3 10 64 https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/27482ef26d01776b07651ef10677aa6a.png fb5bdc935085fb0933fb6b179bd11492 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Joseph Burns OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-08.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 October 13, 2019 Joseph Burns (Part 2), October 13, 2019 LGBT-08 01:53:05 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Joseph Burns Mary Foltz video BurnsJoseph_20191013_Video 1.0:|25(8)|50(9)|69(11)|92(2)|109(9)|122(3)|139(2)|156(2)|177(8)|196(7)|217(3)|238(15)|259(5)|280(5)|299(2)|324(11)|343(13)|364(5)|387(6)|406(10)|427(12)|448(8)|465(19)|482(3)|511(5)|532(6)|555(11)|578(16)|603(11)|626(13)|651(10)|672(16)|693(16)|714(17)|733(14)|754(5)|777(6)|788(12)|809(5)|830(3)|849(12)|870(4)|887(9)|906(12)|929(3)|944(12)|965(11)|986(3)|1005(9)|1026(11)|1043(7)|1066(6)|1087(11)|1110(14)|1131(16)|1158(5)|1183(7)|1208(5)|1229(10)|1250(10)|1271(3)|1294(2)|1317(5)|1338(6)|1359(2)|1384(6)|1405(7)|1430(3)|1455(4)|1474(7)|1501(5)|1520(12)|1543(3)|1566(13)|1587(4)|1604(17)|1623(5)|1646(17)|1669(13)|1694(8)|1715(14)|1734(3)|1751(7)|1772(5)|1789(8)|1814(11)|1837(6)|1856(9)|1875(9)|1898(2)|1917(4)|1934(11)|1959(7)|1978(8)|1999(13)|2020(10)|2039(3)|2060(11)|2083(13)|2104(6)|2119(10)|2144(5)|2169(5)|2188(3)|2209(11)|2232(5)|2255(2)|2276(8)|2303(8)|2328(17)|2351(2)|2378(9)|2399(8)|2402(14) 0 https://youtu.be/zEkvYyfuth8 YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz. I’m here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley. This is part of the LGBT community oral history project, which has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We’re in Joseph’s home in Boiling Springs today. It’s October 13th, 2019. Carol Moeller is our videographer. And Joseph, I just want to thank you once again for talking with us.&#13 ; &#13 ; JOSEPH BURNS: Thank you. 0 32 Stories About Le-Hi-Ho MF: We’re so happy to be here, and we met with you yesterday, and we talked a lot about an organization called Le-Hi-Ho, which you had been really one of the earliest members of that organization, and we wanted to start our conversation today by asking, is there anything else that you wanted to tell us today about Le-Hi-Ho?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Yes, probably. I was a founding member. I was the first to respond to Ron’s letter about forming the organization. Le-Hi-Ho 0 538 Founding Other LGBT Organizations JB: But they were not city -- Allentown was -- Le-Hi-Ho and the organization that we founded, which was called the Citizens’ Concern for a Better Community, CCBC -- did that because our friend Frank, a professor at Muhlenberg, created an organization as soon as he heard for it, Citizens Organized for Decency, COD. So I just needed a name to respond to that, so we came up with the Citizens Concern for a Better Community as the gay organization. 0 788 Demonstrations / Protests / Activism JB: Every week we would go and have some sort of demonstration. Sometimes there were no people around at all ; sometimes -- I think that person was -- noon-time, I believe, lots of people out looking at us, watching us do this publicity thing about coming out and opening the door on discrimination, never to close again, and so we got our free -- well, that wasn’t true. We had a parade at one point in connection with this, and I think there were twenty-seven people who actually marched that day, maybe a few more than that. Close enough. 0 4033 Relationship MF: Yeah, you met Ricky through Le-Hi-Ho, so how did you meet your second lover? How did that relationship begin?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Well, I met him again at a New Year’s Eve party -- I think I -- I don’t remember. We might have had a drag party that night. We may have had a Le-Hi-Ho event, drag event on New Year’s Eve of 19-- going into 1970, and he insisted on taking me home, which was our first time together. And after that, we were -- I had him move down here by April, I think, after that. Moved away from his family. 0 5895 Elder Initiative MF: So we’re right at the end of our time, and so may I ask one more question before we end the interview? I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the Elder Initiative that you’ve been involved in.&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay, I work with a group. I had these papers that I didn’t know what to do with. I had all these papers from forty years ago, forty, then, forty something years ago, forty-three or forty-four, from 1969 on, relating to all the organizations in Pennsylvania that I knew about, that were in existence at that time. 0 MovingImage Joseph Burns shares stories of Le-Hi-Ho, LGBT activism, and personal relationships. MARY FOLTZ:My name is Mary Foltz. I'm here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley. This is part of the LGBT community oral history project, which has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We're in Joseph's home in Boiling Springs today. It's October 13th, 2019. Carol Moeller is our videographer. And Joseph, I just want to thank you once again for talking with us. JOSEPH BURNS:Thank you. MF:We're so happy to be here, and we met with you yesterday, and we talked a lot about an organization called Le-Hi-Ho, which you had been really one of the earliest members of that organization, and we wanted to start our conversation today by asking, is there anything else that you wanted to tell us today about Le-Hi-Ho? JB:Yes, probably. I was a founding member. I was the first to respond to Ron's letter about forming the organization. You know, of course, we didn't have a name, we didn't have any place. So we met with several other people ; one of the men was a nurse by the name of Al Ravert, who became the vice president, and Al had a friend with a cabin in the woods somewhere, I think up in Lehighton, I believe, which was appropriate. We weren't sure -- there had been an arrest not very long before that about the Mafia. A group in the Poconos that had -- Mafia leaders had come out from New York, and they went up and raided them and arrested all these people. So we were a little bit paranoid. I thought -- we thought, is that why we're going to the woods, to be out where we can't be arrested? And I don't know who else felt that way, but thirty-one people who came to that first organization, thirteen of us formed the organization, what was -- decided to meet again. And that's how Le-Hi-Ho started, and that was -- it was in April or May of 1969. Now, the two stories I want to tell you about Le-Hi-Ho, while I was thinking of them: one was the first time we met, probably, was Dick Leitsch, we invited Dick Leitsch, we formed in April or May, invited Dick for February, I -- January or February, I'm not sure which ; February, I believe -- to be our speaker. Well, they had that -- a public meeting, we had that at the church. The Presbyterian church in Allentown sponsored us for that particular day. And so we had the day, Dick came, we had -- the gay community was seven people, seven men from our organization. And we were talking about, the first meeting, we were going to blend in to the crowd, okay, we'll just be anonymous. Four ministers and nobody else. Four ministers and us. Now, we're going to hide, right. (laughter) We're going to look anonymous. That's just -- it's just wonderful, as a matter of fact, our first public appearance being publicly identified as gay was certainly -- there was no hiding. And they were as curious about us as we were about them. At the meeting, Dick Leitsch did an excellent job for us. The next story involves Barbara Gittings, who we had I think in June, I believe -- true, it was June -- as a speaker, and that was the (inaudible) meeting at which we had a young minister there who was vociferously -- he was going to preach that night about the evils of homosexuality, and all of us knew all about this, and we were invited to come and hear all about the evils of homosexuality. And quite forthright, and several of the ministers, who I think were a little more open to the idea of us being there than he was. At any rate, we decided we were going to go, we were going to go, okay, and so we had the first public demonstration against homosexuals in 1970, and it consisted of Barbara Giddings, Ron Seeds, myself, and my lover, Paul Forrest -- stood outside the church and waited for these people to come. Nobody ever showed up, okay. So the hour comes, and I hear the music inside going on, so we went up to the door, looked inside, and there's the minister up in the pulpit, his wife, there with his son, and he's preaching all by himself. (laughter) That was the first demonstration in Allentown that we ever had, first public demonstration. Wonderful memory. I just want to get that story out before we get this -- there wasn't another one until we did coming out, and when we did -- the next organization in 1978, and it must have been prior to -- some time prior to the election, I don't know when, exactly. Dixie White, who was then the state president of NOW -- I don't know -- she hadn't been elected yet. This was before the convention, they elected her. It was '77 when Dixie started and we were going to have a convention at the Hotel Traylor, not the Hotel Traylor, Hotel America? Americana? It's on Fifth, is that right? Fifth and Hamilton, I believe. And it was owned by one person -- We wanted to have a convention there, we were going to have a gay convention, we wanted to have our first gay convention, and he says yes, to begin with, and then said no ; it went to the paper and [said it descriminated against us?]ot a lot of publicity about that, and got a lot of controversy, but that was a part of the conversation about discrimination after that, because they had, you know, that was a front-page story -- not a front-page story, but a story that got in the Morning Call and led to the Valley (inaudible). But that had started because the human relations commission, I think -- they may have approached us as we approached them, I'm not sure. But Dixie had wanted to include other causes in the human relations commission, which were gay, lesbian, trans, and bi having rights for anti-discrimination against housing, employment, and public spaces. And the commission was fine with that. There was a fellow by the name of Bob Prince, I believe, was in charge of the commission, very friendly. There was one commissioner who was not friendly at all. He was very forthright about it, too: a young man who had very strong feelings about -- very anti-homosexual. Didn't make a difference. He would've been overruled by the rest of the commission, because the rest of the commission was for us, whoever they were. But we went to City Council on the basis for the first time and talked about the need for gay rights, taking a bunch of us from -- Le-Hi-Ho was very supportive, and people [were?], then, multiple organizations, I mean, we could never represent five or six organizations, just because people were available and sometimes participated in those organizations, so there was a reason to do it ; we weren't just fooling around. But they were not city -- Allentown was -- Le-Hi-Ho and the organization that we founded, which was called the Citizens' Concern for a Better Community, CCBC -- did that because our friend Frank, a professor at Muhlenberg, created an organization as soon as he heard for it, Citizens Organized for Decency, COD. So I just needed a name to respond to that, so we came up with the Citizens Concern for a Better Community as the gay organization. Met at Confront - a number of people came ; I don't -- Carol Bloch was elected as co-chair with me of that organization, and we used to sit for several years ; (inaudible) for three years, actually, from '77, '78, through '80, and '80 -- on New Year's Day in '80, we started the Gay Alliance Service, which was what we did after we tried for gay rights. There were a number of events involved with that. We had public demonstrations at City Hall. One of the first ones was our coming out. I got a door -- my apartment had doors in the basement that they had taken off the building somewhere, and I got one of those, put it in a frame, took it down to City Hall, set it up, and then we came through the door as a way to "come out," come out of the closet symbolically. Made a speech about the history and the fact that we were so oppressed by history or unknown in history in the Dark Ages, we were kept in the Dark Ages unknowing and unable to reach out to each other. And that has been the key to it, the whole thing, I have always said that if you give them support, give them love, it makes all the difference in the world. It's what makes -- what gives them the chance to grow. It's from where they are, and become the people that they will become, and get -- change that unhappiness to joy of a relation -- I remember a young man who was married, I was confronted with them, personally with him, and his wife, and he was very unhappy in marriage. And I liked her a lot, so I was very unhappy, but he wanted to be gay, and I told him about the Stonewall, and what happens when you go in, people will look at you because you're new, and you have to pay a fee, it's a disco, you dance, just a -- and he did. He said, "I was happy. That was the beginning of my happiness." And I really felt bad that she was gorgeous. She was a very lovely woman, short, and he was also kind of short. They made a really attractive couple, but he got divorced, and happily went on with it. Now, I've had that a lot. When you're out like that, you get people come to you, and tell you that they're gay, and "I'll tell you, but don't tell anybody else," sorts of things. So he was one that did that, and that was historic. So Confront was friendly with me, and friendly enough to sponsor and be very open. We met there through the time that we were - the whole organization whole time we met there. We paid them maybe fifteen dollars for the room or something like that. But it was well worth it -- central place, and I lived beside it ; I was next door, literally, to it, at that time, so it was very easy for me to get there. So we had a -- I don't know -- three, or four, or five demonstrations at city hall. Every week we would go and have some sort of demonstration. Sometimes there were no people around at all ; sometimes -- I think that person was -- noon-time, I believe, lots of people out looking at us, watching us do this publicity thing about coming out and opening the door on discrimination, never to close again, and so we got our free -- well, that wasn't true. We had a parade at one point in connection with this, and I think there were twenty-seven people who actually marched that day, maybe a few more than that. Close enough. Not more than thirty-one, who actually marched down Hamilton Street that day. Met at the corner of Ninth and Hamilton, that was -- Rubes was -- I think still in existence then. And we met in front of there. We had a number of people from across the state -- Mary [Antero?] came from Harrisburg, people came from Williamsport, people came from Philadelphia. A friend of mine from Philadelphia brought his peace professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who I enjoyed meeting. I had talked with this person about it for a long time. We're part of a collective down there, a peace collective that he was a part of, and this peace professor was the leader of that collective. Very interesting man, obviously well-educated, and spoke to this -- was one of the speakers along with Mary, and myself, and Dixie White, president of NOW. There was a group protesting us. If you remember the Daddona Park, there's a map there of the Daddona Park down at the end of Walnut Street, and there is an amphitheater on the hill. We were down at the base of it, where we could have the audience in front of us. And there were a number of people there, I said that there were thirty-one -- now, there may have been more at the park, I don't remember that there were or were not. There was (inaudible) number of people -- bunch of protesters up in the top of the hill. A young man again -- oh, I told you about the -- I told you this story, okay. That was Thirteenth Street, that church was Thirteenth Street, and we went into boycott -- still there, still a very small, tiny little church -- you can see it there. Okay, and I don't know where the young man was from, I don't know where this guy was from that did the preaching. I allowed him to speak, and people were mad at me for that, because I figured, let them see that their word of God is not affecting us very much. But we gave them voice -- I gave them a couple minutes, and people were unhappy with that. I doubt -- I've never considered whether I was truly right or wrong with that. I resent them coming into my space, okay. When I find that straight people are appearing in gay movies, it makes me mad, because that's not fair, really. We need our own employment. It happens, and they're good, and I sort of like Frankie and -- Grace and Frankie very much, and I have appreciated actors who did it more now than I was before, but I still resent it, and when subjects are anti-gay, and that happens sometimes without knowing, unless you really look at it and really understand what they're saying -- the message is really anti-gay. And that's invading my space, and I get really, really angry about that. So I think I could understand people's anger when I allowed it to happen, and that particular occasion -- So we went to Sunday counsel a number of times. They ultimately made the decision that we couldn't speak. They'd had enough. After about three or four meetings, they were going to cut us off and not allow -- cut off that debate. So we went the next time with tape in our mouths to show that we were -- demonstrate the fact that we couldn't speak as clearly as we could. I had known that that was the tactic that had been used plenty of times before, but it was effective then. I remember the first time that I spoke to city hall, I was pretty paranoid. I didn't know what was going to happen. I was concerned about my own position ; I was in the telephone book, and I could be found easily, and I thought, I'm going to be the most hated man in the city. Next morning, I was at work, and I heard on the radio -- the radio was on, and I heard my own voice coming across the airway -- they had interviewed me after that night. And that was the first I had appeared that -- no, I think that may not be true. I was probably out on the radio programs. The first time I'd done it in my hometown. But that was also the first time we demonstrated in Allentown, was when we did that march, all twenty-seven of us, and I remember singing a wonderful Quaker hymn about -- the very famous one from Appalachian Spring. I can't remember -- simple, simple what. "Simple Gifts," it's called. Wonderful plain hymn, and the first time I heard it, singing that, and of course, "We Shall Overcome," and then marching up and down the street. We had a sign from -- my lover had made banners for four different organizations: Le-Hi-Ho, Pennsylvania Caucus, the Reading Group, and a group in Northumberland, little town across from Sunbury. We claimed -- Northumberland only four thousand people, so we claimed we had the biggest group in the smallest city, the other gay group was there. Not quite so. Most of the people came from Sunbury. And my good friend of mine was in charge of that. We were friends -- lifelong ; he had married a man before, and they lived together for thirty-six years before he died, and unfortunately not in -- a couple of years ago. Actually, it was more than that, it was more years than that, maybe forty-two or something like that. Now Le-Hi-Ho is fifty, fifty years old ; he met him in '76, so, what -- At any rate, long friendship. The other thing that happened that particular weekend: there was another demonstration in Williamsport. There was a county fair up there, and Anita Bryant was appearing. Now, we had demonstrated against Anita at several points. We went down through Redding one time, and she was appearing at the Masonic temple, and we protested outside there. She was easy to protest. We never saw her, of course, but we did protest, and I remember people came in costume to emphasize the fact that they had to hide their identity -- the first time that ever happened, that I ever saw it happen. And it was a nice demonstration, and that was the first thing we were able to demonstrate. She was there -- appeared then at the Williamsport fair, and I don't remember the county, unfortunately, right off the top of my head. She was to appear at the fair there. So Mary went up. I did not ; we had had our demonstration on Saturday. They were to go on Sunday to the fair, and they did go to the fair. They had a meeting beforehand, they demonstrated beforehand in a park close by. They had about fifty people, I think, or more at this demonstration. Not everybody elected to march. I think -- I'm not sure how many people elected to march, probably less than fifty, I believe. They actually elected to march at the fair itself. They did that, okay, and they went up there and bravely marched around -- frightening, frightening experience. Mary still is marked by it ; says that was the most frightening day she was ever through. When you've got ten thousand people who hate you, and you're marching in front of them. And I got a letter from the person who founded Homophiles of Williamsburg. Name was Gary. He was the -- he followed me in the co-chair. He was the co-chair of the caucus after me. Then he moved away to Williamsport and founded this group called HOW. The rest of the people -- a lot of people went up there from the state. Thank you. Tony Silvestri spoke there at that demonstration, Mary did, Dixie was there, I'm sure. My point about that demonstration was that following that, the -- fellow by the name of Dan Maneval was then chairman of HOW. It was chairman, leader, president, I'm not sure -- doesn't make any difference what his title was. He was the leader of it. And that was like Dan's second or third -- no, it was his first organization, I'm sorry, his first organization. He was interviewed that night ; following that -- it appeared on television, cable television for Wilkes-Barre. Following that, the neighbor kids began to harass him a little bit. We needed to respond to that. We responded several times. In that day, what happened with gay people when you were an activist, you did everything, okay, and you didn't need anybody's permission ; you simply went ahead and did it without -- doing whatever you could make up for a response. And we were often pretty weak about it ; we didn't know what we were doing. We had to invent these things -- effective answers. And I don't know -- I wanted to find out what were effective answers. I wanted to have a meeting to talk about, let's -- what was good about what we did, and what were the failure, so we could be instructive to the next generation. But the next generation doesn't need this anymore. They have the internet, and wonderful, wonderful means, you know -- when we did a newsletter at -- we used to pull the newsletters in our meetings for the aging group in 2000 newsletter -- hell, we had one hundred forty-seven -- we had a lot. We thought, back in those days, by keeping our -- all those people we had been in contact with would never come to the caucus, we sent newsletters as long as they didn't come back to us, and they frequently did, because everybody was young and in transit. But the difference between two-thousand and now -- they, of course, do it by -- they don't send the newsletters out anymore ; everything by email. And those kids take great advantage of that. They are so aware, and I went to a conference -- I'll have to talk about that later -- go back to Le-Hi-Ho, and back to how and why I was talking about it -- and Dan was interviewed, began to harass him -- we went up and went around to the neighbors and said, "Look, this fellow is being harassed in his own home, his parents' home" -- he had inherited it from his parents, who were then dead, and was living there all by himself. We talked to the neighbors, and they didn't -- the cops wouldn't do anything. The cops said, they don't know who it is, and Dan found out later, of course, that the cops had talked to these very people. They had talked to the neighbors and found out, well, yeah, they were talking to the kids. Didn't you know that? No, we didn't know it, and that was very ineffective, and stopped for a bit, started again, around Halloween especially, and it got so intense, so intense, that Dan got really, really scared, because they threw a cinder block through his front door, and attacked his windows, attacked him in his home at night, and it really frightened him to the degree that he actually left home and stayed in an apartment for some time. Ultimately, he sold his home. The cops never did a thing. Our mistake was not to talk to the cops, and not to create this incredible imbroglio over it. We really should have, but I'm not sure that Dan would've been able to stand it, because he was already in danger. He felt -- he was attacked once, but that was some years after that, as a matter of fact. But Dan is still an activist, okay, going on, like, his thirteenth organization right now in Williamsport. He is just incredible, and he's a little trooper. He also got stage three cancer, and he's waiting now to find out the results of his chemo. He'll know about four days, I think the sixteenth. But that was a terrible loss. He was the only one I knew suffered that great a loss, lost his family home over it. Stayed in hiding in a trailer court for a long time, moved back to the city, and lived at the same address for ever since, but thirteenth organization as far as I know. I really lost contact, and I don't know how many -- up to the modern day, keep re-founding it, and re-founding it, and re-founding it -- Howarth for three years did a terrific job, and then it -- I stayed with him until about two-thousand, he decided -- they had to come to me, now, I'm not going to do it again. Well, three or four years passed, and there were suddenly three organization or four organizations in Williamsport of various sorts, liberal organizations, grassroots, that really carried the banner of gay rights, and (inaudible) always been very difficult -- so the city hall, the city paper, would not publish the word "homosexual," would not advertise meetings for any of these groups for many years. I think they finally did, finally made it a change. It was a long time, a hard change. We interfered another time at Bloomsburg. These friends of ours -- the caucus, essentially -- so it was a multi -- people came from different organization -- met at Bloomsburg and talked to a dormitory. Went and talked to kids in the dormitory, and talked tough, and said, you know, again, we're going to -- we shouldn't have -- of course, we were totally nonviolent, as the gay movement has been, by the way, as everybody should be well aware, is that we haven't killed anybody. We had a few demonstrations in which police cars got turned, and that was Harvey Milk. I remember him being -- we were at Echo -- when there was a demonstration happening on the West Coast, I remember hearing about it, because we were very affected by it, cheering and that kind of thing, and Harvey Milk was there. But that's when they had a violent period, the only violence that I really remember outside of -- well, there's been very, very little violence, and no guns, nobody killed, a lot of people -- a lot of gays died, but not any result of our actions, or (inaudible) demonstrations, it didn't happen that way. Except this one occasion, and poor Dan lost his home, and it's so courageous, and I honor him so much. We'll miss him terribly. So there are a bunch of us who remain from those days as good friends, having bonded in that way, in that particular bond, which was deeply bonding, you know, when you're doing that kind of work, and you're -- There just wasn't enough time to talk to each other. We didn't have time to party. We didn't have time to know each other. We just talked, went and talked and talked and talked, because there was so much to say about what was going on, to talk about all the meetings, and all the events, and all -- everything we need to plan, and all that kind (inaudible), that we just had rare times. I think we got caught in a snowstorm at one time and stayed at somebody's cabin. Wonderful party. We all had pot, and if they arrested, they would have arrested the whole rural population ; all those groups would've been leaderless. That was the only time -- that was one of the few times that we ever had times to just be ourselves. Now, in the modern day, we've finally really been -- without the organizations we're getting to know each other again and enjoying it a lot. So back to the demonstrations and CCBC. When Frank organized his organizations, we quickly organized ourselves into this -- what we came to this Citizens Concerned for a Better Community, for lack of -- the first meeting we had, I think we got a committee, and said, "Name it," and that's what we came up with. Kind of a dumb name, really, honestly, but then, it was a dumb thing to do, calling it "cod." I can't think of any more demonstrations we did. We went to City Council ; there was one councilman who was opposed to us entirely, very vociferously, and he was the one who invited Anita Bryant to come to the city, stirred us up tremendously, stirred up quite a lot of controversially, fortunately, gave us -- there was a lot of back and forth in the letters to the editor. We spoke as often as we could, anywhere we could, went on the radio, went to -- churches wouldn't invite us ; several churches invited us, just to understand what we were doing and what we wanted, which was of course just the support for gay rights. Just allow us to have them, you know, say, "We are for it," instead of against us. And what we're looking for is to just be ourselves, not to bother you, not to be immoral, not do strange things to your children, just to be ourselves. And I really -- I am not a particularly good speaker. I would have preferred that other people had done it than me. But I did it anyway, and some other people did. Somewhere along the way, and this might have been later, we got a chance to talk to Presbyterians -- the Presbytery was meeting, you know. We went to a Presbytery meeting and talked to them. It was a relatively small meeting, because they were just them. It may have been a committee of the Presbytery, I'm not sure. But I did convince them to support gay rights. Now, there were churches -- the Moravian Church was one, the UCC, a number of denominations had actually endorsed gay rights on a national level, and we made a lot of hay with that, put that forward. Le-Hi-Ho was very supportive ; when we formed in Allentown, they came across and became memberships without being a part of leadership. That was what they did. They stayed pretty much with themselves, were very supported, wonderfully, and spoke -- City Hall meetings, organized a great packet of literature, better than I could have, because they had resources, they had the library and all the resources to do that, and organize the packet of information for the City Council. Ultimately, there was a mayoral election, and Joe Daddona was the mayor at that time, and Joe lost by seventeen votes. I couldn't help but say, "Look, you know, I didn't endorsed you -- I disendorsed you, and I want you to know that, so we were the seventeen votes." I'm sure that wasn't true, but it was a cruel thing to do, and a stupid trick to do, and that's no politics at all. That's my most stupid, stupid, stupid -- but I couldn't help it. I had to rub it in a little bit. Seventeen votes. But there never have been -- in that time, the Republicans and Democrats traded administrations every time, and it became a Frank somebody, or -- I don't remember Frank's name, and Joe Daddona was elected again another four years, and there's Joe Daddona Park now down there, and that amphitheater is now called Joe Daddona Park at the end of Walnut Street. When they finally got around to counting on it, to actually voting on it, we lost incredibly. The opposition was there. When we had the tape on our mouths, the opposition stood up to speak, and did speak. The City Council member who favored us said, "Let them speak," and City Council retook the vote then, and said, "Yes, you can speak." So the opposition did speak. We did not. But it was an important occasion that they did, and we applauded and all that kind of jazz, applauding our enemies because they were as fierce as we were as the ability to uphold the Constitution. I always felt that was terribly important. There's one more story I could tell you about that, an instant I thought was really important, that you uphold that right for everybody to do that, speak up, free speech. That was one case we did it. And that was pretty much the end of City Council, whenever they voted that in, and had a letter from the solicitor that they could not do city -- lights in the city, because it exceeded the state, and there was no authority for them to do it. They wouldn't take states that had -- the state commission had not announced -- went on with that and met -- was a nicely integrated group of people. We had some blacks, which was rare. We had men and women. Allentown NOW was founded by Dixie White, president, the state president, because she wanted more people to participate as leaders. You excite new leaders if you have a new organization, and she was very much in favor of that, so she created several. There was a group in Bethlehem, socialists, led by socialists, who were truly socialists. I think there were seven of them. And they didn't have a leadership. They did everything by consensus, no president. We didn't have a president either in the group in Reading, because I was the most eligible person. They didn't want me to do it. They wanted to have a local person do it, and they were right, and I refused -- I wouldn't take the leadership, because it was their organization. But they wanted me to do it. So we didn't have a leader ; it moved by a council that ruled the whole thing. And this socialist group was the same. They did everything by consensus, very difficult to do. And they got -- were very big on the business -- they wanted to be the -- on the discrimination issue at City Hall, and not allowing us to speak, that was a figurative issue that they really jumped on, and the governor's -- candidate for governor, socialist candidate for governor, spoke at that meeting, also, that demonstration we had in Allentown. I don't remember her name anymore, but she came to speak for us. Good people, they were. I like socialists. I wasn't one myself, and I wasn't really a lefty, but I really, certainly learned to respect them and to love them. E. E. Cummings said, "Communists have fine eyes." Great line, great line. Is there anything to say about the organization outside of the fact that it was -- I was not good about -- never good about really integrating organizations with people of color. I just wasn't successful at it. I don't know why. They just didn't respond to me, like the transsexual community's not responded well to me. And I regret that a lot. I can't bridge it, can't be different somehow and bridge that, and I always feel my distance from them. And I've known only a few over the years, until, now, the current -- I know a transvestite comes to the aging group -- no, I'm sorry, a transsexual comes to the aging group, our age. She's seventy, pushing seventy, I believe, and is a former teacher, and got me acquainted with the fact that now there is in Pennsylvania a group that has five-hundred people coming to their conferences, all transsexuals, and that's amazing to me. Not all transsexuals, by no means. Some of our people go. And we're very supportive of her, and she's a good friend of mine, and she and I work with the movies now. There have been other people, but she and I are left to do it. But that's -- I was never successful with it. I met a few over the years, but I was not able to make any breakthroughs with them in terms of really personal friendship. One exception was a transvestite who I knew well, who sang in her own voice. She was an entertainer, and we sponsored her several times for organizational meetings, and when we had an opportunity to present anybody, we presented her, because she sang in her own voice, quite good at that. Still living -- now lives in -- I haven't seen her in many -- since then. She was very forthright, works with women, is a hostess, and went to the police when she was discriminated against, and talked to the police, and said, "You discriminated against me." Very, very forthright. About that business with the CCBC, I was discriminated against once and I didn't even know it. My landlord came to me after I was in the newspaper, sometime after that, and said, "I want to use your apartment ; you have to move out. I'm going to be taking over it." At the time, I was ready to divorce my lover, and we did separate, as a matter of fact, then. I was moving out. I also did the separation. I was also going to Confront at that time for personal therapy. Went to that for several years, enormously, enormously helpful, group therapy was. And my landlord was going to have me move out. That day, we moved out everything except the piano, which I was donating to a woman whose daughter wanted to learn to play the piano. So I gave her the piano. The piano was very, very heavy, and we couldn't move it out the day before, it was the fifteenth, or whatever day I'd promised to get it out. So we went back to collect the panel the next day, and the landlord is there, and he says, "That's my piano." I had to pay one hundred dollars to give the damn piano away. He was such a mean bastard. He never moved in, also, and after that, then he re-rented the apartment. That's when I knew I'd been discriminated against, but I didn't understand it before. I didn't think about -- not realize -- connect the dots, because he didn't present it in any way, like, "You aren't welcome," but he wanted me out of there, and got me out of there as a result of that, right after I'd been in the paper. Rick and I separated after eight years, and he stayed in town ; I loaded him down with my dog and all the furniture, I loaded on him so he'd stay in town, not run home to mother -- he was from Milton, Pennsylvania. Bit of a momma's boy. So I made the choice, stayed in town, it was a big mistake. Ultimately, he -- I met him fifty years ago, yeah, fifty years ago, in '69. In 2007, 2008 -- 2007, in August two-thousand seven, in Allentown. I told you I was going out there to see him once a week. But he was married with this woman for thirty years -- he wasn't married. He lived with a woman for thirty years after that, which astonished me. I mean, clearly it wasn't a sexual relationship, but they grew to be interdependent, so interdependent that they really were pretty tight as a couple, not functioning terribly well, low-level functioning, but able to make it, and leaning together really worked for them. She got him to quit smoking. I never thought he would quit smoking, twenty, thirty years now, twenty, thirty, years before, twenty years -- they were together twenty-eight years, I believe, together, when he died. And that was extraordinary, to have him married to a woman, hard to explain, after he'd been gay entirely, and he continued to be gay. He also got beat up one time in a park, right across the street from where I was then living on Turner Street. If you remember, there's a cemetery there on Turner Street, Ninth and Turner, I believe. And that's where I lived in an apartment there, Dixie White's spouse at that time was Debbie Cedar, and Debbie later became another president of NOW, state president of NOW, I think -- I'm not sure when. Maybe after Bishop Whitley and -- I think after Mary. I'm not sure. That would've been the second (inaudible) of three lesbians, I believe, three or four lesbians in charge of the state organization, you know, in a row. But anyway, I lived in a little apartment there for, like, one hundred dollars a month. They were fixing up. Wonderful -- they gave me the lowest price they could, and I had the whole first floor. And just a good place to live. It had a sun porch on -- loved the sun porch. I could go out there -- it was in March, and I was laid off, go out there and just have my coffee in mornings, enjoy the mornings, warm (inaudible) because the sun was starting right in. A fellow used to go by every morning with his cat on a leash, thirty-foot leash. (Laughter) That cat was all over everybody's porch, went walking way ahead of him, it was the funniest thing I ever saw. I never saw it again, a cat like that. I saw a lot of people travelling with cats ; I never saw one on a leash like that, walking around town. But he was beat up in the park across the street from me. Changed his life. He really became very frightened after that, and all through his going-out pattern, he was never able to cruise the streets as he had. He would go to a bookstore, but he would do it at a building like that, and that's what he did, was adopt a bookstore, the Hamilton and Ninth, Hamilton and Tenth, I think it was. He lived on Hamilton and Eleventh, it was -- I don't remember. That was just a huge change for him, because he had been always promiscuous, even when I first knew him. I hadn't known that for a while, but he just liked anything in pants, he would go with it. He just had anal sex, in particular, once. Never had to have it again, but he had to have it once, with not everybody. You know, I thought it was an act of contempt ; I wasn't quite sure with him, why he did it. He was hard to communicate, difficult, an autistic person, I suspect, ultimately. I was very much in love with him. He was handsome to me. He had some sort of feminine tendencies, which I ignored. To me, he was a virile man ; I treated him as a -- I ignored whatever he might have been. Gorgeous legs ; he would've been a fantastic drag -- truly gorgeous legs to the end of his life. Very supportive of me. Took me everywhere, drove me all over the state. He had a car ; I didn't own a car until I was forty, so we had his. We bought cars together, but they were in his name. I took care of that. And we had a little Subaru, which was then a new car, little tiny thing, yellow. Ah! School bus yellow. We went all over the state. Again, intentionally, we went far distance places, we went out to Pittsburgh a lot, and out to my sister's, and went to the colleges around there, and gay bars where we could find them, just trying to keep contact with what was going on. The caucus itself had people from Pittsburgh come out, not anywhere else, but there was that mutual support among the organizations. They were very helpful to us in Allentown. Le-Hi-Ho was unusually helpful. At one point with the caucus, when we had a crisis of leadership -- as a matter of fact, when I was elected president, when I was elected co-chair, the co-chairs had gotten into trouble because they had done something unauthorized, and as a matter of fact, when we read the by-laws, they were authorized, because in the absence of membership meeting, and being authorized with the meeting, then the co-chairs were legal. But they had done something - I've forgotten what it was -- now, but the woman came by the name of Janet Cooper. I told you about Janet before. She was a professor at [Ship?], and she really was so against them, and really got us to oppose them, and I finally told her that there is an issue, there was a vote of confidence in the English Constitution -- the English use the vote of confidence is what the Parliament rises or falls on, is a vote of confidence, and you can vote them out of office. So she insisted on a vote of confidence after I finally explained to her what it was, and the current president and the current co-chairs lost the vote. Went to the next meeting and there was nobody there, we were there, and Mary and I were there, and a lot of their people, but the co-chairs never showed up, period. So we figured they've taken the vote seriously and they're not coming back. So we elected a new president that summer, and I got to be president, but in the interim I'd written it up in the newsletter. I said, we're at this point of crisis, we've done this thing, which is very controversial, and we need to address it in the next meeting. And Le-Hi-Ho wrote this letter, and said, "Look, if you're going to be this way, we're leaving. We are no longer supporting you at all. We're not giving you any money, we're not sending any people, we aren't allowing (inaudible)." Very important, because it really made the caucus look at the whole issue and get upset about losing the support of the main organization, of one that we really counted on, being as powerful as they were over that many years. They were very successful. And that was Ken Burke, another person that I have forgotten, another wonderful person, and [Lou Railer?] was his lover, and those two were students together, graduate students, I believe, and Ken was interested in politics. I think he might have gone into politics, ultimately. But at the time, he was president of Le-Hi-Ho, and a very good one, very strong, and very forthright, and very honest, and that was an important contribution of Le-Hi-Ho to that organization. And they came to the conferences, gave us a lot of staff for conferences, et cetera, and again, they did it without changing their position. They did not personally come to the caucus meetings, but they were -- supported us in every way. Something was key to support in Allentown, and that was the least we were trying for. The other thing that happened at that particular time that I want to talk about briefly was -- she formed the NOW chapter in Allentown. There were thirteen of us. We're all activists. There were two guys, and all the rest were women. We went everywhere. We went to women's conferences. I went to the women's state conferences. It was the year of the women, and they were having a conference in every city. I went to that conference. Wonderful, wonderful conference. A Quaker conference, I remember, great conference down in Philadelphia. I went to -- fell in love with Quaker meetings. Quaker meetings were unusual because you observe silence, and people are moved to speak. At a Quaker meeting, they have no -- there's no leadership. There were no ministers, no leaders. There are only weighty Quakers. Weighty Quakers are people who are known for their wisdom, and to be a weighty Quaker is a really wonderful thing, if you -- men or women are eligible for it, women can speak as well, because men -- although they do sit on separate sides of the church, women on this side, and men on this side. Long, long tradition, never changed, as far as I know. I don't know what happened in the modern church, in more recent days, but even then, in those days, it was still separated. Went to a Quaker meeting, at -- went on a Sunday that we were there for this Quaker conference, and my expectation was, you were going to get very inward, you're going to meditate, okay, you're going to go into this -- "You all flow out," (inaudible). Had that outflow, and your awareness of everyone else is so intense. For instance, like, there was never a consequence, when you're moved to speak -- I never heard two people try to speak at the same time. I don't know how that works, but collectively, so that you -- and you spoke when you had something to say. When the spirit moved you, then you spoke. And that was revelation, and I really loved that particular form of worship ever since. I think it's just superb, superior to everything I knew. But it's that outflow that you get, and which you're becoming such a part of the hole, and so moved by the whole, and listening, and open to -- we went to the Quakers once for a meeting, I think, at Reading, Reading, yes. We wanted to meet the Quaker church, so we went to the meeting, a Board meeting, I think, it was something, whatever -- wasn't the full -- we didn't go to a meeting ; we went to a -- for the meeting, that was the -- the people who wanted to speak on the issue, and they moved by consensus, and they had -- their whole congregation had to agree, or they couldn't do it. Well, there was one person who didn't agree, and he was pretty forthright, and told us why. I was there at the meeting, and spoke to us directly -- we spoke to him directly, and we didn't get it, but the Quakers and the Unitarians were very, very important to the movement. Unitarians sponsored Le-Hi-Ho membership. The Quakers were often spoken -- in support, were very supportive in terms of congregations and in terms of their actions, whether they -- they were very supportive. We happened to fail on that particular organization ; I'm sorry that we did, because the Quakers were wonderful people, always, and had been great. So NOW, the same thing, NOW had a meeting at that time -- local, state, or national, they talked about gay rights, right from the top, in the presence of any organization, and always talked about it in their meetings. What was happening locally was a part of their agenda. So Lehigh -- the Allentown NOW was a totally active organization. We went to -- we marched on Washington, we went to the '93, '83 march -- no -- We went to the march in, I think it was '79, was the first one, '78, '79, and then there was the first march on Washington. It was the second one in '93, which is also big, and people thought that was the first one, but no, it would've been in '79. Went to Chicago, when we were voting on the ERA, they had a demonstration in Chicago, one hundred-thousand people, as I recall, along the lakefront, enormous event. Washington, DC was an enormous event, the women's march in Washington, DC. NOW marched in the women's march in Washington, DC, was an enormous event ; over one hundred-thousand people marched in Washington that year, one of the largest demonstrations. The first and largest demonstration, I think, that had ever been, was back in -- was in San Francisco, gay pride, three hundred-thousand people, I think, at that time, and we had the record for the largest civil demonstration of anything, it happened to be gay rights. We were that kind of active. We were not -- and didn't spend any money in Chicago at all ; we crossed the border, never spent a cent in Illinois. Marched, wonderful march. First time I was in Chicago -- I moved there about two years later, very happily, happiest thing to be in with my lover. There were probably more conferences than that. I can't remember what they were, but they were always important and everything, well-informed. I was also a co-chair of NOW, and I was the only male that I knew of that held that job, and it was on their insistence ; they wanted to have equality. But there were only two of us available ; and the other was a student, at Kutztown again. It was a great organization, really. Dixie was such a mentor to me, and so politically oriented, and always, always involved, very feminist. My mother was about as strong a feminist as you can get for the forties and fifties, and certainly very aware and very supportive of what she knew -- she was anti-communist like crazy, she was terribly anti-communist. Ran for the state legislature, (inaudible) that she was anti-communist. We had to talk to him all over (inaudible), all over the state. It was really -- I learned to disrespect that. It was the time of the McCarthy era, and -- forty-seven, I think, I think when she was running for -- no, that was school board. I don't remember -- legislature, she ran after that and didn't win. Was (inaudible) anti-communist and talking, and watching McCarthy hearings on television. They were actually on television. House Un-American Commission was one of the first televised events from Congress ever, and Joe McCarthy was leading that pack, and talking about the pinkos, the pinko commies, the gay commies, and all that. I learned later that in political science, and obviously at home, and told my mother off, and said, you're totally wrong, and I do not believe in McCarthyism or anything about it, it's just terrible evil, evil, evil, evil the organization. She got over it, and was fine with me after I came out, and my family has been very supportive, very supportive. I did not have a wedding, however. I wanted to, right when I -- well, I fell in love with Doug, I really wanted to celebrate love with him and have a wedding, and get married, and we didn't ; my sister said that somebody might not come, and I didn't want to know who. I just thought that, I don't want to be hurt, I don't want my family to hurt me now. And I still don't know who might not have come. They've always been supportive to my face, and loved Doug. He was a different person than Ricky was, and they liked him a whole lot more. And Ricky was the kind of person who people did not like, and I had people who'd tell me, "Don't bring him. You come, but don't let me see him," or "keep him away from me." That was tough. But Ricky, as I said, was probably autistic, not autistic, what do you call them -- there's a form of autism -- Asperger's, probably had Asperger's. It was (inaudible) among other things. Had a high fever when he was very young, one hundred and six temperature, sustained for a while, and I think it affected his brain, and he was thereafter not as capable, not as bright as he could have been. Graduated high school at twenty-one, I think, but he finally graduated. His mother got him to do that, insisted, and he stayed in school that long, and participated, even though he was older. But he had his problems, and wasn't kind to people. He was wonderful to me, but he would turn down anybody else for a ride, for instance. He wouldn't take them, and other people, he did take. But friends of mine, he turned them down. And that kind of -- I didn't know about it until later on myself, and it was a problem. He had an intelligence in his hands that was wonderfully good. He could knit, or (inaudible), or anything to do with sewing and threads, great -- did a lot of macramé. My sister has several pieces of that. It was a great skill with them. He just had a mental ability with that. One time, he made a window -- seventy macramé things that he had touched so he could put his plants out there, seventy plants, suspended each one on a string, and he'd take -- lower them and water them. It was crazy. Couldn't see out. He liked the covers when it's three layers on the windows. Couldn't see out. And I love sunlight. I don't put covers on my windows at all, any more covers than are there. These were landlords' -- my landlord wants these because they match his, and so they're his curtains, effectively. But I won't cover them. I have to have the light, all the light I can get. Three covers, good Lord. He lived in a very dark hole. This place is dark enough, as you can tell. I can't tell -- in my bedroom, I don't know whether it's light or day, literally. I don't know whether it's dusk. I'm drawing late, so I don't know, when I get up in the morning, I have to figure, is this morning or evening? What is happening? Is it afternoon? I can't tell. three o'clock in the afternoon, if it's a cloudy day, it's dark as dusk in here, because of that porch. And there used to be a huge elm out there, one hundred and fifty year old elm, that had been there when (inaudible) founded, for God's sake, and -- elm? Maple. It was maple. Dirty old tree, but big. Limbs fell off it twice on my car. (Laughter) It was when they decided to cut the tree down the second time, not because it fell on my car, because they didn't want it happening anymore, and, you know, maple -- everything that falls off a maple tree. So they probably tore it down. They came in and tore it, even the tree, took it down to the roots and (inaudible) that up, so it's completely gone now. It was huge and wonderful, but it's very, very dark. Really made (inaudible). And -- MF:May I ask -- JB:Anything else I can tell you? MF:Yeah, you met Ricky through Le-Hi-Ho, so how did you meet your second lover? How did that relationship begin? JB:Well, I met him again at a New Year's Eve party -- I think I -- I don't remember. We might have had a drag party that night. We may have had a Le-Hi-Ho event, drag event on New Year's Eve of 19-- going into 1970, and he insisted on taking me home, which was our first time together. And after that, we were -- I had him move down here by April, I think, after that. Moved away from his family. He'd been going to Canada, Toronto, Canada, weekly, seven hundred miles, to be gay. Which was a little ridiculous, but he was that kind of person. He loved driving, loved driving. Terrible on cars, hard on cars. I didn't know. I thought he knew something about cars ; he didn't know a damn thing about that. I had to replace the clutch every six months because he was so hard on the clutches. I'll never forget that. I've never had a clutch since then. I thought they (inaudible). I thought clutches -- I thought that was a normal part of having a car, but no. Very expensive part of having a car. Blew out the two gaskets on the damn thing before we got rid of that particular car, and that's expensive. That was thousands of dollars. The whole car was only four thousand dollars. Subarus at that time were nothing. They were the cheapest cars in America. New import then. And Ricky was not a great contributor, but he was very, very supportive of me. He never said a word to me about taking me to all those meetings. Was there with me, and we had -- something (inaudible) supporter. He was also -- didn't have a great deal of integrity. He forged a check at least once or twice. We'd give him rent money, and found out later that the rent wasn't paid, or whatever I'd given the money for wasn't paid, and it wasn't gone. So I thought there was personally too much, and divorced him, sadly. He worked at the Shawnee Penn with me, the furniture factory. He was a sewer, I was the distributing supervisor, and he worked in the -- he didn't sew. He was in the layout room where they laid the clothes out and cut them, cutting room. And that was -- there were two guys, older men, American people, five or six or seven Americans in the place, white Americans -- white people. I'm sorry, I apologize. Puerto Ricans were certainly American, and I was very aware of that. They lived at the top of the hill. There was a -- in Allentown, Hellertown, there's an area up there where it was low-income housing, and they lived up there at the top of the hill, and you can walk down through Saucon Park, which is between Allentown and Bethlehem, and they could walk down the hill to go to work, and I, we used to take the bus out, and when Ricky and I separated, I would take the bus, walk down the hill myself, to that complex down -- They were all Puerto Ricans. Very nice people, wonderful people, but they were very short. I never -- I thought I was tall. I'm only five-eight, and I thought I was tall, because they were truly (inaudible). It took me a long time to figure out that I really wasn't. And I never learned to speak Spanish, either, which I regret. I did learn -- I took it in college, but I never learned -- I missed a great opportunity to speak it. I didn't know them better. And there were -- there was one Mexican that came and didn't like it very much. There was not happiness between the Mexican and the Puerto Rican peoples. They looked down on each other, quite frankly. And I think they -- there was a white guy that came there, young fellow, they told him, don't come back, and he quit in a couple days. They were protecting the jobs for themselves. Which was -- they didn't do that to me ; I was college-educated and was a different line of thing. I got to be a supervisor almost right away, because nobody else in the place was educated, either, and then I got the position. It didn't pay me anything ; it was -- like I said, we were poor as church mice. Ricky lived in Milton, was where he was from, and his grandmother went to see us often. She lived to be ninety-six. I had her cane here for a long time, and it broke, unfortunately ; I was very sad about that, because Ricky had given it to me a couple years ago, before he died. I had kept contact with him all those years ; we were good friends, and -- Doug and I were good friends. It's unique about gay people, that they tend to stay with -- good friends with their exes, and know them, whereas Anne said that's unusual for heterosexuality, that they would divorce, and separate, and not know each other, and stay away from each other, and that just wasn't true of gay people I knew of. We typically maintained our relationships. And I certainly did with Ricky for those forty years, saw him on and off, at least twice a year, once a year at the very least, twice a year if I could, and in the last couple years, when he got -- he got to be about three hundred and fourteen pounds at one time. I had him out here, and I took him to the Y, and I said, I want you to see this. I wanted to take you to The Y specifically so I could take you to see the exercise rooms, through all I do, and know that this is a familiar, friendly place, that you don't have to be embarrassed about being here at three hundred and fourteen pounds and so on. He got so that he couldn't walk down the stairs anymore, and stayed on the second floor for a whole year before he got sick, and then went to bed all by himself, just said, "I won't get out of bed," and he stayed in bed for a year, and I went to see him every weekly, and while he was in bed, feeling terrible for the fact that he had gotten to that bad of shape and he just couldn't get out of bed, lost the use of his legs, almost, could barely stand -- I only saw him standing one time after that, and that was in a nursing home, where they'd taken him out of bed, and they have those lifters that can get people up, and they had taken him for exercises to another place, and I went there and saw him actually standing up, leaning on somebody, practically pushing him over, because his legs could not handle it anymore. That was the last time I saw him stand at all, and that was -- then he fell out of bed on the third of January in 1978. She was out doing groceries, and he made enough of a fuss to get -- enough noise to get -- attract the neighbor, called the police, the emergency people went in, got him downstairs, took him to Bethlehem, which is where they had a mental hospital at St. Luke's in Bethlehem, and they diagnosed him with dementia, and from there he went to a nursing home, and he went to a second nursing home. The first nursing home, he went while it was free, while he could do it under the auspices of Medicare, and then, when he ran out of that, then they changed him to an Alzheimer's home, memory of care home, and that's where he died, got pneumonia, finally, and died. It was a long time -- he was a long time dying, had a long time in dementia. It was hard to deal with, dementia is a very difficult thing -- would go to see him, and he may or may not recognize me, and he got angry with me several times. I think one time -- when the limb fell on my car was the month I couldn't go -- he felt abandoned, terribly abandoned, and it was -- it echoed forty years ago for him, echoed his family (inaudible). So I've got this man who was seventy years old grieving about the abandonment, and the loss, and the separation for him of being the gay individual in a family of three brothers, who were all very male, and his dad, who was beating him up some regular basis. And I liked his father ; I didn't know this was true. She's told me that Ricky complained about having brothers beating up when he was younger, and I don't doubt that that was true. They were quite male, very strong, solid individuals. I remember when his dad died of cancer, going to see him, and we went regularly, just to see him when he had cancer, because he was dying, and the boys would stand around, and just be strong, silent, would never have -- no conversation. Didn't know what to say to him, didn't know how to love him, or say, "I love you, Dad," or whatever. That was very hard. His mother was a good person, a warm person, very pretty, but she also put him on a clothesline when he was a kid, and a harness -- I mean, this was typical in the fifties. They took the kids, and put a harness on them, and then attach it to the clothesline so they couldn't run around, they'd get lost. Now, we happened to live in a place which was a V, two roads, one on each side of the house, and his dog was killed there. He had a dog, a white German Shepherd, that was killed, that he mourned for the rest of his life, loved that dog. We had a dog together that I loved very personally, wonderful dog, that was given to us by a lesbian couple moving to a -- a Reading couple who were moving to Chicago. Now this was an interesting couple, too, talk about somebody else for a moment. They had liberated the mines, Bethlehem Steel mines, were the first women to work, to go down into the mines, because they had sued, and were a lesbian couple, and worked together, went down in the mines together every day until they went to Chicago, and then I lost contact with them, sadly, but they had a dog that I went to see one time, when -- she was away, I think, and the dog was there, put away in another part with another lesbian couple that was either living with them or taking care of the dog. I said, "If you ever want to get rid of the dog" -- so they moved to Chicago and gave me the dog -- wonderful, wonderful animal. Turned out to be a transsexual dog -- trans -- a hermaphrodite. Eight years old, she suddenly began to develop -- lose her hair and develop penile bone, and it turned out that I took her to the vet, and the vet said that they weren't sure what was going on here. Either she's not female, or she's -- honest to God, penile bone going on down here, and she's clearly -- I had known her for maybe her whole life, but she was a female who humped everything. (Laughter) Now I've told you, the dog's -- which must have confused the hell out of them, because she felt like a female, she was a female, genetically, but she had been spayed, or they had gone in to spare, and they didn't do anything ; they didn't take anything out, and the vet told me that, whenever he examined her, that she's been spayed, and whatever they did, they didn't remove anything, and so she began to develop this set of balls and penile bone, and eight years old. And she was a spiritual animal. She was a dog that -- you looked in her eyes, she never looked away. You looked into her -- it could look like you were going to her tail, you know, her eyes were that deep, just these liquid pools, she just looked through -- way, way deep into her soul. And I thought she was Buddha. She was my Buddha dog. Suffered in her own way, became nearly blind, and very deaf, and died at seventeen years old, died in my arms, which I wanted to do. I wanted to give her her last -- if this was her last trip through life, I wanted to be done that way, and she died naturally in my arms, which I was very grateful for. But she was -- we were -- she and I were so in love. It was really a special relationship. She was always at my feet, always right behind me, the whole time. She would just follow me around and be right there wherever I was. I had to watch, step over her all the time, as long as she lived with me. And Doug fell in love with her, but she was so much my dog. Special relationship. It just worked out, the first time I had her, I remember -- she came in the house, they gave us the dog, I went and took a bath, put a few pieces of candy up here -- they were cream drops, they were called, I think, they were just sugar -- melted -- fondant with chocolate on them, and she ate them. (Laughter) What a bad dog. That was the start. And then she'd lick me. She loved Irish Spring soap. Loved it. She would lick it off me. And I'd let her do it (inaudible) because it didn't hurt me, and she loved -- whatever she was, boy, she loved that stuff. It was crazy. Very, very special animal, but humped my leg a lot. And again, it was natural to her. I mean, I didn't know -- like I tell you, she got persistent -- great leaper, my God, she could leap eight or nine feet, and did it often. She used to love chewies, and would chew them and take them from her, and she would just leap to the bed, incredible leaper -- was a poodle mix that looked like an English sheepdog. She had her fur done over her eyes. I had a picture of her there somewhere, but it's not -- she was cut at that time. We had to cut her because she got such long hair that she was only comfortable -- we had to sheer her like a sheep, literally, because it got so thick and so tangled, there was just no way we could handle it, so she was -- every summer, we'd have to (inaudible). Wonderful having her. Really grateful. Doug came to me -- I was busy at being an activist at that point. '80, we were doing conferences and so on. We did four conferences with the caucus. So we were doing a series of conferences, did them in '78, '79, '80, and '83. '81, perhaps, and three, I don't remember, '80, I guess it was. And that -- in different places across the state -- we did central -- we did east, central, west, back to east again. I think it was my turn for east. I told you about the Americus turning us down. After they had said yes, they turned us down, over at the newspaper. A little place called Howard Johnson's up above the Poconos, in the Poconos, they called us, and said they would do the conference. They did the conference. Very, very successful. We had to have it twice. We had a snowstorm the first time. We were going to have it in January, thirty-six inches, it snowed that day. Guy called me in Pittsburgh and said, "Are you going to head to this conference with snow starting in Pittsburgh?" I said, "Of course we have the conference." thirty-six inches. Believe it or not, there's a protest group out there on the highway leaving the hotel. We weren't there. I mean, we called off the cops. We called everybody we knew that had bought tickets, and said, please don't come, but then there was this protest group out there doing their thing without us. (Laughter) So we didn't have that conference. We had it again in April. Very successful. There were several hundred people, people were crying all over the place, really good conference. Really special. It was the first -- lots of people came and said, "I never saw so many lesbians before." It was just a thrill to see fifty lesbians in a room. And it was just a good, good conference. We were well-organized, I thought we did a terrific job. We did good conferences, quite frankly, in those years, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and a place called Rainbow Resort up in the Poconos again. Near that place? Yeah. It was owned by two women ; there was a bar in -- Candida's, they originally owned Candida's, lesbian couple, created it for a gay bar, and then Candida was the waitress at that time, and bought the bar, and took over, and still owns it, as far as I know. Candida's, when I was there, I don't know, two or three years ago, maybe -- I (inaudible) visiting (inaudible) and we decided to go to Candida's. God, I feel like a stranger. I walked in in the middle of the afternoon, seventy-nine years, you know, I'm seventy-eight by that time, seventy-seven, and I was just so out of place. Walked in, (inaudible) looked at me and said, like, "Are you real? You're in my bar?" And I never told him that I had been a frequent consumer once upon a time, although I was always older than anybody else. In gay liberation, I was thirty-five ; everybody else was in their twenties or students. And they accepted me, there was no problem with that, and I was always very grateful that there wasn't a problem. I think I was the only one that thought there should be, but there might be ; never was. We got along extremely well. They were not objects of my affection. I had a lover as long as I was around, and -- so I wasn't concerned, as objects of affection -- that never became a thing. But Doug worked for an airline, and I couldn't get out for a date, so I got a dating service, called a dating service, and Doug responded (inaudible) from Chicago. He worked for an airline, so he flew out, worked for Pan-Am at that time, which was still in existence, and they flew out and saw me, and we were together after that. That was -- although it wasn't true. I told him the first time after about six months, I said, no, I'm sorry, I don't think we're going to be lovers. I proposed to him on New Year's Eve, 1981, and we got together after that, and stayed together for another, actually, eighteen years, altogether. He told me, unfortunately, on the anniversary of our first date, which was the one he met me -- that was one of our two anniversary dates -- the oldest one, because it's when we first met, and then when I proposed to him, was the second anniversary date -- one for each of us, essentially -- but that was important to him. It was quite a relationship. Doug had a -- and he was a warm, friendly, funny person that I needed. That really gave me a lot of space. And he was so supportive in terms of just being who you are, and I thought that that was love. I thought that's what love is all about, it's just being so accepting, and it's really, it's okay. We were fine with what we were. And Doug got a little bit impotent. He got to be diabetic. I got to be diabetic after, I don't know, about fifteen years ago, but it was long after he had, and he got to be impotent, and that was a bit of a barrier, a bit of a difficulty for us. But not enough to end the relationship. It didn't for many years. But I think I ultimately tired of it and our lack of sexuality. When I went to college then, I went to junior college in Texas, and enjoyed that thoroughly, so much that I just kept going, and going, and going. Ultimately ended up at Shippensburg University to graduate, which I hadn't done before. And I never told him I was in college the first time. I just saw -- had three years of Moravian, and never told anybody -- I never told the college that I had this education. And I'd gone to junior college in Northampton and in Lehigh County, both, I was going to schools at the same time at the same year, because my job was ending -- my job at Shawnee Penn was getting worse, and worse, and worse ; they were laying me off more and more times. And I knew that I needed educational background to back me up in terms of shipping, in terms of, what is, transportation, engineering. And they had a degree at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem. So I went there. Met Doug about that time. That was right after all that business with the eighties, when we started the gay line. And he came to me the end of that year, the first time. Happy life. He worked for airlines, he worked first for British airways -- I'm sorry, he worked for Pan Am, which is an international airline, very famous, very famous American, and Pan Am was famous for innovating travel routes for every country in the world, virtually. But they would go anywhere -- they had rights to fly everywhere, as the pioneering international travel agency, especially for the United States, and they just kept furthering on that basis. So it's a big company, but it was also -- when they deregulated the airline industry, it couldn't manage, because it had been regulated all those years, and they had union wages everywhere, and difficulties that they just couldn't overcome because they had been under such regulation, and couldn't make the shift to do it. So he started to work for British Airways, and an interesting story: he had gone there, and the first time, they didn't hire him, so the people -- all the Pan Am people that had gone over there went to the office and protested, and said, "We want to have this guy. He's really good." I mean, Doug was a good agent, was a good reservation agent. So they hired him, and then moved to Texas, then he had to go to Texas, then they moved his job, and ultimately outsourced the entire thing. That's when he retired in 2000 then, because they were getting rid of those reservation agents ; it was cheaper to do it by hiring people in India and so on. And so we were -- he retired after we had sold the house, moved to Plattsburgh, New York, to be with his lover in Canada, in Quebec, Canada, which is fifty miles away from Plattsburgh, and went weekly to see him. They traveled back and forth across the border, never lived together, but were often together, until they weren't anymore. They ceased being lovers per se, although there was still a lot of love between the two of them. And Doug made a very deliberate decision. He told me that, you know, "This is over. I'm sorry, but it's over, never to happen again." And I had to accept that, and did. But I stayed, then, another year and a half, to get the house ready to sell, et cetera. We painted everything, and, you know, did what we could for the house. When we went to Houston, there had been a large gas recession which hit Houston very, very hard. There were a lot of homes on sale ; a lot of homes were in foreclosure. So many people were underwater in terms of their mortgages. This was '80, and it had happened in '78. So they were still in depression, in '80, when -- in '87, and it still was affecting the Houston market heavily by the time we went there in '90, '91. And we finally -- we took a year to find the house. It wasn't foreclosure, but it was in a nice area, nice house, for a very cheap price. In Houston, they never had basements, okay, so everything was built on a slab, much less expensive. You didn't have to deal with winter, you didn't have to deal with cold, so houses were differently constructed ; they were a lot cheaper, since their construction -- And we bought a house, a nice house, for about eighty thousand dollars, four bedroom, in a nice area, which was -- they had sold it -- the house was -- they bought the house for that, thirteen years before, the people had bought the house for the same price that we paid for it, so they did nothing. We made better when we sold it. We sold for a hundred and three, I think, to a nice Hispanic couple. I remember that because the next-door neighbor was a white guy, was on the school board, and I told him I had sold the school to the Hispanics, and he said, "You sold to students? You sold people that have students coming to my school? You dared do that? Hispanic people?" I was incredulous. I really had no idea, but I've always known that they had a lot of -- that the people there in Houston were not very nice to Hispanics. San Jacinto was the main street, they called Jacinto, not Ya-cinto, no changing to Y, they wouldn't do that. It was called Jacinto. Which was just the attitude they had, that everybody was an entrepreneur, everybody -- they had a Spanish grocery store that was looked down upon like crazy, wonderful store. It was practically a Wal-Mart's in a grocery store, and they sold clothes and all kinds of items that would appeal to the Spanish community, and were heavily supported by the Hispanics. Boy, they just looked down on them terribly. Did not do that in San Antonio, where his brother lived, did not do it elsewhere in Texas. But there, they were. They were very, very prejudiced. We had a happy life in Texas. Good place to live for us. Suburban life, we adopted that entirely. Had to drive everywhere in Texas, anywhere you went. Six miles to the grocery store, six miles to everything, and Houston was sixty miles one way and seventy miles the other way. It was huge. Not my favorite place. MF:So we're right at the end of our time, and so may I ask one more question before we end the interview? I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the Elder Initiative that you've been involved in. JB:Okay, I work with a group. I had these papers that I didn't know what to do with. I had all these papers from forty years ago, forty, then, forty something years ago, forty-three or forty-four, from 1969 on, relating to all the organizations in Pennsylvania that I knew about, that were in existence at that time. And I did cover them as well as Ron could have, because he was -- I told you he was down at the mailbox, and he got all the mail. But I had a lot of papers relating to a lot of groups, and a lot of things to do with conferences, all of the papers, for instance, we had all the -- turned in -- all of the people that had gone to the conference. We knew everybody that had attended, and paid prior to and at the conference itself. We had that entire (inaudible) papers, all the workshops, anything we'd done in workshops, all the programs, all the meetings we'd had in connection with it, et cetera, and all these different groups, and all the caucus notes, often, sometimes the attendance sheets. It was five feet of space. Half of it was newspapers. The Philadelphia Gay News, Pittsburgh Gay News, and some (inaudible) -- Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were owned by Mark Siegel -- and both of them -- and were the same paper, pretty much, and I think he ultimately dropped the Pittsburgh paper, because it was most of the same news, with some local stuff. The group -- I wish -- now I can't think of -- the guy in Lancaster was the newspaper of the gay scene out of Lancaster started out, and one of the members of that group by the name of Dave -- oh, I forget -- took over the newspaper and renamed it. It became the rural newspaper, and it wasn't ours. We did our own newsletter, but he operated a rural newsletter, a rural base, for all of us to state. And it was like the necessary news, you wanted to know what was happening among all the groups, you wanted to know what was happening in the state and local and national news, and you could read this newspaper, because that's what he reported on and made a specialty out of reporting those -- having that knowledge of what was going on in activism. And I had all those from beginning to end -- no, I'm not sure I had them all. I had a few of them, the beginning ones, but I had all the later ones, and turned those over, and that was half the collection. What was also so mad, because (inaudible) way back in the sixties, when that was new, before the Stonewall, and before there was MCC, I had the first advertisements to that. Troy Perry had put in the newspaper and said, "I'm starting this church," and then when he founded the church, and as MCC grew, I was very interested in that. I'm an atheist, personally, but I've always had very strong supporting about people who had to answer that question ; I did, too. And my answer was atheism, but certainly the religious conflict was very strong with me. I thought about becoming a minister, with lack of anything else to do ; I didn't know what the hell I was going to do, if it was teaching, or a minister, or anything, and I was going to Moravian College, which had a seminary connected with it, Moravian Seminary, and I was very strongly tempted, but my answer -- and I had gone in high school to -- the two people I came out to, one was my minister at the Presbyterian church who was quite negative, and a supporter and an advisor to what was called MLA, which was Young Masons, essentially ; it was sponsored by the Masons. They said it was no connection outside of the sponsorship -- you did not automatically become a Mason, and in no way you had to apply the join the Masons ; you had to apply to join the MLA, too, 1421. And I went to an advisor there. I loved MLA, I was quite taken with the whole moral outlook thing about being a good person, a strong value system for me, and I believed in it very strongly. So that was the other first thing I went to, and he was neutral. He was a single man who was the advisor, [Levin's mother?], and I was good friends with another advisor ; I was good friends with his son, and went often with them to Allegheny River, and so on, in high school. Whatever. What was the question while I start this? Are we done? MF:I think we'll just close now, but let us close on tape ; we'll wait for Carol. So I just want to say thank you so much, Joseph, for speaking with us again, a second time, in two days. We're so grateful that you would share your stories. JB:Thank you. I really appreciate it. I wanted to -- I wish I remembered more -- the actual names of people. I just felt very -- I felt they were important in my life, and that supportiveness was important to me, okay, to be able to do what I could, and I knew that we were creating a miracle, and it was clear that we were during a unique time in history, when -- Pennsylvania was its own story. There were fifty stories in fifty states, and how we began to move out from the cities. It had only been in Philadelphia and in Pittsburgh originally. Philadelphia had the Jane's Society, and the Homosexual Law Reform Society. Pittsburgh had a Persad Center, which addressed the health issues, and Le-Hi-Ho, when it was first founded, was very strong on the draft. Vietnam was very important, and the question was, do you check the box. Ron took care of all that. That was his particular forte, do you check the box or do you not. And the organization was formed on, you know, (inaudible) that important issue, as a resource for it, and it was the resource with schools, because there wasn't anything else. We had a library that people were able to use, did a lot, which is, again, the impact of Le-Hi-Ho, that was part of the impact. We had a regular lending library that was very active. Every meeting, they took the books. I ended up with the books in my home before I left for Chicago. I had the books for about a year in my house. I don't remember how I inherited them, but there was nowhere else for them to be housed, and I handed them off to another member, ultimately, before I left. I don't know what happened. That was '83. I don't know when Ron left town. It wasn't then, because in '83, I was still going to Le-Hi-Ho, and he must have been there. He left town after that. (inaudible) why he no longer housed the library. They kept the non-book files. Maybe the books would be too much. There were boxes, and boxes, and boxes of books, about four-hundred or more, four-hundred or five-hundred books. I think there were five- hundred books, about that. I had grown considerably from when I had it, and a lot of people donated a lot of other funds, papers, academic works, I no longer had access for. And I didn't have those papers. MF:Thank you so much again. JB:Thank you, thank you, thank you. I really appreciate it, and again, I'm sorry that I didn't get to name more people, because they were the important -- they were why I wanted to do it, to remember -- their contributions were enormous. So many, so many, so many people, you know, organized and participated in those conference. So many people came to our meetings and did what they could for us in the lobby days when we lobbied the state capitol several times, supported us in every way, you know, gave us money while -- we were creating a miracle. We knew what we were creating, and I saw it when I went to that concert in Chicago. They were singing for us. (inaudible) people. (inaudible) us. MF:Well, I think part of what has made this project so important for us is that we want to honor -- JB:People have asked me, do you think we ever made a difference? Yes, absolutely, we made a difference, and I saw it when I went there. That was -- Chicago was everybody that moved to Chicago, okay, was not native, and I was non-native. But they formed these two -- there were two choirs in Pennsylvania. The one that I saw in the first concert was the show choir that had just started that year, and they did this wonderful theme of Yellow Brick Road. Going into the concert was really special. I wanted to do a choir way back when. I thought that was -- one of the first things I thought of -- Le-Hi-Ho, wouldn't it be wonderful to have this musical group that just got together -- that was (inaudible) days, that was folk song days, and people -- everybody sang folk songs, folk songs were very, very popular all over the airways, and everybody was singing, and playing, and learning songs, and learning those particular songs. So it would've been natural for us to do, but there was no -- I certainly didn't have the ability. But I loved choirs. I thought it would be great to have some sort of event and singers like that. Couldn't do it, so it was done for me, and I really -- that's been a great joy, to watch both the choirs -- Harrisburg fortunately has a men's and women's choir, not combined, separate, and Mary Antero was in charge -- the treasurer of that county, and her lover is the president of the organization. Wonderful choir. Have grown to about thirty, forty voices, and rejuvenated themselves in the last couple years, and have become the better choir, while the men's choir has been going down and now reforming itself into a new group. It had been the stronger for a long time ; now, the women's choir has come up powerfully. Very wonderful concert that I had -- an organization for -- they did -- interspersed people of color and refugees, all refugees from all over the world, and they sang the songs -- their country -- the way they combined, I thought, was genius. They did a combination of singing the songs of those countries first, and then -- in a foreign language -- and so that the chair had to work in a new language, very difficult music, and that they wouldn't have known anything about ; did a superb job. And then they interspersed them with the people who read their stories, who had written out the stories of the countries they had come from and their struggles to get to be refugees acclimating to America and that sort of thing. It was a wonderful program, really, really special, and the right way to do it, and I had no idea how are you going to combine this. It was splendid, really good concert. And so I just printed all the programs I could get and sent them north to everybody that I -- sent to everybody that I could get to, this is how you do this. This is the way to do this concert. Splendid. MF:Well, I think we've taken up enough of your time on a Sunday. JB:Oh, no, no, thank you. Thank you so much, and thank you for the bagel this morning. MF:Oh, thank you. JB:Enjoyed it thoroughly, and I've enjoyed our time together. Thank you. MF:So have we. JB:And I wish I had satisfied more for you in terms of personal -- I don't know if my personal was as interesting as what I wanted to talk about, which was the activities. We were a very active state, and an exciting state, and I was so lucky to be a part of that, inspired by it, totally inspired. My God, we used to go plugged in in New York, once a year ; the first time, there were eleven thousand people, the first march, in 1970. It grew to hundreds and hundreds of thousands. There were one of a million (inaudible) didn't get it for Stonewall Fifty. I don't think that -- I don't know what the population was, but they were going to try for a hundred, I knew. That would've been exciting. And we had -- Danny -- we had tickets to go, and he got sick. I couldn't go, so I sponsored a bus for him to take some people, you know, I had to sponsor a bus. I gave him money for two people, thirty-six or forty bucks, to Central Park. That was a great day, great day. That's when the movement really was born. They combined to one lane of traffic, and we just got longer, and longer, and longer, until it was 11 blocks long. More blocks than eight blocks. I don't remember. There were just blocks and blocks of people coming up this single lane of traffic. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:53:05 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Joseph Burns (Part 2), October 13, 2019 Description An account of the resource Joseph Burns shares stories of Le-Hi-Ho, LGBT activism, and personal relationships. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-08 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10-13 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/0a590c6e81907b9e5a1310564a613eb6.png b8acc897f1b74823cde44472e91fbaf8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Joseph Burns OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-07.xml Interview Keyword This field adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the “keywords” field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. Le-Hi-Ho OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 October 12, 2019 Joseph Burns (Part 1), October 12, 2019 LGBT-07 01:29:35 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Le-Hi-Ho Joseph Burns Mary Foltz video BurnsJoseph_20191012_Video 1.0:|27(4)|50(9)|71(6)|92(5)|109(13)|134(9)|155(7)|174(14)|191(7)|214(16)|235(10)|260(2)|281(18)|300(6)|319(15)|340(14)|363(3)|386(2)|415(2)|436(3)|459(4)|480(6)|501(13)|522(9)|541(5)|564(2)|583(11)|604(3)|627(14)|650(12)|675(4)|694(11)|711(9)|732(4)|751(10)|770(7)|791(10)|812(14)|835(9)|854(14)|879(3)|900(14)|919(2)|940(6)|961(6)|978(18)|995(7)|1016(4)|1037(2)|1054(13)|1071(3)|1090(2)|1123(7)|1142(5)|1165(10)|1184(6)|1209(3)|1232(3)|1245(10)|1274(10)|1301(10)|1334(3)|1353(13)|1374(6)|1395(9)|1420(7)|1437(13)|1458(3)|1477(9)|1496(5)|1519(17)|1546(12)|1563(8)|1586(11)|1605(10)|1626(4)|1649(4)|1672(3)|1697(7)|1720(5)|1737(14)|1762(13)|1789(7)|1812(3)|1833(10)|1850(7)|1875(7)|1892(7)|1913(2)|1926(5) 0 https://youtu.be/mrynu9OOewM YouTube video 4 Interview Introduction MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I’m here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are here with Joseph in his home in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania. It is October twelfth, two-thousand nineteen. Carol Moeller is our videographer today. Joseph, I want to thank you so much for agreeing to --&#13 ; &#13 ; JOSEPH BURNS: Thank you.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: -- talk with us. And the first thing I want to ask is did you consent to this interview today? 0 63 Childhood / Early Life MF: And just to start our conversation today, could you tell us a little bit about your childhood?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay. I was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, which is north of Pittsburgh, about thirty miles. And it’s a town of about thirty-thousand, I think. Maybe twenty three- thousand at that time. So, it’s a medium sized town and it was the county seat. And it was a great life. This was before the war. I was born before the war. Then, I began -- the war years, of course, started in forty-one and we spent our time, a large part of our time outside the city because they were polio summers, okay? So, when the summers came, we went outside the city. 0 738 Starting Le-Hi-Ho / About Le-Hi-Ho MF: I just am excited for you to keep going. You should feel like you can just keep talking in the direction that you want to go. And then, if you exhaust it, then I’ll ask a question. I mean, I have so many things that I’m curious about. Why? Why you started Le-Hi-Ho and how it kind of came together, who you were talking with? You know, how did you imagine this organization?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Oh, I left town. When I left home, I was ready, I think. I was ready to go. I was ready to find what I knew was there, okay? I knew that there were, I knew such of a thing -- was gay bar. I had never been into one prior to that. I had had, I think, yeah, and twenty-three, I had another event, another time when I was with somebody. Le-Hi-Ho 0 3135 Le-Hi-Ho Newsletter MF: So, my questions are, you know, what in particular did you want to publish in the newsletter? Did you publish on politics or was it --&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: -- more social?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: I did -- it was politics. I was [strong?] informational and, a matter of fact, got into trouble for it. I was writing as much -- I was doing all this scholarship on the side. And so, I was making what I called reviews of these books. They weren’t reviews of these books. They were really giving you -- since you aren’t going to read the book, this is what the book said. And these are important ideas, okay? Le-Hi-Ho 0 3598 Being Out in the Lehigh Valley MF: Can I ask, before you moved to the Lambda Center, what was it like for Le-Hi-Ho and just to be out in Bethlehem as a city. Like, what was it like at Bethlehem Steel --&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: I didn’t have --&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: -- to be out?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: -- any problem with it. I wasn’t extraordinarily social. I mean, I kept with some gay people. Remember, at that time, you had -- Friday night was your gay -- okay, Friday, Saturdays was your gay time. And so, that was, it was kind of what you did, okay? Le-Hi-Ho 0 4198 Contact with Other Organizations MF: May I ask -- there’s this really interesting way that in the stories that you’re telling, Le-Hi-Ho is moving all around the region. Members are going to Philadelphia, you’re going to New York City, you’re in contact with these major --&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: I was.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: -- organizations, yeah.&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: So, I was because I wanted to be, okay? And I wrote that. And, you know, I wrote about the Stonewall and the meeting and the conflict that was taking place between the old guard and the new guard, which is the homophile organizations and this new group that wants to be out and political and it wants to be very forward and right in your face, confronting. 0 4414 PA Council for Sexual Minorities / Gay Caucus JB: I just did it and the Le-Hi-Ho, two things happened. There was an organization that started in ‘75. This is five, this is six years later, in Reading, okay? Came to Le-Hi-Ho and said, “We’re starting, need your advice.” I went down and stayed with them, literally, for a long time. That organization that we started was called -- at that time, there was movement to start this Pennsylvania Council on Sexual Minorities. There was a group that met in Harrisburg, conceiving this idea, making it up with Governor Shapp’s approval. 0 4917 Impact of Le-Hi-Ho MF: So, I just want to ask that -- you know, for you, personally, what kind of impact do you think Le-Hi-Ho had on Bethlehem, on the Lehigh Valley, and just on the region, more broadly?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay, ask me again.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What kind of impact did Le-Hi-Ho have on Bethlehem, on the Lehigh Valley?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: Okay, I --&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What’s its legacy?&#13 ; &#13 ; JB: -- said that the educational thing was very important. Okay, you’re reaching out to high school students, to college students, giving them good information on a regular basis. 0 5200 Citizens of Decency JB: I’ll tell you what: there’s another organization that founded in ‘87. We founded in Allentown with the Allentown -- so, we call ourselves Citizens (inaudible) for Better Community. The reason we did that, there was -- it was a professor at Lehigh, professor at Muhlenberg, Frank -- I’ll think of his name after awhile. It’s not important or anything but -- who, as soon as we announced that we were going to try for gay rights in Allentown -- organizing organization called Citizens -- COD, Citizens for Decency, something like that. 0 MovingImage Joseph Burns talks about his experience of being a gay man in Bethlehem, PA in the 1970s and '80s, namely his involvement with Le-Hi-Ho (Lehigh Valley Homophile Movement). MARY FOLTZ:My name is Mary Foltz and I'm here with Joseph Burns to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are here with Joseph in his home in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania. It is October twelfth, two-thousand nineteen. Carol Moeller is our videographer today. Joseph, I want to thank you so much for agreeing to -- JOSEPH BURNS:Thank you. MF:-- talk with us. And the first thing I want to ask is did you consent to this interview today? JB:Yes, of course. I did, absolutely. MF:Wonderful. We're really grateful that you take the time to talk to us. And I want to start by asking you, could you please give me your birth date? JB:Eight-one-forty. August first, nineteen-forty. MF:And just to start our conversation today, could you tell us a little bit about your childhood? JB:Okay. I was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, which is north of Pittsburgh, about thirty miles. And it's a town of about thirty-thousand, I think. Maybe twenty three- thousand at that time. So, it's a medium sized town and it was the county seat. And it was a great life. This was before the war. I was born before the war. Then, I began -- the war years, of course, started in forty-one and we spent our time, a large part of our time outside the city because they were polio summers, okay? So, when the summers came, we went outside the city. We had a piece of property outside the city about eighteen or nineteen miles. We went there and spent our summers as children and took our friends along and really stayed out -- pretty much out of the summer polio season, which was devastating in terms of how many people would get sick. And we never did. But outside of that, it was very happy. That was an extraordinarily happy time to be -- my family was good. Well off enough to be able to afford to stay out there. My father came and went every day, for work. And my mother ultimately became a member of the school board, which kind of influenced my life a little bit, made me a little, you know, a little more cautious about who I was and what I could do. But really (inaudible) a whole lot but she -- I think my -- between the two of them, my father would be the more nurturing figure, okay, and the person that I really went to for more nurturing. And that was just true of the family. My mother was a good person and really -- but she had her feelings about things, very different, and was not as caring somehow, not able to communicate the same sort of warmth as my dad did. And so, we had a very special relationship (inaudible) and that was very warm and well-remembered. He lived until I was nineteen. Died in 1960. By that time, I was growing up enough -- I had come out -- I didn't come out, as a matter of fact. I was hesitant, lonely as a child (inaudible) a lot of my childhood, and especially as I became gay. At about thirteen, I think, was my first experience, with a friend. Another person in school, the same age, the same grade of school that I was. Happened in my home. In the basement, there were a pair of, set of bunk beds downstairs, and that's where we had our first encounter. And we went on for probably several months but not longer than that. He was an individual interesting to me because he had some effeminate characteristics more than I would have and more than typical for men. But he also -- and I saw him a gap of time, okay? Remember, I was thirteen then. We were probably -- I remember knowing him till we graduated school and he was a clerk in a men's store, which -- he was still a clerk in a men's store. That's what he did for his whole existence and retired from there. And I didn't see him again for fifty-five years when we came together for the high school reunion. Went to first high school reunion. I went back, it was fifty-five years. So, he's the same person. Exactly the same person. But he was married all these years, to a woman. Assume had children. Nobody talked about children at the reunion. Surprised the heck out of me. I thought that would be the whole conversation. Not at all. Nobody even talked a word about children. And people were so much the same as they were in high school. Like, the high school president was still in charge of this particular occasion and he -- very much the same. Looked the same, talked the same, was the same. Personality, the same. And it was true of so many people but it was also true of this boy, which I thought was most remarkable that he had not changed in all these years and yet had never probably been gay himself. I just find it absolutely remarkable that he remained -- maintained marriage and maintained his lifestyle. And after that, there was only one other person. Then, there was a long period of plight for a long time when I was too shy, too afraid, and too absorbed in the whole business of being gay to reach out. Probably fearful, probably not ever very heterosexual and could -- that was not something I even got to very much at all. I tried. Went out on a few dates. But there was not anything that I was really interested in doing, quite honestly. And that -- maintained myself, even through high school and college. I did not have another encounter with anybody. I knew I was gay. Certainly was dealing with the issue myself but I did not reach out to any other gay people and rarely knew any. When I left Butler, finally, at the age of twenty-seven, and this was years later, I still only knew two gay people in Butler. So, it was a lonely life for me there and was very willing to leave and went to Allentown, Bethlehem, really, in '67, and at twenty-seven. Partly, I had dropped out of college and I was going to go back to college. Well, I went back and I didn't go to college but I did stay in Bethlehem, very happily, and started to come out. And slowly, going to a bar called Rubes. I don't know what Rubes is -- was in existence then, on the corner of Ninth and Hamilton, as I recall. And there was another bar down -- the bus station was kind of gay, part-time, on weekends, especially. And as that happened, in '69, somebody bought the bar by the name of Larry Johns. Yes, Larry Johns is his name and he bought that particular bar, called the Rendezvous, then. And it was the bar that was associated with the bus station and it's just a very small bar. I don't think more than fifteen seats in it. And he put a dance floor in back, which was quite exciting for the time. And then, he founded Stonewall, later on. Sold the Rendezvous, although Rendezvous continued for a long time as a bar. And, let me see, so coming out was slow for me. I met a few people prior to Le-Hi-Ho who were -- in that day, there were queen bees, okay? And a queen bee would be a male homosexual who is -- usually a lot of personality and enough to hold other people. And he would create a social circle for himself. Now, in some times, and this was true almost in every town in America -- probably had a queen bee who was truly -- dominated that society. And not a very large circle. There might be just five or six people, it might be fifteen people. Might be a very large group depending on the person himself. But they were very -- they were leaders, they were social leaders. Commanded the social scene and really, there were specific people. They were funny, they were gregarious. They were also extraordinarily sarcastic, sarcasm being the coin of the realm, to a certain degree, because that passed for sophistication. I'm not sure quite what had happened. I always thought sarcasm hurt more than it was good. But it still was the coin of the realm and if you were sarcastic, then you got to be more popular and more -- dominating those people. So, I met a young man who was in his fifties, had a small coterie of two, three other people, I think, and a home in Bethlehem. A nice little home, quite comfortable. And that was my social set for a while. I met a few people at the bar, older men, specifically. By that time, I was twenty-seven going on thirty. And Le-Hi-Ho was founded when I was twenty-nine. So, my point was that I went -- being, feeling lonely. I was going to a psychiatrist for a period of time and I would talk to him about how do I get to know people? How do I be social? What do I do? Le-Hi-Ho started in, I think, in May or April of 1969, just right after the Stonewall -- and that's important. I'll talk about that. But that was the end of my psychiatry, yeah. I found what I needed, you know? I really kind of did not bloom but I certainly came out and was willing to come out. I had read in the paper, the Philadelphia -- no, wouldn't have been, 'cause that -- I'm not sure. Would have been the morning paper out of Philadelphia and I don't -- I'm not sure that I remember the name of it anymore. But Barbara Gittings was listed in there and she was my inspiration because I thought if Barbara Gittings could be out like that, and she (inaudible) she had been the editor of Ladder and was an activist in Philadelphia. A gay activist (inaudible) be an activist. And I thought, boy, if she could do it, I could do it, too. And so, my opportunity, then, came up pretty quickly after that and I was very, very happy and it was the first moment I knew I was going to be out. I was not going to be one of the closeted people. But that was the brief up to that point, okay, if there are any questions about that. Do you have anything to ask me about that? Any illuminations? MF:I just am excited for you to keep going. You should feel like you can just keep talking in the direction that you want to go. And then, if you exhaust it, then I'll ask a question. I mean, I have so many things that I'm curious about. Why? Why you started Le-Hi-Ho and how it kind of came together, who you were talking with? You know, how did you imagine this organization? JB:Oh, I left town. When I left home, I was ready, I think. I was ready to go. I was ready to find what I knew was there, okay? I knew that there were, I knew such of a thing -- was gay bar. I had never been into one prior to that. I had had, I think, yeah, and twenty-three, I had another event, another time when I was with somebody. And then, it became a little more natural and I met some more people. Individuals. Typically older. Oh, probably even older than I was and I was already twenty-seven. Now, that's interesting. I came out at that age, too. I decided I was coming out and so I wrote to my mother first and the rest of the family and said, "I'm gay" and was -- came out, literally, to them and to other people. So, I was working in Bethlehem still at that point. And I was able to come out in my work, which -- I was working as a laborer. And open-hearth furnaces and so on (inaudible) so, I knew people but it -- again, it was a lonely, lonely existence and I felt that keenly. And I felt very, very lonely. I called it my lonely years, twenty-seven to twenty-nine, between twenty-seven and twenty-nine, when I was able to come out, when I was able to really reach out to other people with Le-Hi-Ho and found my, you know, my niche for myself. Well, I was very, very happy about that afterwards. Became the first newsletter editor for them. And the first meeting, I think the -- well, we'll talk about that, too. I was -- Le-Hi-Ho was founded through the auspices of Mattachine, New York City. And approximately, I think, February. I don't know the date. And I have the letter and it's in the -- I sent that (inaudible) inviting people to -- person who was going to form a group through the auspices of Mattachine, New York. He was a local, Ron Seeds. And Ron Seeds was also working at Bethlehem Steel. He was more, he was in the office, and I don't know what he did. I think he was probably mid-management somewhere but it would be mid-staff management, I believe, not directly supervising anybody that I'd be aware of. He was approximately my age. I'm not sure where we were. At that time, I was twenty-nine when Le-Hi-Ho was formed. I met my lover that first meeting and I did not get together with him. But I knew I saw him, knew who he was. Met him again at Christmas time, at New Year's, New Year's Eve, at -- in 1970. New Year's Eve -- of [Grant?], the 1970s, '69 into '70. And we were a place called the Coral Reef in the Poconos. Now that's important because among other things, we -- Le-Hi-Ho had early fundraising was drag shows. And they were down at the Coral Reef, the Coral Reef being in the Poconos, some distance from where we were. And they were successful. We would have several hundred people and we made three or four hundred dollars out of them, which was a lot of money to us. I mean, we were shoestring budget the whole time, literally. We just never needed, we never lacked for money. If they ever did, they put in the newsletter, "We need money" and people would contribute and they went on. But it was still, it was not, never became a greatly funded organization. Just went along, published this newsletter for twenty-five years, there's been a continuous newsletter. Now, the fact that Le-Hi-Ho was founded -- this is important -- again, it was founded in 1969, April or May. It was through the Mattachine. There was a decision, first, that we had to make about whether we'd go with Mattachine, would become a Mattachine, or we'd become an independent organization. I argued for independent organization and I think that most of us were in favor of that, rather than sending our money away. A little money, it was. It would have cost us twenty-five dollars a year, I think, something like that. But was twenty-five dollars is twenty-five dollars back in that day. It was different. That was a sum of money that you didn't automatically have when you were young. So, we went to stay, but what happened with Le-Hi-Ho was it was formed, therefore, as a social educational organization, okay? And this was what early organizations were. And you talk about homophile organizations? Homophiles stayed in the closet. If you remember Mattachine, they had this structure -- was such that they had -- the leadership was supposed to be out and leading the organization to be there for the public presence, okay? And they could do all the public things and everybody else could remain in the closet and be spoken for. That did not preclude them being activist people but the Mattachine grew to about four-hundred people, which was, at that time, was quite enormous. Now, they had done that, of course, by maintaining all the names, never letting anybody go. We did the same thing with Le-Hi-Ho and with other organizations later on. We just kept them on the books for ourselves. Kept saying the newsletter's -- so, we claimed them as members, even if they were no longer active, which very typical that they weren't. Okay, but being social, educational was what Le-Hi-Ho did, okay? They had a social hour after every meeting. I think I talked about, well, I talked about it before we started. There were about thirty people, would go to a meeting. A number of them would be the activists who took the meeting. And then, they would follow it with a social hour, assigned coffee, assigned refreshments and coffee, and every month. And it was very, very popular. That was what people went for, they really -- that social hour was well attended and very important, I think, again because it was, at that time, probably the social alternative to the bars. There were virtually no others, and certainly none of that ilk, in which you can get to know people without [the bedding, coming off?], without that being the focus of conversation. You would talk about all kinds of other things. You would talk more as a normal conversation. I think it was a very important aspect and a very important difference that went down that made that such an important organization. And it waxed and waned. There were sometimes -- were fewer people, more people. At the beginning, would all connect the business together. Well, that was a three-hour meeting if they had to do that kind of thing. And then, we also learned that that was just not successful. That was not what people went for. So, we learned to -- they built a board, ultimately, that took care of the business. And there was a -- Ron made himself the -- I forget what it was called but the Mattachine, New York and there's actually the same executive. And I don't remember -- executive something or other. Thank you. Okay, so Ron was the executive, meaning that he was responsible for the organization. Once led a fight one time to get the key for the mailbox. Now, the reason I did it was I felt that there were things going to the mailbox that I wanted to know about. I was the newsletter editor and I was really wanting to know about other activities across the horizon, which we didn't -- which I was not informed of but Ron was because, at that time especially, when there are other organizations, you sent your newsletter out to everybody else and the other organizations to keep them reminded, as -- that you were both in existence, what you did. So, but Ron said, "Look, I'm --" faced down the board and said, "I'm going to keep the key. I'm going to be here. I'm going to be head of this organization and I will be here tomorrow and when you guys are all gone, I'll be here." He was almost right. Almost right. He left about '87, I think, somewhere in the late eighties, I'm thinking, like -- and I don't know what that story was. By that time, I was gone myself. To finish that story, okay, back with Ron. And so, he led the organization, did most of the business and conducted most of the meetings. We did get a president. We named ourselves Le-Hi-Ho ultimately. Was a while there -- we wrote some bylaws. Bylaws was -- piece of shit. Never do it. It just takes -- big waste of time because you never -- you don't pay -- little attention to the bylaws after they're written. And they can take up a great deal of time. But finally, they give us a name, which came out to be Le-Hi-Homophile Organization and we shortened that to Le-Hi-Ho. And I remember who did it. That's neither here nor there. There was a person involved with the organization who was a rare book seller. Interesting man. He served that and he was a person who did not like conflict at all, so he didn't even like the meetings. He felt the conflict was too strong for him. Was a very gentle man. Very gentle person. But he came up with the name, ultimately. Good friend and a good person. Older. Again, older than myself, even at that point. Le-Hi-Ho was distinguished by being a little bit older. Generally, the membership would be in their twenties to thirties. And that's a little unusual for gay organizations of any ilk, to not be much younger and much more college age or whatever. These were young men who were starting their careers, typically. And again, that's who came. And sometimes from a distance. We had people coming from Wilkes-Barre, people coming from that area, and around, around, around. There were a few interesting people that might have belonged at one point or another. There was a fellow name of Paul. What was the last name? Oo, can I -- forgive myself. (inaudible), he was a -- Phil Andros, which if you know Phil Andros was a pornographic writer. But he was, yeah, that's what it was. And he -- but by then, he'd been retired from that. He was no longer writing the books but he was (inaudible) with his lover and was one of the interesting characters we once knew at Le-Hi-Ho that were associated with -- and he died, I think, not very long after that, I believe of AIDS, but I'm not sure of that. There were no other famous people, particularly, that I can think of. And Phil was very modest. Paul was very modest. Told us that but he never claimed -- and I was probably -- I was one of the few who would recognize him from pornography. I used to go to New York City and pick up the stuff in Times Square. So, of course, yes, I knew what Paul -- Phil Andros. That was exciting and he was a major author. When I came out in Pennsylvania, I had been to college in Pennsylvania. I had been to college in Bethlehem. And I went thereforth to college, universities -- one university, Lehigh. And then, there are four colleges, I believe: Moravian, Muhlenberg, Lafayette, and -- three cities. And there was also a Catholic school, St. Catherine, St. Catherine, Saint Frances de Sales. And there was even, actually -- there was a Baptist school that nobody knows about -- was in existence. Not quite unknown but it was a college, probably a junior college, but I never knew which one. I used to know its location and I used to observe it. My point was that I went to the colleges, I went to the universities, and I went to the libraries, particularly, that I could find, okay? And I was not much, I was not a great, I was not at that point much of a scholar. But I could not find in any of those libraries anything in the card catalog under homosexuality. There was zero works, okay? And what I could find one time was a book I -- it's written by a psychiatrist, I believe, in association with, well, very famous Midwest -- doesn't matter now. At any rate, there was one blurb about homosexuality, short paragraph thing. Two paragraphs, perhaps. And there was a book in Le-Hi-Ho by Derek, Philip Derek? What was his name? He was one of the very few novelists at that time who was actually publishing books that were gay specific. His last name was Derek and now I can't remember his first name, most regrettably. There was supposedly a copy of that in Lehigh University. It was not on the shelves, I can tell you that. And that was typical. That's what I found is there was very, very little, and not in. I was actually, with a very good book shop because I'd been a student and liked the Moravian Bookshop a great deal. It was a wonderful resource. They thought I was a student. I had been there so often, been there for years. I don't know how they thought I was a student after I was there fifteen years I was associated with them. But they were -- I knew people there and they were my sources. And so, I got a lot of books. I developed a nice library for myself, about one-hundred and fifty books by the time Le-Hi-Ho opened up. And there were not very many books at that time. You have to remember that Psychopathia Homosexualis was still in existence, okay? Now, 1874, it was written. This was a textbook for gay people! Come on! I mean, this is bad stuff. And it was all case histories, that sort of thing, and very -- people like Berger -- Bieber were writing at that time. I don't know if you've ever read Bieber. Irving Bieber was, oh, he was -- terrible man. Wrote a book in 1952. I got a copy of it, was, like, the thirteenth edition. That's how bad it was. I mean, it was all that was available and it was -- he was the one who said, you know, he equated us with -- homosexuals are criminals, teachers were criminals, they all have the same personality. They're all psychopaths. It's all psychopaths. Well, that taught me, that's -- I wasn't. I mean, that was my beginning of my liberation, was knowing who I was not. I was not that person. Nobody I knew was that person. Nobody I knew was of that ilk. But he was just devastating and everything he had to say was very, very negative and he had all his cases and all this stuff and illustrations. But it was a paperback book and the thirteenth edition. And that's just sick when you think about it. Still makes me sick when I think about it because that was really -- that and Berger, Edmund Berger or was it Edmund Berger? [I think Renee?] -- was all I could find. And these were the books that were coming out then. These were the authorities -- were trying to find out why am I homosexual? Was a big question. Screw the question, you know? I learned quickly to forget that, that just that was irrelevant. I am. But it was -- intellectual journey through that. And then, I got, like, The Homosexual in America. Loved Donald Cory. I was just grossly a fan of this man who would -- in '50, I think, perhaps, in the time of the McCarthy era, wrote this book called Homosexual in America, which was probably the first apologist for homosexual -- and he himself was a married man. He was a member of Mattachine. And I wrote to Mattachine a fan letter, as a matter of fact, and said, "I really appreciate the fact that you've done this. This is extraordinary and what a brave and courageous and wonderful" -- they wrote back and said, "He's out of the organization. We kicked him out." (laughs) So, the story about him is, and I find this out later, he was a sociologist who wanted to use the organization for research and to make himself a famous researcher, to [promote?] himself. And Lehigh -- and they turned him down on it. They would not support that. And he tried to become leader of the organization, tried to become the executive director, and that's when they threw him out. His name was -- I want to know, 'cause this is important. He still wrote that -- hate senior moments like this. I'll think of it and I will add that back. But he believed that men were afraid of women, is why they became homosexual. And this was [Ralph Ellard Ellis?] if you remember the name, was a psychiatrist which was -- this was his whole thing. And he said that that was his -- it was his thesis, that people are homosexual because they're afraid of women. He spoke at Le-Hi-Ho one time, which was not a time I was -- by that time, I had acquired a lover and was not directly involved with Le-Hi-Ho, or not very much, so I didn't know he was there. And I was quite surprised because -- but he came and spoke to the organization. Matter of fact, it's in the newsletters. I was actually quite shocked because I wouldn't have had him. He was really -- and he had a major following. But he also wasn't as tough on it. He wasn't just condemning homosexuals as Bieber and Berger and the other people had been. So, I had a library. I did a lot, well, as much research as I could. I find out about Evelyn Hooker, obviously, Ford and Beach, who was the sociologist who made it clear -- the cross-cultural studies and cross species studies. John Money, his sexual studies. And began to learn that there was a whole modern view emerging. Now, I think that that's very important, intellectually, okay? The intellectual beginnings of this were interesting because there were very few authors prior to this who were doing anything on sex at all, okay? And especially when they were across studies or other cultures. For instance, Richard Burton, a very, very famous author, very famous traveler in the East who had written a lot of cross-cultural studies and a lot of cross-cultural things about the -- and that whole Eastern culture. You can think of -- who? Carpenter, John Carpenter. And it was John Carpenter in England, did that -- wonderful books. André Gide wrote a book called Corydon. Was very famous homosexual. He also happened to be a pedophile, regrettably. Went to Algiers. But he wrote about it. One of the books that I found for the library was his diaries, his journals. Journals they were called in that day and he'd written about -- they were continued in four volumes. And I had the slightly abbreviated paperback edition but it was good enough and certainly told me a lot about -- and he was world famous at that point and he was an authority -- if you remember, Leo Tolstoy, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, became such a famous author and became the voice of peace and this world known, world renowned moralist. And that's the role that Gide filled. He became in -- writing a book called The Immoralist, among other things. He became that kind of authority figure and was very much highly regarded despite being gay. Corydon was published and when he published it, he only did twelve copies, so that never did get out until after he was dead. Then [there were -- the number?] (inaudible) published. I happen to have, was fortunate enough to find a copy of it. His thesis talked about a male's beauty and how beautiful males were and they were dominant. And you find beautiful birds, okay? Cardinals, for instance, the cardinal family, the male is the red cardinal. The females are the brown cardinals. The females also lead. They go first, then the male follows when it's safe. But they also were in, (clears throat) I'm sorry, in nature, were very often the more beautiful of the species, the more resplendent of the species to get -- and they were the ones that the females were attracted to. Remember that they, you know, that they did perform the dances or whatever. They had the plumage, the right plumage and the right light and look to be -- [set their genes?], partly because of the (inaudible) and he -- so that's what he emphasized. Interesting thesis. Also, interesting to me, when you talk about early homosexuality, and this was back in -- the term was (inaudible) until eighteen-something, seventeen-something, eighteen, I think. At any rate, [it was?] not a term. And before that, they were called inverts, intermediates, third sex. All-important concepts. And they used to talk about the important contribution that these particular people made, okay, that they could make the society that I've always kind of believed in. I've always thought that homosexuals had a special mission, had a special something, that we understood differently than the dominant culture did, the dominant heterosexual culture did. We weren't as marriage-oriented, for instance. We were freer in our associations and -- but I think now, as we've gone on, I think that what we were looking for is what is now emerging, which is that wonderful fluidity, that you could be anything, okay? That you could be male, female, without limits, without labels, without anything to identify with, that -- and yet, that fluidity, this makes you go all over so that you are all of those things, happily. I was not. I was a male homosexual and I, at my point, when I came out, was binary choice, okay? You were gay or you were straight. I chose gay, absolutely. I wanted to be that and I also emphasized my maleness, as opposed to anything, and really was not happy with the social sets in which the guys would call each other Mary. That made me uncomfortable because I thought that's kind of denial of who we are. And it so often was biting and so often was a putdown or an insult and sarcasm, that sarcasm that I talked about, was so much part of the humor. And that was a part of the humor, too. You had parties, drag shows, and what you did, okay, you -- everybody -- where you went into drag. I never did again. And it just wasn't me. But I think, too, that I really feel that I should have had -- I already knew growing up, when I was asking myself these questions, that there's a large part, a large component of me is feminine as other people would understand it. Not a sports person. A person who liked more concerts, liked music, who liked more things that might be softer and less hard and less harsh. And my brothers were athletic, I always thought. And I felt that difference. So, I kind of still -- I wish I had developed that more and been more open to developing it, that I would be a different person. And now I don't understand, it's very difficult for me to understand young homosexuals because they are so fluid and they are so -- can make that change and identify with it in a way we couldn't. To me, bisexuality was almost an excuse. But again, it never was. There are true bisexuals. I have learned that over the years, too, and accept that. But now, there's something more than that. There's this wonderful fluidity of being whatever you want to be and expressing it all. And I think, especially, Adrian does a terrific job and the Lehigh Valley is doing a terrific job of emphasizing that particular aspect of things. I look at the programs and what I get are everything is very much oriented to the trans community, a lot of it is. You're doing a lot of trans (inaudible) so many of the programs emphasize that as opposed to, okay, a more strictly male homosexuality. Come back to Le-Hi-Ho again for one second. This was a very male organization. There were no women, okay? There was one woman who was directly involved in Le-Hi-Ho in the first 10 years. Her name was [Lou Augustine?]. Lou Augustine became a member of the governor of Pennsylvania, the Governor's Council on Sexual Minorities. She was appointed to that. She lived in Reading. And she [come up to?] groups. She came up to Le-Hi-Ho periodically through all those years. And she was almost the only one who did. And I used to fight Le-Hi-Ho because after -- and in those first ten years, I began to change. There were so many feminists, and met Dixie and so on, so I was really trying to get them to understand that they don't have women, that they need to look at this because -- for many, many reasons. I thought that, for instance, now was our model -- except that the feminist movement was so broad. And that's for many issues, from childcare to pay, to just everything was so different for them. And men didn't pay attention. They did not support that. They didn't support the abortion rights, which they wouldn't do -- they wouldn't come out and say, Le-Hi-Ho -- and I tried to get them to do this. Would not adopt a resolution in favor of abortion or anything else, anything to do with feminism. They just simply wouldn't do it. And I wasn't disappointed and I understood because -- but they were a conservative organization. Again, they were founded two months before the Stonewall, it made them very different. They were social, educational, homophile. No organizations after the Stonewall or after -- yes, after Stonewall, I went to a conference in October of that year, '69. It was last meeting of ECHO, East Coast Homophile Organizations. There were several organizations involved. Le-Hi-Ho was new but so were a whole lot of other things, like HI, Homophiles of -- where? I don't remember. There was a group in -- [Robert Biddings?] was in charge of a group in Philadelphia. Mark Segal had just founded Gay, I think -- the GAA, yes, thank you. And so, I think there were quite a number of organizations. I recall there were thirteen organizations, almost all of them new. Now, the question, of course, with the old guard was shall we seat these people? Can we believe them? You know, they're new, they're young, they're radical about -- and they were, for instance, Foster Gunnison was himself an organization. Foster Gunnison, his whole job and his whole organization was, himself, keeping all the archives of all the earlier groups. And so, he built up a tremendous library and a very important library in New England of all those early newsletters and whatever was new and all the records of those groups. He tried to maintain some semblance of it. But that was (inaudible) okay. Mattachine New York was Dick Leitsch, who I went to see one time. When I came out, I went to New York. I had been to see a program, I think, in '63 that talked about Mattachine and showed the door of the organization, which was somewhere in the Village at that point, as I recall, a glass door. I'll never forget that. And so, really, that was one of the first things with them, when I came out, and I couldn't go to school the next day. I went to the library and I looked up Mattachine. MF:Do you want to stop? JB:It was important to me. And I went there, went to see him in New York. Went to the Mattachine office and walked in and just introduced myself. I was so happy. Went to Philadelphia. At that time, Janus Society was in existence and one called the Homosexual Law Reform Society. Both happened to be the same address in what turned out to be Polak -- why can't I remember their first names? I can remember his last name but I can't remember his first name -- published the Janus Society newsletter called Drum. And he also ran a pornography shop -- is what he did. I think was easier as a business or whatever. When I went to the address, went upstairs to the second floor, met the secretary. He was not in. Dammit, his name just crossed my name again. I mean, he was not there but clearly there was pornography all over. You know, the shelves in back were -- and that was what he did was supply -- pornography supplier. I don't know if that was his main job. He was well known and he did -- Drum was unusual, a little bit pornographic in terms of the newsletter. And I had a copy for years and didn't realize that I -- and I probably turned it into the projects here at the Dickinson when I realized that it was, in fact, the newsletter of the organization. But it had pictures of -- posed pictures back in that day. It's what you did, the posing straps and that sort of thing were de rigueur. You do nothing naked. That wouldn't have been possible but as much naked -- as close you could get. Clark Polak, I believe. Clark Polak, I believe, was his name. Joined their West Coast organization. I would join ONE to me was (inaudible) which was -- I think one in San Francisco, one in Los Angeles. ONE was an educational organization, did meetings, did presentations constantly to the public. Le-Hi-Ho was distinguished for that. They had a wonderful speakers' bureau. I was not a member of it. I wasn't Ron's favorite person but [as their?] -- was really very much in charge of that. Did a wonderful job. Presentations all over the Valley, very, very active, and through all the schools, the high schools, the colleges. Was a very main function, as well as the social organization, which we talked about. They also were very supportive about other things but they didn't -- they were not supportive about women. They wouldn't do the women's rights. They weren't really big on women's rights, although ERA was becoming stronger and stronger through now and now is very, very powerful organization in Pennsylvania. And Ellie Smeal was president, national president, and come from here. Gloria -- not Steinem but Gloria -- what was her name? Sackman-Reed. Gloria Sackman-Reed was the president then, followed by Dixie after that. And Dixie held conference in Philadelphia. And, I'm sorry, in Allentown. And then, she became president that year, [but did?] the conference -- she was self-nominated or nominated (inaudible) president -- Pennsylvania NOW. And that was '87, I believe, '86, '87, because in '87, we're supposed to have a conference in '86, in '87, early '87. We never did. And I'll tell you, that's another story and a later administration. But stay with Le-Hi-Ho for the moment. So, Le-Hi-Ho was very definitely male, strongly male. And I think that later, they did change but it was not until after I had left. I left in '83 to go to Chicago to live with my lover. And lived with him for ten years there, then another ten years in Houston. And then, we got divorced. His choice. I came back here to live with my sister in two-thousand. Had been together, been with Doug for eighteen years at the time he wanted the divorce. We stayed together for another year and a half just in order to sell the house, prepare the house, and so on, for sale. And I wanted to celebrate the coming of the new century with him, the millennial -- I wanted to do that. And really, it was a little bit of an anti-climax in the end. Not sorry that I did it, though. He was a good man and I was very much in love at that point but it just didn't work out. And they were my feelings, not his. Okay, Le-Hi-Ho. MF:May I ask -- JB:And what else can I say about that I could, yeah, (inaudible) MF:Well, I'm curious about your role as the newsletter organizer for Le-Hi-Ho. JB:Okay. MF:So, my questions are, you know, what in particular did you want to publish in the newsletter? Did you publish on politics or was it -- JB:Okay. MF:-- more social? JB:I did -- it was politics. I was [strong?] informational and, a matter of fact, got into trouble for it. I was writing as much -- I was doing all this scholarship on the side. And so, I was making what I called reviews of these books. They weren't reviews of these books. They were really giving you -- since you aren't going to read the book, this is what the book said. And these are important ideas, okay? This man is representing, for instance -- the writer, one from a man by the name of Wainwright Churchill -- wrote a book on -- and it's one that's gotten lost that I very -- don't understand why it did -- on the pro-gay cultures in the past. And so, he emphasized Greece as homo-positive, positive as opposed to negative, and the Roman culture as being more positive than negative and other cultures being more positive than negative. And he talked about them quite specifically, in quite a great, celebrated depth. And so, I would write that in the newspaper, wanting you to know that this saves you. This is saving your ass, okay? Very, very important piece of writing, this thing is. And so, I did it that way. Barbara Gittings wrote a letter and said, you know, "That's not a review." And Ron Seed wrote a letter and said, "You aren't earning views?. You're fired." So, I was fired. And that was about a year and a half later, year and a half or two. There was a person who -- the gentleman who started the newsletter was a guy who owned -- the real bookseller was throwing an advertisement, I think, after the first reading. So, I say, "We're going to have a second meeting." So, he wrote a newsletter for it. Well, that was the beginning of the newsletter and I took over the next one as being the newsletter editor because I wanted to do that. I thought it was a good fit for me. And I did things my own way. There was a little bit of humor that I wrote. I'm not funny. Believe me, it was a terrible piece. It was a lousy idea. And it really was a kind of a bit of a campy persona, which I am not and couldn't really play well. But that was that. And so, my emphasis was trying to be on educational -- and telling them about what was going on, okay? And I think that at some -- what I thought was positive about newsletters that I liked was that, okay? And other newsletters were done -- for instance, there was -- when Gays United of Lancaster's college, U.L., was founded, they formed -- they did a newsletter that became the Pennsylvania -- not rural but what do they call it? Damn. I'll have to think of that again later, too, because it was an important contribution. It was to, like, by the Boston Gay News. Talks about all the other organizations. Talked about what was going on, what was important, what were the leading causes, what -- and so, politically, if you were an activist, that's what you read because it really gave it to you in a way that The Advocate was not doing and it was much more social, much broader, and a lot more advertising in terms -- and a lot of beautiful boys, that sort of thing. And kind of light on good material. Now, it had not always been that way. I remember The Advocate, [firstly?] when it started, and reading it -- I was subscribing at that point -- like, I was a member of those organizations remotely because I couldn't -- that was my way of participating. All I could do what there was to join and pay attention. And one was giving me good information, Advocate was giving good information. And much as I could participate, they were. So, I thought that was a very, very important part of it. I found -- I just donated, I think I've said that, all those books for the library of Le-Hi-Ho, to start the library at Le-Hi-Ho. Mattachine donated their extra books, okay? And if you went to Mattachine, the forepart of -- you walked in, there were stacks of books there. Not very many. It wasn't -- maybe four or five depths but that was the largest collection that I ever saw and knew of. And my one-hundred fifty books, I thought, was quite extraordinary for the time because there were so few still being written. You know, openly -- books that were not people who -- there were some English books. They were hard to find and I tried to find everything I could find. I mean, I would go to books on the margin, okay, that were being dumped onto the market because they weren't any good, going to a special seller. And you'd go there and find books by English authors about -- writing about people who were gay. Was wonderful to me (inaudible) and plays. Very little of that. Le-Hi-Ho often went to plays in New York. Went to see Puppy Dog Tails, went to see -- what was the, shit, Boys in the Band, was, of course, new then. The Homoerotic Opera. Thomas Mann, A Night in Venice? Is that -- I think it was called? Went to see that. And so, they went often. But that was the beginning. They were Off-Broadway. Very little mainstream stuff. We did show, incidentally -- one of the first mainstream movies was, damn, sorry, why can't I think of the name of it? We had a meeting and we're meeting at that point at the Unitarian Church in Bethlehem, which is up in Fountain Hill, way up in the hill. Yeah, that was -- went there. They were good friends of ours. And so, it was early when we were looking for a place to meet and they did, I think, about three or four or five months into the organization. And it was all those years until we left, which would have been -- I think '83, I think is when the center started that Le-Hi-Ho moved out of there and met at the center -- MF:The Lam-- JB:-- was also there. They have their meetings at the center, as well. MF:The Lambda Center. JB:And stopped going to the church. MF:Okay. JB:Okay? As far as I know. MF:Can I ask, before you moved to the Lambda Center, what was it like for Le-Hi-Ho and just to be out in Bethlehem as a city. Like, what was it like at Bethlehem Steel -- JB:I didn't have -- MF:-- to be out? JB:-- any problem with it. I wasn't extraordinarily social. I mean, I kept with some gay people. Remember, at that time, you had -- Friday night was your gay -- okay, Friday, Saturdays was your gay time. And so, that was, it was kind of what you did, okay? You'd live the much more limited life Monday through Friday. Weekends, then you went somewhere to be gay, maybe in town, maybe elsewhere. I went to a lot of gay bars elsewhere just to see what they were. And because (inaudible) and I wanted to know about them and I put that in the newsletters, too. It was a lot of that sort of thing -- you know?] gay guides were very important. Also, talking about the electoral development, I think that we don't realize how much Sexology magazine had to do with publishing the early arguments about gays -- were done in that particular medium before they were done elsewhere and before there were more academic studies by Money and Hooker and so on and Ford and Beach, before those books came out, they were largely arguing in Sexology over the fact that homosexuals -- how they were acceptable and a natural part of sexuality. MF:And that's a magazine? JB:That would be important. Sorry? MF:Was that a magazine or you just -- JB:Yes. MF:-- mean the discipline? JB:Short magazine. Small one. MF:Oh, really? JB:It was almost a 'zine size. And it was pretty informal. It certainly was not a rigorous journal by any means. Ladder was the first lesbian journal, ONE, for -- a publication called ONE, which was probably the first serious journal of any sort. Christopher Street came out, ultimately. That was a literary magazine, the first one. The New York -- Craig Rodwell opened Oscar Wilde Bookshop in the Village. I went to see that. That was interesting. I went, that was right after Stonewall. And Stonewall was very exciting for me. I knew about what had happened and within a month or so, I think I'd gotten to -- I think Craig opened this bookstore and I went to the bookstore. I'm now thirty years old and the kids in there -- and this is when kids -- if you were over thirty, you were not to be trusted anymore. You were over the hill. And so, the kids in there were looking at me very peculiarly and really making comments about Mattachine and how ill they were for being against -- not as out, okay, as we are. They aren't as free, they aren't doing this whole youth thing. And remember, when Stonewall happened, the first thing that happened was you got this wonderful GSG, Gay Liberation Front's organization. Very, very leftist. Very leftist. And, like, remember Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine was a communist. These guys were leftists of that ilk. Not into communism, particularly, but very leftist in New York, well known. Lots of books, you know (inaudible) sort of book. They were quite exciting people when we met them at that -- yeah, met them in Philadelphia at the ECHO meeting. They were -- exciting group of people. But there were three or four organizations that -- I remember there were -- Columbia University, there was New York City University, there was just every kind of school you could imagine. The state university as opposed to the city university. And they represented -- they bloomed. Like, Philadelphia one or several and Gay Liberation Front's were much more oriented to being political in a broad sense. You were supporting the lettuce -- the Chavez and the agriculturists and the leftists all over the world, were -- your concern -- the Chicago Seven, the, you know, the twelve, the elevens or whatever. Their protests -- were the kind of things that you were supposed to be active in. That was not pleasing to a lot of the membership, so that they started GAA as opposed to that -- Gay Activist Alliance, which said, "We are gay, we're going to pay attention to gay causes and not pay attention to these other causes or not support them." And that was a big thing at that ECHO meeting. There was a huge fight. Frank Cannaday was the president of the organization, president of that particular meeting at that time. And he presided over the meeting and when there was this old guard and the new guard, the old guard and the new people, these new radicals coming in. It was a kind of battle, a very big battle about getting seated in the first place and then the battle was over what to do about the Day of Remembrance. You have the Day of Remembrance -- was held at the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July and that was Frank Cannaday's, that was his -- "here's the deal." The first organization (inaudible) in '64 and marched in Washington with the picket line. Famous picture of Barbara Gittings -- is very prominent in that set and -- but he was in charge of that particular meeting and had presided over this battle royale. And again, the issue that they were fighting about was, well, among other things -- I remember that there was somebody in that organization that was talking about Barbara Gittings as a baby killer, you know? So, at that time, they were not as unified on abortion as we got to be, by no means. There was a terrible battle over that and horrible things happened as a result of this terrible argument going on between the baby killers and the right to lifers. And the other thing that happened was coming out, okay? This is when the GFL in New York was -- very important for -- they went over and took a firehouse, took over, literally, just -- and at that time, you could -- walked in and just took over, literally. And they -- an abandoned firehouse. They took it over and it became quite a major organization. They were doing dances of about five-hundred people and they were (inaudible) super, super exciting. And so, they really lit up New York, completely, and in a way -- but also, as these GSAs were -- GFLs founded on all kinds of campuses everywhere. Every campus would have a GFL. There was a group in Kutztown, as a matter of fact. A young fellow that came to Le-Hi-Ho, Frederick Reed. And Fred Reed was -- became vice president of Le-Hi-Ho. And he was also president of (inaudible) about five members, I think, in Kutztown University at that time. He was a student. And then, sadly, he went to the University of Pittsburgh as a graduate student and died -- I don't know how he died. I don't know the circumstances. I've always been suspicious because he fell off a tower. And one of the towers in Pittsburgh was famous for having these -- their first dormitories were twin towers, okay? Dormitory towers. And he died -- jumping, you know, falling off of that. And who knows? Fred would have been out, he would have been -- outspoken person. Very forthright. He also went to the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade and I got in there and he and I and my lover and a woman went in the first parade together. Very happy circumstance. Barry says that there are pictures of me there. No, I knew that there were. I was pictured -- the week, next week, I'm pictured in The Advocate -- my sign is pictured in The Advocate. I'm sitting there -- but the picture's taken with my back to the camera, so no way -- you can see my bald spot. That's how I can -- recognize my lover and you can recognize Fred Reed, who was standing there with me. Was an amazing time. That's a different story, and inspiring, inspiring, inspiring moment, that first march but -- and so, (inaudible) for years and found out from Ron that he had died (inaudible) -- at the university. MF:May I ask -- there's this really interesting way that in the stories that you're telling, Le-Hi-Ho is moving all around the region. Members are going to Philadelphia, you're going to New York City, you're in contact with these major -- JB:I was. MF:-- organizations, yeah. JB:So, I was because I wanted to be, okay? And I wrote that. And, you know, I wrote about the Stonewall and the meeting and the conflict that was taking place between the old guard and the new guard, which is the homophile organizations and this new group that wants to be out and political and it wants to be very forward and right in your face, confronting. And I wasn't sure. I really had to take a stand, oh, and my stand was I prefer to be out. That was clear. And Ron did not at that time. I remember I put his name in the first newsletter and he protested. Now, he didn't stay that way. I mean, Ron became much more public over this period of time, of necessity. And certain lover certainly did because (inaudible) speaking and so on. But at that time, he was protesting it and that would have been -- that more typically Mattachine -- as I said, Mattachine was supposed to be the leadership was out and everybody else wasn't. The only person ever (inaudible) that was Frank Cannaday and he would insist on it. The stories were funny because Frank always tells it that I was the only person who was out. They said, "We never knew that." It wasn't us. We always thought we were out, we always thought we were doing things under our own name. And Frank said, "No, we all had nicknames." (laughs) Wasn't true. Was true in Mattachine in New York. And the very famous person at Mattachine New York outside of Dick Leitch was the executive director, was a lawyer by the name of -- was great. Austin Wade. That just has marble halls behind it. Austin was, in fact -- and he was -- his name was Arthur Kennedy and he was a professor at Princeton Law. And he was the legal counsel for Mattachine Society but known as Austin Wade and he was more known widely through that. And I was a great admirer of Austin Wade because he was the only -- he was the most powerful figure anybody knew and there were no lawyers, no doctors, nobody of any name or of any profession out at that point. So, what was her name? Was a Puerto Rican woman who was the secretary and she was as famous as anybody else because she was such a mother to everybody and a wonderful person. I've forgotten her name now, unfortunately. But Austin Wade was one of those people -- was a big figure in my mind. And, as I said, I find out later what his name was and he was a member of the Pennsylvania Council on Sexual Minorities, from New Jersey. But he was an invited member of the organization. Very distinguished man. Now, you ask me, why did I do that? MF:Yeah. JB:I just did it and the Le-Hi-Ho, two things happened. There was an organization that started in '75. This is five, this is six years later, in Reading, okay? Came to Le-Hi-Ho and said, "We're starting, need your advice." I went down and stayed with them, literally, for a long time. That organization that we started was called -- at that time, there was movement to start this Pennsylvania Council on Sexual Minorities. There was a group that met in Harrisburg, conceiving this idea, making it up with Governor Shapp's approval. Governor Shapp was a wonderful, wonderful leader and a man of -- that's a whole chapter in itself. It's a very interesting story. As a part of that, well, they did a conference in Harrisburg to introduce the idea of the council and to generate with them on the community enthusiasm for it. And it got some people to -- members of the council. And that happened in '75. In '74, December '74, the Reading group was founded, on Christmas -- New Year's Day, matter of fact, of '75. I think that's correct. But they came to us and I went down and that's how I became involved. But through that conference, they started a group called the Caucus -- in order to get more representatives from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to equalize -- Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and then the rest of the state, okay, so that there were three bodies. Philadelphia has seven, Pittsburgh had five, I think, and we had three. Well, that was not enough for the rest of the state combined. So, we caucused to get more people and call ourselves (inaudible) Gay Caucus. This was interagency organization. So, we then founded -- we met the organization of Gays United of Lancaster, Reading was just beginning. Le-Hi-Ho was a major member and I went and represented Le-Hi-Ho at this new group called the Caucus and it became a separate organization, a state organization, worked for state causes, worked on the state level, wanted to be an interagency kind of thing. So, I was the liaison for that. And Le-Hi-Ho chose not to be involved. I could do the involvement but they were not directly involved. No, they did play a major part later on, a very important part, but they chose not to be active in it, okay, I'm just pointing it out. MF:Why not? JB:It's because they were a different organization. They were not politically oriented as such. Now, they didn't ignore it but they weren't about to invest in it, okay? Like, they wouldn't invest in women. They just wouldn't do it. That wasn't their thing. Was okay. I mean, I got along with them but I didn't feel that it would've been better had they done one of the things that -- Reading was very much oriented, was very open, about half and half. Was half men and half women. Five, six men, five or six women. Every meeting, okay? The Caucus had co-chairs in everything we did. We have co-chairs of the Caucus got there every meeting, every committee we had, push at everything because we wanted to be equal. Equality was very, very important to us and equality with men and women was very, very important. And then, again, the ERA was a major issue at that point, so -- Reading was famous that way, Lancaster was very much that way. Very much oriented to having as many women represented -- but female representation they could get and had generated. And most organizations were. Le-Hi-Ho was the exception, had always been the exception. Again, it was an older organization. They had it as a different substantiality. They were okay without -- didn't need to be something different. Very happy with what they were and did a wonderful job, I thought. I mean, they were so important in terms of the people's lives that were there, okay? And I always say that people come with agenda, okay? They come to your organization with an agenda, something that they need. And mostly, it's just to be known, just to tell you that I'm gay and be accepted. And that's the importance of the organization. If you could shine a love on somebody, that's liberation. That is, in fact, liberation. That's what it's all about, is just that little bit of love and they just bloom. They become these wonderful flowers. And it happened to me, it happens every -- to all those people. And, like, an organization -- let's take Homophiles of Williamsport. Three years they exist as two hundred people and six different counties came to that organization. The important thing was that they had a group talk afterwards, okay, that people came to be able to say -- express their concerns, have their questions, get their information, got their agenda taken care of. That was the important part of the group and outside of that, it probably didn't make a -- it did. It made some wonderful -- some contributions. And it tried to be political but it wasn't so much -- its real satisfaction, it was the same as Le-Hi-Ho. It was a homophile organization. It was founded as homophile organization they said. So, social education was what they thought they thought they were doing but they did much more than that. But there were younger members much more oriented to being out and active in a way that Le-Hi-Ho just wasn't. You could belong -- a very satisfactory life with Le-Hi-Ho, be an active member in Le-Hi-Ho. There were wonderful people involved with that, a whole board full of people and that -- oh, they, just -- Bob Steelman, Helmuth Baerwald, oh, [Ron?] and our first president was Al Ravert. Second was -- oh, the person from Wilkes-Barre. Came to the meeting, said -- again, Le-Hi-Ho had that kind of draw, okay? People would come from distance to be there because it was a working organization. Staying in existence gives you a good reputation, just -- people know when you're going to meet and you're going to meet next week or next month, too. Made a big difference. And so, a lot of people came from elsewhere to be at Le-Hi-Ho. Was true everywhere. All those organizations, -- homophile, as I said, there's homophile -- in that little group (inaudible) knew that they had two-hundred members and they had the membership list. I don't have the membership list. That wasn't my thing. That was Ron's thing. He was the one who was keeping track of all the members and who was involved and who wasn't and where they were from. Garth Watkins was the second president. MF:Well, we're about at an hour-and-a-half and that's when we like to stop. And so, maybe, can I ask one more question and then we'll -- JB:Sure. MF:So, I just want to ask that -- you know, for you, personally, what kind of impact do you think Le-Hi-Ho had on Bethlehem, on the Lehigh Valley, and just on the region, more broadly? JB:Okay, ask me again. MF:What kind of impact did Le-Hi-Ho have on Bethlehem, on the Lehigh Valley? JB:Okay, I -- MF:What's its legacy? JB:-- said that the educational thing was very important. Okay, you're reaching out to high school students, to college students, giving them good information on a regular basis. They were (inaudible) back to class after they started, then they would be invited back again the next year. That was a very, very important function. They were out to the degree that they advertised constantly in the newspaper. They were open to everybody that would come. There was one time -- there was a meeting in which they -- a person appeared with a fifteen-year-old. Scared the hell out of that meeting. You got very, really scared men who were suddenly sitting with a fifteen-year-old person, realizing that this guy can get us all in big, big, big doo-doo. The next meeting, they voted out, they voted the person who brought him out. You cannot be a member anymore and we will not support NAMBLA, okay? Not support the North American Boy Association , which is -- I supported -- I thought that that is dangerous to all of us. And, as an activist, I always limited myself to not being in the presence of young men, okay? Younger men that I knew weren't of any -- of a certain age or even they looked like they were a certain age because I was not going to risk what I would've risked. And my reputation was everybody's reputation. I was the leader. I would have been known -- if I had been arrested, it would have been bad news and I didn't want that. So, that -- one thing that happened, that they -- was another organization -- they were just conservative. There was an underground newspaper at that time. They would not support the underground newspaper but [Sweich that had?] the underground newspaper supported them quite openly in their publication. They wouldn't support them. Now, Dixie White spoke among other people. I was program chair for a while and so I invited a lot of people that I wanted them to know, to make this networking business. So, she knew what else is around and I invited a lot of women and, again, tried to make them more comfortable. And this organization did not work for me, okay? I was gone in '83, when I went, and by then, there'd only been one other woman who had ever really showed any interest and she was a radical and secretly not very interested in them. She was -- always thought they were not -- she was far more radical than that -- member of the women's commission, as well as the lesbian -- Governor's Council on Sexual Minorities. Professor out of Shippensburg. And [Mary Anne Caroll?] was my co-chair in the Caucus. We were Caucus co-chairs together and she became president of NOW, later on, after the ERA had -- after '83. I think '84 is when she became president. And the ERA, closest possibility in '83, as I recall. They had to have it ratified by then and there was no chance. I forget -- well, I lost my train of thought. Okay, but then, you asked was it very -- powerfully important to the Lehigh Valley because it was that represent-- it was that presence and really did a lot of things in support of that. MF:I want to say, on behalf of Carol and myself, we have been so delighted to talk with you today. Thank you so much! JB:My pleasure. MF:And maybe you'll give us -- opportunity to talk with you again sometime in the future. JB:I'll tell you what: there's another organization that founded in '87. We founded in Allentown with the Allentown -- so, we call ourselves Citizens (inaudible) for Better Community. The reason we did that, there was -- it was a professor at Lehigh, professor at Muhlenberg, Frank -- I'll think of his name after awhile. It's not important or anything but -- who, as soon as we announced that we were going to try for gay rights in Allentown -- organizing organization called Citizens -- COD, Citizens for Decency, something like that. COD, I don't remember how that worked. And he and I and -- so, I called, I wanted us to be the matching -- we found that since we knew he was -- founded -- and we founded right away. Is that right? I think we founded right away, when -- as soon as we knew about him. And then, we, he and I, were kind of competing. Got in the newsletter a lot and there was probably a monthly magazine published (inaudible) that was a different time, as well. And, again, it's Lehigh Valley. And it was unsuccessful. Ultimately, what happened with them, we went for two years. We became -- found the organization, ultimately we started the Gay Line, and I had a lot to do with that. [And mostly?] happened -- is in my apartment, as a matter of fact. I was the -- people came to my apartment and answered the -- and worked the telephone there. Started in '80. MF:Okay. JB:And that was '78 to '80. So, we stayed open till then, to found Le-Hi-Ho -- or to found Gay Line. And there were events involved. A good time. We had a lot of fun playing with that whole idea. And we knew we weren't going to be successful. And that was pretty much against -- and it was unfair because they simply claimed that homosexuality was on the books, was still illegal, and therefore you couldn't have rights and they couldn't go further than the state permitted, which the state organization -- didn't recognize gay rights. So, they wouldn't either. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:29:35 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Joseph Burns (Part 1), October 12, 2019 Description An account of the resource Joseph Burns talks about his experience of being a gay man in Bethlehem, PA in the 1970s and '80s, namely his involvement with Le-Hi-Ho (Lehigh Valley Homophile Movement). Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-07 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10-12 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/29d09513ff79f5ed4f716cc57de3319e.png 1cc944b71031f38d5a17985761e664c8 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 John Marquette Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Robert Kreider 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-06.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 11, 2020 Roberta and Harold Kreider, January 11, 2020 LGBT-06 01:34:31 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 Robert Kreider Harold Kreider John Marquette video/mp4 Kreider_20200111_FinalEdit_video.mp4 1.0:|21(6)|40(2)|61(18)|76(7)|91(12)|106(6)|119(9)|136(18)|149(3)|166(10)|181(16)|208(6)|233(8)|254(6)|267(5)|280(19)|295(10)|310(9)|327(12)|340(15)|363(17)|380(15)|391(3)|404(8)|423(11)|438(9)|447(15)|458(6)|471(8)|484(12)|507(10)|524(10)|539(15)|558(15)|579(4)|594(12)|611(14)|630(10)|643(17)|658(11)|675(16)|688(16)|699(15)|716(15)|743(2)|762(4)|785(12)|816(4)|837(14)|854(4)|875(10)|894(10)|913(2)|926(9)|941(14)|960(9)|977(15)|996(12)|1015(7)|1036(10)|1057(6)|1074(10)|1093(13)|1114(6)|1131(4)|1148(15)|1167(3)|1186(3)|1211(19)|1246(4)|1257(17)|1268(16)|1285(6)|1306(12)|1323(10)|1340(16)|1355(8)|1370(11)|1385(5)|1404(4)|1417(2)|1430(14)|1449(14)|1476(2)|1493(8)|1510(12)|1529(4)|1544(7)|1561(8)|1580(11)|1601(2)|1622(17)|1641(2)|1658(5) 0 https://youtu.be/czFWJgOiOL8 YouTube video 0 Introductions JOHN MARQUETTE: My name is John Marquette, and I’m here with Roberta Showalter Kreider and Harold Kreider to talk about their life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are in Sellersville, Pennsylvania and it’s January the 11th, 2020. Our videographers are [Danielle DelPriore?] and Mary Foltz. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with us today. To start, can you please state your full name and spell it for me. And we’ll start with you Roberta.&#13 ; 0 126 Roberta's Early Life Let’s start with the very beginning. Roberta, would you tell me about the early years of your life. Describe your childhood.&#13 ; RK: Okay, but a-- part of it I’ll have to leave out because I had some abuse that I really don’t want to talk about. But I was born into a family of four brothers and me. I had three older brothers and then I had a baby brother. And I wanted a sister so bad. But it never seemed to work out that I could have a sister. And my father used to read the story of Baby Ray, how the tree gave him an apple, and the cow gave milk and all that sort of stuff. That was my favorite story. And the reason they were reading it that way was because we were all ours. 0 389 Early Church Experience And I remember the church that we went to would not accept my father’s -- in those days we had to have church letters to take from one church to another to recommend that we become members. And [00:07:00] they did not want to accept my father’s church letter because he wrote insurance -- he wrote out the papers for insurance. He didn’t do life insurance, which would have been a complete no-no, but he did other kinds of insurance. But I remember that one of my mother’s first cousins -- that they would invite us into their home and we would eat with them and things like that. 0 541 Experiences with Westboro Baptist Church And I think I said that we traveled on a bus down to Philadelphia to be part of Witness Our Welcome, which was a welcome for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in the neighborhood. And this professor -- I wish I could think of his name right now -- we ate in their home and were good friends of theirs. And he came to the bus door and he said, “Roberta, Fred Phelps’ crew is over here protesting and saying their terrible, hateful things about fags.” He said, “But you don’t pay one bit of attention to them.” He said, “Do you see this line of gay and lesbian people?” And they were just lined shoulder-to-shoulder all the way from the bus into the building. 0 862 Getting Involved in the LGBTQ+ Community Well, my brother died with AIDS. Have I said that before? I’m not sure. And that’s a long story of how I learned that he was a gay man. Like I said, I knew that people called him a sissy but at that age I didn’t understand [00:15:00] what that was all about. And I remember -- like a vision coming to me when I was debating what to do, I felt these stories needed to be told because we had been going to Laurelville, where our church had a campground. And we were in groups of people where the stories of these people were told. It was called Connecting Families. 0 1137 Harold's Early Life That’s never been a problem for me. And I can’t explain why except I’m convinced that God’s love reaches out to everyone and with God there’s no respecter of persons. And so that’s been part of my life. And the community that I was born in was Northeast Missouri -- near Hannibal, Missouri. And my grandfather was a bishop and a minister and my dad was a deacon in a very small family congregation in Northeast Missouri. And I also grew up with a great fear of God and was never sure that I would ever make it to heaven. 0 1447 The Mennonite Denomination JM: Tell us about your denomination. &#13 ; HK: Oh, it’s Mennonite. &#13 ; JM: And because we’re recording this conversation for the future what are the basic tenets of the Mennonite faith?&#13 ; 0 1542 Harold's Early Views on the LGBTQ+ Community What were your feelings when you were a young man about the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality?&#13 ; HK: I don’t know. As a young man I -- well, homosexuality was unacceptable from any angle you wanted to think about it. And people that I knew, if they knew of anybody that was completely negative. And I never -- well I don’t know when -- I guess homosexuality didn’t become a real part of my life until we were a part of PFLAG in Allentown. 0 1674 PFLAG Tell us what PFLAG is.&#13 ; HK: You could probably tell better.&#13 ; RK: Well PFLAG is an organization of parents -- let’s see -- of lesbians, bisexual. Let me start again. PFLAG stands for parents of gay, bisexual, transgender, and what’s the other one -- and families who love them. That’s the way I titled the first book I wrote on that. But the reason we wanted to go to PFLAG goes back to how we became interested in the needs of gay and lesbian people. And that goes way back to when we found out that my brother was gay. 0 1741 Experience Having a Gay Sibling with AIDS And that goes way back to when we found out that my brother was gay. And that was really a blow to find out that he was gay. We knew that he was sick with something. We didn’t know what. And my family thought, oh my, Roberta won’t be able to take it. Anyhow I would say, “What’s wrong with Ray. Please tell me.” And they wouldn’t tell me anything. And finally somebody said, “You’ll know when you get there.” And I thought what am I going to know when I get there. And I really wasn’t acquainted with any gay and bisexual, transgender people. And so when we got to the hospital my brother just older than I and his wife came from Kansas where they lived near Hutchinson.&#13 ; 0 2278 Accepting the LGBTQ+ Community into the Church nd that was hard too because after he died and we went back to our home church for the memorial service -- this very judgmental place -- no that was the one we were at at -- well, anyhow, there we had to sit and hear the message about Ray among these people. And yet I knew that God was a God of forgiveness and I wanted to be that kind of a person. And right now I’m kind of drawing a blank. Oh, I told you about how I told God, “You know, I can’t do this.” 0 2759 Connecting Families JM: Can you tell me a little bit more about the meeting that you went to? Where was that meeting?&#13 ; RK: The Witness Our Welcome?&#13 ; JM: The one where you first had contact with LGBT people.&#13 ; RK: Yeah. Well, would that have been when we went to Connecting Families, the first time?&#13 ; HK: Probably. 0 2838 Moving in With Daughter RK: It was in Laurelville. Because we had moved back here. Our daughter upstairs had worked in a retirement home. And she had said to us when we were still living in Indiana -- she said, “Mom and Dad, I don’t want you to go to a retirement home.” She said, “They don’t get good care there always.” She said, “When you’re ready to retire I want you to come and we’ll buy a house together and you help us raise our kids and then we’ll take care of you when you get older.” And so that was the agreement that we had then. And it’s a long story that I don’t really want told online. This is just for you. Because I don’t want them involved in this story in any way that’s going to come out in the media.&#13 ; 0 3219 Accepting the LGBTQ+ Community Into the Church cont. And back to church acceptance. At Perkasie they did not want to accept them. But then as time went on they finally became more open and welcoming. But we still weren’t able to really share our stories too much. But then we were a part of this group that was trying to be a welcoming group and starting to investigate letting them be a part of the church. And then the pastor -- we had two women pastors -- and she called us, asked if we’d come in to the library during the week she wanted to visit with us. 0 4194 Early Years of Relationship MF: How did the two of you meet?&#13 ; HK: We met at our church college in Kansas. I can remember so vividly. Our dining hall was in the basement of the girls’ dormitory and it was morning breakfast and she came down the stairs from the -- where students lived for the breakfast -- men and women both. 0 4425 Witnessing in Mixed-Faith Audiences Okay. As we continued over the years to support gay and lesbian people and this community of faith we had many opportunities to share in mixed audiences. And I was asked to speak quite a few places. And I remember especially the time -- I believe it was a Reading, Pennsylvania where we were speaking at a church. And all of a sudden I realized that there were going to be atheist people in that community. 0 4612 Interacting with Atheists JM: You spoke, Roberta, about atheists wanting to tell their stories to you at the table. What common features did they have in their dinner conversation with you?&#13 ; RK: Well, I guess they just told me of how they were raised. And it was just their stories. 0 4797 Growing Together HK: Well, I’ll give Roberta this praise. I’m just so fortunate that she’s my wife and that we’ve been able to share this journey together. And it’s hard for me to believe that I’ve come from where I was born to where I am now and to feel so different about people different from ourselves. And I think the statement in the scriptures where it says God is love. Well if God is love then I can’t do anything else or less. 0 4908 Recommendations for Further Stories who can you think of that we might want to talk with that has a story like yours about being allies, advocates for people who are LGBT?&#13 ; RK: Well, do you see those pictures over there? That’s our gay gallery. And our granddaughter over there --&#13 ; HK: And the only granddaughter we have.&#13 ; RK: Well, the -- yeah, the only one by birth. When she was a little girl, twelve years old, she would bring her laptop down to sit at our table to tell grandpa and I how wrong we were in our welcome of gay and lesbian people. 0 5375 Final Thoughts JM: We are so grateful to have this time to talk with you today and to hear your story and to preserve your story for generations to come. The material will be stored professionally at Muhlenberg College. It will be available for academic research. And I believe there will be people in the future who will sit and watch this conversation with you. And I think their hearts will be gladdened. So thank you so much for the time today.&#13 ; 0 MovingImage Roberta and Harold Krieder discuss their activism and work as allies to LGBTQ+ communities. They describe how the death of Roberta’s beloved brother due to HIV started them on the path toward advocacy for LGBTQ+ people. They go on to discuss their work within the Mennonite Church to make their congregation inclusive of LGBTQ+ people, their work with Witness our Welcome, and their public advocacy for LGBTQ+ communities in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. Roberta Krieder also discusses her published books, which sought to document religious trauma for LGBTQ+ people and to encourage religious organizations to be inclusive of LGBTQ+ members.&#13 ; Kreider_20200111_transcript JOHN MARQUETTE: My name is John Marquette, and I'm here with Roberta Showalter Kreider and Harold Kreider to talk about their life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are in Sellersville, Pennsylvania and it's January the 11th, 2020. Our videographers are Danielle Del Priore and Mary Foltz. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with us today. To start, can you please state your full name and spell it for me. And we'll start with you Roberta. ROBERTA KREIDER: Okay. It's Roberta Hope Showalter Kreider. JM: And can you spell that? RK: R-O-B-E-R-T-A, H-O-P-E, S-H-O-W-A-L-T-E-R, K-R-E-I-D-E-R. JM: And now you Harold. HAROLD KREIDER: Okay, it's H-A-R-O-L-D. And my middle name is Glen -- G-L-E-N. And last name is Kreider -- K-R-E-I-D-E-R. JM: Roberta, will you please share your birth date with us? RK: Yes, it's April the 3rd of 1926. HK: And mine is May 3, 1924. JM: Thank you both. Will you both confirm that you've signed a consent form for this interview? RK: I did. HK: And I do. JM: Thank you. Let's start with the very beginning. Roberta, would you tell me about the early years of your life. Describe your childhood. RK: Okay, but a-- part of it I'll have to leave out because I had some abuse that I really don't want to talk about. But I was born into a family of four brothers and me. I had three older brothers and then I had a baby brother. And I wanted a sister so bad. But it never seemed to work out that I could have a sister. And my father used to read the story of Baby Ray, how the tree gave him an apple, and the cow gave milk and all that sort of stuff. That was my favorite story. And the reason they were reading it that way was because we were all ours. My oldest brother Robert, and then Richard, and Russell and me and then Ray. And when Ray was ready to be born they read -- my dad used to read to me a lot that book about Baby Ray. And so they were preparing me to be disappointed because all we seemed to have was boys. And so I remember so well sitting on the end of my mother's hospital bed. And they put this little baby in my arms and they said, "This is your baby brother and you can name him." And I said, "I want to name him Baby Ray." And so they said, "Okay." And, so, on the birth certificate it says Baby Ray Edward Showalter. Edward was after my mother's youngest brother. And they were quite sure that I would pick the name that they wanted for this [video?]. And I remember once, I wanted a sister so bad that I dressed him up in my clothes and I went around the neighborhood and I kept introducing him as my baby sister. And, of course, people could just smile at that because they could see what was evident. So, we grew up together and my father had been a bridge-builder and a farmer. I don't know what all he had done. But when I was born they lived on a farm that was just about a mile south of West Liberty Mennonite Church, which was near Inman, Kansas. And -- I'm drawing a blank here for a minute. Anyhow, whenever I was interviewed I'd always say that my father had been a farmer and all of this. But then he was president of a small-town bank at Yoder, Kansas. And we used to laugh and say that Yoder, Kansas was like a wide space in the road because it didn't have many people in it. And a lot of them were related to us. But there was a depot and a railroad track that went through the town. And I remember being -- going over there to see a friend of mine and playing with her. And I remember the church that we went to would not accept my father's -- in those days we had to have church letters to take from one church to another to recommend that we become members. And they did not want to accept my father's church letter because he wrote insurance -- he wrote out the papers for insurance. He didn't do life insurance, which would have been a complete no-no, but he did other kinds of insurance. But I remember that one of my mother's first cousins -- that they would invite us into their home and we would eat with them and things like that. But the other church members wanted to shun because he wrote insurance. And this church was a church made up of Amish Mennonites. They came from the Amish and they had become Mennonite. And they were a very judgmental group. And it's hard to know how to describe them other than I grew up in this church of judging other people by the things they did and said that didn't correspond with what I thought the bible said. And so I regret that kind of a childhood that I grew up in. But I'm thankful that in the years that have followed that God has shown me that God is no respecter -- or what do I want to say? -- he treats us all alike. We are all part of God's creation and we're all sacred to him as his children. And that's what I believe now and I have believed through most of my life. And I think I said that we traveled on a bus down to Philadelphia to be part of Witness Our Welcome, which was a welcome for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in the neighborhood. And this professor -- I wish I could think of his name right now -- we ate in their home and were good friends of theirs. And he came to the bus door and he said, "Roberta, Fred Phelps' crew is over here protesting and saying their terrible, hateful things about fags." He said, "But you don't pay one bit of attention to them." He said, "Do you see this line of gay and lesbian people?" And they were just lined shoulder-to-shoulder all the way from the bus into the building. He said, "We're here to make sure that he cannot get to you and you just walk down that path and we'll keep you safe." And that's what they did. JM: Can you describe a little bit more about the Fred Phelps Church and how they felt in regard to the work that you intended to do? RK: I also have a book in my kindle that's written by Megan Phelps-Roper. And she is a daughter of Fred Phelps -- no a granddaughter. And her story is told in that book. And I was so glad that I could read her story. It's very descriptive of the way that church acted and hated people so bad. But I thought it was really significant that our gay and lesbian friends were willing to take the brunt and to see that we were safe all the way into there. JM: Where was this church located? RK: Do you know where it was located? I don't know. HK: You mean in Philadelphia? RK: Yeah. HK: It was on the Western edge of Philadelphia. Wayne, I believe, was the name of the suburb. Wayne, Pennsylvania. RK: Yeah. And it was a Baptist church there. HK: Central Baptist. RK: And I had -- after I did stories and books I had stories from people there too. But it was just so touching how they wanted to be sure that if any hatred coming from this Phelps group or any violence of any kind that they were going to be sure that we were safe. And that was very touching to me to know that these friends cared so much about whether or not we were safe. And this book -- Unfollow -- was written by Phelps' granddaughter who came to know that their attitude was completely wrong. JM: The name of this church is on the tip of my tongue and I can't quite pinpoint what it is. RK: You mean where we had the wo-- JM: No, the Phelps church. RK: In Topeka, Kansas. JM: What is the name of that church? RK: Oh, what's the name of it Harold? HK: [Not sure?]. JM: West-- RK: Westside. JM: Westboro? RK: Westboro Baptist Church. And it was mainly their purpose to just spew out hate of every kind toward lesbian and gay, bisexual, transgender people. And they called the people fags. And the people who were of that orientation, they called them fags. And if you go to -- I mean you can find this book -- Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roper. And she is the granddaughter telling the story about this church. JM: How did you and Harold develop a response to that kind of hatred that you experienced? HK: (laughs) Boy. I guess it was because we began to learn to know gay and lesbian people. RK: Well, my brother died with AIDS. Have I said that before? I'm not sure. And that's a long story of how I learned that he was a gay man. Like I said, I knew that people called him a sissy but at that age I didn't understand what that was all about. And I remember -- like a vision coming to me when I was debating what to do, I felt these stories needed to be told because we had been going to Laurelville, where our church had a campground. And we were in groups of people where the stories of these people were told. It was called Connecting Families. And I remember so well that as I was thinking about all this and I stood in here in the bedroom and I had hold of that treadmill and he was in the bathroom -- I was in there alone. And I said, "Oh God, if I try to tell these stories -- I've never written a book and I don't have a computer -- but if I try to tell these stories," I said, "my friends are going to hate me." And it was just like I had a vision at that time and I heard God's voice say to me, "Roberta, you are just as important to me as the greatest preacher that ever lived." And I thought, oh. I thought about it a little bit. And then he said, "And now look out there. You see that man lying out there in the gutter?" He said, "That drunk man lying in the gutter is just as important to me as you are." And I thought, oh, that's something to think about. And I remember thinking I don't even have a computer, how on Earth am I going to do this. And I was part of a -- well -- no, that -- I couldn't have had that in the computer. But we had attended these Connecting Families weekends. And we heard them telling their stories there. And the very first one I attended was the one that Peggy Campolo went to. And she is a very adamant supporter of gay and lesbians. And, of course, that was many years ago. We moved back here in '83 and we still lived in Indiana then. And so anyhow I tried to think what to do about all this. And finally, I remember saying, "Well, God, if you will lead me I will go." And yet that still wasn't enough. I know we continued to go to these Connecting Families weekends. We went every Spring when they were held for, oh, I don't know how many years. And then, that very first one I told my story about how I found out that I had a gay brother. And I need to stop for a little bit. Okay? JM: Sure, that's fine. I would've-- (break in audio) HK: [Before?] she's out. That's never been a problem for me. And I can't explain why except I'm convinced that God's love reaches out to everyone and with God there's no respecter of persons. And so that's been part of my life. And the community that I was born in was Northeast Missouri -- near Hannibal, Missouri. And my grandfather was a bishop and a minister and my dad was a deacon in a very small family congregation in Northeast Missouri. And I also grew up with a great fear of God and was never sure that I would ever make it to heaven. And then I -- JM: Do I -- HK: -- went through Goshen College and also seminary. And I was ordained minister by that time. JM: I think I hear Roberta coming back and if (break in audio) JM: -- our interview with Harold Kreider and Roberta Kreider on January the 11th, 2020 at their home in Sellersville. And my name is John Marquette and the videographers are Danielle DelPriore and Mary Foltz. Roberta, I'd like to ask if we can hold your portion of the story for a moment and then talk with Harold about his childhood and how he became involved with you. And then I'd like to see how we can bring both of these stories together and bring us to the current moment. So Harold, tell us about your childhood. HK: What was the question? JM: Tell us about your early years and your childhood? HK: I'm the oldest of ten children in our family. And my father tried to teach me this bedtime prayer -- now lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to take -- or when I die I pray the Lord my soul to take. And he would spank me and I was only four or five years old then -- spank me because I had a hard time learning that prayer to be able to repeat it back to him. And from that day on I had a fear of my dad and I never got over that all our lives. And so I never did experience a really happy home. In fact, my father gave my mother a silent treatment for several days -- wouldn't speak to her. And she finally suffered a nervous breakdown because of that kind of conduct. So I made up my mind that my home would never be that way. And I met Robert at our church college in Hesston, Kansas near Wichita. And there I fell in love with her (laughs) and I've been in love with her ever since. But anyway that's part of my experience. And I'm also a graduate of Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana. And also Goshen College Biblical Seminary. I'm also a graduate of that and have a been a ordained minister since 1950. So my experience has been varied. I've been a pastor of three congregations and interim pastor of our home congregation here in Perkasie. Of course I'm completely retired now. That's been my experience for most of my life. JM: Tell us about your denomination. HK: Oh, it's Mennonite. JM: And because we're recording this conversation for the future what are the basic tenets of the Mennonite faith? HK: The basic? JM: Tenets. RK: What do they believe? HK: Well, the bible has been our main textbook. And tried to -- at least for myself -- I made that my standard of life. And I tried to live what I believed. And also made it a point to accept people for who they were and what they were and not be a judge. [But?] I think there's a scripture in Matthew where Jesus says "Judge not that you be not judged." And so I've made that a guide for my life too. JM: What were your feelings when you were a young man about the Bible's teaching on homosexuality? HK: I don't know. As a young man I -- well, homosexuality was unacceptable from any angle you wanted to think about it. And people that I knew, if they knew of anybody that was completely negative. And I never -- well I don't know when -- I guess homosexuality didn't become a real part of my life until we were a part of PFLAG in Allentown. (inaudible) And her brother dying of AIDS. And he was a homosexual. And it took -- and that happened in 1948 -- or 1984 when he died. And it took ten years after that before we became advocates of persons of that nature. JM: In the process of selecting people for this project we have been looking for people who have been allies of and advocates for the LGBT community in the Lehigh Valley. And you mentioned PFLAG in the Lehigh Valley. Tell us what PFLAG is. HK: You could probably tell better. RK: Well PFLAG is an organization of parents -- let's see -- of lesbians, bisexual. Let me start again. PFLAG stands for parents of gay, bisexual, transgender, and what's the other one -- and families who love them. That's the way I titled the first book I wrote on that. But the reason we wanted to go to PFLAG goes back to how we became interested in the needs of gay and lesbian people. And that goes way back to when we found out that my brother was gay. And that was really a blow to find out that he was gay. We knew that he was sick with something. We didn't know what. And my family thought, oh my, Roberta won't be able to take it. Anyhow I would say, "What's wrong with Ray. Please tell me." And they wouldn't tell me anything. And finally somebody said, "You'll know when you get there." And I thought what am I going to know when I get there. And I really wasn't acquainted with any gay and bisexual, transgender people. And so when we got to the hospital my brother just older than I and his wife came from Kansas where they lived near Hutchinson. HK: We went to there. RK: Where I grew up. No, they came. We met together at Ray and Ann's house. HK: Yeah. What I meant to say that we were living here and we went to Chicago. RK: Yes. But we hadn't gone. I mean, we went to Chicago because we knew that Ray was dying and we wanted to see him before he died. And I wanted to know what he was dying from. And people would just say, "Well you'll know when you get there." And I thought, well what am I going to know when I get there and what's all this about. And so when we met at the hospital they gave us gowns to put on and masks. And I thought, well what does he have that I'm going to get or they're afraid I'm going to get. And I was so dumb for all this. And then when we went up to his bedside to say hello to him, he said, "I have a sad story to tell you." And I thought, oh, okay. I guess I did know about lesbian and gay people because I know when he said that I thought, oh, okay, he's a nurse so somehow he's contracted AIDS. And I said -- I went up and took his hand to listen to him and he said, "And I have no one to blame but myself." And when he said that my hopes went way down. I thought, what's he talking about. And then he said, "And I don't want you to tell anyone." And I said, "Well, Ray, our daughters are intelligent people." And I said, "If we go back and tell them we don't know they're going to figure out something. I said we'll have to tell them the truth because I can't do less than tell them the truth." And he said, "Well, okay." And you could tell he was very ashamed of all this. And so -- to make a long story short -- he was in a hospital way up North of Chicago. And the church they had been part of was Community Mennonite and that was down in kind of the center of Chicago. And we had been there for church with them and things like that before too. And on the way up there that was when I said to his wife who was driving the car. She turned her head and we were sitting in the back seat I guess. And she said, "Roberta, what did you want to know about Ray?" And I said, "Well, Ann. Nobody will tell me anything." I said, "Is he dying?" And she said, "Yes, Roberta, he's dying." And I said, "Well, why? What's he dying from?" And that was when she said "Well you'll know when you get there." And so we bounced along and drove up to the hospital and met my brother and his wife. And he didn't tell me what he thought he was suspecting either. And so they gave us these gowns and everything to put on and went into the room. And when Ray said, "I have a sad story to tell you." And I thought, oh, yeah, he's a nurse so something's happened here. And he said, "I have AIDS. And I have no one to blame but myself." And then my hopes went way down because I thought, well, there's some story here that I've not been told. I don't know what this is. And so I went up to his bedside and took hold of his hand. And I said, "Ray, God is a God of forgiveness." I said, "This whole week I've been working on a talk that I was supposed to give at church. And we went to Perkasie Mennonite at that time. And I said, "I've been working on a talk that I was supposed to give to church in the park on forgiveness." And I said, "I had to ask a friend to read it today because I couldn't be there." But I said, "You know, God is a God of forgiveness." And, yes, he agreed with that. But anyhow, can I digress just a little bit back to when Ray -- we were talking about his birth certificate and I said that when they let me name him I said I wanted to name him Baby Ray Edward Showalter. And he spoke up and he said, "Yeah. I have you to blame for that. It's on my birth certificate." I said, "Really?" He said, "Yes. It's written that way on my birth certificate -- Baby Ray Edward Showalter." And had to deal with that always. Well, anyhow, I wanted to talk to him alone because I wanted to ask him some questions and things. And finally I said to his wife Ann, "Do you mind if Harold and I can be alone with Ray for a little while?" And she looked at me sort of strange and then she said, "Okay." So she walked out of the room and that was when I tried to talk to him about God forgiving and he said -- see, how was that -- oh I told you that he said he didn't want us to tell anyone. And that was when I said, "Well I have to tell them because they are intelligent people and they know we came up here because you're dying. And they have to have a reason for why you're dying." So anyhow. Then, the more I talked to him he said, "Oh" -- when we were alone with him -- he said, "Oh, Roberta. I'm so glad you came." He said, "You know, as a nurse I used to think that visitors got in the way. And I didn't have time for them when I was taking care of patients." He said, "But it means so much to me that you drove all the way up here to be with me when I'm dying. And you didn't even know what was wrong." And so we just had a really good heart-to-heart chat with each other there that day. And then we came back home and waited for the call to come that he had died and that we were to go for a memorial service. And that was hard too because after he died and we went back to our home church for the memorial service -- this very judgmental place -- no that was the one we were at at -- well, anyhow, there we had to sit and hear the message about Ray among these people. And yet I knew that God was a God of forgiveness and I wanted to be that kind of a person. And right now I'm kind of drawing a blank. Oh, I told you about how I told God, "You know, I can't do this." And then what God said to me about the people. So I've often wondered if I wouldn't have had a gay brother, would I have been able to open my mind and to accept them into the church. At that time the church at Perkasie where we were members then -- we go to Salford now with our grandson and his family. But I've wondered if I would have been able to accept him. But the people at Perkasie Mennonite they didn't want to hear anything about gays and lesbians. There was no place for them to tell their story, no place for them to share in any meaningful way or give their testimony. And finally I said to Harold after we had been to some meeting that we went to like Witness Our Welcome or something. And I said, "Harold, you and I don't have any children at home anymore that can be affected by hatred." So I said, "I know that we're not welcome any longer at Perkasie Mennonite Church. They don't want us there. And they -- by all means -- have let us know that we're not to share in sharing time." And I said, "But you know what, I really feel that every time we walk in that door we're making a statement. And I really feel that God wants you and I to just walk in there each Sunday and we don't have to say anything. We'll just be there." And so that's what we agreed that we were going to do. And I remember that we came back from a Witness Our Welcome thing and we just wanted to share so bad the things that we had heard there about being a welcoming church and how we need to welcome all people and let God be the judge. And, yeah, we weren't supposed to say anything. And we agreed together that we were going to continue to go even if we weren't welcome there. And so that's what we did. And then our grandson, Luke who -- he and his partner have many apartments in Indiana University up at Indiana, Pennsylvania and in Bloomsburg. And they have rented these apartments to students. They will be giving those up pretty soon but that's not part of the story. So anyhow I often wondered if I wouldn't have had a gay brother would I have been able to accept people. And after he told his story I waited for quite a while. And we kept going to Connecting Families once a year and listened to the stories. And I remember so well the morning that I was sitting in the front row on the right-hand side and after people would tell their stories and they would be affirmed. And I heard God speaking to me and finally I said, "Okay, God. I'll go if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart." And then how was I going to do this because I didn't have a computer -- didn't even know how to use one. I had a good typewriter. And so his boss -- he worked part time after he moved back here and he was retired for a contractor from our church at that time. And he and his wife had taken us to some gay and lesbian meeting. And we knew that they were on that side. And he said, "Roberta, you go down to this address in Souderton Shopping Center and he -- HK: (inaudible) RK: Huh? HK: Was it? RK: Yeah it was. And he said, "You go to this man -- this young man and you tell him I sent you and I want him to find a good computer for you to use." And so I said, "Okay." So I went down -- we both did. And I went into there and I told him that John had sent me and he said that you would help me find a good computer and show me how to use it because I have never used a computer. I've only used a typewriter. And he said, "Sure. I'd be glad to." And so he showed me. And when I told him what it was for -- because I wanted to be able to write stories that these people would send me so we could put them together in a book of stories so people could hear from their own lips what it was like to be born that way -- and he looked at me and he said, "I'll be glad to help you in any way I can." And I came to believe then that he was a gay man and that he was very happy to help me to get a computer and to get going in this work that I felt was so important -- that their stories needed to be told. But like I said before I wondered, could I, would I have been accepting if I didn't have a brother who died with AIDS. But I hope that I would have been and that by now with all the stories around that I would have been able to accept them. And I think maybe I would have. I don't know. JM: Can you tell me a little bit more about the meeting that you went to? Where was that meeting? RK: The Witness Our Welcome? JM: The one where you first had contact with LGBT people. RK: Yeah. Well, would that have been when we went to Connecting Families, the first time? HK: Probably. RK: Well Harold and I wanted to learn to know more about these people after my brother died with AIDS. And so we decided we would go to one of these weekends. And so we drove and I remember that when we came up to the place where you register somebody parked our car for us. Anyhow, they were very warm and welcoming to us. And that was when we actually heard the stories of these people and what it was like to be born a gay person. And, like I said, I've wondered. It took me ten years before I was ready to write their stories. JM: What state was this in? RK: Pennsylvania. JM: This was in Pennsylvania. RK: It was in Laurelville. Because we had moved back here. Our daughter upstairs had worked in a retirement home. And she had said to us when we were still living in Indiana -- she said, "Mom and Dad, I don't want you to go to a retirement home." She said, "They don't get good care there always." She said, "When you're ready to retire I want you to come and we'll buy a house together and you help us raise our kids and then we'll take care of you when you get older." And so that was the agreement that we had then. JM: If this is something that you would prefer not be a part of the work that we're doing today it may be better that we leave that portion to one side and maybe talk about it later. And think more about the contributions that you made in the Lehigh Valley. And how -- RK: Well -- HK: (inaudible) JM: This is about the time -- because we have to change the camera -- this is a good time to take a break. Would you mind we take a break now? RK: Okay. JM: Okay we're going to conclude for a moment and we'll be back sh-- (break in audio) JM: the interview with Roberta Kreider and Harold Kreider in Sellersville, Pennsylvania on January the 11th, 2020. And where we let off was you're talking about your relocation to Sellersville in the home of your daughter and your agreement with your daughter that you would live together and you would help them raise their children and they would help you when you needed to live in the latter part of your life not in a nursing home or in a retirement facility. Does that help you? Does that give you a position? RK: Yeah. And they didn't have money to buy a house and we had a house to sell in Indiana. And so we sold our house in Pennsylvania and used it to help buy this house. But this house was a real dump. The person who had lived here had been a roofer and he just dumped all his trash out there in the backyard. And so it was full of trash. And -- let's see -- was it? -- the stone wasn't pointed was it? HK: No. RK: No, it was just kind of crumbling stone and -- HK: Well plaster. It was covered with plaster but a lot of it had fallen off. It was all (inaudible). RK: So, anyhow, we needed to do something to make this house respectable. We have a book -- it must be upstairs -- of the before and after pictures of what it looked like before and what it looks like today. And we had a fairly nice house out in Pennsylvania -- I mean in Indiana. And I remember when I was jumping on the bouncer -- what do you call it? What do you call those round--HK: Trampoline. RK: -- yeah. On a small trampoline that we had. And I used to use that for exercise in Indiana before we came back here. And I would think about how I had seen this house -- or, no, they sent us drawings of what the rooms were like. And so I had figured out where furniture was going to go and all that. And it was so much different when I actually saw it I could hardly believe it. But anyhow, when we first moved -- well, I came back to help them with their first baby. And we lived in the room above our bedroom -- or I did -- for that month that I was here to help them. And so when I was here when the baby came first -- or, anyhow -- I had figured out how we were going to arrange that room. No, that was when the second child came. And Luke, the little guy, he had come into the room where I had my stuff and he said, "Oh, Grandma, it's just getting cozier and cozier in here." And he was so tickled that we were going to move back here to live with them. And they had a big sign made and he was dancing up and down when the truck came in and when we drove in behind it. And it had a big sign, "Welcome home Ma and Pa." And so they really made us feel very welcome. But that's another whole story that I don't want told on the video here. But anyhow, growing up, all of the children are gone now and married and in homes of their own. And I tell Luke -- who has our power of attorney, our oldest grandson. And I tell him that he's the in-between family now like we used to be in between the grandparents and the grandchildren. And back to church acceptance. At Perkasie they did not want to accept them. But then as time went on they finally became more open and welcoming. But we still weren't able to really share our stories too much. But then we were a part of this group that was trying to be a welcoming group and starting to investigate letting them be a part of the church. And then the pastor -- we had two women pastors -- and she called us, asked if we'd come in to the library during the week she wanted to visit with us. And what she wanted to tell us was that there were people in the church that were very unhappy that we were advocating letting these people be a part of the church just like everybody else. And that they didn't like that. And I -- oh I know -- we just came back from one of those big meetings of Witness Our Welcome and had been really urged there to share. And I can't remember the statement of what they would say. But anyhow -- oh, if one isn't welcome, none are welcome and that we need to welcome everybody. And so that's what I wanted to do. And then when a friend of ours who was gay and we knew she was a lesbian and she had a partner and she had been asked to bring the morning message. And they didn't know that she was a lesbian. And so I had prayed and said, "God, if I am to share in sharing time then please help me to know for sure that you want me to do it. Because I don't want to make dissension here in the church." And sure enough, when got -- after she had brought her message and we got to sharing time and the leader said, "We have extra time this morning, so there's plenty of time to share." And I thought, oh, okay, I guess that's what that means. And so I finally stood and asked for the mic and I shared what we had heard in this Witness Our Welcome meeting. And that week then she called us into the library because she wanted to talk with us. And she said people were very unhappy with the things you shared on Sunday in sharing time. And I said, "Yes. How many?" And she said four people had been unhappy and had complained to her that we were able to share this in sharing time at church. And I said, well that's interesting. I said, "I had prayed about whether or not I was to share and when the leader got up and said we have extra time this morning I took it to mean that God was saying to me go ahead and share what you learned this week. And so that's why I shared." And I said, "And tell me," I said, "Those people that complained. Why didn't they come to us? Why did they come to you and complain? Why didn't they tell us?" I said, "Would you please when anybody complains to you about what we're doing will you please ask them to come and tell us directly so we can tell them why we're doing what we're doing?" And so we kind of left it that way. But it's interesting that when they finally -- this committee decided okay, we're ready to welcome gay and lesbian people. Now we'll make it known. We'll put it on our website that we're welcoming them to come. So we had a meeting later on of this group that was taking the initiative to start welcoming them. And she said, "Well, nobody's come. We've said they're welcome. We've put it on our website. And nobody comes." And I said, "Oh, can't you see?" I said, "These people were here while we dickered and dockered about whether or not they could be members, what we were going to do with them, whether they could sit together in church, and all that stuff we went through. And then they got discouraged and they went away and up to the Lehigh Valley and they found churches that were welcoming. And they've become members of those churches. And do you think that now when we say the doors are open that they're going to come flocking back here to be members?" I said, "No, it'll have to be people that have never been members before if they're going to welcome them back." And then she said, "But Roberta, we thought you were going to bring them." (laughs) And I guess that's when I said, "Do you think they would come flocking back like that?" So that was a long story but they finally became an open and welcoming church. And about that time our grandson who had gone with us to a meeting over at one of the other Mennonite churches -- another branch of our Mennonite churches. And he had been there for this meeting and anyhow, we were sitting about three rows back from the front and I had to sit at the end because there wasn't any place for my walker and I had to have a walker at that time. And I looked up in the row in front and there was a lesbian couple. And they turned around and the woman said to me, "Roberta, do you remember us?" And I looked at her and I said, "I remember your faces but I can't say your names." And then they said their names and what church they were going to and said that they were there to welcome the man who was speaking to invite him to their church to share their story so that they could become a welcoming congregation where they were. And I remember that night as this man shared the story of being gay and what all. And it was just so real of what we had gone through and I just burst out crying. And I just couldn't hold the tears back. And I just sobbed and sobbed. And my grandson sitting there didn't know what to make of me sobbing like that. And so when we went out and we sat in the car a little bit before we went home and he had the car idling. And he looked at me and he said, "Grandma," he said, "I don't know what to do." And I said, "Well Luke, God will show you if there's something that you're supposed to do." I said, "You just keep an open mind and heart and God will show you." And so then we had been having a group that met in our home for gay and lesbian people. Because when one set of books came out one of the gay men came and helped unload it and he and I talked about what can we do to get Mennonites to welcome these people. And to get Mennonite gay and lesbian people to not be afraid to come and tell their stories. And so that's when we decided to send out a welcome to have people meet in our home. And for -- oh I don't know how many years -- we had gay and lesbian groups meeting in our homes. And they would tell their stories and we would share together. And we couldn't -- well, different people would bring refreshments and it was just a good time together. And then after oh I don't know how many years I said to Harold one time, "You know, I think that maybe it's time that this group has served its purpose." I said, "I think that these people -- a lot of them -- are just coming out of welcome to us because we've always welcomed them. And they're afraid to move on. But I think that they need to move on in their lives." And I said, "We need to free them to do that. Don't you think?" And so we agreed. And so at the next meeting I said something to them about we don't want you to feel that you're tied to this group in any way. And if God is calling you in some other way we want you to know that we will release you gladly. And so they talked about it and they said, "Yes, it's time that we move on, but we would like to meet twice a year to keep in touch with one another and what's going on. And so that's how that went about. But I remember that Luke had said, "What shall I do." And so the time came that they decided they were going to come to Perkasie Mennonite Church and be a part of our group because we were welcoming. And so they came on a Sunday and shared during sharing time that they would like to be a part of our group because they wanted to welcome gay and lesbian people. And then that week I got an email from Luke and he said, "Grandma, what do you know about Salford Mennonite Church?" And so I wrote back and said, "Luke, if you want to know if I think it would be a better fit for you and your family than Perkasie, even though it pains me greatly to let you go I feel that I have to say yes because your kids go to school with kids from these different schools and they'll have a lot more friends to meet with them here and make them welcome than they ever would have at Perkasie." And so, I say, "Yes, we release you to go there." And so they started going. And then there was a special meeting and this fella who had a gay son and he had married his son and his partner and had raised a ruckus in the church he was in. But he and I had stories in a booklet together. And I wanted so bad to meet him. But then I realized why they protected us from him that none of us could meet him, he could only tell his story at the front of the church. But on that Sunday we were sitting in the handicapped section. And the minute church was out a gay man came up to me and he said, "Roberta, I want to meet you." He said, "I'm a gay man and I am so thankful for what you've done" or something like that. So that was interesting. And we've had occasion to meet others. And because of the acoustics in that church we have discovered that when we sit clear at the back that we can hear without any devices in our ears or anything. And so that's what we started doing is sitting back there. And Luke and his wife Mandy take turns sitting behind us. And if I have to go out I just have to motion and they will see that I get to go out. But I usually manage to stay until the end. But we've been made to feel very welcome there and they want to also hear my story and there are people there praying for us today because I told them that we had friends coming from PFLAG and they would be asking for our story and making a video of it. And I said, "I feel very inadequate for this." And I wanted them to pray. And it's very interesting that this morning the woman who supports us there in trying to get the church periodical to us, she had come to the door. She hadn't been there and heard what I said last Sunday and so she didn't realize that we were going to be doing this this morning. And so she was very pleased to hear that you were going to be here to interview us today. So, that's the way things are happening and I have to feel that just like that morning when I was debating if it was -- I knew somebody needed to write these stories -- MF: Pause. RK: And I didn't -- (break in audio) RK: I remember sitting in that front row and they were singing, "Here I am Lord. Is it I Lord. I've heard you calling in the night. I will go Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart." And from then on it was my responsibility. And it's amazing how people latched on and helped and gave me stories. And just that I knew that it wasn't my project but it was parents and families and friends -- all of us doing this together. JM: Roberta, we need to take a pause right now and when we come back I'd like to ask a couple more questions about the work that you've done. So we're going to take a break right here. RK: Okay. (break in audio) HK: Married a woman like she is. (laughs) JM: She's a pistol. HK: Yeah. (laughs) (inaudible) JM: She really, really is a pistol. HK: Yeah. MF: Did you tell them how -- how did the two of you meet? HK: Pardon? MF: How did the two of you meet? HK: We met at our church college in Kansas. I can remember so vividly. Our dining hall was in the basement of the girls' dormitory and it was morning breakfast and she came down the stairs from the -- where students lived for the breakfast -- men and women both. And she had her head all bandaged up for some reason or other. And I thought to myself, there's a person I'd like to take care of. (laughter) And what had happened is they had a class outing and she's up to bat and when she swung the bat her kneecap slid over to the side and she went to the ground. And so she had to be on crutches for a month or more. And I really didn't learn or know her until I was a student myself and the draft was on for World War II. And I'd gotten a notice from the draft board that I had a choice to make. One was my dad had enough units on the farm that I could be deferred. And so I went home and was home three years but finally had to go to camp after that for a year and half. So that's the way that went. And before I was out of camp we -- I had a furlough coming up -- ten-day furlough -- and that's when we got married in '46. Then she went to camp with me. That was Gulfport, Mississippi. And that was quite a change going from Colorado Springs -- I was there a year before we were married and got married on the way to this transfer to Gulfport. And that was a real change. I'd gained nearly fifty pounds in Colorado. And down there I lost it all and I've never gotten it back since. And it was really hot down there. No air conditioning. Sheets would be wet in the morning from sweating. MF: How long were you in Gulfport? HK: Pardon? MF: How long were you in Gulfport? (inaudible) HK: Oh about seven months. Until I was released. The war was over and I was released then. JM: And Harold Kreider. It is Sellersville, Pennsylvania and it is the 11th of January, 2020. And go ahead. RK: Okay. As we continued over the years to support gay and lesbian people and this community of faith we had many opportunities to share in mixed audiences. And I was asked to speak quite a few places. And I remember especially the time -- I believe it was a Reading, Pennsylvania where we were speaking at a church. And all of a sudden I realized that there were going to be atheist people in that community. And I thought, oh God, what am I going to do. And I didn't know how to include them. And then God gave me an answer. And so when I got up to speak I said, "I've been asked to tell my story today. And because it is my story I'll have to tell it the way I lived it. But I want you to know, whoever you are, that I would welcome hearing your stories also. And if there just was enough time I would be glad if I could hear your stories too." And do you know that every time after that one I always prefaced my speeches that way. And every time the very first people to come up to me and welcome me were atheists. And they would say, "Roberta, I really appreciated hearing your story. I'm an atheist." But I think they said first, "I'm an atheist, but I really appreciated hearing your story today. May we eat with you?" And so they would come and sit at the table and eat with us so that we could hear their stories too, because they were gay or lesbian. And so that was a really meaningful part of our journey, I felt. And Harold was able to share then too. But I think I said before that I was always his secretary because he didn't use electronic devices of any kind. HK: Well the reason because I was raised on a farm and my parents were not encouraging my education because it was just too busy. We were dairy farmers and I was up early in the morning and early to bed. And busy in between. JM: You spoke, Roberta, about atheists wanting to tell their stories to you at the table. What common features did they have in their dinner conversation with you? RK: Well, I guess they just told me of how they were raised. And it was just their stories. I don't know how else to tell you. And -- but I thought it was something that I felt God answered my prayer in saying this is a way you can handle it and include them too. And what amazed me was that every time the very first people that came up were always people who said, "Roberta, I'm an atheist, but I was glad to hear your story today." And then wanted to eat with us so that they could share part of their story. So it's just been a really exciting journey. And, like I said, I've wondered if I wouldn't have had a gay brother would I have been able to welcome them. And I hope that by now I could have welcomed them with open arms because I know that our creator has created us all and it's not his will or his purpose that anybody should go to hell. And I don't think there is a literal hell. Although I know that there are people who love to hold that over other people's heads. But I don't do that any longer. HK: Well, I think if there's any hell, people make it for themselves here in this life. And that in the end they're in God's hands and they're not destroyed. God, I don't think, destroys what he creates. So, that's where I'm at. JM: This is a wonderful opportunity here, your story. And I believe I would like to ask you as you think about what the two of you spoke about today if there's anything that maybe you missed that you'd like to share with us now. RK: Do you have anything else that -- HK: What? RK: -- do you have anything else that you want to add? HK: Well, I'll give Roberta this praise. I'm just so fortunate that she's my wife and that we've been able to share this journey together. And it's hard for me to believe that I've come from where I was born to where I am now and to feel so different about people different from ourselves. And I think the statement in the scriptures where it says God is love. Well if God is love then I can't do anything else or less. And I can relate to people of any kind without being judgmental about them. It's just not my business to judge people. Judge not that you be not judged the scriptures also says, and so I've never been happier in my life than I am right now. And I feel so fortunate to have married a woman that is what she is and she has certainly made a better person of myself. JM: When we conclude an interview because this is an ongoing process we always like to say -- before we thank you -- can you think -- who can you think of that we might want to talk with that has a story like yours about being allies, advocates for people who are LGBT? RK: Well, do you see those pictures over there? That's our gay gallery. And our granddaughter over there -- HK: And the only granddaughter we have. RK: Well, the -- yeah, the only one by birth. When she was a little girl, twelve years old, she would bring her laptop down to sit at our table to tell grandpa and I how wrong we were in our welcome of gay and lesbian people. And we just let her [rile?] and then we just answered her as good as we could and let it go. And do you know the time came that we were asked -- or I was asked to come to the Church of the Open Door in Arkansas -- forget the name of the Arkansas. And the purpose was to receive the Peggy Campolo award for -- oh what does it say on there? -- for anyhow, working with the gay and lesbian people or whatever. And by that time we weren't traveling anymore. But they said that she would take care of all travel. She would go with us. And we just follow her. And so that's the way we went down to that church. And I had the story of the pastor and his partner in one of the books. And so when I shared with our granddaughter who is also a counselor and she and I have shared deeply about the things in my background and the abuse that I had and all of that. And at that time she said grandma, that wasn't your fault and you don't feel like it was. And she really had talked to me. But anyhow, one day as I was sitting at the computer getting ready for stories to come, here came this email from her and I said, "Oh Grandpa, oh Harold, come here." I said, "I can't read this out loud without crying." I said, "You'll just have to come and sit here and read it -- what [Anika?] has to say." And she said, "Grandma and Grandpa, do you remember when I was a little girl and I brought my laptop down to convince you how wrong you were?" She said, "I'm so ashamed of that." She said, "Can you ever forgive me?" And so after he read it we [went out?] and I wrote back and I said, "Oh, Anika. We remember that time very well and we always hoped that someday you would be able to see it differently. And so we're so thankful that God has answered our prayers." And then she sent pictures of that time in Arkansas, and of that speaking engagement. And she said, "Grandma, now I know you have my family pictures over on the front side of your refrigerator with the rest of the family pictures. And that's where I want them." But she said, "These pictures I want you to put over on the other side in your gay gallery as a testimony to what I feel and believe today." And so there's a whole row over there of pictures of that time in Arkansas and of her speaking and all of us together. And how the people welcomed us and heard our stories and it was just an amazing time together and I thank God that we were able to make that trip. B ut our daughter in Oregon has always supported us and she knew that I had trouble with my eyes and she's the one who sent me a Kindle and said, "Mom, I'm going to give you this Kindle because I think it will help you with your eyes and so you can be able to read and do the work that you do." And she has worked for years in a school that welcomes high school dropouts. They would be dropouts entirely to the system and everything if she and her team did not welcome them. And she has one more year to go and then she will be retiring. And they're retiring to a home out in the country. But anyhow, she has always supported us. It's really been good to know that she has cared that much about me and my eyes because she knows that my grandmother went blind before she died and it's a trait that runs in my family. So. And also that story about the Indians and massacring a cellar full of settlers. And I discovered from another person who searched out my background that that's my fifth generation from me. And that I was part of that group that was rescued by some good Indians. And that's quite a story too. So I just feel that I did what I did because God had his hand on me and I said yes. That's all I can say. That it's been a marvelous journey and one that I'm so glad I didn't have to miss. And I still keep up with, I mean, different ones of those still text me at times. And the guy clear up on the -- is that on the front -- well, anyhow, he followed me almost anyplace I went to hear me talk. And he wanted a partner so bad. And I hadn't been able to find one for him. But God gave him a partner. And now there's another story brewing right now of a guy that he was supposed to come for Christmas dinner at Luke and Mandy's house where we were invited. And that's another whole long story. And I had said, "I missed you there." And then he wrote back and said, "You missed me because I found a life partner. And he's sick and I'm trying to help him. And I'm not sure what the sickness is yet." But, anyhow, we still have people that we're in contact with as much as I'm able. And I read so many good books on Kindle. JM: We are so grateful to have this time to talk with you today and to hear your story and to preserve your story for generations to come. The material will be stored professionally at Muhlenberg College. It will be available for academic research. And I believe there will be people in the future who will sit and watch this conversation with you. And I think their hearts will be gladdened. So thank you so much for the time today. RK: Well, thank you for giving us the opportunity. Because I really am glad to share my story as far and wide as we can. Because I know that was because God showed me that he is no respecter of persons but that he loves everybody. And years ago we were part of a group that was an inter-faith group. And we met in the home of [Barry and Janet Hartsaw?]. And I think they still have the group meeting in their home. But we had to drop out as we got older because we couldn't drive anymore and all of that. But we met wonderful people in there. We met Muslims who shared their story and discovered how God loves us all. And that I don't want to be a judge of anybody. I just want to welcome everybody. And I wish that you would include the sign on our front door somehow in your video. JM: We will make sure that we have a photograph of the sign, and -- with your permission -- your award, and a photograph of the two of you sitting together. So, again, I believe our videographer Danielle is aware that we're reaching our 90-minute point. So, again, thank you so much for your time. And this has been a wonderful opportunity for me to learn. Thank you. RK: Well the people in our Sunday school class at church, we share very deeply. And I had told them about this. And they said they would be praying for us today too. So we had a lot of friends praying for us today that we could be strong and be able to do it. So I'm thankful that you can before God calls us home. And I don't know. We have donated our bodies to science. And so when that time comes we won't have time for much of a goodbye together because they'll have to come and take them while they're viable. So, but isn't that -- I mean, why just dig a hole and put us in. So (inaudible). JM: Harold, could I ask you to offer a benediction for us. HK: Sure. Lord we thank you for the presence of our friends to be with us today. And we thank you for the opportunity to share with them our experience along life's journey. And we pray your blessing upon them. Will you give them much courage and much wisdom as they share this information with them that has been given to them today. Thank you for their presence and their grace. Amen. JM: Amen. RK: I'm sorry he couldn't share more of his story. But usually we -- HK: Well, it's been very involved with your story. So. RK: Well, I know that we've been in it together. But -- HK: I just feel so fortunate that she's my wife. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:33:43 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 Roberta and Harold Kreider, January 11, 2020 Description An account of the resource Roberta and Harold Krieder discuss their activism and work as allies to LGBTQ+ communities. They describe how the death of Roberta’s beloved brother due to HIV started them on the path toward advocacy for LGBTQ+ people. They go on to discuss their work within the Mennonite Church to make their congregation inclusive of LGBTQ+ people, their work with Witness our Welcome, and their public advocacy for LGBTQ+ communities in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. Roberta Krieder also discusses her published books, which sought to document religious trauma for LGBTQ+ people and to encourage religious organizations to be inclusive of LGBTQ+ members. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-06 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-01-11 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/73e989999007b94d1372c4013af5aed3.png 7c33c07be0c05cc1996b27411d1bee3f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Don Kohn OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-09.xml Interview Keyword This field adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the “keywords” field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. PFLAG OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 May 11, 2020 Don Kohn, May 11, 2020 LGBT-09 01:37:24 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg PFLAG GLAAD MCCLV Don Kohn Mary Foltz video/mp4 KohnDon_20200511_Final_video.mp4 1.0:|19(6)|52(8)|83(10)|104(3)|123(9)|140(7)|155(2)|170(16)|189(10)|210(9)|225(3)|242(14)|261(2)|278(7)|295(17)|310(10)|333(14)|350(11)|371(2)|390(4)|411(4)|432(5)|453(7)|472(2)|489(8)|510(2)|529(15)|552(10)|569(14)|588(11)|609(4)|628(6)|647(11)|664(13)|685(10)|706(6)|725(17)|744(10)|765(2)|782(13)|803(8)|820(17)|839(9)|860(11)|881(7)|900(3)|921(3)|942(9)|963(7)|982(3)|999(7)|1018(10)|1039(10)|1058(15)|1077(12)|1096(5)|1113(7)|1132(7)|1151(16)|1168(15)|1185(13)|1208(3)|1227(9)|1252(3)|1271(8)|1286(5)|1305(9)|1322(6)|1343(13)|1362(6)|1381(13)|1400(9)|1419(9)|1442(3)|1459(12)|1476(11)|1493(5)|1512(8)|1531(13)|1548(8)|1571(3)|1588(12)|1609(8)|1626(10)|1647(8)|1664(17)|1683(15)|1698(15)|1717(3)|1734(7)|1757(15)|1776(2)|1797(3)|1828(2)|1861(4)|1888(5)|1921(2)|1930(17) 0 YouTube video &lt ; iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XrrqqvV0Eco?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"&gt ; &lt ; /iframe&gt ; 8 Interview Introduction MARY FOLTZ: So my name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Don Kohn to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are meeting on May 11th, 2020, and we’re conducting this interview via Zoom. So Don, thank you so much for your willingness to speak to me today. I’m just so thrilled that you’re willing to share your story. And to start, before we jump into the interview, would you be willing to state your full name and spell it for me?&#13 ; 0 169 Early Years / Family MF: Oh sure, I’d be happy to. Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: I was raised in Omaha, Nebraska. I had two brothers, a mother and father. I left high school and came out to Lehigh University, where I graduated, and later on raised a daughter -- not a whole family, just that. Melinda was raised in New Jersey, went to Trenton State, until the end of our junior year, where we got married, and she transferred to Moravian. Okay. 0 403 Developed Understanding of Diversity MF: When did you develop your understanding of embracing diversity?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: I don’t know. I went -- my high school was very diverse. When I entered into the realm of GLBT people, and that I know I went back and questioned, what did I think, and how did I treat people? Gee, was that person that I knew -- I had a friend at work, and was he gay? And did I greet him right? It evolved. It evolved from a belief probably that people were all the same. As far as GLBT people, I probably didn’t know much about it. Again, it evolved. So -- that’s right, there was someone in my adult life before we had our daughter, we had a friend who had a child. And the child’s nanny was a gay man. 0 682 Moving to the Lehigh Valley / Schooling / Job MF: Well, I will be curious about, if we move on a little bit, what it was like for you to move to the Lehigh Valley and to attend Lehigh University. What was that move like for you?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Again, it’s so long ago. I can remember I was -- on the football team, I was one of the helpers, I don’t think (inaudible) it called. Standing in the middle of the field, at that time Lehigh’s Goodman Field was nothing except one building and a practice field. There was nothing else out there (inaudible) and saying, how did I get this far away from home? I don’t know. I guess I never looked back that much. I was back two summers, and that was it. Again, the world here is different, and the people were more -- I don’t know. I can’t remember back that far to give you a good answer. 0 1307 Daughter Coming Out / Joining PFLAG MF: So I know that one of the impetus for joining PFLAG was your daughter. So could you describe a little bit about how she came out to you, and how you felt about the coming out process?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: This is interesting, because if Melinda was here, you’d get two different answers. Sally had a best friend, who they did everything together, whatever. And they were in a play together, where her friend and her brother had the leads, and Sally had a supporting role. And I was backstage afterwards. GLAAD ; Liz Bradbury ; PFLAG ; Trish Sullivan 0 2075 How PFLAG Helps Families MF: Maybe we could talk a little bit about, what kinds of activities did PFLAG organize for families? And what kinds of events were you organizing in the early years of your presidency?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Let me say this, I think it’s important to note, right now in the Lehigh Valley, there’s a lot of acceptance. We really are out of business, PFLAG is, because -- you could tell in the early days, we get a phone call -- Melinda and I had the help line. That was another thing we did when this woman transitioned out and went to California. While I wasn’t president, we took on the help line. And we just stopped that last year. Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center ; MCCLV ; PFLAG 0 2745 PFLAG's Strategies for Parents / Advocacy &#13 ; MF: Well, I’m curious, you described -- you said, “We got them through it.” And I’m wondering if you could describe how. What strategies did PFLAG use to help parents that were really struggling to accept their children? How did you help people work through their fears?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Melinda was better at that than I am. Although when she was still working and I was here consulting, I’d get the phone calls, or at the meetings. And I think the meetings -- the phone calls, it was just talking through it, and inviting them to the meeting. Reassuring them that they didn’t do anything wrong. Reassuring that their child was still the same person they knew before. PFLAG 0 3340 PFLAG's Involvement w/ Freedom to Marry MF: Well, so I’m wondering if maybe -- you’ve mentioned the Freedom to Marry events a few times. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about PFLAG’s work on that particular political issue. How was PFLAG involved with the Freedom to Marry movement?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Well, PFLAG nationally was certainly involved. Locally, again, we, as all other organizations in the area, supported that. Again, we went to the Freedom to Marry evening event. It wasn’t necessarily PFLAG support, but on the Friday before the event, there was a march on the Lehigh County Courthouse, where people went in to try to get marriage licenses, unsuccessfully. They took their money, though. Anti-Discrimination Law ; Freedom to Marry ; The Morning Call 0 3742 How LGBT Organizations Work Together in the Lehigh Valley MF: Well, so I have two different sort of ideas for moving forward. But I want to ask the sort of larger question. Looking back on all of your work in PFLAG, how do you think PFLAG as an organization has impacted the Lehigh Valley?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Let me just say, not everything was PFLAG, okay? You know, my support of Renaissance wasn’t necessarily PFLAG, some of it was personal. I’m looking at something else we have in front of us. When MCC had their Christmas party and they needed a Santa Claus, guess who volunteered? You know, was that PFLAG? No. MCCLV ; PFLAG 0 4410 How LGBT Organizations Changed the Lehigh Valley MF: Well, we’re getting towards the end of our ninety minutes, and I have two questions that I’m thinking of. One is one I asked earlier, but I didn’t ask it well. This is sort of a historical question. What do you think PFLAG -- but then the other organizations, MCCLV, Lehigh Valley, Renaissance -- what kind of impact do you feel those organizations have made on the Lehigh Valley in their early years, when we’re thinking historically about your early work in PFLAG? How did those organizations together change the Lehigh Valley?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Well, like I said, the Lehigh Valley over the twenty years has changed from not as accepting to a pretty accepting community. 0 4706 PFLAG's Attendance Decreasing MF: Okay. I want to return to something that you talked about sort of briefly before. But you talk about a sort of change in the need for PFLAG, that the shift in Lehigh Valley has decreased the membership and attendance at meetings for PFLAG. I’m wondering if you could reflect a little bit on that transition. From a really active organization to our current sort of moment, why do you think PFLAG’s attendance sort of declined and the interest in the organization kind of declined a bit?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: Well, there obviously -- again, there’s much more acceptance today than there was then. Why? I don’t know. You know, I’m an engineer, I don’t know why. 0 4967 Personal Reflection on PFLAG MF: How has being involved in PFLAG mattered to you personally, or mattered to you as a father and as a spouse? How have you personally been impacted by your years of work in multiple organizations, you know, centrally with PFLAG?&#13 ; &#13 ; DK: I mean, my daughter thinks we’re more gay than she is, because we’re more involved. Yeah. Let me put it this way. No offense to the Jewish religion or Jewish people, but we were involved with the synagogue for many years -- not a lot, we started late, when my daughter was Sunday school age. 0 MovingImage Don Kohn talks about his involvement with the Eastern PA chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). MARY FOLTZ:So my name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Don Kohn to talk about his life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are meeting on May 11th, 2020, and we're conducting this interview via Zoom. So Don, thank you so much for your willingness to speak to me today. I'm just so thrilled that you're willing to share your story. And to start, before we jump into the interview, would you be willing to state your full name and spell it for me? DON KOHN:Full name, Donald Jerry Kohn, K-O-H-N. I think Donald and Jerry don't need to be spelled, but Kohn, K-O-H-N. MF:Thank you. Could you please share your birth date? DK:June 4th, 1947. MF:And we had a phone conversation about consent for this interview, but I'll just ask you a few questions here now for verbal consent. Do you consent to this interview today? DK:Yes. MF:Do you consent to this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? DK:Yes. MF:Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, and other formats that might appear in the future? DK:Yes. MF:And do you understand that you'll have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview and identify parts that you'd want to delete or withdraw from the project? DK:Yes. MF:Wonderful. Okay. Now let's move into the interview part. Today I want to start with a question about your childhood. Would you tell me about your early years -- DK:I just want to add something that we discussed earlier. MF:Go ahead. DK:My wife and I did most of -- my wife, Melinda, did most of this together. Most of the stories I tell of that are for both of us, but I did want to give a little background and answer some of your questions and some of the discussion from her point of view also. Okay? MF:Wonderful. I'll be happy to hear about the work that you've done together. DK:You wanted to know her -- starting with my -- ask your question again. MF:Oh sure, I'd be happy to. Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life? DK:I was raised in Omaha, Nebraska. I had two brothers, a mother and father. I left high school and came out to Lehigh University, where I graduated, and later on raised a daughter -- not a whole family, just that. Melinda was raised in New Jersey, went to Trenton State, until the end of our junior year, where we got married, and she transferred to Moravian. Okay. MF:What was it like to grow up in Omaha, Nebraska? DK:You know, I don't know that it was any different. I mean, as a youth, you just know what's around you. You don't know there's a difference between Nebraska, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. You don't know that. In high school, you probably still don't know it. When I moved from, at the advice of my older brothers, and came out East, I realized, yes, there's a big difference. Midwestern towns, particularly Omaha at the time, was a one-horse town. There were only Italian or steak houses for restaurants. There wasn't a lot of cultures. There wasn't a lot of interests like there is here. There's no shore, there's no Poconos. You know, it's a different world. It's changed somewhat, I'm sure, in the fifty-some years. But at that time, it was different. MF:Could you talk a little bit about your family and the family dynamic? What was it like growing up in your family? DK:My older brothers were much older. They always treated me as the little brother. My parents were -- my dad was very forceful. Not abusive, but forceful. And I have to look back and probably think that my father was not accepting of diversity, we'll say it that nice way. Okay? MF:I have a question about that, but when you say not accepting of diversity, what, in particular, are you thinking about? Was he sort of like a small-town guy, sort of concerned about outsiders in your community? DK:I'm not sure I can even categorize it. It's just the way he spoke, the way he commented about different people, the way people's color, people of different nationalities, et cetera, over the years. And some of that may have been tainted, or an impression I got later on when I was older and recognized and my own feelings about diversity versus theirs, were different from theirs. He wasn't an overt racist person, it's just the kind of person that you run into who is quiet, but you can tell sometimes they're not appreciating other people. MF:When did you develop your understanding of embracing diversity? DK:I don't know. I went -- my high school was very diverse. When I entered into the realm of GLBT people, and that I know I went back and questioned, what did I think, and how did I treat people? Gee, was that person that I knew -- I had a friend at work, and was he gay? And did I greet him right? It evolved. It evolved from a belief probably that people were all the same. As far as GLBT people, I probably didn't know much about it. Again, it evolved. So -- that's right, there was someone in my adult life before we had our daughter, we had a friend who had a child. And the child's nanny was a gay man. And I guess at that point, I made a decision to treat that person as a person. I won't say norm, but not be concerned with his sexual orientation. Like I said, that all evolved. So the best way to describe my journey, if you call it a journey, is my acceptance of diversity has gotten far beyond just people of color, skin colors or religion, but just in the general accepting of people who are different, and who have different concepts of what I think of, or what I was taught, or what I grew up as. By the way, I think my father was very, this is how he thinks, and therefore, the world around him should think the same way, okay? So maybe that's coming back. So it's a journey. And I'll also say this ; if -- my wife was one of the early people who work in industry, and they did not like to be called, "Girl." My dad's attitude was, "I'm going to call them 'girl,' it doesn't bother me." My attitude's always been, if I put my foot in my mouth and say the wrong thing and someone corrects me, and there was someone who was very good at correcting me on those issues with GLBT people, then the difference is not that I said it in the first place, but that I ever say it again. That I learn from it. So yeah, it's a journey, and I won't say that. I'm not still on it. I still wonder whether, sometimes thoughts creep up from the old days, that I'm, gee, that's wrong, I shouldn't think that. It's repressed. So, yeah, okay. MF:You describe this kind of evolution of your thinking about diversity. I'm wondering, did that occur in part with your move East and out to Lehigh University? DK:I don't know. You know, it's a long time ago. Like I said, my high school was very diverse, from both skin color, religion, ethnic background, financial. We had some very poor people, and we had some very wealthy people at the school. I guess I don't know if it ever started, like I said, so I can't put a thing and say, this is the day that somebody hit me over the head and said, "Diversity's good." All right? Maybe it was in something inherent in me that I just definitely don't see, striking differences in people, okay? Maybe it's a want to -- like the Freedom to Marry, to say, gee, that's wrong thinking. I know I should change it. I don't know. I don't know. MF:Well, I will be curious about, if we move on a little bit, what it was like for you to move to the Lehigh Valley and to attend Lehigh University. What was that move like for you? DK:Again, it's so long ago. I can remember I was -- on the football team, I was one of the helpers, I don't think (inaudible) it called. Standing in the middle of the field, at that time Lehigh's Goodman Field was nothing except one building and a practice field. There was nothing else out there (inaudible) and saying, how did I get this far away from home? I don't know. I guess I never looked back that much. I was back two summers, and that was it. Again, the world here is different, and the people were more -- I don't know. I can't remember back that far to give you a good answer. MF:Describe for me a little bit about your course of study at Lehigh, and the early years of your career here in The Valley. DK:I graduated in chemical engineering. My grades started bad, worked progressively up to the senior year. I didn't do all that bad at the end. I went to work for an insurance company as a fire protection engineer, did that for about three years, and then I went to work for Pennsylvania Power and Light, in the design area of fire protection, office buildings, power plants. And then about '95, I went on private consulting. I go with my wife, she graduated from Muhlenberg with a degree in mathematics. Went to work for -- Burroughs, we were down in Philadelphia, she went to work for the Burroughs Company, in computers. When I moved up here, she went to work for Bell Labs and became one of their computer experts, had supervised people. And the last ten years -- she retired many years ago -- last few years ago, she was an omnibus person, taking care of people's problems. So that helped with our diversity concept also. MF:Well, since you talked a little bit about Melinda, how did the two of you meet? DK:Oh, yes. Remember, because you said you went to Lehigh -- Lehigh was all men back in the sixties. So we had a mixer one day at the Jewish Community Center/Synagogue, which was off the corner of the campus, which is now a campus-owned building, all right. Packer Avenue and the street that goes up towards the alumni, the main street that comes from town -- it's right there. Okay. So interestingly enough, I saw this gal I wanted to ask to dance. I walked up to her, and two seconds before I got to her, somebody else took her away. (laughs) And who was behind her, but Melinda. And it progressed from there. MF:What did you like about Melinda in the first years that you were dating? DK:Same thing I still do, how about that? It's been fifty-two years, at the end of the month. I'd have several steady girlfriends, and, you know, every time each one of them had a quality I liked, but obviously didn't have all the qualities I liked, Melinda seemed to have all the qualities I liked. As far as her point of view, I was a tall Jewish boy. (laughs) Melinda's tall. Okay. MF:Do you want to describe what some of those qualities were? DK:No, just let's go on. MF:Okay. DK:You know, it's so ingrained in me, I'm not sure I could pick them out anymore. You know, I guess many couples split apart and then divorce, we've gotten sort of together. And there are some things she's better at than I am, things I'm better at than she is. Basically, yeah, I just -- there's too -- you know, we only have a certain amount of time. You don't want me to start listing all of her good qualities. We won't get on to the other things. Okay? MF:That makes sense. She sounds wonderful. Why don't we talk a little bit about -- DK:That was the one or two prejudices that I do have, and that's (inaudible). MF:Why don't we talk a little bit about the early years of your marriage, because I know we'll be working up to your work with PFLAG. But what were the early years of your marriage like working and living in the Lehigh Valley? DK:Well, first of all, we spent three and a half years in Philadelphia. Then we came to Lehigh Valley, and I guess it was work. We had a house, and did things around the house, and remodeled a house or two. It's nothing out of the ordinary, nothing different, yeah. Centered around work. MF:Talk to me a little bit about building your family. DK:I guess we made a decision, as many people do right now, saying, do we really want to bring a kid into this world, with all the things going on? We both had our careers, we were both working, we were both happy. And whatever, it's hard to go back -- you're asking me to go back so far in time. But we finally decided that when one of us wanted a child, we would have one, and we did. So about nine years after we were married, we had a baby. And that was Sally. I'm sorry if you hear the geese in the background. I live in the country. MF:That's fine. The geese aren't bothering the sound at all. DK:Good. MF:Describe for me what it was like your first years as a father for Sally. DK:It's interesting. Melinda had a friend who had six kids. And we went through a lot of -- because Melinda worked -- we went through a lot of childcare concepts. And I think when we -- we had a full-time person taking care of her. And when the person couldn't make it, we defaulted to taking her over to this other woman, okay? And she only liked babies, although she had six kids. She loved taking care of babies. And she ultimately had to -- and so I worried that I would only like Sally as a baby. I also worried that having a full-time housekeeper, I'd miss the important things. Well, let me say other than the teenage years, I enjoyed all the years. For things like, you know, learning to crawl ; she was crawling -- or standing up, that's right. I was laying on the floor, and she came to me, crawled over to me, and started to crawl over the top of me, and then stood up. So I got to see her stand up first. We had a family Thanksgiving, I think it was, and she was crawling around from family member to family member, when she stood up and walked across the room. And we all said, "Did you just do that?" So it was an exciting time. While both Melinda and I worked, we came to not work a lot of overtime, so that we were home with Sally. And we did a lot of things on the weekends that you do with kids, and stuff like that. So it was an enjoyable time. MF:What was Sally like as a child? DK:A lot of fun. Like I said, teenagers -- I don't even know if I want to talk about those. And go on the record. But as a child, she was a lot of fun. She was cute, you know, I can remember her -- try to take a picture of her, you know, she had to walk up and see the camera, things like that. And probably around -- now, understand Melinda was into computers, and that was her business. So we got the personal computer very early. So Sally really grew up on computers. When she was in high school, she was teaching the teachers about computers, that same thing, so-- MF:So I know that one of the impetus for joining PFLAG was your daughter. So could you describe a little bit about how she came out to you, and how you felt about the coming out process? DK:This is interesting, because if Melinda was here, you'd get two different answers. Sally had a best friend, who they did everything together, whatever. And they were in a play together, where her friend and her brother had the leads, and Sally had a supporting role. And I was backstage afterwards. And it was something about the way that she looked at this partner -- and I want to leave the partner's name out, because I'm not sure where her parents -- they're -- that was Sally's first partner. And up to the time they split, her parents weren't supportive, very supportive. So I won't mention names. I said, there must be something more to this. Well, they were graduating high school, and as a graduation present, we were going to send them to New York to see a play. The other gal's parents asked a question, and they thought it wouldn't be a problem, and they told them. And the other parents slammed down and said, "You're not going anywhere without a chaperone," da da da da da da, okay. Now here's where the difference comes. I believe she waited until she got home. Melinda thinks she called on her cell phone and told us, thinking we wouldn't have a problem, and we didn't. Melinda thought she had a target on her back, okay, and was very concerned from that standpoint. And now here comes Liz and Trish, and PFLAG, somewhere in there, it might have been a year afterwards. But I accepted my daughter fully, and my wife accepted her fully. But here comes the education part of it is -- what did I accept? Technically I knew what a lesbian was, but I didn't know a lot of the details. I didn't know -- it was easy for me to -- and speaking to an English teacher here -- you -- understand I'm an engineer, my ability to talk and communicate isn't as good, and certainly not as good as my daughter's is today. I needed to know what to say and what not to say, and have some education. And that's -- PFLAG's one of the places I got that. So yeah, we were fine with her and that. And frankly, through her college years, dating and interfacing with her first partner, we got to see that budding romance. You know, as a parent, what do you want from your child? You want to see -- when you give up on the fact that you're not going to have a husband and wife, and two point three kids and a picket fence and two dogs, you really want to see that your daughter has someone who wants to take care of her and loves her. We got to watch that. We got to see that happen, because we spent several times with both of them. They would spend a lot of times on breaks at our house, okay, so we got to see all that. So it was, like I said, yeah. So we accepted her. It wasn't a big, traumatic event for our family. MF:Your daughter comes out, your family's very accepting. But you just described, you wanted education. You wanted to know what to say, when to say it. Could you describe how you found PFLAG, or how you found Liz and Trish? DK:Well, let's see, I don't know. Why I did it, I can tell you. Besides the education, Sally was a teenager, she was about eighteen at the time. And as I either knew then instinctively, or wanted to know -- I clearly know now, because that's how I counsel parents at PFLAG -- if your teenager comes out to you and you say, "Okay, that's fine," and walk away, they think you don't accept them. So you've got to do a little more than just say, "It's okay," and walk away. If you start asking too many questions to a teenager, then you're prying, and they don't like that, either. So what do you do? In our case, joining PFLAG sent my daughter a very clear message that we were accepting and willing to learn more and do something. I might add in here, a couple of things happened when she was in college. First year, which I think was a year before we actually got really involved with PFLAG, mainly because of Sally's partner, who was local, and didn't want it to be known and that. So we were sort of asked to be in the closet for a year, okay? Sally, during college, interned first for the GLAAD, the Gay, Lesbian -- no, GLAAD isn't -- I'm starting to use a different acronym. And so we went down for -- instead of parents' weekend, we went down the weekend before. You said you, when we previously talked, that you were down there then. We had the AIDS quilt in the mall. Sally ran a booth at GLAAD, at the AIDS quilt. Then afterwards, at night we went to a party, with Sally, again, being the intern, had to be at the door to greet everybody. But talking about diversity, and I always tell people, sometimes us white males who are in the majority, ought to find ourselves in the minority sometimes, see how it feels. Here we were at a party, there may have been one other heterosexual couple. You know, I had to be careful. I couldn't tell any of my jokes, which I was just beginning to realize I couldn't, you know? We had dinner afterwards, and I found it very interesting, some of the directors Sally was -- I found this gal was talking about going out to bars and finding girls. I wasn't that far out of (inaudible), I'm thinking, boy, we have some things in common, okay? But that was another event that I like to say comes -- Sally also interned for the National Gay-Lesbian Task Force, both in Washington, D.C., and New York, and became, and to this day, is still friends with some of the leaders (inaudible). In fact, I guess she was still in college when we went to the National Gay-Lesbian Task Force Greeting Change Conference, and we paid for her partner to also go, so all four of us were there. I might point out that somewhere in here, Sally's attitude was, she's got a couple of terrible parents, teenagers going up to where we are today, "I got a couple of terrible parents, what the heck are they all about?" It's, like, okay. At the conference, I kept telling her -- because Sally knew, she was an intern, she knew people, people knew her. And I referred people to her as, "I'm Sally's dad." "Hey dad, you're embarrassing me." "Well, that's my job. I'm a father. I'm supposed to embarrass you." Where, somewhere in the middle of this, people kept coming up to Sally and saying, "Your parents are fantastic! I wish my parents would have come to this. I wish my parents cared enough." Sally started to realize that maybe we weren't so bad, okay? So that PFLAG, all this stuff was our way of letting our daughter know, it's okay. (inaudible), it's okay if you're gay, you know. And being supportive, being supportive of her and her partner. And PFLAG just sort of fell into that. That again, the educa-- I'm not sure if we did it for the education, or we did it because the typical parents that want to go to PFLAG to learn more about it, I don't remember that transition. I do know that once we got, we got hooked. And of course, Liz and Trish were regulars at the meetings. MF:Tell me a little bit about why you got hooked. What was so moving about being a part of PFLAG for you? DK:Well, I'm not quite even sure. But that I remember doing it, I just don't remember the whys. We joined PFLAG, and at the times -- and I can't remember the names, I probably can look them up, but there were three families -- yeah, three families, we'd say, that started the local PFLAG chapter ; one of them had already gotten older and tired and stepped away, maybe they went to Florida. One remained -- Helen Early remained for a long time, even after we were there. Helen, she just passed away last year, I think. Then there was a woman in there, I can't remember, but she was the president at the time, and her husband was dying of cancer. She knew that when he did pass, she would be moving to California to be with her kids, okay? So it was sort of, like, "gee, Don, you seem like a right person. Would you like to be president?" Okay, and that was, like, a year or two. And that was, like, you know, I'm one who likes to get involved with an organization, but learn a little bit about it before I start getting heavily involved. So there was a woman called Elsa [Stohl?], who worked at Bell Labs, who was, again, an ally. Very diversity-oriented. They had a diversity group at Bell Labs, and she was head of it, as I remember. As it was explained to me, Elsa likes to get into a group, give it energy, and then move on. Okay, get it setting right, get it going well. So she stepped in to be president. But she wasn't always available. She was traveling enough that it defaulted to me. And so Melinda was, of course, we were there always together and doing things. And it just defaulted to, gee, I might as well step in to be president, because Elsa's going to move on, and Elsa's doing it all anyhow. Again, those were the early -- I don't remember that part of it as much as I remember the different events and things that we did, and the people and things like that. MF:Maybe we could talk a little bit about, what kinds of activities did PFLAG organize for families? And what kinds of events were you organizing in the early years of your presidency? DK:Let me say this, I think it's important to note, right now in the Lehigh Valley, there's a lot of acceptance. We really are out of business, PFLAG is, because -- you could tell in the early days, we get a phone call -- Melinda and I had the help line. That was another thing we did when this woman transitioned out and went to California. While I wasn't president, we took on the help line. And we just stopped that last year. In the early days, we'd pick up the phone and hear (gasps) -- and then we knew that was a parent that was in trouble, you know? As one of my friends said, because I used her as an example in meetings, you know, with everybody -- I can't -- I don't know what to do. I said, "Go turn to so-and-so, look what she did. What was your first reaction?" "I was going to jump off a cliff." Okay? Now she's a person who's one of our active members, or was. Today, in the last few years, we've got nobody coming to our meetings. If we did get someone coming to the meetings or calling us, it was, "How do I help my child? My child's being abused at school. I want to go stick up for his rights," things like that. So the whole complexion change, that's number one. Number two, right now we have the Bradbury-Sullivan Community Center. There are a zillion different programs. We have GSAs, we have all sorts of activities. Back twenty years ago, we had PFLAG, we had MCC Church, and that was just about it. Liz and Trish had a newsletter, had some friends, had some things, but there was no real organization of activities. So if you, for instance, needed to come out and you needed to get to your parents, you might come to PFLAG. If you were a forty-year-old who had been married and then realized your sexual orientation, where do you come for information? PFLAG. So it was a whole different situation back then. So what did we do? First of all, we had monthly meetings. You know, they were held at the same place. They did switch around different places, but generally you knew where they were, so you could come. They were confidential. You could call us -- you could come and talk and meet with people who had been there before and learn, that's why Liz and Trish came. Somewhere in there, really in the early days, because we went to one of the first PRIDE meetings, back in those days, it was GLBT, right? Well, the gays knew who they were. The lesbians knew who they were. There was some question about what a bi was, okay. Transgender -- that just didn't fit their image. That just didn't -- again, people shall remain nameless, but someone in GLBT in the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual group was, like, "I don't understand why these men are getting dressed -- I just don't understand it." So I'm going to try to guess here for a minute that I said -- first of all, I made an early on decision to go and find out about transgender, because that's part of our mission. I attended some Renaissance meetings. I became friends with some people from Renaissance. Then because of this person, they said, "We need to set up." So we had an event one Saturday afternoon where we invited some of the leaders of the community to learn about transgender. I believe I can explain transgender and what it's all about as well as anyone now. Okay? By the way, fast forward to a couple of years ago, that same person was talking to someone, and this someone said to that person, "I don't understand this." "You don't have to. Just accept them." Okay. So we had the meetings. We had a few special things like that. We attended PRIDE, we had a booth at PRIDE. We supported different activities, like the Freedom to Marry. I can't remember if we did any other special -- you know, there were certain events where -- convening events where we had to set up a table. I do remember one time setting them up a table on Sunday, some event, and this woman comes up. I said, "Take all the literature." She said, "I already got it. I was at the meeting Tuesday." And it's, like, "Well, it's supposed to be confidential." Okay. Mostly we tried to have our meetings and be a presence, so that I suspect if you went to the -- the younger people don't know who we are, because we weren't as important. But if you go back to the people who were in the community twenty years ago, that age group, I think you'll find there's a whole bunch of people that know more than I, and we don't know them. Because they knew that there was this group out there, led by Don and Melinda, who supported them, even if their parents didn't. Okay? So that's what we did. And we did what PFLAG typically does, and that's the national thing of PFLAG. MF:I want to talk a little bit about the monthly meetings. You really describe people sort of calling the help line, or being panicked. For people in our community today, I think they'd be interested why people were so panicked, or the kinds of concerns that people that called the help line, or people that showed up at the meeting, what kinds of concerns were they bringing to those early PFLAG meetings when it was so essential for people in our community? DK:For the GLBT people, it was -- again, it seems to me we had a lot of people who would have been married and in relationships, whether they were forced or whether they thought that would change their -- I don't know. But they did realize that we were a source of support. We also had just GLBT who came to the meetings because there was no other form of support. Where are you going to go, okay  take you as an example, you're gay, where are you going to go back then? To a bar? Where are you going to go for support? We were that support. Then there was the parents who were -- I looked at, and Melinda, GLBT parents, families and friends. Friends. So that doesn't mean you have to -- we're everything, okay, everybody's included. But from the parents' standpoint, this was a time when parents in Lehigh Valley were, God help me if my kid's gay. I must have done something wrong, what do I do? You know, it was the whole gamut. I mean, we had parents who were just absolutely shocked, we don't know where we're going. I think we had a few who just came because -- remember one, got to tell a funny story. My daughter's in junior high, and she wants to have this boy over to do a project. And it's, like, "No, mom and I aren't here, you can't have a boy over to the house." Fast forward a bunch of years, the parents, the boy and his brother come to the meeting, and that boy is gay. I guess I didn't need to worry, okay? But so we had -- it was a big difference -- different people came for different reasons. But by and large, parents were, at the time, it was, "What am I going to do? I'm going to jump off the cliff. How do I handle this? What do I do? Have I done something wrong? Get me through this." And we got them through it, you know? We could turn around and say -- and use members who were in the meeting, or whatever, to say they were in the same position you were, look at me now. Okay? And by the way, when I said I reached out transgender and I had that meeting, that person who ran that meeting is today one of my best friends. She is. She transitioned somewhere in there, did part of that transition at my house. And she would come to the meetings for anyone who was a transgender person, to help. So we were there, again, in the early days it was the parents who were just -- they were ready to do whatever. And they needed some semblance of how to cope with it, all right. You know, Melinda and I did fine. But that's not what everybody else did. Today we see more on TV, we've got more interaction. There's more acceptable -- we've come to grips with it, I guess. Not to say everyone, but some. It's a changed world. MF:Well, I'm curious, you described -- you said, "We got them through it." And I'm wondering if you could describe how. What strategies did PFLAG use to help parents that were really struggling to accept their children? How did you help people work through their fears? DK:Melinda was better at that than I am. Although when she was still working and I was here consulting, I'd get the phone calls, or at the meetings. And I think the meetings -- the phone calls, it was just talking through it, and inviting them to the meeting. Reassuring them that they didn't do anything wrong. Reassuring that their child was still the same person they knew before. I think that we had a few rare -- where people came to a meeting and they were just irate. They weren't going to accept -- I mean, as you know, there's just a group of people who are never going to accept the diversity, or GLBT people. But those people in the middle, and they're just lost souls, if you will, we need to take care of them. When we stopped having meetings, we did have one on one, and there's only one couple that we had that's, like, they were just obnoxious. And we wanted to throw them out. I couldn't believe how they were treating us and their son in our house. But in general, I think we just tried to show people that their children were the same child they were before. They knew more about that child than they did, and that things would be all right. Things would get better. Things that they would find out, and some of the things we talked about, it's, like, gee, you don't want to miss that when your son finds a partner. You don't want to miss that relationship, watching that. You don't want to be in a situation where you don't see your son. You know? And there's a few horror stories, and we used to not deploy those. But there are cases where parents didn't talk to the kid, didn't talk to the kid, and then there was no kid to talk to because of suicide. But generally, no. It's just a basic of talking them through, and the meetings, meeting other parents. We would tend to have sometimes Liz and Trish -- well, they were always there, but sometimes we'd have GLBT people who were (inaudible), oh my God, she's gay, what am I going to do? She won't amount to anything. Well, no. Then we'd bring in someone who was -- you know, go to the community, or whatever accomplished, and say, you know, "Come on. Your child has no future? It's not going to be any different," you know? So I guess that's basically what -- we also -- and that brought us back, we also advocated for, and I think we can talk about that, is going to government things and talking, and standing up in front. I had a great one with politicians of saying, you know, "Yeah, only ten percent is gay." Yeah, but every one of them, every one of those gay and lesbian people have a mother, father, an aunt and uncle, et cetera, et cetera." I said, "Maybe they're going to say it in public. Well, when they go in that voting booth, are they going to vote for someone who's against their child? I don't think so." We can come back to that later, too, another example. But go ahead. MF:Well, you just mentioned advocacy. What you describe is this real commitment to helping people work through fears about their children and their friends, to helping LGBT people feel connected, be leaders or pillars in the community. Now you're introducing this advocacy piece. Can you describe some of the major works of advocacy that PFLAG, during your time in PFLAG, really undertook? The major advocacy issues that you put at the forefront of your PFLAG group? DK:Let's see. I can remember meeting with a state senator, who said, "We really don't think gays should be married. They're not ready for it". And they've been divorced a couple of times." I can remember somewhat involved, Melinda more so than I was, when we had the -- well, in Allentown, we started with the Equal Rights Amendment, add gay, sexual orientation, gender identity to the anti-discrimination law. And as I remember, there were two times ; the first time didn't go anywhere, and the second time did. And I will share with you, part of the project was the Kreiders are also in this project. Kreiders didn't know Allentown very well, and they were older. And they used to come to our meetings regularly, okay? So that's a real thing, when you're a parent and you're emotional, and you think, and here's this former Mennonite minister and his wife who are little tiny old people saying, "It's okay." All right? Anyway, we had dinner with them and then took them to the meeting. And we walked in, and some people standing next to Liz and Trish said, "The other side's stacking on the deck." Liz said, "No, they're on our side." (laughs) So we went to those meetings, we spoke. I spoke, usually. Bethlehem had some more things, we spoke there. Melinda and I were honored by the Allentown Human Relations Commission for some of our work. And that's where I can tell the story. There's a couple of times where I tried to speak to groups and colleges, high schools and that. I wasn't real successful. Liz was more successful getting in than I was. But the first time I did it, I went with a lesbian, and she taught me something. And I use it every time I speak to a group. And at the Human Relations Commission is a good example. Someone I know tried to get the politicians to give her money for -- she was going on a walk for some charity, GLBT, probably, oriented. And it never happened. Okay. So in my talk, because I had to give an acceptance speech, and Liz said, "Make it count." So I start off as I do mostly, I say, "How many people in this audience are GLBT? I don't want anybody to come out," but, you know, a few people raise their hand. And I go on, I talked for a while. And then I say, "How many in this audience have a relative, a brother, sister, family member, uncle, or a friend who's GLBT?" At Lehigh, with the Gryphon Society, I did that talk, and I had seven percent, from one or two in the first place. Well, in this case, I had a large percentage, maybe twenty, thirty percent. And the reason I do that is to show that, you know, you walk into a thing and you say, oh, I can discriminate, there can only be one or two in here. Then you realize you're treading on unsafe water with a lot of people. At the end of the event, those politicians fell over each other to try to give this person a donation, okay? I'm sure there's a lot of other things we did as far as advocacy and speaking, and things like that. A lot of what we did, what I did, again, was indirect. Like I said, there's a lot of people who I'm sure -- and there's a lot of things we did just to show support, you know? Why did we go to the Freedom to Marry events, you know, the marriage type events? To show our support. You know, we were a presence. We were someone who was there, someone who was to show the community that there are two adults, or more, who do care, even if their parents don't. And again, back 20 years ago, a lot of GLB people did not have supporting parents. So here came two people who they care about, okay? So I don't know if you call that advocacy, okay. MF:Well, so I'm wondering if maybe -- you've mentioned the Freedom to Marry events a few times. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about PFLAG's work on that particular political issue. How was PFLAG involved with the Freedom to Marry movement? DK:Well, PFLAG nationally was certainly involved. Locally, again, we, as all other organizations in the area, supported that. Again, we went to the Freedom to Marry evening event. It wasn't necessarily PFLAG support, but on the Friday before the event, there was a march on the Lehigh County Courthouse, where people went in to try to get marriage licenses, unsuccessfully. They took their money, though. I always thought that was interesting. You know, they'd take the money, but they wouldn't give them a license, you know? Anyway, that was February, and it was cold. So we had to do something for the -- so Melinda made -- I don't know how many years when it started, and I don't know how many years, but obviously it stopped, but she made scarves every year. Something like sixty, seventy scarves. And she was a machine knitter, she had a machine that did it. But nevertheless. And of course, each year was a different color of the rainbow flag, okay? And there are people who -- probably Liz and Trish still have every one of them. But again, that was -- I guess we probably held banners sometimes. I can remember  I don't remember what it was, I can remember being out in the cold, some banner and some things, whether that was Freedom to Marry or some other rights event. There was a -- with the adding orientation and gender identity to the Allentown Relations Commission Anti-Discrimination law, there was a challenge to that. I was not that involved, Melinda might have been more involved, where we were calling and checking and telling people not to, and stuff like that. You know, asking to rescind their -- a lot of people signed up to oppose it. We were calling and making -- because a lot of that was almost fraudulent the way they did it, at least in my opinion. But I can remember being a little bit involved. I can remember there being a court case, and we went there again in support. Understand, it wasn't as much that we actively did stuff, as much as just being there and saying, look at how many people there are. Or, look, there's some -- there was a case where, I think it was during that time, the Allentown Morning Call had an insert that was Spanish language. And this Spanish language one wrote a scathing article. And I don't remember the details right now, but a scathing article, anti-gay. And we had some real good supporters in the Spanish community, the GLBT activities. And of course, I'm sure Liz and Trish were there. So we had GLBT representation. And I went, maybe Melinda too, I don't remember. Well, you know, the Morning Call is, like, oh well, you know, this and that, and everything else, and you know, at one point, they said, "We use that newspaper because that's where we get our press people." Now somebody taught me this in industry. There's a time when someone could say something that someone can't, okay? As a straight male, I can say things in that kind of a situation that maybe a gay or a lesbian couldn't say, or a Hispanic couldn't say. And I turned to think and said, "You know, there's some very intelligent Hispanic people. Maybe you could get a few columnists and editorial people, rather than just" -- okay? So, you know, I guess Melinda and I interjected ourselves, where we could, in support, in just numbers, in just saying, there's straight people who are supportive in this. The Civil Rights Movement, and you know, that was in my childhood, as I knew it, got its real strength when white people started supporting it. They could no longer just ignore them, the group. And so that was a little bit of where my thought process came is, you know, this is going to take off more, the more of us that can support it. When we get the parents enraged -- which we did. I think through PFLAG that said, "You can't do that to my child!" You know? "I'm sorry, that's my child. What do you mean, my child can't have this, or can't have that?" We actually, I can remember this thing with fighting the people who signed off, and, you know, my wife called up a friend of ours and said, "What do you mean, your daughter" -- maybe she didn't quite say it to the daughter, but her attitude was, "What do you mean, you think your daughters are better than mine?" Okay? So it's, I guess, to say, as an engineer, I'm a problem-solver, and anywhere I could see that I could help solve the problem, I jumped in. And some of it was quiet, some of it was -- I'm not an in-your-face person, but, you know. Where else should we go here? MF:Well, so I have two different sort of ideas for moving forward. But I want to ask the sort of larger question. Looking back on all of your work in PFLAG, how do you think PFLAG as an organization has impacted the Lehigh Valley? DK:Let me just say, not everything was PFLAG, okay? You know, my support of Renaissance wasn't necessarily PFLAG, some of it was personal. I'm looking at something else we have in front of us. When MCC had their Christmas party and they needed a Santa Claus, guess who volunteered? You know, was that PFLAG? No. That's just me, all right? And that's me supporting the community, all right? So go ahead, what were you going to ask about PFLAG? MF:Well, this actually makes me think about a different question, because I think what you're describing is -- and you'll just have to tell me if I'm right -- but it sounds like the Lehigh Valley LGBT organizations were kind of inter-webbed, in a way, or connected importantly, so that you were drawing on each other for support for different kinds of events or for where you're dressing up as Santa Claus, you know, that you were really sort of working in tandem with each other. Maybe could you describe a little bit of how organizations worked together in the Lehigh Valley? DK:Well, I think you may have used the word "was," and I'd like to change that to "are," because I think we still are. Renaissance had a presence in our meetings at PFLAG. MCC, we had a presence at theirs. And in fact, they would end up having -- some of them, I can't remember if it was Freedom to Marry, or something, it was on a night with Renaissance, and so -- and Renaissance used their facility at the time. I think they still do. You know, there is that inter-mixing. I don't know that we ever made the distinction when we went to do something as a group, like fighting for rights, or Freedom to Marry, that it was PFLAG or MCC, or this or that or the other. You know, occasionally we'd have to go and explain to somebody, I can remember -- oh, we need to talk about Reading and Monroe County a little bit. But someone, one of those, it's, like, didn't quite understand why gender identity was important. And yet this particular lesbian always is mistaken for a man. Her voice is low. And I tried to tell her, when you go out in public -- this sounds prejudice, it's not, it's not meant to be -- but there are certain stereotypical things that people look at and say, she's a lesbian, okay? She's gay. If you don't fit that stereotype, they don't know. And believe me, I've convinced myself over and over and over again that they're not typical, not stereotyped people. But they don't know who she's sleeping with. And in fact, I'm pretty sure she's not sleeping with anyone. It's the gender identity that they see that they are tagging her. And so if you get gender identity on the books, then it's protection, okay? So and today, it's still interweaved. Here I am, PFLAG's essentially not -- you know, the only thing I claim is that I used to be involved with PFLAG ; we used to have a PFLAG. But I moved on. I'm now involved with the Community Center. I am their head of design. You don't know about the first one, but that was a hefty design project. But this one, there hasn't been that much design, but there's a little bit. So I'm still helping the community. I'm still involved, or I can be. I'm a little older, so I'm slowed down a little bit. So I like to think that we all have our little bit of the pie, and we all have a segment that is different than the other. There are times when I felt they overlapped too much, maybe, and it's, like, why are you doing that? That's what we're supposed to be doing. But it's all good. And the pie is us. And so I have never felt like if Renaissance needed something that I wouldn't be there to help them. If MCC needed a Santa Claus, I'd be there. If the community needed scarves for Freedom to Marry, Melinda was there. And it's still that way. It's just you've got so much more going on today, that it's -- yeah. MF:My previous question I'll return to, but I'll make it broader now. DK:Can I just bring up one thing? MF:Oh yes, please do. DK:You know, because we're talking historical here, too. At some point in time we were doing things, and Reading was starting up. And we said, gee, we have a newsletter, why should we have two? Why don't we bring them in? So we started doing things. Then later on, around 9-11, somebody came to our meeting and wanted to start a group up in Monroe County. So we ultimately put those three groups together and called it Eastern PFLAG. It used to be Lehigh Valley, I think. But now it's Eastern PA. I'm not sure we ever fully operated as one group ; each had their leaders, and each did the leaders slightly different and there wasn't a lot of back and forth. Although I can remember taking a group of transgender people to Reading and also to Monroe County to help a situation, and that. So I just wanted to bring that in, that we did formulate and bring -- and right now, Reading has also ceased to have meetings, for the same reason. Monroe County's slowed down and stopped, and we're not sure what's going on up there. We want to separate functionally because -- but I'm not sure what's going on. Yep, and then we've got all the people. But anyway, I wanted to bring that in, that we -- okay. MF:I have a question about that. How did you support Monroe County and Reading in developing their PFLAG groups? What was that process like? DK:Well, first of all, we had, at the time, was running a newsletter. So we extended that newsletter to them so that they're members. Then we kept membership lists. We had a rather large membership list, which was confidential. Everything went out as blind copies, but we'd keep people informed and keep them connected, if you will. I would often go to the Reading meetings. We had a picnic often, and we would have the people together. And sometimes when Reading PRIDE and that, we would set up a table. Again, the personalities were such -- Reading and Allentown -- we never really intermixed much, if you're new to The Valley. But somehow the Lehigh Valley is here, and when you cross that border into Berks County, you're not in Lehigh Valley, according to Berks County people. You're in Berks County, and it's heavens to Betsy that you, you know, it's an (inaudible) -- and by the way, I'm a quarter of a mile from Berks County, okay? But Monroe County was just -- and I had gone up to their meetings a couple of times, just to interface with. It was when we had one Treasurer. We made donations to different -- and that's something else we did -- we made donations to different groups and activities. And I can't remember where we made donations. But we collected some money, and we tried to spread it around a little bit, and somewhat evenly between the different groups. Reading did have a -- I can't remember, it's down here -- they had a funding organization, community funding, and they set up on to do stuff for GLBT. They got additional money from somewhere, matching funds. And I was on that board for a while, to try to figure out where to spend the money. I don't remember where we ended up spending money. But that was an interesting activity, too. The problem is, you tend to do -- if you were writing a resume that you wanted to get another job, or as my consultant, you would write down all these things you did so that you could say, "Hey folks, here's what I did." When you do it just because you want to do it and you think it's the right thing to do, you don't always write it down. You don't always remember what you did, and how you did it. MF:Well, we're getting towards the end of our ninety minutes, and I have two questions that I'm thinking of. One is one I asked earlier, but I didn't ask it well. This is sort of a historical question. What do you think PFLAG -- but then the other organizations, MCCLV, Lehigh Valley, Renaissance -- what kind of impact do you feel those organizations have made on the Lehigh Valley in their early years, when we're thinking historically about your early work in PFLAG? How did those organizations together change the Lehigh Valley? DK:Well, like I said, the Lehigh Valley over the twenty years has changed from not as accepting to a pretty accepting community. And yes, some of that is watching TV and more GLBT people on TV, et cetera. And some of it is just, you know, what's going on the world. I think that the other part of that equation has to be the different groups in the Lehigh Valley. When you get up and you put signs up and say, "We want equal rights" -- I just realized, yeah, I didn't go to those things. It's cold. But I made the signs for them, okay? That's another thing I forgot I did. You know, it's calling attention to what's going on. When you go to city council and you fight for equal rights, and all that gets press, and everything else. So it's those groups. We didn't get where we are today without struggles and without people's efforts. Those different groups, each in their own way, helped do that. The early days of PRIDE. In the PRIDE Festival, we need a bigger -- having a par-- we used to have a parade down Main Street. People see that, you know? There's another one, we participated as a group, PRIDE, with my old truck in the Puerto Rican parade, okay? And -- trying to think now, it was something else -- so those different things and those different activities are what, I think, painted a picture to the community of who we were. And there were allies. The few times I spoke at organizations or to schools, Liz is speaking, all that has caused a different thing. Probably it helps that we've got people in responsible positions at different companies. You know, I'm not -- no offense to Mr. PP &amp ; L where I used to work, PPL now, there's no &amp ; in there, they took it out when I left -- but I used to kid and laugh. Says, you know, it's too bad there's some bigot in there. It's terrible to be a bigot. You have to remember who you hate. As a Jewish person, I'm not sure I feel totally comfortable at times. I probably knew of some gay people who I didn't, you know, (inaudible), but I wasn't necessarily friendly -- I am friendly with those people now. Try and take care of my sins, if you will. But when I got caught up and found out that they have a gay association, I was flabbergasted, okay? So, you know, that all helps with -- it's hard to say why we got where we are, okay? A friend of mine transitioned while at Mack Truck. Mack Truck supported her. You know, what was that all about? Some of the colleges we have were not supportive. Again, I don't want to go into one of them, but they weren't supportive, and others were, okay? So it's not -- I don't know. All right? Don't know how it all came about, and glad it did. MF:Okay. I want to return to something that you talked about sort of briefly before. But you talk about a sort of change in the need for PFLAG, that the shift in Lehigh Valley has decreased the membership and attendance at meetings for PFLAG. I'm wondering if you could reflect a little bit on that transition. From a really active organization to our current sort of moment, why do you think PFLAG's attendance sort of declined and the interest in the organization kind of declined a bit? DK:Well, there obviously -- again, there's much more acceptance today than there was then. Why? I don't know. You know, I'm an engineer, I don't know why. It's a social economical, whatever, change. And how much we had impact on that -- I can guess, like I just said, you asked what the groups did. I can guess. But the effect is that people are more tolerant, and learned tolerance in Lehigh Valley. Is that because of the effects we did? Is that effect of watching more things on TV -- I mean, I watch these home shows where the couples are looking for a home, and it seems like a larger and larger percentage are same sex couples. That's got to be a positive thing, when people see it and say -- you know, their children, and say, "Gee, I just watched that show the other day, and these two guys could afford this really expensive house. You know, I guess my son's going to do all right." Or, "My daughter's going to do all right." You know, all that has an effect. As to which one, or what, I don't know. Maybe PFLAG didn't have a big effect on that. Maybe we're just seeing the effect, you know? Affect, effect, whatever. But we kept seeing a big decrease in the people coming to our meetings. We held on for quite a while, and finally it was like we didn't even stay the whole hour. We were just, like, nobody's here. You know, we talked about changing our format to being just -- because we like getting together once a month, okay, in the early days. And maybe even towards the end. We would get together for dinner before or after the meetings, because we got to be real good friends. So I don't know why it changed. I just know it absolutely did change, again. Now I've had a few people say, "You should keep doing it." I say, "Why?" You don't keep selling tacos when nobody wants tacos, you know? All right? I'm not sure how much the meetings and all that helped, as much as Melinda and I and all the other PFLAG parents being there. And understand, I mean, PFLAG wasn't just Melinda and I. There were people in Reading, two or three people that were involved with the Reading group. They kept Reading going, and kept influence and a presence in Reading. We have still people, friends here who were in our board and our involvement who also, you know, came to those meetings and came to those events and things like that. So, yeah. MF:I'll ask one final question, and then we'll move towards the conclusion. We talked a lot about sort of community impact and the shift in PFLAG, and I kind of want to move towards ending with a more of a personal reflection. DK:Okay. MF:How has being involved in PFLAG mattered to you personally, or mattered to you as a father and as a spouse? How have you personally been impacted by your years of work in multiple organizations, you know, centrally with PFLAG? DK:I mean, my daughter thinks we're more gay than she is, because we're more involved. Yeah. Let me put it this way. No offense to the Jewish religion or Jewish people, but we were involved with the synagogue for many years -- not a lot, we started late, when my daughter was Sunday school age. And when she was about ten, eleven or so, we moved to the country. It became very hard to get her there midweek for Hebrew school. On weekends I would drive her there, it took me a half an hour to get there, class was an hour, then I had to wait around, do something for an hour and then take her home. That was a pain in the neck. During the week was hard, because we both work. And subsequently, we made the decision based on her and her feelings, and everything else, to drop out. The best I can say is, the synagogue was a clique. We never quite got into the clique. We have friends who were involved with the synagogue who were our friends before, and they're still our friends. And yeah, we made a couple. Right around that time was the Matthew Shepard event, and we had  well, there's another example. We went to the Matthew Shepard events, and there was candles and stuff. We did the same thing with the event in Florida. So, you know, that's where we show our presence, if you will. Anyway, I'm standing there, and I'm looking around at the GLBT board. And understand, that was relatively early in our involvement with the community. And I said, I have more friends right now in the GLBT community than I did in the synagogue. I'm going to put, I guess, a pat on my back a little bit -- about five years ago, I guess it was 2015 at the Bradbury-Sullivan gala, we were honored, Melinda and I. The Kreiders were honored before us, and we really love the Kreiders. Roberta refers to me as "son," I refer to her as "mother," and that's pretty odd when you have a Mennonite and a Jewish couple that were that close. And we still see them every few weeks. So we thought that was a big deal. We thought, man, we didn't do much -- by the way, Sally was keynote speaker. And we got a standing ovation. This is my community now, right? And I don't feel I do a lot for it. Other people think I might. But to me, it's my community, and I do things for my family, my community, all right? So does that answer your question? MF:Yeah, thank you so much. Well, before we close, I just want to give you the opportunity, is there anything else that you really want to share today that we haven't yet talked about? DK:You know, there's so many things over those twenty years that I'm sure I did that might be interesting to the community, I don't know. But like I said, it's been a great time, it still is a great time. You know, it's always -- a stereotypical comment is, "Some of my best friends are GLBT." Well, it's not -- that's true. It's not a fake comment, okay? The Kreiders are our best friends. Liz and Trish are our best friends. Some of their friends are now our best friends. Again, I've got a couple of friends who are transgender. I'm going to leave you with this: In the early days, I was concerned of who was gay, and who wasn't, all right? I don't have gaydar, and so I don't know. My biggest concern at some point in time, in certain times, is to know what gender or -- no gender, sexual orientation or gender identity people are, because I want to be able to say to someone, "I'm on your side. I'm a supporter. I'm an ally." You say that to a gay man, and he's not, you might get beat up, okay, and insulted. You know? It could be an insult. Transgender are even harder because someone who's either crossdressing or transgender wants to be accepted, and doesn't want to be identified, okay? So if I can pick them out and identify them, they just lost. So how do you tell someone GLBT, you're on their side? Okay, so two stories with that ; one, we were at the Creating Change conference in Pittsburgh that year. And the events were either at the basement or the top floor. And everybody was riding up and down in elevators. Now I won't begin stereotyping, but most lesbians don't dress very fancy, okay? Melinda gets on the elevator, and from the back of the elevator is, "Hi, mom," which I believe is a euphemism for someone -- a member of the community. "No, that really is my mom." It was Sally, okay? That's one story. The other is, I have ceased to care what somebody's orientation is. I am at events at Bradbury-Sullivan, or whatever, where I can pretty much guess that probably somebody is or isn't. In my early days at PFLAG, and I wanted to be able to prove to myself and be able to say this -- we'd go around and tell who we were. And I have to admit, I tried to pick out who was gay and who wasn't. One time, there was a man with a younger guy, who I knew was gay, and was sitting there like this. And I said, "Oh, that's dad. He's not happy." No, it was the partner. MF:Mmm. DK:Another time it was a woman, who I said, oh, she's gay. No, she was there because of her son. Okay? I don't care anymore. It doesn't matter to me. You know, if somebody tells me, fine. I know a little more about them, you know? I'm not interviewing you, so I don't know a lot about your background ; we should have talked. But it doesn't matter to me anymore. Maybe that goes a little step beyond acceptance, a step beyond where we're at, whatever. But, you know, if somebody wants to share with me what they are or who they are, or whatever, that's fine. It doesn't matter to me anymore. I don't -- it's not that I don't care. It's just that you're a person, I like this person, and I'm not going to make a judgment based on their sexual orientation or their gender ID, and they're fine with me regardless. So that's probably what -- I said it started with getting more and more acceptance and diversity. Now I have to give one more piece of Don Kohn philosophy here. There are those people of a religion belief who believe that we're being tested on earth, and we won't go to heaven if we fail that test. Those people who believe that way have a different idea of what that test is than I do. My belief -- (inaudible), this is a great forum for this -- my belief for this is, what is universal throughout the planet? Diversity. And maybe it's our approach to diversity that's our real test. And a lot of people are failing it. Okay? MF:Don, thank you so much for talking with me today. It truly is -- it's just been a real pleasure and an honor to hear some of your stories. DK:I enjoyed it. I enjoyed talking with you also. And I'm glad -- you know, you talk about what I've done, I think what you're doing, and the rest of the people with this oral history, is also doing something for the community. So we'll have to come when you get honored. I'll have to put the bug in Adrian's ear, that should be one of the honorees, that's the group who's doing this. Okay? MF:Thank you so much. DK:He does listen to me sometimes. MF:Well, again, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. I will just conclude the interview there by letting you know that we'll reach out with a transcript, probably within the next three months, if that's all right. DK:Okay. MF:Great. DK:All right. MF:All right, that will be where we'll stop the interview, but I wanted to stay on the line with you and just check in. How did that go for you? DK:Well, well, I think that there's areas that I was surprised we didn't get to, and there's probably more. But I threw in a few things that I thought were important. Yeah. I thought it went well. MF:I thought it was fabulous. Look, I was tearing up there a little bit. I had to -- fortunately I had Kleenex here, but I didn't want to have that on camera, so -- DK:Oh, okay. MF:I had to dab my eyes there a bit. Yeah, I thought that was wonderful. Well, if there were things that we missed today that you were surprised about, we could always reschedule a second interview if you feel like you're-- DK:I don't know that they were that important. I think I got the important stuff in. MF:Okay. All right. Well, then I will be in touch when we have a transcript for you, and I'll send that via email. And in the meantime, if you have any questions for me, or any concerns for me, anything you want to talk about, just reach out. DK:I'm fine. I just -- we'll see each other, I'm sure, at the Bradbury-Sullivan Community Center sometime and say hello. I'm terrible at remembering people, so it's not a strongpoint. Whereas as a professor, I'm sure you know who all your students are, and so-- MF:Yes, but then sometimes, like a year later, I'll know the face, but I'll forget the name, so-- DK:Politicians are very good at remembering me. I'm terrible. As I'm getting older, I'll remember someone and it's, like, but I can't remember the name. Then it'll hit me. MF:Well, just poke me and say, "I know you. Remind me where from." DK:Well, I'm saying if you see me, poke me, and -- let me put it this way. There's not as many gray-haired old men who show up -- (laughter) with their wives, you know? It reminds me of one time, somehow we got tickets to a GLBT event. I don't even remember how we got it. I mean, they sent it to PFLAG. So Melinda and I said, "We'll go." And there we are. It's, like, "What are you doing here? You're not gay!" You know? "Well, okay." So again, sometimes it's interesting to be in a -- to find out what it's like to be in a minority, when you get to be there. It's not the same. I can't say that I know what it's like to be a lesbian or a gay man. But I understand. And so it's -- yeah. MF:Well, I will say "hi" to you when I see you at the Bradbury-Sullivan, then. DK:I'm looking forward to meeting your partner, I assume, so-- MF:We would be delighted to meet you. DK:Yes. MF:Well, I will be in touch really soon, Don. I hope you have a wonderful day, and thanks again. DK:Good. Thank you. It was enjoyable. MF:Bye, now. DK:Bye-bye. How do I get out of this? MF:I'll just end it for both of us. DK:Okay. MF:When I click this button, I'll disappear. DK:You know, always when I've done Zoom for other things, like a friend of Liz and Trish's had a Zoom birthday party, Melinda always set it up. And my granddaughters had cello concerts with a bunch of kids, and she set it up. So this is the only time I've ever been on Zoom. Now Facebook, I do my yoga class on Facebook. Not on Facebook, on Skype. So that I'm familiar with. But -- okay. MF:You did wonderful for Zoom. Okay, I'll turn it off right now. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:37:24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Don Kohn, May 11, 2020 Description An account of the resource Don Kohn talks about his involvement with the Eastern PA chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-09 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-05-11 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/2f4339ea3abd085e0c2597b0ae9a6116.png 05cebf47c19c2cd954fd37a75da24bb5 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 Nadine Anderson 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-04.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 May 12, 2020 Nadine Anderson, May 12, 2020 LGBT-04 01:39:12 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Nadine Anderson Mary Foltz video/mp4 AndersonNadine_20200512_video.mp4 1.0:|19(3)|50(9)|73(10)|92(5)|107(16)|126(10)|143(11)|160(4)|175(4)|194(6)|211(9)|230(14)|245(15)|260(13)|281(3)|298(12)|317(4)|336(13)|353(7)|372(2)|391(6)|408(17)|423(16)|440(9)|461(3)|478(15)|501(8)|520(12)|535(9)|550(5)|571(3)|588(10)|607(13)|622(15)|641(8)|656(4)|671(9)|684(12)|701(14)|716(16)|733(14)|750(5)|763(6)|778(16)|799(8)|810(13)|825(13)|840(9)|851(17)|866(13)|883(4)|900(9)|915(3)|928(16)|941(6)|954(7)|969(8)|986(2)|1001(14)|1012(13)|1023(10)|1036(15)|1049(9)|1068(5)|1083(16)|1098(8)|1115(8)|1134(2)|1149(9)|1166(5)|1185(10)|1206(2)|1219(8)|1236(13)|1253(2)|1268(4)|1285(2)|1300(3)|1315(2)|1328(8)|1341(12)|1354(13)|1371(2)|1386(6)|1403(15)|1420(12)|1441(8)|1456(16)|1471(6)|1488(14)|1503(8)|1516(13)|1533(12)|1550(10)|1565(14)|1580(5)|1595(6)|1610(6)|1629(18)|1634(6) 0 YouTube video &lt ; iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TkYzM0zBkGE?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"&gt ; &lt ; /iframe&gt ; 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz. And I’m here today with Nadine Anderson to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley, as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are meeting on Zoom today because there is a pandemic. And the date is May 12, 2020. So Nadine, thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation about your life.&#13 ; &#13 ; NADINE ANDERSON: My pleasure.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? 0 126 Childhood &amp ; Family MF: Thank you so much, Nadine. So I’m going to go ahead and get started. And I’ll ask, would you begin today by telling me a little bit about the early years of your life? Could you describe your childhood?&#13 ; &#13 ; NA: Well, a long time ago, I was born in Southern California. But even as an infant, I knew to get out of there. Though when we moved out, I was two years old, so I don’t remember it real well. Dad was teaching flying for the Army Air Corps. That was before the Air Force existed. And we left there, went back up to Washington State, where mother was from. And turned out, dad was a &#13 ; better pilot than businessman. And he had an awful lot of pilots coming back, trying to work at that. And he &#13 ; had trouble getting a flying business going so he went back to logging, which he’d done before. 0 1119 Leaving California / Moving out East MF: Well, so you had described a movement out East. Will you tell me a little bit more about that? How did you come to move out East and leave California?&#13 ; &#13 ; NA: Actually, I was moving West when I came to Pennsylvania. I went my first year of college to U of Oregon. They then tripled the out-of-state tuition, so I went to Berkeley. Anyone from California who refers to Berkeley as a school means University of California Berkeley. I was there two years. The summer after my second year, I went out to New York City, because I’d met some people there. And I went out and saw them for the summer. 0 1334 Getting Involved w/ NOW &amp ; ERA NA: While I was in Louisiana, I got involved with NOW. I was about an hour outside of New Orleans and people would say things like, why would I want to go to the city? I’ve got everything I need here on the bayou. And I talked to people and it didn’t seem like we were agreeing but it didn’t seem like we meant the same thing. Some students wanted to start a chapter of NOW and I became their faculty advisor. They were the people that, we seemed to mean the same things by what we were saying, and I then got involved with state NOW. I became the state VP of NOW and I was in charge of the Equal Rights Amendment effort there. Equal Rights Amendment ; NOW 0 1712 Work in Counseling/Psychology NA: I did a respecialization. My doctorate originally was, well, my doctorate’s in social psychology. Every week, at least one person, students or staff, ended up in my office asking for counseling. So I finally decided to get some training there so that I could do that appropriately and I did that at Hahnemann Hospital, there was a program there. Well, I was used to the students being rebellious. But while we were there, the faculty resigned, en masse, and moved to Widener University down in Chester. 0 2028 MCCLV &amp ; Lutheran Church NA: So when I was up here, actually, I attended both the Lutheran church and MCCLV, Metropolitan Community Church of the Lehigh Valley, when I first came. The MCCLV had a morning and an evening service and so I went to the evening service there. If you want to meet people in the gay community, you can go to bars. I don’t really want to meet people that are drinking too much and besides, they tend to be very smoky and I don’t like that. You can be involved with sports. I played on the softball team one year and it was weird how they expected me to play catcher. MCCLV 0 2514 Work w/ PA Diversity Network NA: I was involved with the Pennsylvania Diversity Network when it was working on getting the -- added to the list of those you shall not discriminate against, LGBT people. And we got a lot of people supporting that and it was passed by the Allentown City Council. Pennsylvania still does not have that as part of a “thou shalt not discriminate against” listing. When that was passed, there were some people who didn’t like it and they started getting petitions signed by people to ask for it to be undone. Put on the poll, put on the ballot and get it voted down, was their thought. Liz Bradbury ; PA Diversity Network ; Patricia Sullivan 0 2748 First Encounters w/ the LGBT Community / Relationship / Advocacy Work MF: So I’m curious about, you described being really active in the gay community when you lived in Easton. And I’m wondering if you could just go back a bit and talk about when you first encountered gay community, and what those communities were like when you first encountered gay community.&#13 ; &#13 ; NA: A lot more hidden. Yeah. When I was down in Philadelphia, I was involved with the gay community primarily through the softball league. Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center ; MCCLV ; PA Diversity Network ; Pride ; Same-Sex Marriage 0 3755 Evolution of Church's View of the LGBT Community MF: Well, I have a question that is about the Lutheran church. And I’m wondering, as someone who’s been an active leader and a changemaker in your churches and also with your work with MCCLV, have you noticed an evolution from your childhood to your adulthood in how the church thinks about LGBT people? Could you talk a little bit about maybe some changes that you’ve seen across your lifetime, within the churches that you’ve been a part of? &#13 ; &#13 ; NA: When I was growing up, I never heard anything about LGBT people. If someone had told those initials to me, I would have had no idea what they were talking about. If they mentioned “lesbian,” I would not necessarily have known what that meant. Lutheran Church ; MCCLV 0 4199 Faith Journey / Personal Acceptance MF: Well, I think you’re doing great. The stories you’re sharing are wonderful. I have a question about your own faith journey, because this is... You’re really describing so much work in the church to build inclusivity. Was that a struggle to you, to work through some homophobia within the church in your own personal faith journey? Or did you always feel that God accepted you just as you are?&#13 ; &#13 ; NA: Oh, I always felt God accepted me. My supportive family expressed that in different ways. No, you can’t tell mother about this at Marilyn’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Then she’ll have these negative associations with it. No, you can’t tell mother about this at Carol Jean’s graduation and marriage. Then she’ll have these negative... This is from my supportive sisters. 0 4549 First Realization of Being Gay MF: You described you sending a letter to your mom to tell her about your sexuality. I’m curious, when did you know that you were gay?&#13 ; &#13 ; NA: I think I was in my forties when I realized, very explicitly. I knew, at a young age, there was no way I was going to end up married to some guy and supporting him going through college when I hadn’t gone through college. I did date guys for quite a while. There were some very nice guys. 0 5356 LGBT Acceptance in the Field of Psychology MF: Well, we’re getting towards the end of our interview time. And I have one more question. And then we’ll move towards closing the interview. We’ve talked about the evolution of the church. And we’ve talked about your different work with various organizations. But I’m curious about being someone who’s in the field of psychology, how have you seen that field change around LGBT acceptance throughout your career? Because that is a field that really has undergone a major sea change. So I’m curious about your thoughts on, your reflections about being a gay person in that field, and what you’ve seen change across your career.&#13 ; &#13 ; NA: Okay, well, my original field was social psychology and there were concerns with how people interact with each other, the social kinds of things. And there had not been a whole lot of looking at LGBT things in that field when I got my degree. It’s shocking to me. 0 MovingImage Nadine Anderson recounts her time as an LGBT individual in church, her career in psychology, and how the fields have developed over the years. MARY FOLTZ:My name is Mary Foltz. And I'm here today with Nadine Anderson to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley, as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. We are meeting on Zoom today because there is a pandemic. And the date is May 12, 2020. So Nadine, thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation about your life. NADINE ANDERSON:My pleasure. MF:And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? NA:Nadine Ruth Anderson. N-a-d-i-n-e. I go by my middle initial "R." Anderson, A-n-d-e-r-s-o-n. MF:Thank you. And will you share your birthdate, please? NA:Fifteenth August, 1943. MF:Thank you. So we had a phone conversation before the interview, where we talked a little bit about consent. And so I'll just do a verbal consent now. Do you consent today to this interview? NA:Yes, I do. MF:Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? NA:Yes, I do. MF:Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, or other formats that might become available? NA:Yes, I do. MF:And do you understand that you will have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview and identify parts that you might want to delete or withdraw the interview entirely from the project? NA:Yes, I understand that. MF:Thank you so much, Nadine. So I'm going to go ahead and get started. And I'll ask, would you begin today by telling me a little bit about the early years of your life? Could you describe your childhood? NA:Well, a long time ago, I was born in Southern California. But even as an infant, I knew to get out of there. Though when we moved out, I was two years old, so I don't remember it real well. Dad was teaching flying for the Army Air Corps. That was before the Air Force existed. And we left there, went back up to Washington State, where mother was from. And turned out, dad was a better pilot than businessman. And he had an awful lot of pilots coming back, trying to work at that. And he had trouble getting a flying business going so he went back to logging, which he'd done before. And that took us over to the Olympics of Washington State I went back there when I was in graduate school and it was amazing how much smaller everything was than what I remembered. I lived there when I was six and seven. It was huge then. We then left from there to another place in Washington, which was very close to Tacoma, which is where mother spent most of her growing-up years. And one thing I remember from then, this was not very long after World War II and people were not real fond of the Japanese. And in talking about something about that once, I referred to them as Japs. Mother informed me that we do not refer to any group disrespectfully and that I would not do that. I was, at most, eight at the time and I have remembered that. Mother clearly had a strong influence on helping me develop values of, valuing people, of looking at everyone positively. We went from there down to Crescent City, California, which is in the northwest corner of California and it's where we lived then. Well, I went from there to college and so haven't lived there since then. But mother continued to live there for quite a while. I was in the third grade when we went there and when I was in fourth grade, we moved into a house that father had built. And he built the back half of it and then we moved in, and then he built the front half. By then, he'd gone from logging back to flying and he was at the airport, managing the airport and doing a flight service. So he ran out of time to finish it. He eventually got someone else to do it. But then I spent fourth and fifth grade with this open beam built house in the front half of where I lived and I learned an awful lot about how to do that. Dad would put the siding on with two nails. And my brother and I would put the rest of them in. It took us forever but it didn't take him any time. My older sister and my next-younger sister weren't interested. Actually, I'm not sure that Lois was old enough to do so. And Carol Jean, I'm not sure whether she was born or not. But Gary and I were the ones that did that a lot. And I did pick up a lot about woodworking and have spent a lot of time building things, particularly bookcases. I think what I learned most during my childhood, though, was that effort, that message that mother gave, that you must always be respectful of people. It still floors me how I never heard anyone refer to the Japanese other than as Japs during that period. But not my mother. That was not acceptable. Actually earlier, when we were still up in Washington, I loved to play baseball. During recess, the boys would play baseball, but the girls wouldn't. I convinced the boys to let me play baseball with them by agreeing to be catcher all the time and not taking my turn at bat. So I became a very good catcher, had lots of practice at that and I did do a little bit more. But this was before the time when girls had anything but intramural sports. And while I played in intramural sports, there were no opportunities for other things. So I was very good at basketball and at softball. But then again, that was just a local thing. I do remember, at that time, we had six on a basketball team for girls. We were so delicate, we couldn't run back and forth the whole length of the court. So I became able to hit the backboard every time from the center circle There and one in three went in, which meant whoever we were playing had to cover me. And if I missed, then my teammates got the rebound and put it in. Last time I tried that, the ball rolled under the basket. My aim is still good, but my strength is a lot less. I did play softball a lot down in Philadelphia. There were several leagues, primarily lesbian leagues that I knew about, I don't know if there were others. And I played in that probably for five years. I'm very good at hitting. And I can direct where it goes pretty well. I still play catcher. Well, I don't know, but I did then. And I would always hit it to left field if there was someone on first base. Usually, the weakest player was put in left field, because most people hit to right field. And that would ensure that the person on first base got to second base. I may or may not get to first base, because I was not a very fast runner. But I would at least advance the other person. Apparently, I did that very often because the last game I played in down there, I noticed that the outfield shifted where they were at, appropriately for where I was going to hit. If there was no one on first, I'd hit it to left field so that... Did I say left before? You hit it to left field if you're going to get it far away and get there. You hit it to right field if someone is on first base. So apparently, I did that a lot, because they shifted appropriately for where I was going to hit it. When I came up here to the Lehigh Valley, I discovered the difference between the modified slow pitch and slow pitch game. We had modified slow pitch down in Philly. Up here, they do slow pitch. And I played catcher, like I've always done. Stood where I've always done. And was told I was too close to the batter. If I got hit, it was my fault. I've never gotten hit. I'm not that close to them. Furthermore, if I caught the ball rather than letting it bounce and then getting it, they didn't know whether to call it a strike or not. I only played one year up here. I couldn't do that. But growing up down in California, it was very close to, well, it's on the ocean. I grew up six blocks from the ocean in two directions. And I spent a lot of time wandering along the beach, playing there, climbing over the rocks, and things like that. We had a lighthouse down there. And you could get out to it when the tide was out. But you had to get back in pretty soon, or else you'd have to wade back in. That wouldn't be a good thing to do. It was a good childhood. I enjoyed a close family, a lot of support, and a fair amount of activity to do things. One thing that was interesting, in recollection, we went to church all the time. And the person, we had a supply minister, someone who was filling in. He had retired. He had been ordained in the 1890s and he had some very old viewpoints. So instead of having two years of confirmation, we got three years of confirmation. So I learned a lot of stuff about the Bible very well. At that point, when you're confirmed, before that, the class would sit in front of the congregation and we would be given questions to answer. I knew the answers to almost all of them. But there was one that I couldn't answer. No one else could, either. As I got older, though, and was very much into science, I started having some strong questions about Christianity. How do we know Christianity is right? Because the Bible says so. That's kind of circular reasoning and when I was eighteen, graduating from high school and about to go off to college, I let my parents know that I wasn't sure I believed this stuff at all. That was very upsetting, especially to mother. Father kind of took it as, eh, she'll get over it. But mother took it very strongly at that point. I did eventually come back, but that was quite along further. Any other specific questions you want to ask about my growing up? MF:Well, I have so many questions about how you moved from California out East. But I guess maybe I'll begin with a question about, did you know about LGBT people in your childhood? Was that just discussed in your family at all? NA:No. Knew nothing about it. I don't know that I ever heard such a term, ever. I probably began to know a little bit about it when I was in high school. But it was not something you ever asked anyone about. If you wanted to know about it, you had to find the information out for yourself. It was not something anyone talked about. That was the dark ages, you have to understand. This did not happen. Everyone grew up, got married to someone of the opposite sex, had a family, and did traditional-role kinds of things. Actually, my parents had a somewhat unusual marriage in that my mother was a teacher. At that point, you needed three years of college to be a teacher and that's what she had. And it's when she was doing that that she met dad. Dad, on the other hand, flunked out of high school. He was in Northern Minnesota, Effie. It's not too far from International Falls. People who know Minnesota know where International Falls is. But I've never met anyone who knew where Effie is. So he had to go to Duluth to go to high school. And his mother was saying, why don't you come home and run the farm? Which does not tend to increase the desire of a high school boy to study. He did eventually come home and found out he had not passed ninth grade. He did not go back. Somewhere along there, his mother passed away. and probably later than that, though. I never knew her, she passed away well before I was around. So I don't have the dates down well. But he eventually went out to the state of Washington, where his older brother had already gone out and was logging. Dad did not want to keep the farm and farm it. He was not interested in farming. When he was out there, he discovered that he had to learn a lot of things to become the pilot he wanted to be. So he took correspondence courses to be able to pass the test on navigation. So when you have one parent who has college and one parent who doesn't have high school, you have a somewhat unusual family system. He was very good at math, though. I probably got my math skills from him more than from mother. Yeah, with this unusual family situation, it was not hard to teach us that you have to treat everyone with respect. And you can't be negative towards people because they don't have some of the supposedly required accomplishments, such as high school. Yeah. MF:Well, so you had described a movement out East. Will you tell me a little bit more about that? How did you come to move out East and leave California? NA:Actually, I was moving West when I came to Pennsylvania. I went my first year of college to U of Oregon. They then tripled the out-of-state tuition, so I went to Berkeley. Anyone from California who refers to Berkeley as a school means University of California Berkeley. I was there two years. The summer after my second year, I went out to New York City, because I'd met some people there. And I went out and saw them for the summer. While there, I ended up -- was in the hospital with an operation. Twenty-first birthday was in New York, which was very distressing. It meant I was now responsible for those hospital bills, not my father. And I couldn't go to the Top of the Mark, because that's in San Francisco. And furthermore, the drinking age in New York was eighteen. Very bad twenty-first birthday. I came back from there. And I couldn't go back to college on time, because I just wasn't feeling up to it. So I worked for a while. When I was ready to go back to school, it was January, February. I'm not sure exactly when but I could get into the third quarter of the year. I couldn't get into the second semester of the year. So I went to Cal State Hayward, finished up there. From there, I went to graduate school in U of Washington, Seattle. After I finished that, my first job was in London, Ontario, at the University of Western Ontario College of Education. And while I was there, I discovered the University of Maryland had these interesting programs, where they taught on US military bases overseas and I applied for that and I was hired to go to Europe. So I taught in Europe for three years on US military bases. I was there for three years and I lived in twenty-five different places while there. I saw a lot of Europe, but when I came back, I was ready to settle down a bit. There, you could go wherever they told you to go and teach whatever they told you to teach and get paid well. Or you could decide whether or not to teach a course and get paid poorly. Obviously, I did the former. Then, when I came back, I came back to Seattle for a short time and then ended up down in Louisiana, where I taught at Nicholls State University. I then left there and went up to Pennsylvania. While I was in Louisiana, I got involved with NOW. I was about an hour outside of New Orleans and people would say things like, why would I want to go to the city? I've got everything I need here on the bayou. And I talked to people and it didn't seem like we were agreeing but it didn't seem like we meant the same thing. Some students wanted to start a chapter of NOW and I became their faculty advisor. They were the people that, we seemed to mean the same things by what we were saying, and I then got involved with state NOW. I became the state VP of NOW and I was in charge of the Equal Rights Amendment effort there. Well, we got enough people in the state legislature to say they would vote for it if it came up for a vote. They probably knew it was highly unlikely to come up for a vote, and it did not. But I became known as the ERA lady and I would get phone calls from people saying, "My husband says if I leave him, he'll only pay me a hundred a month. Can he do that?" Actually, probably not. But you have to get a good lawyer. So I was very involved with the ERA there. But it just didn't feel like a comfortable place. I came up to Pennsylvania. Then I quit working and for a year, I worked full time on the Equal Rights Amendment. Five or six months of that was going into Manhattan for a phone bank. That was in the early days of answering machines and we would call people up and if we got an answering machine, it was an affluent family. And we'd leave a message along the lines of, this is NOW calling. Would you call us back? We're trying to raise money for the ERA. Every day, at least one person called back and the first time we left that message, someone called back and gave us a hundred dollars and a hundred dollars back then was more than it is now. I was then down in South Carolina. Again, we got a lot of information and we had a lot of people saying they'd vote for it. But again, it never came up for passage there. At that time, there was a time limit on the ERA. We were three states short of getting that passed when we got through that time limit. Well, guess what? It's been passed by three more states now. So now, the effort is to get the congress to pass something saying that the time limit is removed. Did you know that there was a constitutional amendment passed two hundred years after it was proposed? After the Constitution was first put forward, people said, ah, no no no no no. There's not enough of our rights protected. And a lot of amendments were suggested. Ten of them passed and are known as the Bill of Rights. Well, this eleventh one was passed two hundred years later. But it was proposed as part of that group. It says you can't increase the pay of anyone in congress until there's been another election, i.e., you can't get voted into congress and then go in and double your pay. Anyway, so while I was working on the ERA, I ended up back in DC and I taught a course with U of Maryland there again. And I went in to talk to them once and they said, would you like to go to Bermuda? Well no, actually, I wouldn't, because I've lived in too many different places. But it was late on a Friday afternoon. They weren't going to get any more people to offer it to until the next day. So I said, sure and thought about it over the weekend and decided, yeah, I should go there. And I did. I spent three years in Bermuda. That was interesting. That was fun. But it also -- I found out why Bermudians are very friendly (audio cuts out) involved with -- my microphone is muted? MF:I can still hear you fine, Nadine. NA:Okay. It just said something about muted. Okay, sorry. Okay, I got to know a lot of people in Bermuda. But every year, the person I was closest to left and I discovered then why Bermudians did not get real close to people who were there on a short contract. Because at the end of your three-year contract, if a Bermudian was qualified for your job, they got it. It wasn't a matter of who was best for it. If the Bermudian was qualified, they got it. And that's reasonable. They have to protect jobs for their people. So I left there after four years and came back to the US then and that's when I came back to Pennsylvania. I did a respecialization. My doctorate originally was, well, my doctorate's in social psychology. Every week, at least one person, students or staff, ended up in my office asking for counseling. So I finally decided to get some training there so that I could do that appropriately and I did that at Hahnemann Hospital, there was a program there. Well, I was used to the students being rebellious. But while we were there, the faculty resigned, en masse, and moved to Widener University down in Chester. Well, there had been a head of the psychiatry department who had a degree in psychiatry and psychology, and he understood how psychology fit in. He retired and the person they got in really saw psychology as irrelevant and was treating the faculty very poorly. So they all found another place to go, too, and resigned en masse, and went there. And students, for the most part, went with them. Well, I had taught a couple of courses down there, because I still liked money, even though I was going to school. It was good to have money to pay one's expenses. So I knew a little bit about it. I was okay with that move. But I did finish up my respecialization in clinical and child psychology. Spent three years after that working in an inpatient child and adolescent hospital in Cherry Hill, which I enjoyed, but it's very intense. The psychiatrists, for the most part, had a third of their time in the inpatient unit, a third of their time teaching, and a third of their patients in outpatient therapy. That would have worked okay, but being full-time inpatient, very very intense and I decided that was too much. So I went from there to working as a school psychologist in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, right across the river from where I lived in Easton. And so that brought me to this area. I was basically moving west when I came from Bermuda to Pennsylvania and moving north when I came from Philadelphia up to the Easton area. Actually, meantime, when I was down in Louisiana and working on the Equal Rights Amendment, that's when I came back to the church. In that, the only place I've ever been where everyone presumed you were involved in church,and when I was setting up meetings pro-ERA, we were starting and ending them with prayer to show this was not anti-family. Well, I wasn't going to lead prayer in public when I wasn't praying in private. So I looked for every woman, religious person I could find and there was a Presbyterian minister. We kept missing each other on the phone and so I finally went to her service on a Sunday morning, with the thought that, well, she'll be there. I can find her there, and I did and she agreed to participate in the meeting I asked her to. Then the next Sunday, when I woke up, I was reading a book. I said, eh, should I get up now and go to church? And, nah. So I continued reading. And then I had an experience, I had an emotion I'd never had before. I was sorry I had not gone to church. So I went back to church at her church after that, and that led to some changes. The Louisiana State Board of NOW met Sunday mornings and they had to meet a little later, because I said I can't get there until noon or 11:30 or something. The service was fairly early. So that's when I got back involved in the church and I have found that a positive thing since then. So when I was up here, actually, I attended both the Lutheran church and MCCLV, Metropolitan Community Church of the Lehigh Valley, when I first came. The MCCLV had a morning and an evening service and so I went to the evening service there. If you want to meet people in the gay community, you can go to bars. I don't really want to meet people that are drinking too much and besides, they tend to be very smoky and I don't like that. You can be involved with sports. I played on the softball team one year and it was weird how they expected me to play catcher. So I found, through MCCLV, a real good way of getting involved in the gay community and met a lot of people there and continued that until they stopped the evening service. Because in the meantime, I had been involved at St John's Lutheran Church in Easton and was on the council and was treasurer for a long time. So I was very involved there. I wasn't going to give that up. That actually became kind of an overlap of the things in that we started having St Johns have a booth at the local PRIDE festival. They started the PRIDE festival after I was up here. I don't remember exactly when it was. I think we had a booth there in the second or third year that they had that. Pastor Grace Olson was our minister at that time. And she had led us into becoming RIC, Reconciling in Christ. Lutherans are very good at coming up with a description of someone that no one else is going to know what it means. Somewhere in, I think it's in Acts, Paul says we need to be reconciled in each other and be accepting of and supporting of each other. And so the organization had been Lutherans Concerned North America. It included both US and Canada. But then in '09, 2009, we got something passed nationally that said you could be ordained if you were in a committed LGBT relationship. Before that, if you were not married, you had to agree to be celibate to be a minister. And since you couldn't get married if you were gay, that was kind of restrictive for a lot of people. So we then became RIC. Well actually, we'd become RIC before that. We became RIC in '02, which meant St Johns publicly stated that LGBT people should be fully involved within the church. And we then worked on supporting people doing that. We went to the Pride every year, had a booth there. And that was always fun and interesting. Met a lot of people. Of course, there was always the assumption if you met someone there, they were probably gay. So you learned a lot of things about people that you hadn't known. That was actually before people started being open about being gay. Since it still can get you fired in most places, it's usually wise not to be open about that. Being that I'm retired, I don't have to worry about it anymore. However, we worked at supporting people in all sorts of different ways. I became a member of the synod -- that's the regional organization of Lutheran churches here -- that had a task force on LGBT ministry, and actually, I'm still a part of that. And so we work with congregations that are considering doing this. We try and provide information at the synod assemblies, at the regional meetings, helping people to understand that this is very supported by God and the Bible is not really against it. If you look at the negative things in the Bible about the homosexuality, they tended to have other reasons than anti-homosexuality. The one in the Old Testament that most people quote, Israel is a small nation. They needed to get lots of kids so they could grow, so they could hold their own. You don't get a whole lot of kids out of a same-gender relationship so they were against it. And while people are quite willing to talk about "It's an abomination to lay with a man as you would with a woman", they forget that it also says "it's an abomination if you curse your parents and if you do that, you should be killed". Somehow, they don't find both of those equally important from the Old Testament. And if you look at the various things that are said in the Bible, they usually have other kinds of explanations than anti-LGBT. If some of the New Testament ones, yeah, if you get involved in a same-gender relationship when, in fact, you are not gay or lesbian, then that probably is not appropriate for you. And that seems to be the viewpoint behind most of the things in the New Testament. So anyway, I have worked with them, with the group and various Lutheran congregations, to help them decide to become publicly supportive of gay people. Since the Supreme Court said it was okay to have gay marriage, people have been much more accepting of it since then. The Supreme Court was probably influenced by the public view, but the public view is also influenced by the Supreme Court. I was involved with the Pennsylvania Diversity Network when it was working on getting the -- added to the list of those you shall not discriminate against, LGBT people. And we got a lot of people supporting that and it was passed by the Allentown City Council. Pennsylvania still does not have that as part of a "thou shalt not discriminate against" listing. When that was passed, there were some people who didn't like it and they started getting petitions signed by people to ask for it to be undone. Put on the poll, put on the ballot and get it voted down, was their thought. Well actually, they did a lot of lying to get people to sign their petition. One councilwoman said she signed that, they told her it was pro-LGBT people. So what we started doing then was getting people to sign letters saying they take their signature back. Liz Bradbury and Trish Sullivan were very efficient in setting up a database where we put in the petition number and the lines on which everyone signed. And then, when we got someone to sign a letter saying, I take my signature back, and we gave it to the city, they said, how do we pull that? We had to tell them what petition number and what line number the signature was on. Well, when this was going on, some of us would go out on a Sunday morning to the churches where they were trying to get signatures. And I could engage them in a long discussion of this, with all sorts of references to the Bible that I was quite knowledgeable about and that would take up their time, so they couldn't go get signatures from other people. This was when they were trying to get signatures to get on the ballot something to oppose the lack of discrimination against LGBT people. And this kind of impressed Liz a lot. She was pretty good at engaging them in a long discussion of this. If they're talking to me, they're not getting someone else to sign it. That was the thing that I did a lot there. And then we would do specific things. If we found someone having problems, we'd try to help them out in some way and I guess I became known as someone in the church community who was very involved with LGBT groups and very accepting of that. MF:So I'm curious about, you described being really active in the gay community when you lived in Easton. And I'm wondering if you could just go back a bit and talk about when you first encountered gay community, and what those communities were like when you first encountered gay community. NA:A lot more hidden. Yeah. When I was down in Philadelphia, I was involved with the gay community primarily through the softball league. And when I came up here, I joined the softball league up here. But I also both found a Lutheran church I wanted to be involved with and found MCCLV and I attended MCC regularly, oh, I don't know, for ten years at least. And was involved in doing the various kinds of things we did to be supportive of the community there. And as I mentioned, I was involved with the softball league for one year. I had decided not to go for another year, because I didn't like the way it was played. I think they basically didn't invite me back the next year, either, so we seemed to be in agreement on that. But that was okay, because how can you be a catcher and not catch the ball? I've never understood that. One of the things, well, the community tended to be pretty private then and you would be careful who you admitted anything to. I find that difficult. I tend to be fairly open about what I'm doing and to have to keep it quiet is difficult. But when you look at the possibility of being fired, you work at it. And I was up here in December of '93, so basically '94 on that I have been up here and it was probably not until ten years after I'd been here that I began to feel comfortable letting it be known. Yeah. At that time, I met Jan. And we were, well, when I met her, she had been given a one-year prognosis. She outlived it by three years. But she outlived several others. We got together after knowing each other for a little less than a year. We had a wedding in the church. It was not possible to have a wedding in -- the state-recognized wedding at that point. But we did our own through the church. She didn't want to do it at my Lutheran church, because I knew everyone there and she didn't know hardly anyone. So we did it at MCCLV, but my Lutheran minister also participated, and that was good. The area, the part of the service when it says, who gives this woman? I've always thought that was dumb. No one's ever giving me away. So I substituted for that, my family welcomed her to the family and her family welcomed me. So her father read that. My sister, I wanted one of my sisters to play, for Marilyn to be my attendant and Carol to play the organ. Carol has the degree in sacred music. Both of them were church organists for forty years. Carol Jean still is, but then she's a whole lot younger than Marilyn and I. And Marilyn finally retired from it. She would not be my attendant. But it was very strange. Anyway, very good friend, Dyan, was my attendant and Marilyn was playing the organ. And so I asked Carol Jean to read the welcome her to the family thing. Carol Jean gets very emotional and she got emotional through it, so Marilyn took over and read the rest of it. So both my sisters welcomed her to the family. I really liked that a whole lot better than, who gives this woman. Bah, humbug. Who can give? That goes back to the days when women didn't have any rights at all. They were, in essence, owned by the males in their life and I do not accept that. So we did have that. And we essentially showed that you could have a same-gender relationship approved by the church, before it was approved by the society. That was ten years, more than that, before the Supreme Court said it was okay. And we met in '98 and got married in '99. After church, after school was over. I was not going to have a wedding during the Spring of school, which is the busiest time in the life of a school psychologist. We moved in together, got the house and moved in in March of '99. And have been here. She passed away in '01. So she outlived their predictions. Her son was twenty-five at the time and she had been told she would never live to see him graduate from high school. So she lived a bit longer than that. But all her medical problems did catch up with her. That was unfortunate but not unexpected. And I do still miss her. So yeah. I was kind of giving a relatively public witness that it's okay to be LGBT and it was okay to do this in the church. And I was very involved in MCC, which was quite a strong, well, clearly the strongest advocate for LGBT folks in the area. Well, equally with the Pennsylvania Diversity Network, which then became the Bradbury-Sullivan Community Center now. I was quite involved with doing the Pride. St Johns has had a booth at Pride for quite a long time. I think by the second or third year it was existing, we have had a booth there virtually every year. I also, through my membership on the synod, the regional task force of the Lutheran church, we've also gone to the Reading pride and had a booth there. And well, the Lutheran synod, fairly early, I'm not sure when, '02 or '01, told people that, told the congregations that they should be more accepting of LGBT people. And the synod became RIC, passed something saying that they think LGBT people should be fully involved in the church. And so as a member of that task force, I did a booth at the Reading pride every year. I'm not sure if it was the first year or the second year that they had one, that we started going there. A few years, three or four years, we had a church service, asking people from all the different congregations and all the different religions to come and have a worship service the night before Pride and that was fun. I organized that for a few years and then keeping going with it became difficult. So it didn't continue, partially because I had some medical problems. And if I'm the one that's supposed to be doing this, and then I can't do it, it didn't keep going. But I overcame all those medical problems and I'm still here and I plan to be around for another thirty years. MF:So I have a question about -- you worked with PA Diversity Network on the anti-discrimination ordinance. You were a major leader in the Lutheran church in advocacy for LGBT Lutherans. And then through MCCLV, LGBT Christians more broadly. I'm curious what other kinds of advocacy work you might have done. You did mention marriage equality a bit. Was that something that you were involved in in the Lehigh Valley? And if so, how did you get involved in that? NA:Not a whole lot. Basically, sometimes people would go to a national gathering, if there was something. We would write letters to the editor and write congress people supportive of this. We would try to be supportive of individuals who were having problems. It's still the case, however, in an awful lot of the country, that you can get married on Sunday and be fired on Monday. Since getting married is usually a reasonably public event, people are likely to find out about that. You hear lots that didn't know you were gay before that. Could find that out and say goodbye. We did various activities where we would hold some kind of a demonstration, pro-LGBT marriage, supportive of LGBT people. Usually, they were relatively low-level things. But there was a lot of contacting congress people and pressuring them. And I still contact congress people a lot. Even though I think two of my three congress people are very pro-LGBT issues, they need to hear from us to counter whatever they are hearing from the anti-folks. And so I will likely sign off on an awful lot of emails that come saying, support this. Golly, I'd have to think about it. I do remember doing different things where we would demonstrate in front of the courthouse or something for this. That was all a while ago. It led to what we were after, which was the national acceptance thereof. And it's good to be public as much as possible. But it is sometimes dangerous to the livelihood of people getting out there. So we try to be working on it in ways that won't get the people doing it in trouble. And we talk to people in the various churches where they are willing to hear us. And we talk to people in other organizations, if they're interested in hearing from us. And at this point, it feels fairly positive, fairly supportive in the community. Everyone doesn't support us, but there's enough that do. And the law is supportive enough that we stay with that. Okay. MF:Well, I have a question that is about the Lutheran church. And I'm wondering, as someone who's been an active leader and a changemaker in your churches and also with your work with MCCLV, have you noticed an evolution from your childhood to your adulthood in how the church thinks about LGBT people? Could you talk a little bit about maybe some changes that you've seen across your lifetime, within the churches that you've been a part of? NA:When I was growing up, I never heard anything about LGBT people. If someone had told those initials to me, I would have had no idea what they were talking about. If they mentioned "lesbian," I would not necessarily have known what that meant. The message in the church was very clear, that you had to behave yourself, behave appropriately. Remain pure until you got married and remaining pure meant restraining from any kind of sexual involvement. And there was never anything mentioned, that I recall, about same-gender sexual involvement. That was just presumed not to exist. And then we had Lutherans Concerned North America develop. That was kind of independent from the church, but it consisted of Lutherans and I think they developed in the eighties, though I'm not totally sure about that, and started pestering the church about it. And then more of us got involved with it and we started working on our local congregations. And there would be a lot of ministers. In fact, I think if all the ministers who think it's a good idea to be reconciling Christ, RIC, to be supportive of gay, if all their churches were, we'd probably double or triple the number of churches who do that. But a lot of them do not want to cause a big commotion in their church. They think it works better to quietly work on getting that kind of support. But now, I don't think any congregation cannot look at that. I don't think kids growing up without any understanding of LGBT exist anymore. I remember, oh, it was probably fifteen years ago. We were talking about support for LGBT people and the "we" that was talking about it was a group of adults and some students. And the kids basically said, why would anyone object to that? They didn't see any reason. So they had clearly changed their viewpoint from that that was prevalent when I was a kid. They don't seem to think it's an insult to be considered that you might be gay. It's just accurate or inaccurate. While when I was growing up, well, I wouldn't have known what it was because we didn't talk about it. But it would have been considered an insult by a lot of people. The church has come a long way, though not all branches of the church. There are three major Lutheran denominations in the US, and the ELCA, the one I'm a part of, is very accepting. Missouri Synod is not accepting. It doesn't even accept ordaining women and the Wisconsin Synod is even worse, much more restrictive. So there's still a long way to go to get everyone to accept what Jesus said. Love your neighbor doesn't have an exception. Unless, of course, they're gay. Then you don't have to. I don't think it says that anywhere in what Jesus said. So the effort has been one to have this recognized. We usually have some kind of a program at the synod assembly, which is where we encounter a lot of people from a lot of different churches. We did one on marriage. Do you know how many different kinds of marriage there are in the Bible? It's unbelievable. There's examples of when the Israelis conquered some group, then they were to kill everyone except the virgins and they could marry them if they wanted. I don't think the virgins had any choice as to whether or not they'd be involved in these. Someone put together a listing I think there's about ten different kinds of marriage in the Bible, only one of which is where both parties agree to it. So we have done a lot of talking to people about these different kinds of things and what is consistent with Jesus' message of loving your neighbor. Love God, love your neighbor. And these are two major aspects of what Jesus says to do. And when we have these programs, we usually get a lot of people at them. Because they're all interested in what's going on here. How can I explain this to other people? Can you give me some information that I can use to argue about it? And we have done that. Okay. My memory of all the specifics that have happened is not coming through real well. I'd have to go back and look through materials to see what else we've done. MF:Well, I think you're doing great. The stories you're sharing are wonderful. I have a question about your own faith journey, because this is... You're really describing so much work in the church to build inclusivity. Was that a struggle to you, to work through some homophobia within the church in your own personal faith journey? Or did you always feel that God accepted you just as you are? NA:Oh, I always felt God accepted me. My supportive family expressed that in different ways. No, you can't tell mother about this at Marilyn's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Then she'll have these negative associations with it. No, you can't tell mother about this at Carol Jean's graduation and marriage. Then she'll have these negative... This is from my supportive sisters. So I finally wrote mother a letter and her response was, well, you young people certainly look at things differently than we did. And by the way, do you remember so and so, who was a third cousin of so and so? The rest of it was a letter like she usually wrote, mentioning someone and what their relationship was to everyone that I might know, and did I know about this happening? And mother was going to come to my wedding but she had a medical problem. Found out at that point she had a heart problem and was unable to travel at that time. But Jan and I went back for Christmas the next year. And was quite accepting. Mother was fine with that. And the rest of the family was okay with that. So I have felt fully accepted by my family all the time and therefore, if others in the church were not so accepting of it, well, that was their problem. And I would like to change their viewpoints, because it's clearly a stupid viewpoint. But I didn't feel put down by it. I guess I do find, as a minority, fighting for our minority rights. Yeah. And my family did come to Jan's funeral at that point, including Carol Jean brought her daughter. It's one thing, as an adult, to accept what this stupid thing your sister is doing. It's another thing to bring your kid to it. So I was impressed that she brought her daughter with her to that. They're in Nebraska. And the rest of the family was in California. So it was quite a trip for them to come for Jan's funeral. But they did come. And yeah, I have never felt negatively, negative devaluations from the family. We don't always agree with what the other's doing. But that's a different... They're still a positive member of the family. I don't know what one could do to have that change. So I've been very lucky in having a strong family with strong support for the various members. And I suppose that comes, at least in part, from the fact that my parents were different in some ways. And while a lot of people consider education level has to be similar for a marriage to work, it didn't for them. And so they could see beyond other kinds of things. And see to the positiveness. And they clearly taught that to all of us, because it seems all my siblings and their spouses have the same kind of view. Yeah. We don't discuss religion a lot, though. Two of my sisters have married men who became second-career Missouri Synod Lutheran pastors and they have different views than I have about the acceptability of LGBT. They've never had that interfere with their relationship with me. But it works better if we don't discuss our different views of religion. We know what the other ones believe, and we know why and we know where we differ. So we don't have to talk about that. We can focus on the family factors that are positive. MF:You described you sending a letter to your mom to tell her about your sexuality. I'm curious, when did you know that you were gay? NA:I think I was in my forties when I realized, very explicitly. I knew, at a young age, there was no way I was going to end up married to some guy and supporting him going through college when I hadn't gone through college. I did date guys for quite a while. There were some very nice guys. But I wasn't real interested in a lifelong relationship with them, for the most part. I was, well, if you go back... I got my degree in '72. So if you go back to the sixties and seventies, it was very difficult to be involved in any kind of a social life without having some level of dating going on. Things were done in pairs a lot. I did a lot of activities that were more athletic. I did a lot of cross-country skiing when I was in graduate school. We went out backpacking every weekend, except Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was home for those. But every other weekend, we'd be out backpacking. And in the winter, we would be cross-country skiing. I usually went downhill skiing a couple of times a year to work on techniques. But mostly, I did cross-country skiing. When I was working up in Canada at University of Western Ontario, there was a cross-country marathon from Ottawa. It started at Ottawa. I don't remember exactly where it went now. But it was basically a hundred miles. There were ten sections of ten miles. Maybe it was less than that. Something like that. And you'd go on one or two of them each day. And whichever ones you want. Well, basically I managed to trip and break my leg on one of those and that got me into the hospital. I did discover the Canadian medical system is much better than the American. The only thing I had to pay for was flying home from Ottawa back to where I was going to, where I lived. But all of the medical stuff was paid for by the system. And we hear about how bad the Canadian system is. Not at all. So I was very involved in these kinds of athletic things. We kept our skis in our office and went out and skied around the campus after five o'clock. That was a lot of fun. And I wasn't dating a lot at that time. But there was not a sense of, it was okay to be looking into same-gender relationships. You had a lot of close friends that were women. Just didn't become sexual a lot. And then, oh, probably starting in about the eighties, I started admitting that these strong attractions I had for women was more than a friendship. That I wanted a lot more from those relationships. I can be a pretty independent person and can get along by myself quite a lot. So I did eventually begin to realize that I wanted more from these relationships than just friendship. And that's when I started acknowledging that I'm lesbian and that that's a positive thing. That's okay. I never felt really negative about that. There's a lot of variety in life. And I have no problem with being one of those minority people, even though, in a lot of ways, I am not. As a white Christian with a high degree of education, that's not exactly a minority, as most people see it in our country. And I guess I was accepted by the important people in my life. And if they weren't accepting, I probably quit being involved with them much. But family, I have not gotten any real strong negatives from family. I've gotten some "well, we don't agree with that, but that's you" kind of statements. But I haven't gotten any "you're bad because of" kinds of statements. So there is that strong sense of family support there. I have been involved with some people. The relationship with Jan is the only one that became strong enough that we were married and together. Actually, she was in the process of changing her will when she passed away. Her son had come up, and we were going over it and he knew what she wanted to change it to but it hadn't gotten actually done. But he followed what she was trying to change it to, as closely as he could after that. So he didn't give me any problem. The house was set up that, if anything happened to either of us, the other one inherited it. And her will also said that any inheritance taxes would be paid out of her money. So I don't even know how much the inheritance taxes were. They paid that. We've kept in touch somewhat since then, though not a lot, over the years. He's up in Michigan. And that's kind of a long ways from here. I don't get up there real often. And since, well, before that and since then, there have been some relationships. But they've been fun while they lasted but they were clearly not going to last forever. I wouldn't mind getting into another relationship but at this point, it's kind of hard to start a relationship with all that's going on now. So just surviving everything is going to be the goal at this point. Also, I plan to live to be one hundred and seven and I suspect that when I'm in my nineties, I'll probably need more family support than I can get from being here. I was not able to go home for Christmas three years ago. I had, well, I had a broken hip in '16. I had uterine cancer in '17 and I had an insufficiency fracture of the spine in '18 and I've overcome them all. And I'm still here. But I couldn't sit up long enough to fly across the country in December of '18. So I guess it was two years ago, not three. So I didn't go home there and that made me realize I really need to be closer to family. I miss seeing them. I did go out in May to my great-nephew's high school graduation. And there were a few more people there, because of his graduation, than would have been there otherwise. But not as many as would have been there at Christmas. So I'm aiming to head back to California probably sometime next year. Meantime, I have an awful lot of stuff here that needs to be sorted through and gotten rid of. And you can't really do that now. I lost a lot of weight and gave away all those clothing, luckily early. But then I bought a lot more clothing very quickly. You've got to have clothing. Your tops, you can wear. But the bottoms start falling off when you lose a lot. So I have some that I bought because I need something and I don't like them and I need to get rid of them. But I can't do that now. I also went to the PEA [Phillipsburg Ed Association] representative assembly every year for ten years. And I got a lot of bags from those so I probably have fifty bags I'd like to get rid of but I can't give them away now. So I am hoping to get through this soon enough that we can start, people will accept things and I'll get rid of all of this. And I will move to California to be closer to family. I will probably look for both a Lutheran and an MCC congregation out there. The Lutheran churches are more likely to be involved in LGBT things, so that I can get to know that community through them. But MCC is the gay community. So I will be looking to both of them to get involved in the gay community when I'm out in California. I think that having someone my age being very supportive is a positive for a lot of the younger folks, who may or may not have family support for that. But when they know someone who knows a lot about the Bible and can quote the various things, and is very supportive of it, that is positive to the people who have felt dumped on by the church. So I try to do that as much as possible. Though I probably don't encounter them a lot, because I tend not to go to the churches that are likely to be negative. But you encounter people constantly that have some negative experiences. MF:Well, we're getting towards the end of our interview time. And I have one more question. And then we'll move towards closing the interview. We've talked about the evolution of the church. And we've talked about your different work with various organizations. But I'm curious about being someone who's in the field of psychology, how have you seen that field change around LGBT acceptance throughout your career? Because that is a field that really has undergone a major sea change. So I'm curious about your thoughts on, your reflections about being a gay person in that field, and what you've seen change across your career. NA:Okay, well, my original field was social psychology and there were concerns with how people interact with each other, the social kinds of things. And there had not been a whole lot of looking at LGBT things in that field when I got my degree. It's shocking to me. It was forty-eight years ago that I got that degree. That's a long time ago. There has been more looking at it since then. When I re-specialized in clinical and child psych, what was amazing to me later is I actually did a course on counseling LGBT people and there was never any mention of some of the problem. The transsexual was not there. If someone was born one thing and they said they were something else, that was never mentioned in those courses. I hope it is now, but it wasn't then. I followed up on it a lot and found out what I could about it. But it's been a, you've got to look into it on your own, kind of thing. I don't think psychology is against it so much as it has never been a major focus in the field. So I would say that it's much more likely to be something that people talk about, people ask about now. It was never mentioned. I don't recall it ever being mentioned when I was going through my doctoral studies. I wasn't doing a lot of clinical then. We had one course thereon you had to take, whatever your field was. You had to get courses in all the different aspects of it. But when I did the re-specialization in there, it was still pretty narrow in what was looked at. I think at this point, I would feel quite comfortable that I have never felt any kind of negative force from the field. When I was at Phillipsburg working as a school psychologist, I was also on the New Jersey Education Association task force on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. And at one point, an article came out in The American Psychologist about the different aspects. You know, some people say you're either this or that. Well actually, there's a lot of psychology that shows that there's a much wider range of things there. And so this one article talked about five different aspects of your sexual identity and I made that available to the other members of the task force. Some of it was pretty detailed, but there were nice summaries of each of the five sections that they could all understand, whether they wanted to understand the rest of it or not. So the field psychology has been more accepting in the sense of saying positive things about the diversity of sexual identity. It wasn't that I ever experienced anyone saying, you're A or B before, you're male or female. It's more that there is an emphasis on the wide variety of things that equal sexual identity since then. When I was teaching at the University level, I would go to the American Psychological Association conferences, which tend to be in August each year. When I started working in the school district, the K12 system, I was less likely to go to those. I still do try to read a fair amount of the stuff, but not nearly the wide range of journals that I used to read. I think the changes I've experienced, it has been more doing research in areas that weren't researched much before. So while there are some psychologists who will tell you that you're A or B, the majority of the field says, that's ridiculous. There's a much wider range of views there. And so I have not felt any problems in psychology. And I have found a lot of support for whatever your identity is. The field focuses more on how you should be supportive of an individual, in whatever their sense of identity is, than in figuring out whether it's a good identity or an accurate identity for the person or not. It's more like the field feels that individuals know what their identity is. Our job, as psychologists, is to help them negotiate how they express that in the world. You probably are better off not being explicit and open about it in a setting where there's a lot of people who disagree with you. You will get into a big fight about it and you won't gain anything. So how can you negotiate that if that place where you get into a big fight is your family? That would be more the kinds of things that psychologists would look at in counseling, than trying to convince someone they are or are not. Now, there has been a lot of effort of some people to change individuals from same-gender to opposite-gender attractions. It's pretty clear that doesn't work. It's pretty clear that that is a useless effort and you cannot get any support, as a legitimate psychologist, in trying to do that. The American Psychological Association has position papers that say, no, no, people know what their identity is and you don't try and change that. MF:Well, thank you so much. Before we close the interview, I want to ask you, Nadine, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you really want to discuss today? NA:I don't think so. I'll think about it. If I come up with something, I'll let you know. But no, I don't think so. I think we've covered a lot of things here. MF:Well, I am so appreciative of your time. Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me today. I'm so grateful. Thank you. NA:You're welcome. I've enjoyed it. 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.) 01:39:13 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 Nadine Anderson, May 12, 2020 Description An account of the resource Nadine Anderson recounts her time as an LGBT individual in church, her career in psychology, and how the fields have developed over the years. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-04 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-05-12 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/d4abf92b9bfeaa3a82dc41c64dd49d37.png e7a5310cbe604bdd2e08986d4e22d395 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Jane Land Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mary Foltz OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-10.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 May 29, 2020 Jane Land, May 29, 2020 LGBT-10 02:01:53 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Mary Foltz Jane Land video/mp4 LandJane_20200529_video.mp4 1.0:|27(10)|62(3)|77(18)|92(14)|111(13)|128(18)|147(6)|168(16)|187(2)|204(7)|221(17)|240(17)|259(7)|280(11)|301(14)|322(4)|343(12)|368(7)|391(13)|412(12)|437(3)|454(8)|479(10)|500(7)|521(8)|546(5)|563(16)|580(12)|597(15)|616(16)|639(7)|658(10)|675(10)|694(9)|713(14)|730(12)|751(15)|776(18)|797(17)|816(19)|833(14)|852(18)|871(11)|892(3)|915(12)|934(12)|953(8)|976(13)|995(9)|1010(6)|1027(9)|1040(15)|1059(8)|1072(15)|1097(9)|1114(3)|1135(11)|1152(11)|1175(6)|1196(7)|1219(4)|1240(15)|1257(14)|1280(15)|1299(4)|1324(9)|1349(5)|1364(12)|1387(11)|1408(3)|1431(12)|1452(5)|1473(9)|1492(3)|1515(4)|1536(13)|1559(6)|1580(8)|1595(2)|1614(4)|1635(7)|1656(14)|1683(2)|1704(10)|1725(5)|1748(2)|1771(5)|1792(8)|1815(8)|1834(7)|1853(6)|1870(11)|1887(2)|1906(11)|1927(7)|1944(5)|1961(3)|1978(16)|1999(8)|2016(9)|2035(7)|2054(14)|2073(9)|2088(16)|2109(12)|2128(11)|2149(18)|2168(14)|2189(12)|2208(10)|2229(10)|2250(10)|2269(6)|2292(9)|2313(11)|2336(2)|2359(15)|2382(12)|2405(8)|2426(11)|2447(14)|2468(6) 0 https://youtu.be/vTO9qsDg640 YouTube video 4 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: All right. My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Jane Land to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. Jane and I are meeting on Zoom because there’s a pandemic going on, and today’s date is May 29, 2020. So, Jane, just first, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; JANE LAND: Oh, sure.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? 0 125 Early Life/Family&#13 ; MF: Okay, great. Thank you, Jane. So to start our discussion today, I’m wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your childhood?&#13 ; &#13 ; JL: My childhood, it was a long time ago, -- I’ll be seventy next month -- and I grew up in the country. My father was a chemist. He had a PhD in chemistry, and he worked for a large pharmaceutical company. And my mother had a library degree, a master’s in library science, but she was a homemaker until I was in seventh grade. I had only one other sibling, my sister, an older sister. She was six years older. She passed away a few years back. So I grew up in the country, and it was a great place to grow up, and I think it had a bearing on who I am. I spent a lot of time outdoors, playing outdoors, and my friends that I played with, my playmates, -- there weren’t too many kids around -- they were all boys. 0 518 College Pressure MF: So you described wonderful adventures as a child in the outdoors and making rafts on the river. And you described a kind of self-sufficiency, a kind of self-knowledge earlier -- early on in your life. What kinds of things were you interested in beyond the outdoors as you were going through middle and high school?&#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Well, you had asked about -- just mentioned something about education and I... There was a lot of unspoken pressure I think to get a college degree. Everyone in the family was educated. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I struggled with that. I really was not keen on going to college because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I have a lot of college credits, but I never got a degree in anything. [laughs] So I did start out by going to college after I graduated. I went to Bucks County Community College for a year and learned... I signed up for data processing. I had degrees in data processing, which was the old punch card system, ones and twos on the punch cards, and that was really boring to me. But as part of that, one of the courses I had signed up for at Bucks County Community College was accounting, and I learned that I liked accounting very much, so I changed majors to accounting. 0 755 Looking Towards the Future JL: So after I got divorced from my husband, I started searching for -- thinking about going back to college. I did attend some college, some more college. I was in Minnesota with my sister-in-law who had gone there for her master’s degree. I took some courses there, I came back to Muhlenberg, took some courses there. Eventually ended up living in Bethlehem and attending Moravian College, and I was getting a degree in social work. And then, one semester before I was due to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in social work, I realized that that was not what I wanted to do. I still hadn’t figured out what I was going to be when I grew up, what I really wanted to do. &#13 ; &#13 ; I was talking with one of my psychology professors at Moravian, and when you asked me to do this oral history with you, I did spend some time thinking about what were the people and the things that influenced my life the most. And that college professor, he -- a psychology professor, his name was Tony LoGiudice. And I was talking with him about so actually getting depressed thinking about spending the rest of my life being a social worker. Social work is a fine profession, but it just was not going to be my thing. And he said, “Well, you know I can give you some -- a battery of tests, and they’ll show what you have an aptitude for. I’ll send them away, and they score them, and then when I get them back, get the results back, we can sit and talk about what you might do when it showed your strengths were.” 0 1112 Schooling &amp ; Career&#13 ; MF: This is a wonderful story that you’re sharing now. I’m curious if you could just talk a little bit about why you felt compelled to explore social work and accounting prior to thinking about other things like mechanics like -- and auto mechanic courses in particular. And I guess what I’m trying to ask is like during that time period of the ’70s, what seemed possible to you as a woman laborer? Did you feel that there were specific careers like social work that were open to women and others that were closed? So I’m just curious why you were -- you thought social work in the beginning even though you weren’t really enjoying the classes. So could you talk a little bit about that, the logic that you had for the courses you were choosing prior to really finding this field that felt really compelling to you? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Sure. Well, accounting was simply by accident. It was a course requirement that I was taking. It fulfilled some liberal arts requirement for a degree, and I just discovered that I really liked it. I really liked working with numbers. I’m not a mathematician, that’s an entirely different thing than -- accounting was just basically arithmetic, but I really excelled at that. And it’s funny that fellow Doug, that boy that used to come over to play, we would often play bank. We would play banker in the -- in my room, and we would do things with money, and it was funny. But to this day, I still do volunteer work as a bookkeeper for the church and have for several churches. So it wasn’t really anything conscious there. It was just something I found I really had a knack for. 0 1659 Being a Woman in a Male Dominated Workplace MF: So you described finding this career in -- entering Northampton Community College. I’m curious, what was it like to be the only woman in that -- in the classes for mechanics at Northampton? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Well, the first thing I did was I didn’t tell my family what I was doing. I stopped going to Moravian College and enrolled at NCCC -- in Northampton County Community College, and in that program. I went to the classes for several months pretty much the first semester before I was in a situation where I had to admit to a family member that I was no longer going to Moravian College, [laughs] so... And there were several family members -- and this is beyond my immediate family. I can remember my uncle in particular sending me -- as he lived in Illinois, him and my aunt, and my uncle sent me this scathing letter about what a big mistake I was making not finishing my college degree in social work and that the idea of being a mechanic was a really bad idea, and that I should really reconsider what I was doing with my life. 0 2351 Social Life in Bethlehem/NOW&#13 ; MF: At this point, you were divorced. What was happening in your social life during the -- that time in Bethlehem and then while you’re moving into this new career? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: At that time, I got involved with NOW, became a member of a chapter in Bethlehem. I was just a member but trying to get plugged into women’s rights and find some support there, that kind of thing. So I belonged to that for a while, and eventually, there was another chapter in Allentown. I don’t remember if it was called -- I think it was called Lehigh Valley rather than Allentown NOW. I’m pretty sure that’s Lehigh Valley NOW, and that’s where I met Dixie White who was an activist that I’m sure you probably know about. I know that ; Liz Bradbury had talked to me about that connection and finding my name in some of Dixie’s memorabilia once Dixie passed away. 0 2415 International Women's Conference 1977 JL: [...] I got the job in August of 1977, and I took the job with the stipulation that even though I wouldn’t have been entitled to any kind of vacation after just joining the company, that I be given time off to go to the international women’s conference that was held in Texas in 1977. I’ve been chosen as a delegate for that. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What was that conference like when you went to Texas? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: That was pretty amazing. I was young though. I was twenty-seven at the time, I wish that I had -- and just newly plugged into NOW and women’s rights, and I wish I had -- I could’ve appreciated it more because the women that attended that... I got in as a delegate. Dixie White said, “Why don’t you apply to be a delegate for this?” and I said, “Okay.” 0 3018 Experiences with the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community MF: It’s 1977 or ’78, around there, you got a great job at PPL. Are you dating at this time? Are you in the LGBT community at this time, and if so, what was that like? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Dixie and her partner [Carol?] were always on the lookout to find someone for me to match up with, and I did eventually. I’m trying to remember how we exactly met. Oh, I know. So I was working at Dave &amp ; Wayne’s, and for the moment, I can’t remember exactly how I met Diane, but -- or maybe it was actually another woman. But this woman had a house on Carlton Avenue in Bethlehem where she was -- and I got to know her and [Diane?], my first lover. [Annie?] had a room on the third floor of this house that wasn’t in use. It was actually the attic. &#13 ; &#13 ; I needed a cheaper place to live to meet my expenses and so I talked Annie into letting me make the attic a livable space and letting me live there. So I insulated it and did some other work to it and ended up living there, and that’s where I met Diane. She lived there also. She had rented another room. So there were four women living there, Annie, Diane, me, and a woman from -- who was a professor, a visiting professor at Lehigh University. 0 3388 Coming into Lesbian Identity MF: Good. I don’t think we talked about -- how did you come into a lesbian identity? When did you start to get a sense of your sexual identity? Was it in the ’70s, was it earlier? How did that happen for you? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: I came out to myself in 1977. I realized looking backward that I’ve been in love with my camp counselor, [laughs] in love with a girl that I met at Girl Scout camp also, and just realized that, wow, I’m not heterosexual. Those relationships aren’t working out. Even when I was going to mechanic school and working at Dave &amp ; Wayne’s and also working at Paul’s Garage, I still dated men, but it wasn’t doing it for me. And I realized when I got involved with NOW and were around all these women that it was incredibly exciting because I realized that this is who I was, that I was a lesbian. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What was it like to live with in Diane in Catasauqua together when you built that, that home together? 0 3618 Life in the 1980s MF: So you’re living in Catasauqua, you’re working at PPL, what -- how -- what changes in your life in the ’80 s are you -- how do you sort of enter into the ’80s? What are the big things that are happening for you in those early years? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Well, once I got a job with PPL in the garage, you start out as a handyman. In garage is basically you’re a gofer, you run for parts, you jockey cars around. Pretty much that’s what you’re doing. You don’t really get to do any mechanical work. So I had gone from doing pretty much -- doing a lot of mechanical work at Paul’s Garage to being a gofer. 0 4253 Being a Lesbian at Pennsylvania Power &amp ; Light MF: Well, I mean, that has -- that kind of leads me to wonder about what it was like to be a lesbian working at PPL during that time period. I’m curious, was there homophobia in the workplace? What was it like to be at PPL as a lesbian person? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Yeah, that was really tough. It was hard enough being a woman in a nontraditional job, and then to be lesbian on top of it was really hard. The whole time I worked in the garage, I was closeted, I was not out but every-- virtually everybody knew it. [laughs] Well, I don’t know ; it’s kind of weird. The guys who gave me a hard time, they seem to know it, they seem to pick up on it. They guys who were my friends didn’t exactly seem to pick up on it because actually several of those friends along the way expressed that they had a romantic interest in me in one form or another -- two of them did. &#13 ; &#13 ; We managed to weather through that and not go in that direction without me saying I am not interested in relationship with a man other than a friend. And we managed to maintain our friendships. Eventually after I left the garage, I ended up in -- I was a mechanic for a number of years and then a job came along as the parts person. They called it the transportation material handler. And the fellow who was in that job, they needed to have a second person, and his name was [Dave?]. He came to me and asked me, “Would you please apply for this job?” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, the pay is about the same, and I’m not a mechanic, and you’re really good at what you do. And there’s some men that are applying for the job -- going to apply for the job that I do not want to work with, so would you please apply for the job?” 0 4612 Fighting for LGBT Benefits at PPL&#13 ; MF: So PPL today has an LGBT staff group. At that time, were -- did you know other people at PPL that were lesbian or gay, or was it mostly like people knew but didn’t know or was it -- &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: No, you knew, you knew who the gay people were there. Your gaydar told you who they were. You gingerly approach them and then they acknowledge they were gay also. So in ’95, they started cutting back on services, and they went through the transportation department. Because of the union, I was -- the fellow Dave who asked me to take that job as the parts person, he was there first, so they cut back to one material handler in every garage, so I lost my job in 1995. I went up to the service center, which was also on the same property and became a dispatcher for -- a power dispatcher for repairs of electrical -- sending people to repair electrical equipment for storms and that kind of thing. And that’s when I became out. I was actually outed by a lesbian up there who was not a very nice person and decided she would do that for me whether I liked it or not. 0 5347 Work with Other LGBT Organizations in the Lehigh Valley/AIDS Outreach MF: So while you were working with GLOW at PPL, were you aware of other LGBT organizations in the valley that were working on similar issues? Or did you have connections with other activist organizations in the valley? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: We did. Air Products was one we often -- that we were connected to, and we would often talk with, maybe meet with here and there. They were ahead of us in trying to get benefits, but in the end -- I’m not sure if they ever got benefits in the end. The people at Air Products were -- all the people we worked with were professional people, people with degrees, so they were considered management employees at Air Products. So I think because of that, Air Products acknowledged them earlier than PPL acknowledged our gay and lesbian workers. But I think because of maybe financial issues, the company was -- I’m not sure why that Air Products seemed to struggle. You would have thought they would get all the benefits before we did. 0 6077 Spirituality MF: Well, we’re nearing the end of the interview, and there two sort of areas that I’d like to explore just a little bit further. I’m interested, you’ve mentioned a few times about being a Quaker in the ’70s. I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about your spirituality? I’m wondering if you could just discuss a little bit about your emergence into the Quaker church and maybe the evolution of your faith? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Okay. Well, I started going to Quaker Meeting in the early ’70s I guess. And I mentioned my psychology professor, Tony LoGiudice went there, and that’s how I ended up attending a Quaker Meeting. He said that I might like this place. Maybe he recognized I was a lesbian -- that was years before I knew I was a lesbian -- I don’t know. But maybe just because I was in a nontraditional -- looking to get into a nontraditional job or probably because Quaker Meeting was a place that allowed people to -- it was not dogmatic, a dogmatic type of religion. &#13 ; 0 6363 Connection Between Faith and Lesbian Identity&#13 ; MF: It sounds to me like your faith -- the faith communities that you’ve been involved in, the Quakers and now the Unitarian Universalist, have been really affirming of both women and LGBT people. Like the MCCLV church in Bethlehem has been -- in Bethlehem and Allentown has been really supportive of LGBT people. Would you say that you ever struggled as an lesbian with your faith? Or would you say that your faith always confirmed the value of your identity, of your sexual identity? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: I didn’t have a religious faith until I was a young adult and did a bunch of searching at different churches to try to find where I fit in. I did that for a good number of years. So it wasn’t until maybe like 1972 -- I would have been twenty-two at the time, twenty-three, around there -- that I found Quaker Meeting. So it’s probably to my advantage that I didn’t have much of a religious upbringing because even not having a religious upbringing, I still struggle with -- that I was a gay person and that this was wrong in society’s eyes. 0 6463 Meeting Michele MF: That certainly was the case for me being raised Catholic ; it was a little bit of a challenge. Okay. So since we’re nearing the end of the interview, I’m wondering if you could share the Michele story? Like how did you meet Michele, if you could talk a little bit about this primary partnership in your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Well, it’s pretty bizarre. [laughs] Before Michele, before I met Michele, I had two other lovers. The first one was Diane, and the second one was Janice. And Janice was with me a couple of years and maybe four I guess it was, and she had two children. We all lived together, and Janice had been a straight woman and then she decided that being a gay woman was what she wanted. And she did that for four years and then decided she wanted to be straight again. So she left me and I had the house still in Catasauqua, the town house. 0 6869 Effect of Marriage Equality on Relationship with Michele MF: What did marriage equality do for you and Michele? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Oh my God, it was huge. It was huge, just huge, and I’m surprised. We were so shocked that we got the right to get married in Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania. It was 2014, May of 2014 when they passed that, and my brother-in-law who lived in Texas -- my sister had passed at that -- by that time -- my brother-in-law who never speaks to me called me. He’s an extremely quiet guy, extremely quiet -- called me and said, “I just heard this on the news.” He was the one who told me that it had been passed in Pennsylvania. &#13 ; &#13 ; Later that day, I got -- the phone rang, and I picked it up and it was -- I didn’t understand what I was listening to at first, but it was a conference call with the gay... I can’t even remember at the moment which gay group it was, but they were having a conference call, the lawyers that had fought for these rights and talking about what had happened, what had transpired, and what it meant. And so when I say it was huge, we’ve always been married whether we could be legally married or not. We’ve always been married in our minds, in our hearts. But it meant that we no longer had to maintain huge insurance policies to try and help pay for -- you know if one of us passed away, the other one would inherit it. 0 7198 Closing Remarks MF: [...] But before we do that, Jane, I just want to ask, is there anything that we really -- that we missed today that you really felt you wanted to share in this interview? &#13 ; &#13 ; JL: Not that I can think of. I will share one story, and I don’t know why this just popped in my head. But when I retired from PPL by that time, I had -- it was a good company to work for, good benefits and good pay, so I kept taking jobs that were there. I always considered the garage my home. That’s really who I am, really where I spent the most time, but I moved on to other jobs. But when I retired, I had not worked in the garage. I retired in 2012 ; I had not worked in the garage since 1995. When I retired, it was the guys in the garage who threw me a party, and that meant the world to me. 0 MovingImage Jane Land describes her childhood in Bucks County, her experiences at Moravian College in a social work program, and her movement to Northampton Community College to study mechanics where she was the only woman in the auto mechanic program. Land goes on to discuss her work as an auto mechanic at a variety of shops until she took a job at PPL in their garage and eventually as parts manager. With reference to her work, she discusses sexism and homophobia in the workplace and her work on gay and lesbian rights for employees of PPL. Beyond her discussion of her career, Land describes LGBT community spaces in the 1970s and 1980s, her work with N.O.W. in the 1970s (including attending the 1977 International Women’s Conference in Texas) and AIDS Outreach, and her religious affiliations with Quakers and UUC. Toward the end of the interview, Land discusses marriage equality and her spouse, Michele Strohl. INTERVIEW WITH JANE LAND MAY 29, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: All right. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Jane Land to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. Jane and I are meeting on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on, and today's date is May 29, 2020. So, Jane, just first, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me today. JANE LAND: Oh, sure. MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? JL: My name is two syllables long, so you have to listen carefully, it goes by fast. It's Jane Land. Last name is spelled L-A-N-D, and first name is J-A-N-E. MF: Thank you. And can you please share your birthday? JL: June 28, 1950. MF: All right, so prior to starting this interview, you and I talked a little bit about consent for the interview, and I'll start by just asking you, do you consent to this interview today? JL: Yes. MF: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made available online in searchable formats? JL: Yes. MF: And do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats including articles, websites, short films, presentations, or other formats that might become available? JL: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you will have at least 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts that you might want to delete, or to withdraw the interview from the project? JL: Yes, I understand. MF: Okay, great. Thank you, Jane. So to start our discussion today, I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your childhood? JL: My childhood, it was a long time ago, -- I'll be seventy next month -- and I grew up in the country. My father was a chemist. He had a PhD in chemistry, and he worked for a large pharmaceutical company. And my mother had a library degree, a master's in library science, but she was a homemaker until I was in seventh grade. I had only one other sibling, my sister, an older sister. She was six years older. She passed away a few years back. So I grew up in the country, and it was a great place to grow up, and I think it had a bearing on who I am. I spent a lot of time outdoors, playing outdoors, and my friends that I played with, my playmates, -- there weren't too many kids around -- they were all boys. The family on a lot adjacent to ours, -- we had three and a half acres, and it was rural, so everybody had some acreage -- there were four boys there so that's primarily who I played with. We didn't have a lot of toys, so we invented things all the time to play. And we traveled quite a distance to play. We had a creek that was maybe a mile away, and we would ride our bicycles into town sometimes. But mostly, we played outside in -- at the creek and in the fields and in -- climbing trees, building treehouses, and building rafts for the creek to navigate on the creek and dams on the creek and catching crayfish and putting them in our pond that we would make. I can't think of all the ways in which we invented things, but we have very few props, very, very few toys, so we had to use our creativity a lot. MF: So what part of the country did you grow up? Where was the closest small city to your country home? JL: I grew up in Northern Bucks County, Pennsylvania, so I was between... The closest town was a small town called Telford, which is actually in Montgomery. And I lived just three houses from the borderline between Bucks and Montgomery counties. I went to Pennridge High School and graduated from there in 1968. MF: And culturally, what was it like in that area around Telford? What was the community spirit like? What kinds of values were promoted in that country community? JL: I don't know. I just know the immediate families that my parents socialized with or had a connection to, basically neighbors. My parents were both educated, my father more than my mother even. My sister went on to get a master's also in biology. And a lot of the people they socialized with were similar middle-class families that the father had an education, mother may or may not have had an education, often did but didn't use it. As far as political -- politically, I'm not really aware politics went -- things that were talked about. MF: I'm curious about your relationship with your parents. You described their emphasis on higher education that they really believed in education. What was your relationship like with your parents when you were a child? JL: My father had to -- he had a job with -- at that time, it was called Merck Sharp &amp ; Dohme, it later became Merck Incorporated. And his commute to work from our home was maybe like twenty-five, 30 minutes. But at the time, I was eight years old, he took a job in -- had to take a job with the company in North Jersey, so he traveled. He commuted about three hours a day, so I didn't see much of my dad. When he was around, he was -- he had a fleet of cars that he would use to get to and from work. When one would break down, he'd have to grab another one and leave it for the weekend when he could fix it. He was a very bright man and very self-sufficient. He didn't have a lot of time to talk or spend with me, but I do remember watching him do things a lot, watching him fix the cars and anything that broke in the house, that kind of thing. My mother was I think a depressed person and so I didn't have -- you know, she kept to herself a lot. So I pretty much had to learn how to be self-sufficient early on. MF: So you described wonderful adventures as a child in the outdoors and making rafts on the river. And you described a kind of self-sufficiency, a kind of self-knowledge earlier -- early on in your life. What kinds of things were you interested in beyond the outdoors as you were going through middle and high school? JL: Well, you had asked about -- just mentioned something about education and I... There was a lot of unspoken pressure I think to get a college degree. Everyone in the family was educated. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I struggled with that. I really was not keen on going to college because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I have a lot of college credits, but I never got a degree in anything. [laughs] So I did start out by going to college after I graduated. I went to Bucks County Community College for a year and learned... I signed up for data processing. I had degrees in data processing, which was the old punch card system, ones and twos on the punch cards, and that was really boring to me. But as part of that, one of the courses I had signed up for at Bucks County Community College was accounting, and I learned that I liked accounting very much, so I changed majors to accounting. But then after a year, I ended up getting married. This was during the Vietnam War. I married a man who then ended up getting drafted into the service, and we traveled. He was first stationed in Phoenixville and then we traveled to San Francisco. When he was drafted, his -- after he finished basic training, he became -- he was assigned the career of a medic. And since it was during the war, medics was not a good occupation to be in. In times of war, they always try to take the medic and the radioman out of commission, so -- the enemy that is. So he signed up for more time and became kind of the equivalent of a M*A*S*H nurse, a field hospital nurse, and... The only reason I mentioned that because, obviously, that was a mistake I made in my life, getting married to a man. It took me a while to figure that out, but I mentioned it because I got the chance to travel a lot. So I lived out in California for a while and got to travel around the country. MF: Well, I'm curious, how did -- did you -- how did you two meet, and how did that relationship develop during that really tumultuous time of the Vietnam War? JL: He was the nephew of a high school professor, a high school teacher that I actually never had in high school. But he was -- Uncle John was a very -- a freethinker, and as it turned out, a closeted gay man. But he was a very dynamic teacher, and he would hold these -- he would have get-togethers with his students where they would come to his house and talk about all kinds of ideas. Really a very, very good teacher who would really expand your horizons, get you to thinking about different things in life. So after I got divorced from my husband, I started searching for -- thinking about going back to college. I did attend some college, some more college. I was in Minnesota with my sister-in-law who had gone there for her master's degree. I took some courses there, I came back to Muhlenberg, took some courses there. Eventually ended up living in Bethlehem and attending Moravian College, and I was getting a degree in social work. And then, one semester before I was due to graduate with a bachelor's degree in social work, I realized that that was not what I wanted to do. I still hadn't figured out what I was going to be when I grew up, what I really wanted to do. I was talking with one of my psychology professors at Moravian, and when you asked me to do this oral history with you, I did spend some time thinking about what were the people and the things that influenced my life the most. And that college professor, he -- a psychology professor, his name was Tony LoGiudice. And I was talking with him about so actually getting depressed thinking about spending the rest of my life being a social worker. Social work is a fine profession, but it just was not going to be my thing. And he said, "Well, you know I can give you some -- a battery of tests, and they'll show what you have an aptitude for. I'll send them away, and they score them, and then when I get them back, get the results back, we can sit and talk about what you might do when it showed your strengths were." So we did that, and we met. He said, "Your mechanical ability is extremely high." I said, "Well, what would I do with that?" He said, "You could be -- well you could be like -- you could be like an electrician or a carpenter or an auto mechanic, something like that." I said, "Really?" and he said, "Yeah, you know this is a really high score in mechanical ability and ability to analyze things and investigate them, be able to apply logic to come up with answers," so I said, "All right." Well, I'm not good at science, so I don't know how well I'd do at being an electrician, understanding the science of electricity. And at the time, it was 1975, and there was a recession going on and so the construction trade was really struggling. I was doing very poorly, so that was a -- that would be a really poor career choice because it'd be tough to make a living and so I chose mechanics. So my next step was where to go to school to become a mechanic, how do I do that. But I quit Moravian one semester shy of getting my degree in social work and one year short of getting a minor I guess, you'd say, in accounting or a dual degree in accounting and enrolled in Northampton County Community College. But before I did that, I went there. I was going to enroll there because they had an auto mechanics training course. But this was 1975, and it was like, would they even let me in as a woman. So I talked to somebody in admission, and somebody said, "Well, why don't you -- I'll give you the phone number for the fellow who runs that training program, and why don't you talk to him, see what he has to say whether he'd let you in or not?" So this fellow's name was George Gerstenberg, and I called him up. He just turned out to be a young fellow. He was not that far from my age, pretty close to the same age -- this was in 1975 -- and told him what I was interested in doing and why. I told him that after I had taken this test and learned that I had this -- realized that I had this ability. I thought back in when I was going to Moravian, I worked my way through college cleaning houses, and along the way for some reason -- these were often households that had educated adults in them -- and the men were not very handy. And the women would ask me if I could fix things and actually really insisted that I try to fix things ; I don't know why. This one woman asked me one day if I could fix a lamp, and I said, "Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure I could fix a lamp because I'd watched my father do it." She said, "Well, here, take this, go and fix -- see if you can fix it and then bring it back." So the next week, I brought it back, and I made the repair, and it worked again. She said, "That's great. I have a mixer that doesn't work, you think you could fix my mixer?" And I said, "I don't know about that. I have no idea about a mixer." She said, "Well, why don't you just take it home and try it, see what you can do with it? It's not working, so if you can't fix it, fine, but if you can, it's broken and I could use -- I'll pay you to fix this mixer." So I took it home, and I took it all apart, and that's something I realized that I used to do when I was a kid. My mother had a friend that had a son my same age, Doug was his name. He would come with his mother over to our house to visit, and we would squirrel ourselves away in my bedroom, and we would take things apart, so... [laughs] So it was just simply by taking it apart, it was -- had a bunch of, I don't know, hair and fuzz, dust stuck in it, and it just needed a good cleaning and lubrication again, and I put it back together, and it worked. So I talked to George Gerstenberg and he was like -- I was really surprised. He was like, "That would be terrific. It would be great to have a woman in the class." He said, "You'll be the only one," but he said, "I welcome it. I encourage you to try that. I think it would be wonderful." So because George thought it was wonderful, I got an opportunity. I'm not sure I would have gotten that opportunity if he hadn't thought it was wonderful back in 1975. MF: This is a wonderful story that you're sharing now. I'm curious if you could just talk a little bit about why you felt compelled to explore social work and accounting prior to thinking about other things like mechanics like -- and auto mechanic courses in particular. And I guess what I'm trying to ask is like during that time period of the '70s, what seemed possible to you as a woman laborer? Did you feel that there were specific careers like social work that were open to women and others that were closed? So I'm just curious why you were -- you thought social work in the beginning even though you weren't really enjoying the classes. So could you talk a little bit about that, the logic that you had for the courses you were choosing prior to really finding this field that felt really compelling to you? JL: Sure. Well, accounting was simply by accident. It was a course requirement that I was taking. It fulfilled some liberal arts requirement for a degree, and I just discovered that I really liked it. I really liked working with numbers. I'm not a mathematician, that's an entirely different thing than -- accounting was just basically arithmetic, but I really excelled at that. And it's funny that fellow Doug, that boy that used to come over to play, we would often play bank. We would play banker in the -- in my room, and we would do things with money, and it was funny. But to this day, I still do volunteer work as a bookkeeper for the church and have for several churches. So it wasn't really anything conscious there. It was just something I found I really had a knack for. One thing that I do realize is really instrumental in my childhood was my father never said you can't do this, you can't do that, a girl can't do this, a girl can't do that. He never ever said those things. And so in a silent way -- he was a pretty quiet guy, in a silent way, he was very encouraging that there wasn't anything that I couldn't do that -- if I put my mind to it, which is pretty much what he had done with his life. He was an only child whose father had died when he was still in college and so he pretty much -- I imagine he'd been in the same kind of circumstance where he just had the confidence, and he just decided there wasn't anything he couldn't do. He was trained as a chemist, but he is busy teaching himself how to repair automobiles and all kinds of equipment. The water pump died, he'd be hauling it out of the well and replacing that. Just anything that broke living in the country where there weren't many services or people who were trained in services, you had to do it on your own. You had to learn how to do it on your own, and that's pretty much what he did. So I think just being around that even though I remember as a kid, I'd ask -- as I got older, I'd ask if I could help because he was basically working all the time. Whether it was going off to work for a paid -- for a salary or working around the house, he was just always incredibly busy. So I'd ask if I can help, and usually within sixty seconds or less of me then trying to do what he had told me I could -- I should do, he'd be impatient and take it away from me because he just didn't have the time. I realize that in retrospect. But I think that was a huge -- an influence on me that he, in his silence, never gave me the idea that there wasn't something I couldn't -- anything I couldn't do. So when I went to college, I probably took -- I probably decided on a degree on social work for the same reason that virtually everyone who goes into social work and psychology goes into it for, which is their chapter one or their childhood had some major dysfunction in it. And then you were -- you went on to college and enrolled in those two disciplines to try and figure out your chapter one. And so it helped me just figure it out some and -- but the thought of -- and I enjoyed the courses. Along the way, I had to do a service project in the community, and I ended up at Northampton County prison. There was a small women's detention center there, and it was a very small area. They kept them segregated from all the men because they thought that would be a huge problem, and they basically had nothing to do. They were in this tiny area and had nothing to do. So I started a program there. It wasn't hard to get them to... I thought it would be really difficult to get the prison system to take any suggestion I had, but I think they were concerned about public opinion and the press. I started a program there where I got some sewing machines donated, and the women had sewing machines. And they actually had some women guards I think who had some sewing ability who then helped them learn how to sew as a career, as a way to make money when they would get out of prison. And so I enjoyed that part of social work, but it was not what I wanted to make a living out of, trying to help people figure out their own problems. I had enough trouble figuring out mine. [laughs] MF: Well, now, I'm curious about -- you said you were drawn to social work to figure out your chapter one. What did you figure out in the social work program about yourself or your family? JL: My mother lost her mother when she was -- I think it was ten -- ten years old and so my mother -- I figured out that my mother was stuck at that age. She had a trauma. There weren't many psychologists or psychiatrists back in those days. People didn't go for therapy particularly if you lived out on the country, so she pretty much was stuck at that age. And a lot of her life was tied to that, so she spent -- so I think she was a fairly depressed person and I didn't... I actually didn't see a lot of her growing up. She was a librarian as I had mentioned, and she spent a lot of time reading, escaping. My father was a good man, but I think he was angry that his partner in life was not being much of a partner. So he had a pretty bad temper. And my older sister, she was six years older, and six years older is like a lifetime at that age. I learned all this from social work and -- social work curriculum and my classes in social work and psychology that she picked up the dominant parent's behavior, so she had a very bad temper. So I spent my childhood trying to stay out of the reach of depressed and angry people [laughs] and a good part of my -- a good portion of my adult life too, so... MF: So you described finding this career in -- entering Northampton Community College. I'm curious, what was it like to be the only woman in that -- in the classes for mechanics at Northampton? JL: Well, the first thing I did was I didn't tell my family what I was doing. I stopped going to Moravian College and enrolled at NCCC -- in Northampton County Community College, and in that program. I went to the classes for several months pretty much the first semester before I was in a situation where I had to admit to a family member that I was no longer going to Moravian College, [laughs] so... And there were several family members -- and this is beyond my immediate family. I can remember my uncle in particular sending me -- as he lived in Illinois, him and my aunt, and my uncle sent me this scathing letter about what a big mistake I was making not finishing my college degree in social work and that the idea of being a mechanic was a really bad idea, and that I should really reconsider what I was doing with my life. My father was like, "Okay, great, and what will you do with it when you're done?" I said, "Well, you know I hadn't gotten that far yet," and he said, "Well, if you want to go in to business for yourself, let me know and I will help you." And my sister who I had a terrible relationship with because she was so angry also all the time -- she was -- had a very unhappy childhood. Because she had the same parents I had but also because she was -- she was very heavyset. She had extremely curly hair that she couldn't manage back in those days, -- the hairdressers weren't used to that -- and she also had terrible acne, so she -- I think those things were all factors in our life that made her a pretty unhappy and angry person. But I was surprised. She said to me when -- and she was the one I had to admit. She kind of pinned me down in a conversation long distance, and I had to admit to her that I wasn't going to Moravian anymore and told her what -- I had to admit to her what I was doing. I was scared that, uh-oh, now, I'm going to get in real trouble, and she surprised me. One of the few times in my life that she supported me, and she said, "You know, I wish my husband could go back and take something that he really enjoyed doing because he's not happy doing what he's doing." So I ended up really different from my family. I didn't want to spend my life as an angry, depressed person. I didn't want to... It wasn't a degree that mattered to me, it was that I found something that I had a passion for, and I found that I just loved mechanics. I just adored mechanics. I did well at school. I had so many credits that I didn't have to -- I transferred all my liberal arts credits and fulfilled all those -- that criteria and just was taking the automotive course and still working to support myself cleaning houses. I never finished the auto mechanics either. I did well, I think I was maybe first in the class, I can't really remember. But I took enough courses that I got it, and I was confident that I could keep learning. And then I decided that. The money was running pretty thin, I didn't want to take out loans, and so I got a job as an auto mechanic and finished learning to be a mechanic by working in a garage. MF: How did the other students in Northampton respond to you as the only woman in that program? And then I'll continue that, like how did male mechanics respond to you on your first jobs out of college? JL: You know I don't remember anybody in the auto mechanics class giving me a hard time because George wouldn't have allowed it. But I was busy learning. I didn't really care what they were doing. [laughs] I was busy learning, and it was just -- I was like a vacuum cleaner, I just sucked it all up, I just loved it. It was definitely my thing. I did well in classroom and well in the shop. Probably the question that you're asking should be asked of the guys that I went to school with. My guess is that they weren't... They were a little intimidated by me, I would imagine, because we were all students, and it's one thing to have another male student -- if you're a male, have another male student by yours side, and you're learning. But to have a woman doing better than you were doing in school was probably hard for them. I know for sure later on in life when I worked as a mechanic, that was one of the things that I recognized. If I did well as a mechanic and as being a female mechanic, it was really hard for men who weren't great at what they did to work alongside a woman who did a better job at mechanics than they did. It was a problem, and I realized that later on in my career, so... I first worked at a place in Bethlehem that might still be there. It was called Dave &amp ; Wayne's. What I did was when I decided that I'd had enough education and really couldn't afford anymore and needed to get a job, I just went door to door to garages asking for a job. Now, I don't believe anyone hired me because they thought that I could do the job at that time. I believe I was hired because it was a novelty, and they thought it would be fun and that -- probably that they could like... It would be fun to see me fail is what it would be. So at Dave &amp ; Wayne's, I did okay. I think the biggest problem I had was the male mechanics there would come over and want to talk, want to chat, want to flirt. Sometimes, it was great that they'd come over because I could learn from them, but the bosses did not like it. And so I was there maybe three months, something like that, and I got fired because I wasn't getting enough work done. I wasn't getting enough work done because these guys kept coming over and [laughs] interrupting me from working on a customer's car. It was the only job in my life that I was ever fired from, and I was devastated. It was not Labor Day. It was right before Labor Day. It was probably on a Friday. I know it was on a Friday. It's probably the Friday right before Labor Day weekend. Yeah, they came over to me in the morning and said, "We're going to let you go, so you can finish out your day, and we'll give a paycheck and then you can be on your way." So I thought about it for a few minutes, and I thought, well, I've still got half a day to go look for a new job. I had to support myself. I mean, I'm sure my family would've helped me if I asked them, but I didn't want. I wanted to be my own person. I felt if I was going to be in this career, and originally I felt they weren't going to approve of it, I needed to pay my own way. So after about half an hour, I went to Dave and Wayne, and I said, "If it's okay with you, I'll leave now," so they let me go. It's about eleven o'clock in the morning, and I did the same thing all over again. I started pounding the pavement, going to different garages looking for another job, and by the end of the day, I had another job in a garage. I'm sure it was for the same reason that I worked for Paul's Garage on -- in Fountain Hill on Broadway. I don't know if that's still there. I'm sure he's no longer in business because he was older than me but not by much. And I got a job there, I'm sure for the same reason, and actually, he used to work -- he started out his career working for Dave &amp ; Wayne. I didn't know that at the time. And so I'm sure I was hired there because I was going to be a novelty also. But Paul was -- he was owner of the garage, and he had a part-time mechanic working there, a young guy named Jeff, and I think that he was more -- a little bit more practical. I think he felt that he could take advantage of me pay-wise -- that he could use me to do a lot of work and pay me little and get away with it. So that's what happened. I worked my butt off for him. I became really fast at what I did. He taught me things. I learned how to do valve jobs on engines really well, so... He liked the work I did on that and so I would do a lot of the valve jobs, engine repair, upper half of the engine on a lot of vehicles. I would do other things too. I got my state inspection license while I was there, and I did a lot of tune-ups, that kind of thing, so... And you asked, how did men -- how did people feel about me being a woman working in this career. I remember at Paul's Garage, the customers that gave me the hardest time were women. Women play a part in discrimination also and stereotyping also. So for the women, a lot of them looked at me and were like, oh my God, I don't want a woman to work on my car, she doesn't know what she's doing. I need my car fixed, I don't want it to be wrecked. And so those were my toughest customers were the women. Sometimes, Paul would tell them, "Well, we'll get your car fixed, and we'll call you." And then after the car was all fixed and working fine, then he would tell them that I had worked on it. He would do things like that. He wasn't terribly supportive of me, but he was in the sense that he gave me a job. You know, 1975 to give me -- to give a woman a job in the garage was pretty big deal, so I have to give him credit. MF: At this point, you were divorced. What was happening in your social life during the -- that time in Bethlehem and then while you're moving into this new career? JL: At that time, I got involved with NOW, became a member of a chapter in Bethlehem. I was just a member but trying to get plugged into women's rights and find some support there, that kind of thing. So I belonged to that for a while, and eventually, there was another chapter in Allentown. I don't remember if it was called -- I think it was called Lehigh Valley rather than Allentown NOW. I'm pretty sure that's Lehigh Valley NOW, and that's where I met Dixie White who was an activist that I'm sure you probably know about. I know that ; Liz Bradbury had talked to me about that connection and finding my name in some of Dixie's memorabilia once Dixie passed away. So I learned the one thing that NOW was good for -- I've never been real big on being a member of groups. I'm just more of a solitary person who needs to do my own kind of thing. But what I got out of NOW was a sense of connection and sisterhood and some support in that way. And also, I met a woman named Sharon who worked for PPL -- it used to be called Pennsylvania Power &amp ; Light -- and she said, "You ought to apply for a job at PPL." I said, "Well, it's an electric company, what would I do for them?" She said, "Well they -- you could be a mechanic in the power plant." She said, "Or they have a garage where they repair their vehicles, you could work for the garage maybe." So I applied there. And you asked how men reacted to me working in this nontraditional field for women, I'm the only person that I ever encountered at PPL who had to go through four interviews to get my job. The job interviews were not about... Well, and first of all, they didn't just -- I didn't just put in an application, and they called me. I put in an application, and I didn't hear from them in several weeks, so I called their HR department, and they told me, "Yeah, we'll get to it, we still have your application, we'll get to it." So I called maybe two or three times and so after maybe three times of calling them, they brought me in for an interview. And so the interviews were all about not my mechanical ability. Didn't ask me, how do you do this, or how do you fix that, or what do you think would be wrong with the vehicle if this happened? Because some of the people who were interviewing me weren't just HR people. Most of the interviews -- I think maybe the first interview was probably the HR department, and the other three were people who were in admin in the garage, in the transportation department. And so they'd want to know things like, well, if you're out in the field working on equipment, construction vehicle equipment like bulldozers or digging trucks, whatever, and you have to go to the bathroom, what will you do? Those are the kinds of questions [laughs] they wanted to ask. Or what are you going to do when some guys swears in front of you? I mean that's what those three interviews were all about. I remember only them asking me one -- somewhat a mechanical thing, which was if you have to go out and fix a flat on a line truck, how would you go about doing that? Because you're talking about a tire and a rim -- an 1120-tire with rim weighs more than I do. So I told them how I would use leverage and just like a guy would do. He's not going to pick up a 1020 [laughs] and throw it on to -- the studs on the wheel, so... So eventually, I got the job. I got the job in August of 1977, and I took the job with the stipulation that even though I wouldn't have been entitled to any kind of vacation after just joining the company, that I be given time off to go to the international women's conference that was held in Texas in 1977. I've been chosen as a delegate for that. MF: What was that conference like when you went to Texas? JL: That was pretty amazing. I was young though. I was twenty-seven at the time, I wish that I had -- and just newly plugged into NOW and women's rights, and I wish I had -- I could've appreciated it more because the women that attended that... I got in as a delegate. Dixie White said, "Why don't you apply to be a delegate for this?" and I said, "Okay." So I did, and I wasn't picked, and this was a process that went on for several months, maybe a half a year or something like that. She said, "Well, try again, but this --" She said, "If you want to get in since you're not really plugged into the leadership, you're my friend and I'm a leader in NOW, but since you're not really plugged into the leadership or haven't had any -- an active role in leadership," she said "you have to find -- you have to be a minority. Why don't you try being a specific minority, and maybe you can get in to fill a quota that way with the conference?" I said, "Well, what minority would that be? I'm a female and I'm white, what minority would be --?" She said, "Well, you're a Quaker, so apply as a religious minority," and so that's what I did, and I got chosen because I was a Quaker, which is a not very well-known type of religion, so... And that's where I knew Tony LoGiudice from, my psychology professor. That's how I ended up at -- being a Quaker was because he was also a Quaker and attended the Lehigh Valley Quaker meeting. So I went to the conference, and it was incredible. Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, you name it, Gloria Steinem, they were all there. The conference was to set -- it was run by parliamentary procedure and was to set what were the important things that women needed to pursue to become equal citizens in our country and in the world. It was really an international thing, and so... I don't know ; they picked out maybe 20 platforms of things that needed to be worked on from an equal rights amendment to women having access to educa-- equal access to education, equal acce-- equal pay for jobs. It was pretty heavy stuff. [laughs] MF: Did you bring back some of those platforms to the NOW organization in the Lehigh Valley? What were the major Lehigh Valley, the kind of platform issues for the NOW organization here? JL: I did not. I ended up not being much of a NOW member. I'm trying to think of a way to say this. There was a lot of dissension about how things were going to be run, and I'm a doer and not so much a talker, and so... They got rather enmeshed in trying to figure out who was in power and where the leadership was going and so I drifted away from there pretty quickly. MF: It's 1977 or '78, around there, you got a great job at PPL. Are you dating at this time? Are you in the LGBT community at this time, and if so, what was that like? JL: Dixie and her partner [Carol?] were always on the lookout to find someone for me to match up with, and I did eventually. I'm trying to remember how we exactly met. Oh, I know. So I was working at Dave &amp ; Wayne's, and for the moment, I can't remember exactly how I met Diane, but -- or maybe it was actually another woman. But this woman had a house on Carlton Avenue in Bethlehem where she was -- and I got to know her and [Diane?], my first lover. [Annie?] had a room on the third floor of this house that wasn't in use. It was actually the attic. I needed a cheaper place to live to meet my expenses and so I talked Annie into letting me make the attic a livable space and letting me live there. So I insulated it and did some other work to it and ended up living there, and that's where I met Diane. She lived there also. She had rented another room. So there were four women living there, Annie, Diane, me, and a woman from -- who was a professor, a visiting professor at Lehigh University. MF: So what was the community like? I mean that sounds great to have a house of four women in Bethlehem. What was the community like in the '70s, the LGBT community? JL: 1977, it was pretty closeted. You had to worry about losing a job, not just losing a job but having... It was difficult to be out because you had to really worry about how you were going to make a living because it was not -- it was -- people were pretty ugly about it back then. Diane and I ended up being partners, moved out of Anne's -- Annie's house and bought a home in Catasauqua. You could go to Rosemary's bar in the Flatiron building in the east Allentown off Union -- very close to Union Boulevard, and that was it. You found each other. You're gaydar helped you find sisters and brothers out there in the community. You found ways to manage to hint at things that you each would safely realize that you were both gay. And then you would see each other at each other's homes, do those kinds of social events, and go to the bar and be able to dance and let loose there. And there were a couple of festivals around. There was a good one called [Sister Fire?] down in Maryland every year, those kinds of things. MF: What was Rosemary's bar like? Will you describe what a night out at Rosemary's might look like? JL: Rosemary's bar was a good location. It was on this little -- literally on this little triangle of land. It was pretty much the building, so you didn't have to -- the wonder of the bar didn't have to share the building with someone else. There wasn't a neighbor that could -- a neighboring business that could complain about a gay bar being there. And it was a great place where you could just go and be yourself. They have a deejay, a number of deejays, really good deejays. You could go and dance and drink and just relax and be yourself. And Rosemary kept that bar going for a lot of years, and it's a pain in the butt to run a bar and she was just -- you know, a lot of times back then, the bar owners were really supportive of the community. They would have special events and that kind of thing. It was like a home. Back in those days, Diane and I used to have -- on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, we would have open house at our house. Any of the friends that we had, gay and lesbian friends could come and visit and hang out at our house. We put out the invitation every year because a lot of gay people could not go home to their families with their significant other. Maybe they couldn't go home at all even by themselves. They had been ostracized by their family, they had been abandoned, turned away by them -- by their family, and they were not welcome. So it was always a place where people could come to be together and instead of being depressed about their family's treatment toward them, where they could feel good on a holiday. MF: Good. I don't think we talked about -- how did you come into a lesbian identity? When did you start to get a sense of your sexual identity? Was it in the '70s, was it earlier? How did that happen for you? JL: I came out to myself in 1977. I realized looking backward that I've been in love with my camp counselor, [laughs] in love with a girl that I met at Girl Scout camp also, and just realized that, wow, I'm not heterosexual. Those relationships aren't working out. Even when I was going to mechanic school and working at Dave &amp ; Wayne's and also working at Paul's Garage, I still dated men, but it wasn't doing it for me. And I realized when I got involved with NOW and were around all these women that it was incredibly exciting because I realized that this is who I was, that I was a lesbian. MF: What was it like to live with in Diane in Catasauqua together when you built that, that home together? JL: Well, it was an existing home, and actually, we had lived also in -- we moved from the South Side of Bethlehem to a row home in Allentown that we owned with a third woman who was -- so the three of us on the house together. She was much older. She was from Quaker Meeting also. So it's tough living, two people together, let alone with three or four. So first we lived together, four women and then it was three women and then we realized you just need to live with your significant together because it doesn't work out too good. So we ended moving to a town house in Catasauqua. And you had to be careful about what you were doing that you didn't offend the neighbors. It was still a fairly closeted situation, although the street we lived on in Catasauqua, we had just picked it as a house that we liked well enough and could afford, and it turned out, it was like lesbian heaven there. We had two women, two gay women that -- oh, sorry, we had two lesbian couples that lived on that street. It was just a circle, a town house circle, two lesbian households and two gay men households on that street, and they were -- in this development, there were three circles. On the other circles, there were also gay people, so it turns out that there was a lot of gay people there. So we also had that support that even though we weren't being really out in the neighborhood, we had each other there, and somebody we could turn to or socialize with. MF: Who knew that about Catasauqua? I've got to say like who knew? JL: [laughs] Yeah. [laughter] Right, we didn't know. It was just an accident. Well, I don't think it was just an accident ; I think it was meant to be. MF: So you're living in Catasauqua, you're working at PPL, what -- how -- what changes in your life in the '80 s are you -- how do you sort of enter into the '80s? What are the big things that are happening for you in those early years? JL: Well, once I got a job with PPL in the garage, you start out as a handyman. In garage is basically you're a gofer, you run for parts, you jockey cars around. Pretty much that's what you're doing. You don't really get to do any mechanical work. So I had gone from doing pretty much -- doing a lot of mechanical work at Paul's Garage to being a gofer. But I did that for a couple of months, and it didn't take long until I got into the mechanics. They had a mechanics training program there, so... It was a four-year program where you worked and you also went to school. And so once I got started at being a mechanics, I had shift foreman whose name was Al Koch. And when I think back -- when you ask me to do this, I thought back to who were the people in my life that really made a difference, Al was another one. Just like Tony LoGiudice and George Gerstenberg, Al Koch, my shift foreman, right away let me inspect cars and trucks. The transportation department, PPL was responsible for all the equipment, any -- everything up into cranes, all the equipment they owned or leased at the time and did the repair work on. Al recognized that I had my state inspection license, which usually if you went through PPL's training program, you didn't get a chance to sit for your exam and become a state inspection mechanic until year three of your training. He gave me the opportunity to do that right away. He was encouraging, but he was fair. He didn't treat me differently than the others. He treated me a little differently in the sense that I remember very keenly one day he paired me with a guy named Jack, another mechanic there. And it was to do a routine maintenance, lubrication, change oil, that kind of thing on a line truck, a digging truck that would dig holes to plant poles -- and to do the maintenance and also the state inspection on it, so pull wheels to look at brake lining and that kind of thing. Jack was not a very good mechanic. He hated working with me. He refused to speak to me the entire time that we did the work on this vehicle, so I ended up having to... All the parts of the vehicle that he checked over, since he wouldn't tell me what the condition was, I had to do the whole -- I had to do his part of the job also. And so when it was done, it had taken me twice as long as it should have taken two people to do that job because I -- he wouldn't talk to me. And I went to Al, and I said, "This is what happened." I said, "Please don't put me with someone again." He said, "I understand, I won't, I won't do that to you again. You're a junior mechanic with a state inspection license, I put you with someone who was farther along in the program, but obviously, it was a problem, it made --" He didn't say all this out loud, but this was the gist of the interaction we had that this was an embarrassment to this man, plus he wasn't a very good mechanic, so he never did that again. So I did all my work on my own. Very rare that I work with someone, it was extremely rare. So Al was really good about that, really supportive. He protected me in that way. When I worked on the garage, I would think of it this way. I looked at the men that I worked with, and there were the guys who were like, it's no problem that you're a female working on this job, and those became my friend, they're my friends and good friends. And about a third of the mechanics, it was like, okay, so you're here, that's fine, no big deal, but we didn't become close. And then the last third, they were the problem ones, they were the ones -- and it took me a long time to understand this. It took me a while to understand this, a couple of years, but I came to understand that those men that really hated working alongside a woman or working with a -- or having -- the idea of having a woman as a mechanic. Those men were ones that were not good mechanics, they were not confident in their skills, they didn't really understand mechanics very well, it was not really their thing. And those were the ones that were -- gave me the hard time, all the time. They were constantly threatened because... And I realized, they might -- being in a situation where I do a much better job than they did and then what did that mean about them. And so those were the ones that would sabotage my work where when I'd walk away from the vehicles and go to the restroom or whatever, come back, they'd had poured transmission flood down the carburetor so that when you start it up, it would smoke like crazy. They'd change the -- loosened the distributor and changed the timing on the engine so that the engine would backfire and wouldn't run, those kinds of things, so... But then, there were the guys who realized that I could be helpful because I have little hands and I could get in really tight spaces. Where when you're working on the hydraulic systems of a line trucks, the digging trucks and the bucket trucks, that I could get in these very tight spaces to get fittings loosened or started again to get them threaded and all kinds of places that were little places, so... But the one thing I remember when I first became -- started to do mechanical work there, a lot of the guys were upset with me, and finally after a couple of weeks, the union steward, the shop steward took me aside and said, "Look, you have to slow down. You're working way too fast, and you're making us look bad, so you need to slow down," [laughs] so I did. And, yeah, I have to say I always enjoyed working for a union. The union is real -- really instrumental in me being able to keep my job. The union was a fair enough union. It had its problems just like everything does in life, but they were about keeping the union employees employed. And so there could be... Along the way, I wanted a place to change my clothes and shower just like the guys did. You're filthy dirty, and you have to crawl into your vehicle and drive home. They didn't have a locker room for the women. The first thing they did was to take -- to -- in response to my request, the union stood behind me, but management was not about to build one woman a locker room, and so what they did was they changed my hours by half an hour. So I would use the men's locker room at the beginning of the shift and at the end of the shift. My shift was half an hour different, so I could use the women's locker room. The union made -- meant that I was going to get -- I was a mechanic trainee just like the other mechanic trainees ; I got paid the same amount they did. So I really appreciated working for a union. But I think that I was a pretty darn good mechanic. I'm not one to toot my horn, but I do think I was a pretty darn good mechanic, and that's what changes people over time. That's what changes discrimination. So along the way occasionally, women would bid into the job of transportation handyman, and it was always a mixed blessing. It would be nice to have another woman there, but if they weren't putting out a thousand percent, then it was -- made my life harder. And along the way, the women that did come through, pretty much all of them were in the category that they weren't really mechanics. They didn't have the training or the inclination or the, yeah, aptitude for it. And over time, it no longer became a problem for me because they did recognize that I was a good mechanic. And they'd say things like, "Oh well, you're different." But I had plenty of people from other departments, like the linemen would come in to drop off their vehicles, and they come up to me and say, "You know you're taking the job away from a man. You don't belong here. You're taking a job away from a man," and I'd say, "Well, who's going to support me? I have to have a way to support me too. Why shouldn't I be able to have this job?" "Well, you should marry a man and then there would be -- and then that job would be there available for a man." MF: Well, I mean, that has -- that kind of leads me to wonder about what it was like to be a lesbian working at PPL during that time period. I'm curious, was there homophobia in the workplace? What was it like to be at PPL as a lesbian person? JL: Yeah, that was really tough. It was hard enough being a woman in a nontraditional job, and then to be lesbian on top of it was really hard. The whole time I worked in the garage, I was closeted, I was not out but every-- virtually everybody knew it. [laughs] Well, I don't know ; it's kind of weird. The guys who gave me a hard time, they seem to know it, they seem to pick up on it. They guys who were my friends didn't exactly seem to pick up on it because actually several of those friends along the way expressed that they had a romantic interest in me in one form or another -- two of them did. We managed to weather through that and not go in that direction without me saying I am not interested in relationship with a man other than a friend. And we managed to maintain our friendships. Eventually after I left the garage, I ended up in -- I was a mechanic for a number of years and then a job came along as the parts person. They called it the transportation material handler. And the fellow who was in that job, they needed to have a second person, and his name was [Dave?]. He came to me and asked me, "Would you please apply for this job?" I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, the pay is about the same, and I'm not a mechanic, and you're really good at what you do. And there's some men that are applying for the job -- going to apply for the job that I do not want to work with, so would you please apply for the job?" And at that time, I was getting really tired of the guys who would sabotage my work and so I thought, oh, maybe -- it was the same pay, maybe this would be a good idea. It broke my heart to stop being a mechanic but I... And it was a hard transition for me because I love what I did. I just was tired of the struggle every day coming and having to deal with some men [laughs] who just couldn't wrap his head around the idea that I would be -- as a woman, be working there. It was a blow to their ego and so there was a certain number of men who it was constantly -- they were out to get me, but like I had said before, not all of them. But I decided I would do that. And so I became material handler and really kind of became the parts manager, even though that was not a title, that was not my title. Because the other fellow really wanted to just do the paperwork, pay the bills for the parts, and this, that, and the other, and wanted me to be the one to find the parts for all the equipment we have. And so it turned out, I ended up loving that job. I could use my mechanical background to do that job, and I could use my knack for accounting and my knack for problem solving. I would find parts sometimes all over the world. I remember one time, I had to -- I ended up pursuing -- looking, and I would read the diagrams for all the vehicles and all the hydraulic plumbing and everything. We had a cable stringer that needed a part, and the cable stringers were used a lot in dock work. You'd think, well, what do you need a -- why would you go to...? I went to the manufacturer of this particular piece of equipment, and it was used for dock work, but it was also used to string electrical cable, heavy -- really heavy cable. I ended up talking to somebody in Italy to find this part. And I was equally as good at doing that job if not better because I was -- I got to operate by myself. I used my mechanical ability and also my problem-solving abilities, and I felt I was really appreciated by the management there. In fact, sometimes, one of the poor mechanics would ask me for a part, and I'd think, why in the world would you want that part, and I'd ask him. I'd say, "Well, what's the problem with the vehicle?" and they'd say, "Well, it's doing this or that or not doing this or that, and I want this part." So I'd say, "Okay," and then I'd have to go to the foreman and say, "So-and-so wants me to order this part. This is what's wrong with it, I don't think this is the problem, I think he needs this other part instead." And the foreman would say, "Yup, you're right, go ahead and order it." So that didn't make me popular with that third group of mechanics who weren't competent at their job. But I was on a much more level playing field because I was the only game in town. They had to come to me for their part. So if you treat me too badly, you might not get the part you needed in the time you need it. [laughs] MF: So PPL today has an LGBT staff group. At that time, were -- did you know other people at PPL that were lesbian or gay, or was it mostly like people knew but didn't know or was it -- JL: No, you knew, you knew who the gay people were there. Your gaydar told you who they were. You gingerly approach them and then they acknowledge they were gay also. So in '95, they started cutting back on services, and they went through the transportation department. Because of the union, I was -- the fellow Dave who asked me to take that job as the parts person, he was there first, so they cut back to one material handler in every garage, so I lost my job in 1995. I went up to the service center, which was also on the same property and became a dispatcher for -- a power dispatcher for repairs of electrical -- sending people to repair electrical equipment for storms and that kind of thing. And that's when I became out. I was actually outed by a lesbian up there who was not a very nice person and decided she would do that for me whether I liked it or not. But in retrospect, it turned out to be one of the best things in my life because I was just tired of trying to be closeted. And so that's when I got involved in -- shortly thereafter, another woman, a lesbian there -- PPL announced they were going to start diversity groups, and a woman activist there named Donna asked that there be a gay group and so that was begun. And I ended up writing the proposal for lesbian and gay rights for employees. Because at that time, if you were a heterosexual employee of PPL , you got all kinds of benefits for your family. And if you had -- you were in a gay relationship because you couldn't be married, you couldn't get any of those benefits. So the biggest argument I made in the proposal I wrote for all kinds of benefits for gay and lesbians was you are -- it should be equal pay for equal work. And that's what you say you have here at this company, but it's not because all of the single people are subsidizing the married couples because they get a huge advantage cost-wise of paying for the benefits for the rest of their family. Whereas our lesbian or gay partner does not get those benefits and has to go out and buy them elsewhere. It took seven years. I think it was seven years... I'm not sure about the timing here whether it was -- it took -- I think it took seven years and maybe seven years for management to get the benefits. It was either five years and seven years or seven years and nine years. Management got the benefit first, employees that were gay and lesbian that were management, and then it took two more years to get the union to give us the benefits. And I still to this day cannot believe that the union stood behind us. [laughs] It wasn't easy to get them to stand behind us. It was actually from the larger union leadership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who pretty much forced our local IBEW to give gays benefits. Prior to that time, if your significant other in life died -- and we had several of these situations. If that person died, you might not even get the time off to go to the funeral. MF: Not all of our listeners, especially younger generations, will be familiar with the kinds of benefits that you were asking for. But what you've just described is like the ability to attend a funeral, the ability to leave work to go to a hospital if a loved one is experiencing illness. I'm sure life insurance might have been something else. But could you describe a few of the benefits that you really identified in that white paper and that you really fought for those seven years for all gay and lesbian PPL employees to have access to those benefits? What were they? What did you really prioritize? JL: Sure. The first benefit we got was a single benefit and what was the right to go -- have the day off to go to the funeral of your partner. That was the first one. And you had to declare that you had a relationship, and you had to prove that you had that relationship by -- now, this isn't something that anybody who was married had to do. They didn't have to turn in their marriage certificate in order to get benefits. They just had to say, "Hey, this is my wife or my husband, and these are my kids' names, and these are their birthdates," and that kind of thing. But the very first benefit we got was a funeral benefit and bereavement benefit. And that was that you could have from the time you're -- just like the straight people got, from the time your partner died if you had them registered as your partner to the time that the funeral occurred, you could have those days off and then you had to return to work the day after the funeral. I know in dispatch, there was someone who was in that case. Well, actually, in that department, it was called -- the fellow held the job of system operator, and his partner died. And because system operators are -- you must -- there aren't a lot of them, and they had to be on the job 24/7, and they did a lot of overtime just like the people in dispatching did, this fellow, they would not let them go because they didn't have a replacement. And so I can't imagine, I can't imagine how much -- how hard that must have been and how much that must have hurt. I was amazed that the fellow hadn't even -- hadn't quit the company, but he weathered through it. There was nothing for us when we started, nothing. When I say it took the seven and nine years, that was to get health insurance. So we're looking to get health insurance, and you couldn't be married at that time as a gay person. So you were looking to get that health insurance. I remember there was one woman in the -- our group there at PPL. The name of the group was called GLOW, Gays and Lesbians in the Workplace, and [Tammy?] was her name. She would call her her wife even though they legally weren't married, and her wife had two children. Actually, the two children were born by artificial insemination in the time that they were together. And so Tammy was a great poster child for our cause because we would occasionally be able to have a meeting with someone in higher management, and we would bring Tammy in to plead her case -- she was great. And Tammy worked as a power plant operator out in Central Pennsylvania, and she will come in. She was a tough broad, but she would tell them, "It breaks my heart when my children are really sick, and I don't have health insurance for them. And I must try to take them to the hospital and get care for them, and I can't get care for them really very well because I don't have insurance, and my partner does not have insurance." And so eventually, the best that they were able to do was to get her partner and the children who were her biological children, she had carried them, on Medicaid. But still on Medicaid, the services were really poor. And so she was one of the big factors that helped turn them around, but it was a lot of factors that -- a lot of work over seven years to try to get them to give health insurance. When you got health insurance, they made it clear that -- the legal department at PPL made it clear that if you left the company -- well, let me not even say left the company. If you retired and you're -- you went on Medicare then because you're a retired employee, that your spouse would no longer -- if the spouse was younger, they would be kicked off of the PPL insurance policy because you weren't legally married. So actually, the rights that I fought for, for all those years, I never ended up using because my partner and now, my -- who's now my wife, Michele was eight years younger, and she's self-employed. We looked at that and said, "You know, I'm going to retire, you'll get bumped off. You have a preexisting health condition and you will end up not being able to be insured, so we're going to have to continue insu-- you're going to have to continue insuring yourself because I don't dare put you on this policy. Because, one, you'll be in your late fifties when I will retire, and trying to find you an insurance policy would be very difficult, that we could afford." It was really already unaffordable, I mean, until I was able to get married -- till we were able to get married and then I could go back to PPL and say, "Okay, now even though I'm retired, you need to put my wife on your insurance policy." That was in 2015, not very long ago. [laughs] But by that time, Michele was paying twelve thousand dollars a year for health insurance as a self-employed person. So when you say help younger people understand, this was huge. Also, I was able to get a life insurance policy for Michele when I was at PPL. That was huge because when you couldn't be married, you're talking about if one of you passes away, the other one has to pay fifteen percent inheritance tax on everything you have accumulated in your life together, and Michele and I have been together thirty-six years, and we maintained -- early on, we got life insurance policies against each other so that if one passed away, the other one would have the life insurance policy to pay the inheritance tax on everything we had built in life. MF: So while you were working with GLOW at PPL, were you aware of other LGBT organizations in the valley that were working on similar issues? Or did you have connections with other activist organizations in the valley? JL: We did. Air Products was one we often -- that we were connected to, and we would often talk with, maybe meet with here and there. They were ahead of us in trying to get benefits, but in the end -- I'm not sure if they ever got benefits in the end. The people at Air Products were -- all the people we worked with were professional people, people with degrees, so they were considered management employees at Air Products. So I think because of that, Air Products acknowledged them earlier than PPL acknowledged our gay and lesbian workers. But I think because of maybe financial issues, the company was -- I'm not sure why that Air Products seemed to struggle. You would have thought they would get all the benefits before we did. MF: Were outside of employee -- like industry-based LGBT organizations, were you aware of social or health-based LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley? Or were you involved with any other organizations outside of the -- outside of GLOW at PPL? JL: On the individual level, I got involved with a community service group, a gay community service group called AIDS Outreach. I didn't have the time to try and dig out when I had actually all the -- when I started volunteering for them, but I'm pretty sure it was somewhere around '92, '93 maybe that I volunteered to be a worker at AIDS Outreach. At that time, the AIDS epidemic had been going on for some time, and it was getting activists. AIDS activists were getting their stories out more and more in the press. There was still a hugely negative sentiment around someone with AIDS. When I started with that group, what that group did was I was, what they called, an AIDS buddy. So they would pair a volunteer to be a support person for someone who had AIDS that had come to AIDS Outreach for services. And so as an AIDS buddy, I was there to be the cheerleader, the person who would help when someone is really sick, get groceries, to be an advocate for services, which might be health services, all kinds of things. And when I started, I volunteered for that job because I had read an article in the newspaper and I thought -- just it moved me to tears. I thought it's hard enough to die, let alone die without a single person in the world there to support you, to give you comfort, to touch you. People were just scared out of their minds by AIDS. And AIDS Outreach not only provided the buddy program, but they educated the public that it's like, you're not going to get AIDS from this person who has AIDS by touching him. You're not going to get it unless you have a transfer of blood products or -- and that kind of thing. You are more of a danger to that person who has AIDS and a compromised immune system than they ever will be of you. If you're not having sex with them, you're not swapping saliva or blood or semen -- I'm sorry to be graphic, but that is basically a product semen -- and so you're not going to get AIDS, and you're not really at risk at all. The first AIDS buddy I had when he was hospitalized -- every time he'd be hospitalized, they had him in a quarantine room. The people would -- or the nursing staff would come in and when they absolutely had to. They pretty much avoid coming into the room. They were scared to death of AIDS and not unlike the situation we're in right now with COVID-19. But I think in a lot of ways, it was even worse because there was the stigma of in our country it was, you don't have this disease unless you're gay on top of it. So you have this horrible disease, it also means you're gay and we don't -- society, for the most part, really ostracizes and does not like gay people at this time in history. And so, I couldn't imagine trying to live with AIDS or die with AIDS without a support system so that's why I got involved. It was hard back then. MF: For how many people were you a buddy during that time period in the early '90s? JL: I worked for AIDS Outreach until the year 2000, and I had three AIDS buddies. I was an AIDS buddy for three clients over that time. The first one, his name was [Brian?]. It was early on, and there was -- they didn't have a combination drug regimen at that time, so he did not last long. So it was maybe a year that we were together. The second person that I was an AIDS buddy for, his name was [Nick?], and I had him for a good number of years. By that time, they had combination drug therapies, but again, they weren't the greatest, and Nick was not -- Nick was -- well I'll just say it. Nick had drug-use problems and so that being a drug user and having AIDS was pretty darn tough on someone's immune system. We were probably together for five years -- four years -- maybe four years, yeah, maybe like three to four years, I guess, until he passed away. And then the last person I had was a woman who was a heterosexual woman who had gotten AIDS from having sex partners -- male sex partners that had AIDS because -- probably because they were drug users. I think she dabbled some in it but not hugely in drugs. And she had four boys, and she was the last client that I worked with. MF: Did you -- in 2000... I guess my question is like, did that organization, was that still -- organization still going strong into the early twenty-first century, or did the volunteer structure change in that, in AIDS Outreach as an organization? JL: I looked on the internet this morning to see if AIDS Outreach still existed. It looks like it does still exist. I know they worked closely with the Lehigh Valley Hospital to provide services for people who have AIDS. People are able to live decently, decently well with AIDS these days, so the picture has changed a lot. I stopped being a volunteer for AIDS Outreach in the year 2000. The last woman, the woman that I had, her name was [Marie?]. The woman who ran AIDS Outreach is a wonderful person named Linda Lobach, and to this day, I think of Linda Lobach every couple of months probably because she had a great saying. She would tell the volunteers and all the people that work for her that "When you're dealing with people with AIDS, AIDS is one thing, but there's a lot of other behavior that enters into working with another human being and trying to support them." When there was a problem, she would say, "Take the AIDS out of it, and what are you left with? Is this reasonable or not reasonable?" [laughs] And so I still use that little bit of wisdom and logic to deal with a lot of things in life, take the whatever out of it, and what are you left with? Yeah, this is not reasonable behavior. [laughs] So I parted ways in 2000 because the last client I had, Marie was... She ended up losing her four children because -- I often had to be the parent. These kids would go without food. I didn't have to, but I wanted to try to help them. Eventually, somebody reported her to a neighbor, or someone she knew reported her to children and youth services, and they took her four kids away because she was... She had AIDS, but take the AIDS out of it, and you were left with someone who was doing drugs, drinking to excess at times, and basically hanging out at bars to find men, and leaving her kids unattended, so... I thought that it was a good time to part ways. AIDS Outreach had been -- to me and my way of thinking, had been established for a very good reason, and that reason was getting lost. And it may have just been... I don't want to discourage AIDS Outreach -- [cat purrs] Hi, Spanky. This is my cat Spanky. [laughs] Say hi Spank. [laughs] Okay, Spanky, go play somewhere. I don't, by any means, want to disparage AIDS Outreach. It was a wonderful organization and did a lot of good work and probably still does a lot of good work. And it may just have been the client I had, but I thought I'd had enough. I needed to do something else, so... MF: Well, we're nearing the end of the interview, and there two sort of areas that I'd like to explore just a little bit further. I'm interested, you've mentioned a few times about being a Quaker in the '70s. I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about your spirituality? I'm wondering if you could just discuss a little bit about your emergence into the Quaker church and maybe the evolution of your faith? JL: Okay. Well, I started going to Quaker Meeting in the early '70s I guess. And I mentioned my psychology professor, Tony LoGiudice went there, and that's how I ended up attending a Quaker Meeting. He said that I might like this place. Maybe he recognized I was a lesbian -- that was years before I knew I was a lesbian -- I don't know. But maybe just because I was in a nontraditional -- looking to get into a nontraditional job or probably because Quaker Meeting was a place that allowed people to -- it was not dogmatic, a dogmatic type of religion. They encouraged people to be freethinkers. You could believe in God, or you could have eastern India -- East Indian background and religions. So you could be of any kind of faith and be accepted there. There were people who were agnostic or atheists. It was a hodgepodge of people that basically believed there is a spiritual light within each of us that we can touch and nurture and share with each other. Quakers were early pioneers of endorsing domestic partnership relationships. Before there was marriage, there were certain states where you could go and be united in the -- as a domestic partner with each other. So it turned out to be a good place for me. MF: Are you still in the Quaker church, or was that your consistent faith community through your adult life? JL: I will always be a Quaker at heart. They worship and they don't... We have what's called an unprogrammed -- the one in Lehigh Valley was called an -- what we called an unprogrammed Meeting where there was no minister. You would sit in silence and meditate. When you felt that a strong urge to speak that you had been given a message from -- a spiritual type message to share with others, then you would stand and share that message. When I say I'll always be a Quaker at heart, it is because that's the way I prefer to worship or to -- that's my spirituality that speaks to me. I'm not a member of Quaker Meeting any longer. There are no Quaker Meetings where I live now. The closest I could come is Unitarian Universalist Church, which again is very supportive of gay people. Any disenfranchised groups, both the Quakers and the Unitarian Universalists are -- champion rights of the oppressed or the disenfranchised group. They worship very differently and so I will -- I like the people at the Unitarian Universalist Church. I share a lot of the same values with them, but their way of worshipping is entirely different. They have a minister and a programmed service, and so... That's not so much to my liking. MF: It sounds to me like your faith -- the faith communities that you've been involved in, the Quakers and now the Unitarian Universalist, have been really affirming of both women and LGBT people. Like the MCCLV church in Bethlehem has been -- in Bethlehem and Allentown has been really supportive of LGBT people. Would you say that you ever struggled as an lesbian with your faith? Or would you say that your faith always confirmed the value of your identity, of your sexual identity? JL: I didn't have a religious faith until I was a young adult and did a bunch of searching at different churches to try to find where I fit in. I did that for a good number of years. So it wasn't until maybe like 1972 -- I would have been twenty-two at the time, twenty-three, around there -- that I found Quaker Meeting. So it's probably to my advantage that I didn't have much of a religious upbringing because even not having a religious upbringing, I still struggle with -- that I was a gay person and that this was wrong in society's eyes. So there were some guilt but not as much as -- I certainly had a number of friends who had been, say, brought up in -- maybe the Catholic church was one of the hardest ones. If you were brought in the Catholic faith and you were going to be gay, you were doomed to struggle and struggle and struggle with what you had been taught was wrong to do and try to figure out how to come out and be a reasonably happy and well-functioning gay person. MF: That certainly was the case for me being raised Catholic ; it was a little bit of a challenge. Okay. So since we're nearing the end of the interview, I'm wondering if you could share the Michele story? Like how did you meet Michele, if you could talk a little bit about this primary partnership in your life? JL: Well, it's pretty bizarre. [laughs] Before Michele, before I met Michele, I had two other lovers. The first one was Diane, and the second one was Janice. And Janice was with me a couple of years and maybe four I guess it was, and she had two children. We all lived together, and Janice had been a straight woman and then she decided that being a gay woman was what she wanted. And she did that for four years and then decided she wanted to be straight again. So she left me and I had the house still in Catasauqua, the town house. I could make it financially on my own, but I had other, a couple of loans because I had made some renovations to the house. I think I had a car loan out, and I was really strapped for cash, so I needed to find a roommate fast. So I asked my friend Dixie White. This was one of the people I said, "I'm looking for a housemate that's going to be probably somebody who's a lesbian or possibly a gay man, but somebody that wouldn't be offended living with me, and I need to find somebody fast." So Dixie had gone to -- she put out the word to a couple of people. And this one day, she went to the dentist, and the dentist, hygienist, or maybe it was the office manager was a gay woman, a lesbian, and she said, "I have this friend who's looking for a housemate." And so, this woman whose name was Gay [laughs] took down my name and my phone number and said, "I'll keep that in mind." And so as I recall, I think I have these details right -- Michele might confirm it when you speak to her -- but Michele was a patient I believe and came in to the dentist's office and so Gay told her. And Michele had just lost her lover who had gone and run off with some woman, other woman and so Michele needed a place to stay. And so this woman, Gay who was a total stranger to me and not very well known at all to Michele ended up putting us together. And Michele contacted me. She came over to look at the house, and I was pretty traumatized at having been left and I was pretty scared of... I just wanted a roommate to help me pay the expenses and so I -- and so Michele had -- she smoked and while she was there, I asked her if I could get her something to drink. It was during the day, oh probably late afternoon, and I didn't expect her to say she wanted some type of alcoholic drink, but she asked for an alcoholic drink. And so I was like, oh, I was a little scared, she wanted alcohol and she smokes, and I told her. I said, "No one smokes in this house. I will not allow you to smoke, you'd have to smoke outside." And she was nervous, had a couple of drinks and so I wasn't sure about that. And so she said, "Well, let me think about it." And she called me back sometime later and said, "I have decided that I don't want to become your roommate," she said, "but I would like to date you." [laughs] So that's how we met. MF: Well, what did you say? What did you say when she said that? JL: So we started dating. It was tough because we both struggled financially because neither one of us ended up with a roommate. We did that for about six months and then she moved into the house with me. [laughs] MF: That's a great story. [laughter] If you reflect back on your relationship because you get -- been together decades, how would you describe your relationship with Michele? JL: Well, Michele is a psychologist by profession, so.. But you take the psychologist out of it as Linda Lobach would say, and you're just left with a person where you have to learn how to negotiate a lifetime together. Do we fight? Sure, we fight at times over the years. It's gotten to be less and less and less, but we both needed to grow, and we grew together. And so we have a pretty solid relationship at this point. And we are a team. We've been together longer than any of her siblings and their relationships. Let me think here a minute. All of Michele's siblings are divorced and have remarried or -- let's see, are they all remarried now? Yup, they're all remarried. They've been divorced at least once if not twice. And so occasionally when they were going through the hard times in their relationships, they would ask us, "Well, what's the -- what's your secret to staying together all these years?" And we'd say one word, "Commitment." You want to make a relationship work, you have to be committed to the relationship. When you're having a hard time, you don't get to run away. You have to stick it out and work it through, and it is no magic bullet. You're not going to be madly in love with each other like you were at the first for the rest of your life. It's going to be a different kind of love that grows very deep because through thick and thin, you stick together, which builds trust, which is an issue for a lot of gay relationships. And you are there for each other and don't break that trust, and you'll get through it, whatever it is. MF: What did marriage equality do for you and Michele? JL: Oh my God, it was huge. It was huge, just huge, and I'm surprised. We were so shocked that we got the right to get married in Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania. It was 2014, May of 2014 when they passed that, and my brother-in-law who lived in Texas -- my sister had passed at that -- by that time -- my brother-in-law who never speaks to me called me. He's an extremely quiet guy, extremely quiet -- called me and said, "I just heard this on the news." He was the one who told me that it had been passed in Pennsylvania. Later that day, I got -- the phone rang, and I picked it up and it was -- I didn't understand what I was listening to at first, but it was a conference call with the gay... I can't even remember at the moment which gay group it was, but they were having a conference call, the lawyers that had fought for these rights and talking about what had happened, what had transpired, and what it meant. And so when I say it was huge, we've always been married whether we could be legally married or not. We've always been married in our minds, in our hearts. But it meant that we no longer had to maintain huge insurance policies to try and help pay for -- you know if one of us passed away, the other one would inherit it. We didn't have to have these really complicated legal documents. We didn't have to... We could be married, and Michele could be on my insurance policy at the company I used to -- that I retired from. I mean that was the biggest one. What did it mean to have marriage equality? Health insurance. [laughs] That's what it meant, health insurance and the right to inherit without having to pay tax. That's it in a nutshell. You no longer had to produce documents, if one of us was in the hospital, that said we had the right to see each other or to make decisions if someone was in poor health, and we were in that situation a number of times. Doctors that would fight with us, get out of here, you don't have a right to be here, huge. MF: Did you have a ceremony together when you got married, or what was your marriage like? JL: We got married at the Unitarian Universalist Church that we belong in -- belong to here in Athens, in the area, Athens and Sheshequin. Good friends of ours from the church, Katie and Chris were the first couple in the county to go to the courthouse and apply for a marriage license. Michele had to think about it a day or two, what it might mean to be out as a psychologist in business for herself. And she thought about it for two days and said, "That's it, I'm not going to live in the closet, we're doing this." We became the third couple to apply. And interestingly, the second couple to apply in our county was from New York State where they already had marriage, the ability to get marriage -- be married for a couple of years, but the county that they lived in in New York State were very close to the border. The clerk there that would issue the marriage license was very homophobic and gave them a very hard time and so they came to Pennsylvania to get their license. So Katie and Chris were the first and Michele and I were the third applicants, and our minister was just finishing up a sabbatical from the church. She came back in June -- I think as of June the first and Katie and Chris and Michele and I were all married at the same day in the same ceremony. We wanted to do it quickly because we were afraid that the state of Pennsylvania would withdraw. The legislation would be overturned, and we would no longer have the right, or it would become a legal issue. So we wanted to get married quickly, so it would at least make it tougher for them to divorce -- to divorce us, so to say, so... And our anniversary is coming up June the fourth, and Katie and Chris and Michele and I still join together every year on -- if not that day, the closest day that we can to it to celebrate that we were all married on the same day. MF: Oh, that's just wonderful. Well, we are well over 90 minutes, so... I have more that I'd love to talk about, but I feel like I really need to end the interview. But before we do that, Jane, I just want to ask, is there anything that we really -- that we missed today that you really felt you wanted to share in this interview? JL: Not that I can think of. I will share one story, and I don't know why this just popped in my head. But when I retired from PPL by that time, I had -- it was a good company to work for, good benefits and good pay, so I kept taking jobs that were there. I always considered the garage my home. That's really who I am, really where I spent the most time, but I moved on to other jobs. But when I retired, I had not worked in the garage. I retired in 2012 ; I had not worked in the garage since 1995. When I retired, it was the guys in the garage who threw me a party, and that meant the world to me. MF: Well, it's clear that they agreed, too, that you really were a star in that garage, and they felt really connected to you. JL: Even the ones that gave me a problem when I worked there, after I was forced to be out, I go back and visit periodically, they all become my friends. And so we all stay in touch till this day. MF: Thank you for sharing that story. The way that I'll end our interview is simply by saying, Jane, it's just really been an honor, a real privilege to hear your story today. Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me and to talk about your life. JL: Well, thank you for inviting me, Mary. I'm a pretty low-key person. At first I really didn't know if I wanted to do something like this, but I thought, oh, let me be out of character a little bit and do it. So I hope it works out for you, what you needed. Thank you for the opportunity. MF: Thank you so much. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:01:53 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Jane Land, May 29, 2020 Description An account of the resource Jane Land describes her childhood in Bucks County, her experiences at Moravian College in a social work program, and her movement to Northampton Community College to study mechanics where she was the only woman in the auto mechanic program. Land goes on to discuss her work as an auto mechanic at a variety of shops until she took a job at PPL in their garage and eventually as parts manager. With reference to her work, she discusses sexism and homophobia in the workplace and her work on gay and lesbian rights for employees of PPL. Beyond her discussion of her career, Land describes LGBT community spaces in the 1970s and 1980s, her work with N.O.W. in the 1970s (including attending the 1977 International Women’s Conference in Texas) and AIDS Outreach, and her religious affiliations with Quakers and UUC. Toward the end of the interview, Land discusses marriage equality and her spouse, Michele Strohl. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-10 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-05-29 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/09d5c14222164d2f4df0fcfa722f335c.png 20a6bf673fbc1e7cbe5317e72871180a 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 Michele Strohl 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-11.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 5, 2020 Michele Strohl, June 5, 2020 LGBT-11 02:13:29 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 Michele Strohl Mary Foltz video/mp4 StrohlMichele_20200605_video.mp4 1.0:|27(4)|62(2)|79(16)|100(10)|123(15)|148(5)|171(3)|192(3)|213(2)|236(5)|255(16)|278(17)|303(2)|324(17)|343(12)|362(16)|379(9)|404(5)|421(21)|442(7)|463(11)|480(11)|499(4)|522(9)|543(6)|564(8)|585(7)|602(14)|621(9)|638(6)|657(5)|680(11)|701(6)|722(7)|739(14)|760(3)|781(2)|800(2)|817(10)|840(16)|861(13)|884(13)|903(16)|922(10)|939(13)|958(4)|977(13)|1000(2)|1023(5)|1042(9)|1063(5)|1086(4)|1103(11)|1122(18)|1141(12)|1160(16)|1179(6)|1202(4)|1223(12)|1240(10)|1259(13)|1278(2)|1301(13)|1322(6)|1345(17)|1372(13)|1393(15)|1414(15)|1435(12)|1456(3)|1475(16)|1494(6)|1515(13)|1534(2)|1553(15)|1568(18)|1589(3)|1610(17)|1629(7)|1646(17)|1665(8)|1682(2)|1701(12)|1724(2)|1747(7)|1764(10)|1781(7)|1804(6)|1821(5)|1842(16)|1853(7)|1866(10)|1887(2)|1906(3)|1925(8)|1948(7)|1969(7)|1994(3)|2013(12)|2036(6)|2059(6)|2084(11)|2107(8)|2128(12)|2149(9)|2168(5)|2187(7)|2210(5)|2229(17)|2254(4)|2277(17)|2300(10)|2321(4)|2346(3)|2371(13)|2392(10)|2415(16)|2438(7)|2459(10)|2478(16)|2495(5)|2512(5)|2529(8)|2548(14)|2567(5)|2588(7)|2609(10)|2630(5)|2649(11)|2668(9)|2691(2)|2714(9)|2739(4)|2752(4) 0 https://youtu.be/djSEcBHVz4w YouTube video 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: Okay. My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Michele Strohl to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Michele and I are meeting on Zoom because there is a global pandemic, and today is June 5, 2020. So first I’ll just say thank you so much, Michele, for joining me today for this interview.&#13 ; &#13 ; MICHELE STROHL: You’re very welcome.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: My name is Michele, middle name is Victoria, and the last name is Strohl. My first name is spelled M-I-C-H-E-L-E, just one L. Middle name is Victoria, V-I-C-T-O-R-I-A, and the last name is Strohl, S-T-R-O-H-L. 0 123 Early Childhood/Family Life MF: Great. Okay, so let’s go ahead and start. And Michele, maybe let’s begin, could you tell me a little bit about your childhood?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Well, I was raised in a blended family, so I was raised by my mother and my stepfather, who actually adopted me. Also, he gave me his last name when I was about five or six. So I do have a number of brothers and sisters. I grew up with three brothers and three sisters, so there were seven of us, and later in life, around the age of forty, I met my other brother, who was a half-sibling of mine that I had known about since I was about seven or eight, but we had never met. So that’s kind of my family. My mother is still alive. She’s eighty-one. And my father -- and I call him my father even though he’s my adopted father -- he's deceased, and he died in 2016. 0 405 Teenage/College Years MS: High school, I was a pretty shy girl, studious, athletic. I played three sports in high school, basketball, softball, and volleyball. Didn’t really get the whole dating thing that was going on in my teen years. I mean, certainly there was a lot of my girlfriends talking about boys, wanting to date boys. I wasn’t feeling that. Ever since I was twelve, I kind of knew I was attracted to girls. Didn’t really know why, didn’t know what that was called. Just knew that I preferred their company once I got to be pre-teen and teen, and kind of thought I was weird. I thought, well, maybe I’m a slow bloomer, and maybe I’ll catch onto this boy thing that everybody’s talking about. Not so. Did not happen for me. &#13 ; &#13 ; I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, very rural town, farming, logging, and you were expected to date boys. You were expected to be lady-like. I had to wear dresses to school or skirts. Pants were not allowed. I’d change into my pants or shorts as soon as I got home. Hated dresses. So by the time I was in seventh grade, they changed that rule in junior high, and we were able to wear pants, and I was so delighted. And I have to say, Mary, very seldom from that time on have I ever worn a dress. Hate them. Feel very odd and uncomfortable in them, but if the situation arises that I have to wear one, I can, but that just was not my uniform of choice. 0 836 Realization of Sexuality MS: And it wasn’t until I got to college that I knew there was a name for women like me. I went to East Stroudsburg University, got my undergraduate psychology degree there. I was in a dormitory named Lenape Hall, which later we called Lesbian Hall because a lot of the lesbians lived in Lenape. &#13 ; &#13 ; I was fortunate enough very early in my freshman year to meet other women like me. Quite a few of them lived on my floor or the floor above or a couple floors above me. And I did meet my first girlfriend my freshman year of college, and she was Mennonite, which is kind of unusual. And I did not go after her. She came after me, which also surprised me because she was raised Mennonite. 0 1083 Coming Out/Family Reaction MS: So my dad was pretty upset that I had said I love you on the phone. My mother started giving me all kinds of negative messages through my freshman year about those weird gay people and things she would hear about on TV and what’s wrong with them and a lot of negativity, a lot of not real hateful words, but I could tell my mom was not liking people like me. So finally after hearing it several times when I’d come home to visit, I was alone with my mother, and I said to her, enough of this. I can’t listen to you talk about gay people like this. This is very hurtful to me. And she said, I don’t understand why, and I said, because I am one of them, mom. I am a lesbian. So then I came out to my mom. I was eighteen. 0 1715 Experience of Being Out in College/Social Life&#13 ; MF: You’re not rambling. This is wonderful. I have some questions about what it was like to be out at East Stroudsburg University in that period prior to meeting Jane. I’m just curious about what college life was like for people that were out in East Stroudsburg.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: I would say I was out to my crowd, out to the other lesbians. I didn’t consider myself to be out, loud, and proud like some people were starting to do. I don’t really feel that I was as much a part of that until maybe later, until I got closer to maybe my senior year of college. But I was lucky enough to meet a lot of lesbians very early on, and a lot of life at that time was parties off campus, older women that lived in a community that once went to college there. Alumni that were in town would host parties. Some upperclassmen who were lesbian who lived off campus would host parties, and so we would go there. 0 2765 Transitioning into the Professional World MF: I’m interested in that period leading up to when you meet Jane. What happened after college? How did you transition into your career?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Well, after college, I came back to Bradford County, Northeastern Pennsylvania, because this is where I lived, and so I moved back in with my parents for a brief period of time and started looking for work, and I got a job at a program called Step By Step Incorporated. It was designed out of Wilkes-Barre to help people who were coming out of the mental institutions, state hospitals. I don’t know if you remember this or if you’re a little bit too young. A lot of people were institutionalized for long, long periods of time if they had mental illness, particularly a lot of women who men wanted to get rid of. 0 3749 Meeting Jane MS: So I was talking to this patient that came in, and at the time, I was not working in my field. I’d left Step By Step. I was working as a receptionist at this dental office. So this woman, Gay, said to me, oh, I know this woman. She’s looking for somebody to rent a room in her house, and you guys would probably get along great. She had met her at an organization called Women’s Inc. which was a women’s organization in downtown Allentown that was kind of an activist organization. Jane was a member there. Dixie White was a member there. There was a number of women that were movers and shakers in town that belonged to Women’s Inc. &#13 ; &#13 ; So Gay gave me Jane’s number, and so I called Jane and arranged to have an appointment to see her house because she was going to rent a room in her house, and that seemed to be what I could afford at the time. So I went to meet her and didn’t really know anything about her other than she said I drive a big truck, van thing. I said, okay. And she said, I’m a mechanic. I work at PPL, so when you see me, I’ll be in my uniform, and oh, I have longer hair. I said, okay. 0 4096 Other Work &amp ; Schooling MF: Okay, so you met Jane, you moved in with Jane. What’s happening with your career? You mentioned you were looking into being an Allentown police officer. You just moved from Step By Step, so what’s happening with your career at this point in your life after you met Jane?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: The Allentown police thing, I did pass the test, the physical agility test. I did pass the exam. I was placed on the list for academy. You’re on that list for two years, and they pull people off that list when there are positions that come available. So during that time, they were getting ready to hire four to six new officers, so I thought, surely I would be one of them, and I had scored pretty high on the tests, and all of a sudden, it comes out in the newspaper, pictures of the new officers that had been hired, and I wasn’t called. 0 4536 Engaging with the LGBT Community in the Lehigh Valley MF: So while you and Jane are living together and your career is progressing, you’re going to get advanced degrees, how are you engaging with the LGBT community in the Lehigh Valley? What kinds of organizations were you involved in or social groups were you involved in during that time period?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: The bar scene was a pretty big deal back in the ’70s, ’80s, even into the ’90s. So Jane was not really a bar person. Jane was more of a stay-at-home, low-key person. I kind of grew up as a baby gay East Stroudsburg and lots of activities and going to the city, and I liked night life, so I liked to go to the gay bars, and so I would drag Jane out with me to the gay bars, and she was not a dancer either, but I was a dancing fool, and I taught her to dance and made her dance with me. 0 5165 Living Through the AIDS Epidemic MF: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what it was like to live through those early years of the AIDS epidemic and to work so closely with people who had been diagnosed with HIV. Just for your personally, what was it like to live through that time?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Well, it was sad, very sad, somewhat scary. It created some anger for me that at the time, we couldn’t get President Reagan to pay attention to fund research to develop medications. It was difficult to find housing for people who were positive, let alone somebody who’s dying from AIDS. There was the Rainbow House down in Wernersville. Thankfully that’s someplace that people who were so ill that they couldn’t live on their own, they could go there, and they could be there and be cared for. So we helped facilitate a lot of different needs for people at that time, anything from making sure they were fed. 0 5546 Gay &amp ; Lesbian Task Force MF: Were there other organizations in the Lehigh Valley, maybe like the Gay and Lesbian Task Force or other organizations, that you felt were really valuable during this period?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: I was a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force. That did not exist until we organized it. That was kind of in response to the Clinton’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and so there was a number of people, the ones that really got things started were professors at Northampton Community College, and so Manny Gonzalez and Chris Boes were talking to me. I think we were at Rosemary’s one night, and I think this might have been after some kind of demonstration or protest or something that had happened, and they said, you know, we should really develop a task force. We should do something to try to further GLBT rights. And so a number of us were sitting there talking and drinking at the bar -- most things happen at the bar -- and decided to develop this task force, and they asked me if I’d be a board member, so I said, sure. 0 5869 Importance of Marriage Rights/Experiencing a Stroke MS: So we had a wonderful lawyer, Robert Brown in Allentown, and he’s since deceased, but he drew up our papers for us, so we had wills and power of attorneys, health power of attorneys, financial power of attorneys, because we did not want either of our families, if something should happen to us, to take what we built together or to deny the other the right to be in a hospital room. So we had those wills. I was twenty-eight years old, my first will and power of attorneys with Jane. &#13 ; &#13 ; And when I had my stroke, we needed those papers. We had copies of them in a file at home. We had copies in a lock box, so I was thirty-six years old, and I had a stroke. Kind of a fluky thing. I had no idea that I had an underlying genetic disorder. That came later after the stroke to find out why I had it, but I had a terrible, terrible headache one night coming home from Hazleton. I was working for my psychologist licensure, and I was driving one hundred and ten miles a day commuting, under a lot of stress, and went to dinner that night with a friend, and I had been having headaches maybe for two or three weeks before. I don’t usually get them, but I was having some pretty bad headaches. And I used to run, and I was running a few weeks before and kept feeling this pulsing in my neck when I was running, and I didn’t know what that was. Later I knew what that was. 0 6331 Connecting with Others in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community MS: So that is what took me out of working with the task force, to go back to that thread, but it didn’t mean we didn’t stay involved with being active in other things that were going on in the community. Trish and Liz -- Trish Sullivan, Liz Bradbury -- they kind of came along during the time that Jane and I were together. They started doing things to be organizing and helping out the community, and I’m very thankful that they have since -- we left the Lehigh Valley before they developed the community center, but I will say, there was a community center in Allentown before the Bradbury and Sullivan LGBT Center. &#13 ; &#13 ; When I moved there in the ’80s, in 1980, there was the Lambda Center that was on Hamilton Street in Allentown, and it was a place you could go if you wanted to play games or meet up with other gay people. It didn’t last very long. They couldn’t support it, pay the rent, so it dwindled pretty quickly, but when Liz and Trish came to town, and they met with Steve Black, and they were part of PA-GALA and getting people to know who to vote, and then there started to be organizations like GLORA, the Gays and Lesbians of Reading and Allentown, and we went to GLORA events, and these were potlucks in people’s homes and organized outings to plays and different events that were being done for socialization, so you could meet other gay people that weren’t necessarily out, maybe didn’t want to be out, but wanted to be connected. 0 6506 Significance of Marriage Equality in Michele's Life MF: I’m curious what marriage equality has meant for you. You described this sort of harrowing experience having a stroke and really advocating for your relationship, for that to be honored. I’m curious now what marriage equality has meant to you personally and how that has impacted your life.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Oh, that’s been huge. Jane and I, earlier on, had tried to do a marriage ceremony, commitment ceremony I guess they were calling it at the time. We belonged to Quaker meeting in the Lehigh Valley, Lehigh Valley Friends. They knew we were a gay couple, and this was the forerunner to marriage equality and the marriage law being passed. &#13 ; &#13 ; So a lot of people were doing commitment ceremonies, civil unions, things like that, so we asked our meeting house if they would allow us to have that ceremony at our meeting, and we had two dear friends who were a straight couple that were having a recommitment ceremony for them. It was an anniversary for them -- and I’m sorry I don’t remember which of their anniversaries it was, Barbara and Jim -- and so they said, how great would it be if -- Barbara was Quaker, too, and she said, how great would it be if they could do their recommitment ceremony, and Jane and I could have a civil commitment ceremony? 0 7264 Work with the Transgender Community MF: Wow, what a wedding story. I wish I could have seen that one hundred and fifty people ceremony. Thank you for sharing that story. Michele, we’re getting towards the end of the interview. I’d like to give you an opportunity. Is there something that we haven’t talked about today that you really feel the need to share, something that we missed in our conversation?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: One of the areas that I worked in that has been pretty important to me is working with trans people. I came by this pretty accidentally, actually, but when I worked at Step By Step, I had an individual who lived in our residential program, a gentleman who was very tortured. He wanted to be female. He felt that he was female, and here I am in my early twenties in charge of this program, and this man is one of our residents, and he can’t get anybody to listen to him about being wrong-gendered. I used to take call, and I can remember that when this call came in, this gentleman was so distressed by being in the wrong body that he cut his testicles off over a bucket at one of our programs, and the call came in that he was in danger of bleeding to death and needed to be taken to the hospital. 0 MovingImage Michele Strohl describes her childhood in Northeastern PA with a focus on family life, discussion of normative understandings of gender, and her school experiences. Strohl describes college life at East Stroudsburg University, the lesbian community at college, and her first jobs as a mental health worker in Wilkes-Barre and then Allentown. Strohl goes on to explore getting a graduate degree in Psychology and her work in this field. In terms of the LGBT community, Strohl discusses a variety of organizations, including PA-GALA, AIDS Outreach, Gay and Lesbian Task Force, GLORA, and GLOS. She also provides information about local LGBT bars and nightlife as well as moving accounts of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the impact of marriage equality on her personally. Finally, she discusses her marriage to Jane Land with details about their marriage ceremony and life together. INTERVIEW WITH MICHELE STROHL JUNE 5, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: Okay. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Michele Strohl to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Michele and I are meeting on Zoom because there is a global pandemic, and today is June 5, 2020. So first I'll just say thank you so much, Michele, for joining me today for this interview. MICHELE STROHL: You're very welcome. MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? MS: My name is Michele, middle name is Victoria, and the last name is Strohl. My first name is spelled M-I-C-H-E-L-E, just one L. Middle name is Victoria, V-I-C-T-O-R-I-A, and the last name is Strohl, S-T-R-O-H-L. MF: And will you please share your birth date? MS: 8-31-1958. MF: And previously, we had talked about the consent for this interview. Do you consent to this interview today? MS: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? MS: I do. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including articles, websites, presentations, films, or other formats? MS: Yes, I do. MF: And so you understand that you will have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, identify parts that you'd like to have deleted, or withdraw the interview from the project? MS: Yes, I do. MF: Great. Okay, so let's go ahead and start. And Michele, maybe let's begin, could you tell me a little bit about your childhood? MS: Well, I was raised in a blended family, so I was raised by my mother and my stepfather, who actually adopted me. Also, he gave me his last name when I was about five or six. So I do have a number of brothers and sisters. I grew up with three brothers and three sisters, so there were seven of us, and later in life, around the age of forty, I met my other brother, who was a half-sibling of mine that I had known about since I was about seven or eight, but we had never met. So that's kind of my family. My mother is still alive. She's eighty-one. And my father -- and I call him my father even though he's my adopted father -- he's deceased, and he died in 2016. Let's see. What else would you like to know? Being in a blended family and lots of kids around all the time, we had lots of chores that we had to do, and I would say that my parents started out kind of traditionally asking the girls to do the girl chores and the boys to do the boy chores. I didn't like that so much. Kind of fought against that because I wasn't liking the cooking and the cleaning. I'd rather be outside cutting the grass or maybe helping my dad chop wood. So my dad and my grandpa had a sideline logging business, and so my dad was a logger part-time, and I would beg him to take me logging with him, so through that process, I learned how to skid logs and use a chainsaw, cut down trees, split wood, kind of help out in that area. My dad taught me to run a lot of different pieces of equipment. He was a crane operator, so we had bulldozers and cherry pickers, and I was able to learn forklifts, learn how to drive those pieces of equipment. So I was kind of the unusual girl on the block. People would walk by, and I might be with my dad up on a lift, a forklift, while we're building our chimney, or we might be painting the house with the bulldozer, and he'd be in the bucket, and I'd be moving it around the side of the house. Or we might be cutting trees in the side yard, and he'd bring the cherry picker up, and we'd be up in the bucket cutting trees. So as time went on, my parents realized that I was not their typical little girl, and they did allow me to experiment with lots of different types of work and ways of being. So I would say ultimately, I got to be raised unisex. I could do boy things. I could do girl things, and I happened to like the boy things better. So that's how that kind of went, which takes me to when I got ready to go to college. I guess I should back up a little bit. I was always kind of known as a tomboy. I used to fight a lot in the neighborhood with all the neighborhood boys, plays a lot of sports with the neighborhood boys. Probably had more boyfriends than girlfriends to start. Later on developed a good circle of girlfriends. But the boys had baseball, and we didn't have much in the way of sports at that time. This was before women's sports became pretty popular. That wasn't happening in my childhood. So I wanted to play baseball with the boys, and they wouldn't let me play, so my dad, he worked pretty much six days a week when I was growing up, but my dad got together with a couple other men in the community, and he said, my daughter wants to play softball, so they organized a softball league, and they developed -- I think we had between four and six teams at the time. And so there was a lot in town that wanted to play softball, so my dad helped organize that, and I got to play softball, not baseball, but softball. And of course, to make it acceptable during those times, it was called the Pony Tail League. Not exactly what we wanted it to be called, but that's what they called it. So that's a little bit about early childhood. High school, I was a pretty shy girl, studious, athletic. I played three sports in high school, basketball, softball, and volleyball. Didn't really get the whole dating thing that was going on in my teen years. I mean, certainly there was a lot of my girlfriends talking about boys, wanting to date boys. I wasn't feeling that. Ever since I was twelve, I kind of knew I was attracted to girls. Didn't really know why, didn't know what that was called. Just knew that I preferred their company once I got to be pre-teen and teen, and kind of thought I was weird. I thought, well, maybe I'm a slow bloomer, and maybe I'll catch onto this boy thing that everybody's talking about. Not so. Did not happen for me. I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, very rural town, farming, logging, and you were expected to date boys. You were expected to be lady-like. I had to wear dresses to school or skirts. Pants were not allowed. I'd change into my pants or shorts as soon as I got home. Hated dresses. So by the time I was in seventh grade, they changed that rule in junior high, and we were able to wear pants, and I was so delighted. And I have to say, Mary, very seldom from that time on have I ever worn a dress. Hate them. Feel very odd and uncomfortable in them, but if the situation arises that I have to wear one, I can, but that just was not my uniform of choice. So through high school, I did date boys even though that was not where my heart was, and just didn't get it, what the girls were saying about these boys. I found them obnoxious and kind of jerky and yeah, just didn't have much in common with them. I did kind of have a first experience with some girls at age twelve, which was somewhat sexual exploration, and that stuck in my mind as I started dating. I thought, wow, this is what I remember kind of playing around with these girls, and of course, they said, this was in preparation for dating boys, and I thought, well, I kind of like this with the girls. Didn't really dare speak about that. Heard a lot of negative language about homosexuals. That was the word at the time. Didn't know what that meant. Didn't know that that might apply to me. So I just kind of tried to do what everybody else did and was not very successful at it. Went off to college only after begging my father to allow me to because at the time in high school I was dating a boy that liked me very much, and my father liked him very much, and my dad was like, I don't understand why you want to go to college. Mary, I had always gotten really good grades in school. I had always been telling my parents that I would never marry. I would support myself, and if I had my way, I would have been born a boy because boys had more power. Boys had more opportunities, and I wanted to be a boy. Now, that does not mean I'm trans, and I know a lot of people now have that opportunity to be who they feel they are in their heart. I think if someone would have heard me speak like this, and I were living now, I might have been taken to counseling for some trans counseling. That is not what was going on with me. What was going on with me, I believe now, looking back, was I like the privileges that men had, and I didn't understand that as a nine, ten -- and this was young -- nine, ten, eleven years old. I didn't understand. I just knew that they got to do a lot of neat stuff and girls weren't supposed to. And they got to date the girls, which I wasn't supposed to. So that upset my mother very much to hear me speak like this. She did not want to hear that I wanted to be a boy, although she did allow me to cut my hair short and wear my hair short. She was a beautician by trade, so up until probably fifth grade, my mother would try all her new hairdos on myself and my sister, and I would go and wash my hair out because I didn't like bologna curls. I had long hair, and I would just ruin her hairdos. So finally she cut my hair short. So these were some of the things that were happening as I was growing up, so by the time I got ready to graduate, I said to my father, I want to go to college, and if I can't go to college, then I want to be an oiler for your crane because you taught me all of this stuff about heavy equipment, machinery, and I want to go do bridge jobs with you and work with you, and he said, oh, no, no. We can't do that. I said, why not? Because you're a girl. And I said, well, I don't understand. All my life, you've let me do everything that I've asked to do. You've taught me how to do all these boy-like things, and now you're saying, I can't do this, and I don't understand why. And he said, well, when we go out on these jobs, there's no bathrooms. I said, okay. Where do you go to the bathroom? He said, well, we go to a tree. I said, well, then I can go behind a tree, too. He said, oh, I'm not going to let any of my men see my daughter's *hand gestures*. I said, oh. He said, so you can't do it. He said, I thought you'd outgrow this. I thought you would outgrow this sooner than this. I said, outgrow what? Being a tomboy. Being a tomboy. Why can't you just start to do some of the things like the other girls are doing, you know? And why don't you just marry Robby, who happened to be the boy I was dating in high school that my father liked, and I said, I don't want to marry Robby. Yeah, he's a nice guy. He's a friend. I don't want to marry Robby. So I said, well, if you're not going to let me be your oiler, then you need to send me to college because I need to be able to take care of myself, dad. I'm not marrying Robby. So after a few discussions with my parents, they did allow me to go to college, which they did help me pay for it. And it wasn't until I got to college that I knew there was a name for women like me. I went to East Stroudsburg University, got my undergraduate psychology degree there. I was in a dormitory named Lenape Hall, which later we called Lesbian Hall because a lot of the lesbians lived in Lenape. I was fortunate enough very early in my freshman year to meet other women like me. Quite a few of them lived on my floor or the floor above or a couple floors above me. And I did meet my first girlfriend my freshman year of college, and she was Mennonite, which is kind of unusual. And I did not go after her. She came after me, which also surprised me because she was raised Mennonite. But as soon as she and I got together, then I realized what those girls were talking about in high school when they were dating boys because all the things they said that was wonderful and they felt when they were with their boyfriend, I felt with my girlfriend, Shirley. It was kind of like all of a sudden, something turned on, and I now felt like a sexual being as opposed to just a person in the world, and it was pretty wonderful. Also pretty frightening because we weren't out at that time yet. Some people were starting to come out, but this is 1976, and up until 1973, this psychiatric diagnostic manual still said that being gay was a mental illness. You could still be hospitalized for that. So it was kind of scary to realize that now that what I am is a lesbian, and in society's terms at that time, a homosexual, which was a dirty word, and kind of felt shameful about that. That was the flip side of the feeling excited. I also felt shameful, like what will I do with this? How do I reconcile this not just with myself but with my family? I was raised in a somewhat religious family. Did go to church ever since I was a little girl, was active in my church, in youth group, taught Sunday school, so I had to grapple with a lot of feelings once I realized who I was and that I now had this girlfriend that I very much loved. So I had a little bit of a rough time trying to reconcile that, and I would say that process took time. I can remember going home to my mother, and I would be talking about Shirley and talking about other women that I was spending time with. I also happened to have a very close friend from high school that I later found out was gay, actually three friends from high school that I later found out were gay, and there was one I played a lot of tennis with, and I talked about her a lot, and my mother did not like this. I wasn't talking about boys. It's all girls. And my father heard me on the phone one night telling one of my friends that I loved them, and he got angry after I got off the phone, and said, telling a girlfriend that I loved her was unacceptable, that you only loved your family and the man that you will marry. So my dad was pretty upset that I had said I love you on the phone. My mother started giving me all kinds of negative messages through my freshman year about those weird gay people and things she would hear about on TV and what's wrong with them and a lot of negativity, a lot of not real hateful words, but I could tell my mom was not liking people like me. So finally after hearing it several times when I'd come home to visit, I was alone with my mother, and I said to her, enough of this. I can't listen to you talk about gay people like this. This is very hurtful to me. And she said, I don't understand why, and I said, because I am one of them, mom. I am a lesbian. So then I came out to my mom. I was eighteen. And she and I then sat and talked for about two hours. And she had lots of questions, and she also wondered, did I do something to make you gay? Are you gay because I wasn't married to your father? Because my mother got pregnant with me when she was at beauty school and never married my dad. And I said, no, mom, it's not something you did. It's just, I think, who I am and how I feel inside. I think I've always been like this. And I said, I remember feeling this way very early and all the way back to when I wanted to be a boy. That was like very young, seven, eight, nine years old. And when I was twelve, I realized I liked girls. And she just couldn't quite wrap her head around it, but of course, she loved me and she said that there was not any chance that she was going to not have me in the family or throw me out. She just didn't understand. It might take some time to understand. But she asked me not to tell my dad. Please don't tell your dad. And of course, from my early situation with the phone call, I thought, no, I'm not going to tell dad. And of course, I had younger siblings, and my mother said to me, do not tell your siblings because we don't want you influencing them. They're young. They don't know who they are yet. They look up to you. We don't want you influencing them. My siblings were pretty upset later in life because I didn't really tell them until they were in their late twenties, almost thirty, and they were really angry, particularly my one brother. Why was this kept from us? And it doesn't matter. It did matter to my parents at the time. I did bring girlfriends home. My mother and father did allow me to bring girlfriends home, which was nice because I would have been devastated if I couldn't, and they always welcomed them as if they were family. That was not an issue until I got serious about someone, and that someone is Jane, and Jane is my wife now of almost -- well, it was six years legal yesterday on June 4, but we had been together it'll be thirty-seven years this August. So when I first brought Jane home, that went well, and they liked her. Jane's a little older than I am. She's eight years older. A lot of my other girlfriends were very near my same age, within a year or two, so it was a little different to have an older woman in the home with me. My father apparently knew about me now because he talked with me after I had brought Jane home and said, what are you doing with this older woman? And I said, well, I'm with her because I love her and I care about her. And at that time, we had just started living together, and he said to me, are you sure you're not being kept? Yeah. Old school words, right? Are you sure you're not being kept? I said, what do you mean by being kept, dad? Well, she's an older woman. She's established. She has a career. She has a house, and you've moved in with her, and I just want to make sure you're not taking the easy way out. Which really was hurtful to me because I had a college education. I had a job. I had been working in my field. Wasn't a great paying job. And he thought I was looking to be cared for by someone else. Yes, I was looking for someone to be cared for and to be loved by, but not to be taken care of in the way he meant. He had paid for an education, right? I certainly would be using my education to support myself and contribute to the household, so that's what I told him. That made me pretty angry, and of course, I had a conversation with my mother and said, I thought dad didn't know, and of course, she said, your father and I share everything, and I told him over the years, so he knew. Then we fast-forward to Thanksgiving holiday, and my parents have a big -- well, my parents had because we've taken that over now, but my parents used to have a big spread on Thanksgiving, and my grandparents would be there, and all the family would be there, and lots of good food. So I was going to bring Jane home for Thanksgiving dinner, and when I was speaking to my mom, trying to find out when they were holding it and when I could arrange for us to travel from the Lehigh Valley up to my home town in Pennsylvania, my mother said, oh, you're bringing Jane? And I said, well, yes. I'm bringing Jane. Is that a problem? And she said, well, can't she go to her family? Doesn't she have a family? And I said, well, of course she has a family, but I would like her to come and meet mine. And we always have a big gathering, and anybody's welcome, right? And my mother persisted with the, I really think it would be best if Jane would go and have Thanksgiving with her family. I don't want to deprive her family of having their daughter with them. And I said, mom, Jane's parents usually go south for the winter, and they're on their way to Florida and then on to Texas. They're not having a Thanksgiving dinner. I want her to come home with me. And my mother again persisted with, I don't think that's a good idea. Now this is early on when my siblings are still young. This is early on when everybody didn't know. And all I could figure is my mom was trying to figure out, how do I explain this? So I said to my mom -- and this was very frightening for me to take this stand early on. I think I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, around that time, and I said to my mother, if Jane does not come home with me to this holiday gathering, I will not be home for any other holiday gatherings going forward. If she is not welcome, we are not coming. I'll go someplace else for Thanksgiving and Christmas and every other holiday. You have to understand, my mom is all about family. I knew this would really get her. If I was going to have any chance of getting Jane home, this would be it, but I also knew if she wasn't on board, and if she wasn't accepting totally of me, as she has said she would, I would be out of home to go home to for holidays. Luckily, my mother said, oh, well of course you can bring her. So Jane went home with me for Thanksgiving and met the family. Jane comes from a very, very small family, mom, dad, and older sister. Jane comes from a family that was educated. Her dad was a doctor in I believe it was chemistry, so he worked for Merck Sharp &amp ; Dohme and was a doctor, and her mother had a masters in library science, and my mother's a beautician and my father's a crane operator. And Jane was born in Philadelphia and grew up in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia, and I grew up in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania in the sticks. So bringing Jane home to my family was also kind of a risk because, okay, we're a big, loud bunch, and Jane's used to some sophistication, but my family welcomed her. She had a good time, and she's been home with me ever since. So that's kind of how that part progressed. What else can I tell you? I don't know. I feel like I'm rambling. MF: You're not rambling. This is wonderful. I have some questions about what it was like to be out at East Stroudsburg University in that period prior to meeting Jane. I'm just curious about what college life was like for people that were out in East Stroudsburg. MS: I would say I was out to my crowd, out to the other lesbians. I didn't consider myself to be out, loud, and proud like some people were starting to do. I don't really feel that I was as much a part of that until maybe later, until I got closer to maybe my senior year of college. But I was lucky enough to meet a lot of lesbians very early on, and a lot of life at that time was parties off campus, older women that lived in a community that once went to college there. Alumni that were in town would host parties. Some upperclassmen who were lesbian who lived off campus would host parties, and so we would go there. There was also a bar in East Stroudsburg called the Blue Bugle. I had a fake ID at that time, so that we could get into the gay bar, and so we would go to the Blue Bugle. I went to college before Rainbow Mountain was there, so that was not an option. We would travel to Allentown, get a car load of us, and go to the Stonewall. That was one of the places that was available to us. And there was a bar in Easton at the time called the Musical because -- I don't know if that word means anything to you, musical? No? MF: No. MS: Being gay in the '70s, because a lot of people weren't out, you had to have ways to find each other, recognize each other. Musical was a word that was used for gay people. Are you musical? Particularly used more for gay men, but if you were musical, then you might be invited to a party. And the bar in Easton was called the Musical, and so we knew it was a gay bar. You could go there. So these were the highlights of college life was to go to the Stonewall, to go to the Musical. We would travel into New York City. My parents had told me, don't go to New York City. You'll get killed, maimed, raped. Something bad will happen to you. I had a car on campus. I drove my friends to New York City. So we would go into the city and go to Greenwich Village. We'd go to the Duchess. It was during the disco era. I love disco. I'm a disco queen, so we'd go in to dance. We'd drive uptown and go to Dapper and Friends. After hours, we'd drive out to Long Island and go to the Swamp, which is another gay bar out on the island. So this was how we spent a lot of our social life. While my straight counterparts were going to frat parties, my gay friends and I were going out of town to the gay bars or to local kind of underground house parties. So that's kind of what it was like there. You looked for people that were wearing lambda necklaces because the lambda symbol was a symbol of being a lesbian, and we all joked about the lesbian uniform, flannel shirts and jeans and shit-kicker boots, short haircuts. You looked for women that looked like you. There wasn't very many feminine-looking lesbians at that time that I could see. The first gay bar I went to, I was eighteen, and actually it wasn't at college. It was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I had an older friend -- and remember I was dating a Mennonite girl as well that was from Intercourse, Pennsylvania. So the first gay bar we went to, I was with Shirley. I was a freshman in college, but high school girlfriend who was gay lived in Lancaster, and she invited the two of us to come down and visit her and her girlfriend for the weekend, so that we would have a place to be ourselves. That was a big thing then. Go someplace where you could be yourself. So we drove to Lancaster and stayed with Pam and Lori, and they took us to the Sundown, the name of the bar, in Lancaster. And this was an eye-opener. I had never been to a gay bar before -- neither had Shirley -- and we walked in, and it was smokey and dark, and there was a lot of pumping disco music playing. Of course, Shirley didn't dance, being Mennonite, and we were met at the door by a big dykey woman, and she wanted to know, what are you? What do you mean, what are we? We're gay. No. No, no, no. What are you? I know you're gay. You wouldn't be here if you weren't gay. What are you? You butch or you femme? Are you butch or are you femme? 1976, right? So we're neither. Well, you've got to be one or the other, is what this big old dyke said. You've got to figure that out. You've got to be one or the other. You two look like dykes to me. You look like you're butch. Kind of soft butch, but butches over there, femmes over there. And we said, on the opposite sides of the room? I mean, that sounded like high school dances with heterosexual people. She said, that's just the way it is here. And I spoke up and said, well, we're not butch or femme, and we're together. And she said, no, no, no, butches can't be together. Butches are with femmes, and she kind of directed us to the butch side of the room. And the two friends we were with, they were more traditional that way. My friend Pam was very butch. Her girlfriend Lori was very feminine. She had long, dark hair and wore more feminine clothing, and my friend Pam looked like a young man. And they just kind of shrugged their shoulders and took us with them, you know? And we kind of just looked around wide-eyed and got a drink, and I did manage to get my girlfriend to dance with me because, you know, nobody's going to know. No one from your church is here, right, to know that you're dancing with me. Which is another phrase they used at that time. Do you go to our church? Are you musical? Do you go to our church? Are you a friend of Dorothy? These are all phrases that you would hear when people were trying to find out, are you gay? Are you lesbian? In college, I had one woman come up to me in the laundry room, and she said, are you in the life? And I said, what is in the life, you know? She said, you know, in the life. You look like one of those people. So apparently, this was also another phrase that I learned was in the life. This was a woman from, I think, New York City at the time, a black woman. I had never heard that before, and that was what she asked me. So very interesting. There were pinky rings you'd look for. Is that person wearing a pinky ring? There were handkerchiefs in the pockets, mostly the gay men wore those to indicate what kind of sexual things they were into. So you had to kind of be careful who you talked to. You tried to find out who's who, so you didn't get hurt. There was a lot of concern about getting hurt at that time, which, you know, I was chased. I'd been chased at East Stroudsburg by people who apparently surmised that I was gay, and I remember having to run a few times to get away from someone who was, I think, going to hurt me if they caught me. My car was vandalized when I was in college by some frat boys. They ripped the mirror off my car, and I remember going home very angry because I had to tell my parents that my car had to be repaired and why. And at the time, when I was a freshman in college, I looked more like a younger boy. I was very androgynous, more boyish looking. And I really wanted to get back at these people, these guys, that had vandalized my car, and my mother talked me out of it. And that was not the only time that my car was vandalized. I used to go to a bar called Rosemary's in Allentown, Bethlehem area. It was on the border of Allentown and Bethlehem line, kind of on a triangle. And I was there one night and went out to leave, not just one but two of my tires were flattened. Somebody had stuck a knife through them. Not only were my tires flattened, but a friend of mine who was parked near me, her tires were flattened, too. I didn't realize both of them were until I had changed one. I got the tire out of my car and put one tire on only to release the jack and realize, there's another tire flat, and I only have one tire. So the two of us went back into the bar, talked to the bartender that we knew, and AJ had to take us home because we couldn't drive our cars. The next day, a friend of mine that I worked with drove me back to get my car, and there was a tire place up the street called Joe's Battery and Tire. And she said, let's go there. We'll get the guys to get a couple tires and go down and get your car and get it fixed. So I went in there and said that I needed two tires and that my car's tires had been slashed the night before, and would they be able to sell them to me? And the guy started laughing, and he said, oh. Where was your car parked that you got your tires slashed? And I didn't want to say because again, at that time, you tried to be low key. This would have been 1981, I think. So I didn't want to say where my car was, and right away, he piped up and said, was it down there in that parking lot across from that gay bar? He knew where my car was, which made me wonder if they knew something about or had something to do with our tires being slashed, being a tire store that sells tires, right? Again, I was pretty angry that somebody had done this to myself and my friend, and I'm not proud of this, Mary, but what I did the next time I went to the gay bar was I took a tire iron, and I laid in wait by my car for hours with a tire iron while my friends were in the gay bar to see if anybody was going to come around the parking lot to bother our cars. Because if they were that night, I was prepared to fight. Now I'm not generally a fighter, but I was very angry. And luckily after a couple hours, one of my friends came out and said that, you know, this is not a good idea. You really shouldn't be out there. Why don't you come in and join us for the party? Which I did, but that's how angry I was. I was at that bar another night when we had a bomb threat, and they had to evacuate the whole bar because someone had threatened to bomb the gay place. I'm a little bit too young for raids, but we heard about them from older lesbians and older gay men, so this bomb threat was really scary, as was knowing somebody's out there cutting tires. So there was a number of things that were happening at that time that were kind of scary for gay people. I know people who had been beaten up. I know people who have been stabbed. I know people who have been killed because they were gay. I think a lot of young people today don't realize that that was not that long ago. I'm sixty-one, and I'll soon be sixty-two, but it was not that long ago when you couldn't just be out and proud without some pretty major consequences. So at East Stroudsburg, you had asked me what it was like there. A lot of that was kind of like on the QT. As my group got closer to being seniors, there was movements afoot for women's rights. There was movements afoot for gay rights. So I did participate in some marches and demonstrations. At East Stroudsburg, there was a women's center. There was a women's annual convention -- I can't remember what it was called -- where they brought in speakers to speak to women about women issues and GLBT was included in that as well. So I did participate in that. I did participate in a sport when I was in college, in intramurals. I did participate in student government. I ran a coffee house when I was in college and brought in musical acts and singers, so that we had entertainment. And that was a big part as well of trying to find out our culture was women's music. Cris Williamson, Tret Fure, Ferron, Holly Near, there was all these women singers that made us feel good about who we were, so we try to pass that music around, that information around. There were books that you wanted to read. Rita Mae Brown was big, and everybody wanted to read Rubyfruit Jungle and Southern Comfort. Later on, there was some really bad lesbian films. Tigress Productions put out some lesbian films. Some of them weren't so good, but anything that we could identify with, we wanted to access it. We wanted to share it. So we'd get together, and we'd watch these things together, or we'd pass these books around. There was gay newspapers, Village Voice out of Greenwich Village. There was a Philadelphia paper. We'd eat all that stuff up just to be able to hear about other people like us. Coming to poets, Adrienne Rich, May Sarton, any literature material that we could get our hands on. So that was kind of what it was like in my early college years being lesbian. MF: I'm interested in that period leading up to when you meet Jane. What happened after college? How did you transition into your career? MS: Well, after college, I came back to Bradford County, Northeastern Pennsylvania, because this is where I lived, and so I moved back in with my parents for a brief period of time and started looking for work, and I got a job at a program called Step By Step Incorporated. It was designed out of Wilkes-Barre to help people who were coming out of the mental institutions, state hospitals. I don't know if you remember this or if you're a little bit too young. A lot of people were institutionalized for long, long periods of time if they had mental illness, particularly a lot of women who men wanted to get rid of. If their husbands wanted to get rid of their wife, they could easily sign them in to a mental hospital, after a period of time divorce them, and move on to marry another woman. So there was women, and there were men, too, that were hospitalized for twenty-five, thirty years in mental institutions, and they were able to live in the world. I mean, they were not that mentally ill, right? So there was a movement at that time to bring people out of the state hospitals and to help them get reacclimated to living in the world. So Step By Step was a residential program that was designed to take people out of the state hospitals into a full-care facility that's twenty-four hours staffed, teach them skills that they would need to live on their own, and then moved them to a sixteen hour residential apartment. And then from that sixteen hour staffed apartment, if they did well, moved them into their own apartment with only appointment-only staff to check on them. So my first job was with Step By Step as a mental health worker, and I worked in the full-care facility, stayed overnight, worked with the mentally ill that came out of state hospitals. I was at home probably three months doing this job and living with my parents and feeling pretty isolated because I'd just come from this very rich college environment, where I had a lot of gay friends and a lot of opportunities and a lot of activism and a lot of things going on, back to my hometown that was very rural, and I didn't know any gay people except a couple of friends from high school. So I worked for three months with this program, and my director said, we're opening some new programs down in the Allentown area, and we'd like to promote you to a supervisory role, and we'd like to know if you'd be willing to move to that area and help set this program up. So I talked to my parents. I'd only been home three months, and my mother said to me, I think you should go. And I said, really? You feel like confident in me? I just started working, you know? And she said, well, more for the reason that because you're a lesbian, I think you should go. I said, what? She said, if you stay here, I'm afraid you'll get hurt. If you stay here, I don't think you'll be happy. If you stay here, you might bring attention to our family and the younger siblings. I think you should go. You liked it there. There are people like you there. I think you'd have a better life there. So that's not exactly what I wanted to hear from my mom, you know. I would have liked a little bit more pride in I'd like you to go there because you're getting this new job, which I think she was excited about, but there was more of a push for you should go there for these reasons. So I did. I took the job and went to the Allentown area. The house that I supervised for Step By Step was on Sixth Street between Gordon and Chew. Not a good neighborhood really, right? So when I went to training in Wilkes-Barre, because that's where the main headquarters were for Step By Step, they told me I had a few weeks. This was before Christmas, 1981. And it was a few weeks before Christmas, and they said, we'd like you down there, I think it was like the seventeenth of December, so we could get started. Two weeks of training, and I'm supposed to be there if I want this job. I didn't have a place to live. So I had met a woman during the training who lived in Allentown who was going to be one of my coworkers, and Maggie said to me, why don't you come live at my place, and you live with me until you find a place to live? So that's what I did. She was a little bit older than I was, and I moved in with her and left home and took a job in Allentown. Maggie helped me find a suitable apartment. I started looking at places in really bad neighborhoods, and she said, oh no, you're not from here. She said, you can't live there. So she went with me on her lunch hour several times until we found a place that she thought would be safe for me to live. So that's how I moved from where I lived in Bradford County to the Allentown-Bethlehem area, and did not meet Jane until I lost that job. I did have a couple girlfriends ahead of Jane, a couple significant relationships before I was with Jane, but none of them were longer than a year. There was a woman that, when I worked at Step By Step, that I fell in love with, and she was straight, and I thought, well, this is not going to work. But she over time developed feelings for me, and she actually approached me, so I thought, oh. So she and I ended up being together for a while. Being that she was newly then out because she had been with a man before she was with me, and she was attending a Moravian College and was in her senior year and worked at my site. I was twenty-one, and I think she was nineteen or twenty, so she left her boyfriend and was with me. When she got ready to graduate from college, she broke up with me, which was devastating to me because I really loved this girl, and the reason that she broke up with me, she said, was I don't know if I'm really gay. I really love you, and I really wish I could stay with you and be with you, but I want children, and I can't have children with you. 1981, I can't have children with you. There wasn't any movement yet for lesbians to adopt children or to inseminate. If you had children, it's because you got pregnant by some boy in high school or college, and you later found out you were gay, or you later came out and knew you were gay before but later came out, or you had a good friend, good male friend, that would impregnate you, so that you could have children, but you didn't have children because you got inseminated or you adopted them. And so I didn't know how to answer this question for my girlfriend at that time. I begged her to please stay, that maybe in time things would change, and she said, I'm not strong enough. I'm not as strong as you. And she went back to her boyfriend, and she did say to me at that time, I want you to stay in my life. I would like you to know my children. And I thought, well, this is something, right? So I said, sure, that would be fine. So at some later date, and only a few months, I called her to try and stay in touch, and she answered the phone, and she was very angry with me. Don't call here. Don't call here again. What are you doing calling me here? And I said, well, I'm calling you because you wanted to stay in touch. You wanted to stay friends. And I knew she had married her boyfriend, and she said, what if he had answered the phone? Don't ever call here again. So that was very hurtful. After her, I met another woman. Her name was Lori, and Lori was lesbian through and through, had been ever since she was a young girl, so I thought good, not a straight woman that thinks she's gay. It's someone who's lesbian and knows she's lesbian, so I was with her for about a year, and she cheated on me with the girl that lived downstairs. We were in the apartment upstairs. She was downstairs. I was working a lot of hours, supervisor of the Step By Step program, a lot of responsibilities for a young person, and she was a party girl, and she just couldn't be alone for very much. So that ended. That didn't end very well. She was also, I found out later, using some drugs because I came home and found drugs in the house and people partying, and that didn't set well with me. And at the time that that was going on, that she was doing drugs and partying -- this was just before we broke up -- I had been working for Step By Step for a while, didn't pay a lot of money. My second degree, my minor degree, was in criminal justice, so I had applied for Allentown City Police, and I was being investigated. People were checking me out, and I was sitting for the exam, and here's my girlfriend doing drugs in my house. So I had a talk with her about that, and I said, I can't believe you're doing this. You know, I'm trying to become a cop. You're going to jeopardize this opportunity for me. We got into an argument, and it's the very first time that anyone ever beat me up. So this girlfriend, I believe at the time and I didn't understand, but -- I mean, I knew she was doing drugs, but I believe she was under the influence of drugs, and she beat me up because I asked her to stop these activities while I was trying to become an officer. So that was pretty devastating. That was the end of that relationship. I was not going to be with somebody that would harm me. She is the one person that I was with that we tried to get an apartment before the apartment we were in, that we were discriminated against by a landlord, and they would not rent to us, so she was the one girlfriend that I had that we were denied housing because we were lesbian. The landlord said, we would fight, one of us would break up with the other, and somebody wouldn't be able to pay rent, so he wouldn't rent to us. But the person that rented to us in the apartment where she beat me happened to be the landlord of the girl she was cheating with on me. So that relationship ended. I called friends in New Jersey, asked them to come and pick me up because I was afraid to stay in that house. So that relationship ended, and it was after that relationship that I met Jane. So I had taken a break from working at Step by Step. That job, there were some things that happened there that didn't go too well, so stopped working there. There was a situation at Step By Step where I had interviewed someone for a job under me who was a black woman. I had also interviewed a white man, long-haired fellow, and I hired him instead of her, and so there was now a lawsuit that was going to be brought against the company because the black woman, who also was a lesbian, claimed that I had discriminated against her because she was gay and black and that she was going to sue us. I was the one that interviewed her. I had not discriminated against her. I chose the white hippie guy because he was better qualified for the job. This blew up into a really big thing. The company I worked for wanted me to come out as a gay woman because clearly I didn't discriminate against her for that because I'm also a lesbian. I got a lot of pressure from the company's lawyer to come out publicly. It would be in open court. Would I do this, so that the company would be able to survive being sued, and I said, I didn't discriminate against her on either count, but I'm not willing to come out publicly for this company. So I kind of lost my job, so I no longer worked there, so I was working at a dental office -- I think Jane might have gotten this a little backwards -- and there was a woman that came in for services, and her name was Gay, which was very apropos, and since Lori and I had just broken up, and Lori had moved out and left me with an apartment that I could not afford on my own and left me with a bunch of bills that I also couldn't afford at the time, I needed to downsize and move someplace else. So I was talking to this patient that came in, and at the time, I was not working in my field. I'd left Step By Step. I was working as a receptionist at this dental office. So this woman, Gay, said to me, oh, I know this woman. She's looking for somebody to rent a room in her house, and you guys would probably get along great. She had met her at an organization called Women's Inc. which was a women's organization in downtown Allentown that was kind of an activist organization. Jane was a member there. Dixie White was a member there. There was a number of women that were movers and shakers in town that belonged to Women's Inc. So Gay gave me Jane's number, and so I called Jane and arranged to have an appointment to see her house because she was going to rent a room in her house, and that seemed to be what I could afford at the time. So I went to meet her and didn't really know anything about her other than she said I drive a big truck, van thing. I said, okay. And she said, I'm a mechanic. I work at PPL, so when you see me, I'll be in my uniform, and oh, I have longer hair. I said, okay. So I got to her house first. Jane's always late. So I got to her house first, and this woman pulls up in this big van, hops out, and she's this little, short, five-foot-two, pretty little lady with curly hair down to her shoulders, and she's wearing a blue mechanic's uniform that says Jane. And I thought, wow. How cute is she, you know? So she invites me in, shows me around the house, shows me the room that would be mine if I choose to rent from her, asked me if I'd like a drink. Sure, I'd like a drink. I was very nervous. So I had a drink. I drank that pretty fast, and she said, do you want another? Sure. Ah. And she said, oh, do you drink a lot? And I said, well, no, not really. She said, well, that's two drinks pretty quick there, and I said, well, I'm a little nervous, and I lit up a cigarette. And Jane said, oh, you smoke? No one smoked in my house for a number of years. Now I want to put it out, but she didn't have an ash tray or anything, so I'm blowing this big time. I'm just really not going to be renting this house at all. And soon she got talking to me a little bit, and she said, why do you need to move? I said, well, my girlfriend broke up with me, and I can't afford the rent. And I kind of wondered if Jane was gay. She was very feminine-looking, but she was a mechanic, and she said, oh. My girlfriend left me, too, a while back, and that's why I need to rent the house, someone to share expenses, because she had a couple loans that she had taken out with her girlfriend, and when her girlfriend left her, she couldn't afford these loans. So I was like, ah. And then Jane kind of interviewed me pretty hard because she owned the house, and she thought I was a party girl, and she's like, you know, if you're going to live here, you can't be partying, carrying on, because I own the house. And I said, I'm not really a party girl. And she said, and, you know, you're gay, and I'm gay, and it would be strictly business. There would be no, you know, chance of anything here. So I don't know if I was giving off some, I think you're cute, but she quickly set me straight about that. So she said, what do you think? You want to rent the room? I said, no, I don't want to rent the room. She said, why? I said, because I'd like to take you out. Would you go out with me? I can't date you if you're my landlord, right? She said, no, you can't date me if I'm -- so I don't want the room. I'd rather go out with you. So she said, yes, she would go out on a date with me, and our first date was to the Bronx Zoo in New York City. I drove, which if you were to know us today, Jane does all the driving. I don't. I mean, I drive sometimes, but she likes to be the in control and she drives. But our first date, I drove to the city, and she showed up with a picnic lunch, roasted chicken, some good salads, some wonderful foods. I had a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and some cheese. You know, not much contribution to the meal. But we ended up eating our picnic lunch in traffic because one of the Yankee games was playing at the time we were traveling through and got stuck in traffic from the ball game, so we ate our lunch in the car. By the time we got to the Bronx Zoo, it was open for half an hour before it closed, and that was our first date. And we dated for maybe three to five months before she asked me to move in with her. I lived in a really crappy area of Allentown down on Fifth Street. Somebody has shot through my neighbor's front window while I was living there. And Jane would stay at my house sometimes, and we'd stay at her house sometimes, but after a couple of these events in downtown Allentown, she said, I don't think it's safe where you live. I'd really like you to move in with me. So I did, and we have been together ever since. So that's kind of how I met Jane. What else can I tell you, Mary? MF: Okay, so you met Jane, you moved in with Jane. What's happening with your career? You mentioned you were looking into being an Allentown police officer. You just moved from Step By Step, so what's happening with your career at this point in your life after you met Jane? MS: The Allentown police thing, I did pass the test, the physical agility test. I did pass the exam. I was placed on the list for academy. You're on that list for two years, and they pull people off that list when there are positions that come available. So during that time, they were getting ready to hire four to six new officers, so I thought, surely I would be one of them, and I had scored pretty high on the tests, and all of a sudden, it comes out in the newspaper, pictures of the new officers that had been hired, and I wasn't called. So I was pretty upset about this, and I called up and asked. Hey, I scored really high. I didn't even get an interview. What happened here? I was on the academy list. And they said, oh, we had to select from a minority list this time because there was affirmative action, and we had to be picking officers that were minorities, and I said, aren't I a minority? And they said, no. Why would you be a minority? I said, well, I'm a woman, and they said, women are no longer considered a minority in police work, and you're a white woman. So they had hired women and men of color. I had seen the pictures in the paper. It didn't even occur to me that that's what that was. I mean, I just didn't see that it was people of color. So I was told that I'd have to wait another two years to reapply, at which point I decided to go back to school to further my degree in psychology, mainly at Jane's urging because she said, you know, you're really smart. Why don't you go back to the school? And the time that I was with Jane, I was working as a security guard up at Bethlehem Steel at the research center, so that was my job at that time. So I did. I went back to school at Kutztown University, and Jane said, don't worry about the extra income, not a problem. So she was pretty good about that while I had this crap job and went to college. And I had gotten a job after the security job back in my field down in Pottsville and worked at a clinic that was called Turning Point on Center Street in Pottsville. And so I did group therapy there, individual family therapy there. I guess I didn't go back to college until I got the next job, which was I got a job at the Allentown Hospital in the adolescent psychiatric unit when they first opened that up, so correcting my memory here. I did not go back to college until I was in the hospital position, and once I was in the hospital position, they offered two-thirds tuition if you were to get a degree in the field that would help you with your current job. So since I was in psychiatry, I was going to get a mental health degree. As long as I did A or B, they were willing to give me two-thirds of my tuition back, so that's how I got my next degree was through while working at the hospital, and luckily they rearranged my schedule from days or thirds or seconds, so that I could go to college whatever course was offered. I also did my internship there under the direction of the psychologist at that time and then later went on to become a psychologist, again, at Jane's urging. Why don't you do that? Because I could still be licensed at the masters level at that time up until 1986, if you were in a program, so I went on and did that as well, did my final internship up at Northeast Counseling in Hazleton and traveled one hundred and ten miles a day, commuted back and forth to that job for three years while I did my licensing internship, all the while being supported by Jane, so I could get that next degree and start my career as a psychologist. So that's kind of how my career progressed. And I lived in her house in Catasauqua after moving in from that crap place in Allentown. It felt a little uneasy after a few years that Jane owned a house, and I really didn't have any part in that, and I was feeling a little insecure about that, and Jane had been through that very bad breakup with her girlfriend prior to me and before that a breakup with a girlfriend who almost took her house from her, so she didn't really want to put me on the deed, and at that time, we couldn't be married and own property together, so it had to be a more business arrangement. So it took until our fifteenth year together, and on our fifteenth anniversary, Jane gave me a card, and the deed, my name was now on the deed to the house. So it took a little while for Jane to feel comfortable that I was going to stay, and she could share her property with me. I told her I understood, you know. I felt a little insecure about it, but I understood that she had been hurt before, and I wasn't going anywhere, so fifteen years later, she put me on the deed. Now, let's see, what is it, 2020 now? 2005, we built a house together up in my home area, and then we truly had our place. It became our place. MF: So while you and Jane are living together and your career is progressing, you're going to get advanced degrees, how are you engaging with the LGBT community in the Lehigh Valley? What kinds of organizations were you involved in or social groups were you involved in during that time period? MS: The bar scene was a pretty big deal back in the '70s, '80s, even into the '90s. So Jane was not really a bar person. Jane was more of a stay-at-home, low-key person. I kind of grew up as a baby gay East Stroudsburg and lots of activities and going to the city, and I liked night life, so I liked to go to the gay bars, and so I would drag Jane out with me to the gay bars, and she was not a dancer either, but I was a dancing fool, and I taught her to dance and made her dance with me. So we'd go to Rosemary's. We'd go to the Stonewall. We'd go down to the Silhouette in Easton. We'd, you know, go to different places, down to Philadelphia. Giovanni's Room was a big thing at the time, go down to the bookstore, get some books, see who was in the gay [inaudible] down in Philly. Go to Judy's Café. Try to go places like that, and that's where you would hear about what's happening out in our world, what's happening that we need to march for, what's happening that we need to be involved with. I'm a super voter. Been a super voter since I could vote, so there was a PA-GALA. We put out a voter's guide every year. Steve Black was really instrumental in getting that started, and then Liz and Trish kind of took that over later on, Liz Bradbury and Trish Sullivan. I believe they met up with Steve Black at some point and then took that over. So we would try to educate ourselves. I met Liz and Trish first time at their house down on Turner Street when they had Charlie Dent and some other officials over to their house for a meet and greet, so we would go to things like that. Jane had gotten involved with AIDS Outreach during the AIDS epidemic. That started in 1983. I had moved to the Lehigh Valley in 1980, so pretty quickly after moving there, that became a big deal. That was very scary. I can remember being pretty frightened about, oh my gosh, you know, are we going to get AIDS? And trying to be educated about who gets AIDS, how do you get AIDS, how do you be gay and sexual and not get AIDS? Because there was a lot of myths at that time about how you got this disease. And there was a lot of hatred at that time about gay people, particularly males, and AIDS. So here was this big backlash coming at us again about being gay. So I can remember that we started to hear about different people who were getting sick, and it was a pretty scary time. Jane wanted to do something about that, so she got involved with a group called AIDS Outreach that was down on Sixth Street, I believe it was, in Allentown, and she became a buddy for the buddy system, and they would partner a person with someone who had HIV or AIDS to help them with things, help them with doctor's appointments, picking up groceries, cooking, cleaning their place, just company sometimes. And after she was involved with that for a while, they were in great need of people to help counsel folks who were being newly diagnosed, families who had members of their families who are HIV+ or dying from AIDS, and I had just gotten my license to practice psychology, so Jane said, why don't you approach them and see if you can like help in some way? Maybe they can help you get a start, and you can help them. So I did. I went and talked to Linda Lobach at AIDS Outreach, and they were very happy to bring me onboard. They did have a psychologist there. What was his name? [Gerry Machado?]. He was a psychologist that they had hired, and I spoke with Gerry, and he said, yeah, that'd be great. We'd love to have you onboard. They gave me an office to practice out of in the upstairs of AIDS Outreach, and they said, as long as you can see the people we refer to you, you may use this office and see other people and build your practice. So it was a wonderful opportunity. The Lehigh Valley Hospital AIDS Net would refer people to AIDS Outreach, and they would refer people to me, and I started seeing people who were newly diagnosed, meeting with them, meeting with their families. I ran a support group with other people from the hospital, and we ran an HIV/AIDS support group for many, many years. I started doing that '95 and stopped doing that somewhere around 2010, I think, something like that. In the beginning, we started counseling people how to die right, how to die right, how to get ready for death because people were not surviving this illness, and how to get things in order, how to reconnect with family that maybe had kicked them out, ostracized them. And as the protease inhibitors started to be made available and people were starting to be able to live with HIV -- because at first they had AZT, and AZT caused all kinds of problems for people. Once the protease inhibitors came onboard, we had to start counseling people how to live with HIV, and there weren't so many people dying of AIDS anymore. People would die of natural causes, so it transitioned during my work there. And I also helped AIDS Outreach run buddy program training, so I was part of the team to help caretakers take care of themselves, so that they would know how to cope with dealing with people that were this ill and also have the facts right, so that they knew that they weren't going to get HIV if they just help clean somebody's apartment or if they hugged them or if they cooked with them. So we did some training. So that was something that Jane and I did that was kind of an activist role. She was out being a buddy, and I was doing buddy training and counseling. Other things that we did, we went to Washington. We marched on Washington for GLBT rights, and I can remember going there with Jane and being very excited, Think FACT or Pride or Lehigh Valley organized that, and we all went down together, and all of a sudden there's movie cameras and people being filmed, and I thought, oh my god, what if my mother or my siblings who are still young see me on TV? I didn't tell them I was going to be here. Oh no. So I was a little frightened that there were TV cameras, and Jane said to me, don't worry. They're not going to film us. We're too normal-looking. They're going to get the dykes on bikes. They're going to get the trans people. They're not going to get us. So yeah, when it was on TV, of course, anybody that looked a little different was on the TV. The people that looked like us that weren't so different, they didn't have us on film. So it was fine, but yes, that was exciting. We marched in that. We went to Sister Fire outside of Washington D.C., went there a couple times to see all those women sing wonderful, empowering women's music, meet other lesbians, all shapes and sizes and ages, vendors, buy stuff that represents you, right? So we did that. I'm trying to think if there's other things. In college, I did Take Back the Night against rape and things like that. We went to the annual women's workshops at E-Berg for a couple years after I left college, and we went back to support the women's center there. Those kind of things. We would support local bars, gay bingo, drag shows. There was a lot of drag shows that went on down at Rosemary's. Things that were a part of our culture at the time and a part that helped us celebrate who we were safely in our own communities. Yeah. Those were the kind of things we were doing. MF: I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what it was like to live through those early years of the AIDS epidemic and to work so closely with people who had been diagnosed with HIV. Just for your personally, what was it like to live through that time? MS: Well, it was sad, very sad, somewhat scary. It created some anger for me that at the time, we couldn't get President Reagan to pay attention to fund research to develop medications. It was difficult to find housing for people who were positive, let alone somebody who's dying from AIDS. There was the Rainbow House down in Wernersville. Thankfully that's someplace that people who were so ill that they couldn't live on their own, they could go there, and they could be there and be cared for. So we helped facilitate a lot of different needs for people at that time, anything from making sure they were fed. There was Las Manos De Dios, which was next door to AIDS Outreach. The Hands of God was a Hispanic church that partnered with AIDS Outreach to make food every week, and people would volunteer and come and package it up, and AIDS Outreach had a list of people that needed food because they were too ill to cook for themselves, and the buddies would take the food from Las Manos De Dios to these people with HIV and AIDS, so that they could eat. There was a lot of taboo. People didn't want to touch them. People didn't want to have them around or in their presence. Family members turned away sometimes to people who were infected. It was kind of a sad time, and at first, people were dying, so you might know somebody or work with somebody, and they would pass away, and you'd have to go through the loss of someone that you had worked with and try to help. I know Jane experienced that several times with some of the people that she buddied with. One of her buddies went blind from HIV. Another one developed some dementia. I had to hospitalize him because he was hallucinating and not safe for himself, and that was hard to have to put him in a hospital. And unfortunately, he was placed in the psychiatric hospital, and then we had to advocate for him because that's not really where he belonged. This was part of his illness was affecting his brain. He wasn't psychiatrically ill, but there just weren't places for people to go. And so sometimes they were placed in inappropriate settings. I mean, this man had to sit in groups and was on a behavioral program and was chastised for not being able to sit in a group for an hour. He was sick. He couldn't sit in a chair. He was almost bones. It hurt him to sit in a chair. So we had to try to advocate to get him out of those groups and let him lay in bed. Just feed him and keep him safe. So those were hard things to watch and try to navigate. Going and seeing the quilts, and some of these quilts were people we knew. [long pause] That was hard. And to wonder who's going to be next and to realize that some of the male friends that we socialized with were diagnosed with HIV, and some of those men died, and having spent time with them, you know? It was a tough time. So we did the Washington march. We went down and saw the quilt, which was pretty awesome to watch them lay it out across this large area down by the Capitol and walk through it. It's just many, many, many people who died. And then when they brought it to Muhlenberg, and they couldn't bring the whole quilt, but parts of it, we attended functions to support bringing the quilt to the Lehigh Valley. What else did we do? I don't know. I can tell you that the last groups that I ran with people who were HIV+, my oldest client had been living with HIV for twenty-five years, so it was very heavy to have members of my group who had longevity, who had survived it, who were still doing well and were going to die of old age. So that was kind of the upside as time went on, but the early years were very hard. It was very scary. MF: Were there other organizations in the Lehigh Valley, maybe like the Gay and Lesbian Task Force or other organizations, that you felt were really valuable during this period? MS: I was a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force. That did not exist until we organized it. That was kind of in response to the Clinton's Don't Ask Don't Tell, and so there was a number of people, the ones that really got things started were professors at Northampton Community College, and so Manny Gonzalez and Chris Boes were talking to me. I think we were at Rosemary's one night, and I think this might have been after some kind of demonstration or protest or something that had happened, and they said, you know, we should really develop a task force. We should do something to try to further GLBT rights. And so a number of us were sitting there talking and drinking at the bar -- most things happen at the bar -- and decided to develop this task force, and they asked me if I'd be a board member, so I said, sure. So this would have been 1994 into '95, so I was part of that group for the early of the task force, and we brought speakers in to speak. There was a woman. I can't remember her name -- I've been trying to remember her name for a while now -- that they brought in to speak about the Don't Ask Don't Tell because she was a ranking officer in the military. And one of our board members was ex-Navy and also had had some experiences with discrimination because of being a lesbian in the service. So we brought her in to speak and was one of the events in the Lehigh Valley that people could attend. Pretty shortly after I had become a board member, unfortunately, I suffered a stroke, so I had to resign and step away from the organization as a board member at that time. I still stayed active later as attending events that they put on, but at that time, I needed to recover and take care of myself. But one of the things we did at the task force was to help disseminate these voter guides when I was there. It was to make sure that all the bars and all the places that gay people frequented, they could get access to these voter guides, so that they knew what representatives in the valley would represent us and work to get our rights. And many of the members of the task force talked to people, talked to representatives, tried to get them to understand what we needed and why we needed it. Marriage equality, that was kind of like an idea, but I never thought that would happen in my lifetime, but that was something we hoped that maybe this newly formed task force someday would maybe get there, but we just wanted things like anti-discrimination. We just wanted fair housing, not to be able to worry that you'd lose your job. These were all things that could happen to you as a gay person at that time. You could be fired. You could be denied housing. Your children could be taken from you. We have a friend that lost her son in a custody battle because she was lesbian. We knew a couple women like that that lost their children. So it was very important. The task force had lots of different areas they wanted to look at from AIDS to anti-discrimination. At that time, civil unions and marriage ceremonies were kind of like the only thing we could do aside from developing your own legal protections, which Jane and I did very early in our relationship. I've had a will since I was twenty-eight, so very early we realized we didn't have these rights, and if something were to happen to one of us, we wouldn't be allowed in a hospital room with each other. We wouldn't be given time off work. We wouldn't have any of these rights. So we had a wonderful lawyer, Robert Brown in Allentown, and he's since deceased, but he drew up our papers for us, so we had wills and power of attorneys, health power of attorneys, financial power of attorneys, because we did not want either of our families, if something should happen to us, to take what we built together or to deny the other the right to be in a hospital room. So we had those wills. I was twenty-eight years old, my first will and power of attorneys with Jane. And when I had my stroke, we needed those papers. We had copies of them in a file at home. We had copies in a lock box, so I was thirty-six years old, and I had a stroke. Kind of a fluky thing. I had no idea that I had an underlying genetic disorder. That came later after the stroke to find out why I had it, but I had a terrible, terrible headache one night coming home from Hazleton. I was working for my psychologist licensure, and I was driving one hundred and ten miles a day commuting, under a lot of stress, and went to dinner that night with a friend, and I had been having headaches maybe for two or three weeks before. I don't usually get them, but I was having some pretty bad headaches. And I used to run, and I was running a few weeks before and kept feeling this pulsing in my neck when I was running, and I didn't know what that was. Later I knew what that was. So I went to dinner this one night after work with a friend, and I hugged her goodbye, and when I hugged her goodbye, I felt something snap in my neck. As I'm driving home from Hazleton to Allentown, I feel like I'm drunk. The lines on the road are kind of wavy, and I'm having trouble staying on the road. I have this terrible, terrible headache, like the worst headache of my life, and I stopped and got gas, and I called Jane and said, something's wrong. I have a terrible headache, and I'm having trouble driving. So when I got home, she gave me some, I don't know, Tylenol, something, and I'll just go to bed, right? Got a headache, go to bed. And she went to work the next day, and she said, why don't you call your doctor? I said, okay. And off she went to work, and it was our habit to lock the door in the morning with whoever was left behind. You know, we lived in a fairly nice neighborhood, but we still locked our doors. So we lived in a townhouse, and I was upstairs, and she locked the door. She leaves. I get up to call my doctor. I fall in our den with the phone in my hand. I can't get up. I feel like my brain is shutting down like a computer, like, brrr, and I just thought, oh no. Something's really wrong. I go to dial the phone, can't remember my doctor's number, can't remember to call off work. Get the phone book out, can't read the phone book, so now I'm thinking, I'm really in trouble. So the only number I can remember is Jane's number at work. I call Jane's number at work, and she wasn't available immediately, and I got her coworker, and all I said to him was, have her call me. I could still speak at that time, and he said, okay. And within a few minutes, I realized I was going to lose that ability, so I called back, and all I could get out at that time was, I need help, and Davie, her coworker, got Jane on the phone, and Jane said, as soon as she heard me trying to speak, said, I'm sending an ambulance to the house. So I was locked in. They couldn't get upstairs to me. Her mom and dad lived next door to us at this time because we had moved them from where they lived -- they had lived in Bucks County and they were getting older -- we moved them up next to us, so luckily she called her dad, and her dad came with a key and let the ambulance in. Jane's on her way to the hospital to meet me with a couple neighbor ladies who drove her. Then she gets there, and I'm in the ER, and they won't let her in because she's not family, and so they don't want to let her in. And one of my neighbors said to her, don't you have papers? Didn't you say you guys had papers? So she told them that she had papers and that she was my medical power of attorney, and they said, unfortunately, if you don't have them with you, we can't let you in. So I am now starting to -- I mean, I could lose consciousness. I am having trouble advocating for myself. The neighbor lady drove her home. She got our papers out of the file, drove back, and presented them, and then they let her in. But that's what you had to do then. This was 1994, November 1994. And after that, I had to follow up with this doctor. I had a temporary left-side paralysis, full facial droop on the left side, affected speech, so I had two-and-a-half months of rehab. Luckily all of that was temporary. It all came back, and I made a full recovery, but I had to see this neurologist frequently, and I had to be a blood thinner, and I couldn't drive for two-and-a-half months, and I'm trying to do my psych internship to finish up for licensure, and he doesn't want to talk to Jane. I want her to come with me to my appointments because I need someone to help me make sense of everything that's happening. I've had a brain injury. I need a second set of ears, right? He was pretty disrespectful at first. Why does she need to be here? You are my patient. Who is she to you? She's my girlfriend. She's my partner. She's not your family. So we had to negotiate. I was pretty angry with my doctor at first, and so was Jane, and did a lot of crying. And eventually over working with him for a period of weeks to months, he and I came to an understanding, and I'm glad to say to this day, I count him as a friend. We kind of won him over. Yeah. And I credit him with saving my life that day. Luckily, I was able to recover fully. Did have some neuro-psych testing at my insistence because my doctor did not -- this is during my arguments and fights with him -- he did not want to have me tested for neuro-psych testing because he said, you're fine. I said, I'm sitting for my psychology license to practice psychology, and I want to make sure my brain's okay because I really only get one or two chances to sit for this test, and if I don't get it, I'm not going to get it. So I finally talked him into allowing me to do that. I think because of my tenacity and I kept at it with him that eventually he came to respect me, and he came to respect Jane, and pretty quickly, she started going to all my appointments with me. And if she didn't come, he would ask, where is Jane? Now. So that is what took me out of working with the task force, to go back to that thread, but it didn't mean we didn't stay involved with being active in other things that were going on in the community. Trish and Liz -- Trish Sullivan, Liz Bradbury -- they kind of came along during the time that Jane and I were together. They started doing things to be organizing and helping out the community, and I'm very thankful that they have since -- we left the Lehigh Valley before they developed the community center, but I will say, there was a community center in Allentown before the Bradbury and Sullivan LGBT Center. When I moved there in the '80s, in 1980, there was the Lambda Center that was on Hamilton Street in Allentown, and it was a place you could go if you wanted to play games or meet up with other gay people. It didn't last very long. They couldn't support it, pay the rent, so it dwindled pretty quickly, but when Liz and Trish came to town, and they met with Steve Black, and they were part of PA-GALA and getting people to know who to vote, and then there started to be organizations like GLORA, the Gays and Lesbians of Reading and Allentown, and we went to GLORA events, and these were potlucks in people's homes and organized outings to plays and different events that were being done for socialization, so you could meet other gay people that weren't necessarily out, maybe didn't want to be out, but wanted to be connected. There was GLOSS. There was the Gay and Lesbians sports group, and they played ping pong, and they played softball, and there were different groups that started to spring up. There was an educational group that tried to help out with schools and education. And there was a little newspaper, the Valley Press, the [inaudible] Valley Press put out, that would list a whole calendar of events of different things that were happening in the gay and lesbian community that you could attend, that you could go to, and hopefully there would be something that spoke to you. So that was happening in the '80s, in the '90s, in the Lehigh Valley. So a lot of things were word-of-mouth and these small flyers that would get printed and put out. That was what was happening then. MF: I'm curious what marriage equality has meant for you. You described this sort of harrowing experience having a stroke and really advocating for your relationship, for that to be honored. I'm curious now what marriage equality has meant to you personally and how that has impacted your life. MS: Oh, that's been huge. Jane and I, earlier on, had tried to do a marriage ceremony, commitment ceremony I guess they were calling it at the time. We belonged to Quaker meeting in the Lehigh Valley, Lehigh Valley Friends. They knew we were a gay couple, and this was the forerunner to marriage equality and the marriage law being passed. So a lot of people were doing commitment ceremonies, civil unions, things like that, so we asked our meeting house if they would allow us to have that ceremony at our meeting, and we had two dear friends who were a straight couple that were having a recommitment ceremony for them. It was an anniversary for them -- and I'm sorry I don't remember which of their anniversaries it was, Barbara and Jim -- and so they said, how great would it be if -- Barbara was Quaker, too, and she said, how great would it be if they could do their recommitment ceremony, and Jane and I could have a civil commitment ceremony? The Quakers said, no. They would not allow us to do it, even though we were members of this meetinghouse for a number of years, and Jane being a very active member on committees and such. So that was very hurtful that they would not allow it, and so our friends had their recommitment ceremony, and we did not get to be a part of it with them. And later, they then asked us -- they were going to put a First Day School addition onto the meeting house, and they were raising money, and we were one of the first people that they came to to ask for money for this project because at the time, I was a now practicing psychologist, and Jane had a very good job at PPL, and they asked us if we could contribute ten thousand dollars towards this project. Yeah. In their little pyramid, that was their top number that they were looking for. They came to us as one of the first people and asked would we contribute this for the children of First Day School. Oh, I was very angry. I said a few words, and then I had to go upstairs, and I left Jane to finish because I just would not be able to hold my temper. But I thought, how dare you ask us for this much money for a cause that we're not really as much a part of when you could not support us in our commitment ceremony? So we did not contribute towards that, mainly just because of hurt. Not because we didn't want the First Day School, not that we didn't want the addition, but I just was not in a place where I was going to be generous at that point. So by the time that marriage equality was coming around, I said to Jane, people are going to other states. They're getting married in other states. I don't want to go to another state. I don't want to go to Canada. If I'm going to be married to you, and I want to be married to you, I would like to be married in my home state, and I will be married when our state passes it. So in May of 2014, when it passed Supreme Court, we were at our new church, which is a Unitarian Universalist church of Athens and Sheshequin in Athens, Pennsylvania, which happened to be at the time we joined, about one-third GLBT, which is why we joined it. We were at the church at a function, and my mother called me on the phone, and Jane's brother-in-law texted her, and my mother said, hey, I don't know where you are right now, but I think the Supreme Court just said you guys can get married now, and I wanted you to know. So my mother's come a long way. She's come a long way. And Jane's brother-in-law had texted her almost at the same time. Hey, did you see the news? You have a marriage equality. So we told two of our friends at the church, Katie and Kris, that this had just happened, and oh my god, could this be real? And they were excited, too, because they're a lesbian couple, and they've been together a number of years, and they're like, we can get married, and I said to Jane, do you want to get married? And she said, yes. So then the question was, where to get married, and where do you go for your marriage license? We're here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, very conservative, Trump land big time, and it's my home area where I grew up, where my mother said to me, you should go to Allentown because you'll be safer there, and here I am back in my home area working as a psychologist. Built a home here in 2005, and here it is, 2014, and we're allowed to be married. So I said to Jane, I'm not sure if I want to go to the courthouse in my hometown and ask for a marriage license because at that time, when marriage equality came out, there were people that were denying them even though it was now the law of the land, and I was not sure if we would be met with trouble here. And she said, well, I understand that. She said, we could go back to the Lehigh Valley, and we could get it there. I said, let me think about it, and she's like, well, okay. And our friends said, we're going to go right down and get it here, the two friends that went to our church. They were going to go to the courthouse in Bradford County. They were the first gay couple in Bradford County to get their marriage license. It took me about three days. I wanted to think about it, and on the third day, I said, come on. Let's go down to the courthouse here in my hometown, and let's get our marriage license. We were the third gay couple in Bradford County to get our marriage license. And when we went in, I was surprised because the clerk said, it's about time. It was wonderful. So we were a little afraid that maybe the governor would appeal it, overturn it, so we were afraid that we should very quickly -- because that was happening around the country, and so we decided pretty quickly after getting our marriage license that we should marry as soon as we could, and we asked our minister at the UU church if she would do the ceremony, and we asked my parents if they would stand up for us. Unfortunately, Jane's parents had passed away years before this, so they did not get to be a part of our wedding, and unfortunately, her older sister had also passed away, so they did not get to see us marry, but my parents said yes, including my dad, who was still alive at the time. And they went with us to the UU church. Our friends Katie and Kris were married the same day, minutes apart from us, by the same minister, and we were married on a Wednesday afternoon. I took off the afternoon from work. We got married that Wednesday afternoon, and I was going to go back to work, and Jane said, you're not going back to work. It's our wedding day. [laughs] So we then went out to dinner and celebrated with our friends and my parents and the couple that had stood up for them. Shortly thereafter, within days, my sisters found out that we had gotten married on a Wednesday afternoon, and they weren't a part of it, and they were very upset, and they said, what the heck? You've been waiting all these years, and you can finally get married. We thought there was going to be a big wedding, and you snuck off and got married in the middle of the week. We want a celebration. So Jane and I decided to have a do-over wedding ceremony in September of 2014, and we invited one hundred and fifty people. I told Jane, if I was going to have a wedding celebration, I wanted everything. I wanted it to be big. So we had friends and family and people from our church and coworkers from the thirty-one years that we were together at that time, and it was hard to select who got to come, but we tried to pick people who had kind of been supportive of us through the years. And the people that stood up for us were the people that had known us as a couple the longest, thirty years for Barbara and Jim, the couple that had wanted us to marry at Quaker Meeting. My dear friend that I grew up with from high school, we were best friends from fifteen to sixteen years old, playing sports together, and she's also a lesbian, her and her girlfriend came up from Philadelphia and stood up with us. Jane and my dear friend from Quaker meeting who had moved to Alaska and we had known for twenty-five years and had always been supportive of our relationship, she and her boyfriend TJ, Debbie and TJ came from Alaska to stand up with us. So we had many, many people come to this wedding. We were married in the historic church of the UU church here in our home area. The minister that married us that Wednesday did the do-over recommitment of our marriage that September. My father and mother were part of the ceremony, and all of my siblings got to come and some of their children. So we had a great service at the old historic church. A good friend of ours, the photographer, she took some wonderful pictures. We had a big celebration with a DJ and all the traditional throwing the bouquet. Yes, I carried flowers. Jane did not carry flowers, but she wore a flower. And we danced in the church on the way out, and we went to a local hall that you could rent that is owned and operated by two gay men, and we had our reception there. Started out upstairs in the dining room. My niece and her partner had a catering business, and they catered our wedding for us, so we had a cocktail hour, and we had a nice, sit-down meal, and then we moved downstairs to the cabaret bar and stage where they had a DJ, and we had dancing until late in the night, so it was wonderful. And what did it mean to me? When I got to say to Jane the vows that I had written, and she got to say what she had to say to me, I felt legitimate. I felt whole. I felt like we counted, like everybody else, and it was a wonderful feeling, and I'm not really sure how else to describe it, but something shifted and changed for me that day. It was great. MF: Wow, what a wedding story. I wish I could have seen that one hundred and fifty people ceremony. Thank you for sharing that story. Michele, we're getting towards the end of the interview. I'd like to give you an opportunity. Is there something that we haven't talked about today that you really feel the need to share, something that we missed in our conversation? MS: One of the areas that I worked in that has been pretty important to me is working with trans people. I came by this pretty accidentally, actually, but when I worked at Step By Step, I had an individual who lived in our residential program, a gentleman who was very tortured. He wanted to be female. He felt that he was female, and here I am in my early twenties in charge of this program, and this man is one of our residents, and he can't get anybody to listen to him about being wrong-gendered. I used to take call, and I can remember that when this call came in, this gentleman was so distressed by being in the wrong body that he cut his testicles off over a bucket at one of our programs, and the call came in that he was in danger of bleeding to death and needed to be taken to the hospital. So of course we got him emergency services, and he was taken to the hospital, and we thought for sure, Lehigh Valley Hospital would make him right. They did not. They did surgery, and they fixed him up, and now he was a man with a penis and no testicles. Terrible, terrible story. Terrible story. Could not get someone to help him get his body fixed. So here I am, twenty-one, twenty-two years old, and this is my first experience with a person who needs to have sexual reassignment surgery. I didn't know what this was. I mean, I had heard of transsexuals. The only thing I knew about transsexuals were the men that dressed up in women's clothing and Rocky Horror Picture Show, right? I didn't know much else beyond that. Now I have a person in my program who's very clearly distressed over his gender and wants to be female and knows that all his life, he's been female, and we can't get him what he needs. So that was one reason that I wanted to start helping folks who were trans. The second one was when I did my psych internship up at Northeastern Counseling in Hazleton. Again, we had a gentleman who was distressed about his gender. He wasn't as open as the other fellow was at Step By Step, so it wasn't known to us until he had his situation occur, and again, an on-call situation where we got a call that this gentleman had cut his penis off at his home, and we sent emergency services to his home to get him and his penis and take him to the hospital, and before emergency personnel could get into the bathroom to him, he flushed it down the toilet, so they could not reattach his penis. This is how distressed he was. So again, I'm thinking, here I'm in my thirties now, and I'm thinking, surely they will fix him and do the surgery now. No. They did not. They again sewed him up. He now has a small stub that they fixed, so he can urinate out of it, but he still has testicles and a small stub to urinate from. Can you imagine the psychological distress this person was now in? And we didn't have resources, and we couldn't find a way to help him. So then I'm working at Northampton Mental Health and Mental Retardation in the Lehigh Valley as a young psychologist there seeing patients, and I have a young trans man come in, and he is in between. Still has some feminine characteristics, starting to grow a beard, voice is changing, still has breasts, and is very distressed about his situation and needing to find services to get gender right and very angry because where do I fit now? I'm stuck in between. What can you do to help me? Again, I'm a thirty-something, new psychologist working in the Lehigh Valley, and I don't know, and this person had every right to be angry at me because coming to me for services, and you don't know? Who can help me? I said, I'll find out. I'll find out. So I started asking around, and there was PK Counseling in the Lehigh Valley, and she had been doing some work with trans people, and she came and met with me and brought me some of her books. She was an older woman getting ready to retire, and she passed her books onto me, and she said, I'll help you learn what you need to learn if you will take over this type of work. So I did. I didn't know what I was doing. She mentored me. I talked to some people down in Philadelphia and got some mentoring there. There was a couple psychologists down there that were associated with -- it's going right out of my head. The center down in Philadelphia, I can't think of it right now. I know it, and I should be able to tell you. Maybe it will come to me, [The Mazzoni Center]. At any rate, word got out, and I started seeing people who were transgender, people that would have gone to PK Counseling she was referring to me because she was retiring, and that became a part of my practice in Bethlehem, and I became known as one of the few people in the Lehigh Valley that would see trans people and help them with sexual reassignment surgery. The first person that became gender-right under my care went to Thailand to have her surgery done, and I coordinated care with a doctor in Thailand through an interpreter. So since then, we were able to develop more local resources, different people that we could count on for hormone therapy and gender reassignment. Dr. Christine McGinn down in Doylestown area[inaudible] for sexual reassignment surgery, Dr. Sherman Leis down in Philadelphia for sexual reassignment surgery. There was a doctor that we met at the trans conference in Philadelphia. I went to the health trans conference when I was newly starting this work, so that I could learn, and met a lot of physicians and psychologists who were working in this field, and that was a pretty wonderful experience. Talk about feeling like a minority, to be in a hotel in Philadelphia at the trans health conference and being one of the only people walking around who's not trans. Pretty interesting. So I began that work and have had a number of people transition under my care since, and I continue to see people who are trans in my practice now. So that's one of my subspecialties as well as GLBT issues. Back long ago when Liz Bradbury was doing her photo exhibit and wanting to photograph couples, she asked me if Jane and I would be in her couples photograph series, and I said, not yet. Not yet. And she's like, why not? Why not? Everybody knows you're gay. You're out. I said, well, I'm not really out out, shouting-it-from-the-rooftops out. I'm not sure I want my pictures out there yet. I'm practicing in the valley, and I'm seeing a lot of young GLBT people, and I think I can do more good if I just stay kind of behind the scenes because GLBT people need a safe place to go and a counselor they can talk to, and some of these kids' parents would not have let them see me if they had known I was a lesbian. So I know that was not what Liz wanted to hear at that time, but that's why I did that, and that's why I didn't have our pictures taken earlier, so that I could do more good, as I thought, by kind of keeping that under the wraps. I knew people knew, but I wasn't going to put it out there and maybe exclude someone who needed services. Jane and I used to run annual holiday open houses at our home in Bethlehem because we knew people who had been kicked out of their homes, who had been disowned by families, and had no place to go for holidays, so we used to have Thanksgiving dinners for GLBT people. We used to have an annual Christmas party where people came and helped dress our tree and have a cup of cheer and be able to sit around and talk with everybody. I wanted to do that in my practice, too. I wanted to have a safe place for people to come, so that even though the parent might be sending them to see me because we don't really want them to be gay, they could come to me, and that kid could sit in my office without a parent sitting in the office and say, how do I get my parents to accept that I'm gay? They don't want me to be gay. They're sending me to you because they want you to change me. Can you help me change them? That's why we didn't have our pictures taken. When we got ready to leave the Lehigh Valley, I said to Liz, you know, you can have our pictures now, and we did finally get our photos taken, so that we could be a part of her photo display of GLBT couples in the Lehigh Valley. The one thing I do wish, and I hope she's done it since, it would be nice if there would be some way of being able to know on those photographs how many of us have been together for how long and whether or not we ever married because those pictures were taken before gay marriage, and now we're married. So it would be nice if that could be reflected in that photograph project as well. But yeah, that's another thing that I just thought would be worth mentioning. MF: Thank you so much, Michele. It's just been such a pleasure to talk with you today. I am so grateful that you took the time. MS: Well, thank you for interviewing me and asking all the right questions. I appreciate that. It made it easier to talk about things. MF: 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.) 02:13:30 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 Michele Strohl, June 5, 2020 Description An account of the resource Michele Strohl describes her childhood in Northeastern PA with a focus on family life, discussion of normative understandings of gender, and her school experiences. Strohl describes college life at East Stroudsburg University, the lesbian community at college, and her first jobs as a mental health worker in Wilkes-Barre and then Allentown. Strohl goes on to explore getting a graduate degree in Psychology and her work in this field. In terms of the LGBT community, Strohl discusses a variety of organizations, including PA-GALA, AIDS Outreach, Gay and Lesbian Task Force, GLORA, and GLOS. She also provides information about local LGBT bars and nightlife as well as moving accounts of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the impact of marriage equality on her personally. Finally, she discusses her marriage to Jane Land with details about their marriage ceremony and life together. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-11 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-06-05 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/ac119b5677e6eefd21937be4a4366c07.png 36edd9d5708951cf034dac90258eca60 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed D.J. Landis OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-05.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 June 12, 2020 D.J. Landis, June 12, 2020 LGBT-05 01:39:12 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg D.J. Landis Mary Foltz video/mp4 LandisDJ_20200612_video.mp4 1.0:|29(4)|64(8)|83(14)|102(8)|115(12)|132(14)|151(7)|168(8)|185(9)|204(8)|223(14)|240(10)|259(2)|274(12)|291(14)|312(2)|335(4)|350(5)|371(5)|390(11)|409(5)|428(4)|443(8)|460(16)|477(12)|492(17)|505(19)|524(2)|541(11)|558(5)|577(5)|596(2)|613(6)|628(17)|643(13)|660(7)|677(6)|694(7)|719(12)|736(11)|753(14)|772(4)|789(2)|804(9)|819(16)|836(13)|857(7)|876(8)|893(19)|910(4)|929(8)|946(5)|961(7)|978(16)|1001(10)|1024(12)|1045(6)|1064(6)|1079(9)|1100(4)|1117(3)|1134(5)|1155(12)|1170(15)|1191(6)|1212(16)|1235(9)|1248(9)|1263(9)|1282(6)|1301(5)|1318(6)|1329(14)|1344(7)|1359(15)|1374(12)|1401(5)|1420(7)|1435(9)|1448(5)|1461(4)|1478(7)|1497(4)|1514(14)|1535(4)|1554(17)|1569(7)|1586(9)|1601(12)|1618(10)|1635(6)|1654(6)|1671(12)|1688(5)|1707(3)|1722(14)|1731(5) 0 https://youtu.be/CNefhC2A5-g YouTube video 1 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: Well, good morning. My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with DJ to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we are meeting on Zoom because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. And today’s date is June 12, 2020. So first I just, DJ, I want to say thank you so much for doing this interview with me today.&#13 ; DONNA J LANDIS: You’re welcome. &#13 ; MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? 0 117 Early Life in Shamokin MF: Great. All right, well, let’s go ahead and get started. And I’m going to start the interview by just asking you, could you tell me a little bit about your childhood? &#13 ; DL: Well, I grew up in the coal regions, Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and I’ll be seventy-five years old on Sunday. And I was always a tom boy. My mother bought me dolls, but they stayed in the box. I didn’t play with dolls. I wanted guns and all the boy’s stuff, all the boy’s toys. And I was just playing football, baseball, I did all that stuff, and I had a lot of friends, and we just rode around. It was all the good stuff. I was never a little girl playing girl stuff. 0 304 Growing Up / Familial Relationships MF: Tell me a little bit about sort of that extended family and your relationships with either your biological parents or your parents, parents who adopted you.&#13 ; DL: We were friendly at first, and then my biological mother and my adopted mother, like I said, they were good friends, and they thought my adopted mother couldn’t have children. So what happened is when my biological mother gave birth to me they adopted me, and then when my adopted mother ended up getting pregnant there was a little bit of a rift there. So then I didn’t have contact for many, many years. And then with my biological father, I did have contact with him. [00:06:00] But you know, back then when you were adopted it was always hush-hush, nobody talked about it. 0 624 Being a Tomboy in Shamokin MF: I’m curious about, you know, you describe yourself as being a tom boy. So you’re kind of hurting in your family life, but it sounds like you had relationships in the community with neighbors. What was it like to be a tom boy in Shamokin when you were a young person?&#13 ; DL: It was good. I started doing odd jobs at nine years old. We lived -- are you there? We lived across from a grocery store. I would come home from lunch break and deliver groceries for nickels and dimes, and I would save that because I figured my own money, nobody could tell me how to spend it. And if I wanted something I would just ask my mom because, like I said, I was spoiled. But it was great. I had a lot of friends, and I was sort of like -- my girlfriends that couldn’t protect herself, I was their protector. If they couldn’t fight I would fight for them. And I wasn’t the type that would sit and play with dolls or play girly girls. That wasn’t me. 0 772 Youthful Experiences MF: So I’m curious about your rebellious spirit. When you bagged school you said we did typical things. What were the typical things you do when you snuck off from school?&#13 ; DL: Oh, we would go down to different places and go get hoagies and ride around and go different towns and just do all that stuff. Of course you couldn’t stay around where you was at school so you wouldn’t get caught. Or because you would get detention. I had so much detention just from rebelling at home ec because I wouldn’t do the home ec stuff. I wanted shop because I couldn’t understand. The boys could take home ec. Why couldn’t the girls take shop? And we had to wear dresses to school even in the winter time. No long pants, dresses. 0 1047 Steps After Graduation MF: So describe what happens for you after you leave school. What is sort of the next step of your life after your adolescence?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Okay, so after that, after I left school, I would hang out in the little town called Kulpmont, which was like, six or eight miles -- four miles from Shamokin and in Mount Carmel and party, drink, like teenager stuff. But our parties were different. We used to go up into the mountain, (inaudible) up in the coal mountains, and we would stay up there and have our weekend parties and not come down and cause trouble. And the cops knew we were up there, and they were okay with it, long as we stayed up there and we didn’t come down and cause any trouble or anything else. We would have a party, and it would last the weekend, and open the trunks of my car, and everybody had to put their keys in my car, my trunk. So you couldn’t get down. You had to stay up there, not cause any trouble. And we built a pavilion that you would have, you know, you pay $10, you drink all the weekend, you have food and everything else. And we would drive to -- a bunch of us sometimes would go to Philadelphia because we had friends then that graduated and worked in Philly. At the time they worked at, used to be Bell Tel. I don’t know what it was called, but and then from there we would meet there, go down there and spend a weekend and drive up to New York. There was plenty of parties. You know, you had to in-know to where the parties were. But that’s how I got in to go the Village and The Stonewall. 0 1169 Interactions/Associations within the LGBT Community MF: Tell me more about that. Were these parties -- were they coed parties? I mean, going to Stonewall, of course, you’re with LGBT people when you go into New York to Stonewall. Tell me a little bit about the kind of makeup of your friends and were you associating with LGBT people in Shamokin, or was that primarily in Philly and New York?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: No, that was in Shamokin. In Shamokin, in the town of Shamokin the gay bars would be after 2:00. And you couldn’t go earlier until after 2:00 in the morning. And of course we were underage, but that was okay. They let you in. And there was other clubs that you could go, like it was up in Berwick. It was Berwick Hotel, when you were of age, but it was down in the basement. And the first gay bar I went to was called the Lark. And it was -- the dance floor was only about 12 by 12. That’s how big it was. It was small. It was in the back room of a bar. And there was another bar that we went outside of Sunbury, and you’re dancing all, and I would say no clenching, no clenching. And then the other bar, it was you would go Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday it was straight. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday it was gay. So everybody knew that the town knew which was which. So if you didn’t want to be with the gays you didn’t go. And there was a lot of the women that would come that they were straight, but they loved being around the gay people. 0 1305 Coming Out MF: When did you know you were gay, or when did you encounter gay community? You talked about the first gay bar that you went to, but when did you know you were a part of the gay community?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I guess I always -- I just was different. There was only one guy I truly, truly loved, but we couldn’t be together because he was an Italian. And back then you had to be Italian to be with Italian. His wife was already picked out. But we remained friends. And I was married to a man. I got married at 19. I got divorced at 19. And I came out at 19. And him and I are friends now. We’re better friends than we were married. 0 1452 Experience in Gay Bars / LGBTQ Community in Shamokin MF: So I’m curious about some of the bars that you describe, like the Lark and other places. Could you describe what was a night out -- what did that look like? What kind of music did they play? What were those bars like? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Back then when you went to the gay bars the butch type girls would be dressed more boyish, and their girlfriends would be -- you could tell the difference. They would be dressed up nicely and, you know, like if they were going on a date with a boy. But that’s how they would be dressed, not like they’re dressed today. You would know a butch from a fem. And that’s how you did it. And you went to the bars. You danced. You socialized and just like a couple. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Was the gay community in Shamokin and those coal towns -- what was the size of that community? Was it a small, insular community, or what was the size of it?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Very small, people knew but they didn’t say nothing, to your face anyway. They might have said something behind your back. But when I came out at 19 I never changed. It was like you accept me for who I am or you don’t. It’s your loss. That was my attitude. 0 1627 Travels to Bigger Cities MF: So I have one more question about the bars. So I’m curious, you went into Stonewall in the late ’60s. What was that like, to go into New York City with friends from Shamokin? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: We enjoyed it. It was wonderful. I mean, it was like wow, the Village, we loved the Village. You can go on up there. We would go every time we could come we would go up. It was just unbelievable the difference between little towns where you had to wait to go to the bars and then go to New York where it was all open. But it was bad. The night the Stonewall was raided I was supposed to be there. But my gay friends, the males, they couldn’t change their own tires or nothing, so I had to do that. And that’s why we didn’t go. And I’m glad we didn’t go. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: So I’m curious about that, like the openness that you see in New York City versus living in a small town, did you want to continue to live in that kind of small region, that Shamokin region? Did you ever considering going to New York City, or did you really prefer the kind of small town atmosphere? 0 1845 Working in the 1970s/Taking Care of Mother MF: So you’re working up in the kind of Shamokin region. Can you tell me a little bit about the jobs that you held during this time period? Is this the early ’70s that we’re talking about?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yeah. I tried sewing. Like I said, I hated home ec. I tried that. I quit the job. I worked one day, and I didn’t know. I sewed everything together. I didn’t know that. I flunked that. But I worked building RVs. Pace Arrow I was called. You get a chassis and then you built the camper on the chassis. All you got was a chassis and you had to build everything on the chassis. And it was a joke at first when they first came out because if you were in an accident you didn’t call [the body a fender?] you called a carpenter because they were made out of wood. They were top heavy. You couldn’t drive if it was real windy on an interstate. You better be afraid, topped over. 0 2096 Meeting Sandy/Connecting with Other Women MF: Well, I know Sandy is an important person in your life, so could you tell me how you met her at state hospital? How did you two meet?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: She was my boss. I went to work on WD, which was a unit down there, and she was my boss. And when I told her stories she’ll say what the hell are you talking about? I’m still your boss. So but we split for almost 30 years, and we’re back together now. In February we were together 26 years. Like I said, when Sandy and I split I met this woman, and I just believed everything she told me because at that time I was still not trusting people. And I still had the chip on my shoulder and everything. And in between time I ran in -- Sandy and I met in between. And I asked Sandy to take me back, and she laughed. When Sandy’s nervous she laughs. So I thought oh well. 0 2327 Living as a Same-Sex Couple in Shamokin MF: Did the two of you live together with her children in Shamokin?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yes. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: And so can you describe a little bit what that was like, to be a same-sex couple living together in Shamokin?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: It wasn’t too bad. I guess it was harder on the oldest child because his friends used to make fun of him. And I was friends with her husband too. So it was like, you know, we were all friends. When he got sick I helped take care of him. I would go up and make sure he got all his medicines and everything, and it was, you know, we all got along. Like I said, it’s like I’m who I am, you accept me, and that’s how it is. She didn’t bash the husband, and he didn’t bash the wife. You know, it was like, we just talked, you know. If he needed something to drive, I would drive him and his girlfriend places, and, you know, he had a girlfriend, and he just drank a lot. 0 2569 Favorite Memories of 20 Year Relationship MF: [inaudible] some of your favorite memories from that partnership, that 20 years together? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I would say the birth of the first grandchild. I love him dearly. He was my favorite. I have to say he was my favorite. But there was, you know, the proms, the weddings, the graduations, typical all, like, if you were a married couple, the typical thing of what goes on with their kids, their dates, their broken hearts and just the typical things of what a married couple would do if they had children, the ups and downs, the fighting. But it was -- I can’t say it was bad. It was good times, a lot of good times. 0 2852 Butch-Femme Culture MF: You early talked about the kind of butch-fem emphasis in the bar culture, and I’m wondering, how did you feel about kind of butch-fem in the bar culture or in the larger sort of gay community?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: How do I feel about it?&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Yeah, were you a part of butch-fem culture, or were you sort of outside of that?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I guess I was part of it. I always dressed that way, so it was nothing new to me. My hair’s longer now than it has been in years because I can’t get a haircut, but it was -- I didn’t wear fem clothes. In fact, when I worked -- and this is funny, but it’s a true story. When I was building RVs my niece was getting -- she always says she was my niece, was getting married, and I said I had to go get a dress for the wedding. And my boss said to me if you’re going to get a dress I want a picture of it, and I’ll pay you for working. So I went. I didn’t get the dress, but I put my partner’s dress on, made her take the picture, and I showed it to my boss, and I got paid for the day. I didn’t own dresses. I still don’t own dresses. The last dress I wore was I think in ’63 or ’62 when my cousin got married. 0 2983 Loss of Partner MF: They look beautiful. The one on your shoulder looks amazing, but I could see that one a little bit more. Oh, that’s so cool. So you describe -- this partner had an untimely death from the 20-year relationship. What happened at that period? You know, tell me a little bit about what happened around that time?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well, she had breathing problems. You know, we all smoked back then. Everybody smoked. And she had asthma. And she had it for many, many, many years. And like I said, we grew up on that street, so I know her for, you know, from when her firstborn -- and it just was getting worse and worse and worse. And her oldest son and I took her to Hershey Medical. And he gave her only six months to live because her lungs -- her one lung collapsed. But she didn’t know it. She didn’t want to know. So, you know, we didn’t tell her. And a few months later she was rushed to the hospital, and this doctor came in and told her -- she asked did she have cancer? He said no, but you’re dying anyway. So she just gave up. So she died November 11, I think it was, in ’93. And she made me promise to call Sandy and tell Sandy because she said you always loved Sandy. You never gave up. You never stopped loving Sandy. You would never let anybody say anything bad about Sandy. 0 3013 Tattoos MF: So I’m curious about [break in audio]. I’m curious about your tattoos because you brought them up. You said you have a woman’s name tattooed on your arm. You’ve got 10 tattoos. &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yeah.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Tell me a little bit about your tattoos.&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well, our neighbor’s son was doing tattoos. And he needed people to practice on. So I said sure. My mom said don’t you dare. Wrong thing to say to me, don’t. And I got it. It’s a big thing with flowers and double hearts and a blue bird and all that. I have a black rose. I have an eagle tattoo. I have a dream catcher tattoo on my other shoulder. On my back I have a yin-yang. On the other side I have a Pegasus on the other with the rainbow. On my leg Sandy’s songives tattoos out in Minnesota, but this was in California. When Sandy and I had our holy union, Mark and Michelle came, that’s his wife, but he’s remarried now. I have a cherub on my leg with double hearts. The cherub represents the grandchildren, and the double hearts is Sandy and I. I’ve got hot stuff devil, so. And then I’ve just got the last tattoo I got from Mark was a ribbon because Sandy had lung cancer. And I have it white with her name on it and my color as a care taker and the date when she had her lung cancer. So that’s my tattoos. 0 3315 Rekindling Relationship w/ Sandy MF: So when you came down from Shamokin to Allentown to visit Sandy, tell me a little bit about, like, how you got back together. How did you make that transition from friends or potential friendship back to partners?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well, we always stayed in contact, but my former partner used to talk more to Sandy than I did. Sandy and I would say hi, how are you? Okay, yeah, me too, blah, blah, blah. But her, my former partner and Sandy would talk more than I. And we would even come down and visit. Because see, I had people from Shamokin moved down here, and that’s when I moved to Allentown. I stayed with people from Shamokin that was family friend from family like grandfather lived with them, you know. And so I lived with them when I came down here until I got my apartment across the street from them. And then when Meg passed I come down. I called Sandy, and she invited me down. And it was a little strange at first, but then I kept coming down. She invited me down, and we got back together. 0 3627 Life in Allentown in the '90s MF: So you moved to Allentown in March of, I think you said 1994. Tell me a little bit about the neighborhood that you lived in Allentown. Like, what was it like to move to Allentown in the 1990s?&#13 ; DL: Where we’re at now, we’re in the same house. We’re in the same house, Sandy’s house, and neighborhood’s fine. They all know, and we get along. Actually, Sandy works at the state hospital forty-one and a half years. And her parents love me. And actually in 2001 I changed my name to Landis. That’s Sandy’s name. My name was Golda. When I met Liz and Trish I was Golda, my married name. And in 2001 when I changed my name Sandy’s parents, her mom especially really loved it, that I became a Landis. And we’re still in the same house, twenty-sixyears still in the same house. And the neighbors, I have no problem with them. I watch every -- I know everything that’s going on in the neighborhood. I watch. I know new cars and old cars and what belongs here and doesn’t belong here. 0 3868 Connecting w/ Pride Festivals DL: Well, I was trying to sell my property up there. I mean, what I did, I rented it to sell for a year. I went to my very first pride fest. The year before I heard about it. I read about it on TV. But I went to my first pride fest. I called Liz and Trish. And I called Mickey Katz. I don’t know if you know Mickey Katz. And I talked to them. And I started volunteering. I went over, and I met Liz and Trish. And I start volunteering. I just thought it was wonderful that they had something like that for gay people. And I volunteered for our pride fest. I went to Harrisburg’s for their pride fest. And I went to Philly for their pride fest and worked them. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: What did it feel like for you to be at that first pride festival in Allentown?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: It was wonderful. And it, you know, all this and, you know, no problems. It was different back, you know. This was wonderful. They had something for gay people that I never knew they had. Well, the very first gay pride down here was in ’93, I think they started it. And then I ended up going being on the pride board for a couple years. But it was wonderful. I just totally enjoyed it. 0 4378 Involvement w/ other LGBT Organizations in Allentown MF: So you’re working on the Pride board in Allentown. What other LGBT organizations were you involved with in Allentown during this period of the ’90s?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: There was one called Kindred Spirits, [GLOR?], and with Liz and Trish it was a different name back then. It was PA- Gala. And I can’t think of the other ones, but it was different, quite a few. I tried to help with every one I could. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Yeah, Liz and Trish describe you as, like, a volunteer all over the valley, that you were just sort of like, just helping in any way you can. I’m not familiar with Kindred Spirit. Could you talk a little bit about what that was and how you worked with that organization? 0 4613 Involvement w/ Religious Organizations in Allentown MF: Were you involved with any religious organizations during this time period like MCCLV?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yes.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Tell me about -- &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I belonged to [inaudible].&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Tell me about your involvement with MCCLV.&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I went there. I was at a birthday party, and this friend of mine was there, and she was leaving to go to church. It was at Sunday night at 6:00 or for first six. And I said can I come with you? She said sure. And I went. They were in -- sharing a church, Unitarian church in Bethlehem. And I enjoyed it. And that’s the first I went to church down here with MCC. I was a member. I belonged there 17 years. I was on the board. I was on the property board for six years. And I helped move with the church and all of that. There’s where I fell. We moved from Ford Street. Was it Ford Street? From Merchant Square. We were at Merchant Square on Vultee Street. We moved from there to Ford Street in Allentown. And I was working at the church, and I fell 15 feet and broke my leg. But yeah, I belonged to MCC for 17 years. And now I belong to St. Mark’s, Lutheran church. 0 5101 Importance of Volunteering and Leadership MF: You really have so many stories about volunteering or being on leadership, both in LGBT organizations but in your church organizations both at MCCLV and now with your Lutheran congregation. Could you tell me a little bit about why volunteering and taking on leadership roles in community organizations has been important in your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well actually, they asked me to become one of the leaders. They asked me. I was just a member over a year, and they called and asked me to be on their board. And I was honored. I said I’m not even a member only a little over a year and you’re asking me to be on your board. I was honored that they asked, you know. So that’s how it is. They asked me. And I’m honored. And I told them right from the beginning my mouth sometimes got me in trouble. And they were happy. Because I speak my mind, and that’s where it got me in trouble at MCC. You ask me a question and I’m going to answer it, and if I feel something’s wrong I’m going to speak my mind, and that’s what happened. 0 5206 Legitimizing Her Relationship w/Sandy MF: I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about just kind of to turn back to you and Sandy, did you have a commitment ceremony or, you know, something prior to the passage of marriage equality? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Yes, we had a holy union back in 1998 at the Unitarian church where we had that. My family from Delaware all came. They all love Sandy. And it’s like you can’t accept Sandy. And before my biological mother died we mend the fences, and, you know, I said this is my partner, and if you can’t accept her you’re history. You’re not as important to me as she is. And that’s how it is. They can’t accept Sandy then we’re history. And in 2001 we had, in Connecticut, we had a civil union. We can’t get legally married in Pennsylvania because I would lose my benefits. That’s why we -- not legally married in Pennsylvania or we would be because I’m a fixed, very low. Like, I only get $1,000 to live on. And my medicine, because I have COPD, two of my inhalers are over $1,000. 0 5378 Current Relationship with Sandy MF: So now in your seventies, how would you describe your relationship with Sandy now that you’ve been together for so many years and you’re in your seventies, you’re kind of in this, like, really beautiful part of your relationship because you’ve been together so long. Describe that for me. &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: I still love her with all my heart. And we talk, which we never did in the beginning back in the ’60s. We didn’t talk. We talk. We’re honest with one another. And like, she’ll say how are -- like if I’m not feeling good I’ll say I’m good. She’ll say honest? And if I’m not feeling -- I won’t say honest unless I mean it. But we talk. We don’t just do something. No matter what it is we talk about, give each other’s opinion on everything. We trust one another. 0 5544 Current Status of LGBTQ Community&#13 ; MF: Well, we’re getting close to the end of the interview. So I want to ask just maybe one or two more questions. In your seventies, as you look back on your experiences and really the kind of LGBT movements from the ’69 and Stonewall, you know, through the present, how do you think things have changed for LGBT people? What have you sort of witnessed across your life? &#13 ; &#13 ; DL: Well, I don’t remember the movie, but they showed a movie at NCCC one time. And I was there helping one of the groups out. And the younger people that was younger than me were in there that didn’t come out as early as I came out. And when they came out, and they kept thanking me. And it’s like, for what, you know? I don’t consider myself a hero or warrior or nothing else. I’m just me, plain old me. And it’s a lot different. Now I see people walking hand in hand, you know, couples, and I think wow, what a difference, what a difference. They didn’t realize what it was like to go to a bar after 2:00 in the morning to be with yourself and friends. And I got a nickname called Bobbie because I was, like I said, I was butchy, and this drag queen thought I was a guy. And I told him no. He said from now on you’re Bobbie to me. And so I did a couple drag shows at the church, and I went by Bobbie. But it’s so different. And they don’t realize how lucky they are that they can walk down the street hand in hand and not get bashed or beat up or anything because a lot of that was going on. We fought for a lot of this. I remember so many years standing on Hamilton Street fighting for gay marriage in the freezing cold. 0 5770 Final Message DL: I would just say not to be ashamed of who you are or who you love. Love is love, no matter what color, what race, or who it is. Love is love. And don’t be ashamed of who you love. And don’t hide who you love. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Thank you so much, DJ. It’s just been such a pleasure talking with you today. 0 MovingImage DJ Landis discusses early childhood and young adulthood in Shamokin, PA, her thoughts about being adopted, and her family life. DJ addresses a number of gay bars in small towns and cities as well as LGBT social scene and butch/femme identities. The interview also addresses her work life at Pace Arrow, the challenges facing LGBT couples prior to marriage equality, and two serious relationships in her life. In reference to LGBT organizations, DJ discusses Pride of the Lehigh Valley, GLORA, Kindred Spirits, and MCCLV. DJ ends the interview with a discussion of her marriage to Sandy at a Unitarian Church. INTERVIEW WITH DJ LANDIS JUNE 12, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: Well, good morning. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with DJ to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and we are meeting on Zoom because we're in the middle of a pandemic. And today's date is June 12, 2020. So first I just, DJ, I want to say thank you so much for doing this interview with me today. DONNA J LANDIS: You're welcome. MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? DL: My full name is D-O-N-N-A J Landis, L-A-N-D-I-S. But everybody calls me DJ or Deej. MF: Thank you. And will you please share your birth date? DL: June 14, 1945. MF: Thank you. And so prior to starting this interview we had talked about consent. So I just want to check back in with you, do you consent to this interview today? DL: Yes. MF: And do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available on online spaces? DL: Sure, not a problem. MF: And do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, and that might be articles or websites or presentations, things like that? DL: Sure. MF: And do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript of this interview to identify parts that you want to delete or withdraw from the project? DL: Yeah, I understand. MF: Great. All right, well, let's go ahead and get started. And I'm going to start the interview by just asking you, could you tell me a little bit about your childhood? DL: Well, I grew up in the coal regions, Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and I'll be seventy-five years old on Sunday. And I was always a tom boy. My mother bought me dolls, but they stayed in the box. I didn't play with dolls. I wanted guns and all the boy's stuff, all the boy's toys. And I was just playing football, baseball, I did all that stuff, and I had a lot of friends, and we just rode around. It was all the good stuff. I was never a little girl playing girl stuff. MF: What was it like to grow up in Shamokin? What was that region like? DL: It was a cult where -- it's different now than it was back then. It was a nice town, friendly, and everybody knew everybody, and it was like you did something wrong and you didn't have to worry about your parents not finding out because somebody did. Everybody knew everybody, and your Oma's going to get you, and you didn't have to worry about being safe because everybody watched out for everybody. MF: Tell me a little bit about your family. Did your family work in coal mining in Shamokin? DL: My father was in the service, and he worked for the government down in Middletown, Pennsylvania. He worked for the Army base down there, the military base. My mother didn't work. So he basically [break in audio] And I was the only child. First though I guess I better tell you I was adopted. And I was adopted at four hours old. And my biological mother and my adopted mother were best friends. And my biological father and my adopted father were cousins. And that's how it was. And I am actually related -- my aunt was married to a black man, and I have, like, 17 biracial cousins. And I love them dearly. And I am not a racist. MF: Tell me a little bit about sort of that extended family and your relationships with either your biological parents or your parents, parents who adopted you. DL: We were friendly at first, and then my biological mother and my adopted mother, like I said, they were good friends, and they thought my adopted mother couldn't have children. So what happened is when my biological mother gave birth to me they adopted me, and then when my adopted mother ended up getting pregnant there was a little bit of a rift there. So then I didn't have contact for many, many years. And then with my biological father, I did have contact with him. But you know, back then when you were adopted it was always hush-hush, nobody talked about it. And that's wrong because you should, you know, talk about it because I actually grew up with a big chip on my shoulder because I only heard people talk about, when they think I wasn't paying attention, about it. And that's not good. I think it's great now how they have open adoptions where you talk about it and all that. Because otherwise you're going to grow up like I did for until I was in my twenties with a big chip on my shoulder. And I just never trusted people then. MF: Could you say a little bit more like, why was there a chip on your shoulder? What were your feelings about being adopted? DL: I didn't understand. I didn't understand because I didn't know the story back then. Nobody talked about it. And when you hear that nobody -- your mother didn't want you, you know, people would say things and you didn't know why. And so you didn't -- you hurt, but I never would cry. I just kept everything inside. And it just hurt that, you know, you didn't know why you were adopted. And it's wrong. I really believe you should talk about it when you're growing up. Don't wait until you're in your teens and twenties to find out. Because I now, on my mother's side, I have, like, seven or eight other siblings. And I only really bother with, know two of them. And on my father's side I know the three of them, but we don't have no contact. MF: Tell me a little bit about your relationships with your parents, the parents that you lived with, your adopted parents. What was it like growing up in that family? What were those familial relationships like? DL: It was good. I mean, I was spoiled. I got everything I wanted. And but you didn't hear the words love. You know, back then you didn't hear them words love. But I was a spoiled brat. I mean, whatever I wanted I got. They bought me my first car and everything. They were good to me, but it was rough growing up because when my adopted mother got pregnant and she lost the child, then she started drinking. And then I used to get beatings and everything. And you know, she would go out. Good thing she was a loud drunker, when they would come home, her and her friends, because then they knew she was coming, and, like, she had already locked me in a room, so she would go out because my father worked, and the neighbor's would let me out so I could, you know. And then when they hear her coming they put me back in the room and lock me back in. But it was rough from the time I was, like, maybe eight until I was about eleven or twelve years old. MF: I'm curious about, you know, you describe yourself as being a tom boy. So you're kind of hurting in your family life, but it sounds like you had relationships in the community with neighbors. What was it like to be a tom boy in Shamokin when you were a young person? DL: It was good. I started doing odd jobs at nine years old. We lived -- are you there? We lived across from a grocery store. I would come home from lunch break and deliver groceries for nickels and dimes, and I would save that because I figured my own money, nobody could tell me how to spend it. And if I wanted something I would just ask my mom because, like I said, I was spoiled. But it was great. I had a lot of friends, and I was sort of like -- my girlfriends that couldn't protect herself, I was their protector. If they couldn't fight I would fight for them. And I wasn't the type that would sit and play with dolls or play girly girls. That wasn't me. MF: What was school like for you in Shamokin? DL: Oh, I liked school, and I didn't like school. I was a rebel, I guess. In high school or grade school -- I loved grade school, was a block away. It was when I got in high school I was a rebel. I would bag school, and just typical stuff. I was a rebel, I guess, because at our school back then girls couldn't take shop, and I wanted shop. We had to take home ec. That was learn to cook and sew and clean and all this for your husband and your future. Ugh. I didn't want that. I wasn't to learn to work on my car and do other kind of jobs because I had helped my dad put a motor in my car and all this. So I don't want home ec. I flunked home ec. MF: So I'm curious about your rebellious spirit. When you bagged school you said we did typical things. What were the typical things you do when you snuck off from school? DL: Oh, we would go down to different places and go get hoagies and ride around and go different towns and just do all that stuff. Of course you couldn't stay around where you was at school so you wouldn't get caught. Or because you would get detention. I had so much detention just from rebelling at home ec because I wouldn't do the home ec stuff. I wanted shop because I couldn't understand. The boys could take home ec. Why couldn't the girls take shop? And we had to wear dresses to school even in the winter time. No long pants, dresses. MF: What are some of your favorite memories from your youth? DL: How my friends and I would, especially on Saturdays, do hiking. Pack a lunch and go hiking and just walk around, different places and climb the coal banks. Believe it or not we used to hop on a moving train and ride it for seven miles. Then I walk back. On a Saturday there'd be coupons, they'd been on the Thursday paper up there, our Thursday paper be all kind of coupons in there for grocery stores, and the store across the street from our house would pay you whatever the coupon was worth, ten cents, they give you have of it in cash. So we would walk around a whole town and knock on doors and ask that we were poor. We couldn't afford the paper. Could they give us the sports section with the coupon? And I happened to knock on a door that they recognized my voice. The husband didn't, but the wife said, "Donna Jean, is that you?" Because I would say we're so poor. She said, "Does your mother know what you're doing?" Before I got home my mom found out. Boy, did I get it when I got home saying I was poor. Yeah, my dad was at work, and we didn't have a job, and I needed the coupons to buy groceries. But we made, like, $15, $20 every weekend doing that until we got caught. But I had a good childhood, lot of fun. I never stayed in the house, but you knew when to be home. You didn't have to be told. You knew when the night lights come on, get home. MF: It sounds like you and your friends were kind of outdoorsy, you know, hopping on trains, going for hikes. Can you tell me a little bit about that region of Shamokin for people who don't know what that kind of natural landscape is? What was it like to be out hiking in those areas? Did you have favorite spots to visit? DL: We would go up the mountains. There was coal holes. You had to know where the coal holes were because, you know, sometimes I would help pick coal for people that couldn't afford to buy coal for their heat. So I would help pick coal for them. And you had to know the difference between coal and slate. Because slate wouldn't burn. And it was like, there was a lot of coal holes, lot of rocks. It's mountain area. It's nothing like it used to be. But it was beautiful. You just had to know where to walk, and all over. MF: So describe what happens for you after you leave school. What is sort of the next step of your life after your adolescence? DL: Okay, so after that, after I left school, I would hang out in the little town called Kulpmont, which was like, six or eight miles -- four miles from Shamokin and in Mount Carmel and party, drink, like teenager stuff. But our parties were different. We used to go up into the mountain, [inaudible] up in the coal mountains, and we would stay up there and have our weekend parties and not come down and cause trouble. And the cops knew we were up there, and they were okay with it, long as we stayed up there and we didn't come down and cause any trouble or anything else. We would have a party, and it would last the weekend, and open the trunks of my car, and everybody had to put their keys in my car, my trunk. So you couldn't get down. You had to stay up there, not cause any trouble. And we built a pavilion that you would have, you know, you pay $10, you drink all the weekend, you have food and everything else. And we would drive to -- a bunch of us sometimes would go to Philadelphia because we had friends then that graduated and worked in Philly. At the time they worked at, used to be Bell Tel. I don't know what it was called, but and then from there we would meet there, go down there and spend a weekend and drive up to New York. There was plenty of parties. You know, you had to in-know to where the parties were. But that's how I got in to go the Village and The Stonewall. MF: Tell me more about that. Were these parties -- were they coed parties? I mean, going to Stonewall, of course, you're with LGBT people when you go into New York to Stonewall. Tell me a little bit about the kind of makeup of your friends and were you associating with LGBT people in Shamokin, or was that primarily in Philly and New York? DL: No, that was in Shamokin. In Shamokin, in the town of Shamokin the gay bars would be after 2:00. And you couldn't go earlier until after 2:00 in the morning. And of course we were underage, but that was okay. They let you in. And there was other clubs that you could go, like it was up in Berwick. It was Berwick Hotel, when you were of age, but it was down in the basement. And the first gay bar I went to was called the Lark. And it was -- the dance floor was only about 12 by 12. That's how big it was. It was small. It was in the back room of a bar. And there was another bar that we went outside of Sunbury, and you're dancing all, and I would say no clenching, no clenching. And then the other bar, it was you would go Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday it was straight. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday it was gay. So everybody knew that the town knew which was which. So if you didn't want to be with the gays you didn't go. And there was a lot of the women that would come that they were straight, but they loved being around the gay people. MF: When did you know you were gay, or when did you encounter gay community? You talked about the first gay bar that you went to, but when did you know you were a part of the gay community? DL: I guess I always -- I just was different. There was only one guy I truly, truly loved, but we couldn't be together because he was an Italian. And back then you had to be Italian to be with Italian. His wife was already picked out. But we remained friends. And I was married to a man. I got married at 19. I got divorced at 19. And I came out at 19. And him and I are friends now. We're better friends than we were married. MF: So when you say you came out at 19, what do you mean by that? Do you mean that that's when you started going to the gay nights at the bars, or, you know, what do you mean by --DL: Yup, yup. Like I said, I got married in 1964, and I really came out, was 19, and I came out in '65. But I start going to the gay bars before that, but I wasn't sure I was gay. I thought I was, but I wasn't sure because I had feelings for this girl, but I wasn't, you know, didn't act upon them or anything. I felt comfortable being around the gay people. And I wasn't sure about anything. I was just, felt comfortable being around them, but I didn't have gay feeling, you know, moved on them until I was 19 years old. MF: So I'm curious about some of the bars that you describe, like the Lark and other places. Could you describe what was a night out -- what did that look like? What kind of music did they play? What were those bars like? DL: Back then when you went to the gay bars the butch type girls would be dressed more boyish, and their girlfriends would be -- you could tell the difference. They would be dressed up nicely and, you know, like if they were going on a date with a boy. But that's how they would be dressed, not like they're dressed today. You would know a butch from a fem. And that's how you did it. And you went to the bars. You danced. You socialized and just like a couple. MF: Was the gay community in Shamokin and those coal towns -- what was the size of that community? Was it a small, insular community, or what was the size of it? DL: Very small, people knew but they didn't say nothing, to your face anyway. They might have said something behind your back. But when I came out at 19 I never changed. It was like you accept me for who I am or you don't. It's your loss. That was my attitude. And I mean, I never had a problem with, you know, housing. My jobs, they knew I was gay at my jobs, and I never had a problem. Fact, one of the jobs I worked for -- I was the first female foreman building RVs. And my two bosses were from Wyoming, and they knew I was gay, and we had a couple other gay workers there. They wanted me to go to Wyoming with them, and I said no, I wasn't going to go out that way. But I was who I was. I was upfront. I was honest. I didn't pretend to go home to my boyfriend or husband or whatever. I just, I was me, accept me how I am. And that's how I am to the day. MF: So I have one more question about the bars. So I'm curious, you went into Stonewall in the late '60s. What was that like, to go into New York City with friends from Shamokin? DL: We enjoyed it. It was wonderful. I mean, it was like wow, the Village, we loved the Village. You can go on up there. We would go every time we could come we would go up. It was just unbelievable the difference between little towns where you had to wait to go to the bars and then go to New York where it was all open. But it was bad. The night the Stonewall was raided I was supposed to be there. But my gay friends, the males, they couldn't change their own tires or nothing, so I had to do that. And that's why we didn't go. And I'm glad we didn't go. MF: So I'm curious about that, like the openness that you see in New York City versus living in a small town, did you want to continue to live in that kind of small region, that Shamokin region? Did you ever considering going to New York City, or did you really prefer the kind of small town atmosphere? DL: I really loved Philadelphia. And I loved it. I wanted to go to Philadelphia, and but then I was working. And I was accepted at -- I don't know if you remember the Philadelphia Warriors Roller Derby? I was accepted to go to the school for Little Richard, but I couldn't afford to go to Philly and not work. So I had to decline, but that broke my heart. I wanted to be a Philadelphia Warrior. MF: I'm actually not familiar with the Philadelphia roller derby. Could you tell me a little bit about what that was and what that league was? DL: It was a sport, roller derby, like, they have the different teams all over from New York and Chicago and all that where they would skate against one another. And I loved it. It was a rough game, but I loved it. It was popular back in the '60s and the -- well, not the '60s but the '70s and the '80s I guess it was. It was Buddy Atkinson, Little Richard, Judy Arnold. The older people would know it. The younger girls won't know it. They still have some now, but it's not like it was. MF: So you're working up in the kind of Shamokin region. Can you tell me a little bit about the jobs that you held during this time period? Is this the early '70s that we're talking about? DL: Yeah. I tried sewing. Like I said, I hated home ec. I tried that. I quit the job. I worked one day, and I didn't know. I sewed everything together. I didn't know that. I flunked that. But I worked building RVs. Pace Arrow I was called. You get a chassis and then you built the camper on the chassis. All you got was a chassis and you had to build everything on the chassis. And it was a joke at first when they first came out because if you were in an accident you didn't call [the body a fender?] you called a carpenter because they were made out of wood. They were top heavy. You couldn't drive if it was real windy on an interstate. You better be afraid, topped over. MF: And how long did you work on building RVs? How long were you at that job? DL: I only worked there three years, and they laid me off. They were kind because my mother had cancer, had facial cancer, so they left me collect unemployment to take care of her. MF: Tell me a little bit more about taking care of your mother? DL: She had had it in her face where soon as it would hit a different spot she would hemorrhage. And we took her to, I think it was called Saint Vincent's Hospital in New York. And there was nothing they could do. It was too far gone because she had it when she was a child at eight or nine years old, and then it came back. And that was in '75 right after my father passed away. But between that, in '65 I moved to Allentown. MF: So describe that a bit more for me. Were you living in Allentown and then driving back to care for your mother or --? DL: No, I moved to Allentown, and in '65 I came out, separated from my husband in February. March I moved to Allentown. I had my divorce in April. And in May I met Sandy, the state hospital in 1965 in May. And her and I went together for almost three years. But by that time I was wild. Nobody was going to tell me anything. I wasn't nice to her. I was really -- wasn't very nice. Like I said, I had a chip on my shoulder. And it was I did what I want when I wanted to and nobody was going to tell me anything different. And then we split. I met a wrong person that was a mistake in my life. And then I moved back home, and my father died. He died of an aneurysm. And then he died in '74, and my mom had the cancer in '75. And she died in '77. They only gave her six months, but she lived two years and two months. MF: Well, I know Sandy is an important person in your life, so could you tell me how you met her at state hospital? How did you two meet? DL: She was my boss. I went to work on WD, which was a unit down there, and she was my boss. And when I told her stories she'll say what the hell are you talking about? I'm still your boss. So but we split for almost 30 years, and we're back together now. In February we were together 26 years. Like I said, when Sandy and I split I met this woman, and I just believed everything she told me because at that time I was still not trusting people. And I still had the chip on my shoulder and everything. And in between time I ran in -- Sandy and I met in between. And I asked Sandy to take me back, and she laughed. When Sandy's nervous she laughs. So I thought oh well. The first person I ever had any relationship was a married woman in Shamokin. And she used me. And oh well, you learn from the heart -- you know, you learn from that. But out of that relationship she had, and I loved the children. And I loved her until after a while, but she had grandchildren, and I loved the grandchildren, everything, but you know, when she passed it was like I had to pay a 15 percent inheritance tax and everything. And we were together like 20 years. So it wasn't that I would go to the bars and hook up with different people at the bars. I never did that. I was like, I always had somebody in my life. MF: So the relationship after Sandy, the one that was 20 years, can you tell me a little bit about how you met each other, how that relationship started? DL: She was my neighbor. She was neighbor, and it just happened one night that she kissed me, and I thought oh, this is pretty nice. But it was rough because she was married, and she was still with her husband. And it was like, ugh, I can't do this. So then that's before I came down to Allentown and meet Sandy. That was before I met Sandy. And then after Sandy and I split I was with this girl for a couple years, and I was like, nah, I don't want someone that's going to run around on me and cheat on me. So then I ended up back with the first person I ever had kissed. MF: And did she move to Allentown to be with you, or did you sort of move back to -- DL: That's when I moved back to Shamokin. But she did help take care. And that's one of the reasons I [inaudible]. She helped take care of my mom with me. She was there with me to help take care of my mom. MF: Did the two of you live together with her children in Shamokin? DL: Yes. MF: And so can you describe a little bit what that was like, to be a same-sex couple living together in Shamokin? DL: It wasn't too bad. I guess it was harder on the oldest child because his friends used to make fun of him. And I was friends with her husband too. So it was like, you know, we were all friends. When he got sick I helped take care of him. I would go up and make sure he got all his medicines and everything, and it was, you know, we all got along. Like I said, it's like I'm who I am, you accept me, and that's how it is. She didn't bash the husband, and he didn't bash the wife. You know, it was like, we just talked, you know. If he needed something to drive, I would drive him and his girlfriend places, and, you know, he had a girlfriend, and he just drank a lot. MF: You describe after your partner passed having these sort of property taxes, and a lot of younger people won't understand why. So I'm wondering if you could explain a little bit about pre-marriage equality what it was like for gay people to own property together or to, you know, to live together and then have that relationship not be recognized by the state or the government. So could you describe a little bit about what that was like to kind of live together and own property together, et cetera? DL: It was like you were strangers living together even though you were couples. It wasn't recognized as a couple. You were just like strangers living together even though you had property and it was in both names. You had to pay like that, when she passed me on the house, and I had to pay 15 percent income tax, inheritance tax on half the property because both our names was on it. But we weren't recognized as a couple. And so everything was 15 percent, and even to today, if you're not legally married in Pennsylvania or any state you have to pay 15 percent tax. It's not like you get away with it. If you're married you only pay nothing really or six percent. But back then it was, you know, being legally married wasn't up until what, about few years ago? I don't remember. I remember fighting for legal marriage with Trish and all of them. But back then it was rough. You had every -- you filed income tax. You had to file it separately. You couldn't file jointly. Even though you supported them you couldn't claim them. MF: [inaudible] some of your favorite memories from that partnership, that 20 years together? DL: I would say the birth of the first grandchild. I love him dearly. He was my favorite. I have to say he was my favorite. But there was, you know, the proms, the weddings, the graduations, typical all, like, if you were a married couple, the typical thing of what goes on with their kids, their dates, their broken hearts and just the typical things of what a married couple would do if they had children, the ups and downs, the fighting. But it was -- I can't say it was bad. It was good times, a lot of good times. MF: You're really talking about the beauty of that extended family, the children and the grandchildren. Could you talk a bit about how her extended family and how your extended family accepted you or didn't accept you as really a marriage relationship? How did your families respond to your relationship? DL: It was okay. I didn't have a problem. The kids called me Aunt. And everybody accepted -- like I said, when you're in Shamokin it was like everybody was family anyway. My aunt, you called my aunt Aunt. I called her family Aunt or Uncle, and it was accepted. It was everybody knew everybody. Like I said, it was like everybody knew everybody so it was like you're aunt or uncle to everybody almost. MF: So during this 20-year period are you working at this time, or what is happening? DL: Yeah. MF: Tell me a little bit about where you were working and what kinds of jobs you had. DL: Well, I was working at Pace Arrow, and then that -- like I said, my mother got cancer. Then after that I went to work at, I can't remember the name of it, but it was a fabric place, and I was what they called an assorter. And it was in a sewing factory, but I didn't sew. We got material from a plant or from wherever it came from, and we assorted it into bundles, and it went to the sewers. And I had a partner, and they all knew I was gay too. I mean, like I said, Shamokin was a small town. And you know, all the towns up there, you know people from working around, and basically I didn't have -- like, I never had a problem because I was up front with people. I was honest. They knew who I was. I wasn't pretending to be. I think when you pretend to be something you're not and you lie about it people tend to rather be, in my opinion anyway, rather you being honest and be up front about something than oh, I'm going home to my boyfriend or my husband and that's not true. And I mean, I was, like I said, a rebel. I have tattoos. I have, like, maybe 10 of them. I got them when I was, you know, when my mom said don't dare, and that was, oh, don't say that to me. But I got them. I had a woman's name tattooed on my arm. So you know, what am I doing? MF: You early talked about the kind of butch-fem emphasis in the bar culture, and I'm wondering, how did you feel about kind of butch-fem in the bar culture or in the larger sort of gay community? DL: How do I feel about it? MF: Yeah, were you a part of butch-fem culture, or were you sort of outside of that? DL: I guess I was part of it. I always dressed that way, so it was nothing new to me. My hair's longer now than it has been in years because I can't get a haircut, but it was -- I didn't wear fem clothes. In fact, when I worked -- and this is funny, but it's a true story. When I was building RVs my niece was getting -- she always says she was my niece, was getting married, and I said I had to go get a dress for the wedding. And my boss said to me if you're going to get a dress I want a picture of it, and I'll pay you for working. So I went. I didn't get the dress, but I put my partner's dress on, made her take the picture, and I showed it to my boss, and I got paid for the day. I didn't own dresses. I still don't own dresses. The last dress I wore was I think in '63 or '62 when my cousin got married. MF: So did you have relationships with other butch women? And if so did you talk a little bit about being butch or what it was like to be butch during that time period? DL: Yeah, there was a lot of us that was there. We all dressed the same. And you just knew. And I'm proud of myself. I can always -- and I guess that's one thing that they knew. I never crossed the line of a friend. If a friend was involved with somebody I would -- I guess you would say put the make on them. I never did that to a friend. A friend's a friend. I would never cross that line. MF: So I'm curious about [break in audio]. I'm curious about your tattoos because you brought them up. You said you have a woman's name tattooed on your arm. You've got 10 tattoos. DL: Yeah. MF: Tell me a little bit about your tattoos. DL: Well, our neighbor's son was doing tattoos. And he needed people to practice on. So I said sure. My mom said don't you dare. Wrong thing to say to me, don't. And I got it. It's a big thing with flowers and double hearts and a blue bird and all that. I have a black rose. I have an eagle tattoo. I have a dream catcher tattoo on my other shoulder. On my back I have a yin-yang. On the other side I have a Pegasus on the other with the rainbow. On my leg Sandy's songives tattoos out in Minnesota, but this was in California. When Sandy and I had our holy union, Mark and Michelle came, that's his wife, but he's remarried now. I have a cherub on my leg with double hearts. The cherub represents the grandchildren, and the double hearts is Sandy and I. I've got hot stuff devil, so. And then I've just got the last tattoo I got from Mark was a ribbon because Sandy had lung cancer. And I have it white with her name on it and my color as a care taker and the date when she had her lung cancer. So that's my tattoos. MF: They look beautiful. The one on your shoulder looks amazing, but I could see that one a little bit more. Oh, that's so cool. So you describe -- this partner had an untimely death from the 20-year relationship. What happened at that period? You know, tell me a little bit about what happened around that time? DL: Well, she had breathing problems. You know, we all smoked back then. Everybody smoked. And she had asthma. And she had it for many, many, many years. And like I said, we grew up on that street, so I know her for, you know, from when her firstborn -- and it just was getting worse and worse and worse. And her oldest son and I took her to Hershey Medical. And he gave her only six months to live because her lungs -- her one lung collapsed. But she didn't know it. She didn't want to know. So, you know, we didn't tell her. And a few months later she was rushed to the hospital, and this doctor came in and told her -- she asked did she have cancer? He said no, but you're dying anyway. So she just gave up. So she died November 11, I think it was, in '93. And she made me promise to call Sandy and tell Sandy because she said you always loved Sandy. You never gave up. You never stopped loving Sandy. You would never let anybody say anything bad about Sandy. So I called Sandy, and I was just happy that we were going to be friends for the way I treated her. Because I was nasty to Sandy. Like I said, the chip on my shoulder wasn't good. And because Sandy has two boys. But anyway, I called Sandy, and she invited me down for around Christmas time. I came down. And I thought we would just be friends, but we ended up getting back together. And I love her dearly. She's the best thing to happen to me. And we talk now, which we didn't before, because, you know, we were both 19 years old, and I come from a small town in Shamokin into a big city, and nobody was telling me what to do. I regret how I treated her. I regret that every day of my life. MF: So when you came down from Shamokin to Allentown to visit Sandy, tell me a little bit about, like, how you got back together. How did you make that transition from friends or potential friendship back to partners? DL: Well, we always stayed in contact, but my former partner used to talk more to Sandy than I did. Sandy and I would say hi, how are you? Okay, yeah, me too, blah, blah, blah. But her, my former partner and Sandy would talk more than I. And we would even come down and visit. Because see, I had people from Shamokin moved down here, and that's when I moved to Allentown. I stayed with people from Shamokin that was family friend from family like grandfather lived with them, you know. And so I lived with them when I came down here until I got my apartment across the street from them. And then when Meg passed I come down. I called Sandy, and she invited me down. And it was a little strange at first, but then I kept coming down. She invited me down, and we got back together. MF: So when you got back together did you move to Allentown then, or where were you living at that time? DL: I still had my home in Shamokin, but I would come down every couple weeks, and I knew I was going to move. I didn't know where I was going to move. This is before Sandy and I got back. I knew I was leaving Shamokin. I just couldn't handle Shamokin anymore. Because there was -- some of my former partner's children and I didn't get along after, you know, because I felt they could have done more than they did for their mother instead of just stop in five minutes and say hi, how are you. And I felt they could have came because it was like 24-7 I was there. I could have needed a break. When you take care of somebody you could use a break. But I didn't get that. I mean, I went to the store, and I had to be back, pay bills and everything, and be back in a half an hour. And it was like, they said oh, I should have done more. I said yeah, you should have done more. You could have done more. And it was like I paid for everything. The only thing they paid for is their own flowers. But I paid for everything. And the one thought I should just turn over the house to them. And I didn't. I sold it. And I gave the oldest grandson a nice amount of money. A thousand dollars I gave him. But then you have to -- I only sold the house 20,000. It was a house, a storefront and an apartment. Down here I could have got like $150,000. I just wanted out of Shamokin. I didn't care. I just was at the point where it was getting nasty. So I just wanted out away from all the trouble. It was like, I don't need any more problems. It's, you know, you can all be on your own now. You're not young children. You're all married. You all have children. You can be on your own. And, you know, because I didn't sign the house over to the one it was a big upset. And it's -- I just felt I could not live in Shamokin and be happy. So I knew I was going -- this was in November I knew. And I just knew I was getting out of Shamokin one way or another. And I just had to get out. And then I stayed with friends. And I came back and forth to Allentown with friends, and then in March I moved down here, March of '94. And I just went back and forth until I sold the house. I mean, anything I needed done I had to pay for up there. They didn't help. Everything I needed done it was I had to go up, cut the grass, trim the hedges. Nobody did it for nothing. It was always about money. MF: So you moved to Allentown in March of, I think you said 1994. Tell me a little bit about the neighborhood that you lived in Allentown. Like, what was it like to move to Allentown in the 1990s? DL: Where we're at now, we're in the same house. We're in the same house, Sandy's house, and neighborhood's fine. They all know, and we get along. Actually, Sandy works at the state hospital forty-one and a half years. And her parents love me. And actually in 2001 I changed my name to Landis. That's Sandy's name. My name was Golda. When I met Liz and Trish I was Golda, my married name. And in 2001 when I changed my name Sandy's parents, her mom especially really loved it, that I became a Landis. And we're still in the same house, twenty-sixyears still in the same house. And the neighbors, I have no problem with them. I watch every -- I know everything that's going on in the neighborhood. I watch. I know new cars and old cars and what belongs here and doesn't belong here. MF: So it sounds like -- did you move in with Sandy, or did you -- when you moved back to Allentown in March, did the two of you moved in together then? DL: Sandy already had this house. Sandy already bought the house. She moved here. She's living here now in June will be twenty-seven years. So she had the house six months before I came down. I taught Sandy how to drive. MF: Tell me that story. How'd you teach her to drive? DL: We got in trouble because I taught her how to drive on state property. But I thought it was safe. That's better than out on the road. But I taught her how to drive, and yeah, but we got in trouble for it. MF: How did you get in trouble? DL: Because of her driving on the state property without a license. MF: So when you moved to Allentown, you move in with Sandy in March, tell me a little bit about what else was happening in your life in 1994 in Allentown. DL: Well, I was trying to sell my property up there. I mean, what I did, I rented it to sell for a year. I went to my very first pride fest. The year before I heard about it. I read about it on TV. But I went to my first pride fest. I called Liz and Trish. And I called Mickey Katz. I don't know if you know Mickey Katz. And I talked to them. And I started volunteering. I went over, and I met Liz and Trish. And I start volunteering. I just thought it was wonderful that they had something like that for gay people. And I volunteered for our pride fest. I went to Harrisburg's for their pride fest. And I went to Philly for their pride fest and worked them. MF: What did it feel like for you to be at that first pride festival in Allentown? DL: It was wonderful. And it, you know, all this and, you know, no problems. It was different back, you know. This was wonderful. They had something for gay people that I never knew they had. Well, the very first gay pride down here was in '93, I think they started it. And then I ended up going being on the pride board for a couple years. But it was wonderful. I just totally enjoyed it. MF: When you volunteered at the different pride festivals, what did you do? Were you setting up booths? What was your volunteering -- DL: Well, in Philadelphia I worked the beer booth because Allentown didn't have a beer booth. And it was funny. The second time we did that -- I did that for a couple years. Sandy went with me, and it was I was doing the beer, and she thought oh, I couldn't handle it. She couldn't. So she did the vodka, the Absolut vodka. And when it first opened she said oh, I can handle this only one. She gave them the first vodka, and she turned around, and she said where the hell did they all come from? But yeah, we did work the booths. We went and helped. We did the same thing in Harrisburg. In Harrisburg I got them to come up and help up here on Pride with us, and then in return I went down and helped with them. And I helped with Philly. MF: Tell me a little bit about the Pride board. What was it like to be on that board? How did the board operate? What was it like to try and set up the pride festival here? DL: Back when I was on it was different than what it is now. It was like you send out, get in touch with vendors, and I was helping with the setting up, marking off the field where the booths would go and all this. And then I would stay overnight and sit overnight so they wouldn't vandalize the vending places until we set up. And then we would work it, work the booths, and do that. And like, back then we didn't charge to get in. And then we -- I was part of the very first parade with them, Hamilton Street into Pride. You didn't realize how expensive it was for the police to block off the streets for to have the parade come down the streets. That was, I think, the only parade that we had. We had music and everything else. It was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Like I said, ours never had alcohol. And I'm not sure if I like the idea of, you know, charging people, but you know, that's only my opinion. I'm not sure what -- then we had the protestors. Then I was a silent witness for the protestors. And we had it down in Harrisburg. Yeah. It was rough at first. MF: Tell me a little bit about, so you say it was rough at first. Tell me why. How many protestors came out? What was happening with the protesting of Pride? DL: The screaming and the yelling, and you know, it was like why couldn't you just let us be instead of protesting? We're not hurting nobody. You know, and God doesn't say nothing about us. You know, it's you love who you love. It doesn't matter what sex you are or what race you are. Love is love. I'm sure, you know, God didn't put us on this earth to say you have to love this person. You have to love that person. The main thing is He don't want us to hate. And to me the protestors was just about hate. MF: Were there a lot of protestors at the first Pride? DL: No, actually that wasn't our first Pride. I guess it was couple years later that the protestors came. And the first ones maybe if they were there they were across the street. You didn't even have any, you know -- it was when that, I guess it's what was his name, Philips or something like that. He started the big mouth stuff. The others one were just, you know, so-so. They were against it, but you didn't have it until he came with his big mouth. MF: What was it like to be a silent witness? Can you tell me what that is and what it felt like to be a silent witness? DL: What it was is you just stood there, and you kept your mouth shut. And that was hard for me. And you just didn't let them get to the people that was walking in to the Pride Fest. You stood there and just stood there quietly, and no matter what they said to you you ignored them. But you blocked them from getting people, you know, getting in the other gay people's face. You were like a bridge between them. I don't know if they still have them or not. MF: Can you tell me -- you said at one point it was that the parade was so expensive because you had to block off the streets. When you were on the board, how were you funding the pride festivals? Did you have donors? How did you raise that money to make that happen for the --DL: Well, you know, when you were sold a spot, depending on the space you bought, you rented it, you paid for it, and that's how we got money. And then we had different, you know, depending on your size of the spot you wanted and where you wanted it costs the money. And that's how you made money. And you know, you sold stuff, but I don't know if we had sponsors or not. We might have. I think we had a lot of donations. Like we put the fliers out. They were donated by different people. And people that -- like a flier, people rented space to put in the, you know, paid for an ad to put in the advertising. MF: So you're working on the Pride board in Allentown. What other LGBT organizations were you involved with in Allentown during this period of the '90s? DL: There was one called Kindred Spirits, [GLOR?], and with Liz and Trish it was a different name back then. It was PA- Gala. And I can't think of the other ones, but it was different, quite a few. I tried to help with every one I could. MF: Yeah, Liz and Trish describe you as, like, a volunteer all over the valley, that you were just sort of like, just helping in any way you can. I'm not familiar with Kindred Spirit. Could you talk a little bit about what that was and how you worked with that organization? DL: It was like a get together. You would meet if you had to talk. Most of them was like, didn't have a partner at the time, but I did. And it was like we meet at -- we used to meet at Unitarian church at Center City in Bethlehem at Center Street and talk, say, about like -- it was like socializing gathering to talk about your feelings and what happened and all this. And then we would leave there for about an hour or so, and then we would go to Diamonz or something before the charge, get in. We would go there and just drink, dance, shoot pool. We would meet every -- I think it was a Friday. I believe it was a Friday. And the other, GLOR was male and females. Kindred Spirit was mostly all female. GLOR was a mixture. It was, I think it cost you like $10 a year to join. And it was like different people had something at their house every weekend. Somebody else had something or every month somebody would have something. And it was like you get together, potlucks, and stuff like that. And it was like maybe go hiking. They get together to go hiking or down to Longwood Gardens, who wanted to go, or go golfing or something like that but in a group. And I don't know if it's still going on or not, but it sort of phased out after a few years. I guess we all got older. I know at first they used to think I made Sandy up because she was always working. But she worked second shift at the state hospital, you know. But it was funny. So we had a event at our house, and then at first they said I paid her, somebody to do it until at last a couple came later, stayed later, and then they realized I had to ask her where stuff was because she knew and I didn't know. But yeah, it was funny. MF: Were you involved with any religious organizations during this time period like MCCLV? DL: Yes. MF: Tell me about -- DL: I belonged to [inaudible]. MF: Tell me about your involvement with MCCLV. DL: I went there. I was at a birthday party, and this friend of mine was there, and she was leaving to go to church. It was at Sunday night at 6:00 or for first six. And I said can I come with you? She said sure. And I went. They were in -- sharing a church, Unitarian church in Bethlehem. And I enjoyed it. And that's the first I went to church down here with MCC. I was a member. I belonged there 17 years. I was on the board. I was on the property board for six years. And I helped move with the church and all of that. There's where I fell. We moved from Ford Street. Was it Ford Street? From Merchant Square. We were at Merchant Square on Vultee Street. We moved from there to Ford Street in Allentown. And I was working at the church, and I fell 15 feet and broke my leg. But yeah, I belonged to MCC for 17 years. And now I belong to St. Mark's, Lutheran church. MF: And when you first started going to MCCLV, could you describe how it felt to be a part of a church community that's primarily LGBT? DL: I thought it was wonderful. It was really, really nice. I thought it was great. And lot of the people that I knew from Kindred Spirits and that went there. But yeah, I was on their board for six boards. I was property chair for six years. I really enjoyed MCC. But then, you know, time comes where you move on. MF: Can you describe why you decided to move on and a little bit about that kind of religious journey to a different church? DL: Oh, how can I say it nicely? I just felt maybe different. I felt differently about things that the church -- I just felt I know who I am. I know who I was since I'm 19 years old. And it's not all about just the gays. There's other people, just because they're not gay, that don't mean that you can't be friends with. And it's just time to move on. I just felt it wasn't the same as I was first in love with the church. Things, personalities changed. People changed. And speaking, I just felt when I -- you know, you ask me a question, I'm going to speak my mind. And you don't like it, and friendships change. I'm trying to be very polite and not say nothing but being honest. And it felt time for a change. MF: So how did you find your new church? And what has that experience been like for you? DL: Well, friends of ours that went to MCC, she was a secretary at St. Mark's. And they got tickets for Elvis impersonator, and they know I liked Elvis. And she called me up and said come and meet them. You know, come. So we went there, and there was people there that Sandy worked with at the hospital and kept saying join, come join this called Sharing Life. You'll love it. So we ran into -- so we did. Sandy went, and I went in November. So we seen the Elvis impersonator. So we went to the Sharing Life, and what that is is it's people from the church that have this deal with mentally ill. And the nurses and all that from the state hospital where Sandy worked started this. And what it is is different patients from the -- they don't call them patients now. They're clients or started this where once a month the beginning of the month they had crafts. So many people come for crafts. On the third Wednesday of the month they come, we give them something to eat, and we have bingo or a dance or something like that. And we enjoyed that. And the people was so accepting of Sandy and I being gay that they were so wonderful. And I said to Sandy, eh. This was in November, and I said that February was our anniversary. I said let's go to church. I'd like to see this church. Because the church was beautiful. And we went in, and the people were so accepting. It was like -- it was great. And I remember the sermon. The pastor said we're here for the people, not for the church. And I said, I like that. So then we went a couple times, and then we missed for two weeks because we went on vacation. And when we came back everybody said oh my God, you're here. You're here. We thought you didn't like us and that you weren't coming back. So we are now members of the church. I'm on the church counsel. I love the church, and I love their outreach. We do a pantry, open-door pantry. Twice a month we give people food that's in our zip code because there's so many we can't do it all. Because ours is a food pantry where they pick what they want except for now with this virus going on they tell us what they want and we fill the bag. Because we give them meat, sometimes eggs, milk, cheese. So it's not like where we fill a bag and just hand it to them. They pick what they want. I just love their outreaches, and I love the church and the people. It's the people. They love you for who you are. MF: You really have so many stories about volunteering or being on leadership, both in LGBT organizations but in your church organizations both at MCCLV and now with your Lutheran congregation. Could you tell me a little bit about why volunteering and taking on leadership roles in community organizations has been important in your life? DL: Well actually, they asked me to become one of the leaders. They asked me. I was just a member over a year, and they called and asked me to be on their board. And I was honored. I said I'm not even a member only a little over a year and you're asking me to be on your board. I was honored that they asked, you know. So that's how it is. They asked me. And I'm honored. And I told them right from the beginning my mouth sometimes got me in trouble. And they were happy. Because I speak my mind, and that's where it got me in trouble at MCC. You ask me a question and I'm going to answer it, and if I feel something's wrong I'm going to speak my mind, and that's what happened. MF: I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about just kind of to turn back to you and Sandy, did you have a commitment ceremony or, you know, something prior to the passage of marriage equality? DL: Yes, we had a holy union back in 1998 at the Unitarian church where we had that. My family from Delaware all came. They all love Sandy. And it's like you can't accept Sandy. And before my biological mother died we mend the fences, and, you know, I said this is my partner, and if you can't accept her you're history. You're not as important to me as she is. And that's how it is. They can't accept Sandy then we're history. And in 2001 we had, in Connecticut, we had a civil union. We can't get legally married in Pennsylvania because I would lose my benefits. That's why we -- not legally married in Pennsylvania or we would be because I'm a fixed, very low. Like, I only get $1,000 to live on. And my medicine, because I have COPD, two of my inhalers are over $1,000. MF: Can you describe the civil union ceremony for me? What was that like? DL: Well, our holy union at the Unitarian, both Sandy's sons walked her down the aisle. And the pastor, I forget her name, but we have her pictures and everything, she married us. But it was great seeing her walking down the aisle with both her sons there. And her one son calls me Mom Number Two. But he's more laid back. The older son is -- he lived in California, so you can tell how laid back he is compared to the other son, but we get along good. MF: So now in your seventies, how would you describe your relationship with Sandy now that you've been together for so many years and you're in your seventies, you're kind of in this, like, really beautiful part of your relationship because you've been together so long. Describe that for me. DL: I still love her with all my heart. And we talk, which we never did in the beginning back in the '60s. We didn't talk. We talk. We're honest with one another. And like, she'll say how are -- like if I'm not feeling good I'll say I'm good. She'll say honest? And if I'm not feeling -- I won't say honest unless I mean it. But we talk. We don't just do something. No matter what it is we talk about, give each other's opinion on everything. We trust one another. We don't hang in bars. We're home, basically home bodies. We like to travel. But with this going on we're not planning no vacations. We already canceled our vacations for this year. But next year we're planning to drive to Minnesota to see her oldest son Mark. Michael lives down in Phoenixville, but with this going on we don't go to see him either. But it's still wonderful. We talk. We don't leave the house without kissing each other goodbye and saying we love each other. We never go to bed without kissing and saying goodnight and love each other. We never do that. And it's great. We laugh. We watch TV. We read. Right now I'm working on a puzzle, and she'll help me pick out pieces. But it's wonderful because we might disagree. We still say thank you, please. We treat each other with respect. MF: Well, we're getting close to the end of the interview. So I want to ask just maybe one or two more questions. In your seventies, as you look back on your experiences and really the kind of LGBT movements from the '69 and Stonewall, you know, through the present, how do you think things have changed for LGBT people? What have you sort of witnessed across your life? DL: Well, I don't remember the movie, but they showed a movie at NCCC one time. And I was there helping one of the groups out. And the younger people that was younger than me were in there that didn't come out as early as I came out. And when they came out, and they kept thanking me. And it's like, for what, you know? I don't consider myself a hero or warrior or nothing else. I'm just me, plain old me. And it's a lot different. Now I see people walking hand in hand, you know, couples, and I think wow, what a difference, what a difference. They didn't realize what it was like to go to a bar after 2:00 in the morning to be with yourself and friends. And I got a nickname called Bobbie because I was, like I said, I was butchy, and this drag queen thought I was a guy. And I told him no. He said from now on you're Bobbie to me. And so I did a couple drag shows at the church, and I went by Bobbie. But it's so different. And they don't realize how lucky they are that they can walk down the street hand in hand and not get bashed or beat up or anything because a lot of that was going on. We fought for a lot of this. I remember so many years standing on Hamilton Street fighting for gay marriage in the freezing cold. But most of the people, I can only say I think only twice I ever had something thrown at me during that time. Most of the people past and honked their horns. But there was other places where there was bashing, like with Mathew Shepard and a couple others. You know, the movement back then was very different. You had to be really close and, you know, different now. They're lucky. Things has changed, and they're lucky to have it changed. Some people lost their jobs. Some people lost their homes. Some families put them out. My family stuck by me. Sandy's family stuck by her. But we were lucky. But some wasn't as lucky. MF: Have we missed anything today in this interview that you really wanted to share today in our conversation? Is there something that you'd like to share that we haven't addressed yet? DL: I would just say not to be ashamed of who you are or who you love. Love is love, no matter what color, what race, or who it is. Love is love. And don't be ashamed of who you love. And don't hide who you love. MF: Thank you so much, DJ. It's just been such a pleasure talking with you today. DL: You're quite welcome. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:36:19 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource D.J. Landis, June 12, 2020 Description An account of the resource DJ Landis discusses early childhood and young adulthood in Shamokin, PA, her thoughts about being adopted, and her family life. DJ addresses a number of gay bars in small towns and cities as well as LGBT social scene and butch/femme identities. The interview also addresses her work life at Pace Arrow, the challenges facing LGBT couples prior to marriage equality, and two serious relationships in her life. In reference to LGBT organizations, DJ discusses Pride of the Lehigh Valley, GLORA, Kindred Spirits, and MCCLV. DJ ends the interview with a discussion of her marriage to Sandy at a Unitarian Church. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-05 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-06-12 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/8b8550e02b3c5ba232fb6d1119b4e704.png cb6775fd46a276fbe94207b2cfc5bc56 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Liz Bradbury OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-20.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 August 10, 2020 Liz Bradbury, August 10, 2020 LGBT-20 1:57:36 LVLGBT Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive Collection Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Liz Bradbury Mary Foltz video/mp4 Copy of BradburyLiz_20200810_video.mp4 1.0:|5(3)|60(7)|85(5)|108(5)|133(11)|158(7)|183(10)|208(3)|229(2)|250(8)|269(7)|294(11)|319(7)|342(7)|363(14)|380(11)|405(7)|432(14)|455(13)|484(14)|509(6)|536(13)|563(2)|584(14)|613(5)|638(10)|663(3)|686(11)|709(2)|732(8)|757(3)|780(6)|801(16)|824(15)|847(16)|874(4)|901(9)|928(11)|953(14)|978(18)|999(11)|1026(3)|1047(2)|1068(8)|1093(14)|1114(16)|1139(11)|1158(11)|1181(7)|1206(5)|1233(5)|1256(16)|1281(10)|1306(7)|1337(5)|1362(6)|1389(4)|1412(13)|1433(5)|1458(14)|1483(15)|1510(10)|1533(14)|1560(9)|1581(14)|1606(11)|1631(6)|1652(14)|1675(15)|1700(16)|1717(6)|1742(10)|1767(12)|1794(9)|1819(6)|1844(10)|1865(15)|1894(3)|1917(5)|1942(5)|1963(14)|1986(4)|2009(2)|2030(5)|2053(6)|2072(12)|2095(16)|2118(7)|2143(10)|2164(8)|2185(11)|2208(9)|2233(11)|2258(2)|2285(13)|2308(13)|2333(15)|2354(13)|2375(10)|2396(3)|2419(14)|2438(8)|2465(7)|2488(18)|2513(14)|2536(10)|2561(3)|2584(13)|2605(12)|2628(9)|2651(5)|2672(8)|2693(18)|2714(3)|2737(18)|2758(8)|2779(10)|2792(9) 0 https://youtu.be/wrbrbA_vjgY YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: Okay, my name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences with LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on August 10th, 2020. We’re meeting over Zoom because there is a pandemic. Liz, I’m just going to go ahead and do the consent really quickly. Do you consent to this interview today?&#13 ; &#13 ; LIZ BRADBURY: Yes. 0 87 Maternal Family LB: I’d love to do that because everybody likes to talk about themselves. I do want to talk about my parents a little bit because I realized how much their life influenced mine. Of course, everybody’s parents do. But I don’t want to get stuck in that because I can talk about them for hours and they are pretty fascinating characters. So, let me say that my mother, her mother was the child of immigrants, she was the child of Norwegian immigrants, and she was very much of a bootstrapper. She wanted to make a name for herself. In fact, she used to say that to me all the time, “Make a name for yourself.” She should be thrilled that a building is named after me. 0 459 Paternal Family / Father's Work LB: Meanwhile, so then go back to where my dad was, my dad was born in South Dakota, in Lead, South Dakota. Lead, South Dakota is a mining town in the middle of literally nowhere. I’ve actually been there. We went on a little excursion to see what it was like and it’s truly in the middle of nowhere. It’s right next to Sturgis, where everyone is getting COVID-19 right now, with that big Harley motorcycle thing. It’s really right next to there. Trish got a T-shirt from Sturgis because she said, “Oh, this would be fun.” 0 1030 Liberal Upbringing / Parental Influence LB: So, one of the things about my parents, and I think that the main thing about them was, that they were very liberal. They were passionately committed to that. I don’t know if my mother would have been that way as much had she had a different husband, but she really liked my dad and she really believed in everything that he did. They had pretty diverse friends considering we lived Greenwich, Connecticut, which was a very white, suburban white flight area, where there was a certain amount of segregation, or gated community kind of stuff. But they were friends with lots of people that were very diverse. And so, that was great. 0 1353 Embracing Lesbian Identity LB: So, I really liked girls. And I knew that I liked girls. And I would think about guys and stuff and was so separated from that that I couldn’t really imagine actually being with a boy, or a man, or anything like that. I never got a thrill from that. But when I started to get older and I started to learn that there were lesbians in the world and that there were women that were attracted to women, it was such a rush. 0 1632 Greenwich High School LB: And I also, in high school, was able to gather -- I went to a huge high school, Greenwich High School. At that time, it was three grades and had 3,000 students, so there was 1,000 kids in my class. And because of that, when I was in junior high, I’ve had friends and hung around with people who were artists, and they still are artists, but the people that I met in high school, I had a sort of 10 friends that were really close, we’re still friends in some ways, we don’t have as much communication as I’d like because we all live so far away from each other. But they were zany, erudite, interesting people. 0 1841 College Days at Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore LB: And then, I went to college. I decided to go to art school, and I went to the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. I applied to a bunch of different arts schools. I had sort of wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design, but I didn’t get in there so I went to the Maryland Institute, which was good because everything that happened in my life sprung out of going to Maryland Institute. 0 2192 Woodworking LB: I forgot to say that, Shirley Jankovich, which was the one I had the big crush on, she said to me, “You know since you’re so interested in woodworking you should go talk to this little woodworker guy that does stuff for me for my house. His name is Luigi Cappotelli and he’s a master craftsman. Why don’t you go and talk to him?” So, I went to talk to Luigi, who was in the next town over. I was 15 actually, when I met him, and he asked me to be his apprentice. Or I asked him. We ended up where I was his apprentice. 0 2367 Exploring LGBTQ+ Hangouts / Club Mitchell LB: So, while I was in Maryland, they had a GSA in my last year when I was in college. And so that would have been in 1979. But the people in it were so weird that I would see these people and be like, “I don’t think so.” I didn’t know anybody in the group. But my pal Christine, I came out to her, and I told her about the crushes that I’d had. She had a boyfriend that we knew and stuff. And we had really serious talks about this. And we were really good friends, and we’re still good friends. I just talked to her. 0 2635 Camaraderie in the Woodworking Department LB: But I have to say that in college I worked so hard. I’m still tired from college. I’m really still tired from graduate school. There were days in graduate school that I didn’t sleep for days, for three or four days I just didn’t sleep. And in college I never had time to go out. Maybe after eleven o’clock, I’d have a couple of hours. I guess that’s the way college is now, except I had to get up early for class, because our classes started at eight. And I was a teaching assistant for art history, too. And lots of things happening. 0 2775 Relationship with Jean Ruben LB: Anyway. Then, I decided that I didn’t want to be just an art teacher in school, I wanted to be a college teacher. And I used to say, “I don’t want to have to clean up vomit from a first grader. I just really want to be a college teacher.” And that was smart. I think I did want to be that. But the other thing that happened when I was in college was I met an English teacher named Jean Ruben, and Jean became -- I had her for one class, and she lived right near me in Bolton Hill. 0 3638 Moving to Allentown / Jean in Later Life LB: So, I said, “I think I should think about buying a house because if I have a house, even if I don’t have a job, if I have a house, I’ll have a place to live. I can piss this away really easily if I just use this on rent.” So, she said, “Well, Wayne is in Allentown.” And he was the partner of Arthur Miller who was a friend of ours, who was another teacher, who was a very good friend of Jean’s. And I knew him, he’d been one of my teachers. And I’d done some work for him at his house. And she said, “Wayne is in Allentown. Why don’t you go and talk to him? He’s a nice guy. He’s a sweet guy.” I said, “I’ve met him.” 0 4081 Earning a Woodworking MFA / Finding Community in Terre Haute, Indiana LB: In the meantime, going back to a little bit, when I went to Indiana, and I went to study under [Allen Friedman?] who turned out to be a complete asshole and ended up leaving after the first year, which meant that I didn’t have a mentor while I was there, and there weren’t any other woodworking teachers, so the people in ceramics who didn’t understand anything about wood, there was nobody to teach me everything. And then, they got some part-time guys, and then they got another guy that was kind of an idiot. 0 4827 Leaving Indiana / Moving to Jamestown, New York LB: So, what happened was at the end of my second year in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant, I taught art history, and I done that for the time. And I only had a couple of credits left. I think I had one credit left that I had to fulfill. I’d actually, during the time of working on my MFA, gotten letters in the mail. I’d get this letter that goes, “Now you have an MS,” because I just took enough credits. And then, “Now you have enough credits for an MA in Fine Art.” So, now I had a master’s degree in Fine Art. I’m like, “Whoa.” But my MFA was a 90-degree credit and that had a lot of reviews and stuff. So, I was still going through the reviews. But I had a legitimate masters. 0 5257 Relationships in Jamestown LB: So, I dated some women. And then, I met another woman who was the head of the United Cerebral Palsy offices there in Jamestown, and we had this group of women that were meeting each other, and there was a women’s domestic violence hotline, a lot of lesbians worked there. She was very interesting. I asked her on a date and she was much more excited about the sex, so that was really fun for that beginning of that date. But we were really not ultimately suited for each other. I think we were together for just about four years. 0 5396 New Beginnings / In-Between Relationships LB: So, all this tough stuff was happening. I was in a bad relationship, my mother was going into a nursing home for Alzheimer’s disease, I lost my job that I thought was going to be the most perfect job ever, I didn’t have any money, I had to move to Philadelphia, that relationship didn’t work out. It was a lot of tough stuff. And I was just turning 30. Sasha and I had gone to a party. We knew other lesbians in Western New York and some of them had moved to Eastern New York. And so, we went to a party and we met a group of women, and one of them was Trish. And I was still with Sasha then, but our friend Cheryl, who had the party, when Sasha and I broke up, Cheryl said to Trish, “Liz and Sasha broke up.” 0 5718 Meeting Patricia Sullivan LB: So, Cheryl told Trish that Sasha and I had broken up. And then Cheryl told me that she told Trish that and I said, “What did Trish say?” And Cheryl said, “Trish said Sasha’s an idiot.” And I went, “Whoa, all right.” And then, I got a letter from Trish, remember letters. No, Cheryl asked me to go on a double date with Trish and Cheryl and her partner, at that time, Donna. And they’re not together anymore. But Cheryl has been in a long relationship with another person that Trish happened to have worked with in New York State, because there’s really only about 100 lesbians in the world. 0 6269 Early Days Apart LB: The whole thing that happened with Trish was so fabulous that in the beginning part of our relationship, I was just so overwhelmed by how terrific it was that I was afraid. I’m still afraid. I’m afraid of for when it ends. And if you’re with somebody long enough, somebody’s always going to be sad in the relationship because one person is going to leave. At the end of the relationship one person is going to die, that’s what happened with my parents who were married for 42 years. Trish’s parents were married for 75 years. We come from really great circumstances. 0 6406 Creating a Life Together LB: And after five months, the job in North Carolina, the whole company closed and I got to come home. And we started our life together which was really wonderful. We were far away from each other but Trish had told me in our first conversation that she wanted to retire, because she had lupus. And the stress of her job, which was extraordinarily, it’s a government job, running a government hospital, having to justify every penny you spend, to Albany, when they don’t give you enough money, but when you’re required to do certain things. So, she said, “I’m going to get scapegoated for something. I know that’s going to happen.” 0 6590 Trish's Impact &amp ; Influence LB: Sure. And we can talk about that, and I can figure out anything else I forgot to say. I have to be sure that that’s in there. Because there are a few other things that I didn’t talk about, I think, that have to do with some other civil rights issues that I think are very important that we haven’t touched on that had to do with stuff that Trish and I did. I know that Trish doesn’t sing her own praises as much as she should, but the extraordinary work that she’s done, and I have to say, I’ve done a lot of stuff. I couldn’t have done any of these things if it hadn’t been for Trish. She rescued me. 0 7006 Closing Remarks LB: So, we can talk about other stuff but I did want to say those things, you’ve got that. I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff. Oh, I had all these lists of stuff, here. I think I said all of these things. Yeah. So, my whole life before Trish was just getting ready to be in love with Trish. And that was really the terrific thing. And I do want to say that I had a lot of wonderful support for that, as well. It’s been good. 0 MovingImage Liz Bradbury describes her maternal and paternal family, her upbringing, time at the Maryland Institute of Art and Indiana State University, and relationships before Patricia Sullivan. INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY AUGUST 10, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: Okay, my name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences with LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley. This is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on August 10th, 2020. We're meeting over Zoom because there is a pandemic. Liz, I'm just going to go ahead and do the consent really quickly. Do you consent to this interview today? LIZ BRADBURY: Yes. MF: And you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, and presentations? LB: Yes. MF: And you understand that you'll have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts you want to delete, or to withdraw the interview from the project? LB: Yes, I do. MF: Well, fabulous. Thank you so much for being with me today. And I'm going to start with just a broad question. Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life? LB: I'd love to do that because everybody likes to talk about themselves. I do want to talk about my parents a little bit because I realized how much their life influenced mine. Of course, everybody's parents do. But I don't want to get stuck in that because I can talk about them for hours and they are pretty fascinating characters. So, let me say that my mother, her mother was the child of immigrants, she was the child of Norwegian immigrants, and she was very much of a bootstrapper. She wanted to make a name for herself. In fact, she used to say that to me all the time, "Make a name for yourself." She should be thrilled that a building is named after me. And she was the grandparent that I grew up with in my family. I saw her all the time. And her name was Selma Barry. Her parents didn't speak English. She got an education. She lived in Bonita, an area of California. And she became a teacher. And she intentionally moved to a place where there were very few women and a lot of rich entrepreneurial guys. And she was very beautiful, so she picked one and she married him. His name was Edmund Drinan Barry. And he was the son of millionaires and stuff like that. And then, she soon after had two girls, my aunt, and then my mother. And then, it was the Depression and he turned out to be a terrible businessman. And he had an orange grove, and he had a dairy farm and stuff, and he just ran them into the ground and had no money and they were always turning off the power. And my grandmother, I think, that his parents had been unhappy that he had married an immigrant's daughter, because he really was in the high level of social register. And so, I think his parents had disowned him, but he was going to make it on his own. And he didn't. And my grandmother was pissed off. She was really mad because she was very concerned about appearances. So, she took her two girls and she had been a teacher and she had gone to normal school, which is what they called teaching colleges, and she moved them to the only job she could get in the Depression, which was in the Mojave Desert, teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, which was an interesting -- so, my mother had gone from quite an affluent life, which she never really realized, my mother was very naïve and very ingenuous, and she never really thought anything about it. I think she was just sad her father wasn't there anymore. And she talked about how she loved being a teacher and she ultimately became a teacher. And she was about 14, I think, when they moved there. And so, she taught all the little kids. She was still in the school and her mother didn't know, she was like K through eight, and she was in eighth grade and she didn't know anything. Her sister had gone to the high school. This was in Victorville High School in Hesperia, was the town, which was, in those days, 200 miles from civilization. Now, there's literally civilization, so to speak, all the way from here back to Santa Barbara and Redlands, California, where they had come from. And so, she worked to teach kids and stuff like that. And they lived in a pretty scrubby life, in that my mother did all the cooking because her mother taught and worked all day and my aunt was in high school and stuff. And my mother loved working with little kids, and playing with little kids, and teaching them and stuff, and she thought that was wonderful. But she didn't learn anything. She learned from teaching, but she didn't really learn anything that an eighth grader would learn to prep for high school. So, when she went to high school she kind of had a hard time. But luckily because her sister had been very smart and very good at math apparently people just gave her good grades. And the other reason was because she was really pretty. And she was pretty educated enough and certainly compared to other people who maybe lived in that area that were really poor, in the desert. But here's the other flip side of that coin. Also in the desert in that area were dude ranches where really, really rich famous people would go for holidays. And so, my mother had a friend from high school whose family owned one of those dude ranches. My mom used to hang out there all the time and she would tell me, "I played ping pong with Loretta Young, and I danced with Jimmy Stuart," and she did, because she was really pretty and a young teenager, just the perfect person to have hanging around these dude ranches for other people. And she was polite and smart, stuff like that. And she also learned how to ride because her friend who had had the dude ranch was a champion horse rider and so, she had aged out of the young woman's thing, so she trained my mother to do it, and she went all through these competitions and stuff. And she said, "You know, I wasn't really into it, but my friend wanted me to do it." That's the way she was. "So, I just did it." So, she did all these interesting things and then she went to college at the University of Santa Barbara, and that was right before World War II, to be a teacher. And her sister went to college to be a nurse, because that's what people did. And my grandmother was saying, clearly to them, "Yeah, well, don't rely on getting married because look what happened to me. Thank God I have this teaching degree." So, they went and did what the only thing that women could do in the 1930s to study, which was either being a teacher or being a nurse. Meanwhile, so then go back to where my dad was, my dad was born in South Dakota, in Lead, South Dakota. Lead, South Dakota is a mining town in the middle of literally nowhere. I've actually been there. We went on a little excursion to see what it was like and it's truly in the middle of nowhere. It's right next to Sturgis, where everyone is getting COVID-19 right now, with that big Harley motorcycle thing. It's really right next to there. Trish got a T-shirt from Sturgis because she said, "Oh, this would be fun." So, my father was born in 1914, my mother was born in 1921. So, he was older than she. And when he was four years old, his mother, in 1918, died of the flu epidemic of 1918. She was 32 years old. He had one sister who was older. And he said the only memory of his mother, the only clear memory of his mother, was at one time, she was trying to fix the furnace and asked them to go and get the tongs from the fireplace, and they thought that she meant the andirons. So, they dragged the andirons down, these filthy, dusty andirons down, and she just laughed hysterically. And he said that's the only thing that he could remember about her. So, one of the things about the flu epidemic of 1918, which we all talk about now, it was so, so serious, 50 million to 100 million people died. And 72 percent of women who were pregnant died when they got the flu. If they got the flu, 72 percent of them died. And actually, the death rate of the flu is about 10 percent. It particularly struck people between the ages of 20 and 40. My grandmother was 32. I think she was probably pregnant because she was the only one in the family who died. My father didn't say that anyone else had the disease. But anyway, as soon as his mother died, his father -- and they had both gone to high school in Lead -- his father decided to go with his brother to make roads in South America. And they went to Chile to do that. So, his brother, Phillip, and he, went there and left my father and his sister, Ruth, who they called PD, in Lead, South Dakota, to be raised by his mother's parents, and his mother's father was the mayor of Leads, South Dakota. His last name was Erwin. But my dad had a hard time I think. They were smart people, but he was left on his own and stuff. So, anyway, ultimately, he was smart and literary and his sister turned out to be very capable as well and she ended up being an editor for Antiques Magazine and living in New York City with her husband, Marshall Davidson, who was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the American wing and wrote books and stuff like that. They were very much in our lives when I was growing up. So, anyway, his father left him, his mother was dead, and so, he was really an orphan but when they grew up, he went to Berkeley and he got a really great education there in English, and then I think he had a year of graduate school, and then he went to South America to be with his father and his uncle, and stayed there, and learned to speak Spanish fluently. So, he could speak Spanish fluently and he lived there for a year or two. And then, he came back because it was right before World War II, and he worked as the person who edited the newspaper, particularly the sports part of the newspaper, of the University of Santa Barbara, which was actually then Santa Barbara Teachers College, where my mother went. And my mother and father met that, and that's how they fell in love with each other. It was right before World War II, my father was drafted, and my mother left school a little bit early and went to where he was. He was going into Officer's Candidate School in Miami. This is the tough war thing that he had. He had to train guys how to fly planes. And one of them was Clark Gable. He trained Clark Gable how to fly a plane. And then they went to North Carolina where he wrote flying manuals and stuff. And he really had a great time. I mean, there was nothing about the war that was bad for him, except for that some of the people in basic training had gone to bad places, and he felt a little bit guilty about that. But he just had a great time. So, when he was in South Carolina, he was married to my mother by then, she was teaching in a little school and my father was at the base. And his CO was Ken McCormick. And Ken McCormick was the senior editor at Doubleday. And another person that was there was Mac Showman. You probably don't know who that is but your parents do. So, ask your parents who Mac Showman is, he created the television show Dobie Gillis. They know what this is because it was the funniest show in the '50s. And he wasn't famous then. And he met Ken McCormick, and he wrote a lot of books, and my dad was best friends with Mac, and he wrote plays and stuff like that. Anyway, after World War II, my father got to get a really good job at Doubleday. That's the way it was in the 1940s. If you had a good education and you were a white guy, you usually got a really good job. And so, he went from being an editor for some creepy little newspaper at a college to now he's a top editor at Doubleday in in his first job there. So, this was after the war, so this is in 1946, '47, his first job was to edit Crusades through Europe, which was Dwight Eisenhower's memoir of World War II. I have pictures of him with Eisenhower. My dad established himself as a very liberal guy, and he also spoke Spanish fluently, so he worked with all sorts of people. And that was his career. And he was at a couple of publishing companies, but mostly, Doubleday and he was there at the beginning, and then he left there for about 10 years and then came back for the rest of the time. And he worked with really famous authors. He ended up being the science fiction editor, so he worked with Ray Bradbury. He kind of discovered Ray Bradbury, not related to us, and Martian Chronicles is dedicated to him. He also worked with Isaac Asimov. He was the editor for Asimov, and I wrote down a bunch of other people because this is pretty cool. He also worked with a bunch of other guys, so Catherine Cookson, Velikovsky, Norman Katkov, who wrote Fabulous Fanny, which was about Fanny Brice, that Barbra Streisand movie that is about Fanny Brice. And Irving Stone, who wrote Lust For Life, he worked with him on writing The Agony and the Ecstasy. Irving Stone was the guy who actually promoted Vincent van Gogh. Nobody knew who Vincent van Gogh was until Irving Stone wrote Lust For Life. He worked with Leon Uris, who wrote Exodus, and Irving Wallace, and Fletcher Knebel, who wrote Seven Days in May. Anita Brenner, who was a really significant writer about Mexico, because he spoke Spanish. And he also worked with Martin Luther King. He was the editor of Martin Luther King's books. He was the liberal guy there, so he worked with Martin Luther King. I have pictures of him with Martin Luther King. He edited Why We Can't Wait. And then, after Malcom X's death, he negotiated to get the autobiography of Malcolm X to come to Doubleday. We lived in Connecticut, and so, he would come home and he'd go, "Yeah, Tony Curtis was in the office today," or, "Hey, guess who's going to be working with us and is going to have the office next to mine. Jackie Kennedy Onassis. This will be so fun." And he's always saying things like that. And as a kid, I never really quite got that. I think my sister, who is nine years older than I am, understood this a little bit better than I did. But that was fun. So, one of the things about my parents, and I think that the main thing about them was, that they were very liberal. They were passionately committed to that. I don't know if my mother would have been that way as much had she had a different husband, but she really liked my dad and she really believed in everything that he did. They had pretty diverse friends considering we lived Greenwich, Connecticut, which was a very white, suburban white flight area, where there was a certain amount of segregation, or gated community kind of stuff. But they were friends with lots of people that were very diverse. And so, that was great. My mother was an artist. And besides being a teacher, she was a painter. And she was involved with the Greenwich Art Society all of my life, I think from the time I was in about third grade all the way through the end of the time that I lived with them. And she was on their board, and she was a painter, and she did wonderful, wonderful paintings. And so, I saw that all the time. My sister was also an artist. She was a photographer. My dad was interested in photography. We had a permanent darkroom in our house. My sister became a photographer. I learned how to do woodworking from my dad. It was a hobby of his. Photography was, too. So, as I was growing up I was learning about all of these things. And the other thing that my parents did was, they were volunteers. They volunteered for stuff all the time. My mother was a volunteer for Greenwich Art Society for 25 years. She was the treasurer, and she did all their taxes. She did everything. She wasn't even into that kind of stuff, but she was very dedicated to doing that. She led some of the shows. They have regular shows at the Greenwich Arts Society and she would be the chair of the show and stuff and do that. And my dad was involved with the local libraries. And even just personally, he would do things like we lived on what they call a private road, and so, instead of the association of the people who lived there hiring a person to mow the lawn, he would just do it. There was a little beach at the end of our -- because we lived on the water. We didn't live on the water, but we lived on an area where there was a beach at the end of the road on Long Island Sound. So, I was really into that thing. I didn't really think anything about everybody else's dad isn't going after work when he comes home from New York and then goes, "I'm just going to go mow the lawn at the pier. I'm going to go do that." And he did that all the time. "I picked up all this garbage." He was really into just giving himself. I think I got that ethic from them. So, I picked up those literary things. Let me say quickly that my mother died of early onset Alzheimer's disease when she was 68, in 1988, right after I met Trish. She was already in a nursing home. And that was devastating because she was wonderful. And she also would have really loved Trish. She just would have loved Trish. And she would have had so much fun with her and I'm so sad that they didn't get to really know each other. My mother lost her memory by the time I was 26. She was really not remembering things. And she didn't know who I was by the time I was 30 and I had met Trish. And she died in a nursing home. My father, like many guys his age, had smoked since he was 12 years old and died of emphysema, but quite a while after my mother died so Trish did meet him and he was good to her. He was a liberal guy. But he also had some of those things that men of that day -- like, he belonged to some clubs that wouldn't let women in. He didn't always get the gay thing. He wasn't any anti, but he just didn't always understand the LGBT stuff. He certainly had gay friends but he said, "I wouldn't talk about that." I said, "Well, why not?" So, we had some confrontation, but they were okay. He was a little curmudgeonly for a guy. But because of them, I grew up around books all of the time. I was horrendously dyslexic as a child, so a little bit of a disappointment. Luckily, that's not as much of a problem once you have computers. But in the olden days, we didn't have spellcheck, so I couldn't spell anything. But I did end up writing books and stuff, but I consciously decided to wait until after he died to do that because he was not supportive. He just didn't think I could ever do that. I actually won national awards for the books that I wrote, so I think he would have been happy about that. But he just didn't think other people could just write books because he realized how hard it was. So, anyway, my mother and father were a big influence on me, certainly, and all the time that I was growing up, I was involved with art shows and I was in art shows. By the time I was 12, I was in juried art show, so I've been doing that for more than 50 years, putting my work out, not just in a show but in a show where people might reject it, which is an interesting thing to learn about yourself and how you feel about that. That's the way art school is. So, I ended up going to Maryland Institute of Art. No, let's go back a little bit, about queerness. So, I really liked girls. And I knew that I liked girls. And I would think about guys and stuff and was so separated from that that I couldn't really imagine actually being with a boy, or a man, or anything like that. I never got a thrill from that. But when I started to get older and I started to learn that there were lesbians in the world and that there were women that were attracted to women, it was such a rush. I mean, even really negative depictions of lesbians in movies and stuff like The Children's Hour, I've talked to you about that before, or in the movie The Miracle Worker, where there's like a little mention of women who go after women? I'm like, "What? What? What's that?" It was so exciting. It was Anne Bancroft because she's so hot. And if you talk to any lesbian, you talk about how hot Ann Bancroft is is in The Miracle Worker, everybody is into that. Everybody. Every woman my age who's a dyke will absolutely say that they were so intrigued by The Trouble With Angels. All these nuns living together, and they're having such a good time and they're laughing and stuff, and I know women who were absolutely not Catholic would say, "I've thought about becoming a nun because I saw The Trouble With Angels, and these women were having such a great time." Even in The Sound of Music, the nuns are so cool and they're all living up there all together, and who knows what they're doing and stuff like that, and they don't care about men at all, it doesn't matter. In fact, they're always bossing men around, Rosalind Russell is bossing men around, it's great. And so, all that kind of stuff was going around in my head. And I've always been attracted to older women, so I used to have these incredible crushes on my teachers. And I have to say that, looking back at them, not all of them were unrequited in many instances. And so, I had attractions. And some of those women are still my friends. If they're alive, most of them are still my friends. And so, I had a very good relationship with one of the art teachers that was in what we used to call junior high in those days. And I'm still friends with her. We were really friends. In fact, she ended up getting a job in Baltimore when I was in college, and we were friends. We hung out and stuff and she stayed at my apartment. And then, she got an apartment nearby and we spent a lot of time together. She was not a lesbian. I just talked to her, as a matter of fact. She lives in Maine, now. But other women that I was attracted to, there was a teacher in high school that I was so attracted to, and I spent so much time with her. She'd give me a ride home every day. I'd be at her house. We'd go to New York. She'd say, "I'm going to New York in the weekend, you want to go with me?" I'm like, "Of course." It was like a fantasy. And it was so easy. And I also noticed that she was touching me all the time. She would touch me in class. And I counted, she did it 100 days in a row that she would come and she would touch my shoulder while she was talking to the rest of the class. I'm thinking -- but anyway, apparently, things fell out because I thought that she would be more -- we had some arguments after I was in college, or maybe after I graduated from college, which was too bad. She died a couple years ago and I'm sorry about that because I thought she was a really fascinating person. She was a great artist. And she really influenced my development in art, to love art all the time. But we would go into New York and she'd go, "I want to go to a fabric store," she taught me about Art Nouveau, she was always collecting pieces that were Art Nouveau, and we would go into these stores. She was a Russian immigrant's daughter, so she could speak Russian. She was Ukrainian, actually. We'd go into New York and we'd be in these districts and people would call out to her. And they knew her name and stuff. I thought that was so cool. We had so much fun. And it was too bad I guess that we didn't continue that. Although, I think there was a reason, I think she was more attracted to people that she could push around than adults, because she didn't have as many older adult friends. And I also, in high school, was able to gather -- I went to a huge high school, Greenwich High School. At that time, it was three grades and had 3,000 students, so there was 1,000 kids in my class. And because of that, when I was in junior high, I've had friends and hung around with people who were artists, and they still are artists, but the people that I met in high school, I had a sort of 10 friends that were really close, we're still friends in some ways, we don't have as much communication as I'd like because we all live so far away from each other. But they were zany, erudite, interesting people. They were really smart. They all went to Ivy League colleges and they all really knew about things. They wrote music, and plays, we wrote plays all the time, and they did art. I was the one who was more in the Fine Arts, but as I said, we had this playmaking group called [The Quadnalescent's Players?] and teachers would come to us -- this was the way it was in the '70s. They'd come to us and they'd say, "Could you write a play for tomorrow night? Skip all your classes, write a play for tomorrow night, because we have parent's night and we need a 15-minute play that's funny." And we'd just do it. We didn't have to go to class or anything. School was so open. And it was perfect for me because you could choose a lot of classes. I didn't like math. I thought math was stupid. And it was, the way it was taught was a very stupid model for people. It was an impractical model. And the teachers were not great. And so, I had an opportunity to not take math. I didn't even have to take math in my senior year at all. I don't think I took it in my junior year of high school, even. I was finished with math when I was a sophomore in high school. That was true. And I was able to take all these art classes. It was a very affluent high school and there were all these different things. I could take print making, photography, ceramics, painting, and drawing, and watercolor, just a class in etching. That was how privileged I was. And I knew how privileged I was. I know other people just had the art teacher, we had six art teachers. And they were all significant in different areas. Charles Eames came and spoke while we were in the high school, and his wife, Ray, and they talked about their work. It was like, "We're not having class today, Charles Eames is coming to talk to us." It was brilliant stuff. And so, I was so excited to do that. And I spent a lot of wonderful time with my other friends who were just brilliant. And I realized that being smart and erudite was really fun. And so, I was learning about classical music, and I was learning about writing, and we were in English classes and history classes together, and jazz. It was really great, because it reinforced that. It wasn't a weird, obtuse thing. None of them were gay, though. And then, I went to college. I decided to go to art school, and I went to the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. I applied to a bunch of different arts schools. I had sort of wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design, but I didn't get in there so I went to the Maryland Institute, which was good because everything that happened in my life sprung out of going to Maryland Institute. I studied Woodworking and Furniture Design. I was in the Woodworking Department. There was a small department. And I also double majored in art teacher education, because I wanted to be an art teacher and I came from a big history of people who were teachers, so I loved that idea. And I developed friends in my department and I made a very, very good friend who lived nearby, and we had almost all of our classes together. Her name was Christine. And she was straight but she was really, really wonderful. Oh, one of the things that happened to me. When I was a senior in high school I got pneumonia, and then I had encephalitis. And I came very close to dying. I was in a coma for about 10 days and it took me about a month to recover. I was in the hospital for three weeks and then I slowly recovered. And a lot of my friends thought I was going to die. They really thought that that was going to happen. And the doctors didn't know what to do. It came from being overtired and having a high fever when I had pneumonia. Because I was working too hard. And one of the things that made me decide was, first of all, I lost my memory for a while. I couldn't remember telephone numbers. I couldn't move my hands as well. It took me a little while to be able to walk again. Encephalitis is an inflammation of the sac around your brain. And I realized a couple of things that I didn't want to do drugs and I didn't want to drink alcohol because not being able to remember and not being in control and not being able to speak even, at times, or order my thoughts, was frightening. And I thought, "Why would I induce that into myself? I never want to do that." And I had done a little bit of that kind of stuff before that happened to me, I didn't decide to do drugs or other things because of that frightening thing that happened to me. And so, when I met Christine Gaffney, when I was in college, right in the first week that we met -- we had to be in apartments, they didn't have any dorms at Maryland Institute in those days, which was really cool because I was a grownup. All of a sudden I had an apartment and I had to do my own shopping, and I had to clean and do my laundry, and go off campus to do my laundry, and get my own phone hookup and stuff like that. In those days, we had landline phones. It was really fascinating to suddenly go from being a very suburban, privileged young person whose mom did all the laundry to suddenly being completely on my own, in a scary city, which wasn't that scary actually, I love Baltimore, and to be in a place where I had to make all of my own decisions every moment of the day. And also, when you're in art school, as I said, everything you do is scrutinized and criticized. That's what critiques are. Every single thing you do, you put it up in front of everybody and everybody can say rotten things about it. And so, you get a really thick skin from that. It's a great thing in a lot of ways because, like people say, "I don't want to read any comments about myself," I don't really care. If they're valid, and if it's a stupid comment, who cares. People get so uncomfortable." I've been in probably 500 critiques of my own work through college and graduate school. It's what you do. It's not that big a deal. You listen to it, and you take the best you can out of it. You try to figure out how to improve your work and then you let everything else go. And I learned that right from the beginning of college. And I think people who don't learn that end up having problems with the fact that not everybody loves everything they do, which happens all the time to people, and it's a shock to them all of a sudden. "Why isn't everybody saying everything I do is perfect?" Art school is extraordinarily competitive. There is no right answer. There's no, "I answered all the questions that were on the thing, and I got everything right." There's nothing. You're always in competition with everyone else around you, all the time. And there's a lot of technical skills that you have to learn that you come away with from art school. Some people come away from college and say, "Well, I didn't really learn anything in college other than maybe being able to write better or something, or to think more critically," but I can say things like, "Yeah, I learned how to use a table saw and bandsaw and how to carve things out of wood and how to bend wood and how to weld and how to develop pictures in a dark room, which nobody does anymore, and I know how to make prints and silk screen," I've got all these skills. And I already had a lot of woodworking skills because I had done that in high school and through art, and I'd learned how to learn power tools. I forgot to say that, Shirley Jankovich, which was the one I had the big crush on, she said to me, "You know since you're so interested in woodworking you should go talk to this little woodworker guy that does stuff for me for my house. His name is Luigi Cappotelli and he's a master craftsman. Why don't you go and talk to him?" So, I went to talk to Luigi, who was in the next town over. I was 15 actually, when I met him, and he asked me to be his apprentice. Or I asked him. We ended up where I was his apprentice. So, I worked for him. I got about 20 dollars a week for working for him, but I learned a lot about woodworking from him. I bought my first table saw from him, which I still have, and use all the time. That was almost 50 years ago. And it was a pre-war, Sears, cast-iron table saw. I've taken it with me. It's in the basement of our house right now. And I use it all the time. And it's a big heavy stationary table saw. And I bought it for 50 dollars from him, I think I worked it off. But he did not speak English well and I would listen to the words he did understand, and then, when rich people would come in to get him to do work, like to redo their kitchen or something, they would say ridiculous things to him that he couldn't understand at all, and he would look at me and I would translate it into the words he knew. Like, one woman came in one time and said, "I don't want it to look like it's just gerrymandered together." So, I turned to her and I said, "First of all, gerrymander means to take apart." And I said to him, "Do a good job." And he had no idea what she was talking about. But we used to go into New York and install things in people's fancy apartments, and he made cabinets. But he made them out of solid wood, and it was very interesting. So, I had that previous experience of working with him. And I had worked with tools with my dad. I actually created a job for myself when I was in high school, where I would repair and build things for people. I'd build cabinets for people, and people would bring me pieces of furniture that they wanted me to fix and stuff. And I did that for years. I did it when I was in college, too. When I went home, I did it that summer as my summer job. So, I was in woodworking with Richard Breidenbach, who was my teacher. And there was another guy there named [Greg Comstock?], who was a part-time teacher. And he ended up getting another job at Jamestown Community College, which he didn't like, and after a couple of years after I finished my graduate degree, Greg Comstock said, "Why don't you apply for this job? I think you should do this job at State University of New York." And by then, I had my Master of Fine Arts in woodworking furniture design. So, while I was in Maryland, they had a GSA in my last year when I was in college. And so that would have been in 1979. But the people in it were so weird that I would see these people and be like, "I don't think so." I didn't know anybody in the group. But my pal Christine, I came out to her, and I told her about the crushes that I'd had. She had a boyfriend that we knew and stuff. And we had really serious talks about this. And we were really good friends, and we're still good friends. I just talked to her. And in those days, she said, "You know, you need to go out. Let's go to the Hippo." So, the Hippo was a gay men's bar, and it was pretty near the college. We used to go there at lunch, so nobody was there. I said, "This is okay because it's gay, but it's all guys." And so, one time we decided that we were going to go to Club Mitchell. So, Club Mitchell was the biggest East Coast lesbian bar. And it was right in Baltimore. And it was down by the docks. It had little cameras, it was all dark around it, and you'd drive around. First, we went the day before to figure out where it was because it was an industrial site there that you could never figure out where it was. So, we went there. The problem with going with a female friend is that, in general, women will not be as available to you if you're with another woman, which was a problem for me because I was looking for a date, bad. And I had really not been around a lot of women that were identified as lesbians. So, we go to the thing and it's just like this block building with a door, and a little light, and a sign about this big that said Club Mitchell on it. And one time I said to Faye Jacobs, "Did you ever go to Club Mitchell?" she said, "Bonnie and I had our first date there." Every woman in that area, women from DC would go there because you could go there very safely. This would have been like 1976, '77. I had a little car. So, we drove down. It was near Fells Point in Baltimore. And we went to the door, you'd need to knock, press a button, and then they'd look at you to be sure, first of all, that you were a woman, or a flaming gay man. They might let a flaming gay man in. But this was a club, so they didn't have to let other people in. And they'd look at you and then they'd buzz you in. And we'd go into this thing, it's an enormous, big open space. And there's a million dykes in there. It was just wonderful. And it was cowgirl night, so they were giving away for some wonderful reason, free cowboy hats. I still have that hat, as a matter of fact. This was many, many years ago. And Christine said, "Well, this is interesting." Because sometimes you could go to a bar, there'd be six women there. This was hundreds. There were probably 300 women there. The problem was, we didn't know anybody and that can often be an uncomfortable situation. But we sat at the bar. Christine used to drink quite a bit, and I didn't drink at all. I never drank, and plus I was driving, so that was fine. Well, you could drink when you were over 18 in Baltimore. You could drink beer or wine. I didn't drink. We saw these women and they were playing this music. Have I told this story before? This is a great story. So, I look across, and there's this row of women sitting on a wall, and there's a big dance floor but nobody's dancing, people are all shy and stuff. And this one woman turns to this other woman and she leans down, and she kisses her neck. And I think I came close to passing out. It was so hot. And I said to Christine, "If I never have to see anything else this will be enough to jerk off to for the rest of my life." It was so great. But I have to say that in college I worked so hard. I'm still tired from college. I'm really still tired from graduate school. There were days in graduate school that I didn't sleep for days, for three or four days I just didn't sleep. And in college I never had time to go out. Maybe after eleven o'clock, I'd have a couple of hours. I guess that's the way college is now, except I had to get up early for class, because our classes started at eight. And I was a teaching assistant for art history, too. And lots of things happening. I met a couple of women, the two other women in my department who are still my friends now, particularly Barbara Miller who is a wonderful person. She lives in Pennsylvania. And it was great to have other women in the department. There weren't very many people in the woodworking department, and when I graduated, it was just me and one other guy. But when I started in the woodworking department, when I was a sophomore, there were two other women who were just a riot. And they were great woodworkers, much better than I, and I learned a great deal from them and they were really free about sexuality, although they were not lesbians. But I remember Barbara saying to Samantha one time, and they were listening to somebody else and one of them said to the other -- they heard some other women say, "I've slept with about 15 or 16 guys," and Barbara said to Samantha, "Remember when you could still count?" It was so great that they had both had so many boyfriends, Samantha had actually been one of the first five women that had gone to an all-boys school. She said, "They used to line up at my door. And they would try so hard." It was a riot. This was before the AIDS days. In fact, it was right at the beginning of the AIDS days. And we did know other gay men. A lot of them died who were young gay men at the college at that time. Barbara knew a number of them and made their quilt squares and stuff. And they were great woodworkers and I kept in touch with them all the way through, and couple of other people and stuff. Anyway. Then, I decided that I didn't want to be just an art teacher in school, I wanted to be a college teacher. And I used to say, "I don't want to have to clean up vomit from a first grader. I just really want to be a college teacher." And that was smart. I think I did want to be that. But the other thing that happened when I was in college was I met an English teacher named Jean Ruben, and Jean became -- I had her for one class, and she lived right near me in Bolton Hill. I had a wonderful little apartment that I paid 95 dollars a month for in Bolton Hill that was two blocks from the school and in a beautiful view. It was a funky, little, weird place. It was tiny. But it was right in the middle of Bolton Hill, which is lovely. And it was in a building next door to where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas would visit. One time I was reading about them visiting F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived next door, in the apartment building next door. I'm like, "That was there." It was pretty great. And Somerset Maugham lived in that neighborhood and stuff, and the Kohn sisters. It was a great area to live in. Very arty. And Jean, I got to know her very well. And she was about 30 years older than I. And she also was not a lesbian as far as she knew. I think she would have been happier had she been a lesbian, or if she had been able to express that in her life. But I remained friends with her. I'm still friends with her now. She's in the nursing home now and she doesn't remember who I am. She's 92, now. But she was extraordinarily, wonderful to me all my life, and all the rest of my life. And she, I have to say, I'm sure she knew that I had a terrific crush on her and she didn't really dissuade me from that, but she never acted on it. And once in a while if I got a little too frisky, she would say, "Just cool your jets on this." Which is too bad, frankly, because I just wrote a little thing in Gay Journal, it was about coming out. And I remember I was in her apartment -- in those days nobody thought anything about having students in their apartments. I slept in her apartment. I used to come in, it would be so hot. This is so unbelievable, but when I worked in woodworking, one of the things we used to say is, "If you're not wearing work shoes and long pants and usually long sleeves, you're not there to work. You cannot work in woodworking in shorts. It's too dangerous. And you can't wear flip-flops because you can really, really hurt yourself." So, I always had long pants on. And heavy long pants. I would go to her apartment in the summer -- because I always went to summer school until I think one summer I wasn't there. I had an apartment, so I would stay there in the summer and take classes and then make money and stuff like that. And I'd go into her apartment. No one had air conditioning, and this is Baltimore. So, it'd be 100 degrees. One time it was 100 degrees in my apartment and I had a fan. I just threw water on myself all night. It was so hot. I go to Jean's apartment and I'd have a big, long shirt on, and then I'd have these heavy pants, and she'd say, "Do you want to take your pants off? Go ahead and do that." And I would do it. I would actually do that in my professor's house. I would go to her apartment and take off my pants. And Christine would say, "I can't believe that you can't see what this is like. You went to Jean Ruben's." I called her Ms. Ruben. It was just ridiculous. But she was wonderful to me and she helped me through lots and lots of things. And when I went to graduate school, I had a hard time communicating with the guy to get into graduate school and she told me exactly what to do. She said, "You need to call him up and this is what you need to say. He's not going to be upset if you just call him," because I hadn't heard back from the college that I was in, and she said, "He's the professor, not the college. They don't get to decide this. He told you you were going to be in the program. Call him up and make it happen." And she really explained that to us. She was very erudite. She had a subscription to the opera and to a couple of other music things, and she would take me. She'd have two tickets and she would take me and we'd go to those things. It was lovely. She was very, very sweet to me. When I went to graduate school, I would visit her. I would come back to go to my parents, it was so far. It was in Terre Haute, Indiana, and I would come back and stay with her, I'd stay overnight, and then I drive the rest of the way because it was an 18-hour drive and I'd often had my cat with me. And so, we would just stop there and stuff. She was very great to me. So, one time I was with her in her apartment and I was fixing a lamp for her because she couldn't do anything stuff like that. So, I was rewiring this lamp, which is one of my skills. And putting a weight in it and doing some stuff. And she was on the phone to her mother who I also knew, she had a very problematic relationship with her mother. And I fixed a lamp for her one time, too. And so, then she gets off the phone, and so we're just talking, and she said, "Who are some of your other people that are your friends?" And I said, "Well, in the building that I live in, when I was an undergraduate, I got to know these people," and she said, "Oh, I know Jay Walter," who was a Facebook friend -- thank goodness for Facebook -- and she said, "Now, he's an attractive guy. Are you attracted to him?" And I said, "Well, I'm gay." And she said, "Oh." And I said, "No, I don't think I'd be attracted to him." And she said, "No, you don't have to explain anymore. I get it. You're gay. Okay, fine." Well, she had a lot of gay friends, including other professors, which I'll get to in a minute. She knew lots of gay people. So, one of the things she told me was that -- people are always saying things to me like this. She went to Smith, and when she graduated right after World War II, she went to Paris, because she could speak French fluently and she wanted to just be an erudite young woman in Paris. She was very young. And she was not particularly attractive. I have to say that she's not conventionally attractive in any way. She had a great, sexy voice. But she absolutely was not something that some straight man would go, "Wow, what a babe." Ever. But she met these guys in a café, and she said, "Well, yeah, I have an English degree and I'm a poet." She wrote poetry. I published a book of her poetry. She's telling me the story, "I met these guys and they wanted me to come and work in this little magazine that they were starting up because they said, 'This is great,' and I wanted to do because this is a poetry writing magazine, and I wanted to do it because I want to be around these writers. I didn't know who they were and they weren't famous but I wanted to be around these writers." And they wanted her to be there because she spoke fluently and she could order the food. And they actually said that to her. And she could also type really fast. She was also a great poet. And I'm like, "Who were the guys who were starting it?" And she said, "It was Zero Magazine," which you should look up, by the way. "The literary magazine Zero." And she said, "There were famous people there," and she named a couple of guys that started. And then she said, "Then there was William Carlos Williams, and the main guy was James Baldwin." I'm like, "So, you're hanging out with James Baldwin every day?" So, she told me all about him and how she thought that really the hardest thing in his life was that he was gay. So, she's hanging out this them. She had all these stories about things. She came back to the United States and then she went to graduate school at Columbia to get her masters, and she was working as a secretary and doing typing, and helping people write papers, and stuff like that. And she said, "We used to go out to jazz clubs. I had a friend that was dating a guy in a jazz band. And we were in New York." This was the '50s in New York, and my parents were there in the '50s in New York, too, and it was all exciting and fun. And she said, "We went to this jazz club, and the musicians, two of them came down and sat with us, her boyfriend, and then they introduced me to the other guy, and his name was Charlie. Charlie Parker, do you know him? 'The Bird?'" And I said, "Yeah, I know who Charlie Parker is. Shit." And I said, "Well, was he good at playing the jazz?" And she said, "Oh, yeah. He was really great. He could play really, really fast." But she never really understood about pop culture. I don't think she could name the Beatles. She was just sort of like that and she would say things like that, all the time. So, she's hanging out with Charlie Parker in jazz clubs in the 1950s, and after she'd written with James Baldwin and was pals with them when she was 19. So, she had fascinating stories. And I wanted to listen to her. A lot of other people didn't appreciate this stuff as much. A lot of other people my age didn't always know who she was talking about because this was the '70s and they didn't know who Charlie Parker was. I was really into jazz. I had his records, for heaven's sakes. And I went to her poetry readings and I was just a groupie, totally a fan. But I continued to be friends with her. Anyway, I said that stuff about coming out to her and him and I said in this little story that I wrote in the Gay Journal, I wish I could say that then we just had this hot little moment together, or more than a hot moment together. But that's not what happened. Instead, we became really good friends. And since I lost my mother when I was very young, I mean, she stopped really understanding things by the time I was 25. So, that was just a few years later where she couldn't really -- and she was wonderful. She was a wonderful, interesting, fun, sweet person, but she lost her memory and that's everything. So, then there was Jean and she was great because also, my parents were terrible at helping me make decisions about my life. They'd be like, "Well, what are you going to do?" If I had a hard thing they'd say, "Well, what are you going to do?" They'd never say, "I think you should do this." I would say to Jean, "What do you think I should do?" I would call her and say, "What do you think I should do about this serious thing that happened?" And she would say, "I think we should think about these things and let's talk about what this means." So, one of the things I found so attractive about her was she was a single woman. She was on her own. She didn't have a boyfriend. She had had relationships with people but she would constantly tell me -- or I asked her several times because -- she was 48 when I met her. I would ask her when she was in her fifties, "Do you have regrets about your life?" And she said, "No, not really. I'm happy with my life. I like my life." I would ask her things like, when I was at State University of New York, I suddenly found out that they were going to cut out my program. And I'd been teaching there for six years. I was in a relationship. It wasn't going very well but I owned a house. I was tenured, so I had no expectation that this was going to happen all of a sudden. I had built the program up to something very significant, and all of a sudden they were just going to cut out the program. It had to do with stupid financial circumstances, and not the least reason was because I was a lesbian. And clearly, there were some issues that they had with that. They didn't persecute me, but there was absolutely nobody that was going to step up for this program, and it was too bad, because it was a jewel in that college's cap. But I remember saying to Jean, "Everything is falling apart. This is what I've worked for all my life and now I'm not going to have this." And she said to me, "You weren't going to stay in this place, in Western New York. This was a five-year plan. You were going to stay there for five years. Now you're going to go on another adventure. That's okay." I was going to move with my partner, who had moved to Philadelphia. So, I moved to Philadelphia. We'd stayed in an apartment for a while. She was in Philly and I was there with her, and things weren't working out. And now I said to Jean, "This is really not working out. Sasha and I are going to break up. I do have some money from my TIAA-CREF fund that I could take out. It's quite a bit of money. And so, I think what I want to do," we had owned a house which we'd sold, and I had a little bit of money from that, about 8,000 dollars, which was quite a bit of money in those days. It turned out I had about 30,000 dollars in my CREF thing, which was a lot of money. So, I said, "I think I should think about buying a house because if I have a house, even if I don't have a job, if I have a house, I'll have a place to live. I can piss this away really easily if I just use this on rent." So, she said, "Well, Wayne is in Allentown." And he was the partner of Arthur Miller who was a friend of ours, who was another teacher, who was a very good friend of Jean's. And I knew him, he'd been one of my teachers. And I'd done some work for him at his house. And she said, "Wayne is in Allentown. Why don't you go and talk to him? He's a nice guy. He's a sweet guy." I said, "I've met him." So, anyway. I did go and see him and he was wonderful to me. And he was lonely. And he said, "I want you to move here. If you fix my stereo, you can store all your stuff in the basement. I'll help you find a new house and then I'll help you fix it up," because he did that all the time. So, I looked at the back of the stereo, turned the on switch on, and then he went, "Yay," and then he helped me. I moved all my stuff because I'd broken up with my partner at the same time my mother had gone into a nursing home because she had Alzheimer's disease, which was very devastating. My dad was moving. So, I had to get all of my stuff out of the house. But I didn't have a house anymore. So, that was very tough. I packed up a lot of stuff that I wanted to have but it was very complicated. So, I really needed a house. My family needed a house. We needed a place to go for holidays. My sister was in the process of moving, as well. She lived in Connecticut but she was between relationships, too, and she didn't really end up having another serious relationship after that time. And I ended up talking to Wayne and moving to Allentown, and really, that turned out to be a good idea. And it was because Jean told me to do that. She said, "Go and do that. Don't worry about stuff that's happened in the past. That wasn't the place for you. It's okay." I think she was absolutely right. And she was saying, "You're young and you don't have to worry about that." So, what I said in the Gay Journal was that when she became older, she was wonderful to Trish. She was absolutely terrific. Every time that she was still cognizant when I would talk about Trish and how long we've been together, because Trish and I have been together for 33 years now, but I'd say to Jean, "Trish and I just had our twentieth anniversary or our tenth anniversary," and she'd go, "I'm just so happy that you found her. I'm so glad that you were able to hook up with her and have this relationship. It's such a good relationship. I'm so proud of you for doing that." And we would go and she came to visit us several times and stuff. But at the end of her life, she was in this little apartment in Baltimore that she'd been in all of this time. It was a condo and she owned it. She began to clearly forget things. We'd go to see her and she'd be walking on a street and she'd say, "I don't recognize this street," and it'd be her street that she'd been walking on for the last 30 years. And Jean's brother took care of her, and still does take care of her, he's five years younger. He said to me, "My wife and I are going to go to Europe and we're worried about Jean because I'm visiting her every week." And I said, "Okay, I'll visit her every week while you're away. So, I'll just go and visit her. I'll be sure she has enough food and stuff like that." So, we did that for actually a couple of months. But it was very apparent that she was at risk. She was over 85 by then. So, she would lose things. Here's a tip, don't buy black things for your parents because if they put a black thing down, you can't see it. If you put it on another black thing, you can't see it. Don't get a black address book. She would call me up, hysterical, because she couldn't find her address book. And she said, "I don't want that bright fluorescent green one." "Yeah, well, that's what we need to have, now." It's true for me, now. See? I have my phone, because my black phone I lost all the time. So, she called me up and she said, "I'm afraid," and I said, "Well, just talk to me." And she felt better after I talked to her and then she said, "Can you call me up now and then?" Well, I was calling her frequently, but I said, "I am going to call you every day for the rest of your life, so you can be calm. I'm going to call you every day for the rest of your life." And I did that for the next six years. And then she stopped knowing who I was and it was scaring her that she didn't know, so I had to stop. So, she's alive now, during COVID, she can't see her brother, she's in a nursing home, I haven't spoken to her in a year, it's a terrible situation. And I miss her so much. But she also can't remember what she's saying from the beginning of the sentence to the end. So, it's not like she's really there. But when she was in her late eighties, she began to express to me that she was not really happy. She did have a lot of regrets. And one of the big regret she had her life was that there was never anyone who wanted to team up with her, in her life. And she said that to me several times. And I remember saying to Christine, "Jean thinks nobody ever cared about her." And Christine said, "Well, why don't you tell her that you cared about her?" And I said, "I don't want to scare her, especially now." But finally, Christine said, "She's not going to remember it anyway," which is true. So, I did say it to her and when she said that again, I said, "You know, Jean, I would have been with you. I would have been with you as long as you wanted." And she paused for a long time, and then she said, "You mean you would have teamed up with me?" And I said, "Yeah, I would have." And then there was another long pause and then she said, "I was too old for you." And I guess she knew that. Maybe there was a possibility that that could have happened, but she had enough integrity to recognize that she was way too old for me. I have to say that she was a little jealous of Trish, particularly at the beginning, and she acted as though she and Trish were the same age, which is really not true. She's about 30 years older than I am, Trish is 12 years older. Not quite the same. But she thought, "Well, wait a minute." But anyway. So, she was wonderful to me through all of that time. In the meantime, going back to a little bit, when I went to Indiana, and I went to study under [Allen Friedman?] who turned out to be a complete asshole and ended up leaving after the first year, which meant that I didn't have a mentor while I was there, and there weren't any other woodworking teachers, so the people in ceramics who didn't understand anything about wood, there was nobody to teach me everything. And then, they got some part-time guys, and then they got another guy that was kind of an idiot. And everything about Terre Haute, Indiana was horrible. It's a horrible place. It smells bad. The water tastes like rotten clams. The college, they had a very good art department in a lot of ways. They had some big-name artists there. They had a few important people. They had a wonderful art history department and two of the art history teachers were very, very, very good to me. I was very indebted to them. And I minored in art history, and I teach art history classes now, and I taught art history when I was at State University of New York, too. so, I got a lot out of working with them. And one of them was gay, and he was wonderful. He was one of the first people who a gay professor that I came out with who really, really supported me. When I went to Terre Haute, I had some friends there. It was so cutthroat in the department that we couldn't even be friends with each other. The other graduate students just couldn't be friends with each other. It was hard. Some people left because of that stress. Some guys in the sculpture department left and just bought a pizza parlor. They just couldn't handle the stress. It was terribly stressful. I just wanted to get my MFA and get out of there. And it was very hard. It was the kind of high-level hazing that you have in the worst hazing circumstances in graduate school. And it was just awful. And I think of that as some of the worst years of my life. But two good things happened. One of them was that I got a wonderful little kitten that I had for 18 years, and the other was that I came out and I started to have really great sex with women, which was really fun. And there were two gay bars there, one of them was predominantly a women's bar, and there was a Gay-Straight Alliance there that I worked with. That was in the '70s. I did programs and stuff like that. So, I really have legitimate credentials that go back to 1979 when I was setting up gay awareness things at Indiana State. And I met a couple of people there in the gay community, in the lesbian community particularly, who were very, very interesting and fun to be around, and supportive. And I think I told you this story before, but after my second review of my work, I was just ripped apart by a bunch of professors who didn't know anything about woodworking, and didn't believe that people should make furniture, they thought they should make sculpture. I was in the furniture department. It was ridiculous. But I had had a horrible review. And I went to the bar, it was a Tuesday night. It had been very, very hard because I went to set up my work in a place where they could look at it, and it turned out that the elevators to take the work to the gallery didn't work, so I had to have another friend help me carry all the stuff up like two flights of stairs. It was pieces of furniture. It was really, really hard. And then I had this review and the things that the people said didn't make any sense, like, "Why aren't you making sculpture?" I'm like, "Because I'm in the furniture department." "Well, why should you?" because they all hated Allen Friedman. He was gone. And they didn't have anything to say. It was awful. There were rats in the building where we were working. I have an irrational fear of rodents, too, so that was very, very serious for me. So, I had this terrible review and I went to the bar, it was called J &amp ; J's this little bar. And I didn't drink, so I couldn't really going get drunk. But I went to the bar. I just wanted to be around queers. And I sat down and there were two women there. One of them I'd had a little relationship with, and the other one I was friends with. And so, it was Debbie and Janet. And they came over. And they don't know each other that well but they did know each other because everybody knew everybody in the bar. And they came over and they sat with me at the bar, and there wasn't anybody else in there. There was about six women in there. It was about eight o'clock on a Tuesday. But they were there. And they came over and they said, "What's wrong?" And I said, "I just had a terrible time at the college." They were both townies. So, I said, "You have these things called reviews and they come in and they talk about your work and they were just horrible to me. And there was nothing supportive. And they were talking about things that didn't make any sense. And they were just showing off for each other who could be meaner to me," it was really like that. And there were a number of other instances where that kind of stuff happened in front of the art history teachers who would later say to me, "Why are they treating you that way?" And I said, "Because they hate Allen Friedman. They hate him and they want to make my life miserable. Plus, I'm a dyke." And a lot of the students were having affairs with professors because that was a way that you could get good grades. And that actually happened, clearly happened, with one person who's my Facebook friend, now. But she had a relationship with several of the other professors, and one guy who was a professor actually raped a student, and all the other professors stuck up for him. It was just horrible stuff like that. I couldn't wait to get out of there. This was in my first year. So, Janet and Debbie come over and Janet says to me, she's a big dykey woman, she goes, "Do you want me and Debbie to go over to their house and beat them up?" And I just laughed because they weren't kidding. They were really going to go over. They would have turned one of their cars over. They would have done that for me. And I thought, "Okay, these are my people. These are the people who understand me. These are the people who I can count on. I cannot count on these people at the college. I can count on these lesbians. They are here for me because we're sharing this thing." And I suddenly felt a totally different feeling about this. So, I did go to that bar, or one of the bars -- there was one called Mothers, and there was one called J &amp ; J, and Mothers was a more mixed bar, it had more men and lots of drag shows and stuff. And then the other one that I went to was this little corner bar, but it had a dance floor. And I would try to go every Friday night. I would work until about nine o'clock, then I'd go out to dinner at this little, tiny Vietnamese restaurant that was in Brazil, Indiana. We don't call it Brazil, because we don't want it to get mixed up with the country, they would say. So, I would go to Brazil, Indiana, and I'd go to this tiny little restaurant that was in a gas station, an old, converted gas station. They had wonderful food and I'd spend 3.98 on this really wonderful dinner. And then, I'd go to the bar and I'd hang out there and I'd try and pick somebody up and have sex with them, which would make me a lot happier if that could happen. And it did happen quite a few times. But I also really decided that I wanted to be in a relationship. And my first coming out was meeting somebody at a bar and going home with them and just praying that this was going to go well because I hadn't been with any other women. And I was thinking that this was why I wasn't having good relationships with men, so to speak, let's say satisfying relationships with men. And I thought, "I'm really hoping this is going to work with this woman because otherwise I'm going to have to go to The Trouble With Angels and be in the nun thing." So, it did. And it was really great. And I thought, "Okay, this is the right thing. This is the right thing." And I had a relationship with her with for about five months and it was pretty serious, and then she dumped me for someone else. And that was really painful because it was the first time that had happened. But I also recognized that I had done the wrong thing in some parts of the relationship. I don't always think about that as a relationship that counted that much, but at the time, it seemed really devastating. I remember going to Charles Meyer's house, he was my art history professor, such a brilliant guy, lives in New York now, and I just came out to him and I said, "I was dating this person, she dumped me, but I want to go on another date, I want to have her to come over for dinner." And he goes, "Oh, let me." And he was a great chef. He started getting me all this food. I was in his apartment and he was setting up all this stuff for me and he's going, "Take these, this is good, this is canned white asparagus, but it's really hot and it's aphrodisiac-like, and you can have that." He was wonderful to me. He was so adorable. That didn't work out either, but I ended up having somebody who did contact me. In fact, I was at a party of lesbians and this woman sat down next to me. And I had met her before at the GSA. And she was very young. She was an undergraduate. I think she was a sophomore at the time. She was way too young for me at that time, for a lot of reasons. But she said, "I want you to meet my roommate. She saw you on campus. She really wants you to go out with her and she's going to write you a letter," because in those days, we wrote people letters all the time. And I wrote Jean a letter every couple of days. In fact, when my friend Christine was on junior year abroad in England, I wrote her a letter every day, sometimes twice a day. And she said, "My roommate here is so jealous because we get two postal deliveries and I get like a letter from you in each delivery." And she was writing me that way, too. I kept them all. I have stacks of those letters. But anyway, this woman, who's also named Jean, Jean Church, and she wrote me this beautiful letter to ask me to go to a play. And it was The Good Woman of Setzuan, it was a college play. She'd actually watched it already, which is typical for a lesbian to do, go to the play to be sure it's okay and then ask them to go to the play. "I saw the movie, it's all right. Now I'll take her to the same movie." And we went out. I sort of messed up on that date because I thought she really wanted to have sex and that didn't seem like something she wanted to rush right into. I ended up writing her a letter back and saying, "I apologize for that, let's go out again," and so we did go out again. We went out a couple more times, and then we started a relationship that lasted about two and a half years. So, what happened was at the end of my second year in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant, I taught art history, and I done that for the time. And I only had a couple of credits left. I think I had one credit left that I had to fulfill. I'd actually, during the time of working on my MFA, gotten letters in the mail. I'd get this letter that goes, "Now you have an MS," because I just took enough credits. And then, "Now you have enough credits for an MA in Fine Art." So, now I had a master's degree in Fine Art. I'm like, "Whoa." But my MFA was a 90-degree credit and that had a lot of reviews and stuff. So, I was still going through the reviews. But I had a legitimate masters. So, Greg Comstock, who was the guy who taught woodworking, he was the other woodworking teacher, not the main guy, but the part-time teacher in Baltimore, said, "I'm in this job in Jamestown, New York. I'm teaching woodworking here. I'm leaving the job. I hate it here. I hate it here because the clouds are too low." That's why he hated it there. And for a couple of other reasons, but one of the reasons was they wanted him to have a masters, and he didn't want to go and get a masters. He didn't want to do it. And he said, "I think you should come here. I think you should apply for this job. I think you could do it. And you have a masters." So, I applied for the job. And during that time one of my other art history teachers, Harriet Kaplow, who's my Facebook friend, although she's well into her nineties now, said, "I'm going away for the summer and my 15-year-old daughter," who's now a Buddhist priest, "is going to be here alone all summer and I would like you to come and house sit for me and live in my house, you and Jean," because Jean and I were together then. And so, I gave up my apartment and we did that. And I was about to graduate soon, I had a couple more credits to do, but I knew that I was going to have to make some decisions about what I wanted to do. But I got a call that I was high up for this job in Jamestown. And they flew me out there, I guess, to interview for the job. And I got it. I got the job in Jamestown. And I was very excited about that because I didn't know what else I was going to do. And that's exactly what I wanted to do. So, I went there and started to teach there. Jean and I drove there, and Greg said that the woodworking department was in a separate building that was actually sort of a big garage that had been converted into a studio at a building that the college owned that was a house, actually, where they put people up and had meetings and stuff. It was a beautiful old Victorian house that had this enormous garage thing that had been converted into the woodworking studio. And Jamestown, New York, has a history of woodworking factories. It was the biggest furniture producer at the turn of the century. At the turn of the 19th century, they had 119 woodworking factories there in those days. And so, 1981 I started the job, they wanted to try to revive that. And they still had a lot of factories there. So, I said to Jean, "I got this job, let's drive out there and then you can fly, I'll pay for you to fly back to Indiana." But Greg said that he was living in his office because there was actually an office upstairs in this building that had a full bathroom. It was a nice big space and it actually had been an apartment. It didn't have a kitchen but it had a place for one, and he said, "My bed is there, the mattress is there, bring some sheets and you can just stay there. I'll mail you the key." I don't even know if this was a legitimate thing to do, but I lived in that. So, Jean came with me, we stayed there a couple of nights. And then she left, and then I lived in that office and taught downstairs. I started in August and all the way through October, I did that. Until one day, when one of my part-time teachers was teaching downstairs, and I had the worst cramps ever, and I thought, "I don't want to be living upstairs when they're making power tool noises." Also, I was beginning to be afraid because I couldn't really lock the doors to my office and people would come in to clean the building. And I was nervous. And I actually jammed pieces of wood to hold them, because I didn't really feel -- I could hear people downstairs and it was creepy. So, I ended up renting a house. And then after Jean graduated, she came to live with me for about a semester, and then she got a job. She was a recreation major, which is kind of a funny thing, but it was like wildlife and she did camp stuff. That's what her degree was in. And they had a big program at Indiana State for that. So, she did her internship on Golden Pond. It was actually at Squam Lake in Vermont. And I visited her there. We were still together and then she lived with me for about six months, and then she got a job at that place, so she went there. And while she was there, she wrote me a Dear Jane letter and said, "I can't do this anymore." And part of it was that she had a lot of really serious issues from child abuse that she didn't want to work on. She just didn't want to talk about them and she didn't want to deal with them and they were affecting our relationship very seriously. And I kept saying, "You're in a place where you can get free therapy. Why are you not doing that?" And she just didn't want to do it. So, we broke up. And that was hard. I had a very good friend who's still my very good friend, I was just talking to her yesterday, who was another new professor at the college when I started there. And I remember telling her about that. She was straight but I remember telling her about that. And she was very, very supportive. She said, "She's not the right one for you." And then soon after that, about six months after that, I met another woman, Sasha Hovack. So, I dated some women. And then, I met another woman who was the head of the United Cerebral Palsy offices there in Jamestown, and we had this group of women that were meeting each other, and there was a women's domestic violence hotline, a lot of lesbians worked there. She was very interesting. I asked her on a date and she was much more excited about the sex, so that was really fun for that beginning of that date. But we were really not ultimately suited for each other. I think we were together for just about four years. We owned a house and it was quite a serious relationship. But when my job was coming to an end, because I talked about this, they cut my job out of the program, she had been working at United Cerebral Palsy then, that job ended and she was working at a big hospital in Erie, and she was commuting from Jamestown, which was a long way. So, she'd actually stay there for three days out of the week, and then she'd drive back. It was a good three, two-and-a-half-hour drive. And very rural drive. And Jamestown is a snow belt area, so it's very hard to drive around. There wasn't any highway to get there. But she was also in a relationship with someone else that I didn't know about. And she's still with that person today, which is interesting. She said she wasn't, but she was. She was living in that woman's house. And so, she got a job in Philadelphia and I moved all of our stuff to Philadelphia, and we sold our house in Jamestown. I moved every single one of her things, including the refrigerator, upstairs, and then she let me know that it was not working out, after I moved all of her crap and all of her huge pieces of furniture. My pieces of furniture, which I made, come apart for easy transport. Her pieces of furniture were just ridiculously huge. So, all this tough stuff was happening. I was in a bad relationship, my mother was going into a nursing home for Alzheimer's disease, I lost my job that I thought was going to be the most perfect job ever, I didn't have any money, I had to move to Philadelphia, that relationship didn't work out. It was a lot of tough stuff. And I was just turning 30. Sasha and I had gone to a party. We knew other lesbians in Western New York and some of them had moved to Eastern New York. And so, we went to a party and we met a group of women, and one of them was Trish. And I was still with Sasha then, but our friend Cheryl, who had the party, when Sasha and I broke up, Cheryl said to Trish, "Liz and Sasha broke up." Oh, and by the way, when I saw Trish, she was so hot I couldn't even look at her. My heart was beating so hard. And at one point, it was a Fourth of July party, so we'd had dinner, we had hot dogs and stuff, and then we were going to go to see the fireworks, and I maneuvered that she would go in the car with me and Sasha because we were all going to go and we didn't want to take all the cars. So, she was sitting in the front and I was sitting behind her and I go, "This woman is so attractive. I can't stand it." And I knew that this relationship between me and Sasha was not working out. I didn't know that she was actually seeing someone else. So, we both knew that this was not working. So, when I went back to Philadelphia because we had gone to New Jersey to this party, and then we were back in Philly at the apartment, and I had applied for a job to be the gallery director, or assistant gallery director at Moore College of Art. And I was very high up. And the person who was the gallery director said, "I absolutely want you to do this job." So, I thought I was going to get this job. And then she said, "We don't have any other good candidates. You're the one. You've got all the credentials." And then all of a sudden she called me up and said, "I'm really sorry, but they want to hire somebody else." I think it turned out to be the wife of a professor in the department, which had been typical in that situation. So, I was really devastated because I hadn't had a job. The money that we got from the house that we sold was running out. And Sasha's rent was pretty high and I was paying half the rent and I didn't have any prospects for jobs. And also, I knew this relationship wasn't working. So, I said to her, "I know that you're not in love with me anymore." And she said, "No, I'm not. I'm not." And I said, "Okay. Let me stay here until I figure out what to do." And she said, "Of course." And we're friends now. It wasn't it a horrible relationship breakup, except for that I had to move the refrigerator and I had paid for half of it, but that was the worst thing. There are worse things in the world. I mean it really wasn't bad. And so, I ended up, then, soon afterwards finding out that I could take all my CREF money out. So, suddenly I had 30,000 dollars, plus I had about 7,000 dollars leftover from our house sale. That's pretty much money. And I said to Sasha, "I'm going to buy a house," and she said, "I don't think that's a good idea, you're going to use all your money for that." I said, "Yeah, but I can always make money. The thing is I don't have any place to live. And I've got all this stuff. I don't want to just move into an apartment." I never wanted to live in an apartment again. We'd already owned a house. I really liked that. I had all my woodworking tools. My parents' house I couldn't move. My mother's in a nursing home, my father's going to move into a condo, I just didn't have any options. And I had huge power tools that were still in Jamestown that we had to move. I moved them into a friend's, Barbara Miller's house, who I had gone to college with. She had a big place in Pike County, in Milford, Pennsylvania. She was a woodworker and she had a big, big space and I said, "Can I move my tools?" She had an enormous warehouse thing in the back of her property that she did her woodworking in. She was a professional woodworker and I said, "Can I move all my wood?" I had wood, even. And she said, "Yeah, move everything in here." I moved my boat there. I had a sunfish boat. It's still there, unfortunately, in the woods with trees growing through it. But I did all of that stuff. I had all sorts of crap that I had to take care of, and Barbara really stood up for that. She let me use her van to move the stuff there. And I ended up having that money and then that was the thing where I met Wayne and I said, "I'm going to buy this house in Jamestown," and I did. And we still live in that house. And I had met Trish. So, Cheryl told Trish that Sasha and I had broken up. And then Cheryl told me that she told Trish that and I said, "What did Trish say?" And Cheryl said, "Trish said Sasha's an idiot." And I went, "Whoa, all right." And then, I got a letter from Trish, remember letters. No, Cheryl asked me to go on a double date with Trish and Cheryl and her partner, at that time, Donna. And they're not together anymore. But Cheryl has been in a long relationship with another person that Trish happened to have worked with in New York State, because there's really only about 100 lesbians in the world. So, we ended up going on this date. We went to a play in the Village, and then we went out to dinner. And then Trish and I, we were walking around, we went to take the train back to Cheryl and Donna's house. I owned my house then in Allentown. And Trish and I sat in the Penn Station and we quizzed each other on everything we could imagine for about an hour. What do you think about living apart? What do you think about being closeted? Because both of us had to have been closeted because of our other relationships and we really hated it. And she was really strong about that. And she said, "What do you think about long-distance relationships?" She said, "I don't believe in them." And we talked about politics, and we talked about kids, and we talked about all this different stuff, really fast, like speed dating in one date. And that was great. And then, Cheryl said that she was going to go to New Hope. And it was near Valentine's Day. I ended up going, and she said, "Trish is going to come." And so, I got to hang out with Trish some more. And Trish had made me a beautiful loaf of bread and I had a really sexy little present to give her, which was a little Christmas ornament that was grapes. It was old. It was an old German ornament. It was beautiful. And Trish said, "I took one look at that and said, 'Okay.'" So, then she wrote me a letter, and invited me on a date. And she said that I had to contact her. She didn't tell me her telephone number or her address or anything. And I said, "You know you didn't do that." She said, "I expected you to work for it." And I did. Because again, we didn't have the internet in those days, so I had to figure out how to do this. And she lived in New York State, Sullivan County. And she lived way up near Bear Mountain. The shortest way is a two-hour drive, but I went the wrong way, it took me three hours to get there. But what happened was at the same time I had had an opportunity. I had been in Jamestown, I'd gone out to dinner at the Chinese restaurant where I loved to go, and I knew the family that ran the restaurant, and the father of the restaurant came and said to me, he said in not very good English, he turned out to be a huge, big-time entrepreneur in Beijing, and his family, his brothers were some of the biggest wheelers and dealers in Beijing. They owned all these companies and stuff. He had actually started this restaurant in Jamestown so he could have a place where all of his relatives could come and get green cards. And so, I knew his daughter and stuff, they'd all gone to college at Edinboro State. So, he said, "I have a possible job opening for you at a paint factory in North Carolina, where they're having a lot of trouble communicating. They sell these specialty paints to people in China and that's my connection, but the guys at the company are so colloquial that they cannot communicate with the Chinese people." Because they would say things to them like, "You can't not never do this," and the Chinese people, who could speak English would go, "What?" And they'd say these wacky things. And they did it on purpose because they were racist, frankly. But he said, "Do you think you could do that?" And I said, "Well, I'm a teacher. If I know how to do it, I can teach anything." And it's in furniture. So, I was going to go to North Carolina. But Trish's date was the weekend before. I was supposed to leave on Monday and my date with her was on Friday night. I was supposed to leave on Tuesday, I think. And so, I went on a date with her, we went to this play, and Trish tells this whole story about this other student and stuff. This is such a bullshit, that is absolutely not true. I talked to somebody for like five minutes, and she was so uncomfortable about that. This was a student that was older than I was that I had happened to see there, and her partner was there, too, that I also knew, or previous partner that I also knew. And we went to this play. It was all about lesbian stuff. It was a lesbian review in the Village. We went with her old girlfriend, for heaven's sakes. And then, her girlfriend. Talk about that, that was problematic enough. So, it was her old girlfriend. Anyway. It all happened that I met Trish through Cheryl, because Sasha had introduced Cheryl to Trish, and then Cheryl fixed us up. That's how Cheryl knew Trish, because Sasha had been taking a course with Deborah, who was Trish's old girlfriend. That's the way these things work in the lesbian world. And those were all in Eastern New York and they all got to know each other, and then that's how Cheryl thought, "Trish and Liz would really be a good item." She was right. So, I had this wonderful date with Trish that started on Friday night. We went to the thing. We came home to her place where my car was. And we sat and talked for hours, and hours, and hours. And I thought, "She's not going to kiss me. I'm going to have to kiss her, because I really want to go to bed with her but I'm tired. I need to go to sleep pretty soon. So, this is going to have to happen before it starts to get light." You know that thing where you start to hear the birds and you think, "Oh my God, I've got to hurry up on this, it's twitter time." So, I thought, "I don't want it to start to get light." So, Trish had come home, she told me later, and taken a nap so that she'd be able to stay up late for this gig. So, finally, I kissed her which turned out to be the right thing to do this time, and she wildly kissed me back, and then we went to bed and stayed there for three days, which was really good. Really good for everyone, except her dog, who was very jealous. Her dog, Obie, who wouldn't let me go to the bathroom because, "Who is this woman?" But it turned out to be a terrific thing. But then, I had to go to North Carolina right then. And so, I went to North Carolina and I called Trish the minute that I got there. I called her as soon as I got home, and then I got in my van, and I drove down to North Carolina, it took 10 hours. And then after I got there, I called Trish again. And then, I said to her, "Could you come and visit me on Easter weekend?" And this was two weeks from Easter. And she said, "I have plans." And then I went, "Oh. Man." And she said, "But I just got a plane reservation to visit you this weekend." Not even two weeks. This is so lesbian with the U-Haul. So, she came. I went to pick her up at the airport. It was a long way away. And I knew that it would be dinnertime. So, when she gets to the airport -- maybe she'd told you the story. But she gets to the airport and she's not on the plane. The people are coming out of the plane and there's nobody there. Well, she had taken an earlier plane. So, she was already in the airport and I was running in. So, anyway, we drove back, we had a wonderful time. The whole thing that happened with Trish was so fabulous that in the beginning part of our relationship, I was just so overwhelmed by how terrific it was that I was afraid. I'm still afraid. I'm afraid of for when it ends. And if you're with somebody long enough, somebody's always going to be sad in the relationship because one person is going to leave. At the end of the relationship one person is going to die, that's what happened with my parents who were married for 42 years. Trish's parents were married for 75 years. We come from really great circumstances. And when I said to Jean Ruben, "I would have teamed up with you," and she said, "I was too old for you," she was right. But I learned from being with older women how to be with older women because that's one of the reasons that I thought Trish was so attractive. She was so capable. She was the head of Helen Hayes Hospital at the time. When I went in her bedroom, I looked over her bed, we were about to go to bed, and I looked over her bed, and she had a handmade copy, silkscreen, from The Book of Kells of a letter of a P. And I said, "That's from The Book of Kells." And I said, "Yes, it is." And she said, "I got it in Ireland." And I said, "Have you seen The Book of Kells?" And she said, "Yes, I have." And I thought, "This is a woman who has seen The Book of Kells. And I'm going to have sex with her right now. This is big. This is a big deal." This was the first time it had happened to me. And she had a book next to the bed, you know how people have things next to the bed for excitement, and it was drawings by [Keta Kellwood's?], of nude women. And I thought, "That's your porn?" It's like a really high-level artist drawing of women. I thought, "This is really, really good. I can't mess this up." Luckily, I didn't. And after five months, the job in North Carolina, the whole company closed and I got to come home. And we started our life together which was really wonderful. We were far away from each other but Trish had told me in our first conversation that she wanted to retire, because she had lupus. And the stress of her job, which was extraordinarily, it's a government job, running a government hospital, having to justify every penny you spend, to Albany, when they don't give you enough money, but when you're required to do certain things. So, she said, "I'm going to get scapegoated for something. I know that's going to happen." Anyway, after a while, and I think Trish talked about this in her talk, we decided ultimately that the most economical and smartest thing to do would be to move into this house, and we did that, and to be antique dealers, which was what I was beginning to do, because Wayne Camburn, he was an antique dealer and he taught me how to do that. And I could use my skills from being an art person to be an antique dealer, which is a very fascinating job. It's one of the few jobs in the world where the more you know, and the smarter you are, the more money you make. That's not true in most jobs. But the more you know, the more you know that this pocketknife is worth 1,000 dollars because they only made three of them, or this piece of art is by Gustav Klimt, and it's a real piece, or that this Hepplewhite piece of furniture is actually from the 1700s. And what we ended up doing is selling sterling silver, mostly, and we have the high-level collection of women silversmiths from the 1600, 1700, and 1800s. And it's very portable. I already knew about furniture that it's hard to move around, and it's not good for it to move around. But I could fix things, too. And so, we did that. And then Trish said, "Let's buy some rental properties, because I have a lot of credit," because she made a lot of money at that job, "And then we can run the properties," because that's what Wayne did, "And we can rent out my house in New York State," which we did, "And then we should have enough income to be able to live off of." And we did. And that's what we did. We did that for 10 years. It was very hard, actually, but also very fun. And then we started to do other things. We are at noon now. Do we have to stop or what do you think? MF: Well, this is actually sort of a good stopping point, although we're starting at the beginning of your life with Trish and Allentown. Would you be willing to do maybe another interview and start there next time? LB: Sure. And we can talk about that, and I can figure out anything else I forgot to say. I have to be sure that that's in there. Because there are a few other things that I didn't talk about, I think, that have to do with some other civil rights issues that I think are very important that we haven't touched on that had to do with stuff that Trish and I did. I know that Trish doesn't sing her own praises as much as she should, but the extraordinary work that she's done, and I have to say, I've done a lot of stuff. I couldn't have done any of these things if it hadn't been for Trish. She rescued me. Because frankly, when we got together, I didn't have any money. I was going into debt. And I had to ask her to lend me a lot of money. I asked her to lend me 1,000 dollars. And we had only been together for about eight months then. And five of them I'd been in North Carolina. Maybe it wasn't even that long. I was crying, and we were hugging, and I felt her go like, "I don't know about that." Because she had other girlfriends and she didn't talk about the other girls, so that's one thing I want to say. When you talk to older lesbians like us, frequently, this thing can happen. You can try this. Ask an older lesbian if she's ever kissed a woman that she didn't go to bed with, because they'll almost always say no. And I have a lot of friends that that would be the case with. It's not as true these days, but it still can be very true. It's certainly more true among women than men. And I've had women say, "Women have kissed me." I say, "No, that doesn't count. You kiss them." And people are like, "No?" Well, here's the deal with Trish. She's never kissed a woman that she hasn't had a five-year relationship with. And she's had four. So, she actually had three other girlfriends before me. When we met, she was 43. And they had really been tough for her. They'd all cheated on her. They'd all really done stupid things because she's so wonderful. But one of the things she said to me right up front was, "I am a jealous lover." And I remember one time after we got together I had a dream that I was having sex with Cher, and the in the dream, I said to Cher, "Oh, wait, I can't do this." And I told Trish the next day, "I had this dream that I was having sex with Cher but then I told her I couldn't do it because you and I were together." And then Trish goes, "You're an idiot. What are you, insane? That was Cher." I said, "Yeah, but." But anyway. The reality is that Trish made my life work. And all the things that I wanted to do right up front, we had a deal. And the deal was that I would put her first, which I have always done, and to see that she is the most important person in my life. That has to be the case. And it has been, for every minute. But for her, she said to me, "I will do everything I need to do so that we can learn new things together. And I'll love learning new things with you," because I'm always about that. And she said she didn't want to be in the forefront anymore. She'd been the head of Helen Hayes Hospital. She had to stand up in front of the New York legislature to justify the budget of a 600-bed hospital. She had been the head of a variety of different professional organizations for physical therapists. She had been at enormous risk for somebody throwing her under the bus because they wanted to get away with something that they were doing bad. She'd been horrendously discriminated against, based on being gay, at the hospital where she worked. And when I met her, up until just a few weeks before we met, every weekend she had had to go into the hospital because she'd had a physical breakdown from her lupus because she'd worked so hard. She'd get up at six o'clock in the morning, she'd come back at eight o'clock at night after working. Even when we were together, she would do that, at the beginning. And she couldn't wait to leave that job. But I think she told you that a new head of the hospital came in, and she was able to be the assistant again, to break that person. And that person was great. And during that time, for the next year, we were fine. And Trish made a lot of money. She was able to vest in her retirement, not get a retirement, but vest in it, so that between the time she was 45 and 55, if we could hold out during that time and manage to get through that she would start to get a small pension, it's not very much, it's about 2,000 dollars a month. She would start to get that pension, and both of our insurance would be covered, which is a huge part. We had to pay for our insurance for those 10 years, which was huge. Trish couldn't afford to let that go because she could never have been insured again because of her lupus. Anyway, I can go on and on about that stuff. But anyway, the significant thing that happened was that I couldn't have done any of these things. I couldn't have done what I did because I never was able to have the time or tenacity to be an activist because I'm too easily distracted by other things. And so, Trish has made it so that we could do all of these things. She's also incredibly, brilliantly frugal, so that we can live. The COVID-19 is killing her because she can't go get bargains at the grocery store. It really is costing us. I had no idea. Well, I did kind of, but it's really costing us a lot of money for her not to be able to shop because she really could make a big difference in terms of our cost. So, we can talk about other stuff but I did want to say those things, you've got that. I'm sure there's lots of other stuff. Oh, I had all these lists of stuff, here. I think I said all of these things. Yeah. So, my whole life before Trish was just getting ready to be in love with Trish. And that was really the terrific thing. And I do want to say that I had a lot of wonderful support for that, as well. It's been good. MF: Well, thank you so much. I think we could set up something for next week and start at the beginning of your life here in Allentown. I'm going to go ahead and just pause the record for a minute, and then we'll just sort of close out. But thank you so much, Liz, for talking today. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:57:36 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liz Bradbury, August 10, 2020 Description An account of the resource Liz Bradbury describes her maternal and paternal family, her upbringing, time at the Maryland Institute of Art and Indiana State University, and relationships before Patricia Sullivan. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-20 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-08-10 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/740a6bfa3b21416d6e86e4f972b0294a.png f4d83e150faacfb6ed213cd8e8407759 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Description An account of the resource This collection began in 2019 with the initial goal of collecting ten oral histories from older adult LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley. Topics explored include the childhood experiences of LGBT people, experiences within educational and religious institutions, coming out stories, understanding of the gay liberation movement (1960-1980s), experience of the early years of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism (1980s-present), and experience with the fight for marriage equality. The project has been a collaborative effort among faculty and librarians from Cedar Crest College, Lehigh University, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College, and members of the local community, under the direction of Dr. Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and Co-Director of the South Side Initiative. <br /><br /><em> The project was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.</em> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Liz Bradbury OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-19.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 August 3, 2020 Liz Bradbury, August 3, 2020 LGBT-19 1:31:13 LVLGBT Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive Collection Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Liz Bradbury Mary Foltz video/mp4 Copy of BradburyLiz_20200803_video.mp4 1.0:|33(7)|62(9)|79(9)|104(13)|129(4)|158(3)|183(3)|206(5)|233(3)|252(17)|277(11)|302(7)|329(4)|356(3)|385(11)|414(8)|439(14)|468(3)|493(8)|520(10)|543(10)|554(11)|583(12)|608(14)|633(7)|660(7)|683(13)|708(12)|741(4)|764(17)|789(11)|812(13)|835(17)|860(15)|883(9)|908(2)|929(10)|950(9)|977(10)|994(13)|1021(9)|1048(7)|1071(4)|1094(3)|1115(12)|1140(3)|1163(6)|1184(13)|1211(5)|1234(5)|1257(12)|1284(2)|1309(9)|1334(13)|1363(5)|1388(8)|1413(5)|1438(4)|1463(11)|1484(14)|1509(13)|1534(13)|1561(2)|1586(4)|1609(16)|1632(12)|1659(6)|1678(5)|1701(9)|1722(14)|1747(6)|1772(4)|1799(13)|1824(10)|1845(10)|1864(16)|1885(6)|1904(10)|1933(9)|1964(15)|1991(7)|2022(8)|2051(8)|2074(12)|2095(18)|2114(14)|2145(6)|2170(6)|2193(12)|2220(4)|2247(3)|2256(10) 0 https://youtu.be/gFXnnMuRT_s YouTube video English 5 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on Zoom because there’s a pandemic going on. Today is August 3rd, 2020. So, Liz, thank you so much for talking with me today.&#13 ; &#13 ; LIZ BRADBURY: So, glad to be here. 0 109 The Valley Gay Press LB: I can’t remember exactly what I covered in the last time when we were talking about Steve Black. I did talk about Steve a lot. And certainly, he was the one who got us involved with the activism that we did in the 1990s which was over a long period, and then well into the 2000s. One of the things that happened was that, in 1998, we began to produce the Valley Gay Press. 0 203 Finding Community &amp ; Sharing Resources LB: And by the way, I didn’t really mention this, but I really miss it and I think a lot of people miss it. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to continue to do it. It connected me and connected all of the different LGBT organizations with each other, and that was one of the things about Pennsylvania Diversity Network, too. We called it a network on purpose so that we could really talk about the relationship between all these different organizations. And if you look at the Valley Gay Press where we indicated the different things that were going on in the community, in the events section, because we always had the events section, there was a list and the communication information for all these different organizations in the greater Lehigh Valley, and there were over 30 of them. And there still are. 0 365 Transitioning from The Valley Gay Press LB: Well, what happened was that, and as I outlined before, that Steve became very, very hard to work with, and it just got harder, and harder, and harder to work with him and it was very frustrating. And we were also beginning to realize as time went by, and this was over a four-year period, that paying to print the paper was extremely expensive. The cost of the paper just went up and it would just double all of a the sudden. We were printing 800 papers, and they’d say, “This is 120 dollars,” and then the next month they’d go, “That’s 240 dollars.” And we’d be like, “Wait, it was 120 dollars last month.” “Yeah, it went up. And it’s not a lot, it’s just like two cents a page.” I said, “Well, yeah, but it was one cent a page before, now it’s double.” 0 462 Goals for the Community / Haven (run at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lehigh Valley) LB: And we also felt that what we wanted to do was concentrate on bringing information to people and we weren’t going to try to do PA Gala because Steve was running it. And he wasn’t going to stop running it. That was the thing. He was going to continue to run that, and we were going to continue to run an organization that’s primary purpose was getting out Valley Gay Press. And also, other kinds of things. 0 617 Haven Facilitators / Facilitator Age Discrimination LB: So, we were involved in setting up Haven and we worked with Unitarian Church, and we were there for some of the first meetings of that. And I trained to be a facilitator. I was a facilitator at Haven for years. And at one point I was almost at every facilitator meeting. I had a little conflict with one of the people who ran the organization. And I thought that there were some problems with it because I actually didn’t think that we were trained very well. I saw that. I saw youth that had pretty severe problems there that the facilitator had no idea how to handle. And that was confirmed by other facilitators that were there, too, because there always had to be at least three facilitators there during the time. So, it was hard to fill those slots. 0 773 Instilling Pride in Out Haven Facilitators LB: They also had a training -- and I remember this, it was very stressful because Don Kohn was involved with it, a bunch of different. He was on their beginning board, and Tracy Denton was very, very involved in setting that program up, and she really did all the beginning steps to make Haven work at the Unitarian Church. And [Elsa Stole?], who was a member of the church, she really was the other person that made that happen. And it’s done great. They’ve met every single week for, what, 20 years. Every single week they do it. 0 1031 Starting Pennsylvania Diversity Network So, anyway, we had the Valley Gay Press and we couldn’t afford to pay for it and we were having a hard time working with Steve. So, we said to Steve, “We’re going to start a new organization, it’s going to be a 501c3, which is a charity that you can donate to and you can write off of the money. And we’re going to call it Pennsylvania Diversity Network. And Steve understood. We gave him a year to get ready for us to leave, and he was fine with that. And, so we started Pennsylvania Diversity Network, and Robert Roush, who was a development guy, and he now is running a big LGBT youth organization in Western New York that covers the whole part of that state, and he and his partner, Steve Olofson, started the Gay Men’s Chorus in the Lehigh Valley. And I said to Robert, “We will pay you to help us set up the 501c3.” 0 1214 Fighting Anti-LGBT Discrimination at JCPenney So, we had two numbers, our house number and then another number that now is my cell number. And people would call to ask questions about anything. They would call me and say, “I’ve been discriminated against. What should I do?” Well, I was the chair of the Human Relations Commission of the City of Allentown. I was on the commission for many, many years, more than 15 years. I helped to write the antidiscrimination ordinance because when we passed the ordinance, I was involved in writing it so I really understood how the ordinance worked. 0 1477 Providing the Community with Regional Discrimination Information LB: So, I would point out to them how to write the policy that would really protect people so people could be comfortable. People would call me on the info line and say, “I’m coming to a job at such-and-such a place, is this college,” and this has happened, “I’m coming from Princeton and I’m looking at a job at Moravian. Are they LGBT-friendly?” And at the time I said, “No, they’re not. They just removed their nondiscrimination policy. There’s no policy in the City of Bethlehem. You’re really at risk here. I wouldn’t recommend it.” 0 1660 PA Diversity Network's Purpose LB: And I would refer them to lawyers but sometimes the lawyers would contact me because they didn’t really know what the law said in Allentown. It’s not the same from town to town. And I’m very familiar with what the laws say throughout the state, and which laws are the ones that are really protective. So, we wanted Pennsylvania Diversity Network to be able to give that information to people. And we worked a lot on the marriage equality issue, which I talked about. And we also produced the Photo Project, which I talked about as well. So, we did that kind of stuff. 0 1811 Marriage Equality &amp ; Partner Benefits / Effect of United States v. Windsor LB: Did I talk about that one before, Freedom to Marry?&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: You talked about the Photo Project but you didn’t really talk around it, like what other activities you were involved with. &#13 ; 0 2067 Freedom to Marry / Spreading Info to the Community LB: And then in 2014, we got full marriage equality. And so, up until that time, the full marriage equality that happened in 2014 we did these Freedom to Marry things. And Pennsylvania Diversity Network partnered with Metropolitan Community Church to do these things. So, there was a protest outside, and we did that outside the courthouse. And I worked with Beth Goudy a lot about what would be the best use of our time to do this, and what would make the most impact? 0 2208 Making the Information More Accessible LB: So, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was speaking politically, and MCC was speaking from the point of view of a religious organization. And they had larger groups of people to do this. We made a video about it, and we put that up. I would speak to the press. Beth would speak to the press. I would try to have a Spanish statement, because I can read Spanish so it really sounds like I know what I’m talking about. I may have absolutely no idea what I’m saying, but I have a really good accent. So, people would fall for that. 0 2327 Collaboration between PA Diversity Network and the Metropolitan Community Church LB: So, we always wanted to be involved in that and we always worked with MCC, and then MCC would have a service, and I would usually speak at the service. And I usually would go for the laughs. I did a couple of really big laughs ones one time. And I’m one of the things I said was, “You know, we have a lot of different anniversaries when we’re a lesbian couple. And so, lesbian couples, we have all the times that we got married in the church, and the different times we tried to do Freedom to Marry, and our civil union, and our marriage, but for a lot of people, the most important anniversary is their first date, or their first kiss, or the first time they did it,” and people began to laugh. 0 2618 Working with the Community to Disseminate Infomation LB So, we did a lot of different events like that. I think we had some at our house. We were also really involved with ACCO, A Chorus Celebrating Women. ACCO is the name of a mythological woman singer, which is true, actually. But it also stands for A Chorus Celebrating Women, A-C-C-O with a woman’s symbol. And Bev Morgan was the founder and leader of ACCO. She’s a wonderful musician with a beautiful voice. And she had all these women. There was a lot of bi and lesbian women that were involved with ACCO for years and years. She ran that for a long, long time. And we worked with them to promote a lot of their events, or just to be at the events or help them with stuff that they were doing. Because we were very good friends with Bev Morgan and Sandy Fluck. And Sandy Fluck was the chair of the Education Department in Moravian. They live in Rehoboth, now. 0 2733 Meeting Adrian Shanker LB: So, here’s the story of meeting Adrian. So, Adrian was a freshman at Muhlenberg College. And that was in about -- he’s 32 now, so that would have been 14 years ago, so 14 years ago would have been 2006. So, I got a call from Patti Mittleman, I believe, and she was the one who ran Hillel House, and also was involved with running the organization that was really supportive of LGBT students at the college. 0 2806 Including Gender Identity in Muhlenberg College's Nondiscrimination Policy LB: So, Adrian calls me and he goes, “I’m a freshman at Muhlenberg, and I want them to include gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy because it only includes sexual orientation.” I said, “Okay.” So, this is in 2006. So, I said, “Okay, yeah. There’s no problem with that.” He goes, “Well, I want to create a petition to get everybody in the college to support this.” And I said, “No, you don’t want to do that. That’s not what you want to do.” Now, this is one of those few times that Adrian totally listened to me. He stopped doing this. He started telling me what to do, I think, the next year. 0 3173 Adrian's Molding of the GSA at Muhlenberg College LB: And when Adrian started at Muhlenberg, there was about 45 young people in the Gay-Straight Alliance there that they had. And he also did a really smart thing. He stopped letting them worry about changing the name of the Gay-Straight Alliance to spectrum or citron or whatever. Because it’s an enormous waste of time. The federal government allows you to call a group like that Gay-Straight Alliance, and they only actually support that, particularly for high schools. But the thing is that every time a group of college students wants to deliberate that, it usually takes them about eight months to decide what the name is going to be and then they leave, and next year, the next group comes in. 0 3276 Asking Adrian to the PA Diversity Network Board / Making Changes LB: So, after he did that for a couple years, we said, “Let’s have this college student on our board,” and he would be walking by our house. He would walk everywhere, and he’d take other students and walk by our house. He’d ring the doorbell and come in. And we’d hang out with him. Trish would always make him vegetarian food. So, he did that. 0 3535 September 11th Religious Healing Ceremony LB: So, now Adrian’s on our board. And I just want to point out one of the things that happened with that. So, we had September 11th that happened during that time in the beginning part of that. And it was devastating. A year later, there was supposed to be a healing religious ceremony in the community that was put on by the Council of Churches. So, they scripted the whole thing, and they told all the ministers what they had to say. They gave them the script. And one of them was Reverend Beth Goudy of the Metropolitan Community Church. 0 3771 Westboro Baptist Church Fundraiser LB: Well, one of the groups that picked up on this was the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps’s people, the God hates fags people. This is 2002. Now, I have maintained, absolutely, that these people are our best friends. And there’s a reason for that, and I’ll show you why. Because we could not get the Council of Churches to say anything. We couldn’t get any condemnation from politicals. The mayor of Bethlehem wouldn’t say a fucking thing about it. And we were mad that he wouldn’t say anything. This was supposed to be a healing ceremony and we get kicked in the teeth. So, nobody says anything. 0 4269 Televised Debates LB: And I would be on debates. They called me to be on the TV a lot of times. But they really screwed us on the TV a couple of times, because Adrian and I were going to be on a debate one time, on Business Matters and I said, “We will be on this debate about marriage equality, but you have to have,” because they were considering a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the State of Pennsylvania. I said, “You have to have legislators on. You can’t just have some crazy street preacher who’s just going to scream and scream and scream and say, ‘You’re a giraffe,’ and ridiculous stuff like that.” So, Adrian had set it up. 0 4472 PA Diversity Network Advocacy LB: But that was one of the things that we did as Pennsylvania Diversity Network. We did political things. We did speak on political issues. We did actual advocacy with regard to people who had lost their jobs or who had been denied -- we would help people find lawyers that would help them obtain custody of their children or get second-parent adoptions. We advocated to and explained to people about the second parent adoption law and how important that was. 0 4627 Hop the Bridge LB: Even after marriage legal in New Jersey, we did a big effort, it was called Hop the Bridge. And we had a huge demonstration in Easton. We got three couples to get legally married. One of them was my previous girlfriend and her partner, which was 25 years before, he’s my Facebook friend, she said, “We want to do this.” And they’d been together for the same amount of time as Trish and me. And I said, “Okay, I’ll set it up.” She said, “We have a niece in Easton.” They live in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania. So, they came and we had two other couples. It was Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and -- actually, we did it twice. So, we had these different people that did this. I think that was the next Freedom to Marry thing. We took a bus over and did it. But there was a bunch of different ways. 0 4781 Leaving PA Diversity Network to Start an LGBTQ+ Community Center LB: Now, Trish and I had been doing this for 20 years. Both of us had actually been doing LGBT activism since -- I had been doing it since the ’70s, she’d been doing it since the ’60s, she was in on the starting of SAGE, the national organization for older LGBT adults. I was working on stuff when I was in graduate school. We had been working all the way through on civil rights stuff. And truthfully, we were getting worried because we were thinking, “Who’s going to do this stuff after we retire?” 0 4913 Raising Money for the Community Center LB: And then I told the story. And people stood up and clapped. And Barb Ross, who, her wonderful partner Kathy Bergey had died and she had this estate money, she said, “I’m going to make the first donation.” So, I said, “We need to raise money.” I said to Adrian, “After Barb makes this money, I’m going to call for people to give donations in the room. Let’s just do that. Trish and I’ll donate 1,000 dollars,” which was hard for us, because we didn’t have a lot of money. “But we’ll do this.” And he goes, “Okay. Well, I’ll donate 1,000 dollars.” So, okay, we’ll do this. And then he says, “Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks.” He said, “We need to raise 75,000 dollars by October for us to do this. Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks.” 0 5127 Looking for a Physical Space for the Community Center LB: So, one of the things was that the mayor said he would give us a building for a dollar. And the city did do this. Now, we’re running out of time here. But the city did do this. And they arranged to give us this building on Turner Street, and it was a dollar. It was really neat, because it was only half a mile from our house. And it’s a weird-shaped building. And so, in a nutshell what happened was, we investigated that building for a year. And we had architects and hazmat and we did all this due diligence and we figured out there’s no way in hell we can use this building. Among other things, it’s not just covered with asbestos, it’s made of asbestos. It was full of lead and asbestos and Adrian said, “The only thing that was living in that building was dead pigeons.” 0 5463 Closing Remarks MF: All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. It was, again, just such a pleasure. 0 MovingImage Liz Bradbury details the transition from The Valley Gay Press to Pennsylvania Diversity Network, providing the Valley with crucial information, meeting Adrian Shanker, and starting an LGBTQ+ community center for the Lehigh Valley. INTERVIEW WITH LIZ BRADBURY AUGUST 3, 2020 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Liz Bradbury to talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. And Liz and I are meeting on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on. Today is August 3rd, 2020. So, Liz, thank you so much for talking with me today. LIZ BRADBURY: So, glad to be here. MF: I'm just going to go ahead and do the brief consent and then we'll jump right in. So, do you consent to this interview today? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? LB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Community Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, like films, articles, websites, presentations? LB: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts you want to delete, or to withdraw the full interview from the project? LB: Yes. MF: Okay. Great. So, last time we talked a lot about the move to PA Gala, and then we moved to discussion of The Valley Free Press/Valley Gay Press that you had put out for 18 years. I thought today we could spend some time talking about the PA Diversity Network, which was the organization that you started after PA Gala. So, could you give me the origin story of PA Diversity Network, and what your aims were with that organization? LB: I can't remember exactly what I covered in the last time when we were talking about Steve Black. I did talk about Steve a lot. And certainly, he was the one who got us involved with the activism that we did in the 1990s which was over a long period, and then well into the 2000s. One of the things that happened was that, in 1998, we began to produce the Valley Gay Press. And at that time my dad had passed away and we had inherited some money and so we could afford, at that time, to pay Trish and I out of pocket to produce the Valley Gay Press out of our own pocket. So, we paid for it to be printed, and PA Gala mailed it to its constituency, our mailing list for PA Gala. And it was a very welcome piece of information for people to get. We also were making people aware of the kinds of political activism they could do, particularly with regard to the passage of the ordinance, the passage of the hate crimes bill, voting information, that kind of stuff was all included. And then, the Valley Gay Press, which was fun to read. And the Valley Gay Press was such an important thing for me. And by the way, I didn't really mention this, but I really miss it and I think a lot of people miss it. I'm sorry that I didn't get to continue to do it. It connected me and connected all of the different LGBT organizations with each other, and that was one of the things about Pennsylvania Diversity Network, too. We called it a network on purpose so that we could really talk about the relationship between all these different organizations. And if you look at the Valley Gay Press where we indicated the different things that were going on in the community, in the events section, because we always had the events section, there was a list and the communication information for all these different organizations in the greater Lehigh Valley, and there were over 30 of them. And there still are. If you look at all the GSAs, if you look at the colleges, if you look at the churches that are really doing significant things like MCC, or the Quaker church, or the Unitarian Church that had specific programs for LGBT people, if you look in everything from the Gay Men's Chorus to, at the time, the sports organization, there was a sports organization, now we have all these youth groups that are happening, Haven came up during that time. We had, of course, Pride, and a bunch of other things that were happening, lots of different things that MCC was doing and within MCC, they had other organizations that were involved. There were other religious organizations. There was a Catholic organization. And then, once we did the outreach to Berks County, because Trish mentioned that last time, we got this grant to do outreach to do Berks County, we included all the Berks County organizations. And there was a bunch of different organizations in Berks County. There was an organization called "The Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Reading and Allentown." And it was this social group that just hung out and we had events here, we'd just invite all these people and they'd just come and make friends and stuff like that. So, we had all these different groups. And the thing is, that people didn't know those groups existed. And today, people don't know these groups exist. People come to us and say they didn't even know there was a community center. They didn't know there was an LGBT organization at Lehigh University. They didn't know there was the Gay Men's Chorus. They didn't know that there was a Pride Festival. And so, all of those things we felt were really important to emphasize in Valley Gay Press. Well, what happened was that, and as I outlined before, that Steve became very, very hard to work with, and it just got harder, and harder, and harder to work with him and it was very frustrating. And we were also beginning to realize as time went by, and this was over a four-year period, that paying to print the paper was extremely expensive. The cost of the paper just went up and it would just double all of a the sudden. We were printing 800 papers, and they'd say, "This is 120 dollars," and then the next month they'd go, "That's 240 dollars." And we'd be like, "Wait, it was 120 dollars last month." "Yeah, it went up. And it's not a lot, it's just like two cents a page." I said, "Well, yeah, but it was one cent a page before, now it's double." And we were printing, then, front and back so that counted. We were printing the equivalent of legal sheets, and some places wouldn't print legal-sized sheets. So, anyway, the cost was getting very high. And one of the things about PA Gala was that PA Gala was a 501c4 organization, which means that it endorsed candidates. And if you endorsed candidates, if that's the kind of organization, you can't be a charity and you can't get sponsorships. PPL isn't going to give money to a PAC, or it wasn't a PAC, but they're not going to give money to a political organization. They want to give money to charity so they can write it off. And we also felt that what we wanted to do was concentrate on bringing information to people and we weren't going to try to do PA Gala because Steve was running it. And he wasn't going to stop running it. That was the thing. He was going to continue to run that, and we were going to continue to run an organization that's primary purpose was getting out Valley Gay Press. And also, other kinds of things. So, the other kinds of things that we wanted to do was to go and speak on LGBT issues, to help other organizations establish themselves, and continue to run with specific missions that were specific, like Haven. We were really involved in the beginnings of Haven and setting up Haven at the Unitarian Church. There had been another organization that Steve Libby had been involved with through Valley Youth House, that had been the first LGBT youth group in the Lehigh Valley that Steve Libby started, and Robert Roush was involved in that. And that was at Valley Youth House. There were a lot of problems with it. It turned out that the guy that was running Valley Youth House, he made statements to us that sounded as though he was thinking that most gay men were pedophiles. At least he said, "Most people presume that all gay men are pedophiles," that's what he said to us. And he said, "We have to fight that every day." And I said, "Well, I don't know what you mean by that." And he said a lot of other things that implied, and this was a long time ago, this was 20 years ago, that Valley Youth House presumed that any kid that was LGBT had severe mental health problems. Now, lots of kids that are LGBT have the stress, minority stress issues, but they're not abnormally affected by the fact that because they're LGBT. And he was likening them too -- he actually said this to us, "I'm part of a parents' group that the parents have lost a child to an accident or violence," and I said, "And that's the same as being gay? Is that what you think that means?" And he sort of said, "Well, you know, there's a lot of stress." I said, "Well, sometimes, not everybody feels that stress. That stress is external. It's not the same." Anyway. So, we were involved in setting up Haven and we worked with Unitarian Church, and we were there for some of the first meetings of that. And I trained to be a facilitator. I was a facilitator at Haven for years. And at one point I was almost at every facilitator meeting. I had a little conflict with one of the people who ran the organization. And I thought that there were some problems with it because I actually didn't think that we were trained very well. I saw that. I saw youth that had pretty severe problems there that the facilitator had no idea how to handle. And that was confirmed by other facilitators that were there, too, because there always had to be at least three facilitators there during the time. So, it was hard to fill those slots. But so, I did that for a long time. And I was concerned about that. And that was one of the reasons that we started our youth group, because the people who were at Haven, and I know that there were a lot of people that were very, very serious about, and very concerned about the youth, but they didn't have any training. Many of them didn't have any training. They also had some policies that, we felt, was pretty discriminatory, blatantly illegal, that they were discriminating against people who, because of minority status, to be Haven volunteers. A lot of it had to do with age. They said, "Anybody under 25 can't be a facilitator." I said, "I was a college teacher when I was 25. How can you say that? In the City of Bethlehem, it's against the law to discriminate against people based on age. So, you can't do that." And they said, "But what if somebody has a relationship with somebody who's 21?" I said, "Well, that's your training issue." That's like saying, "Well, if we have Black people, what if they're thieves?" Yeah, what if they're not? You can't just presume that somebody's going to be inappropriate because they're a minority. That's completely discriminatory. And I had a conflict with them. I said, "I'm not going to list you in the Valley Gay Press if you continue to have this policy because it's going against our nondiscrimination policy. We don't discriminate against people based on age. If you think that someone is going to be too young, you can say they have to have experience. But if this person is a high school teacher, how can you say that they can't be around a person who's 18? That's ridiculous." They also had a training -- and I remember this, it was very stressful because Don Kohn was involved with it, a bunch of different. He was on their beginning board, and Tracy Denton was very, very involved in setting that program up, and she really did all the beginning steps to make Haven work at the Unitarian Church. And [Elsa Stole?], who was a member of the church, she really was the other person that made that happen. And it's done great. They've met every single week for, what, 20 years. Every single week they do it. The problem was that at the beginning they had this training, so I had to go to the training. Trish and I were both at the training. And they had a form that we had to fill out, which was fine. And we had to fill out this stuff, and we had to apply to be a facilitator. One of the things you had to do was, you had to have three letters of recommendation, or at least references, that they could check of people that had known you for more than 10 years. I said, "Fine, that's fine." And then, it said, "Don't worry, we won't tell them that you're working with an LGBT youth group." So, I said, "Why are you saying that?" And they said, "Well, we don't want to out anybody." I said, "But what if the person who is applying is a homophobe? Don't you want to be sure?" And they said, "Well, we don't want to out anybody." I said, "Well, isn't it kind of a requirement for a person who is working with LGBT youth to be honest about their sexual orientation and gender identity? Isn't that what we want, role models for them?" They said, "No, we don't want to have to have people out themselves." I said, "Okay, well, I don't agree with that at all. I think that's wrong." I remember this. And some of the straight people who were involved with this -- and including Don and Melinda Kohn, this is a long, long time ago. I remember Melinda Kohn saying, "Well, what if somebody doesn't want to out themselves?" Then they said, "They shouldn't be a facilitator. That's all it is to it." If a kid says to them, "Well, are you gay?" are they going to lie? Or are they going to say, "I don't want to say?" because if they say, "I don't want to say, you're instilling in some queer youth that it's bad to be queer, and that you should hide, and that you don't have the tenacity to say, 'Sure.'" So, Scott Lauoner, who always wrote for our paper, he wrote "Scotty in the City", and he was a wonderful advocate, and he lives in New York now and I still hear from him all the time, he works with SAGE and a bunch of stuff like that. So, he and I and Trish and Melinda Kohn and a bunch of other people were standing outside of the Unitarian Church. It was in the summer. We were having this discussion, and Melinda turns to Scott, and she says, "Well, I know that Liz and Trish are out to everybody, but lots of LGBT people aren't out to everybody." She turns to Scott and she says, "You're not out to all of your family members." And Scott goes, "I have some third cousins in Arkansas that don't know that I'm gay. But that's about it." And I think that's the kind of deal. I mean, he was a young Republican, although a very progressive one, I doubt he's a Republican now, and he'd been on the Human Relations Commission as an out gay man. And this was 20 years ago. He was the first out gay person on the Human Relations Commission in the City of Allentown. And he wrote in the paper and he didn't care. And Steve Ziminsky, I just interviewed him for a COVID thing, he was a schoolteacher and people would say, "I'm a schoolteacher," I'd say, "Steve's a schoolteacher. He's written letters to the editor where he outed himself, and he doesn't care. He wants youth to know." He wrote this whole thing, like a kid asked him to go to his installation as an Eagle Scout, and he wrote this whole thing about how the Boy Scouts were discriminatory and how he was very proud of this kid to do all these things. But, and then he outed himself in The Morning Call. So, we wanted kids to be proud of our LGBT elders, of our ancestors, of our heritage. And we didn't feel that Haven, at that time, really got that because it was being set up by people that weren't queer, and we didn't feel that they understood. But we worked with them for a long time. So, anyway, we had the Valley Gay Press and we couldn't afford to pay for it and we were having a hard time working with Steve. So, we said to Steve, "We're going to start a new organization, it's going to be a 501c3, which is a charity that you can donate to and you can write off of the money. And we're going to call it Pennsylvania Diversity Network. And Steve understood. We gave him a year to get ready for us to leave, and he was fine with that. And, so we started Pennsylvania Diversity Network, and Robert Roush, who was a development guy, and he now is running a big LGBT youth organization in Western New York that covers the whole part of that state, and he and his partner, Steve Olofson, started the Gay Men's Chorus in the Lehigh Valley. And I said to Robert, "We will pay you to help us set up the 501c3." It's pretty complicated to do it. And he was a development director in a lot of different places and he knew how to do it. And so, he did it. But he said, "I really think this is great you're doing it." I think we said. "We'll give you 400 dollars to do this." We had the money then. And he said, "I will donate it back to the organization." So, he did that. But he set up the 501c3, which is complicated to do. But when you do that, you have to do it at right at the beginning of an organization because if you run an organization for a long time, and then try to set up the 501c3, it's quite hard to do that. So, we set up the 501c3, we got an immediate okay from the government that said that we could run it, which was provisional, and then we began to run it later. I was the executive director ; Trish was the chair of the board. She did all of the membership stuff. She did all the financials. It was a herculean task. And one of the things we did was, we represented on a lot of different other organizations. So, we worked with other organizations, we helped other organizations, we helped with Pride, we always were at Pride, we helped to try to get information to the community at Pride Festivals, and lots of Pride Festivals and different events about how people could lobby their state representatives and state senators and other elected officials to support LGBT issues, which is not actually a political thing. That's a legitimate thing for a 501c3 to do, to talk about issues and then have people support issues. So, so one of the things we did what we worked on Lehigh Valley Health Network to add sexual orientation and gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy. And we were successful with that. And we worked on St. Luke's to do domestic partner benefits. And we used the Valley Gay Press and the organization to do that. I also ran the info line and I've been running this info line for 25 years, and I still do it. It's running right now. And people would call us, at our number, we had a specific number for a while, and then I just said, "Let's just use my telephone number, what the heck." So, we had two numbers, our house number and then another number that now is my cell number. And people would call to ask questions about anything. They would call me and say, "I've been discriminated against. What should I do?" Well, I was the chair of the Human Relations Commission of the City of Allentown. I was on the commission for many, many years, more than 15 years. I helped to write the antidiscrimination ordinance because when we passed the ordinance, I was involved in writing it so I really understood how the ordinance worked. I also knew other kinds of ways that people could challenge instances of discrimination through other things because when people are discriminated against regularly on the job, it almost always falls into the circumstance of sexual harassment. And if it is sexual harassment, then it's against the law and it's been against the law since the 1980s. So, I had a call from a guy -- and this was before we passed the ordinance -- who said that he worked at a major chain pharmacy which is actually owned by JCPenney, and it's a well-known pharmacy. And he was a manager, but he had a higher-level supervisor. The supervisor was constantly saying things that were very rude to him, including writing him emails that said things like, "Hey, at the Pride Festival, you could get a date down there and you could probably get a lot of dick down there," and stuff like that. Well as soon as you say something about somebody's sex life, it's absolutely sexual harassment. And if it's happening from your boss, it doesn't matter whether it's same sex or opposite sex. So, I said, "Do you have any witnesses?" And he goes, "Oh, I have the emails." I said, "The guy wrote you the emails?" He goes, "Well, he put them in the trash but he doesn't know that you could just look in the trash. So, I took them out of the trash and I copied them so I have copies of them." I said, "So, you have copies of this guy saying you can get dick at the Pride Festival." He said, "Yeah. And then he put posters on the wall about it and stuff like that." Well, this really affected this guy's health. He said, "I've had heart palpitations. I have a heart condition." So, I contacted JCPenney, the highest level of people and I said these things had happened to him, and we had documented proof of that, and I was on the Human Relations Commission. Well, that was before we had the law. That would have been in 2000. I said, "I'm part of this organization, we're a civil rights organization. I'm advocating for this guy. He's going to sue you. He's got health problems. It's exacerbated his health problems." They got back to me within two days. And I said, "This is blatant sexual harassment," and they said, "What does he want?" And I said, "He wants this employee to be gone. He wants a new supervisor. He wants some time off. He wants healthcare, to be sure that his healthcare recognizes this," and a bunch of other things. And they did it within a couple of days. But he thought that it was going to be some other kind of thing. He didn't know how to proceed with that. And we had loads and loads of instances like that, where people would say, "This company has a policy that looks like it's really anti-gay but they don't mean to say that." And I've mentioned this in another thing where policies would say, "We don't discriminate based on the law," and wow, yeah, that's really altruistic of you that you don't do something that's illegal. That's not exactly something to laud. So, I would point out to them how to write the policy that would really protect people so people could be comfortable. People would call me on the info line and say, "I'm coming to a job at such-and-such a place, is this college," and this has happened, "I'm coming from Princeton and I'm looking at a job at Moravian. Are they LGBT-friendly?" And at the time I said, "No, they're not. They just removed their nondiscrimination policy. There's no policy in the City of Bethlehem. You're really at risk here. I wouldn't recommend it." One time, we had a guy who called me who was the spouse, but they weren't legally married because it's before marriage equality, of a neonatal surgeons that was coming to Lehigh Valley Health Network and he said, "Do they have domestic partner benefits there?" And I said, "They do not. They do not and we've been lobbying them for a long, long time." This is, again, before marriage equality. They did pass their thing, and as a matter of fact, they passed it because of this. So, I said, "What's your partner going to do?" And he said, "Well, we have two kids," and he told me this whole thing. I gave him all this stuff. I said, "Here's a good pediatrician, and here's a good school, they could go to United Friends School, it's really terrific but we have this nondiscrimination policy at the City of Allentown, but they don't give domestic partner benefits." And he said, "Well, I'm proud of the fact that he's a star. I mean a neonatal surgeon? Somebody that's doing that kind of work, that's the kind of thing that a big healthcare system has a feather in their cap." I said, "Okay. Well, do me a favor. I'm sure, in fact I know that you can get them to give you the benefits through him. Do not accept that. Say to them, 'We won't accept that unless you give everybody these benefits.'" And they did. They did it. And they did it for a bunch of reasons. I also threatened them with Money Magazine, I talked about that before. But that was something that we would do. So, I would get calls. I remember before Equality Pennsylvania was a statewide organization, it was a Philadelphia organization, and before that, it was called Lesbian And Gay Legal something, it was a group of lawyers. And they would deal with discrimination issues. And they had a bunch of interns. I was talking to them and they said, "We have like five people that field phone calls that have questions about discrimination and other LGBT issues." I said, "I do that, too." They said, "How many calls do you get?" I said, "I get about an average of a call a day. Sometimes it's three calls in one day and then not, but it comes out to be maybe one every two days." And then I said, "How many do you do?" And they said, "Two a day." And they had five people working on this stuff. And I would refer them to lawyers but sometimes the lawyers would contact me because they didn't really know what the law said in Allentown. It's not the same from town to town. And I'm very familiar with what the laws say throughout the state, and which laws are the ones that are really protective. So, we wanted Pennsylvania Diversity Network to be able to give that information to people. And we worked a lot on the marriage equality issue, which I talked about. And we also produced the Photo Project, which I talked about as well. So, we did that kind of stuff. And then we did all these other programs. So, our house is a big open space, and so, we actually had art shows in our house. And we did that once a year. We did that, I think, for four or five years until they realized that there was a little bit of an insurance issue there. We were probably a little bit at risk. And that was a fundraiser but it was also really fun. Trish made wonderful food and there would be all these people looking at all this art in the walls because it's big open gallery spaces on the second floor and the first floor of our house. And we used the living room and stuff. We had six or seven artists displaying their work, and a lot of crafts. It was really great. It was very exciting. As I said, we worked right from the beginning with Haven. We worked right from the beginning with the Gay and Lesbian Taskforce. And I doubt that anybody is talking about that taskforce but one of the things that the Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, and they started in 1998, did was -- in fact, it's the only thing they did because they only lasted about six months -- but they created a survey of 900 people that they actually surveyed and tabulated and analyzed, and I don't know where that is, but it might be in the archives. So, if anybody makes any reference to this survey that the Lehigh Valley Taskforce did, [Chris Bose?] was really involved with that, and [Renee Bennett?], and they're still together and they're still in the Lehigh Valley. They may have that survey and that information. It's really an interesting snapshot of 900 identified queer people and how they felt about things in 1998. Very interesting thing to see what would come out of that. We also worked up with MCC on loads and loads of stuff. And one of the things was the Freedom to Marry events that we had. And I think I talked about that before as well. We did a lot of things with Freedom to Marry that had to do with speaking publicly. Did I talk about that one before, Freedom to Marry? MF: You talked about the Photo Project but you didn't really talk around it, like what other activities you were involved with. LB: Okay. So, one of the things that happened with Freedom to Marry, and I think it started about seven years before we got marriage equality. So, we got full marriage equality in the State of Pennsylvania in May of 2014. And anybody that was legally married in any other state, and Trish and I had been married in Connecticut in 2009, we got that full marriage equality in 2014. In 2012, we got federal marriage equality based on the Windsor case, Edie Windsor's case. And so, in 2012 if people were legally married in other states, then some federal benefits would come to them, including that I was getting Trish's domestic partner health benefits at that time through her job at New York State. She was retired, but I got the health benefits. But we had to pay tax on those benefits as though it was money that she was earning. And it was a lot of money. So, we paid about 1,000 dollars a year for those benefits. But when the Windsor case came down through the Supreme Court, which had to do with certain federal benefits, and we're about to learn about Edie Windsor. I'm going to talk about how significant this was, because only Edie Windsor could have made this happen. There's almost no one else in the whole country that could have made the Windsor case happen. And every marriage benefit we got came out of that case. But only Edie Windsor could have done it. And it has to do with how much money she inherited from Thea Speyer. The Windsor case determined that the federal government should recognize benefits for people who were married in other states, in some instances, and who were married in their own states, fully. And in other countries, because Edie Windsor and Thea Speyer were married in Canada, so they have a reciprocal agreement with the United States. So, Trish and I were married in 2009, so in 2012, we didn't have to pay 1,000 dollars a year on the healthcare benefits that I was getting through her domestic partner benefits. They recognized our marriage. And that was a big deal because 1,000 dollars was a lot of money to us. We also recognize that at that point that from that moment on in 2012, if Trish died before me, I would get her pension. And that wouldn't have happened. Well, actually, New York state had that caveat, but everybody that had a federal regulated pension, which is pretty much every pension, so the pension you get, TIAA-CREF pension or something like that, that would all have been covered for anybody that was legally married. So, I was just interviewing somebody who said, "What's the financial benefit?" Because she has been with her partner for a long time. I said, "If you die, your partner can get your pension the way a married person would get it." And she said, "I thought we designate it." I said, "That doesn't work. You can't just designate somebody, unless you have a special caveat through," and that's what New York State had. They said, through their unions, "You can designate one person to get this benefit." But if we had broken up, she couldn't have her next partner do it. That was it, you get one choice and you can choose anybody. But there were all sorts of tax consequences of that. But after Windsor, that was for everybody. And there was also a Social Security benefit that came from Windsor, as well. That was a big deal. And then in 2014, we got full marriage equality. And so, up until that time, the full marriage equality that happened in 2014 we did these Freedom to Marry things. And Pennsylvania Diversity Network partnered with Metropolitan Community Church to do these things. So, there was a protest outside, and we did that outside the courthouse. And I worked with Beth Goudy a lot about what would be the best use of our time to do this, and what would make the most impact? And one of the things we realized right from the beginning was, as I said before, that if we went to Lehigh County Courthouse, we could apply for a marriage license and then they would deny it, but they would keep it on file. And I told you that before, didn't I? yes. So, that stuff, it was important. But with the Pennsylvania Diversity Network, one of the things we were doing was, we started telling people about that. And we'd share that information with people. So, here's the important thing that you need to know, that if you go to Northampton County to apply for a license, your effort disappears the next day, because they're not going to let you apply. But if you go to Lehigh County Courthouse, 100 years from now people are going to go, "What's the deal about Liz Bradbury and Trish Sullivan and why were they constantly denied a license for seven years in a row? And look, more and more people were doing it," because the first year, we were the only ones that did it, and then it was more and more people until every time, there'd be 30 people that would apply for a license until 2014, when they recognized our marriage, and then we stopped doing that. In fact, after we got legally married, I think we stopped doing it then because we thought that, in effect, we were legally married and so we didn't try to apply for another license because we didn't want to get married again, we just wanted them to recognize us. So, I think that went from 2002 to 2009 for us. Other people would apply because they're trying to get the state to do it. But we were there for all of those protests. So, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was speaking politically, and MCC was speaking from the point of view of a religious organization. And they had larger groups of people to do this. We made a video about it, and we put that up. I would speak to the press. Beth would speak to the press. I would try to have a Spanish statement, because I can read Spanish so it really sounds like I know what I'm talking about. I may have absolutely no idea what I'm saying, but I have a really good accent. So, people would fall for that. So, we were in line to apply for our marriage license, and there was a young Latino couple in line, too. And we did this thing and we went outside and then all the press was there, and the television stuff. The thing about speaking in Spanish was, they often didn't have a lot of Spanish content. So, we could almost always get on the Allentown Spanish station, which is part of WFMZ. And usually, I would just start to read the statement and then they'd have a voice over because I really only said two sentences, "nos derechos es importante," that kind of stuff. Then, they interviewed this Latino couple that was in the line, and then the guy says, "Do you think there's a large percentage of gay people in the United States?" And he goes, "Oh, yeah. I do. I think there's a lot." "Well, what do you think is the percentage?" He goes, "Oh, about 50 percent." I'm like, "Yay." And I'm thinking, "Okay." I thought that was a great thing because I think a lot of people think Latinos are very anti and stuff like that. And this young guy was like, "Yeah, it's 50 percent. Why shouldn't they have these rights?" It was great. So, we always wanted to be involved in that and we always worked with MCC, and then MCC would have a service, and I would usually speak at the service. And I usually would go for the laughs. I did a couple of really big laughs ones one time. And I'm one of the things I said was, "You know, we have a lot of different anniversaries when we're a lesbian couple. And so, lesbian couples, we have all the times that we got married in the church, and the different times we tried to do Freedom to Marry, and our civil union, and our marriage, but for a lot of people, the most important anniversary is their first date, or their first kiss, or the first time they did it," and people began to laugh. And I stood, "For those, ours were March 11th, 1987." And then it just got this huge laugh, and it went on for a long time. There was about 250 people there, so it was a big rockstar moment. And I think Beth didn't want me to say it. She goes, "You're not supposed to say those things. It's a church." I said, "Oh, come on. I got a big laugh." She said, "Yeah, you did." And we had the Photo Project there, we would take more pictures of people for the Photo Project, which is another big Pennsylvania Diversity Network effort. So, another thing that we did with MCC, we had another organization that was one of our branches that was called Rainbow Families. And it was run by Donnie and Earl Snyder. They have a little kid. and Donnie and Earl also wrote "Planet Parenthood," in the last 10 years of the Valley Gay Press. It was about what it was like to be a couple of gay men raising a child, and the process that they went through to get their kid, they had an open adoption, and it was very interesting stuff. We did Rainbow Families, and Rainbow Families would put on a Christmas party. This is kind of hilarious. So, we put on this Christmas party at MCC for kids. It was put on by Rainbow Families and Donnie and Earl were very involved with Metropolitan Community Church. But Rainbow Families was our organization, actually. And so, we worked together with the church. There was a sing-along, and it was Christian because they're a church. There was a lot of Latino kids, and kids would come from the neighborhood would come in -- this is when they were on Fourth Street, so there's all these kids. Then, we had cookies and all this kind of stuff. And I read the Grinch in Spanish because there's a lot of Spanish kids there. Trish read it in English, I read it in Spanish. And Don Kohn came -- this is pretty hilarious -- and you may know this, but he came dressed as Santa Claus. Don looks like Santa Claus, if you think about it. He's got the grey, white hair and he had a beard. So, it's two Jews and an atheist put on a Christmas party, or two atheists, and Melinda was there, too. And the funny thing about Don is, he's really Jewish, and he doesn't know the words to any Christmas carol. So, I think he'd get by with "Jingle Bells," but that was about it. So, we had to print out the lyrics so that he could sing along, we'd have a big sing-a-long in the church, and that was fun. And we did that for quite a few years. We did that to have fun in a variety of different circumstances. And we really wanted to be sure that there was outreach to families. So, Rainbow Families had an event for quite a while, they had an event every month, particularly in the summer, where it would be at a park and a bunch of families, it could either be LGBT families with kids or kids that were LGBT, so it was something about the family that was queer. I remember one of the last ones we had, which I think was about 2008, or no, a little bit later than that. And Hannah was living at our house, then, so I think that was in about 2008. And Adrian was there, and he was in college. Now you may not know this about Adrian, but he can make balloon animals. That's one of his top skills. So, he said, "I will come and make balloon animals." And he can make all those balloon animals for the kids. I'm sure that he can still do that. I'm sure it's on his resume. And he made balloon animals for kids, and we did all sorts of things. The kids were playing and the parents are just hanging out and a lot of fun stuff. So, we did a lot of different events like that. I think we had some at our house. We were also really involved with ACCO, A Chorus Celebrating Women. ACCO is the name of a mythological woman singer, which is true, actually. But it also stands for A Chorus Celebrating Women, A-C-C-O with a woman's symbol. And Bev Morgan was the founder and leader of ACCO. She's a wonderful musician with a beautiful voice. And she had all these women. There was a lot of bi and lesbian women that were involved with ACCO for years and years. She ran that for a long, long time. And we worked with them to promote a lot of their events, or just to be at the events or help them with stuff that they were doing. Because we were very good friends with Bev Morgan and Sandy Fluck. And Sandy Fluck was the chair of the Education Department in Moravian. They live in Rehoboth, now. So, these events that were happening would use the Valley Gay Press, and we'd use our other vehicles, and we had a huge email list that I can send lots of emails out whenever I wanted to. And people paid attention to those emails. Because I didn't send things that were just like, "Give us money," or something like that. It would be like, "Edie Windsor's case has been decided, and this is what this means to you, and this is why you need to get married because now you won't have to pay for your benefits and you can get your partner's pension if your partner dies." These are really important things. And then as I said before, Trish's explanation of how you do that. And then we'd constantly be telling people, people calling us and asking us how to do that kind of stuff. And all of those things happened. And so, we went along and we met Adrian. So, here's the story of meeting Adrian. So, Adrian was a freshman at Muhlenberg College. And that was in about -- he's 32 now, so that would have been 14 years ago, so 14 years ago would have been 2006. So, I got a call from Patti Mittleman, I believe, and she was the one who ran Hillel House, and also was involved with running the organization that was really supportive of LGBT students at the college. We had already known Patti for years. Right from the beginning we knew her. She just died a few years ago. It was very sad because she was such a wonderful advocate and so important to so many people at the college. And in fact, loads of people that we know, we knew because of Patti Mittleman. Everybody says that. And so, she said, "I have a guy who's going to call you," and she said his name, and then Adrian called me and he said -- have I told you this story before? Probably. Oh, okay. This is a great story, then. So, Adrian calls me and he goes, "I'm a freshman at Muhlenberg, and I want them to include gender identity to their nondiscrimination policy because it only includes sexual orientation." I said, "Okay." So, this is in 2006. So, I said, "Okay, yeah. There's no problem with that." He goes, "Well, I want to create a petition to get everybody in the college to support this." And I said, "No, you don't want to do that. That's not what you want to do." Now, this is one of those few times that Adrian totally listened to me. He stopped doing this. He started telling me what to do, I think, the next year. But this year, he was really listening to me, I said, "First of all, realize that petitions are a bad way to go about anything because you're really creating divisiveness, and it's harmful to you because if you go ask your friend or your teacher or your parents or your boss, if they'll sign a petition for your rights, and they say no, you're not going to ever get over that. You're going to remember that for the rest of your life. And if you have 10 people say no to you, it's going to be devastating. You don't want to know where they stand on this issue. It's not up to them. It's to the president of the college." And I said, "We already have a law in the City of Allentown that includes gender identity. Why don't you already have that in your policy?" And he said, because Adrian already had the ear of the president of the college when he was a freshman, he said, "The president of the college told me that the college, first of all, it was a Lutheran college, and because they're a not for profit, they don't have to follow the nondiscretionary policy of the City of Allentown." I said, "Well, that's crap. That's ridiculous. Of course, that's not true. Do you think a not-for-profit can discriminate against Black people just because they're a not for profit? Unless it's their mission to do something, they can't blatantly discriminate against somebody." So, I said, "Let me give you an example of somebody that can do that because it's their mission. The Catholic church. It's the Catholic church's mission to follow Catholic principles. So, if they want to not allow people based on Catholic teachings, a divorced person, to have a position at the church, or they don't want to allow somebody who's Protestant to have a position at the church, they're allowed to do it because it's their mission to do it. Cedar Crest College's mission is to elevate and support women students, that's their mission and it has been since the 1800s, one of the ways that they can enforce that or support that, is by keeping men from living in the dorms. That's one of the things that they do. Now, there is some validity to that, it's a women's college. There's some validity to that. And it's their mission so they can do that. The NAACP's mission is to work for the health and welfare of the Black population. So, they can say, 'It's our mission to give scholarships to youth, and we are going to only get them to Black youth, or people who identify as Black, and it's our mission to do that. It's okay. We don't think white people are bad, we're just working for this disenfranchised community.' With the NAACP, clearly that's racial discrimination. They're discriminating against white people. But that's okay, it's their mission and they're not doing it because they hate white people, they're doing it to support Black people. The mission of Muhlenberg College is not to discriminate against, or promote straight people, or cisgender people. It's not. It's not their mission. So, first of all, that's the thing. The second thing is, it's not even the mission of Muhlenberg College to promote Lutheran principles. That's not their mission either. They dropped that mission in the 1800s. Their mission is to educate people. And that's all they do. They educate people. So, if you came in and said, 'I want to go here but I'm not going to get an education,' yeah, yeah, they can say, 'No, you can't do that.' But you can't say to people that, 'We're not going to support you because of your gender identify.' So, it's the law. But the way you want to get them to change the policy. So, first of all, it's a law. So, you can just say to them, 'It's the law. You have to have this policy. It's the law. In fact, you can't even deny people gender-neutral housing, because it's the law. And they're adults. You can't tell people, 'Well, you have to live in this kind of a housing with the opposite sex.' You can't say that in a hotel, so you can't say that in the college. But that's not what you want to do. Go to the president, tell him it's the law, and then tell him that Lehigh already has this policy. Just tell him that. He'll change it in a week. Lehigh's had this policy for two or three years. They have gender identity in their policy. And Muhlenberg wants to be considered the hot, edgy school, and Lehigh is the stodgy, 'We used to only let men in 20 years ago' school. He'll turn it around in no time." And he did. He did. And I said, "You don't have to ask anybody. It's no work. Just go in there and tell him. And if you want him to talk to me I'll talk to him. But you can convince him of this." Well, that was a big win for Adrian. And when Adrian started at Muhlenberg, there was about 45 young people in the Gay-Straight Alliance there that they had. And he also did a really smart thing. He stopped letting them worry about changing the name of the Gay-Straight Alliance to spectrum or citron or whatever. Because it's an enormous waste of time. The federal government allows you to call a group like that Gay-Straight Alliance, and they only actually support that, particularly for high schools. But the thing is that every time a group of college students wants to deliberate that, it usually takes them about eight months to decide what the name is going to be and then they leave, and next year, the next group comes in. So, Adrian said, "Forget it, we're not worrying about that. We're calling it Gay-Straight Alliance, we're not going to call it anything else. But we're going to do a bunch of different important things." And we worked on some of those things. But he pretty much did this on his own. And within a year, he had 700 students in the Gay-Straight Alliance. Yeah. And then, when he left, there were 45 again. Which is something I point out to people all the time. It takes a dynamic person to make that kind of stuff happen. You have to make it attractive. It doesn't just spontaneously happen. You have to make it attractive. And he did all these things, like he had the sex toy expo, and there was a drag ball, and nobody else had done that. He was the one who had instituted these things. All the other things, they were just worried about changing the name to be more inclusive. Just shut up about that and have a drag ball and a sex toy thing, and everybody wants to join. So, after he did that for a couple years, we said, "Let's have this college student on our board," and he would be walking by our house. He would walk everywhere, and he'd take other students and walk by our house. He'd ring the doorbell and come in. And we'd hang out with him. Trish would always make him vegetarian food. So, he did that. That's how we met Hannah Watson, who ended up living with us and now is a very, very close friend of ours, and lived with us for almost two years. So, we asked Adrian to be on our board. And he was very excited about that. And so, once we had him on the board, he began to point out important things that needed to change. And one of them was that he said that he thought that I should get paid, because up until then, I was getting nothing. I didn't get any money, and of course, no benefits. But I did have benefits from Trish's stuff, and we had a little bit of income, and we were still antique dealers up until 2002, and we did other stuff, and we have some crappy investments that give us a tiny little amount of money. And so, we were getting by. We live very, very frugally, and we were getting by. But Adrian said, "You should get paid. You should get 500 dollars a month." And then I got a big raise, I think the next year I got 700 dollars a month. I don't get any benefits. I think we also had a deal where if we got paid for a training, or whomever did the training would get half the money that the place paid us. We never got very much in those days for trainings, but if they gave us 100 dollars, I would get 50 dollars and the organization would get 50 dollars. So, we actually built up our bank account pretty well with that. He pointed out some other ways that we could -- I had already created the Gala. I've wanted that Gala to be a community event, because FACT's event was very, very, prohibitively expensive. It cost 80 dollars or 60 dollars to go. We couldn't afford to go to it. It was fancy. I wanted our event to be very inexpensive and to honor people who were working in the community, so a party for community members, and then honor people. And Adrian has changed that back into a much bigger fundraiser because we make a lot of money from that, and he really wanted that to make more money. But I wanted people to come to it and I wanted to honor people. And he said, "Let's get sponsors for this." And so, we started to do that. We went from making 2,000 dollars to making 8,000 dollars, and now it makes about 45,000 dollars a year. At that time when Adrian joined the organization, our budget was about 20,000 dollars a year. And I didn't make any money. Well, our budget was about 12,000, then we went up to 25,000, because I was getting paid and so we had to make more money. But I also said, "I never want to take any money from this if we can't afford to do other stuff. So, we need to have a savings account," and we did. Because that was one of the things that used to happen with PA Gala, that we would run out of money, and it was really scary that we just wouldn't have any money. And I'd say, "We spent all the money on the last mailing and now we have nothing for the next mailing," and I didn't want Pennsylvania Diversity Network to have no cushion at all, that we couldn't produce the paper, for example. I didn't want to be hand to mouth with it. So, we decided that we would have a savings account about 5,000 dollars in it, which would be a big cushion and that was about half our year's budget at that time, so that would be good, and we built that up. And we did fundraisers and we would have events, a lot of them we would put on, we'd do it. And we were involved with Theatre Outlet that did the Matthew Shepard play, and we did other protests. We were doing a lot of interesting ways to protest and get money where we would get people to pledge money to us or to other organizations. And we would help other organizations to raise money, particularly if they'd been targeted by an anti organization. So, now Adrian's on our board. And I just want to point out one of the things that happened with that. So, we had September 11th that happened during that time in the beginning part of that. And it was devastating. A year later, there was supposed to be a healing religious ceremony in the community that was put on by the Council of Churches. So, they scripted the whole thing, and they told all the ministers what they had to say. They gave them the script. And one of them was Reverend Beth Goudy of the Metropolitan Community Church. So, because Beth was going to be there and she was going to say positive things about our community, we wanted to support her. And we did this a lot. We were really, profoundly not religious. We don't like religion. And this story is one of the reasons. We would often go to MCC stuff, we were very good friends with Beth, and we'd often go to MCC stuff to support her and to support other things, particularly the Christmas service we'd go, because very few people would go to the Christmas service, so we would go to that, just to support her. She said, "You don't do this because of religion, right?" I said, "No, we do it because we like you. It doesn't have anything to do with religion." But MCC was doing some very good things for the community, and we were pleased with that. So, we go to this big ceremony and Beth's going to speak and there's 25 other ministers who are going to get up and do a five- or two-minute gig. And there's two big lines of people from MCC and other LGBT and queer people that are in these lines. It was in a church on Center Street, it was one of those big churches on Center Street out there in Bethlehem. So, Beth's about to go and they had a lot of white people. And I think they got a couple of Black people. So, this guy gets up and he's a Black Baptist minister from Philadelphia. And apparently nobody knew him. I don't know where they got this guy. But he gets up and he gets the thing, and he tosses the script away, and he blames September 11th on gay marriage, just flat does it. It's gay people, it's supporting gay people, that's why this is happening, that's why God did September 11th, God hates fags, the whole thing. Unbelievable. And nobody says anything. And then, another person goes up, and then Beth gets up, and she's just got this look on her face. She's just totally white. I think she's thinking, "What the fuck am I supposed to do now?" Although she wouldn't have thought it that way. So, she gets up and she does her thing and then she gets off stage. And I look down the row to Trish. I look at the other people. And I look at the other people in the next row and I say, "I think we should go." So, we all stood up en mass and walked out of the church and we stood on the steps and we wouldn't leave, but we stood outside. And the head of the Council of Churches comes to the door and she says to us, "Well, I know that was bad." I said, "You don't know how bad that was. You have no idea how bad that was. And here's the second thing. You should have stood up and said you don't support that and you didn't. So, what are you going to do about it?" "Well, we'll have to think of it," mealy mouth, "We'll think about it, I don't know." So, we of course contacted the press and told them that this had happened. So, there was an article in The Morning Call about it that was picked up by The Wire and other people pointed this out, because it was a pretty big deal to blame September 11th on a bunch of gay people in the room. Well, one of the groups that picked up on this was the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps's people, the God hates fags people. This is 2002. Now, I have maintained, absolutely, that these people are our best friends. And there's a reason for that, and I'll show you why. Because we could not get the Council of Churches to say anything. We couldn't get any condemnation from politicals. The mayor of Bethlehem wouldn't say a fucking thing about it. And we were mad that he wouldn't say anything. This was supposed to be a healing ceremony and we get kicked in the teeth. So, nobody says anything. So, the Westboro Baptist Church announces that they're going to come to the Lehigh Valley and demonstrate all over the place, and they're going to support this minister that said this horrible thing. So, I said, "Bring it on." And I said, "Let's do a fundraiser. Every minute they are speaking, every minute they're on, people will pledge 10 cents a minute up to a cap, you can make anything but you pledge 10 cents a minute, and then you can say, 'I'll pledged up to 20 dollars,' and we'll time how long they're here." They were supposed to be here two days. Within one week, we'd raised 1,000 dollars. And we gave it all to MCC. And we got contributions from Alaska. People were spreading this all over the place. We had email in those days. We didn't' have social media, though. So, we did this with just email and people were sending the email around to different churches and progressive churches, and political people were pledging, and these weren't large pledges. We had hundreds of pledges. And we gave the money to MCC because they had really been victimized. This was a religious thing. I just collected all the money and I gave it to MCC. It was great, actually. But as per the circumstances of Westboro Baptist Church, they decided to not show up. Well then, we weren't going to get the money. So, now we really wanted them to come because we wanted the money. And we got attention from this. So, they did come about a month later. And this was in November, or something like that, I think. Yeah, it was in November. So, they show up and they're going to protest at Cedar Crest and Lehigh University. Were you there then, at Lehigh? No. Okay, this is pretty hilarious, actually. Now, this is the thing. We don't want them to protest at MCC. We want them to protest at the Episcopal Church. We want them to protest at the Unitarian Church, although the Unitarians are on our side. So, what we want is United Church of Christ. Well, they came to the Episcopal church and they screamed the vilest, rudest, most horrible things at every single person that came out of that Episcopal church that's right downtown in Bethlehem. Suddenly, they're all on our side and the Council of Churches is saying, "Hate is so bad, it's so terrible," because it's happening to them and they're saying horrible things. The Morning Call interviews the Westboro Baptist Church who tells The Morning Call that they do 1,000 protests a year. I point out to The Morning Call in a letter to the editor that that is ridiculous. A thousand is a ridiculously high number. I said, "That's three a day. So, on the day after Christmas, do they do an extra three? Do they do six the next day? Come on. They don't do 1,000 protests. They didn't even come when they said they were going to come." They didn't even do that number of protests while they were there. And in fact, at one point they said, "We're going to do Lehigh," but they like to go to places where there are big college football games. So, they were like, "We couldn't go because we had to go to Philadelphia to go to a big game in Philadelphia." It was really true. This is this really true. When they show up, they're totally bumbling idiots and they have no idea. They have these horrible signs and it's so easy to protest against them because to say, "God hates fags," that September 11th was the fault of somebody else, it's ridiculous. So, because they protested in Allentown, the mayor of Allentown was very direct, it was Roy Afflerbach then, and he said it was terrible that they had done this. We couldn't get the mayor of Bethlehem to say anything because he was a weasel, and I was really angry that he didn't say something. I humiliated him, publicly for years. But they did protest at Lehigh. It was right outside of Packer Hall. And Beth Goudy, and I, and a bunch of other people from MCC were on the other corner from them. And they have these ridiculous signs. But there's like three of them. So, there's three people. No one else would be with them because they were such buffoons. They weren't really on the campus. They were on the street. Cedar Crest let them be on the campus which they didn't have to do, they could have told them they could be the entrance, but they just let them be on the campus. They didn't want to be on the campus, because nobody would see them there, so they didn't even do it at Cedar Crest. They only do it for high profile. Again, they're our friends because they really are, at Lehigh, everybody at Lehigh thinks they're horrible. All the students are doing horrible things to them. Nobody's on their side because they're so outrageous. One of the things they did was, they'll sing, "God hates fags," to different pop songs. So, they're standing in the corner and Beth and I are across the street, and they're singing, "Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, hey, hey, God hates fags." And they kept doing it. Beth and I were just laughing through the whole thing. So, then, after that for years, every time anybody would mention Westboro Baptist Church, Beth and I will both burst into, "Na, na, na, na," we would sing, "God hates fags," because it was just so absurd. That's the best you could come up with? It was so not offensive in a lot of ways. They weren't like the street preachers that really are scary. We couldn't have paid them for more publicity. And people used to say, "If we'd show Matthew Shepard the Matthew Shepard's play, it would be terrible if Westboro Baptist Church," I'd say, "Pray they come, you'll sell every ticket. People would pour out to support you. They'd give you donations because they're there. You want them to be there because they're so outrageously horrible." And they're so much on our side that they didn't just go stand in front of MCC, they stood in front of the biggest Episcopal church and called them vile, horrible names, and said just the worst possible things you could say. And people who had never had anybody shout anything to them suddenly, "Oh, now I know what it's like to be discriminated against." So, we were really involved with that and we were really involved with promoting that. And we did a lot of other actions to try to get people to -- before Silent Witness, which is actually a very effective way of dealing with pro to anti-gay protesters, we worked on schemes to turn around the ability to do those protests and be successful with them. And I would be on debates. They called me to be on the TV a lot of times. But they really screwed us on the TV a couple of times, because Adrian and I were going to be on a debate one time, on Business Matters and I said, "We will be on this debate about marriage equality, but you have to have," because they were considering a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the State of Pennsylvania. I said, "You have to have legislators on. You can't just have some crazy street preacher who's just going to scream and scream and scream and say, 'You're a giraffe,' and ridiculous stuff like that." So, Adrian had set it up. Adrian was then chair of Equality Pennsylvania. So, it was me and Ted Martin, who was the CEO of Equality Pennsylvania, and then there was a guy who had been on school board who was ultra-far right, and we said he would be okay, but I said, "Unless you can get somebody who is a normal person, you can't just bringing that crazy guy that comes with the megaphone and stands at MCC and shouts out, 'I want to have sex with my child.' Forget it." So, they said, "No, we won't do that. We'll have this guy and if we can't get somebody else it'll just be the three of you." I said, "Okay." So, we get out there and it's the three of us and then they have the crazy guy on the phone. And we're already taping. And I said to Ted, "We can't walk out of this because then he gets the whole forum. He'll be able to talk the whole time. He says these crazy things over and over again. Obviously this person is insane, he's a pedophile, this has nothing to do with this argument. You can't even find anybody to speak intelligently about this." And then, at the end, I said to the guy who's in charge of Business Matters whose name I can't remember right now, but he's the head of the Business Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and he's in all the billboards and stuff, and I can't remember his name right now. He's very effective in this job. But he said, "This is much more interesting if we do it this way." I said, "It's not okay for you to do this because you lied to us. You lied to us and I'm out of here and I will never be on the show again because you lied. You said you weren't going to have him and you did. That's a lie." So, Adrian ended up talking to the producer of the show and he said, "You know, broken trust like this is like trying to use a broken condom. You can't just patch it back together." He actually said that to her. He said, "We can't just overlook this." And we've never been on that show again. Because they did lie to us. They wanted it to be a circus and stuff. But I also debated on National Public Radio, I debated that woman -- I can't remember anybody's names, it's like Molly Mase? It's two Ms. She's the woman who spoke to the Supreme Court about Proposition 8, she's ultra-far right, she's disappeared now because her issue was marriage equality and she lost, and I don't know what's going on with her. But I actually debated her on Radio Times. And they have no argument. But that was one of the things that we did as Pennsylvania Diversity Network. We did political things. We did speak on political issues. We did actual advocacy with regard to people who had lost their jobs or who had been denied -- we would help people find lawyers that would help them obtain custody of their children or get second-parent adoptions. We advocated to and explained to people about the second parent adoption law and how important that was. At that point for me, Pennsylvania Diversity Network was all about information. So, we had the newspaper, we had the info line, we had a really, really large, blanket email potential, which was one of the first times that people could do that. We had an enormous mailing list that we could write to people and send people written information. We spoke publicly. We were on television all the time. Trish hates to be on TV, but I don't mind it that much, and so, we would be at protests and I had figured out ways to speak. We had a really great press list that we could send out information to, I would speak publicly. And Adrian still does that in a lot of ways. He will speak publicly in very infrequent situations. He makes it a media event. And, as we got closer and closer to the center, what we did was, we got full marriage equality in 2016, and Adrian came to us and he said, "Okay, we have full marriage equality now. This is one of our biggest projects that we had done," he had done a whole marriage equality circumstance where when he and his husband got married, they went to the Lehigh County Courthouse, applied for a license, were denied, with me and Trish there and I photographed the whole time. We got in the car with them, we drove all the way to Darien, Connecticut where their families were, and they got married there. They got legally married right there. And then it was this whole series of photographs, and he had this whole thing about how he couldn't get married. And we did another marriage action. Even after marriage legal in New Jersey, we did a big effort, it was called Hop the Bridge. And we had a huge demonstration in Easton. We got three couples to get legally married. One of them was my previous girlfriend and her partner, which was 25 years before, he's my Facebook friend, she said, "We want to do this." And they'd been together for the same amount of time as Trish and me. And I said, "Okay, I'll set it up." She said, "We have a niece in Easton." They live in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania. So, they came and we had two other couples. It was Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and -- actually, we did it twice. So, we had these different people that did this. I think that was the next Freedom to Marry thing. We took a bus over and did it. But there was a bunch of different ways. But the Hop the Bridge thing was, Jerry Schmidt and Chuck Woodbury, and Bill Morrow and his partner whose name I can't remember, and Jen and Mary Ann Kelly. And they'd all been together for a long time. I was with them when they got the licenses. I was the witness. You have to have a witness in New Jersey, so you get the license in New Jersey. I set that up for them and everything. And then we had this big demonstration in Easton. We walked across the bridge into New Jersey where Beth Goudy was in a parking lot and married them in the parking lot in front of all this press, and it was on TV and everything. And then we walked back. We got to the middle of the bridge we said, "We're married, and now we're not married. We're recognized, and now we're not recognized." It got national attention. And Adrian and I worked on that together. And one of the things that Aiden was beginning to realize is when you do a press thing, you have all of your people behind you. You don't talk to your people ; you talk to the cameras and have all the people behind you so it doesn't look like you're by yourself. And that was a really good way of doing it. So, we had hundreds of people there. It was really great. And it was really terrific. And we got front-page articles in all the newspapers and stuff. We had always been very serious when we went to get our civil union, because that's when Trish and I went and got a civil union. Did I talk about that? That's our personal thing, but I'll talk about that when we talk about this other stuff. So, Adrian came to us and he said, "Okay, this is what I want to do." Now, Trish and I had been doing this for 20 years. Both of us had actually been doing LGBT activism since -- I had been doing it since the '70s, she'd been doing it since the '60s, she was in on the starting of SAGE, the national organization for older LGBT adults. I was working on stuff when I was in graduate school. We had been working all the way through on civil rights stuff. And truthfully, we were getting worried because we were thinking, "Who's going to do this stuff after we retire?" And we were praying that Adrian wouldn't move away, which he almost got a job and moved away, but he didn't move away. And then he bought a house. That was really good. He's married now. Okay, now he has to stay here. And he ended up saying to us, now in 2016, "We have marriage equality, you've really done this stuff. I think it's time to start a community center, and this is what we should do." And he said, "And I want to be the director of it. And I want it to be a paying job. So, we need to raise enough money to pay for me and to start the thing so I can quit my job." So, we were coming into the Gala, and I said, "So, we're going to make this announcement. We're going to end the organization. We're going to start a new organization that's going to be call the LGBT Community Center," and he said, "We're going to name it after you. You're going to step down as the CEO, I'm going to be the CEO. You both are still going to be working on it." Trish was the chair of the board ; she would stay the chair of the board for the first year. And we're going to make this announcement. We're not going to tell anybody. It's going to be a secret announcement and we'll tell everybody to come." We had the event at the Symphony Hall in Allentown, this big event room, a beautiful room. My sister was there, she came from Connecticut, because I said, "You have to come for this, it's a big deal." After all, it's her name, too. And the mayor was there, and all these different people. But we didn't tell them exactly what was going on. So, people were guessing, "You're going to run for office," they were saying to Adrian. And then I get up, I have a little fake thing. I said, "I'm going to change the Photo Project," and I could see people going -- and I said, "That's not it." And then I told the story. And people stood up and clapped. And Barb Ross, who, her wonderful partner Kathy Bergey had died and she had this estate money, she said, "I'm going to make the first donation." So, I said, "We need to raise money." I said to Adrian, "After Barb makes this money, I'm going to call for people to give donations in the room. Let's just do that. Trish and I'll donate 1,000 dollars," which was hard for us, because we didn't have a lot of money. "But we'll do this." And he goes, "Okay. Well, I'll donate 1,000 dollars." So, okay, we'll do this. And then he says, "Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks." He said, "We need to raise 75,000 dollars by October for us to do this. Maybe we can raise 10,000 bucks." So, I said, "Okay." I have to say, and this is not humble, but I run a party better than Adrian does. For one thing, I'm funnier than he is. So, I get up and I say the stuff, and I had been running all the galas, I think this was our eighth gala, and I was running it. I said things that made people laugh. One of the things I said was that I had gotten a call from one of our regular calling guys who says, "Well, you know, you do a great job with this but what if you die?" And so I said this to everybody. I said, "Well, I'm not going to die, but this is what we're going to do." So, I said all those things, and then Barb came up and she said, "I'm going to make the first donation," and then I said, "I'm going to donate." And then I said, "Okay, our friends Ann and Laura donated. So, now we have 3,000 bucks. Now you have heard from the lesbians. Where are the gay men?" People started jumping up all over. By the end of the night, I mean people were going, "Five thousand dollars," I mean, they were just like dominos they were just going over and over. And finally, we were writing it down. We thought it was going to be four or five people, we'd have 10,000 dollars, it'd be great. So, I'm like, "Is somebody writing this down?" And nobody was doing it. I'm trying to remember everybody and I'm looking around and people are doing this. And we didn't even know they were, they were just jumping up and stuff. So, at the end of the night, I was awake all night, and in the morning, at about seven o'clock, Adrian goes, "Do you have a list?" I said, "Yeah, I think I have a list," because I'm trying to remember everybody, and we compared our lists, and we had 35,000 dollars. So, we were halfway by then. We actually made the money by -- this was in the summer, why was it in the summer? Yeah, it was in August. And we were actually able to make the money -- I'm pretty sure that's sure. We had the gala in August. No, no, it was in June, and we had the money by August. That was the thing. It was in June because we had it as a Pride thing. And it was a problem because a lot of the high schoolers were graduating, and they were all graduating in the arena, and there was no parking and nobody could find any place to park. So, we remembered as many people as we could and we had 35,000 dollars. And by August, we had the money. Adrian quit his job within a month, and then he did it, and he set it up. So, one of the things was that the mayor said he would give us a building for a dollar. And the city did do this. Now, we're running out of time here. But the city did do this. And they arranged to give us this building on Turner Street, and it was a dollar. It was really neat, because it was only half a mile from our house. And it's a weird-shaped building. And so, in a nutshell what happened was, we investigated that building for a year. And we had architects and hazmat and we did all this due diligence and we figured out there's no way in hell we can use this building. Among other things, it's not just covered with asbestos, it's made of asbestos. It was full of lead and asbestos and Adrian said, "The only thing that was living in that building was dead pigeons." Now, Adrian and I are both scared to death of dead things, particularly rodents. I said, "Don't look down," when we were in the building, because there were all these dead birds because there was no roof. There was no roof, there were no windows. It was going to cost us a million dollars. In fact, it's still there because nobody can afford to take it down, because the remediation of it would be so hard to do. So, we ended up then, it was August and we went to Florida, and Adrian was looking around at buildings, and he said, "I think I found a building. I want you to look at it online." And so, we're looking at it online, and I said, "Adrian, this looks like a mobile home with no windows." Oh, no. We found a building that we really liked. And we tried to get it. It was on Seventh Street. It was close to the arena. It fell through and it was sort of an anti-gay thing that made us very sad. We almost got that building. And then, he had this building. We didn't want it to be in Bethlehem because I wanted to be able to go to work and I really wanted it to be in Allentown. I thought we would get more government support. He wanted it to be in Allentown, too, even though he lived in Bethlehem, then. And there's a lot of reasons for that, and one of them is that there's more people in Allentown, so there's more justification of having it, there's more inner-city youth, that kind of stuff. So, Trish said, "I don't want this mobile home with no windows," which I'm not kidding, it really was only 4,000 square feet. The building that the city wanted to give us was 7,000 square feet. I think the mobile home was 3,000 square feet. And so, Trish found the building that we have online, and she said, "Look at this building. It's great and it's kind of within our price range. It's a little high, but it has an elevator." So, I called Adrian up and I said, "We just sent you a thing, you have to go look at this building today." He said, "I can't go today, but I'll go tomorrow morning." So, he gets Rob Ritter, and he goes to the building, he calls me from the building, and he says, "I love the building. I love this building." I said, "Are you going to put an offer on it?" And he said, "I already have." And we got it. That's the end of that story. Then, there's all this stuff about the center, but other people can tell that story. So, that's what we got. MF: All right. We can conclude today, and then we had talked about maybe with our next interview focusing on some more personal stories, maybe your life history. LB: Sure. MF: Okay. Is there anything else you want to add before we can conclude today's interview? LB: I can talk about the center, and there are things I know about the center that other people, mostly the main stuff that I know about is when Trish and Adrian and I walked into the building and said, "What are we going to have to do to it, and how are we going to fix it up?" And how we fixed it up in the first six months. Adrian was doing colossal efforts to get money, and to make it happen, and get all the other complicated things, including changing over the 501c3, and doing all that kind of stuff. We took the Pennsylvania Diversity Network 501c3 and converted it into the center's 501c3. And getting the board together and doing all the different kinds of things and getting contracts and doing all that kind of stuff, while I was getting 300 different volunteers to prep the building and to clean it and to paint it and to do a few physical changes in tearing up the rugs and rebuilding the moldings and doing all the stuff that we had to do. It was a colossal effort. And it was fun because that kind of stuff I like to do, although it was physically very tiring. And Adrian has no skills in that at all, so I get to do everything. And I just tell everybody what to do. And he told people that. They said, "How did you know what to do?" He said, "Well, Liz tells us what to do and then we just do it." So, I did a lot of work but we also had wonderful, wonderful, wonderful volunteers, hundreds of volunteers. Some of them would just come. We were there all night, and people would come and stay all night with me and help me until three o'clock. "I don't want to come until midnight, is that okay?" You know that kind of stuff. It was terrific. So, I can talk about that. But that seems like other people know about it, compared to me. That was wonderful. MF: All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. It was, again, just such a pleasure. LB: Oh, it was fun. MF: All right, I'm going to pause this now. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:31:12 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liz Bradbury, August 3, 2020 Description An account of the resource Liz Bradbury details the transition from The Valley Gay Press to Pennsylvania Diversity Network, providing the Valley with crucial information, meeting Adrian Shanker, and starting an LGBTQ+ community center for the Lehigh Valley. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-19 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-08-03 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.