is great." And so then we started on that journey to change one organization into another and he did a great job with that. MF:I want to go back to PA-GALA for a minute and just talk a little bit more about what that organization accomplished or what your sort of mission for that organization was. You focused on the voter guides as sort of a central mission for that organization. PS:Yes, it was a political organization and you know we provided information and we tried to change laws and educate people with respect to things like that. Like one of the things we did was the anti-discrimination laws we worked on all of those, we did the one in Allentown, and we had that terrible court fight over that. Because Liz had to sue to get the -- she would have to explain this, but we were trying to get the anti-discrimination laws and there was a referendum against us and we had to sue to fight the referendum. And we have the suit, it's in the archives. I wanted to go back a minute and just say something else about Steve Black. Steve, he was a lawyer, but he didn't really practice law, he ran his family's diner in Pen Argyl. And so we would go up to the diner and after the diner would close we'd sit in the booths and we'd process all these forms and do mailings sitting in the booths in the diner, all the computers were set up there, it was a very interesting system. And Steve didn't have a good mailing list we didn't think, and we found out he had this bag of papers that were like people's addresses and everything. So we met this woman here who was a lesbian and she worked, I don't know if she worked with a finance company or a cellular phone company or something, but she was really great with computers and she took that bag and she made a computerized mailing list for him and that was one of the things that really changed things early on because we had a computerized list. Then her name was Joan Todaro, she just did it like overnight she said, "Just give it to me." And then when we wanted to do the voter's guide, the voter's guide was very complicated and it used a very special program called Quark, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's a publishing program and I don't think people use it anymore. But, we sent out the word that we needed some help and Steve sometimes didn't look at these things when they came through and I was going through the mail and I found this letter from someone who said she could help us with that. And she just lives, she's our neighbor, she just lives down the street here over on Eighth Street. And she works for a publishing company and that's all she does every day is publish books, and she created the book that allowed us to send out the book for the voters' guide. And that's what I mean about people who do one thing, but it has such impact, but no-one even knows they've done it and they're sort of in the background. And Gail did that for us, and she would come over here every voter's guide and we would sit and we'd plug in all this information and it came out in a really nice booklet and very hard to do, very hard to do. But when we wanted to pass the ordinance there was a referendum against it and they collected signatures. And there was a fanatic in town who worked at Muhlenberg College, and he actually -- his name was Frank McVeigh and he's no longer with us, but when he was at the college he said such outrageous things in his classes, he was a, not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, he taught psychology. And he said such outrageous things in his classes and students complained about him so much that they took him out of the classroom, and they couldn't fire him because he was tenured, so they just sat him in an office. And they hired Patty Kline to go in and replace him, and she taught gender studies, you know, she taught really good stuff, and he was just awful. Well he disliked gay people so much that he went around, and he collected thousands of signatures, but he lied to people. He would go in their yard and he would look at their cars and he would see they had a sticker for the environment or conservation or something and he would go in and he'd say, "This is a petition--" and he would say it was about that and he would get them to sign it. And they did, and we had a city councilperson, Hershman, who would go around and take these petitions to churches and at the churches they had nights where they did bingo sign-up sheets. And he'd walk around, and he'd say, "This is a bingo sign-up sheet, do you want to sign up?" And they would sign up, or it was a food giveaway thing and they would sign up. He was so bad, and he was so stupid about this that he actually on a bunch of the petitions accidentally signed his own name with his signature pen, which was a blue fountain pen, very easily to pick up. And we searched, we went through all of those, well now this was before we had cell phones. And so we turned the downstairs over there and the upstairs over there into a center to deal with this. And every day from early morning until after midnight those rooms were filled with people with computers and phone books taking the names of everybody who had signed one of these. And then we sent out a letter to them, because it was public record we could get their signature, we sent out a letter to them with a postpaid envelope in it saying, "Did you know that this is what is about, and did you really mean to sign it? And if you did would you be willing to take your name off?" And we got -- there was an attorney in Philadelphia named Dan Anders who had been a clerk for one of the judges here. And he worked for the major, major firm there and they paid him to be our lawyer, the firm gave him his salary so he could come here and work with us and fight that referendum. And he figured out that we could put a piece of paper in that envelope that was a legal declaration that you could take your name off. So we, you know, all of our friends came over and we had some friends that were really computer literate and their families came over and they would look up things and they would sit here with phones and call the people and say can we come over and get you to take your signature off of this, sign one of these and then we would send people out. And we did that, and we waited for these cards to come back and Liz and Steve went to the post office and the first day Steve comes out of the post office carrying a box like this and there were hundreds of retractions, and that was the first day. So then we started going to people's homes and getting them to sign off and we'd call them up and the stories we heard were unbelievable like I went to a person who lives behind the Jewish community center or he did then and he was a World War II veteran and he said the person who shared the foxhole with him was gay and he would never discriminate against gay people because that person saved his life. And there was this family Liz went to see this really, really Catholic family with like ten kids and this woman was just so upset that she had been hoodwinked into signing this. And you know she was going on and on about it and took her name off, people were just appalled that they had been lied to. And then we had to go to the city and present this data and so we called a press conference and we'd go to the city and the city thought we were going to bring in a little stack of things and we brought in this huge stack of papers. Well they couldn't not listen to us, but here's the funny thing, they didn't have a way of dealing with it, and so what they had to do was cross file those people with the petition and they didn't know how to do it. But we'd already done it and so they had to use our records because they had no system to determine who those people were and we were able to pull the things where Hershman signed more than one thing and we, in our archives, we have a list of everybody who collected those petitions, and you know. So every time there would be an election and we wanted to -- somebody was going to run we would cross file the list to see if they were one of the people who filed petitions against us so we could tell people not to vote for them. Information is good, really good, but we sued, and so Dan wrote the case and it was in Liz's name because they had to have somebody against these far right people who were doing this. And he threatened them with subpoenas, and they withdrew, so we won. But that was really exciting, the other exciting was that the anti-discrimination law that contained the information about the transgender community, the gender identity part of it and the definition of gender identity was written in our solarium by -- okay now why can't I think of her name, she's the head of the transgender equality group. MF:Corrine? PS:No, in Washington. Starts with an M, I'm going to say Myra, anyway really she's been there a long time and she came here, and she wrote the definition and now the laws that Liz and Steve wrote and that you know Adrian has been involved, and now they all have all the proper terminology. And ours was the first one and it's used all over the country now when people want to look at the terminology for what should be included they use that as the model. MF:For a city. PS:Mara Keisling, Mara Keisling. MF:So that's a model for a city or a county or a statewide-- PS:Right, the thing is that each one of them have different stipulations to how they're done, because like we're a third class city and it's a different sized city the terminology has to be a little bit different, but the definitions stay the same. And so all those were, you know, great models for people around the country, it's pretty cool. MF:So it sounds like this organization, I mean you're putting together the voting guide, you're working on anti-discrimination legislation at the city and at the county level? PS:Yes. MF:You're interviewing local politicians that will go in the voting guide, but also just keeping track of even how they're voting. PS:Right. MF:There's also a piece here that I think I want to ask a question about which is you're building political community through the organization, could you talk a little bit about that? PS:Well, that was what was so great about PA-GALA and that's why I say it's so sad we don't have it anymore, because we would send out those voter guides and we encouraged people to become super voters which means they voted in the general and the primary election every year, because those are the people that elected officials listened to, they know they vote. So, when you write a letter to your senator or your representative they give it to their staff, and they look in their file and see if you vote. If you don't vote they don't necessarily pay attention to it. But if you're a super voter not only will they write you a letter sometimes they call you because they know you're going to pay attention. So we wanted all our people to be super voters and we started this push to make them that way. And so what we would do is just before the election we would call them up, "Did you get your voter's guide? Are you going to vote tomorrow?" And they started expecting us to do that, and then they would go vote, and then they would call us. And today we still get people calling us and saying, "Who do we vote for? There's no voter's guide, tell us who should we vote for?" And it's very hard because of course we only know the people in our area, we aren't necessarily able to help people in some of the smaller elections because we don't know anymore. But it really built a big political community, and then when we were working with somebody at some point and they took out the -- it was a candidate for mayor or for some big office, and there's a list you can buy on a disk and you can plug it in the computer and it shows you the voting record of everybody that's registered to vote, not how they voted but did they vote in these elections, and politicians take those and they use them to build their voters. And we were sitting down with this person and we looked at it and for our area every time we went down the list there was somebody we knew that was a super voter that was gay, and we could find them. And Steve always used to say he had a system, he called it, find a gay or something like that. And he would take the phone book, or the voters records and he could go through it and he could say these people live at the same address, they voted in every single election for how many years they are the same sex, they're about the same age, gay and track them down. You know and he was able to do that, we built more lists figuring those things out, because you had to find people and then you'd give them information and then they would get involved. And people really valued that information, they wanted to -- it's not that people don't want to vote, they're afraid they're going to vote for the wrong thing, and you have to educate them. MF:Before PA-GALA there were a few other organization like Le-Hi-Ho-- PS:Right. MF:--but how do you think PA-GALA really changed what LGBT organizations were doing in the valley? PS:Well Le-Hi-Ho, those were organizations were a lot further back in time. I think when we were doing PA-GALA it was a Gay Men's Chorus and F.A.C.T. and Pride and there was ACCO which was a women's group, but it had a large lesbian group that participated in it, but it was a women's choral group, and there were a few other groups. But the thing we changed was getting people politically active and getting the laws changed, that was what our goal was to make fair laws. We did the photo project too which was to help people understand about marriage and the laws related to marriage and everything, and that was an interesting project because those people were so brave. Because when we did that we thought okay so we -- let's see if we can get fifty people, we can name at least twenty-five couples that would probably do it because they're our friends. But let's see if we can get fifty people and this was when there were no laws protecting anybody and you had parents, you had people who wrote right in that photograph I'm a parent, I work at this kind of job. I mean they put all this personal information out there on that and people just started coming to the door to do it. And it just grew and grew and every one of those people put themselves at risk to do it and they were so willing to do it because they were -- part of it was educating them about why it was important to do it. And we displayed that in the state capital, it was pretty cool to have it in the state capital. MF:Just to give some context to people that photo project that you started was prior to -- it was about sort of moving up to marriage equality. PS:Right. MF:I was actually in that -- you took our photo and that was an incredibly powerful experience to have those photos put in the state legislature, so you had to look at all of these couples that were denied the right to marry. PS:You know, and people would be critical and say well why do you have someone up there that says they've only been together two months? Well so what people have short relationships, we had people in there who divorced or remarried, and the saddest part were the people who died without getting their rights, you know, that was the really hard part and we had to use that to educate people too. Because that's part of life, but it was a very important project, this just popped into our head we have to do this, let's do this, let's put a face on it. And then other people around the country started doing it, but they did it differently, like she had this thing about -- make people stand and put their heads together and it makes them smile, and it did. And you look in those pictures and more people particularly non-LGBTQ people would say, "Everybody looks so happy." And it's because of the way she took the picture and she did it intentionally, and we would go around and give lectures about marriage equality and show those. And people in the audience would say, "What are you doing that we're not doing because our relationships aren't that good?" Because we would give the statistics of how long people stayed together and people assumed that gay men didn't stay together very long, they just made the assumption and the statistics didn't show that at all, it showed there were some very very long relationships among men in the community, they're different, it was a wonderful project. MF:And that was a PA-GALA project or that was the organization that put together the photo project? PS:It was PA-GALA. [correction: PA Diversity Network] MF:I want to ask a little bit about the publication you put together, but I'm curious about how PA-GALA came to an end, because you describe sort of sadness that it isn't here anymore. PS:Well, it's kind of sad -- it was that we had been doing this for a long time, we'd been doing it with Steve and Steve was very hard to work with, I mean he was a genius and I loved the work that Steve did, but I did not have a good relationship with him, I could not work well with him at all. Liz could work with him very well, but he just was difficult to work with and I finally reached the point I just couldn't do things the way he wanted them done and he wasn't -- I didn't feel he recognized the efforts that were going into all of this. And he was sort of tired of doing it and so we decided, we gave them about a year's notice, and we said you know we're not going to be able to continue to do this because it was just getting too hard to coordinate things. And we didn't want to stop but we just couldn't do it anymore. And we thought he would do something else with it, but he didn't, and then we sort of went off on our own with PA Diversity which was not a political organization, it was an educational organization and that's really where our background is in education. And he just -- other things were happening in his life and it just ended, you know, he wasn't able to do it alone, but he wasn't able to work with the people who had worked with him to do it. And it was very sad because I have such admiration for what he did and what a great politician he was in terms of managing this stuff, and he -- so much of this progress in our community is growth from what he did. You know he just can't be left out of that equation, it was just too important and it was tough. You know here he was this guy who went to law school, he was bright, he was successful, but he was one of those people who had a family that didn't accept him, and it played really hard on his life. And it was very sad to stop doing it and it was very sad to lose him from the community because he would still be doing great things if he were here. MF:So while you're getting involved in PA-GALA you also are at some point starting one of, to my mind, one of the most important publications in the Lehigh Valley that focused on-- PS:Oh the Valley Gay Press? MF:Yes, so could you talk a little bit about the origin of that and what your mission was? PS:Well Liz wanted to do a newspaper, Liz always wanted to do a newspaper and with her art background she could create it on -- and we started it at the time of the anti-discrimination law work. And we started it because there was going to be this referendum and we had to get information out. So our first paper was one page and it was all about that, and then it just grew. And then she started getting other people to write for it, to write little columns just that were part of the community, and we found that there were a lot of organizations in the community and they weren't talking to each other. And so for example F.A.C.T. would hold their major event on the same night that the Gay Men's Chorus was holding their major event, and there was no reason for that to happen. And we thought there should be a calendar, so we created a calendar and we did this out of our pocket, I mean PA-GALA didn't pay for it, we did it out of our pocket, and we sent it out to everybody. And we would tell every group you can give us information and we'll put it in, because we wanted people to get the information. And it worked, there were still a few conflicts but pretty much people could look at the calendar and say if they really were serious about it and say okay we're not going to plan and they got to know when people's regular times were for galas and things like that, not conflict with them. And those were the two big reasons for doing it was to get information out. And it also advertised and we did it, we got a grant and we also provided in Berks County, so we did a lot of work in Berks County to get them started and now they have a center and they have a pride fest and they didn't have that before. MF:So you're doing PA-GALA and the newsletter, newspaper everything at the same time, but they seemed to be a part of a larger political vision that you, Liz, and then others in that network had which was at least what I'm hearing from you getting information out on politicians, the kinds of legislation you were interested in passing and supporting. But also highlighting other organizations in your area that were doing the good work. PS:Right. MF:How did you do all of that and your antique business? PS:Oh well we worked all the time doing that. The paper took Liz about two weeks to produce, two solid weeks and then there was the mailing of it. I did the mailing and you know we at the time -- one of the nice things in our lives is we had opportunity to be nanas to four wonderful children of gay couples and two of them stayed here a lot, and so we would get the kids to sit with us and we'd say, "Let's see how fast we can do this. See who can do this fastest." And so the kids would stuff envelopes with us, and we would take them to rallies and Liz would carry them on her shoulders, she said, "You might have to tell these kids that they did this for their resumes, that they went to all these rights rallies." And then we'd come home and watch it on the news, but we got volunteers to come in and help us. And it was really important to do that. MF:How long did the newspaper last and was it the internet that sort of changed your desire to publish it or how did it close? PS:Well we created the center we changed from PA Diversity to the Center and we transferred our 501C3 to the Center and Adrian chose not to continue that as part of the Center that they would provide information other ways. And Liz couldn't -- it was a full time job I think she was ready to stop with it, and it was sort of like the voter's guide we really hoped someone would do it but many people tried to start gay periodicals during that time and nobody was successful, because they always tried to do something really glossy and expensive and they couldn't maintain it. And we just did it, we did it low cost, and it wasn't as fancy looking, but it got the information out and that to us was the important thing not that it had a glossy cover. But she couldn't do that and do her other work too. MF:You've mentioned the PA Diversity -- is it network on the end? How did that come to be, your participation in PA Diversity? PS:Well when we left the voters organization we created that, we had to write a 501C and create a new organization for us to run, because we didn't want a political organization, the rules are different for them. We wanted an educational organization and so Robert Roush who was in the community and had been one of the people who developed the Gay Men's Chorus wrote the 501C3 for us and we just created a new organization. And we did the Valley Gay Press under that, that was the main thing that was under it and then we did other, we still did education about -- we still did things that had to do with laws and ordinances, but we did it from an educational point of view rather than a political point of view. MF:Well we're right at about an hour and twenty minutes so I think this might be a good place to stop for the day. But as a way to close I want to ask you is there anyone off the top of your head that you think we really need to interview for this oral history project? PS:I mean the main people I know are the people that are your list. Do you have Dixie White? MF:Yes. PS:I know she would really love to be interviewed and she is one of the really old timers in terms of being around way before we were. And she was also the head of AIDS Services at one point I think, I don't know exactly what her title was, but she was involved with the AIDS Services Center. And I don't know, I'd talk to Liz about that and I think she gave you names, I can't think of anybody right off the top of my head. MF:If you think of anyone you can email me. Well I think I just want to sort of end by saying thank you so much, you know, for being with Carol [Moeller?] who did our camera work today, and with me, again my name is Mary Foltz, both Carol and I are on the LGBT Oral History Project for the Lehigh Valley and are really excited you volunteered to be our first interview. Thank you so much Trish. PS:Thank you for letting me do this. 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.) 01:21:27 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 Patricia Sullivan, July 19, 2019 Description An account of the resource Patricia Sullivan talks about her life growing up in Florida, her journey to creating crucial LGBT organizations, and it's impact on the LGBT community. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-03 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-07-19 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.