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40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community: COVID-19
Description
An account of the resource
In the spring of 2020, the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive received a grant to collect oral histories and written stories for 40 Years of Public Health in the Lehigh Valley’s LGBT Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBT Health Experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19.
The collection consists of oral histories from individuals who experienced the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as oral histories from members of the local community as they lived through 2020's summer of Covid-19. Running through both are the themes of dealing with the fear of an emerging health crisis, loneliness and isolation, and coming together as a community in support and activism.
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.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Liz Bradbury
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Miles Molerio
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_19.xml
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5.4 July 27, 2020 Miles Molerio, July 27, 2020 PH40_19 00:57:35 LVLGBT40 40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community 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 COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- COVID-19 (Disease) Miles Molerio Liz Bradbury video/mpeg MolerioMiles_20200727_video.mp4 1.0:|23(12)|42(14)|71(8)|96(13)|129(5)|162(7)|191(7)|214(8)|243(3)|264(10)|289(14)|322(5)|349(9)|372(18)|397(8)|426(5)|451(10)|472(12)|495(3)|514(7)|535(15)|562(2)|583(11)|606(9)|639(12)|662(13)|697(3)|726(9)|763(6)|794(3)|825(14)|856(12)|881(16)|906(4)|929(11)|952(12)|973(14)|992(8)|1013(13)|1042(13)|1067(11)|1088(13)|1111(14)|1138(4)|1163(3)|1190(18)|1213(2)|1222(10)|1241(2)|1278(7)|1309(17)|1336(13)|1369(4)|1398(9)|1421(12)|1450(10)|1489(9)|1506(5) 0 https://youtu.be/QQWZgibNMfE YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction LB: So, with this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and Trexler Library at the Muhlenberg College will collect forty years of public health experience in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community, collecting and curating local GBT health experiences from HIV AIDS to COIVD-19. My name is Liz Bradbury, and I’m here with Miles Molerio -- is that right? 0 224 Quarantining with friends' family during pandemic MM: So, I’ve been quarantining with my friend, Sarah, and her family, after my college forced us all to leave. 
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 ; LB: I see. Oh, so you’ve been there a long time then?
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 ; MM: I’ve been here since March. 
 ; 0 266 Graduating from Moravian University and working as the school's mascot LB: And now, you’re getting ready to go to graduate school. But have you been working or --
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 ; MM: Kind of. Well, I was still in school, technically, online, for Moravian. I’ve been doing some promotional work for them as the mascot, making videos and whatever the media department needed because I --
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 ; LB: So, tell me what the mascot is. 0 336 Completing school online MM: Not really. I have some issues with light sensitivity, so being on the computer for hours and hours -- migraines, headaches. I had a couple accommodations with the college, but it wasn’t really working, since everything was online. So, I just kind of suffered, and pulled through it, and got my grades, and left. 0 408 Staying in touch with others MM: Yeah, so, especially being a graduating student -- and I work a lot for my college. There’s a lot of things that didn’t get to happen. I was an RA as well, a resident advisor, so I had a lot of students I oversaw. They were really sad that we weren’t together anymore. So, we get together just about every week and do a little face call and speak to each other, just check in how everyone’s doing. Just a lot of FaceTiming and calling people. 0 514 Discussing "Zoom bombing" MM: It was a large group when school was still in session. A lot of my residents are music majors, so they had an online composers concert, where they were able to play music files of what the kids were composing to at least get them some kind of concert. I was there watching, supporting my friends and my former residents, and some guy hacked into the Zoom call and started saying the N word and writing the N word all over the place on the screen. 
 ; 0 715 Staying in touch with aunt/Aunt's and mom's reactions to being trans/Staying in touch with family MM: I have a brother. I have an older brother. But yeah.
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 ; LB: But you have aunts and uncles that you’re having good -- I remember that, actually, that you had some -- a particularly cool aunt. Is that true? 
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 ; MM: My Aunt Debbie, yeah.
 ; 0 935 Biggest concerns for self and LGBT community during pandemic MM: [...] Because my biggest concern for myself was my mental health, and I think that also transcribes over to the whole community, as a whole. It’s so, so rough. I’m very energetic -- as you know -- person. I’m a very personable person. I like to be around people, my friends, hang out. I don’t get to anymore. FaceTiming and talking on the phone is one thing. But I miss just sitting and hanging out with my friends, and I don’t know, playing video games or just talking. Just being around people that are different than the ones I’m living with. 
 ; 0 1099 Thoughts on Dr. Rachel Levine MM: I very much appreciate her. I love seeing the updates that she puts up. I follow all that on Facebook, so I get the updates on COVID in Pennsylvania, so I know what’s going on when I go back soon. Especially in the day of social media, I think it’s a little -- you know what’s going on with her, and people are being so horrific toward her for just being trans. 0 1230 Using queer data and hookup apps during the pandemic MM: I think it’s so funny because I’ve had these apps. I know people have the very queer-centric ones, like the really gay-centric and the queer-centric ones. I’ve tried those ; I don’t like them. Not enough people. 0 1339 Location during the pandemic/Friends' parents working in the health industry during the pandemic/Opening of schools in Hampton, Massachusetts LB: So, are you going out, or are you pretty much staying in? Or what about the other people in the -- where you are, in the house? Are they pretty much staying in? Are people at risk? Or what do you think about that? 
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 ; MM: We have all pretty much stayed here ever since March. The only person who’s really been out of the house has been my friend’s mom and dad because her dad owns his own health business. He actually owns a company that sells the technology for telehealth. 0 1498 Sharing ads for LGBT events online MM: Not really. I share a lot of stuff. When I see that there’s events going on for queer folks, I share it on my social media because I have a lot of friends and queer friends, and kind of share that with them. 0 1563 Going out during the pandemic LB: Golly. So, do you go to the store? So, the mom goes to the store and just brings food in, and you’re just there like, “Thank you very much?”
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 ; MM: Yeah.
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 ; LB: Have you gone to McDonald’s?
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 ; MM: She goes to the grocery store. Huh?
 ; 0 1624 Concern over friends' family going on vacation in the middle of the pandemic/Experience living in Hampton, MA MM: They went to North Carolina. They have a beachfront down there. So, they’re doing their best to socially distance as much as possible. It’s their home. So, they brought their own groceries, their own cleaning supplies, everything, just to not have to go out. The more southern you go, the more spikes there are. 
 ; 0 1737 Passing the time with reading and restoring a/learning the saxophone MM: Yeah, I bought some books recently. My boss for my job at Lehigh, my graduate assistantship, sent me some books for student leadership, student affairs kind of stuff. I’ve been catching up on some hobbies. The only kind of thing I actually went out to do is I went to a barn sale. 
 ; 0 1960 Biggest frustration during the pandemic/Biggest fear during the pandemic MM: [...] I think my most frustration is when I see people not abiding by any social distancing things. I had to go to the grocery store before my friend’s parents left, and we’re in the grocery store, and they have they have the signs “you must wear a mask.” And there’s people wearing masks, and I think the most frustrating thing is when people have the masks on --
 ; 0 2161 Point of hope during the pandemic MM: Hope and strength right now is every time I look up Moderna and they’re phase three of the vaccine. I keep very on top of the vaccine info. I don’t just watch the news, see what they say. I go look it up and see what the actual companies are saying and what the reports are looking like. That’s the only thing really giving me a lot of hope, is that they’re going into phase three of the trial. And after phase three, so close to get (inaudible) out to the public. 0 2236 Having an anti-mask friend MM: I do. I don’t know why we’re friends, but we are. She has been good to me, respectful of me. And we’re opposite on the political spectrum. She’s my age. Actually, she’s younger. I know. It’s strange. We’ve always been kind to one another. Great friend of mine. And always respectful towards one another. But she, on Facebook -- oh my God. 0 2361 Thoughts on why some people are skeptical about pandemic precautions/Developing an open-minded point-of-view through a college education MM: I think it’s based off of where you’re raised. You grow up in a household that is particularly Republican or very right-winged, you learn from your parents. I could say the same thing. My parents were hateful. My parents said the N word.
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 ; LB: You’re not like that.
 ; 0 2551 Discussing centrist stances on racism MM: And there’s no place for middle ground anymore. Either you’re on one side, or the other. You can’t be in the middle anymore because being in the middle is just as bad as being racist.
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 ; LB: What’s the middle?
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 ; MM: Omnipotence and just oblivious, like I don’t see color kind of people. 
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 ; LB: Such a crock that is. I don’t see color. 0 2638 Being considerate to the health of others/Knowing of people who have contracted Covid-19 LB: It would be hard, I think, for your friend that you -- all of you are sort of getting on her and saying, “You’re talking about killing our friend. How can we just overlook that?” I think that’s a pretty effective way of making an argument. 
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 ; MM: We have tried. I think she’s just so thick-skilled. I don’t understand how people just can’t have compassion for another human being. 0 2783 Thoughts on Black Lives Matter MM: It is as white as eggs on toast up here. But surprisingly enough, for this little area, where there are quite a bit of Trump posters and things, there was a Black Lives Matter protest in a city. So, a little city. Barely a city. A little area that we actually drove out to a couple weeks ago. And it was a very peaceful protest. It was led by African American community members. 0 2962 Attending Lehigh University as a graduate student during the pandemic MM: So, Lehigh has said they are doing mainly online classes. They’re sending out a more detailed plan on August 3 of exactly how they’re doing things. I know two of my classes are online. 0 3095 Cooking while friends' parents are away/Emotional support cat, Magic LB: So, if you’re all by yourself there, how many more days do you have to be all by yourself there?
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 ; MM: The rest of this week. My friend’s parents will be coming back at the end of the week. So, I’m just here by myself until then.
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 ; LB: So, what’s for dinner?
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 ; MM: Tacos. 
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 ; LB: If you run out of food, what are you going to do? 
 ; 0 3220 Thoughts for the future/Conclusion MM: Oh, geez. I think the most important kind of emotions to put forth in the future -- like I’ve been saying, this is going to happen again. This is going to happen again. Maybe someone’s going to look at this when it is happening again with a different virus, or a different disease, or type of global emergency. I think the best thing, the most important thing to understand, is the need for the human compassion. 0 MovingImage Miles Molerio talks about how the current COVID-19 pandemic is affecting him. He talks about leaving college early, having to stay with a friend’s family for 5 months, how the virus is affecting him and other members of the Transgender community, and what is bothering him the most. Miles Molerio 2020-07-27 LIZ BRADBURY: Let me turn this on. Okay. And I pinned you? Yeah. That's good. I'm going to turn this (inaudible). Okay. I'm good. So, here's the stuff. I'm sorry that's a waste of that time. So, with this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and Trexler Library at the Muhlenberg College will collect forty years of public health experience in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community, collecting and curating local GBT health experiences from HIV AIDS to COIVD-19. My name is Liz Bradbury, and I'm here with Miles Molerio -- is that right? MILES MOLERIO: There you go. LB: To talk to him about his experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT community archive. We're meeting on Zoom on July 27 -- Monday, July 27. And 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? MM: Okay. My name is Miles Elliot Molerio, so M-I-L-E-S, E-L-L-I-O-T, M-O-L-E-R-I-O. LB: And please share your birthdate. MM: My birthdate is April 15, 1998. LB: And what town are you in? You said you were in Massachusetts right now? MM: I'm currently in Hampton, Massachusetts. LB: Oh, in Hampton, where Smith is, right? Oh, no. That's Northampton. That's different. Okay, this is the consent portion. Do you consent to this interview today? MM: Yes. LB: Oops. That's the wrong page. Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? MM: Yes. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, archives, articles, websites, presentations, and other things we may not even know about today? MM: Yes. LB: Do you understand that you'll have thirty days after your electronic -- after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview and identify parts you would like to delete and, or withdraw from your interview from the project? MM: Yes. LB: So, let me see. All right. So, this is some identity stuff. What is your zip code of the place where you live? Because you live in Bethlehem, right? MM: Yes. Oh, God. It just changed: 18018. LB: That's close enough. What's your age? MM: I am twenty-two. LB:nOh, okay. How do you identify within the LGBT community, i.e., trans, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, pan, (inaudible), that kind of stuff? MM: I identify as trans and queer. LB: You don't have to talk about these if you don't want to, but here are some general things for us to consider. Let's talk about this now. So, right now, during COVID pandemic, you are in some -- you are someplace. And are you with somebody? Who's in the house with you? MM: So, I've been quarantining with my friend, Sarah, and her family, after my college forced us all to leave. LB: I see. Oh, so you've been there a long time then? MM: I've been here since March. LB: Holy moly. How terrific that these people let you do this. You're indebted to them for the rest of your life. MM: Oh, it even goes further. (laughs) LB: They'll be talking about this for the rest of your life, that they had to put up with this. Well, how great that they're doing that. Isn't that wonderful? So, you just graduated from Moravian at the end of this -- the year, so to speak, and you're all done there? MM: Yes. I am officially done with them. LB: And now, you're getting ready to go to graduate school. But have you been working or -- MM: Kind of. Well, I was still in school, technically, online, for Moravian. I've been doing some promotional work for them as the mascot, making videos and whatever the media department needed because I -- LB: So, tell me what the mascot is. MM: (laughs) Our mascot is Amos the Greyhound. So, I have a big Greyhound costume in the house. LB: So, you brought it with you? MM: I was asked to bring it with me. LB: Oh, how funny. MM: So, I've been doing that. Because before the college shut down, we made a COVID about what not to do, what to do, how to wash your hands, all that kind of stuff. So, I had it with me, and they're like, "Take it home. Make some videos. We'll pay you." LB: Oh, good. And did you have to do schoolwork from -- your college work from where you were? MM: Yeah, I had to do everything from here on the computer. LB: Did that work out okay for you? Or what do you think? MM: Not really. I have some issues with light sensitivity, so being on the computer for hours and hours -- migraines, headaches. I had a couple accommodations with the college, but it wasn't really working, since everything was online. So, I just kind of suffered, and pulled through it, and got my grades, and left. LB: Really? So, you finished though, so that's good. That's really good. Because I just want to say, for prosperity, because I hope that somebody in the future, people will see this, that you were an intern at the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, and you worked in the department that I am in charge of. So, I've known you for a long time, relatively. And that was a long time ago, actually. But I haven't really seen you to talk to since then. So, I'm so happy that I get to talk to you now. MM: Yeah, it's awesome. LB: So, you were just talking about being away from people, and I really would like you to talk about that. I think it's a significant thing to say that you're away from folks now and you've been communicating with your family, which I guess is on -- I just want everybody to know that Miles has the greatest demonstrative face in the United States. So, you can always know what Miles is thinking by looking at it, and it's brilliant, I think. I think you could see it through the Greyhound costume. But I really would love you to talk about what it's like communicating with others on the phone, or online, or on video. You're probably talking to friends that you graduated -- talk about that a little bit. MM: Yeah, so, especially being a graduating student -- and I work a lot for my college. There's a lot of things that didn't get to happen. I was an RA as well, a resident advisor, so I had a lot of students I oversaw. They were really sad that we weren't together anymore. So, we get together just about every week and do a little face call and speak to each other, just check in how everyone's doing. Just a lot of FaceTiming and calling people. Lots of friends. A lot of my family, like my aunts and uncles, who I still talk to. They check in a lot to see how I'm doing. A lot of letter writing. It's back into style. LB: Wow. MM: Postcards, and letter writing, and all that kind of stuff, just to have some kind of form of contact. It's been really good, for the most part. There's been a couple of the times where -- I don't know if you've heard of it, but we've experienced the Zoom bombing. LB: Yeah, sure. MM: We've had couple times where -- LB:So, groups? Talk about that. MM:It was a large group when school was still in session. A lot of my residents are music majors, so they had an online composers concert, where they were able to play music files of what the kids were composing to at least get them some kind of concert. I was there watching, supporting my friends and my former residents, and some guy hacked into the Zoom call and started saying the N word and writing the N word all over the place on the screen. We had to schedule it, and redo it, and put passwords, and all sorts of stuff. It was really horrific. I actually didn't go to my Zoom classes for the rest of the week because I didn't want that to happen again. I was kind of scared. It was awful. LB: And I'm about to do a big training next week that -- for The Children's Home of Easton, which is a -- and it's not that big. It's about forty people all together. It's two trainings, actually. But do you think if there had been a waiting room for that, that would've kept that from happening? Was the Zoom link published somewhere? Thirty years from now, people are going to go, "Why didn't they just use the franistan [sic] and keep this from happening?" Because we're just not used to that now, and this kind of stuff is happening. Or the iris recognition or something that you would do. MM: I can't really blame the faculty member who tried to put the concert together. He was just trying to get something for his students. He's a ninety-year-old professor, who somehow was able to learn Zoom. LB: Don't be ageist. MM: (laughs) His name is Dr. Lipkis. Very nice guy. Just not very tech savvy. LB: Okay, you can say that. MM: But he was just trying to put together something for the students. And we all had to rush to learn Zoom and this kind of stuff. I wouldn't blame any one of them. LB: So, this was just at the beginning then? MM: Yeah, this was just in the beginning, around end of March, beginning of April. LB: So, as people are much more careful, and I have actually set up a waiting room for this, and they have to check through every person so that -- and then also that they'll be identified, so that if somebody does something naughty, it will show who it is. And these are employees. But yeah, who would know that that kind of horrible thing would happen? Terrible thing. I'm sorry that that happened to you. It must've been very devastating for the ones who did this music. Did they do it again? MM: Yeah, we stopped it, and then we did a different day with a password-set Zoom link, and it was restricted. A lot more restricted. LB: I see. MM: So, we got it working eventually. LB: Creepy though. Do you have brothers and sisters? MM: I have a brother. I have an older brother. But yeah. LB: But you have aunts and uncles that you're having good -- I remember that, actually, that you had some -- a particularly cool aunt. Is that true? MM: My Aunt Debbie, yeah. LB: So, you've been having communication with her? And do you have Zoom with her, or do you just chat on text or over the phone? MM: We just talk over the phone. That's what we've been doing ever since she's kind of stepped in as my mom. So, we just call on the phone and check in, just see how everything's doing, how everyone's doing. LB: Do you want to say why that is, that you had to have somebody step in as your mom? You don't have to if you don't want to talk about it. MM: I'm fine with it. My mom was just -- didn't really understand the whole trans thing. We tried talking with therapists and counselors, so it was a mediated conversation. She didn't really care how I felt. She was more, "This is hurting me. You're making me feel bad." All this. Trying to blame me for it, and about her feelings. I just refused to talk to her, really, for the rest of my college career. She would try to reach out. I would answer with a one-word answer. And my aunt was kind of like -- she's the baby child of her -- of my mom, her sister, and her other sister. And she works in the health field, so she has a bit more of an understanding. Her boss is actually a surgeon, who does transgender-related surgeries, who is trans. LB: Wow. MM: So, she was -- had a lot easier connection of trying to understand, and learning. So, she's kind of the one who stepped in to help me. Just basic things that you would call your mom for, like I don't feel too well. What should I do? Or how do I do taxes? Those kind of conversations and things. And some place to go for Christmas and spend Christmas with family. LB: So, you go to her house? Or is that the deal? MM: Yeah, I've gone to her house every year for Christmas. LB: I see. And since the virus has happened, have you talked to family members about how they've been coping with that too? I mean, in some ways, since it's so much more the norm to talk to people on FaceTime, you're getting more FaceTime with some people. That happen? MM: Yeah. I have a lot of aunts, so definitely, I check in with them a lot, especially my aunts on my dad's side, who -- we didn't really have a good connection. So, we get to talk a lot more now. We do a lot of letter writing between each other, and FaceTiming, and calling. They're doing okay. A lot of them like it because a couple of them are very antisocial to begin with. So, they're like, "I love this. This is great. I can stay in my house all day, and I don't have to explain it to anyone." (laughs) My one aunt, Debbie, hates it, because she works in the health field. She works in a hospital, so it's a little bit scary for her because her hospital had the first COVID case for her region in New York. LB: Oh, she's in New York? Oh, golly. MM: Yeah, she's in Mahopac, New York. So, it's not the center of the city, but it's still New York. LB: Yeah, it's different. It's different there. So, what's your biggest concern during the pandemic? What do you think is a biggest concern for you, and then also for the LGBT community, and sort of in general, the whole queer community? MM: I think those two, for me, go in together. Because my biggest concern for myself was my mental health, and I think that also transcribes over to the whole community, as a whole. It's so, so rough. I'm very energetic -- as you know -- person. I'm a very personable person. I like to be around people, my friends, hang out. I don't get to anymore. FaceTiming and talking on the phone is one thing. But I miss just sitting and hanging out with my friends, and I don't know, playing video games or just talking. Just being around people that are different than the ones I'm living with. LB: And this is your interview, but I have to interject something here. I have to say that when I left college and I went to graduate school, and I did what you did -- I went right to graduate school -- I had really dear friends and -- that I really -- that are -- I'm still friends with and that I still communicate with. And one of them was a wonderful, wonderful person, who I spent every day with the entire time I was in college. We were really pals. And we're still friends, and we still talk. But when you leave college, your whole life changes. Because otherwise, you're with those people. You're living with them every day. So, leaving college, I mean, the fact that you have -- because I didn't see that person again for 10 years. I didn't see her. I mean, I talked to her and I wrote a lot of letters, but I didn't see her again for 10 years. So, at least when you have Zoom, you can -- you've already seen your people a whole bunch of times since college was over. And it is kind of wonderful. She ended up living in Indiana for a while, and then in New Orleans. Really, I can count on my hand the number of times that I've seen her since 1979. And it's sad because I could never talk to her. And she doesn't like Zoom, which sucks, because I would actually love to talk to her on Zoom. You're lucky that -- in a lot of ways, that in a way, people intentionally trying to stay hooked up in this visual way. They might not even be doing that if it weren't for COVID. So, good for you that you're keeping up with that. That's been a good thing. So, let me ask you about being able to see Dr. Rachel Levine on -- you know who she is. It's our wonderful secretary now, of course. Well, do you want to talk about seeing her and how that's made you feel, and in general, how you felt about her being the voice of Governor Wolf's offices? MM: I very much appreciate her. I love seeing the updates that she puts up. I follow all that on Facebook, so I get the updates on COVID in Pennsylvania, so I know what's going on when I go back soon. Especially in the day of social media, I think it's a little -- you know what's going on with her, and people are being so horrific toward her for just being trans. But she's doing a phenomenal job reporting the health data and keeping everyone updated. I think it's just ridiculous. Even if she wasn't a trans woman, I think that people would still find a way to pick on whoever it was because they're not happy about being told what to do. I think it's awful what people are saying about her. I know there was that incident at that fair, where they had her -- someone dressed like her in a dunk tank. She's putting her neck out there, doing all this research, and making sure we're all safe and healthy, so we can open everything again and go back to normal life. People are just being babies, and picking on her, and being awful. LB: And really, for the most part, it's really anti-minority, picking on her. Here's a person, who's a brilliant scientist and capable of giving us -- and they're not picking on the information. And truthfully, if they disagree with her policies, that's one thing. Everybody has the right to that. This is just how she looks. It's ridiculous. And it's all based in transphobia, and misogyny, and stuff like that. It's terrible. Let's see. I already said that. Oh, here's a good one. Are you spending any time on queer dating or hookup apps? (laughs) MM: Oh, God. I can't lie. Yeah. (laughter) LB: You don't have to lie. And you won't be the only one that said yes. MM: I think it's so funny because I've had these apps. I know people have the very queer-centric ones, like the really gay-centric and the queer-centric ones. I've tried those ; I don't like them. Not enough people. Maybe I should try them now. I don't know. But I have the standard Tinder and Bumble, and that's it. I hate Tinder, so I haven't touched it, and I think I got rid of it recently. And then Bumble -- I think it's nicer. There's a lot more people on all of them now. LB: I bet. So, is that giving you enough ability to hook up with other queer people? Or does that not matter as much to you, as long as they're queer friendly? Or what do you think? MM: It doesn't really matter to me, long as they're queer friendly. I don't really get to see people. I wouldn't do a date or whatever because of social distancing. No. I'm fine with just talking with people and communicating with people on the phone. I'm not trying to be going out there, doing a date or a hookup. No. That's totally out of the question. That's defying all of the science that we've all been seeing. Come on. No. LB: So, you're in Hampton, Massachusetts. And where is that, say, in relation to the state? Is it near Boston? Or is it right in the middle of the state? Is it near Northampton? MM: It's right in the middle of the state. It's very woodsy. A lot of back roads ; not a lot of main roads. I think the most city I've seen is a little area with a Wendy's and a McDonald's. That's about it. LB: So, are you going out, or are you pretty much staying in? Or what about the other people in the -- where you are, in the house? Are they pretty much staying in? Are people at risk? Or what do you think about that? MM: We have all pretty much stayed here ever since March. The only person who's really been out of the house has been my friend's mom and dad because her dad owns his own health business. He actually owns a company that sells the technology for telehealth. So, he's in charge of a lot of that. And he has to go to the office because everyone's relying on telehealth now for doctor visits and such. But he's done it in a way where he goes one day, someone else goes the next day, so there's only one person in the office. So, just kind of staging it out nicely. And my friend's mom's a school nurse. LB: Oh, golly. Oh. Oh, could there be a worse job? MM: Yeah, during all this. She's a school nurse for a Catholic school. And they haven't really been giving her much guidance or money for buying PPE and supplies for the start of the school year. So, she's having to do her own research, and has to go out and buy her own PPE and things. LB: Is it open? MM: Hmm? LB: The school's going to open? MM: The schools here are going to open. That's what she's been told. She doubts that it's going to actually open. She thinks they're going to close them beforehand. LB: I think that's true. Trish was going to her regular doctor that's the specialist because Trish has lupus. And she went to the doctor, and the doctor just said, "Don't worry about schools opening. They're not going to open." MM: No way. LB: Because if we have a spike, how can you already have a spike? You can't say, "Well, it's okay." MM: Yeah, I don't know. I leave the science up to Dr. Levine, and I listen to what she says. (laughs) LB: So, it's certainly affecting your life. So, have you been doing any new queer activities online? It sounds like you try to avoid being online too much but -- because of too much flashback. Have you said, "Oh, look at this site," or something, or, "Hey, the Bradbury-Sullivan Center has all these cool things"? MM: Not really. I share a lot of stuff. When I see that there's events going on for queer folks, I share it on my social media because I have a lot of friends and queer friends, and kind of share that with them. Especially being the former president of Moravian's LGBT club, I share a lot of that stuff with the new leadership, and they've been getting stuff together with the community, and sharing all that information with them, and having some type of -- they together monthly, just to check in on everyone and see how everyone's doing. But I haven't really been doing anything new. Just kind of sticking to my usual kind of stuff. LB: Do you go out for walks and stuff there or -- MM: Not really. A lot of the neighbors around here have a lot of dogs, and they don't keep them leashed. LB: Oh. MM: Also, there's a bear running around here. So, I don't really go outside much, because that bear keeps showing up in the backyard. Very, very woodsy. There' LB: (inaudible) MM: We live up a hill, and one of the neighbors has a Jeep, and he drives eighty miles per hour up the hill. So, I'm not about to get hit by a car. LB: Golly. So, do you go to the store? So, the mom goes to the store and just brings food in, and you're just there like, "Thank you very much?" MM: Yeah. LB: Have you gone to McDonald's? MM: She goes to the grocery store. Huh? LB: Have you gone to McDonald's, since they happen to have one in the town? MM: No. I have not gone to really anything, except for when I had to -- so, they're actually gone on vacation right now. To be honest, I'm not too happy about that. They're adults. I can't stop them. LB: Where did they go? MM: They went to North Carolina. They have a beachfront down there. So, they're doing their best to socially distance as much as possible. It's their home. So, they brought their own groceries, their own cleaning supplies, everything, just to not have to go out. The more southern you go, the more spikes there are. LB: I know. MM: So, I'm a little worried. I hope they don't come back and get me sick. Hopefully, they don't get sick. LB: Did your friend, Sarah, go too? MM: Hmm? LB: Did your friend, Sarah, go too? MM: No. She actually moved out recently. She wanted to move back to Bethlehem. They're back already. She has her own apartment and is settled there, which is -- LB: You're there with her parents? MM: Hmm? LB: Are you by yourself there? MM: I have the house by myself right now. LB: You've got the cat and the bear. MM: I've got the cats and the bear in the backyard. LB: Do you have a car? MM: No. LB: Oh, shit. (laughs) So, this is like a slasher movie. MM: Yeah. The doors are locked every night. There's a hammer under my pillow. (laughs) LB: Oh my gosh. MM: It's okay. The neighbors know I'm here. They know the neighbors ; the neighbors know I'm here. So, it is what it is. LB: Is it hot? It looks like there's an air conditioner in your window. MM: Yeah, we got a couple air conditioners. It's hot. It's not as hot as Bethlehem, but it's still hot up here. LB: So, are you bored? What are you doing? I mean, are you reading books and stuff or watching TV? MM: Yeah, I bought some books recently. My boss for my job at Lehigh, my graduate assistantship, sent me some books for student leadership, student affairs kind of stuff. I've been catching up on some hobbies. The only kind of thing I actually went out to do is I went to a barn sale. LB: Oh, yeah. Cool. MM: I went to a barn sale, and I bought an antique saxophone. LB: You did? MM: So, I've been restoring that as my way to pass the time. LB: Is it a marching saxophone? MM: Yeah, it's a vintage saxophone, French saxophone, from the 1950s. LB: Well, as long as it's not bent and you can put the new corks on, it should be okay. Had you played saxophone before? MM: Nope. LB: Oh. Did you play any other reed instrument before? MM: Nope. LB: I tried to learn to play the clarinet, and I have a saxophone, which I never was very good at. I told [Cindy Rodriguez?] I would give it to her because she wants to learn how to play it. And I said, "It's very hard to learn reed instruments later in life." You're pretty young. You should be able to do it. Don't wait until you're 40 or 50 because it's really hard to. MM: That's what's keeping me busy, giving me something to do. LB: So, are you watching YouTube videos and then going, "Okay, I'll try that?" Or did you have music and -- MM: Yeah, watching YouTube stuff. Trying it. A lot of my friends, like my friend who was living here before she moved out, they're all music majors. LB: Oh, I see. MM: So, I call them. I'm like, "Okay, you know saxophone. You don't have anywhere to student teach right now. We can share." LB: I was going to tell you the place where everybody gets their tool -- their saxophones and stuff. It's a place in Nazareth, Pennsylvania that's -- MM: Nazareth Music Shop. LB: You've heard of it? MM: Yep. I've been there. I called them. As soon as I get back to Pennsylvania, I'm taking the saxophone over there. LB: Yes. Yeah, yeah. They're really good. MM: Oh, fantastic. LB: They really are pros. And what they'll probably tell you is that you should get a different mouthpiece because if you have a better mouthpiece, it's easier to play it. It's really true. You think what? But it's definitely true. Well, good for you that you could be doing that. So, let me ask you this. Do you have a Bethlehem Library card? Or a library card any place in Pennsylvania? MM: I don't. LB: Well, too bad, because I just found out that you can access all of Philadelphia's library if you have any card from the State of Pennsylvania. And there's a lot of audiobooks. So, it's really fun to have. So, next time you're in there, get a card, because it's really fun. And plus, sometimes you can get books that you need to read. I had to read a book for a book club, and it turned out that they had the audio book. And so, I didn't have to read it. It was a good book. It was a book that our group at the community center was doing. And I'm way too lazy to read the whole book. I had other stuff I had to do. So, I'm like, if you're going to work in the garden and you can listen to the book at the same time, it's great. But I couldn't not do the garden stuff, so that was terrific. So, let's see. I asked you that. What's the biggest frustration you have, or the biggest fear you have? Maybe that's two different things or the same thing. MM: Those are very two different things for me. I think my most frustration is when I see people not abiding by any social distancing things. I had to go to the grocery store before my friend's parents left, and we're in the grocery store, and they have they have the signs "you must wear a mask." And there's people wearing masks, and I think the most frustrating thing is when people have the masks on -- LB: Great mask. (inaudible) MM: -- but do this. With the nose. It totally defeats the purpose. I don't understand. You see the picture on the box when you buy the masks. It's over the nose. I think that's the most frustrating thing because you're just so close to doing the right thing, but you're not there. And you're still getting people sick, or possibly getting someone sick. Just do that. LB: No kidding. MM: It's (inaudible) frustrating. LB: And so, that's a frustration. What about a fear? What's your biggest fear? MM: I think my biggest fear is that the people -- people want to go back to this normalcy. Normal wasn't working. That's the biggest fear. Normal wasn't working. Normal didn't have us prepared for a pandemic. This is not the last pandemic, with the way the Earth is burning and everything going. And this is definitely not the last time we're going to see something like this. And the normalcy everyone wants to go back to has ended up with hundreds of thousands of people dead. I think people wanting to go back to normal is very fearful because normal wasn't working and we need to do better for -- if something happens like this again, so hundreds of thousands of people don't die because of a virus that we have all this science for. But we can't get something under control, or we don't have enough compassion to just stay in our house for a couple months, or if you're going to go out, do it six feet apart with a cloth over your face. It's not a political thing. It's just being compassionate about other people's well being. I think that's the most scary part of all this: people don't care. LB: Yes. I've interviewed more than twenty people, twenty-two people. You're the twenty-second person. Every person has said that. I mean, everyone (inaudible) said the most frustrating thing is people just not taking care of people. And I think it's part of our queer community that -- I guess there are some people that don't feel this way, but for the most part, our queer community really doesn't want to make anybody else sick, for heaven's sakes, and wants people to just figure it out and do the right thing. So, yeah. Well, this is sort of a similar question. But what's giving you hope and strength right now? MM: Hope and strength right now is every time I look up Moderna and they're phase three of the vaccine. I keep very on top of the vaccine info. I don't just watch the news, see what they say. I go look it up and see what the actual companies are saying and what the reports are looking like. That's the only thing really giving me a lot of hope, is that they're going into phase three of the trial. And after phase three, so close to get (inaudible) out to the public. LB: You think people will okay? Now, when Trish went to the doctor, the doctor said, "If seventy percent of the public have the vaccine, that's the end of it." Because everybody, like us, who doesn't want to get it, will be protected, relatively well protected. And the people who are anti-vaxxers will either get it, but they won't be able to give it to anybody because we have the vaccine. But 70 percent will wipe out the thing. Do you know who are against vaccines or they don't think that -- do you know anybody that's like, "I don't think we should need to wear a mask," that you have a personal relationship with? MM: I do. I don't know why we're friends, but we are. She has been good to me, respectful of me. And we're opposite on the political spectrum. She's my age. Actually, she's younger. I know. It's strange. We've always been kind to one another. Great friend of mine. And always respectful towards one another. But she, on Facebook -- oh my God. Actually, we all got into a big fight with her on social media the other day because she was going on about her rights and how she doesn't need to wear a mask. But we're all friends with this kid on our campus, who has cancer. So, his immune system is shot, completely shot. And we were all like, "Are you kidding me? You know this. We all know this kid, who is a great musician. He has cancer. If you get him sick, you could kill him. You know him. You've worked with him. You know he's frickin' bald, chemoed [sic] out, completely fighting this, and still a fantastic pianist. And you guys work together in orchestras and ensembles, but you don't want to wear a mask when you go back to campus. But you could kill him." And we all kind of got on her case about it. I've never really seen her be anti-vaxxer, but very anti-mask, very, "It's my right." When people say, "My body, my choice," for the mask thing, it's so stupid. (laughs) LB: Not good. MM: It's so dumb. It breaks my heart more than angers me. She can be such a nice, smart person, but she chooses to think like that. LB: Why do you think people are like that? MM: I think it's based off of where you're raised. You grow up in a household that is particularly Republican or very right-winged, you learn from your parents. I could say the same thing. My parents were hateful. My parents said the N word. LB: You're not like that. MM: No, I had to unlearn that kind of stuff. You learn it as you're young, and then if you have -- you go into an environment where it's mixed of people, like college, you kind of learn, oh, I need to rethink biases and thing -- learn biases and learn habits that are not the entirety of the world. It's just my parents or this group of people, this small group of people. I think it's just a learned habit. I think hate's learned. LB: Well, I agree with you about that. I know somebody who was saying that -- he talks a lot about it. He's an older guy. Well, he's my age. And he was a music teacher for a long time, since we were talking about music. And he said that he's concerned about people who have to go to colleges where they cost so much money. It's such a huge amount of investment. He was saying that you could get a degree to teach music, or you could get the skills to teach music by just being at home and doing a year and a half program or something, and you could teach music. And I said to him, "I think that one of the things that saves us is going to college and changing your mind about stuff because you're away from a family, who may not have very open views." So, in effect, what you're saying is that kind of thing. And while it isn't really influencing the person that you were talking about, the other people are sort of getting it now, I think. You certainly have seen that about your life and -- over the time. Over time. If everything you'd done had been online school, that's tough, I think. MM: Yeah. The online schooling is just -- I don't -- it's not -- I think it depends on where you are doing your classes. My last semester, I took -- I was working on an Africana studies minor because that's a field I'm not very knowledgeable on. And if I want to work in student affairs, I need to know. So, I was taking a course on communism, and it was fantastic. And discussions in that class? Mind blowing. We were talking with the professor. This should be something that everyone is forced to take. The different conversations on immigration, and racial rights, and gender, and sexuality, and all this stuff. I think it's just something that students need to have, especially in this day and age with -- there's so much going on on the TV. All the turmoil. And there's no place for middle ground anymore. Either you're on one side, or the other. You can't be in the middle anymore because being in the middle is just as bad as being racist. LB: What's the middle? MM: Omnipotence and just oblivious, like I don't see color kind of people. LB: Such a crock that is. I don't see color. Don't see color because there isn't any there. I always talk about this meme that was a bunch of kids from the 1950s or something, and they were all saying the Pledge of Allegiance. And underneath it says, "Remember these days?" And my response was, "You mean when every kid was white?" And then this person who had put it up says, "I don't see color." I said, "Well, you don't see any color in this picture. They're all white. How could you not see that?" I didn't notice that everybody in this picture was white. Well, that's because you're white, for heaven sakes. And you think that that's the way it's supposed to be. MM: (laughs) That's good. That's a good one. LB: I don't see color. I have friends, who will say that, who are really okay people. And you just have to grab them by the lapels and say, "That's a racist thing to say. Cut it out. Don't say that. Don't say that." Sometimes, you have to yell at them. It would be hard, I think, for your friend that you -- all of you are sort of getting on her and saying, "You're talking about killing our friend. How can we just overlook that?" I think that's a pretty effective way of making an argument. MM: We have tried. I think she's just so thick skulled. I don't understand how people just can't have compassion for another human being. We're all just trying to exist, and live out through this pandemic, and get through the other side. We can't get through the other side with only fifty percent of people doing the work. Everyone has to do their part. And for the people who have shot immune systems, who are in that higher demographic of more likely to get this disease -- he actually caught COVID. The kid actually did. He's fine ; he got over it. But he did get it for the fourteen days. LB: Oh, I was going to ask you if you'd known anybody that had had it. So, this was a person. Have you known anybody else that's had it, or been close to people that had it or died, or know people who have died, or something like that? MM: The only person I did know was the student I was talking about. My friend's parents, on the other hand, that I'm staying with, a lot of their friends got it and died. People (inaudible) school with. There was a lot of stuff in the newspaper, I remember. Because I sit and talk to my friend's mom a lot. She's really cool. LB: You meant the (inaudible)? MM: My friend's mom, yeah. The mom here in this house. LB: The one (inaudible). MM: A lot of parents around. But there was a couple friends that they went to high school with, who passed away, and were about their age, in their fifties. LB: I mean, you want to listen to that and you want to say things like , "Well, were they sick?" Well, that's not really the point. It doesn't matter whether they were sick. It doesn't matter how old they were. People get sick. You don't know (inaudible). MM: (inaudible) LB: And some people, who are perfectly well, get sick. To other people, it's terrible. It's a terrible situation. So, we've asked about that. And let's see. So, let me ask you about Black Lives Matter. I want to have everybody give an opportunity to talk about that or anything about -- if you want to talk about politics, that's okay. I mean, you cannot separate that from what we're doing right now. But talk about Black Lives Matter, if you want to. MM: Absolutely. LB: Are you aware of that, where you are? I would guess that everybody's white there. MM: Oh, yeah. LB: I'm from New England. I know what it's like. MM: It is as white as eggs on toast up here. But surprisingly enough, for this little area, where there are quite a bit of Trump posters and things, there was a Black Lives Matter protest in a city. So, a little city. Barely a city. A little area that we actually drove out to a couple weeks ago. And it was a very peaceful protest. It was led by African American community members. So, they had the stage. They had the voice. It was very respectful. People were social distancing away from each other. Everyone had masks. They had masks and hand sanitizer there, and gloves, if the people wanted it. There was a lot of speakers from the community, all African American in some way, shape, or form. Young, old. Everybody you could imagine had a voice at that. Parents and grandparents. Anyone who wanted to from the community could speak. There was a big road by a roundabout, so we lined up throughout the roundabout with our posters, and signs, and stuff, and were just getting attention to folks, and just getting -- doing what you got to do. It was very small, in comparison to the protests going on in the world. But I think it was still meaningful for that tiny area with a small population of African Americans. LB: Well, it's great to see people coming together, who are maybe concerned about a part of the population, but not part of the population. It's kind of like the mask thing. MM: Absolutely. LB: The thing about it is selfishness has never been an attractive quality for anybody. So, why would somebody adopt that as their primary qual-- I'm really selfish, but I can't understand why I can't get a date. That kind of thing. So, that's great. So, what are you imagining? If you don't go back, are you going to stay there? If they say, "Okay, we've decided that we're not going to let students back to Lehigh?" Or have they said anything about what it's going to be? MM: So, Lehigh has said they are doing mainly online classes. They're sending out a more detailed plan on August 3 of exactly how they're doing things. I know two of my classes are online. I do have to go back to campus because I will be working in student affairs, and staff and faculty will be back on campus. I'm actually going to be managing a building. LB: Wow. MM: So, I have to go back, as well as part of the GA. Hmm? LB: So, what's that going to be? You'll be managing a building that -- as an R-- a residence hall? Or you're going to manage a building that's a different kind of building? MM: I'm going to be managing a student life building. They're Lamberton Hall. It's where they have a dining facility and they do some of their events. I think they do their drag show there. LB: Oh, yeah. Okay. I've been there, yeah. MM: So, I'll be managing that building. Layout's going to be changing because they're making some spaces for classrooms, and just a bunch of layout changes that I'm going to have to be in charge of. I'll be in charge of COVID-related things in the building, as well, like cleanups, and social distancing, and all that kind of great stuff. LB: So, they're anticipating people to come back, but not necessarily go to classes regularly? MM: Yeah. As little classes as possible in person. The ones that have to meet in person, like health-related fields and the engineering stuff, a lot of the hands-on kind of programs and classes. But if it can be done online, it's going online. LB: So, if you're all by yourself there, how many more days do you have to be all by yourself there? MM: The rest of this week. My friend's parents will be coming back at the end of the week. So, I'm just here by myself until then. LB: So, what's for dinner? MM: Tacos. LB: If you run out of food, what are you going to do? MM: I got to the grocery store before they left. So, I got a week's worth of groceries, and just have some chicken that I'm going to cook up. And I got some corn I'm going to make into elote. I like to cook, so it keeps me busy. LB: That's good. That's great. And where's your cat? MM: My cat? Oh, that's a really good question. LB: I wanted to see the cat. So, tell me about your cat. Is this a cat that you got at school? MM: Yes. His name is Magic. He's a black cat. When did I get him? 2018. He is my registered emotional support animal. LB: That's so great. Is he good at it? MM: Hmm? LB: Is he good at it? MM: Yes. He is fantastic at his job. LB: Good. MM: He's very good at his job. He's really good at letting me know when I particularly am getting sick. LB: Oh, that's good. MM: He's caught both of my UTIs before they got worse before. He sits on my hips, and he kneads my hip area very aggressively. So, then I just go to the doctor, and they're like, "Oh, yeah, you're this close to getting a kidney infection." LB: Oh my goodness. Well, cats are smart. MM: Cats are very smart. He's very smart. LB: It's good that you've adopted a black cat because they're at risk. MM: That's why I got him. There were so many at the shelter. So, I got him. He's my little buddy. So, we're in this together. LB: Well, good for you. Well, I think we're coming to the end. So, here's the thing. When we look at this presentation, we imagine that someday in the future -- and it could be a long time in the future -- it could be twenty, thirty, forty years -- and somebody's going to look at this and see you talking about this. And you said a lot of interesting things. But what's something you'd want to communicate to somebody in the future about how you feel now, and what you're hoping to see happen, and that kind of stuff? I mean, they know the future. You're talking to somebody who can see into the future. MM: Oh, geez. I think the most important kind of emotions to put forth in the future -- like I've been saying, this is going to happen again. This is going to happen again. Maybe someone's going to look at this when it is happening again with a different virus, or a different disease, or type of global emergency. I think the best thing, the most important thing to understand, is the need for the human compassion. And no matter what communities you belong to, racial, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, whatever, I think it's just most important to think about the community aspect and the care. We need to care about everybody. We're not caring everybody right now, and look how well we're doing. We're doing an interview online, in a computer, states away. People are dying. People are in hospitals. We're really not doing a good job at maintaining this virus, no matter what that idiot in charge says. LB: We're talking about the Federal Government here. MM: Hmm? LB: We're talking about the Federal Government here. MM: Oh, yeah. No, Governor Wolf, I like him. LB: (inaudible) that state? Yeah, it's Governor Wolf. Well, I have really loved talking to you, Miles. I'm so glad that I got to talk to you today. And I don't know how I feel about you being there all by yourself in the middle of no place with a bear. MM: I'm okay with it. The parents have been here almost every day in the house. So, I'm good. I have a little peace to myself. I can relax, watch the TV, sit down, do some cooking, do some reading. It's quiet. LB: Is it a big house? MM: Hmm? LB: Is it big? Is it a big house? MM: It's a big house. It's bigger than my dorm. So, anything's bigger. LB: Well, I mean when you're there with other people, you don't feel like you're on top of each other? Or is it that kind of place? MM: When they're here, yeah, I feel a little bit on top of each other because the kitchen's really narrow. LB: Well, I'm so glad that I got to talk to you today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for doing this. MM: Of course. LB: And we will send you the transcript. They send it to a transcript -- the college program, where people learn how to do these transcripts, and then they send it back with it all written out. And you can look at it and see, and say, "I didn't mean to say this." And if you want to take those things out, you can. But I really think everything you said was brilliant. So, I hope you don't -- MM: Thank you. LB: -- feel the need to do that. And it's been terrific to talk to you. So, it's just been great. And I hope I get to see you more, Miles. I miss seeing you. And so, I hope when we all -- when things get back to normal, we'll get to see each other more. MM: Absolutely. I hope so too. Hopefully, this virus will end soon. I'm over it. LB: Okay, well, I agree. But we have to be careful, so we can stand it, right? MM: Mmhmm. Really. LB: Well, thank you very much. I'm going to turn your recording off. END OF VIDEO 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). 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Miles Molerio, July 27, 2020
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Miles Molerio talks about how the current COVID-19 pandemic is affecting him. He talks about leaving college early, having to stay with a friend’s family for 5 months, how the virus is affecting him and other members of the Transgender community, and what is bothering him the most.
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PH40_19
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COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-
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2020-07-27
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community: HIV/AIDS
Description
An account of the resource
In the spring of 2020, the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive received a grant to collect oral histories and written stories for 40 Years of Public Health in the Lehigh Valley’s LGBT Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBT Health Experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19.
The collection consists of oral histories from individuals who experienced the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as oral histories from members of the local community as they lived through 2020's summer of Covid-19. Running through both are the themes of dealing with the fear of an emerging health crisis, loneliness and isolation, and coming together as a community in support and activism.
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.
Oral History
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Liz Bradbury
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Mitch Hemphill
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_12.xml
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5.4 June 17, 2020 Mitch Hemphill, June 17, 2020 PH40_12 01:02:34 LVLGBT40 40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community 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 AIDS (Disease) Mitch Hemphill Liz Bradbury video/mpeg HemphillMitch_20200617_video.mp4 1.0:|25(5)|42(5)|71(3)|94(10)|113(7)|138(2)|159(5)|180(4)|199(5)|220(4)|245(3)|270(5)|293(6)|316(16)|339(14)|364(18)|387(16)|408(2)|429(14)|456(9)|479(8)|508(2)|533(6)|562(9)|583(9)|612(8)|633(2)|660(4)|685(7)|706(15)|727(8)|750(8)|775(2)|806(13)|827(10)|850(15)|875(12)|902(2)|927(3)|948(13)|971(13)|996(4)|1017(13)|1040(10)|1067(6)|1088(18)|1111(10)|1144(5)|1165(4)|1192(4)|1213(16)|1242(13)|1269(10)|1292(7)|1319(5)|1342(10)|1361(11)|1384(13)|1411(18)|1442(7)|1475(5)|1506(13)|1533(5) 0 https://youtu.be/09bpVqt3Ywo YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction LIZ BRADBURY: -- do -- great, and there we are. So, I have to start out by saying this project, with this project, the Bradbury Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College will collaborate on 40 years of public health experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community, collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. And so, I start out by saying, and this is all on and everything -- I’m supposed to, let’s see, I want to be sure I’m going to do the right thing here. Yes. So, this is the first one I’ve done. So, that’s why --
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 ; MITCH HEMPHILL: Oh, okay. 
 ; 
 ; LB: (inaudible) [a little hesitating? ]. My name is Liz Bradbury and I’m here with Mitch Hemphill to talk about his experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community -- oh, this is the wrong one.(laughs) No. During this -- oh, I see, the LGBT community, during this time of the COVID-19 epidemic as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT archive, our project was funded from the Lehigh Valley engaged consortium. We’re meeting on Zoom and so today’s date is June 17th --
 ; 0 187 First time hearing about HIV/AIDS LB: Great. So, here’s the deal: we’re just going to start right out. And so, what I’m going to -- just start with this little prompt and then say in the midst of the current health crisis that we are experience-- we want to take this opportunity to look back and reflect and to capture the stories of those who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the nineteen eighties and nineties. So, we just have three things to prompt you. I’m going to start you right out to say do you remember the first time you became aware of the disease and just talk about that? 
 ; 
 ; MH: Sure. I may have heard of it before but I wasn’t really aware of it until about nineteen eighty-four or nineteen eighty-five. That’s at the point that people that we knew were starting to get sick. And I believe -- and in nineteen eighty-five, when Rock Hudson, when it was on the news that had HIV and then died shortly after, I think that really brought it to the attention of a lot more people. 0 329 Living in the Lehigh Valley/ Moving to Florida LB: Yeah. So, at what point in the crisis were you living in the Lehigh Valley? So, you were at the Stonewall, you were living there -- here the whole time and can you speak -- so, talk about that and then also talk about -- can you speak to what resources or communication or attitudes were going on at the time? 
 ; 
 ; MH: Well, I actually lived in the Lehigh Valley all of my life with the exception of three years where I lived in Florida, which was from nineteen eighty-seven to nineteen ninety. So, actually, right in the middle of the peak. But before that, before moving to Florida, in the -- like I said, around eighty-five is where you started hearing more about it. There didn’t seem to me -- I didn’t see a lot of information out in our area at that time. 0 562 The formation of FACT / The Bar Olympics LB: Yeah. When you were talking about FACT being formed, that was before you went away in eighty-seven? 
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 ; MH: That was actually before I went away. FACT was formed in nineteen eighty-six. It came out of a friendly competition between the Stonewall bar and Candida’s bar. The staff on both, at both bars, were always doing things with friendly competition and it kind of built up to what we decided was going to be a bar competition. At the time, we called it the Bar Olympics. 0 726 Educating the public about HIV/AIDS LB: Yeah. In nineteen eighty-six, when these things were happening, do you think that people were -- they were changing their behavior? I mean, you were raising money with FACT. What was the money for? Because in eighty-six, I don’t know whether there was medication. I was just moving to Lehigh Valley then, so I wasn’t as aware of that. But, like, when they were trying to raise money, what was the money for? Was it for education? 
 ; 
 ; MH: The money at that point, as I understood it, with my involvement with them, in the beginning, was a lot of it, it had to do with helping people that were HIV-positive. It had to do with educating the public. It had to do with getting materials like condoms out in bars and literature out in bars and making people more aware of it within the community. 0 831 Being young and not thinking about the effects of AIDS LB: I think there was, perhaps, a time, and maybe you could comment on this, where people didn’t know where it was coming from. They just thought it was a gay disease that gay people were getting but they didn’t really know how it was communicated. Were you sort of aware of --
 ; 
 ; MH: Definitely was the case, especially in the earlier days. And I think a lot of us -- and like I say, I was young and a bit selfish, you know, with my own life at that time. Had it been happening when I was in my forties, perhaps I would have been different. But a lot of people really just thought this was something that affected a small group of people in other places, you know? 0 1320 Emotional toll on caregivers LB: Did you know people that were taking care of other people, who were -- you know, people who were caring for people that were dying or sick? 
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 ; MH: Just indirectly, for the most part, you know? And, yes, and that was -- in the nineties, there were numerous people I -- that took such a toll on the people that were the caregivers. I can only relate to it having taken care of my father until he passed [at the? ] first of the year. But there is quite a struggle for a lot of people that not only had to, you know, deal with this -- and from the entire community as a whole, you know, that were taking care of people like that and having to watch them waste away, especially in the early days, you know? 0 1390 Starting Above Ground Magazine LB: So, when you were doing the -- talk a little bit about the magazine because [I think it? ] --
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 ; MH: Well, when I did come back -- like I said, I helped with the formation of FACT and I was doing that. That was my involvement and I was a little bit, you know, involved with some of the work on the fundraisers and things like that in the early years, then I moved to Florida. When I came back, like I mentioned, in the early nineties, that’s when people were being more affected/ 0 1524 Working at the Stonewall LB: Oh, yeah, no question. So, what do you think, in terms of activism, I mean, you did some significant things with activism and we saw the continuation of FACT over all of that time. And things began to change in terms of medications and stuff. In about nineteen ninety-three, I think that really began to change. How did that seem different to you? Did you see any kind of difference or did you see people still being actually more aware of things? 
 ; 
 ; MH: I actually believe people were -- after I came back from Florida, I did go back to work at the Stonewall again and I worked there for another eight years or so. And so, you know, just having to see the view of how people are reacting in the bar scene, do you know what I mean? There was a difference made. You know, the work of FACT and other organizations like that actually was working and people were being less promiscuous, in my opinion. I think people were starting to show, you know, safe sex practices more. They were involved. 0 1694 Social life in the bars LB: So, how did you think -- with the competition between the bars that really began FACT and began those kinds of things, that part atmosphere that made things more fun in some ways, do you think that that was something that really encouraged people to become involved? 
 ; 
 ; MH: Oh, absolutely. To be honest with you, if it was less fun, you wouldn’t have had people coming to it. You know, sometimes you have to kind of make things fun to make it worth people to do things, you know? It’s difficult. Right now, (inaudible) we’re looking at the pandemic, with the COVID-19, how do you really encourage people by doing something fun to do the right thing or to -- you know, it’s a totally different situation in that it really can affect anyone and everyone. 0 1793 Being young at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and parallels to COVID-19 pandemic MH: One of the things that was a parallel that I see was to the way I felt when I was younger and AIDS came out, we were young. And, you know what? We’re strong and we will get through this and it will not affect us and if I get it, I will beat it. I saw that, especially if they close down things and I’d see big groups of people on the basketball courts: younger people, still playing, you know? And that feeling that you’re invincible when you’re younger, it’s difficult with younger people, you know? So, it’s such a different situation now than the AIDS crisis was. 0 2318 The beginning of the Pride Festival in the Lehigh Valley LB: I think that the Pride festival in the Lehigh Valley grew out of that. So, were you involved with Pride during the beginning times of that? 
 ; 
 ; MH: I was. And when Pride first started, one of the ways I was actually involved with Pride was doing graphic work for them. Now, let’s see, Pride started --
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 ; LB: Nineteen ninety – 
 ; 
 ; MH: around nineteen ninety-four, three, ninety-four? Yeah, at that time, ninety-four, I had started the magazine. And before that, I was actually doing a newsletter for the Stonewall. 0 2505 The Summer Games / Competition between the bars LB: [Tell me a? ] little bit about the summer games because people in the future should hear about that because they were pretty wonderful. 
 ; 
 ; MH: They were fun. First of all, like I say, they came out of a fun competition between competing bars. And they built into a much larger thing. At first, it only included Candida’s and the Stonewall, which, you know, because of our friendship with each other and our competition with each other -- but then, after the first year, then it was decided that we were going to make an event and it was going to be a FACT event now that FACT had been formed. 0 2691 Bringing together the community and strengthening it MH: Yeah, it brought our community together, too. I mean, beyond the AIDS epidemic and, you know, it strengthened our community as we moved forward looking into our own rights. So, some of the things that came out of that epidemic were then -- we as a community became stronger. We became used to getting together and doing things together, which made us stronger going into the nineties with the elections and as we go down the line. And then, the different organizations that -- you know, has the voter’s guide that came out and the -- now with the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, you know what I mean, there’s so many things that would have been unthought of actually years ago. 0 2826 Growing up in the Lehigh Valley LB: Where did you go to high school? 
 ; 
 ; MH: I went to school in a high school in Emmaus, just outside of Allentown. So, I grew up in a pretty small, somewhat privileged area. And then, like I said, I was in a big hurry to move out to the big city of Allentown as soon as I could and I hadn’t even turned eighteen yet, yeah. 
 ; 
 ; LB: Yeah. 
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 ; MH: [You know? ]? 0 2871 Moving to Florida LB: Yeah. So, is the reason that you came back to the Lehigh Valley because you just missed it so much? Or was there some reason why --
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 ; MH: Because everybody comes back (laughs) that’s from here. I moved to Florida with a boyfriend at the time. Things didn’t work out so well and then you come home, you know? Actually, while I was here on vacation, I met my current husband and came back to be with him. And then, like I said, we’ve been together for thirty years now. So, it’s not a bad area and it’s not -- we don’t get as much cold weather as up north. (laughs) So, that’s why I came back to this area. It’s home. 0 2954 Thoughts for future generations LB: Well, I think -- so, here’s one thing I think everybody should ask and -- because we hope that someday in the future, somebody will look at this and get a sense of, you know, various different people’s experiences with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. And it is true that we Baby Boomers are the ones that went through this in our twenties and now we’re at a different age. We’re about to go through the aging epidemic, as well, since that’s another thing. But what would you want somebody in the future to know, like, in terms of what that was like? I mean, if you were just going to sort of describe what the AIDS epidemic was like to somebody who had no sense of what it was like -- and I think there are young people today who really don’t have any sense of what it was like. 0 3084 Rock Hudson having AIDS LB: Yeah. I want to ask you one more thing because you brought it up because you were talking about how you became aware of this sort of -- of HIV/AIDS because of Rock Hudson. And I think people don’t have an understanding of how significant Rock Hudson’s circumstance was. And there were some other famous people that -- 
 ; 
 ; MH: Yeah. 
 ; 
 ; LB: -- spoke out about -- but you want to say a little bit more about that? because I don’t know if people would always really get what happened. 0 3349 Comparisons between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 MH: No, no. I wish I -- like I said, I thought to myself I didn’t know that I would be a good candidate for this because I wasn’t one of those heroes that walked the straight and narrow. But I think I’m more an example of how a lot of people were back then, you know? Like I say that the knowledge wasn’t there in the beginning and then it was a bit sketchy as we did get it. And a lot of us still carried on, thinking this won’t affect me. 0 3534 Using Corel for Above Ground and the Valley Gay Press / Above Ground Magazine as an inspiration LB: I just want to say, Mitch, that when you were doing Above Ground and I was writing an article for it, I remember one time me sitting in your office and you were showing me how to use that program that -- Corel. 
 ; 
 ; MH: Corel Draw that I used to use, yeah. 0 MovingImage Mitch Hemphill talks about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. He focuses on working in the local bar ; the rise of the Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT) organization ; and creating and running his newspaper "Above Ground," which covered AIDS information. MITCH HEMPHILL LIZ BRADBURY: -- do -- great, and there we are. So, I have to start out by saying this project, with this project, the Bradbury Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College will collaborate on 40 years of public health experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community, collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. And so, I start out by saying, and this is all on and everything -- I'm supposed to, let's see, I want to be sure I'm going to do the right thing here. Yes. So, this is the first one I've done. So, that's why -- MITCH HEMPHILL: Oh, okay. LB: (inaudible) [a little hesitating? ]. My name is Liz Bradbury and I'm here with Mitch Hemphill to talk about his experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community -- oh, this is the wrong one.(laughs) No. During this -- oh, I see, the LGBT community, during this time of the COVID-19 epidemic as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT archive, our project was funded from the Lehigh Valley engaged consortium. We're meeting on Zoom and so today's date is June 17th -- MH: June 17th, 20-- LB: -- 2020. And 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? MH: Certainly. My full name is Mitchell Hemphill, spelled M-I-T-C-H-E-L-L H-E-M-P-H-I-L-L. LB: Great. And will you please share your birth date? MH: Yes. September thirteenth, nineteen sixty. LB: Okay. So, this is the consent part. So, do you consent to this interview today? MH: I do consent. LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? MH: I do consent. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for this -- educational purposes in other formats, including films, archives, websites, presentations, and other formats? MH: I do consent. LB: Do you understand that you will have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview and identify parts you would like to delete and/or withdraw from your interview from the project? MH: I understand. LB: Great. So, here's the deal: we're just going to start right out. And so, what I'm going to -- just start with this little prompt and then say in the midst of the current health crisis that we are experience-- we want to take this opportunity to look back and reflect and to capture the stories of those who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the nineteen eighties and nineties. So, we just have three things to prompt you. I'm going to start you right out to say do you remember the first time you became aware of the disease and just talk about that? LB: Sure. I may have heard of it before but I wasn't really aware of it until about nineteen eighty-four or nineteen eighty-five. That's at the point that people that we knew were starting to get sick. And I believe -- and in nineteen eighty-five, when Rock Hudson, when it was on the news that had HIV and then died shortly after, I think that really brought it to the attention of a lot more people. Honestly, even at that point, still, it wasn't very much a part of our life, it seemed, you know? It was still happening to other people, more so before that, too. And it seemed like it was happening more so to other people. It was only happening to people that were very promiscuous or using drugs and so -- even at that point. And I have to admit, at that time, I was very young. I was in my early twenties. I had only really come out a few years before that. And so, I was exploring my own sexuality and really kind of self-focused on my own life and what was going on with me, with work, and relationships, and things like that. But in eighty-four, I started working at the Stonewall and that's really when I -- by working there, that's when I started hearing more about it, although it wasn't -- there wasn't a lot of focus, still, yet and I didn't see much about it. LB: Yeah. So, at what point in the crisis were you living in the Lehigh Valley? So, you were at the Stonewall, you were living there -- here the whole time and can you speak -- so, talk about that and then also talk about -- can you speak to what resources or communication or attitudes were going on at the time? MH: Well, I actually lived in the Lehigh Valley all of my life with the exception of three years where I lived in Florida, which was from nineteen eighty-seven to nineteen ninety. So, actually, right in the middle of the peak. But before that, before moving to Florida, in the -- like I said, around eighty-five is where you started hearing more about it. There didn't seem to me -- I didn't see a lot of information out in our area at that time. And it may be my own guilt of not noticing things that were out there but I wasn't paying a lot of attention to. And I know a lot of people like myself and my circle of friends, we were more focused on partying (laughs) and enjoying each other's company than we were about the issues. Also, at that time, I wasn't much of a news watcher and things like CNN were still in their infancy. So, you weren't hearing about it on the news and it was considered still a gay disease, you know, that was affecting gay people only. So, you really didn't hear anything and you didn't get any support from the government about it. In the early days, there was an organization I was aware of, the AIDS Service Center, although I was not involved with them other than seeing some of their literature and things like that. The time, as far as the way people felt at that period of time, and this going -- before eighty-seven, when I moved, in the early years. To be honest with you, I think, like myself, a lot of people were still of the opinion of this was an isolated thing. It wasn't something affecting me, it wasn't going to affect my lifestyle, and as long as you weren't -- if you were in a monogamous relationship where you weren't sleeping with somebody that looks sick, you were fine, you know? Something we all learned later was not really going to be the case. But there didn't seem to be a lot of resources at that time. But if you weren't looking for them, you weren't going to find them. Until about nineteen eighty-six, when FACT was formed, that's when things really developed as far as information getting out there, activism being there. And so, that's when it became more -- I became more aware of it, myself. That's pretty much -- like I said, I think, still, like I said in that period of time, there wasn't a lot going on that you could see, going up to eighty-seven. Then, I did go -- eighty-seven to nineteen ninety, I lived in Florida. There were some activities going on there, too, some fundraising events and stuff like that. But to be honest, being around Orlando, which was a vacation spot, promiscuity, et cetera was in full swing, you know? There was more focus on having fun and the shows and things like that then there was, actually, on activism about this disease. LB: Yeah. When you were talking about FACT being formed, that was before you went away in eighty-seven? MH: That was actually before I went away. FACT was formed in nineteen eighty-six. It came out of a friendly competition between the Stonewall bar and Candida's bar. The staff on both, at both bars, were always doing things with friendly competition and it kind of built up to what we decided was going to be a bar competition. At the time, we called it the Bar Olympics. LB: Right. MH: And a few forward thinking people, not necessarily that were part of the actual activities, thought to use this event to actually do something more with it, raise awareness about AIDS and things like this, and started FACT. So, that was in eighty-six, eighty-seven I moved to Florida, and then didn't return until nineteen ninety. So, when I came back in nineteen ninety, things were -- we're seeing results of the disease within my community and my circle of friends and things like this. LB: Well, I want you to talk about that but I just want to get an idea, like, when FACT was forming in nineteen eighty-six, do you think that that was happening because people were hearing about the disease or because people had it? MH: In eighty-six, when it was actually formed, it was -- FACT was formed in our area because we were seeing people we knew who were being affected by it, that had it, and were already passing away, you know? LB: Right. MH: And within our community, we knew that the government wasn't really doing much of anything for it. The health departments really weren't doing anything. And to raise awareness and do something about it, we kind of had to do it on our own. And that was one of the reasons, you know, with founding FACT, although it was supporting the entire community, not just gay and lesbian, you know, people and LGBTQ, but it opened itself up, knowing it had to do everything for the entire community and have those services for everyone. That was a big step forward, you know, and drove a lot of things, I think with, like, the Allentown Health Bureau and different -- made more things available and brought more information out there as a result of it. LB: Yeah. In nineteen eighty-six, when these things were happening, do you think that people were -- they were changing their behavior? I mean, you were raising money with FACT. What was the money for? Because in eighty-six, I don't know whether there was medication. I was just moving to Lehigh Valley then, so I wasn't as aware of that. But, like, when they were trying to raise money, what was the money for? Was it for education? MH: The money at that point, as I understood it, with my involvement with them, in the beginning, was a lot of it, it had to do with helping people that were HIV-positive. It had to do with educating the public. It had to do with getting materials like condoms out in bars and literature out in bars and making people more aware of it within the community. And, like I said, obviously, they, you know, were open to the entire population of our area. However, that was where the focus needed to be because our community was being affected in a higher ratio than the community at large. So, that's really where their focus was, to educate, to -- there was money, as they went down the line, that was made available, like, through grants for different other organizations. So, they're almost, like, a parent organization to other organizations. But the main thing was to get the word out, to get the materials out so that people understood better what was going on and how to help prevent it from spreading. LB: I think there was, perhaps, a time, and maybe you could comment on this, where people didn't know where it was coming from. They just thought it was a gay disease that gay people were getting but they didn't really know how it was communicated. Were you sort of aware of -- MH: Definitely was the case, especially in the earlier days. And I think a lot of us -- and like I say, I was young and a bit selfish, you know, with my own life at that time. Had it been happening when I was in my forties, perhaps I would have been different. But a lot of people really just thought this was something that affected a small group of people in other places, you know? Like I say, it's only the people that are going to the bathhouses or, you know, that have way too many partners or, you know, people that were IV drug users, we heard about it, and were also being affected by it. But I don't think it was something that we thought of as a community so much was going to affect us individually. It's not going to get me. Kind of like the young people right now with this pandemic. I'm strong, I'm young, and if I do get it, I'll beat it, you know? And I think that attitude, it wasn't -- I think I had that attitude and I believe a lot of other people did, as well. And, you know, coming from the freedom of the seventies and the sexual freedom and everything we experienced as a community that you were able to do without having to worry about somebody getting pregnant, you know, that's one of the reasons that it was spreading so rampantly through the community. But we really didn't think that it was going to affect me personally. And I think a lot of my circle of friends and a lot of people that I waited on as customers and knew from the bar, I think they felt the same way until, like I said, around eighty-six -- was when we were starting to see people we actually knew getting sick with it. And back then, with what little you did hear about it -- was that if you did get it, it was a death sentence, you know? because people were getting very sick and people were dying rather quickly in the beginning. LB: Yeah. MH: You know? So, that was eighty-six, when FACT was formed. And then, by the time I came back from Florida in nineteen ninety, a lot more people were affected and a lot more people that I knew were affected. And I went to a lot of funerals and I got to the point, in the early nineties, where I just felt I can't go to one more funeral because I had been to so many where I had seen friends and people that I had known, you know, pass away from this thing. But even then, to be honest with you, the mentality of myself, even -- I'm guilty of this. I'm one of those lucky fools because I wasn't even tested myself. I didn't get tested until about nineteen ninety-one . In 1990, I moved back to be with my current partner of, where -- my husband and we've been together for thirty years. But before -- and to be honest with you, I'm not proud to say this but I tried to have monogamous relationships throughout my life but in between those relationships, I lived a free life and I did a lot of things that were not safe and I was a bit of a hypocrite because even after the formation of FACT, I would encourage people to use safe sex, and -- if it's abstinence and everything that was involved with trying not to get this disease. But myself, I was not following the rules. And when I took that test in -- around nineteen ninety-one, I was actually of the opinion and thought I'm definitely going to show up positive because I did too many things that were too risky. I drank too much in those days and I made some very poor decisions. And I knew of some people that I had been involved with that actually had contracted the disease and then later passed away from it. So, I thought it's a given and my only protection was not to do things with my current husband that could put him at risk. So, when I actually got the test back negative, I was actually kind of surprised, you know? LB: Wow. Is that why it took you a while to get tested, because you were afraid -- MH: I think so. I think I was kind of, in my head, it's going to be positive, you know? But ignorance is no excuse, you know? And I can't really relate that to something that's going on in this situation other than the -- my behavior, I was a hypocrite. It's like telling somebody you should be wearing a mask but then I go out and don't wear one myself, you know? So, yeah, it was a hard time within my own mind, too, and I don't know if a lot of other people struggled this way. I contemplated -- like, this interview, I'm not the best example of it because I wasn't the best hero, definitely, through that period. I was doing the things that I was telling other people not to do and I was the lucky fool in this case. LB: Weren't there other people that were doing that too, though? MH: Oh, I know there were, yes. There were multitudes of people doing that. But, you know, when you look at it and you think of the things you have done to try to help with the epidemic and stuff like that -- but while not following your own words, you know? And I was guilty of that, you know? It was something that I think a lot of people within my age group, you know, that are now coming on sixty and, you know, a little younger and older, we were all pretty much doing the same thing and we were very quick to be a part of the organizations, go to the fundraisers, do these kinds of things, and go to the fun things, you know? The Summer Games were fun, you know, to be a part of them, to be there. Going to the Snowball, the FACT Snow Ball, that was fun. You got to dress up. It was kind of like just another event. And you all often lost sight of why you were actually doing it while there were people in the background always working. You know, some of the people, you know, that I've known through time, like Carl Mancino and David Moyer and people like this that were doing all the hard work through all of that, you know? But it's a time I look back on and say I didn't deserve to make it through it, in some ways, you know? And I'm sure there's a lot of people that feel the same way, you know? LB: What was the hard work? I mean, what were some of the things that you saw -- MH: The hard work is actually living what you're saying, you know? Doing -- not only just doing the fundraising and actually doing the work of an organization but also walking the walk and talking the talk. Not just saying this is what you should do, you should be safe, you should be using condoms, you should be doing this and then going out on your own and doing otherwise, you know? And like I say, I know a lot of people, they -- we've talked about this, you know, looking back, and it's, like, how did we survive this when our friends who were less active, even, didn't, you know? We knew people that actually had had one sexual encounter and that was it, you know? But this was all before they had the medications that they have now to make it that it is not a death sentence. LB: Yeah. MH: You know? LB: Did you know people that were taking care of other people, who were -- you know, people who were caring for people that were dying or sick? MH: Just indirectly, for the most part, you know? And, yes, and that was -- in the nineties, there were numerous people I -- that took such a toll on the people that were the caregivers. I can only relate to it having taken care of my father until he passed [at the? ] first of the year. But there is quite a struggle for a lot of people that not only had to, you know, deal with this -- and from the entire community as a whole, you know, that were taking care of people like that and having to watch them waste away, especially in the early days, you know? There wasn't -- the drugs that were out there really weren't extending life and it wasn't making life better, you know? So, the early days were really rough and a lot of us, people like me, sometimes it was easier to look the other way. But then, when a friend of yours died, it brought it right back to the forefront and it was, like, you know, why are we forgetting about this, you know? LB: Yeah. MH: Was a lot of that. LB: So, when you were doing the -- talk a little bit about the magazine because [I think it? ] -- MH: Well, when I did come back -- like I said, I helped with the formation of FACT and I was doing that. That was my involvement and I was a little bit, you know, involved with some of the work on the fundraisers and things like that in the early years, then I moved to Florida. When I came back, like I mentioned, in the early nineties, that's when people were being more affected. But I started Above Ground magazine and launched that in November of nineteen ninety-four. And the reason for launching the magazine was because the LGBQT (sic) -- the community in Lehigh Valley no longer had a periodical, you know, that -- and it was something that was needed, it was missing for a period of time, since other things had fallen apart. So, it was an entertainment and information monthly magazine that I put out. And one of the things that I made available through it was access to the HIV/AIDS groups so they could advertise their events, put in articles, you know, different things like that. And I would actually always go to the big events and give them some publicity and things like that so people kept aware of it. And the magazine I had ran for -- I had it for three years, until I sold it in nineteen ninety-seven. And then, shortly after, it stopped being published. But it was filling a need at that time, which was filled by other things in the meantime. Some, notably -- (laughs) but at the time, there was really nothing out there, so you didn't know about these events other than that. And that was one way that it actually spread throughout the community and into the surrounding areas and people were made more aware of these different events, as well. So, I hope to think that it did something to help in that way. LB: Yeah. MH: [You know? ]? LB: Oh, yeah, no question. So, what do you think, in terms of activism, I mean, you did some significant things with activism and we saw the continuation of FACT over all of that time. And things began to change in terms of medications and stuff. In about nineteen ninety-three, I think that really began to change. How did that seem different to you? Did you see any kind of difference or did you see people still being actually more aware of things? MH: I actually believe people were -- after I came back from Florida, I did go back to work at the Stonewall again and I worked there for another eight years or so. And so, you know, just having to see the view of how people are reacting in the bar scene, do you know what I mean? There was a difference made. You know, the work of FACT and other organizations like that actually was working and people were being less promiscuous, in my opinion. I think people were starting to show, you know, safe sex practices more. They were involved. Over time, after the medications became better and treatment became better, I think there was less urgency with a lot of people. Like, we have to do something and we have to do something about this now, you know? However, I think that it did make a change. Now, whether that change is still relevant today is a little different. For a short period of time, sometime after two-thousand, for a very short period of time, I worked part-time in the Stonewall's coat check, for their underage night. LB: Ah. MH: And all of the materials are there. I think that they have a different sense -- the younger generation definitely has a younger sense and they're more aware of how easy they can contract the disease from another person, although they don't have the same fear that a lot of people did, especially in the nineties, you know, because of the advances that have been made, you know, through medicines and treatments. LB: Yeah. MH: So, I wouldn't say that they're ignoring it. I think they're still behaving better than we did in the early '80s, I really do. I think in a lot of ways, they're more responsible. But, like I say, good medicine also makes you little more comfortable with thinking that if I do get it, they can take care of it, you know? Which does nothing to stop the spread. LB: Right, right, right. MH: Yeah. LB: So, how did you think -- with the competition between the bars that really began FACT and began those kinds of things, that part atmosphere that made things more fun in some ways, do you think that that was something that really encouraged people to become involved? MH: Oh, absolutely. To be honest with you, if it was less fun, you wouldn't have had people coming to it. You know, sometimes you have to kind of make things fun to make it worth people to do things, you know? It's difficult. Right now, (inaudible) we're looking at the pandemic, with the COVID-19, how do you really encourage people by doing something fun to do the right thing or to -- you know, it's a totally different situation in that it really can affect anyone and everyone. It's an even more invisible thing and it's, you know, so much easier spread that people just don't -- they don't realize how severe it is, you know? What we had to deal with with the AIDS epidemic was kind of compartmentalized, you know what I mean? It was only affecting people that were having sex with each other or transferring blood, you know, through the use of different needles and stuff like that. But it was something that -- at least you weren't going to get it just by walking up to somebody and talking to them, you know? One of the things that was a parallel that I see was to the way I felt when I was younger and AIDS came out, we were young. And, you know what? We're strong and we will get through this and it will not affect us and if I get it, I will beat it. I saw that, especially if they close down things and I'd see big groups of people on the basketball courts: younger people, still playing, you know? And that feeling that you're invincible when you're younger, it's difficult with younger people, you know? So, it's such a different situation now than the AIDS crisis was. But, at the same time, there are a lot of parallels that we see and one of the things, if we as the gay community hadn't kind of taken hold of it ourselves, it would have been left to just run rampant, you know what I mean? We weren't getting support from the, you know, Reagan/Bush government. We weren't getting support by a lot of people in general because they thought this was a gay disease. It was only affecting gay people and it was only affecting drug users, so better to it. I mean, even leading to some conspiracy theories, you know, that it was actually put out there on purpose to wipe us out, you know? But one of the parallels I see to this and our situation now is actually the way that a lot of people in the government are trying to make it seem as if it's a non-issue, it doesn't exist, you know? We can look the other way, it'll just go away, you know? And that, we saw when we had the AIDS epidemic. It was, like, this is a small, isolated thing. It's only affecting, you know, this type of people. It's nothing for us to worry about, you know, until it started going into the population as a whole and heterosexual couples had to worry about it, too, and it was, like, this is something that could be spread that way. So, it was a difficult time going through that. But, unfortunately, I'm one of the examples of the, like, I say the lucky fools that, even though I was doing everything I could to help promote information about it and promote people to do the right thing, I wasn't necessarily doing the right thing, you know? And so, I'm fortunate that I can look at that in hindsight and know that I didn't contract it myself. And, more importantly, I didn't pass it on to someone else, you know? This epidemic here, you can get it, you may not even get very sick. But you can pass it on to so many other people, so -- LB: Yeah, in terms of contagion, really, HIV is very hard to pass on just to another -- MH: Correct. LB: -- [you know, to? ] -- MH: You can't pass it through the skin, it's not breathed in. It's something that has to be done through a bodily fluid. LB: But do you remember a time when people had no idea how it was passed and so there was [no? ] -- MH: Oh, yes, I do. You know, at first, when you'd first heard about it -- and like I say, I was mostly -- really became aware of it around eighty-four, eighty-five, when I started working at the bar because that's when you'd actually hear some inklings about it and people that were a little bit more aware and actually took the time to look into this when they were hearing about it and reading about it in the news. Before that, like I say, I believe I'd heard of it, you know? And then, in the beginning, we really didn't know what was happening. In the early days, I think, from when it came out around eighty and eighty-one that they saw the first cases of this, they were just telling us they didn't really know what was happening but it was affecting heterosexual males I mean, homosexual males more than other people and so it was kind of focused on the group. So, no, we didn't know and, to be honest, we didn't know that it wasn't the government or some group trying to actually wipe us out. We didn't know that. That's why these theories come up. Until science took a hold of it and funding came in, we didn't really find out all the details of what caused it, where it came from, and how it was transmitted. One of the things -- I wasn't very politically motivated until leading up to the elections in nineteen ninety-two. And one of the main focuses of that was because of the way the government was responding to the AIDS epidemic and it was important that, then, Bill Clinton got into office and got the Reagan/Bush era over so that we could see something done. And we did, you know? That's when you really saw a lot more information come out from the scientists. LB: And maybe there's a tie-in, do you think, between that and when people were really understanding about it? I guess people who had been infected, people who were scientists, people who were doctors had enough information then and they could begin to make scientifically informed -- MH: Oh, definitely. And, well, there was more motivation -- there wasn't a lot of motivation to push for it, to give money for the funding into the research into it in the beginning because of who it was affecting. Had AIDS been only affecting rich, white businessmen, they would have had funding a lot quicker. But like I say, there wasn't -- a lot of funding has to come through the government. And so, if it's not being funded for the research and to find out what this is, to actually look at it and say this is going to be a problem and we got to take care of it, in the early days, that wasn't there, you know? And so, as a result, none of us knew, really, what was going on. And if there was science coming out, it wasn't coming out to us. LB: In the Lehigh Valley, do you remember any kind of political response or any kind of elected officials who talked about it or didn't talk about it or supported the rights and stuff that had an effect on that? MH: I really don't have a big memory of that. And perhaps during the time from eighty-seven to ninety, when I was actually out of the Lehigh Valley, there may have been more of that. I knew that there were people within the health department that were very focused on it. But that was actually coming a little bit later, once there was more knowledge of what it was. But I didn't really notice a feeling of support or denial or anything like that coming from, you know, government. It almost felt, to be honest with you, back then, it felt like this was our problem, we had to take care of it. Nobody else cares, nobody else is even looking at it, and so if anything's going to be done, we have to do it as our own community. And I honestly believe that communities across the country, that's how a lot of this got done. Philadelphia having a bigger city and a lot more different groups and stuff like that and activism, that kind of filtered to us, some of that. They were more active before we were in this area, I think, in a lot of ways. LB: In nineteen ninety-three, people in the Lehigh Valley who -- and this really came out of the bars -- organized a bunch of buses to go to the March on Washington in nineteen ninety-three. MH: Yes, yes. I actually didn't go on that march. But, yeah, that was a big thing. It really was. Wish I had gone. It was one of those things that I didn't go, probably because something was going on with one of my relationships at that time. No, actually, no, that was ninety-three, so, you know, I think I was just too focused on work and things like that. But after hearing about it and seeing people bring back pictures and stuff and [come back with? ] camaraderie -- it was a wonderful experience for a lot of people that I wish I'd been a part of, you know? LB: I think that the Pride festival in the Lehigh Valley grew out of that. So, were you involved with Pride during the beginning times of that? MH: I was. And when Pride first started, one of the ways I was actually involved with Pride was doing graphic work for them. Now, let's see, Pride started -- LB: Nineteen ninety -- MH: around nineteen ninety-four, three, ninety-four? Yeah, at that time, ninety-four, I had started the magazine. And before that, I was actually doing a newsletter for the Stonewall. And so, I was doing some kinds of graphic things. And some of the board members from Pride actually came to me and I did their, like, their booklet for the day of Pride and things for the first two years. And then, obviously, with working within the bar situation, we were able to promote things to a lot of people. And the bar itself making -- was very supportive of all kinds of things, always showing -- actually, all of the bars were as far as getting literature out there for people to read, making announcements, doing fundraisers within their own bars. And so, yeah, that, I think the Pride event grew out of that and some other things and our community already coming together because of the AIDS crisis. So, I think that helped strengthen that, as well. LB: Yeah, I think that's a big deal. MH: Yeah, it is. LB: So, as things went on and the various different stuff kind of wound down for the AIDS community, I mean, I think if we look back at that, there were some pretty key people that were making things happen in those days. And can you mention some of those folks and what they -- MH: Oh, yeah, in the early days, I mean, we lost some people that actually were -- Ken [Tall? ] was an example. But Dave Moyer, Carl Mancino. There were people that were just part of -- they weren't part of the LGBTQ community but they were actually close friends and stuff and they became very instrumental, as well. Off the top of my head, coming up with names, those are two people that did a significant amount in those days, especially with FACT and things like that. But there were so many people involved and, to be honest with you, I wasn't as involved with the organizations other than, for instance, with the startup of it, promoting their events, perhaps, and like I said, helping with organizing some of the events. And I did concession stand -- I was in charge of concessions and stuff in the second Summer Games and things like that but -- LB: [Tell me a? ] little bit about the summer games because people in the future should hear about that because they were pretty wonderful. MH: They were fun. First of all, like I say, they came out of a fun competition between competing bars. And they built into a much larger thing. At first, it only included Candida's and the Stonewall, which, you know, because of our friendship with each other and our competition with each other -- but then, after the first year, then it was decided that we were going to make an event and it was going to be a FACT event now that FACT had been formed. And so, other bars were invited, as well, from outside of the Lehigh Valley. There was bars from Reading, there was bars from Wilkes-Barre, Scranton. So, you had bars from other areas coming in and bringing more people in and learning about these things. One other thing about the summer games was it was a lot of fun. It was fun to watch, it was fun events. There was swimming, there was, you know, things like a drag competition where people would have to do a relay race getting into different outfits and stuff. A lot of fun. But one of the things that I remember the most we would get to the end of the competition and there would be a ceremony at the end and that is when everybody had time to actually remember what we were doing there with candlelight vigils, sometimes the naming of names and remember what we were doing there and take time to reflect on that. And that was a very heartwarming part of those events. So, like I said, the different events were always a lot of fun. You want people to do things, you want people to participate, you got to make them fun. The Snowball, a lot of people didn't do the Snowball as they thought it was a little bit elitist because everybody was renting tuxes and going like this. So, they said, well, I can't afford to rent a tux and if I don't wear one -- you know, and over the years, that changed somewhat. There was a lot less people worrying so much about what they looked like and just enjoying the event. But the summer games was one thing where everybody could just show up, was a big ol' picnic, kind of atmosphere. And Rainbow Mountain resort in the Poconos hosted it for most of that period of time until it moved past that. But, yeah, for people that didn't experience that, at a time in our community, it was just something where you could bring all kinds of bars from all different areas and people from those areas together, just have a great day. But at the same time, you're doing something for a wonderful cause. And that makes people feel good, that you can actually still have fun and you're doing something good. LB: Yeah, great. MH: Yeah, it brought our community together, too. I mean, beyond the AIDS epidemic and, you know, it strengthened our community as we moved forward looking into our own rights. So, some of the things that came out of that epidemic were then -- we as a community became stronger. We became used to getting together and doing things together, which made us stronger going into the nineties with the elections and as we go down the line. And then, the different organizations that -- you know, has the voter's guide that came out and the -- now with the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, you know what I mean, there's so many things that would have been unthought of actually years ago. There was little fringe things here and there but they never got a full acceptance and support of community. And so, like I say, our community is actually better off -- not that we had the disease come through us but how we came together for it. LB: Were you involved with Le-Hi-Ho? MH: Le-Hi-Ho, that goes back pretty far and I don't have a lot of memory of that. I believe Le-Hi-Ho is back in the late seventies, perhaps? LB: The eighties, I think. MH: Was it eighties? LB: Yeah. MH: Yeah, there was some -- I have to be honest, I'm not the best one for an interview because a lot of my time was spent inebriated. (laughs) Let's just get right to it. When I was young, I drank a lot. I had a lot of fun. But those were the days. I graduated from high school at seventeen, moved out of the house at seventeen into my first apartment. Had just realized that I was gay, finding out what gay was, and was living to -- exploring myself, you might say. It was a different time coming off of the craziness of the seventies, so -- LB: Where did you go to high school? MH: I went to school in a high school in Emmaus, just outside of Allentown. So, I grew up in a pretty small, somewhat privileged area. And then, like I said, I was in a big hurry to move out to the big city of Allentown as soon as I could and I hadn't even turned eighteen yet, yeah. LB: Yeah. MH: [You know? ]? LB: I didn't ask a whole bunch of demographic questions on this. I don't think this really -- oh, well, it does ask you what your zip code is. We're supposed to day what your zip code -- MH: Oh, well, right now, I'm in one-eight-oh-five-two, which is the Whitehall area, but -- LB: Yeah. So, is the reason that you came back to the Lehigh Valley because you just missed it so much? Or was there some reason why -- MH: Because everybody comes back (laughs) that's from here. I moved to Florida with a boyfriend at the time. Things didn't work out so well and then you come home, you know? Actually, while I was here on vacation, I met my current husband and came back to be with him. And then, like I said, we've been together for thirty years now. So, it's not a bad area and it's not -- we don't get as much cold weather as up north. (laughs) So, that's why I came back to this area. It's home. LB: Yeah. And I guess, see, in this list, they didn't -- they ask, in the COVID thing, that you're supposed to identify yourself within the community. So, in other words, how do you identify your LGBT-ness? And so, you would say what -- how would you identify your -- MH: Within the current situation, really? LB: No, no, just, like, I would identify myself as a lesbian, in other words. MH: Oh, I identify as gay, I'm -- you know, but -- LB: [That's? ] easy, okay. MH: Yes. LB: Well, I think -- so, here's one thing I think everybody should ask and -- because we hope that someday in the future, somebody will look at this and get a sense of, you know, various different people's experiences with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. And it is true that we Baby Boomers are the ones that went through this in our twenties and now we're at a different age. We're about to go through the aging epidemic, as well, since that's another thing. But what would you want somebody in the future to know, like, in terms of what that was like? I mean, if you were just going to sort of describe what the AIDS epidemic was like to somebody who had no sense of what it was like -- and I think there are young people today who really don't have any sense of what it was like. MH: I think more so than anything, I would like them to know that hopefully sometime in the future when there's no real recollection of that, I hope that we as a community are accepted just as -- the same as anyone else in the community, that our -- as the gay community is no longer the gay community, you know? I'm hoping that would be that but the case would be that we were at a time then where we still considered less than, being part of our community. And we had something that struck us really hard but we showed a strength that probably would not have been imagined. And we pulled ourselves up by our boot straps and we took care of it on our own when the government wasn't there to do so, you know? It was a time of a lot of pain but there was a lot of camaraderie and a lot of good things actually did come out of the situation, so -- although it was a difficult time for a lot of people, we lost a lot of friends, we lost family members, a lot of good actually did come out of the situation for us because we became stronger. LB: Yeah. I want to ask you one more thing because you brought it up because you were talking about how you became aware of this sort of -- of HIV/AIDS because of Rock Hudson. And I think people don't have an understanding of how significant Rock Hudson's circumstance was. And there were some other famous people that -- MH: Yeah. LB: -- spoke out about -- but you want to say a little bit more about that? because I don't know if people would always really get what happened. MH: That was actually something, by somebody of his stature coming out. And for somebody of my age, we thought of him as McMillan from McMillan and Wife, you know, even more so than the movies, in the black and white movies and stuff. But he was a leading man. He was everything. So, from a gay person's point of view, I almost wonder if -- he brought attention to it but we were also looking as, like, well, look, he was gay, you know? And we were almost more focused on that when the whole thing arrived than we were on the fact that this guy has HIV. And at that point, we thought, well, he came out -- that he had HIV. It's, like, oh, he must be gay because this is a -- you know, we were still being told this was a gay disease. But for somebody like that, somebody in the public eye like that, that meant so much to older people, too, older than us at that time. That meant a lot. It's, like, oh, wow. LB: Yeah. MH: He's, like, Rock Hudson and he got this disease. And I think it made people think, you know what? I can get this, too. It was really big. Other people did talk about it frequently. You know, we had Magic Johnson come out, that was very big, to have somebody that wasn't homosexual get the disease, come out publicly about it. I think that was really a big turning point because this wasn't somebody that was gay, to our knowledge, at least. And so, when celebrities or famous people like this actually can show that "this can happen to us, too" and then they relate their story and they actually speak out in support of a cause like that, it means the world, it really does, just like right now, with this epidemic, you're seeing so many famous people, celebrities, whatever you would call them actually speaking up: "Wear a mask, you know? It's not that hard. This is very important. This is a serious issue. " Without that, a lot of people would actually ignore it completely. So, that was an important turning point and it really was and -- as were some of the people that got -- contracted it and came into public view after that, even more so -- there's other people that may have been more known to the gay community but not to the entire population of our country that -- that's why, to me, that was extremely important and that's why it made you notice it right then and there and this is a real thing. LB: Yeah, it' pretty -- it was remarkable. And even Elizabeth Taylor's response and -- MH: Yeah. LB: -- you know, that kind of stuff, too. MH: Yeah. And when, like, for instance, when Liberace died, he didn't do a lot for -- the fact that he denied that he was gay throughout his lifetime. He didn't talk about having AIDS throughout his lifetime. It was done -- all that came out posthumously. So, that did nothing, really, to help in eradicating the disease. It takes a lot for a celebrity, even knowing that he's going to pass away soon to know that everything he's done and the way he wants to be remembered, this is what you may be remembered for but this is important. So, that actually was something that really meant a lot at that time and especially, like I said, to be a leading man like that, a heartthrob to so many heterosexual Americans, you know what I mean? It was a very important -- yes. LB: Great. Well, is there anything else you want to add that you're thinking -- MH: No, no. I wish I -- like I said, I thought to myself I didn't know that I would be a good candidate for this because I wasn't one of those heroes that walked the straight and narrow. But I think I'm more an example of how a lot of people were back then, you know? Like I say that the knowledge wasn't there in the beginning and then it was a bit sketchy as we did get it. And a lot of us still carried on, thinking this won't affect me. When we look at this pandemic right now, I have a whole different world of thought. Not only did we hear right away from experts and scientists of what it is, how dangerous this could be, but every person that I know that's in the medical profession says this is serious. And these are Republicans and Democrats and Independents, you know? But when it came to this disease, they weren't hedging on it. And so, to see people not take it seriously is scary. It is scary. Like I say, the AIDS epidemic was a little bit different, you know? It wasn't as easily transmitted by any measure. But when you see some of the ways -- you know, I think about -- I somewhat had a somewhat cavalier attitude back then and I see that to the nth degree right now with something that's far more contagious, you know? So, that's just fuel for thought, you know? LB: It is, it's -- MH: I believe, to be honest with you, too, as far as our own community, I think we're more -- I see very few people that I know from the LGBTQ community that aren't watching this closely, aren't very cautious about it, and a lot of that may come from the fact that we went through this. We went through an epidemic of our own, on a smaller scale, but we know this is serious business. And, like I say, with that community, I'm not seeing the same kind of divisiveness I'm seeing through people in general and the way they ignore it, you know what I mean, and don't take it seriously. So, [I don't know? ]. LB: Hashtag not our first virus. MH: What's that? LB: Hashtag not our first virus. MH: Not our first virus, absolutely, absolutely. LB: [Thanks that we're? ] -- MH: And although we may not have individually dealt with it so well then, now that I'm older, more mature, now more so than ever, my biggest fear is that I get it and give it to someone else, you know? That was something that was part of our epidemic at the time. With maturity comes the understanding of that. LB: I just want to say, Mitch, that when you were doing Above Ground and I was writing an article for it, I remember one time me sitting in your office and you were showing me how to use that program that -- Corel. MH: Corel Draw that I used to use, yeah. LB: (inaudible) [and hook it, yeah? ], and when I was watching you set up the graphics on it and then, soon after, the magazine, your magazine was over and I started the Valley Gay Press and I used Corel for eight years. MH: Did you? (laughs) LB: So, well, I could probably do this. And Mitch is doing it and he's -- and I really -- I wrote the paper in Corel -- MH: Yeah. LB: -- and typed it in in Corel and [part of it was? ] just because you were doing it that way. And I ran that paper for eighteen years. MH: Yes. LB: So, it grew out of [the stuff you learned? ] and I thought Above Ground was a huge inspiration to a lot of people. People really paid attention to it and read things in it. And, you know, Steve Black wrote political articles in it and we really covered information to a lot of people and we began -- MH: Steve Black, there's another one who was so involved with so many different things, especially in the political field with us -- LB: Yeah, yeah. MH: -- [another one? ]. LB: Yeah, [just? ] Steve in my office and at the center. He was amazing. MH: Yeah, yeah. There was actually so many people that we've lost over the years that -- and, like I say, you almost become numb to it. And then, when you think about somebody, it was -- it took a lot of people that it shouldn't have. LB Yeah. MH: There's a lot of people that passed away that never allowed it to even be said that that's what they passed away from, you know? LB: And Steve died of AIDS. MH: I know he did, yeah, yeah, because -- yeah. And he had said something to me about it. But he did not want that to be out as public knowledge, either, and a lot of people didn't, you know, that were suffering through that. It was [a pitiful? ] -- LB: [Yeah? ], that he had it. MH: Yeah. LB: It was too late by the time -- MH: Yeah. LB: It was [clear? ] that he had it. MH: So, it was too late and also too early as far as the medical advances they had made, yeah, yeah. LB: Yeah. So, well, thank you very, very much for talking to us about this. This is really terrific that you've done this and I -- let me just remind you again, I'm supposed to do that, to say that, let's see, that, you know, you -- we're going to -- this Zoom meeting is private and so it has a password entry so there's no, you know, other people on this or anything like that. And we, I just want to remind you again, that once this is done and I upload this and then they'll send it to be transcribed and then you'll be able to review it. We'll send it to you in an email so that you can read through the whole thing. And if there's things in it that you want to change or add or rearrange or [look at? ] -- MH: Absolutely. Will they look at it at any point and say we should edit certain parts of this or -- LB: [Not -- not? ] -- MH: No? Okay. All right. I just wonder if -- I get a bit long-winded sometimes. LB: No, and I don't think that's the case at all. I thought that you were really great and fascinating. But I think that, you know, people may listen to this in the future and what they would do -- and I think I'm going to stop it now because we're just chatting. MH: Okay. LB: Turn this off -- 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=
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01:02:33
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Mitch Hemphill, June 17, 2020
Description
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Mitch Hemphill talks about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. He focuses on working in the local bar; the rise of the Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT) organization; and creating and running his newspaper "Above Ground," which covered AIDS information.
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PH40_12
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AIDS (Disease)
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2020-06-17
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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05cebf47c19c2cd954fd37a75da24bb5
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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
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Mary Foltz
Interviewee
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Nadine Anderson
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-04.xml
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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 < ; iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TkYzM0zBkGE?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"> ; < ; /iframe> ; 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.
 ; 
 ; NADINE ANDERSON: My pleasure.
 ; 
 ; MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? 0 126 Childhood & ; 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?
 ; 
 ; 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. 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?
 ; 
 ; 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 & ; 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 & ; 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.
 ; 
 ; 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? 
 ; 
 ; 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?
 ; 
 ; 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?
 ; 
 ; 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.
 ; 
 ; 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=
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01:39:13
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Nadine Anderson, May 12, 2020
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Nadine Anderson recounts her time as an LGBT individual in church, her career in psychology, and how the fields have developed over the years.
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LGBT-04
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2020-05-12
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community: HIV/AIDS
Description
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In the spring of 2020, the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive received a grant to collect oral histories and written stories for 40 Years of Public Health in the Lehigh Valley’s LGBT Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBT Health Experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19.
The collection consists of oral histories from individuals who experienced the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as oral histories from members of the local community as they lived through 2020's summer of Covid-19. Running through both are the themes of dealing with the fear of an emerging health crisis, loneliness and isolation, and coming together as a community in support and activism.
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.
Oral History
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Liz Bradbury
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Nan Kozul
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_14.xml
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5.4 June 17, 2020 Nan Kozul, June 17, 2020 (Part 1) PH40_14 00:28:20 LVLGBT40 40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community 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 AIDS (Disease) Nan Kozul Liz Bradbury video/mpeg NanKozulPart1_20200617_video.mp4 1.0:|23(7)|50(8)|81(12)|102(8)|125(7)|144(14)|171(5)|192(12)|211(12)|232(8)|255(4)|272(10)|297(2)|312(10)|335(17)|352(8)|371(9)|392(12)|417(6)|436(9)|457(7)|480(7)|505(5)|530(2)|565(6)|582(12)|607(7)|636(8)|643(5) 0 https://youtu.be/TJ8kkq69Iac YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction 0 147 First time hearing about HIV/AIDS / Bartending at Candida's Bar LB: So, the first thing I’m going to say is that in the midst of this current health crisis we’re experiencing, we’re taking this opportunity to look back and reflect to capture the stories of those who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the nineteen eighties and nineties in the Lehigh Valley. So, let’s just start out by saying do you remember the first time you became aware of the disease? And you could say anything you want, so, you know, you don’t have to just stick to that. What do you think?
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 ; NK: Well, I was bartending -- Dina opened her bar, Candida’s in nineteen eighty. Prior to that, I was visiting the Stonewall and pouring there but once Dina opened her bar, I started bartending there. And it was when HIV first started -- it had happened in the bigger cities, so it was more prominent, like, in New York, Philly. 0 265 Fears of AIDS and COVID-19 while working in the medical field NK: I remember I had, just as the epidemic started, I had gone to a new dentist in Allentown. And so, I went to get my teeth cleaned and I’m sitting in the chair and the dentist and the hygienist, they were really animated, they were fun. I was talking to them and they were, like, “So, where do you work?” And I’m, like, “I work for a drug dealer but I also work at a bar.” And they were, like, “Oh, where do you work?” And I said, “Candida’s.” And they left the room and I was sitting there (laughs) and then they came back in. And when they came back in, they were donned with gowns, gloves, and a facemask. 0 435 Promiscuity in the early 1980s / Noticing friends losing weight and knowing they had AIDS LB: What kind of other kinds of circumstances in terms of relating to that kind of fear and concern -- did people feel that around the bar, too? I mean, were people sharing stories like that?
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 ; NK: It was very -- they didn’t talk about it. You know, the promiscuity in the early eighties was really high and especially at Candida’s because you had the cemetery across the street, so it was easy access for private liaisons. (laughter) And it was interesting because it started to shift, slowly, but it started to shift. And it wasn’t until probably later, in the later eighties, that I actually saw friends becoming sick and admitting that they were positive. Yeah, it was a tough time. 0 880 Parents disowning their children because they were gay LB: And during the beginning of the epidemic, I think some people were really not supported by their families, although I’ve also heard that a lot of families in the Lehigh Valley were pretty supportive. What’s your take on that?
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 ; NK: Well, you know what, Liz? To be honest with you, that was -- I bartended every -- well, bartended quite a few nights. But Sunday afternoons was one of my days that I bartended. I can’t tell you the amount of young guys that would come in and just cry to me because their parents disowned them. 0 980 Bar mascots being stolen as a prank / Beginning of FACT LB: Yeah. Well, tell me about the start of FACT there and how that happened.
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 ; NK: Well, (laughs) it started as just a crazy -- Dina had a parrot that was her mascot and the Stonewall stole the parrot. And then she --
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 ; LB: It wasn’t a real parrot.
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 ; NK: No, it wasn’t a real parrot, even though she had a real parrot. (laughter) No, it was just her mascot. 0 1105 Planting memorial trees in Lehigh Parkway / Discussion of best friend who is HIV positive LB: You remember -- I know that there were a lot of funerals and I don’t know the history of this exactly but I know they were planting a lot of trees. You remember that?
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 ; NK: You know, I remember that vaguely, that they were planting trees. I don’t remember actually going to any funerals, only because it’s a painful time.
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 ; LB: Yes. 0 1258 Working as a medical assistant / Discrimination in nursing school LB: Now, are you a nurse (inaudible) nurse? 
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 ; NK: Actually, I’m a medical assistant. I was two semesters away from being an RN back in eighty-nine, ninety, nineteen-ninety, and I was forced out of nursing school because I was gay. 
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 ; LB: What happened?
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 ; NK: St. Luke’s was not known (laughs) for their inclusivity of gay people, especially back then. And I had gone to nursing school. I was elected class president. I was going to graduate in nineteen-ninety. And two semesters before I was to graduate, I start flunking and I went to the instructors and I said, “Why -- I don’t understand why I’m flunking my tests,” because we had study groups. 0 1503 Medications for HIV/AIDS LB: So, back to the stuff that was happening, then. What kind of stuff, externally, was happening with regard to that? Like, were you aware of things that were happening politically, that -- you know, we have those kinds of political issues now that have to do with COVID-19. There were political issues that were happening then. Do you remember how that had an impact on you?
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 ; NK: You know, I don’t remember the political aspect. I remember the drugs that were coming out. And it was really -- I found it awesome that scientists and labs were creating different kind of, like, medications that went from having these guys having to take gobs of pills to one pill or, you know, or less pills and how it curbed the side effects of what they were experiencing. (electronic tone) Now, it’s saying that I am running low on juice. 0 MovingImage Nan Kozul talks about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. She focuses on working in several local LGBT bars, including Candida's ; her work in healthcare ; AIDS discrimination ; the formation of Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT) ; and friends who became sick. This interview took place over two days because of technical difficulties. NAN KOZUL - PART 1 LIZ BRADBURY: -- computer, yes. Now, I have to read you these things. So, with this project, the Bradbury Sullivan LGBT Community Center at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College, will collaborate on 40 years of public health experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. So, this is the HIV/AIDS part. My name's Liz Bradbury. I'm here with Nan Kozul to talk to her about her experiences in the Lehigh Valley community during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive. And this project had funding from Lehigh Valley -- I'm not supposed to say that, so I'm going to cross that off. Okay. Has had funding to do this data collection. We're meeting on Zoom and this is, the date of this is June seventeenth, twenty-twenty. And we're talking specifically about HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early part of the epidemic. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me today and to make this Zoom video. Can you please state your full name and spell it for me? NAN KOZUL: Nan, N-A-N, Kozul, K-O-Z-U-L. LB: Okay, and will you please share your birth date? NK: May fifteenth, nineteen fifty-eight. LB: Okay, and now this is the consent part, do you consent to this interview today? NK: I do. (laughs) LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? NK: I do. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats including films, articles, websites, presentations, and other formats? NK: I do. LB: And do you understand that you will have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview and identify any parts you'd like to delete or withdraw or change from the project? NK: I do. LB: All right, okay. So, this has got pretty short little questions here in terms of asking you things. So, the first thing I'm going to say is that in the midst of this current health crisis we're experiencing, we're taking this opportunity to look back and reflect to capture the stories of those who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the nineteen eighties and nineties in the Lehigh Valley. So, let's just start out by saying do you remember the first time you became aware of the disease? And you could say anything you want, so, you know, you don't have to just stick to that. What do you think? NK: Well, I was bartending -- Dina opened her bar, Candida's in nineteen eighty. Prior to that, I was visiting the Stonewall and pouring there but once Dina opened her bar, I started bartending there. And it was when HIV first started -- it had happened in the bigger cities, so it was more prominent, like, in New York, Philly. It didn't feel like it hit so close to home that early. But eventually, it started to. And so, it was a hard time because being gay at that time and then having HIV on top of it being there, it was difficult. LB: Yeah. What were some of the things that kind of made you aware that this was happening? Like, were you hearing outside information about it and then also stuff that was happening around the community? NK: I heard more, like, watching the news. I saw a lot of news features. And then, of course, we were talking about it in the bar. And there was primarily a male clientele that came into Candida's in the beginning. I mean, it was a busy bar all the time but it was a lot of guys and -- but it was interesting because what happened was the -- I remember I had, just as the epidemic started, I had gone to a new dentist in Allentown. And so, I went to get my teeth cleaned and I'm sitting in the chair and the dentist and the hygienist, they were really animated, they were fun. I was talking to them and they were, like, "So, where do you work?" And I'm, like, "I work for a drug dealer but I also work at a bar." And they were, like, "Oh, where do you work?" And I said, "Candida's." And they left the room and I was sitting there (laughs) and then they came back in. And when they came back in, they were donned with gowns, gloves, and a facemask. LB: Wow. NK: And the whole mood changed from, you know, being light and fun to very serious. They cleaned my teeth, I paid them, and left. And I sat in the car and I was just so blown away with how I was treated. And it hurt me and it just caught me so off guard. I wasn't expecting that. LB: When was that, in the epidemic? NK: Right in the beginning. because working in the medical field right now, I see the fear of COVID-19 and so, it's an interesting dynamic to see, to experience both. Because back -- we didn't really know a whole lot about HIV other than that it was a blood -- you know, like it was transmitted through blood. And then, with this COVID-19, it was transmitted through air. And, you know, people just generally are scared. And so, it's been an interesting few months, just going through this and dealing with patients that are COVID positive and how we have to protect ourselves. LB: Yeah. NK: And I think about that patient sitting in the chair, thinking, wow, I was that person but I didn't have HIV. I was just a gay person and I was labeled right away and feared right away just because of the -- LB: And do you think that was because at that time, people really had no idea where it was coming from? Or they were just overly concerned? NK: I think they weren't sure how it was transmitted, so they wanted to take all precautions. But I just thought the way they did it was so, so blatant, you know? LB: Yeah. NK: I said that I worked at Candida's and they just went -- and then they just left the room. And then, I was like, wow, and it just was a weird time. LB: What kind of other kinds of circumstances in terms of relating to that kind of fear and concern -- did people feel that around the bar, too? I mean, were people sharing stories like that? NK: It was very -- they didn't talk about it. You know, the promiscuity in the early eighties was really high and especially at Candida's because you had the cemetery across the street, so it was easy access for private liaisons. (laughter) And it was interesting because it started to shift, slowly, but it started to shift. And it wasn't until probably later, in the later eighties, that I actually saw friends becoming sick and admitting that they were positive. Yeah, it was a tough time. LB: Yeah. Could you tell that they were sick? Is that what they were saying? Or they were just sort of confiding in you that that was -- NK: No, you could see they started to lose weight. Probably one of the most heart-wrenching things that happened to me one time was I was actually bartending at Jeff's City Line Pub (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible) yeah, it was probably -- I would say it was definitely probably eighty-eight, maybe, when I was bartending there. And a friend of mine, Joe, was the bouncer there and he was just the sweetest man. And he always helped, at the end of the night, to help clean up. And we used to throw bottles in big plastic bags, heavy contractor bags, and then throw them in the dumpster. And he came in one night after a busy weekend night and his hand was bleeding. And it was a pretty deep cut. And so, I applied pressure to it with my hand, you know, not even thinking, just because it was bleeding so bad. And then, I got a rag and I wrapped it around his hand. And a few weeks later, he came in to work and he just -- he looked really sad and he's, like, "Nan, I need to talk to you." And I said, "What's wrong?" And he said, "Nan, I had a Western blot and I'm positive." And he goes, "You should get tested." And it was numbing because I just remember compressing the cut and not having any protection. But the way he declined was horrible and he wound up getting Karposi. LB: Yeah. NK: And he was in St. Luke's and he had eventually gone blind and that was just so, so sad, just to see that happen because he was such a gentle soul. He was a really nice guy. LB: Did you get tested? NK: No. No, and I was going to but I knew that I hadn't broken skin but -- and part of that, probably, too was fear. I thought, well, if I get it, I get it. But, yeah, it was a -- interesting time when it first came out. It was -- and we just lost a lot of people. And some people that got -- that wound up being positive, you didn't expect, you know? You just [thought it?] -- because you just didn't expect it. And it was all ages. It wasn't just the young guys. And once the cocktail came out, it really helped. It turned the corner for a lot of guys that were positive. What's amazing, Liz, is working in the doctor's office today, I am amazed how many people are actually HIV. LB: Yeah. NK: I am shocked. And equal gender, you know? It's, yeah. LB: When it was happening back during the time of the epidemic, when you were saying that it was all different kinds of folks that were coming in and it was clear that they were positive -- and were they sick? I mean, at that time, particularly at the early time, it was really a death sentence. Would everybody sort of feel that? NK: Pardon? LB: Did people feel that way? I mean, you know -- NK: Just from what I remember, they kind of tried to just forge ahead and not think about it. Some dealt with it by drinking heavier (laughs) and just sinking into alcohol more. Others pulled away from the bar and going out. LB: Yeah. NK: And some just lived their life. Rob St. Mary, he was just -- I don't know if you remember him. He lived his life and he danced until the day he wasn't here anymore. LB: Well, I interviewed Mitch Hemphill earlier today and he mentioned Rob St. Mary, too. I didn't know him. So, what was he like? NK: Rob was -- (laughs) he was crazy. He was fun and I just remember him just loving to be in drag but just silly drag. But dancing at the Stonewall, he was always dancing. He's just really outgoing and friendly. And as the disease progressed with him, it was hard to see because they -- often, the guys that would or the people that got sick, they would just get really drawn, their faces, you could just -- they had this pallor about them that was -- you knew. And so, you just didn't say anything. You just respected that space. LB: Yeah. I think after the Pulse tragedy, the Pulse massacre, a lot of people were talking about how, for a lot of us, bars were our homes and it certainly was for everybody our age because there wasn't anything else. NK: Right. LB: And during the beginning of the epidemic, I think some people were really not supported by their families, although I've also heard that a lot of families in the Lehigh Valley were pretty supportive. What's your take on that? NK: Well, you know what, Liz? To be honest with you, that was -- I bartended every -- well, bartended quite a few nights. But Sunday afternoons was one of my days that I bartended. I can't tell you the amount of young guys that would come in and just cry to me because their parents disowned them. It was heartbreaking, you know? At a time where you had HIV and you were gay, it was such a one-two punch for people that got sick. It was just so sad. And, you know, it was a family. I wasn't out to my parents when I was that age and I remember talking to a therapist and she said, "Nan, your family, you're going to create a family at Candida's." And that's what I did. And they were family. It was so tight-knit. And when, like, in the mid eighties, there were -- we just wanted to do something and we -- and that's how FACT got started. And that was amazing. And it's amazing where that has come today. It's so awesome that it helps so many people. LB: Yeah. Well, tell me about the start of FACT there and how that happened. NK: Well, (laughs) it started as just a crazy -- Dina had a parrot that was her mascot and the Stonewall stole the parrot. And then she -- LB: It wasn't a real parrot. NK: No, it wasn't a real parrot, even though she had a real parrot. (laughter) No, it was just her mascot. And so, they stole the parrot and then we tried to steal the moose head from the Stonewall. (laughter) And it was really massive. But we wound up having these bar wars that were hysterical. And that camaraderie between Candida's and the Stonewall just created such a bond and that's where that -- it just created this force behind wanting to help people that were infected. And it just, you know, all the right people were in the right places. And they had the right connections to get everything financially solvent. And then, the games started at Rainbow Mountain. LB: Right. NK: And it was just amazing, you know? And every year, there just seemed to be more and more. And then, you had the Snow Ball. And it was FACT Bingo. It was crazy stuff but it all worked and all for a great cause. LB: And did you find people were coming in saying that they needed that kind of help? NK: There were some people that did, yeah. Some guys did. LB: Yeah. NK: But it's so wonderful for today to see how it made such a difference in the lives of the Lehigh Valley. LB: You remember -- I know that there were a lot of funerals and I don't know the history of this exactly but I know they were planting a lot of trees. You remember that? NK: You know, I remember that vaguely, that they were planting trees. I don't remember actually going to any funerals, only because it's a painful time. LB: Yes. NK: And my best friend, Pete, at the time, when he was HIV, I was devastated because he was my best bud. And at one point in time, he got really sick. He was at Sacred Heart Hospital and I went to go visit him and I walked right past the room he was in because I didn't know it was him. He always had salt and pepper hair and was always clean shaven or he had a small beard. But his beard had grown out and it was scraggly and he was sitting in a hospital chair. And I didn't even know it was him. It looked like an old man. And I went into the room and I asked him to get back into bed and he got back into bed and I had a healing crystal. That was my crystal and I put it on his heart. And I know when I left there, it was raining that day and I got to my car and I just sobbed. But he's still here and he's [super?]. (laughs) Yeah. LB: So, was it that he -- there were drugs or he got better enough to be able to hold out for the drugs? NK: He did. He did get better and he got on the right cocktail. I used to marvel at, you know, because he literally would take a handful of medication, in the morning and in the afternoon, I think, in the evening. I mean, handful. But he just, it's just amazing, even today, you know? He's doing great. And he came back for his horse. He loves his horse. And I'm glad that he survived that and, yeah, so -- but it's amazing. LB: Now, are you a nurse (inaudible) nurse? NK: Actually, I'm a medical assistant. I was two semesters away from being an RN back in eighty-nine, ninety, nineteen-ninety, and I was forced out of nursing school because I was gay. LB: What happened? NK: St. Luke's was not known (laughs) for their inclusivity of gay people, especially back then. And I had gone to nursing school. I was elected class president. I was going to graduate in nineteen-ninety. And two semesters before I was to graduate, I start flunking and I went to the instructors and I said, "Why -- I don't understand why I'm flunking my tests," because we had study groups. And I said, "Can I see the master key?" And they were, like, "No, we don't do that." And I'm, like, "Okay." And so, I was basically forced out of school. And there was an instructor there that actually had a crush on a friend of mine who was male and -- because I went back to school when I was twenty-nine. I was older. And so, I had become friends with this nursing instructor. Unbeknownst to me, she thought she could change my friend. So, we had gone out to dinner and at the time, I had just broken up with a partner that I was with. And I told her. LB: Oh. NK: And thinking that it was okay. (laughs) And it wasn't. And a few weeks later, she threatened me. She called me into her office and threatened to flunk me and that -- she just said a lot of things and I just left the office so defeated. But I wound up, unfortunately, having to leave the school because I didn't meet the grades. I got a job at Lehigh Valley, in ICU. They were great. They actually let me be involved with things in intensive care and were, like, "Nan, get your RN." And so, I was going to go to community college, NCACC, but I didn't want to start from the beginning. So, I wrote St. Luke's a letter to ask for transcripts of my grades to be released and NCACC said that St. Luke's had said they never heard of me. LB: Oh, my God. NK: And, like, at the time my parents were really upset. They thought I just quit school. And I just couldn't come out to them. At the time, I was afraid. I just felt so beaten [on?]. And it was really weird. Back in 2002, I had gone to massage school and I became a massage therapist. And one of the girls there at the school actually worked for St. Luke's and had gone through St. Luke's School of Nursing. And she said to me, she said -- I told her about what happened to me and she goes, "Oh, yeah." She said, "You know, Nan," because she was bisexual, said, "They threatened me." And I'm, like, "You're kidding!" And she's, "No." She goes, "Matter of fact, I said go ahead and try. I'll get my lawyer on you." And she said, "And they backed off." LB: [Oh?]! NK: And I'm, like, "[No?], I wish I had that kind of chutzpah," you know? (laughter) But so that's why -- not a nurse today. But I -- LB: Well, [you're a?] professional. NK: Yeah. LB: I think you, at the beginning, you said you were a drug dealer and I think that might be misinterpreted. NK: Oh, a drug -- oh, yeah. I worked for a drug wholesaler. LB: Okay. (laughs) NK: Yeah, I worked -- (laughter) it was a wholesale drug company that was based out of Harrisburg and we supplied all the pharmacies. So, oh my gosh, yeah, I wasn't a drug dealer. (laughter) Thanks for catching that, Liz! (laughs) LB: So, back to the stuff that was happening, then. What kind of stuff, externally, was happening with regard to that? Like, were you aware of things that were happening politically, that -- you know, we have those kinds of political issues now that have to do with COVID-19. There were political issues that were happening then. Do you remember how that had an impact on you? NK: You know, I don't remember the political aspect. I remember the drugs that were coming out. And it was really -- I found it awesome that scientists and labs were creating different kind of, like, medications that went from having these guys having to take gobs of pills to one pill or, you know, or less pills and how it curbed the side effects of what they were experiencing. (electronic tone) Now, it's saying that I am running low on juice. LB: Uh-oh. NK: Uh-oh. (laughter) I have it plugged in. I don't know why -- hmm. Plugged in. Uh-oh. LB: Is it plugged in? NK: Yeah, it is plugged in. I don't know why it said it's low on juice. Okay. LB: Tell people about, I mean, you know, twenty years from now -- it's bad enough now because people don't know what it was like at the beginning. A lot of young people certainly know and when we talk about young people, we don't talk -- but they're not that young. (laughter) But they don't know what it was like in terms of side effects and stuff like that. Talk about some of that thing that would happen in regard to the side effects from the drugs and also the symptoms of the disease that show -- you already mentioned some of those. NK: Yeah. One of the things that I remember, Pete had a hard time eating because it destroyed your appetite, the pills. And because he would get high. And I'm, like, "Why are you getting high?" He goes, "because this is the only thing that lets me eat." LB: Right. NK: And so, that was a big thing. That was a big side effect. And I think, too, I think that's probably why people that were positive wound up dropping so much weight, because that was a huge side effect. And skin issues. LB: Yeah. NK: You know? But mainly, it was just the weight loss, what was profound. LB: Yeah. NK: Yeah. LB: And so, when FACT was doing stuff and began to do stuff, when did sort of shift from this (electronic tone) idea of, like -- uh-oh. Are you there? Oh, dear. Oh. 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=
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00:28:20
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Nan Kozul, June 17, 2020 (Part 1)
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Nan Kozul talks about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. She focuses on working in several local LGBT bars, including Candida's; her work in healthcare; AIDS discrimination; the formation of Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT); and friends who became sick. This interview took place over two days because of technical difficulties.
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PH40_14
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AIDS (Disease)
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2020-06-17
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community: HIV/AIDS
Description
An account of the resource
In the spring of 2020, the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive received a grant to collect oral histories and written stories for 40 Years of Public Health in the Lehigh Valley’s LGBT Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBT Health Experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19.
The collection consists of oral histories from individuals who experienced the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as oral histories from members of the local community as they lived through 2020's summer of Covid-19. Running through both are the themes of dealing with the fear of an emerging health crisis, loneliness and isolation, and coming together as a community in support and activism.
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.
Oral History
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Liz Bradbury
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Nan Kozul
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_15.xml
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5.4 June 21, 2020 Nan Kozul, June 21, 2020 (Part 2) PH40_15 00:52:36 LVLGBT40 40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community 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 AIDS (Disease) Nan Kozul Liz Bradbury video/mpeg KozulNanPart2_20200621_video.mp4 1.0:|23(8)|60(16)|83(5)|100(2)|117(13)|132(5)|149(6)|166(16)|183(13)|202(8)|227(6)|250(5)|269(15)|290(8)|303(16)|322(4)|341(4)|358(4)|377(2)|394(5)|413(10)|432(7)|447(10)|470(3)|487(5)|508(2)|531(3)|546(9)|565(13)|584(6)|601(6)|622(12)|639(12)|662(3)|689(5)|710(2)|731(14)|756(8)|777(2)|794(4)|815(3)|832(6)|851(10)|878(6)|901(7)|926(7)|945(5)|964(13)|989(8)|1010(2)|1027(9)|1050(4)|1071(5) 0 https://youtu.be/WsMLJ9ciPI0 YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction 0 116 Using Reiki to help AIDS patients LB: Okay. So we started talking before, so once again this is the second part, this is part two, of Nan Kozul’s interview of talking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the nineteen eighties and nineties. So part one is already available and I think in part one we were talking a lot about -- well, we were talking about in general a lot of things, about some of the things you were doing and where you were working and people that you knew. And since we talked, because of those surprise technical difficulties, have you thought anymore about that? Like, I thought I should have said these things, or did it make you think about those things more? I think it was -- what do you think?
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 ; NK: Well, I realized that AIDS wasn’t a quick killer. Like I saw my friends who wound up with AIDS, they kind of -- it went slowly. I just remember some of my friends just kind of like losing weight, and just getting sickly, but it wasn’t fast. 0 584 Pranks by the Stonewall and Candida's / Stealing the "Candida's" record and tying up Nan LB: I was talking to Larry Kleppinger and at the end of the interview he started to tell me about all the wacky things that two bars did to each other.
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 ; NK: Oh, my God.
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 ; LB: Do you remember any of those? [laughter] I was talking to Trish about this and he was talking about all these crazy things. And then what ultimately happened was Candida’s said okay, now we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to make this pay, in effect. So talk about that a little bit, what do you think?
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 ; NK: (laughs) That was just --
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 ; LB: The memories of -- 0 759 Creation of FACT / The Summer Olympics and Bar Games NK: And all for a good cause, just to eventually come down to that point where everyone got together and created FACT. And then to have the games at Rainbow Mountain. Everyone took it so seriously for a number of reasons: for competition and to win, but also to know that the end result was we were getting money and creating something to help people. So it was really cool.
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 ; LB: Did you work at the games or did you have a table? What was that like?
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 ; NK: The games were -- (laughs) they came up with different things like drag racing, “drag” racing where they had to put on a hat -- it was hysterical. So there was a start and end. 0 1015 Men hooking up at the bar LB: I think you have to explain what you mean by that.
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 ; NK: Oh, well (laughs). It was new to me. Hell, I never saw women do that (laughs) but guys would just hook up. I remember being behind the bar and seeing a guy nod and (laughs) and they would talk and they would leave and they would go out and whatever they did. And then they would come back in. And sometimes -- I know of one guy that came into the bar, he would do it a lot. 0 1200 Women being HIV positive / Taking care of people who were ill LB: I wanted to talk about what that kind of stuff that was happening and there were people that were in. So I’m trying to -- suddenly aware that there was an issue. And I think I asked you before about people that were -- everybody stepped up. I think people really stepped up. LGBT people suddenly thought, okay, this is about us. We have to take care of each other. And people started to really take care of each other, especially when families were ostracizing their children, their sons who were HIV positive. Not very many in those days got HIV in our community I don’t think. I don’t know. Did you know any women who were HIV positive that you were aware of?
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 ; NK: No, even though I have to tell you, I work in a doctor’s office and I marvel at the amount of women that are HIV now. Just having me go into their -- read their history with the patients. I marvel at how many women are positive today. Because you didn’t see that in the eighties. 0 1367 FACT raising money for direct aid LB: And that was one of the reasons that FACT started up was to help people finance (inaudible). Because that wasn’t -- in fact, I don’t know that people really understand that FACT wasn’t around to raise money for research or something. It was direct aid.
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 ; NK: Direct aid. Absolutely, Liz. It was directly to help them. I remember when FACT first started out I just vaguely remember people getting groceries for people that were positive, taking them to doctor’s appointments, stuff like that. 0 1453 Stigmas and lack of knowledge about AIDS LB: And there was a time -- were you aware of a time where people really thought if you just went into a gay bar, you just walked around people, or you might have been in the restroom. People thought you could get it from toilet seats, do you remember that?
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 ; NK: Yeah, some of it was such nonsense with how you could catch AIDS. It was idiotic. It was a blood-borne thing. And I was -- it was transmission through blood. So I remember Johnny, this one guy that lived in Philly, we all kissed him. 0 1717 Friends who are HIV positive and how they grow older / Watching people get frail and come to the bar less LB: There must be twenty people dying at the beginning of the epidemic in six months and then improving forty years (inaudible).
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 ; NK: I’m just curious, my friends that are HIV today, how they’ll fare moving forward. Some of them are in their sixties, early-mid sixties, late sixties, and they’re still plugging along (laughs) so it’s really awesome to know that that medication was able to keep the numbers down that they’re not symptomatic. 0 1873 Jeff's bar / Diamondz opening in 1992 LB: What were the other bars? There was Jeff’s. Tell me about Jeff’s. I went to Jeff’s maybe all of one time and then it was kind of not there. I think I came to the Lehigh Valley in nineteen eighty-seven so I think I went one time. And then I met Trish and we weren’t really hitting bars but it was right then when we met. But what was that bar? I don’t think it was there much longer after nineteen eighty-seven or eight. Is that true?
 ; 
 ; NK: No. That’s funny because I actually (laughs) googled it because I was curious, like, wow, when did Jeff close his bar? Because I couldn’t remember when he closed it. I know it was up for eighty-eight, eighty-nine, and then it closed. And then Diamondz opened up in ninety-two I think. 0 2080 Candida's bar being like a family NK: (laughs) It’s crazy. Dina’s bar was so -- Candida’s was a small bar but I just remember how much of a family -- like we were talking. It was such a family. We did such things in that bar that were just so crazy. Like just fun things that it would be wall to wall people. Like you could not move. And it was just amazing. And we accepted everybody. And that’s what was so great about Candida’s. And even during that time when HIV was prominent there was never anyone that was shunned. And that’s the beauty of what gay people are about because we are so loving and so accepting, do you know what I mean? 0 2154 Uninformed assumptions on how HIV/AIDS was transmitted / President Clinton working to remove the stigma of having HIV LB: Did you ever have a circumstance -- and this happened to me -- a circumstance where you were talking to somebody about HIV who was not in the know and they said negative things about it and you said, “that’s not true.” That kind of thing. Did that ever happen to you, where people --?
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 ; NK: Not in the bar.
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 ; LB: I mean anytime in your experience.
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 ; NK: Oh, in anytime? Oh, yeah. (laughs) People were just -- I mean, before they came out with the -- about it being transferred through anal sex, they were -- I would hear people say, “no, you can get it from spit, you can get it from kissing, you can get it from touching.” 0 2411 New York Times article on Reiki being administered to AIDS patients NK: Well, I remembered after we were done talking, I said to Barb, wow, I forgot to tell Liz about the New York Times article about the reiki because in the eighties it was all about being spiritual (laughs) and just tapping into your quiet place and reiki was a great modality. People didn’t understand it but I thought it was really progressive for The New York Times to have such a big article and how impacted a lot of the gay men and giving them a moment of peace or calm by just administering reiki to them. 0 2465 Bartending and reflections on the 1980s NK: But I feel so blessed to be able to be a part -- remember, I said to Dina I would never want to redo the eighties because there were some sad times but there were so many good times. And I think it was because we were all interconnected. We all felt safe. What’s really funny is because I bartended in the gay bars for so many years, I mean I bartended at the Stonewall, I bartended at Candida’s and Jeff’s Cityline Pub, 13th Street Pub in Easton, I mean I tended Rainbow Mountain, I went down to New Hope and I bartended there sometimes. And so being in that community, it allowed me to just be myself and just have fun. And I remember (laughs) finally actually moving. I wound up managing a straight bar that was the sister to the Chicken Lounge. It was Marble’s down in Phillipsburg. 0 2698 Differences in bars for men and women / Lesbians supporting gay men in the community during the AIDS epidemic LB: Do you think that that’s because -- I think there was a big difference between the seventies and the eighties in terms of the division between men’s bars -- men’s and women’s bars -- because I went to a woman’s bar. And I talk about this all the time and now I can’t think of the name. It’s in Baltimore and it was --
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 ; NK: In New York?
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 ; LB: Club Mitchell. It was in Baltimore. And this was a bar that would not allow men in unless they knew the men. 0 2881 Valley Gay Press and Steve Black / Political activism / Gay and Lesbian Task Force / Le-Hi-Ho and the AIDS Services Center LB: One of the things that people need to understand, I think, is that in the nineteen-eighties, while we did have just the beginnings of some other groups that weren’t bar-oriented, like we had GLOSS, that sports group, and Force was kind of starting up, and MCC had been going for awhile. And then we had the League -- Gay and Lesbian Task -- or Lehigh Valley Gay and Lesbian Task Force. And then just after that we started PA-GALA. And there had been Le-Hi-Ho, which had been both men and women. But really in the eighties, the only thing that was really going in the eighties was the bars. And if the bars hadn’t existed, nothing else would have come out of that because that’s where people started out where they started to make --
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 ; NK: Wow. That’s so true. When did your Valley Press come out, when did that come out?
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 ; LB: Valley Gay Press, we started the Valley Gay Press in nineteen-- so Trish and I met Steve Black in nineteen ninety-four and we began to work on political stuff with him that year. I think we started the Valley Gay Press in nineteen ninety-eight. 0 MovingImage Nan Kozul talks about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. She focuses on working in several local LGBT bars, including Candida's ; her work in healthcare ; AIDS discrimination ; the formation of Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT) ; and friends who became sick. This interview took place over two days because of technical difficulties. NAN KOZUL - PART 2 LIZ BRADBURY: So I have to say, with this Bradbury-Sullivan LGBTQ Community Center and the Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College will collaborate on this "40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBT Health Experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19." My name is Liz Bradbury and I'm here with Nan Kozul to talk to her about her experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive. [Pause it?] here, hold on a minute. Okay. And thank you so much for your willingness to speak to us again. This is part two of Nan Kozul's interview, there were some technical difficulties the first time. So you can see part one that I've already uploaded. So to start, Nan, can you please give us your full name and spell it for me? NAN KOZUL: Nan Kozul. It's N-a-n K-o-z-u-l. LB: And will you please share your birthdate? NK: Five fifteen fifty-eight. LB: Okay. Do you consent to this interview today? NK: Yes. LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? NK: Yes. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, and other formats? NK: Yes. LB: Do you understand that you have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview and identify any parts you would like to delete and/or withdraw from the project? NK: Yes. LB: Okay. So we started talking before, so once again this is the second part, this is part two, of Nan Kozul's interview of talking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the nineteen eighties and nineties. So part one is already available and I think in part one we were talking a lot about -- well, we were talking about in general a lot of things, about some of the things you were doing and where you were working and people that you knew. And since we talked, because of those surprise technical difficulties, have you thought anymore about that? Like, I thought I should have said these things, or did it make you think about those things more? I think it was -- what do you think? NK: Well, I realized that AIDS wasn't a quick killer. Like I saw my friends who wound up with AIDS, they kind of -- it went slowly. I just remember some of my friends just kind of like losing weight, and just getting sickly, but it wasn't fast. It was just long. And what was interesting, actually one thing that I did think about was I remember reading an article in the eighties, in The New York Times about reiki. And how a lot of reiki practitioners were working on AIDS patients in New York City and finding that it really helped. Which actually catapulted me into wanting to become a reiki master and pursue reiki. And I did work on a few people, which was really cool, and it did work. It just calmed them. It wasn't a -- no one was miraculously healed, it was just more of a comforting, calming, that some of my friends felt. LB: What kind of -- you were talking a lot about all the different things that happened with the bars and I think a universal theme of talking about HIV/AIDS with regard to the Lehigh Valley in the eighties is really the involvement with the bars. But you were talking about some people that you really knew that were sick and people who were working through these things too. And did you want to talk any more about some of those folks that you knew, or things that you remembered about them, or what it was like then that people in the future could know? NK: Well, the friends that I have know that are still positive, that are still here living, they just live life at the fullest. Danny, I think you know Danny, he just was a wild and crazy guy in the eighties (laughs) and he still is today. But him and his partner have been together, oof, probably thirty-some years. And both are HIV but their constitution and their will to live, it's awesome. And my friend Pete, he's just amazing. I'm so glad we got to a point where we were able to find a cure somewhat, to be able to keep this HIV from killing so many people. It is, it's such a relief because I think I would have lost a lot more friends had that not happened. I think that's it as far as from what I remember of my friends that are still here today. LB: What do you think -- for a lot of people at that time, and there were loads of deaths and it was really terrible in those days, and then some people didn't die and then some people -- what do you think was the difference there? What was it? What do you think? NK: That's a really good question, Liz. I used to wonder why some people deteriorated at a much quicker time than others. It's interesting. About -- let's see, maybe ten years ago I was at Candida's and a friend of mine that -- he started to lose weight. He was always healthy and I never knew that he was positive. And he actually came up to the bar and he had a bag and he had a port. And one of the -- the IV line had popped out and I saw it and he put it back in and he said, "oh, man" and he took me to the corner of the bar. We were sitting at a table and he was like, "you know, Nan, I actually have AIDS." And I'm like, "wow, I never knew that about you." Because he looked so healthy. And he said, "well, right now I have pneumonia and a nasty infection, but I have this bag and this port and it's really helping me a lot." And I'm like, "well, that's good. And hopefully it'll knock it out." But one of the things that unfortunately as AIDS -- you know, as people that carry HIV, as it progresses, I think eventually it just wears on your organs and he wound up passing away maybe six or seven months later. But I was shocked. I had no clue. He kept that very private and he hadn't -- I mean, I'm sure other people knew but he had never said anything to me. So when he talked to me about it I was shocked because he always looked healthy, he was always fun and we always had a lot of fun together. Picnics and stuff like that. But I think that -- I can't imagine that for anyone that was diagnosed in the eighties that has to take that medication for prolonged use, inevitably I'm sure that it takes a toll on your liver and your kidneys and overall. LB: Some people might not know what a port is. (inaudible) NK: A port is typically a catheter that's put in a larger vein for quicker access for medications. So that's what a port is. It's a different type of catheter that IV medicine can be administered. LB: I was talking to Larry Kleppinger and at the end of the interview he started to tell me about all the wacky things that two bars did to each other. NK: Oh, my God. LB: Do you remember any of those? [laughter] I was talking to Trish about this and he was talking about all these crazy things. And then what ultimately happened was Candida's said okay, now we've got to do something. We've got to make this pay, in effect. So talk about that a little bit, what do you think? NK: (laughs) That was just -- LB: The memories of -- NK: I want to tell you, Liz, it was so (laughs) -- just the things we did to each other were -- I can actually hear Larry laughing right now because he has such a boisterous laugh. And the things that him and the other bartenders would do to Dina's staff, like us, it was so dastardly. (laughs) It was so funny. The one Sunday afternoon I bartended, and I always bartended on Sunday afternoon. And I opened the bar up. And at two o'clock no customers would be in there. So I opened the bar up and Dina used to have "Candida's" by Tony Orlando and Dawn in the jukebox. It was a little forty-five RPM that he had in the jukebox. And we had a key into the jukebox. Well, he and a couple other guys came in. And I'm like, "hey," and they just had this look on their face, and I'm like, "what are you guys doing?" And with that they took a chair, and they put it in the middle of the dance floor. And I'm like, "what are you guys doing?" And they're like, "come here, Nan." (laughs) And I'm like, "do I have a choice?" And they're like, "no." And I sat on the chair and they tied me to the chair. (laughs) And they went to the jukebox and stole "Candida," the record, and they left me there, tied up. And I'm sitting there. Dina can't here me, so (laughs) I'm sitting there, I'm like, "oh, my gosh, a customer's going to walk in and think that we were robbed." And who walked in but Linda Mason. So Linda walks in and she goes, "what are you doing?" (laughs) And I'm like, "untie me" (laughs). And it was just the funniest thing. And then one night we went commando and Dean decided we were going to Silly String the Stonewall. We went one night and oh, my gosh. We busted in the front doors with Silly String and just annihilated everyone that was sitting around the bar. It was -- I want to tell you, Liz, those were some of the greatest times of just having just so much fun. And all for a good cause, just to eventually come down to that point where everyone got together and created FACT. And then to have the games at Rainbow Mountain. Everyone took it so seriously for a number of reasons: for competition and to win, but also to know that the end result was we were getting money and creating something to help people. So it was really cool. LB: Did you work at the games or did you have a table? What was that like? NK: The games were -- (laughs) they came up with different things like drag racing, "drag" racing where they had to put on a hat -- it was hysterical. So there was a start and end. And there were all different kind of things, whether it was in the pool or whether it was out in the grass, but I know the one year that I was going to compete on Dina's team and I actually dislocated my ankle and broke my foot. So I was in a cast so I couldn't do anything. But it was so funny because Larry Kleppinger sent me a picture of me on my crutches at the games. He had a picture of me. And I'm like, "oh, my gosh." (laughs) It was so bizarre. But it was neat. And then there was always a trophy at the end. And it was just fun. It was so meaningful at the time because we were setting a precedent for the future. I think that young people today get it. Back in the eighties there was a lot of promiscuity, like crazy stuff. And the HIV epidemic really curbed it. I just remember seeing a lot less traffic and stuff like that coming in and out of the bar. LB: How long do you think it took for people to understand that there was a tie between promiscuity and getting the disease and then passing it around? This is a relatively small community so one would think that if people didn't understand how to get it, if somebody had been in New York, they got infected, they came back, that it could really go through the community? Was there that kind of feeling about that? NK: Another awesome question, Liz. Just from what I saw, I thought it took quite a few years until it really made its presence known that guys were becoming positive. In the beginning I remember thinking in my head it was going to stop. (laughs) And it didn't. It went on for awhile. It took years until it really rooted itself and guys realized, wow, we have to stop. That's -- LB: Was there a time when somebody stood up and said, "look, this is how we're getting it, we have to stop doing this"? NK: I didn't see that. I just saw where people just -- they would just come in and drink and that traffic, going in and out of the bar, that just really slowed down. And people came in and stayed and drank and then left. LB: I think you have to explain what you mean by that. NK: Oh, well (laughs). It was new to me. Hell, I never saw women do that (laughs) but guys would just hook up. I remember being behind the bar and seeing a guy nod and (laughs) and they would talk and they would leave and they would go out and whatever they did. And then they would come back in. And sometimes -- I know of one guy that came into the bar, he would do it a lot. I mean, I used to -- I know there were times I wanted to say, "would you stop already? Do you get what you're doing?" But it's not my business. And it's his life, if he chooses to live his life like that he did. Sweet guy but [whistles] he just was very frisky, you know. (laughs) Just to describe that, I don't know. (laughs) LB: At times when people would say, "I can't believe this guy never got it" because he was so promiscuous, and then other people -- like Dave Moyer was saying, people who had one partner and would become positive. And I had people say to me, "I can't believe I didn't get this." I can't either. NK: I know. Sometimes I just -- yeah. I don't understand it either. I just remember quite a few times in the eighties going to house parties and guys would be throwing the house parties. And it was men and women there but I walked into a room one time and there on TV was porn. Like male porn. And I'm like, "wow." (laughs) I was just so new to this whole type of lifestyle. But that's how it was back then. I was just watching a really interesting documentary on Netflix about gay porn and how prominent it was in the eighties. And it really was. It was crazy. Watching that brought back memories of going to some house parties and them having that on TV and I'm thinking, "by gosh, why would you have that playing in an afternoon?" (laughs) But that's just how the lifestyle was back then. LB: Yeah, I don't think you would have found that at a lesbian house party. I think that's true. NK: (laughs) Exactly. (laughs) LB: I wanted to talk about what that kind of stuff that was happening and there were people that were in. So I'm trying to -- suddenly aware that there was an issue. And I think I asked you before about people that were -- everybody stepped up. I think people really stepped up. LGBT people suddenly thought, okay, this is about us. We have to take care of each other. And people started to really take care of each other, especially when families were ostracizing their children, their sons who were HIV positive. Not very many in those days got HIV in our community I don't think. I don't know. Did you know any women who were HIV positive that you were aware of? NK: No, even though I have to tell you, I work in a doctor's office and I marvel at the amount of women that are HIV now. Just having me go into their -- read their history with the patients. I marvel at how many women are positive today. Because you didn't see that in the eighties. LB: But I guess what I was getting at -- and that's an interesting thing -- but what I was getting at was, did you know people that were taking care of other people, had a reputation that that person has taken this person into their house. Folks like that that you were friends --? NK: Yeah, I'm trying to think if I knew of anyone that did that. I had taken in Don Horton but he had lymphoma. But I'm trying to think of anyone that was positive. You know, I remember the Stonewall was so -- the older guys, like Dave Moyer, all those guys that frequented, they were really big caretakers. They were involved in that aspect of caretaking. And I know Markie Cummings. Markie helped a lot with -- she worked at the state but she really worked with Larry in helping people get support and funding just to help to live. LB: And that was one of the reasons that FACT started up was to help people finance (inaudible). Because that wasn't -- in fact, I don't know that people really understand that FACT wasn't around to raise money for research or something. It was direct aid. NK: Direct aid. Absolutely, Liz. It was directly to help them. I remember when FACT first started out I just vaguely remember people getting groceries for people that were positive, taking them to doctor's appointments, stuff like that. The simplest acts that was taken care of which was awesome because it's what was needed. When there was -- I think it was such a hush-hush thing when someone was positive because people were so afraid. Just like COVID-19. People are so afraid of being around with someone that's positive. Like me going to the dentist and getting my teeth cleaned and them donning gowns and masks. They didn't know and there was such a fear that people that wound up being positive were really shunned if they came forward. And that was just heartbreaking. LB: And there was a time -- were you aware of a time where people really thought if you just went into a gay bar, you just walked around people, or you might have been in the restroom. People thought you could get it from toilet seats, do you remember that? NK: Yeah, some of it was such nonsense with how you could catch AIDS. It was idiotic. It was a blood-borne thing. And I was -- it was transmission through blood. So I remember Johnny, this one guy that lived in Philly, we all kissed him. And it wasn't like, oh boy, now we're going to get AIDS. It was a shame and I think that was a huge stigma in the Valley. People didn't walk into a gay bar because I'm sure that hung in their minds, like ooh, you'd better watch it because you can get AIDS. And like you said, like a toilet seat. Like wow. It was the fear. It just went -- it was out of control. It had to be tough for people that were positive. LB: There was a time that people really didn't know where it came from but too much information -- one of the whole things about HIV/AIDS and the government and everything is that no one spoke about it publicly in the government for about, well, some of the guys were saying -- I think it was Larry who was saying he was really angry at the government for not saying anything about it until about nineteen eighty-eight, nineteen eighty-seven. Here it had been eight -- seven, eight years, and one thing about we didn't have social media, so we didn't have any way to share information, even though people will say disparaging things about the way things are today, we do really get information today. It's not like COVID-19 that nobody really knows where it came from, which is what happened in the flu epidemic of nineteen-eighteen. People didn't really know what to do about it. And I think at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, at the very beginning, people like Trish knew. Health care professionals really had no idea where it was coming from or how people got it. And they wouldn't talk about it, too. Were you seeing that kind of thing? There must have been a changed time where people were saying, "okay, look, this is how you get it. You get it from having anal sex. That's why you have to wear condoms." It must have been uncommon. NK: Yeah, I think that happened in the later eighties, where that actually came into fruition when they were just stating that. Rachel Maddow interviewed the scientist who came up with the cure for HIV and he was really, really cool to listen to because he was so tenacious. He worked around the clock trying to figure out a cure because he knew that it would wipe out millions if let go. And we're so blessed that we had that scientist just be so driven to find that cure. LB: I don't know if it's a cure. NK: Well, it's not a cure, but it -- LB: It keeps people from dying, let's put it that way. NK: Right. It keeps the count down. Yeah. LB: There must be twenty people dying at the beginning of the epidemic in six months and then improving forty years (inaudible). NK: I'm just curious, my friends that are HIV today, how they'll fare moving forward. Some of them are in their sixties, early-mid sixties, late sixties, and they're still plugging along (laughs) so it's really awesome to know that that medication was able to keep the numbers down that they're not symptomatic. LB: When people were dying -- I think I was asking you this before -- were those people that you knew? Like one person I was interviewing was talking about how having to go to all those funerals, it just got to be too much. It was so hard to keep doing that. Do you have a memory of that? NK: You know, I don't. I just remember people getting -- some of the guys getting sicker, becoming more frail, and then I didn't see them anymore. And that's how they -- because I was very active in the bar scene, working pretty much fulltime at the bar. So I would see guys coming in that were positive and as they became more ill they came in less and less and less and then they were replaced by new people. The traffic was always busy because in the eighties you didn't have straight bars that accepted gay people. Not like today where you can go into pretty much any straight bar and have fun. But back in the eighties you stuck to your bar (laughs). You stuck to the gay bars where you could feel safe. But I don't remember that. I definitely remember people coming into the bar and saying this person died, or that person died, and I'm like, wow. LB: What were the other bars? There was Jeff's. Tell me about Jeff's. I went to Jeff's maybe all of one time and then it was kind of not there. I think I came to the Lehigh Valley in nineteen eighty-seven so I think I went one time. And then I met Trish and we weren't really hitting bars but it was right then when we met. But what was that bar? I don't think it was there much longer after nineteen eighty-seven or eight. Is that true? NK: No. That's funny because I actually (laughs) googled it because I was curious, like, wow, when did Jeff close his bar? Because I couldn't remember when he closed it. I know it was up for eighty-eight, eighty-nine, and then it closed. And then Diamonds opened up in ninety-two I think. So the only bars -- and Jeff's [Cityline?] Pub was frequented by guys and girls. It was a mixed bar. But Candida's and Stonewall were primarily gay men with a splattering of women here and there. LB: I think the first or second time I went to Candida's Suzanne Westenhoefer was doing a show. Do you remember that? You were probably there I'm sure. Everyone was there. Every woman in the -- that was -- I don't think I was even involved in the community yet then, I didn't really start being involved until nineteen ninety-four. It was before ninety-four I'm pretty sure. (inaudible) NK: What's that? LB: That was one of the best nights I've ever had when I was involved in that kind of stuff. (inaudible) NK: What? LB: Was she there more than once? NK: I don't know. I know that she was at Dina's bar and I know that she was at Diamonds. And Lea DeLaria. But I can't remember if she was. Now, I left Candida's in eighty-eight and I came back in nineteen-ninety. Yeah, because I think that's when I worked at Jeff's Cityline Pub. But Suzanne Westenhoefer, she's still around. I've watched some of -- LB: [We're Facebook friends?]. NK: Pardon? LB: She's my Facebook friend. NK: Is she? (laughs) LB: Yeah. NK (laughs) That's awesome. LB: She was famous then. She was famous. For some reason she was doing a gig where there were three other lesbian comedians and there were so many people in the bar. So many lesbians. There must have been two-hundred women in the bar. I think we were just standing up for an hour and a half or something. That was something. NK: (laughs) It's crazy. Dina's bar was so -- Candida's was a small bar but I just remember how much of a family -- like we were talking. It was such a family. We did such things in that bar that were just so crazy. Like just fun things that it would be wall to wall people. Like you could not move. And it was just amazing. And we accepted everybody. And that's what was so great about Candida's. And even during that time when HIV was prominent there was never anyone that was shunned. And that's the beauty of what gay people are about because we are so loving and so accepting, do you know what I mean? LB: Yeah, I do. NK: And it created a nurturing place that people knew that they could come and they would be loved. LB: Did you ever have a circumstance -- and this happened to me -- a circumstance where you were talking to somebody about HIV who was not in the know and they said negative things about it and you said, "that's not true." That kind of thing. Did that ever happen to you, where people --? NK: Not in the bar. LB: I mean anytime in your experience. NK: Oh, in anytime? Oh, yeah. (laughs) People were just -- I mean, before they came out with the -- about it being transferred through anal sex, they were -- I would hear people say, "no, you can get it from spit, you can get it from kissing, you can get it from touching." And I'm like, "no, you can't. If that was the case, we'd all be HIV." You know what I mean? Sometimes it's just common sense. But again, fear just ruled a lot of people. Especially straight people. LB: Do you remember -- I think right when Clinton was first elected, so that was into the nineties, but there was a letter sent that went out to every person in the United States that explained where you got HIV and why. And it was to remove stigma, to make people understand that you couldn't just get it. You couldn't fire somebody for being HIV positive. That was included in the Civil Rights Act. And I remember my father was a very smart man, very, very smart man. Absolutely did not know anything about -- and when he gets the letter, I said, "well, did you read the letter?" And he said, "well, yeah, how would I even know this?" And I'm like, "how would you know this? I've known it for five years already." And it wasn't just because I was -- NK: Wow. LB: -- and he was -- I mean, this was a guy who did The New York Times crossword puzzle every day and he still had no idea. He thought you could get it at the salad bar or something like that. And I think that we as people who are part of the LGBT community don't always understand how out of the know so many people were. That people should have known better and you just -- how could you not know this? And one time, it's hard to not be. Did you think there was a circumstance where people were judgmental when people got it and they'd say -- did you ever find people in the community being judgmental of each other if people --? NK: Actually, I didn't, and that, to me, I thought that was really beautiful that no one judged anybody. At least I didn't find that. Bartending at Candida's I didn't. Or even the Stonewall. It was just a happy place to go to. And you had those interjections of sadness when someone was positive or someone passed away. But for the most part, the gay bars in Lehigh Valley were just an escape for people to just meet where they knew that it was like-minded and they would be liked and cared for and talked to, where you didn't feel lonely in your life if you were. You could go to the gay bar and feel safe. LB: We're coming down to a little bit of time left because we did the first part, so since this is part two and you said some great, really interesting things in part one. Was there anything else that you thought of or you said to Barb, "hey, I forgot to talk about this, this is something that I've thought of since we talked." NK: Well, I remembered after we were done talking, I said to Barb, wow, I forgot to tell Liz about the New York Times article about the reiki because in the eighties it was all about being spiritual (laughs) and just tapping into your quiet place and reiki was a great modality. People didn't understand it but I thought it was really progressive for The New York Times to have such a big article and how impacted a lot of the gay men and giving them a moment of peace or calm by just administering reiki to them. That was really awesome. But that's I thought of after we broke the last time. But I feel so blessed to be able to be a part -- remember, I said to Dina I would never want to redo the eighties because there were some sad times but there were so many good times. And I think it was because we were all interconnected. We all felt safe. What's really funny is because I bartended in the gay bars for so many years, I mean I bartended at the Stonewall, I bartended at Candida's and Jeff's Cityline Pub, 13th Street Pub in Easton, I mean I tended Rainbow Mountain, I went down to New Hope and I bartended there sometimes. And so being in that community, it allowed me to just be myself and just have fun. And I remember (laughs) finally actually moving. I wound up managing a straight bar that was the sister to the Chicken Lounge. It was Marble's down in Phillipsburg. And it was the first time that I was out of my gay element. And I didn't realize that when you're in that, working in a gay bar and feeling so safe around men, you're going to feel safe that men aren't going to hit on you if you call them "hon" or "dear." And that was a huge shift for me because all of a sudden I found guys treating me differently. And I'm like, what is this. And I forgot. When you're around gay men you feel safe (laughs) because there's no pretense there. It's interesting. LB: I remember one time Trish and I were leaving Candida's and something happened. We had a friend, Judy Art, who lives right around the corner. She still lives there, right around the corner from Candida's. Trish had to go in and talk to her and then there was some kids that were giving us a hard time. And guys came out of the bar and they were there for us in about two seconds. And it is true. But there is one other thing that we have to remember about the eighties besides all of that stuff that made it so much fun. And it was because we were young. (laughs) NK: Yeah, that's true. (laughs) LB: We weren't in our sixties then. We were -- NK: Nope, no we weren't. (laughs) LB: The bars that are like that -- there's no bars that are like that anymore. NK: Not anymore. You know, Liz, this is a true story. I was bartending one Sunday afternoon, and it was probably eighty-seven, eighty-eight. I was bartending and these three guys came in. Older, like middle-aged guys. And they sat at the bar so I was talking to them, and they were like, "why are you friendly to us?" And I'm like, "what do you mean?" And they were like, "well, why are you nice to us?" And I'm like, "well, why wouldn't I be nice to you? Where are you from?" And they said, "well, we're from Connecticut, and in Connecticut, there's women's bars and men's bars, and women don't talk to us gay men." And I'm like, "well, that's not how it is in the Lehigh Valley." (laughs) "Why would you discriminate, we're already discriminated against through sex, like men and women. Why would there be a division?" I said, "no, that's not how we are in the Lehigh Valley. We all work together." And they were like, "wow." They were blown away by that. LB: Do you think that that's because -- I think there was a big difference between the seventies and the eighties in terms of the division between men's bars -- men's and women's bars -- because I went to a woman's bar. And I talk about this all the time and now I can't think of the name. It's in Baltimore and it was -- NK: In New York? LB: Club Mitchell. It was in Baltimore. And this was a bar that would not allow men in unless they knew the men. And there was a reason for that because in the seventies there was guys, straight guys would come in and really cause problems for the women. I mean, really scary problems for the women. NK: Wow. LB: So if they knew gay men they would let them come in. But because of the AIDS epidemic and because of those circumstances, women who are lesbians really rose to help and support the gay men community. NK: I agree. I agree totally, Liz. I'm with you on that. And it helped, too, that when Dina opened her bar she was so interconnected with so many of the older gay men, like the old guys (laughs) that it created such a great foundation. It was just natural. And when HIV rose and came to prominence we all just banded together and took care of each other. LB: Because a lot of people who were involved with this FACT events, may not have been the board of FACT, but the FACT events, were women too. They were doing (inaudible), don't you think? Dina was so involved in that. NK: Sure she was. And then you have Gail Hoover, she was a realtor forever. So there was all those ties into everybody all just getting together to do the best they could to raise as much money as they could. LB: Well, great. So anything else that you want to toss in there? NK: You know, Liz, thanks for giving me this opportunity. I don't know how much I shared, (laughs) whether was -- (inaudible) but it was a lot of fun. And just even bringing up Larry Kleppinger's name just brings back such -- my heart is just filled with joy because that man is just a hoot and a half. He was just so much fun. And he's just such a great guy. But I appreciate it, Liz. LB: One of the things that people need to understand, I think, is that in the nineteen-eighties, while we did have just the beginnings of some other groups that weren't bar-oriented, like we had GLOSS, that sports group, and Force was kind of starting up, and MCC had been going for awhile. And then we had the League -- Gay and Lesbian Task -- or Lehigh Valley Gay and Lesbian Task Force. And then just after that we started PA-GALA. And there had been Le-Hi-Ho, which had been both men and women. But really in the eighties, the only thing that was really going in the eighties was the bars. And if the bars hadn't existed, nothing else would have come out of that because that's where people started out where they started to make -- NK: Wow. That's so true. When did your Valley Press come out, when did that come out? LB: Valley Gay Press, we started the Valley Gay Press in nineteen-- so Trish and I met Steve Black in nineteen ninety-four and we began to work on political stuff with him that year. I think we started the Valley Gay Press in nineteen ninety-eight. So it wasn't until ninety-eight. We were doing voter's guide information for about three years but he had been -- we sort of knew him, we knew him from the Pride Festival. We met him at the first Pride Festival. But at the same time there was that effort to start the Gay and Lesbian Task Force that was running in the Lehigh Valley for a little while. But what happened with that was that people tended to be -- there was no focus of it. And there was no -- I think that people just ended up to be -- because this is the point. FACT had an extraordinary focus. Everybody knew what had to be done and they did it. But for general stuff, even Le-Hi-Ho became AIDS Services Center because people had to deal with AIDS. They had to deal. But also that really codified our folks together. It made us all begin to work together. And the very first thing that Trish and I did that was part of the LGBT life here, because we've been here since eighty-seven together, was that we went to an event that was put on by FACT, that if you went that flamingo ice cream place that some of the money would go to -- and the Red Ribbon Restaurant thing. They were doing that and all of those things were happening at the very beginning of FACT. They were doing lots of different events and we got involved with that. But out of the bars also grew that thing of going to the March on Washington in nineteen ninety-three because the bars organized the buses. We went on our own and people came back and said now we have to have the Pride Festival. And I think everything changed because people could see that the organizational circumstances of FACT could happen. That people could do this and that there were a lot of people who were willing to be involved. And that really came out of the bars' response to AIDS. I think that's really -- NK: Yeah, you're right. They truly were the foundation of everything getting started. At least getting the community involved where everyone met. Wow, that's so true. I just remember when you would bring in your newsletters from the Gay -- how quickly they would go. People just waited for them to come in (laughs) and then they'd scarf 'em and they were gone. (laughs) Yeah. LB: Well, I'm going to thank you again, and I'm just going to turn this off since we're okay. NK: Okay. LB: I'm going to turn this off and I'm going to turn off the recording, but thank you again, Nan. This has just been -- NK: Thanks so much, Liz. (laughs) LB: I'm going to turn off the -- no, I have to turn off -- oh, it says stop 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=
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00:52:35
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Nan Kozul, June 21, 2020 (Part 2)
Description
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Nan Kozul talks about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. She focuses on working in several local LGBT bars, including Candida's; her work in healthcare; AIDS discrimination; the formation of Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT); and friends who became sick. This interview took place over two days because of technical difficulties.
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PH40_15
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AIDS (Disease)
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2020-06-21
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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8df612f28cfae09eece3c64f941a0436
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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
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Mary Foltz
Interviewee
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Patricia Sullivan
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-03.xml
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PA-GALA
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5.4 July 19, 2019 Patricia Sullivan, July 19, 2019 LGBT-03 01:21:27 LVLGBT Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository This oral history recording was sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg PA-GALA PA Diversity Network Patricia Sullivan Mary Foltz video/mov SullivanPatricia_20190719_video.mov 1.0:|21(5)|46(10)|59(15)|80(6)|95(8)|110(15)|131(3)|148(5)|167(8)|182(6)|203(8)|222(4)|241(2)|258(5)|279(7)|296(11)|315(2)|334(5)|351(14)|372(15)|391(3)|408(9)|427(17)|446(9)|465(16)|486(7)|505(8)|526(3)|545(20)|560(5)|579(14)|600(17)|619(18)|638(5)|657(6)|674(17)|693(18)|712(8)|731(10)|752(8)|771(6)|788(2)|807(3)|828(3)|845(9)|866(4)|885(3)|902(11)|923(15)|942(16)|961(7)|980(9)|997(15)|1014(7)|1033(4)|1054(5)|1075(7)|1092(2)|1109(7)|1134(10)|1163(4)|1186(14)|1205(2)|1222(5)|1245(11)|1264(14)|1287(2)|1310(2)|1329(10)|1350(11)|1371(2)|1386(18)|1409(15)|1428(14)|1449(13)|1472(13)|1493(7)|1512(11)|1533(11)|1556(2)|1575(17)|1586(8) 0 YouTube video < ; iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rkA0R7UFiCo?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"> ; < ; /iframe> ; 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, I’m here with Trish Sullivan in her home in Allentown. Today is July 19th, 2019. We’re here as a part of the LGBT Community Oral History Project and Trish has so graciously agreed to be the first person that we’re interviewing for the oral history project. The project is sponsored by the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and we did receive funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium for which we’re also very grateful. So to begin I’m just going to ask Trish could you introduce yourself?
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 ; PATRICIA SULLIVAN: I’m Patricia Sullivan.
 ; 0 73 Early Childhood / Family / Life in Florida MF: Fantastic. Well as I said, we’re just so grateful that you’re willing to sit here with us today and tell us a little bit about your life, and I thought we could start by just asking you to tell me a little bit about your childhood. Where are you from?
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 ; PS: Well I was born on a barrier island, the first barrier island off the coast of Florida, Amelia Island, Florida. And I lived there for a part of my childhood, and then I moved inland, but I was born on an island which was pretty great. Liz and I are fortunate enough to still have a place there which is nice. 0 840 Leaving Florida / Schooling MF: So you had said earlier I couldn’t wait to get out of this town, describe for me how did you do that, how did you get out of Florida, where did you go?
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 ; PS: Well, when I graduated from high school I went to a college in North Carolina, Montreat Anderson College, it’s a Presbyterian college. And it basically it’s a liberal arts college, but it trains people to be music educators and missionaries basically. And my parents wanted me to go there, I wanted to go to the University of Florida, they didn’t want me to go there, they was afraid I’d party too much, and they wanted me to go to a little school where it would be controlling, and it would be very moral and upright and all of that. 0 1122 Early Interactions with LGBT People MF: I want to go back to when you talk about being at the first, your first college experience and feeling that you were different. I have a question about how were people at that college or people in your family, or just communities in which you sort of moved through -- how were they talking about lesbian, gay, or bisexual, or transgender people at that time?
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 ; PS: Well, when I was a kid and we would go visit family friends there were gay people there. I remember going to visit a family friend that rented an apartment to a gay man who was obviously a drag queen. 0 1425 Career Path / Life in New York / Gay Scene MF: Why were you drawn to physical therapy as a career path?
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 ; PS: Well it was because I took a -- when I was in college I took one of those placement tests and it said I should have been a like a park ranger or something like that and or a camp person or something like that. And I thought eh, and my “little” sister at college from the class behind me had had polio and she said to me, “You should be a physical therapist.” 0 2094 Meeting Liz MF: How did you meet Liz?
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 ; PS: I met her through mutual friends, one of my former partners and her former partner were doing a workshop together on a special technique that used to treat children with cerebral palsy. And they were in this month long workshop and they got to know each other, and we all went out to dinner at a café and they introduced me to some other friends that knew Liz and then those friends decided we’d make a good couple and set us up to go into New York City to see a play and meet. 0 2471 Starting PA-GALA / Mission & ; Work PS: And our friend Steve Black, who was a part of the group, was just a political mastermind, just an incredible person said let’s start our own organization and we’ll call it PA-GALA and we’ll provide the voter information, and we’ll do it right, because this other organization was giving good information but they just weren’t doing it in the right way, according to us. So we did this, and Steve ran it with Liz, and we continued to do the mailings and interviewed candidates for office, everything from school board right through to senator. Adrian Shanker ; PA-GALA ; Steve Black 0 3018 Anti-LGBT Petition / Anti-Discrimination Ordinance PS: And there was a fanatic in town who worked at Muhlenberg College, and he actually -- his name was Frank McVeigh and he’s no longer with us, but when he was at the college he said such outrageous things in his classes, he was a, not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, he taught psychology. And he said such outrageous things in his classes and students complained about him so much that they took him out of the classroom, and they couldn’t fire him because he was tenured, so they just sat him in an office. 0 3621 Building Political Community / Voter's Guide MF: There’s also a piece here that I think I want to ask a question about which is you’re building political community through the organization, could you talk a little bit about that?
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 ; PS: Well, that was what was so great about PA-GALA and that’s why I say it’s so sad we don’t have it anymore, because we would send out those voter guides and we encouraged people to become super voters which means they voted in the general and the primary election every year, because those are the people that elected officials listened to, they know they vote. PA-GALA ; Voters Guides 0 3856 How PA-GALA Influenced Other LGBT Organizations in the Lehigh Valley MF: Before PA-GALA there were a few other organization like Le-Hi-Ho--
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 ; PS: Right.
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 ; MF: --but how do you think PA-GALA really changed what LGBT organizations were doing in the valley?
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 ; PS: Well Le-Hi-Ho, those were organizations were a lot further back in time. I think when we were doing PA-GALA it was a Gay Men’s Chorus and F.A.C.T. and Pride and there was ACCO which was a women’s group, but it had a large lesbian group that participated in it, but it was a women’s choral group, and there were a few other groups. But the thing we changed was getting people politically active and getting the laws changed, that was what our goal was to make fair laws. ACCO ; F.A.C.T. ; Gay Men's Chorus ; PA-GALA ; Pride 0 4000 Photo Project & ; Marriage Equality MF: Just to give some context to people that photo project that you started was prior to -- it was about sort of moving up to marriage equality.
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 ; PS: Right.
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 ; MF: I was actually in that -- you took our photo and that was an incredibly powerful experience to have those photos put in the state legislature, so you had to look at all of these couples that were denied the right to marry. Marriage Equality 0 4155 End of PA-GALA MF: I want to ask a little bit about the publication you put together, but I’m curious about how PA-GALA came to an end, because you describe sort of sadness that it isn’t here anymore.
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 ; PS: Well, it’s kind of sad -- it was that we had been doing this for a long time, we’d been doing it with Steve and Steve was very hard to work with, I mean he was a genius and I loved the work that Steve did, but I did not have a good relationship with him, I could not work well with him at all. Liz could work with him very well, but he just was difficult to work with and I finally reached the point I just couldn’t do things the way he wanted them done PA Diversity Network ; PA-GALA ; Steve Black 0 4353 Start of Valley Gay Press MF: So while you’re getting involved in PA-GALA you also are at some point starting one of, to my mind, one of the most important publications in the Lehigh Valley that focused on--
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 ; PS: Oh the Valley Gay Press?
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 ; MF: Yes, so could you talk a little bit about the origin of that and what your mission was?
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 ; PS: Well Liz wanted to do a newspaper, Liz always wanted to do a newspaper and with her art background she could create it on -- and we started it at the time of the anti-discrimination law work. Adrian Shanker ; F.A.C.T. ; Gay Men's Chorus ; PA Diversity Network ; PA-GALA ; Valley Gay Press 0 4705 PA Diversity Network
 ; MF: You’ve mentioned the PA Diversity -- is it network on the end? How did that come to be, your participation in PA Diversity?
 ; 
 ; PS: Well when we left the voters organization we created that, we had to write a 501C and create a new organization for us to run, because we didn’t want a political organization, the rules are different for them. We wanted an educational organization and so Robert Roush who was in the community and had been one of the people who developed the Gay Men’s Chorus wrote the 501C3 for us and we just created a new organization. Gay Men's Chorus ; PA Diversity Network ; Valley Gay Press 0 MovingImage Patricia Sullivan talks about her life growing up in Florida, her journey to creating crucial LGBT organizations, and it's impact on the LGBT community. MARY FOLTZ:My name is Mary Foltz, I'm here with Trish Sullivan in her home in Allentown. Today is July 19th, 2019. We're here as a part of the LGBT Community Oral History Project and Trish has so graciously agreed to be the first person that we're interviewing for the oral history project. The project is sponsored by the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and we did receive funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium for which we're also very grateful. So to begin I'm just going to ask Trish could you introduce yourself? PATRICIA SULLIVAN:I'm Patricia Sullivan. MF:Wonderful and I'm hoping that you, could you spell your name for us? PS:P-A-T-R-I-C-I-A J. Sullivan S-U-L-L-I-V-A-N. MF:What is your birthdate? PS:January 28, 1945. MF:And then I am just going to ask, before we started this interview you and I read a -- or talked about a consent form, and do you consent to this interview today? PS:Yes. MF:Fantastic. Well as I said, we're just so grateful that you're willing to sit here with us today and tell us a little bit about your life, and I thought we could start by just asking you to tell me a little bit about your childhood. Where are you from? PS:Well I was born on a barrier island, the first barrier island off the coast of Florida, Amelia Island, Florida. And I lived there for a part of my childhood, and then I moved inland, but I was born on an island which was pretty great. Liz and I are fortunate enough to still have a place there which is nice. MF:What was it like to grow up in Florida? PS:Well Florida it's a mixed thing, it's a lot of old people and a lot of conservative people particularly in the northern part where I was from, I was right on the Georgia Florida line and it was a very, very small town. And I have to say I grew up in the segregated South, I went to segregated schools all my life and I unfortunately witnessed lots of bad things, you know. And so when I was very young I decided that I had to get out of there and I decided very early that education was my way to do it. So I worked very hard to get a good education and be able to leave there and never go back except to visit. Because the politics is just very hard in Florida. MF:Well I'm curious about that, I mean it sounds to me like you're talking about how your childhood was shaped by sort of seeing institutionalized racism or racism in the South. PS:Well I have to -- maybe I should start by saying something about my parents, because my father was a World War I veteran, he served under King George. And he left the country as a seventeen-year-old to go join the Canadian Army before the United States got in the war, because he felt so strongly about what was happening to the country, and he lost his citizenship as a result of it. And he was gassed in the war, and he came back, and he obviously had very strong feelings about politics. He met my mother on the day she was born, he held her in his arms, and he told the family, "I'm going to marry this person." And he did and he was with her for seventy-five years and she was Canadian, and they left Maine in Canada, he'd actually been born in Maine. They left Canada and came back to the United States during the depression and drove to Florida and stopped in the first town they came to in Florida and made a home for themselves. And my family always had very diverse friends, I recall in my childhood we had a family that we were very close to that was from Persia which is currently Iran. We had several Jewish families that were friends and at least two of them had tattoos from concentration camps. And so my family was very, I wouldn't say they were progressive, but they were very oriented toward diversity. And when I was a kid they made a real point of trying to help me understand that the place we lived and the way we lived, we couldn't overlook the things that were happening there. Like you know if -- when I was young and it was segregated if a person of color came to your house they came to the back door, and they would take a hoe and tap on the steps they wouldn't even come up the steps to the door. And yet my parents had black friends who would come to the back door and come in the house and I'd play with the kids. And my mom would sit and sew and cook with the parent or the grandmother who was there for the day. But that wasn't something you did, so they were very brave about that, my father would go do business for black households, he was an electrical contractor and he would actually go into the community and do services for them. People wouldn't do that, they wouldn't let them use the bathroom, they wouldn't let them -- anything, you know. And so I was very fortunate to have a family that appreciated diversity and made me realize that I shouldn't fall into these habits of things that went on around me. At one point I lived across the street from the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and I learned very young not to just trust everything and everybody, because I sort of had my own personal "Scout" moment when I discovered that this person was the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. It was very scary. And yet I didn't have those problems, I didn't experience those problems, I experienced bullying and things because I was different, I was an outsider, but I saw that happening, I saw all the injustice of that. And it made me want to leave there because I couldn't, I felt I couldn't live that way, I couldn't live in a place where you know there were such strong divisions between people. And so I -- as soon as I graduated from high school I left, and I never went back. But my parents were very, very amazing that way. MF:What was your relationship like with your father, what was your relationship like with your mother? PS:Well, my father didn't say much, he was a very quiet person, he was a very gentle person. He spent a lot of time reading to me. My whole life he read to me, he read me stories, he wrote poetry, he read me poetry. That was the biggest contact I had with him. My mom I was with almost all the time since my dad had been gassed in the war and when I was very young he got sick and they thought he had TB because there was TB all over. And they put him in a sanitarium for a year and isolated him, took him from us, my mom didn't have a job, we had no income because we only lived on my dad's salary. And so my mom took in children to take care of children to make a living and she tied tobacco at the farm where they raised tobacco. She would go at tobacco harvesting time, that was a very skilled chore to do that, you had to be very good to do it. And I used to help her take care of the kids, and so I spent a lot of time taking care of little kids. I could like take twins and diaper both of them at the same time, and wash diapers and all those things you had to do back in that day. And then we discovered after he had been in the sanitarium for a year that he didn't have TB it was the effects of the gassing during the war. And so we lost that whole period of our life where we had to readjust to all these things because he couldn't be with us. And then he came back, he always had a job doing something, you know, he would go into places, people would pay him with chickens or pay him with vegetables, or money. He didn't care whatever, he would do work for anybody that would pay him for things. It sounds so rural doesn't it, but that's the way it was. And he was very educated he -- not formally educated, neither of my parents went to, got to go to school, he was, my dad was an Anne of Green Gables type kid. He was raised in a Catholic orphanage and they sold him to a family to run their store as a young boy. And so he got all his business experience running the store, and making change, and part of his education he memorized the dictionary from cover to cover, so he had an incredible vocabulary, and he was incredibly well-spoken, but had no formal education. And my mom was similar, she was self-educated, I was -- my one sister graduated from high school, but I was the first one in our family to go to college. But I had a good relationship with the both of them, they were great parents, you know, they worked very hard and made do with everything, I never felt as a child that we didn't have anything, but I guess we really didn't, but you know they always made me feel like you know really special and everything we had was just what we needed and we made do with it, it was great. So no trauma there. MF:What were your relationships like with siblings? PS:Well, my two older sisters one was twenty-four years older than I and the other was twenty-three years older or twenty-two years older than I. And between us there were four children that we lost, and the only reason I'm around is because they discovered clotting factor and vitamin K, and while my four siblings died because that medicine wasn't available, I didn't. And so there was, when I was born, my mother and my sister each had a child within three months of each other, so I was sort of raised with one of my nephews as like a sibling. But my sisters weren't at home when I was at home, so I was raised very much like an only child. MF:So you had said earlier I couldn't wait to get out of this town, describe for me how did you do that, how did you get out of Florida, where did you go? PS:Well, when I graduated from high school I went to a college in North Carolina, Montreat Anderson College, it's a Presbyterian college. And it basically it's a liberal arts college, but it trains people to be music educators and missionaries basically. And my parents wanted me to go there, I wanted to go to the University of Florida, they didn't want me to go there, they was afraid I'd party too much, and they wanted me to go to a little school where it would be controlling, and it would be very moral and upright and all of that. And it was a horrible experience. It was -- you had to go to church services and you, Billy Graham lived on campus, his wife's father was the president of the college and he and his wife lived on the mountain on the campus. And they would come to services at the college every week and bring all their kids, and you know Franklin Graham who is being such a ridiculous person now sort of shaming his father's history. Those kids would go to the nursery school and I didn't like to go to the church services so I'd volunteer in the nursery school, and so I always say well you know I knew he was a bad kid because he would always say, "You can't tell me what to do my daddy's Billy Graham." And we just were so used to seeing the Grahams on campus, but it was religious school. There were a lot of gay people there, but nobody was, nobody talked about it, no-one really knew they were gay. I mean I just, I'm assuming they were, I'm really clocking them because I don't know for sure, but seemed to me. But I wasn't really out then and although I knew I was different, and I knew I didn't fit in I just hadn't found a name for it yet. And the best thing I got out of that school was that when I wanted to transfer to the Medical College of Virginia, they let me transfer my old testament as history and my new testament as philosophy. And so I had all the credits to get into the program at the Medical College of Virginia, so it was wonderful and that was easy. It was a beautiful campus and I loved the area, I was president of hiking club and I played soccer and you know fun things like that, but it was every bit was a little bit too religious to me and most of the kids there came from missionary stations around the world where their parents were stationed and they sent them back there to go to school. So they were all geared up to go save the heathens of the world and I was one of them. And then I went to the Medical College of Virginia in physical therapy and that was a great program, one of the best programs at the time I went to it. And I think there were only about twenty-five physical therapy programs at that time, and when I graduated from there I went to -- on all my internships around and then I took a job in New York, just outside of New York City, up by WestPoint and I spent my whole working career at that hospital, it was a rehabilitation hospital run by the State of New York Health Department. That was a great job. MF:I want to go back to when you talk about being at the first, your first college experience and feeling that you were different. I have a question about how were people at that college or people in your family, or just communities in which you sort of moved through -- how were they talking about lesbian, gay, or bisexual, or transgender people at that time? PS:Well, when I was a kid and we would go visit family friends there were gay people there. I remember going to visit a family friend that rented an apartment to a gay man who was obviously a drag queen. And he would come in and out while we were there and everything, it was totally -- no-one paid any difference to him, it was just like he was just there, and no-one said anything about it. My sister, who was a lesbian, when she grew up her best friend, you know, was a lesbian, she was this real tall person who wore cowboy outfits all the time, they called her cowboy. And people talked about that, but they didn't use the words, but it was like nobody paid any attention. And then my mom told my dad she didn't want him to take me to work with him because she wanted me to be different, because he -- my sister worked with him and became a licensed electrician and then she went into the marine corps and she was one of the first women marines that was an electrician. And I think my mom was concerned he was going to teach me all these tasks that would turn me into a dyke or something, but they never said that. And I recall people saying I was queer, I remember hearing that a lot from people, but it was difficult to put that into context, you know. And the friends that I had were all sort of outsiders and we got along well, and I never heard anybody say anything about gay people at all. Let me think there was one instance, I was out having lunch with a friend when I was a teenager and we were at a little barbecue spot and we sat down at a table and there was a napkin on the table, and somebody had written something on it. And I remember her saying to me look at this, and I looked at it and I can't remember exactly what it said, and she says, "That's because they're lesbians, they wrote this on here." And it was I don't know if it was like, "less ben" or, you know, something weird some little code-y thing like that or something. But I remember that person brought it to my attention and I'd never heard anyone use those words before, and this was like one of my best friends. But you know I never heard any talk about it when I was in college I never heard any talk about it. But like I said a college that was segregated when I was a sophomore they finally allowed a black woman from the community to come to classes, but she couldn't stay on campus. And my roommates and I said well she could be on our suite we gladly have her in our suite and they wouldn't let her stay. They would only let her come for day classes. And it wasn't until I was in New York that I really started being out and knowing I was out and why I was out so to speak. I mean when people say to me when did you think you were gay and I always do this, (mimes a doctor holding a newly born baby by the feet and lightly spanking it to get the baby to get its first breath) because I just always had -- now that I know what it is I've always felt I was that way. But I didn't have the experience or the background to know what it was and then in physical therapy there were so many lesbians in the field. It was like being a coach, you know, everybody was a lesbian, you would go to conferences and it was like going to a pride fest, you know, it was great. MF:Why were you drawn to physical therapy as a career path? PS:Well it was because I took a -- when I was in college I took one of those placement tests and it said I should have been a like a park ranger or something like that and or a camp person or something like that. And I thought eh, and my "little" sister at college from the class behind me had had polio and she said to me, "You should be a physical therapist." And I had no idea what it was, but I went, and I looked at the catalogue and I matched my credits to it, and I thought I can do this, and the government was giving scholarships to go because there were a lot of war injuries and they needed people to be physical therapists. And so I was able to get a scholarship and so it was all very mercenary I didn't even know what I was doing, but they took my philosophy and my history from bible class and I thought this is what I'll do, I'll do this because I knew I couldn't go home. I knew if I couldn't take care of myself, you know, there wasn't a -- I wasn't in a situation where there was going to be a man in my life I could look to to say support me, and I couldn't go home to my family because they weren't able to support me, I actually was supporting them once I got a job. And so I thought I have to be able to support myself and I can do this in two years, I can get a scholarship, it's a great paying job and I actually liked it. I really loved working with the patients and I ultimately became an instructor and my job was to run the training programs in the hospital for all the students that came through from the colleges around the country and to train the clinicians how to deal with them and to work with them with patients. And I really loved that, that was one of the best parts of my career. MF:After college you go to New York City and you accept this first job, can you talk a little bit about your career in New York City with some more detail? PS:Well I wasn't actually in New York City, I was in Rockland County which is North and West of New York City, between West Point and New York City, it was about an hour drive. And that's where I was a physical therapist and then I became a clinical instructor and one point I was administrator and then I had been there close to twenty years and I applied to be the deputy director of the hospital which is like the second in command. And I got that position, it was a terrible position, and it was terrible because I'd been a clinician and people who are clinicians will tell you that when you get into administration it's really hard because they're only concerned about the bottom dollar and you're concerned about the patients, and that's really true. But I did that, it was sort of a career move, and the director of the hospital was never there so I ended up basically having to run the hospital, I was on call twenty-four hours a day and it was a very very stressful job. And then I had -- New York didn't have a non-discrimination policy yet, and I had a person on the staff who was creating problems for me by making people not want to deal with me because I was a lesbian. And he was doing this intentionally because he knew there were people that would be bothered by that. And I went to the director and asked the director to deal with it, and the director's response was, "Well the two of you have to get along and if you can't get along I'll just fire both of you." That was how he dealt with it. Well I couldn't go anywhere with my complaint because the person I had the complaint against was the personnel director and he was the head of the committee that reviewed discrimination complaints. So I was stuck, you know, so I thought I can't deal with it I'm going to -- you know I've got to get out of here. And I also had found out I had lupus and it was hard for me to do that job, it was very stressful because I would work all day and into the night and then on the weekends I would just be in bed because I was sick. And so I decided to leave the job, and that was when I met -- I had met Liz and we talked about it and the director was going to leave and a new director was coming in. And so I was really happy about that, I liked the new director and I negotiated with her to work part time and train her and then I would leave. And so while I was working part time I was moving here. MF:Well before we get to discussing your movement to the Lehigh Valley, I maybe have one more question about Rockland and your time in New York State which is what was your social life like? You have a career that's taking off, you're moving into administration, what was your life like after that work? PS:Well like I said there were a lot of people in my circle who were lesbians, but they were so closeted it drove me crazy, because once I knew I was a lesbian I wasn't closeted, I was never closeted about it once I really knew. And I couldn't get over why they were being so closeted because everybody knew they were lesbians and it was so frustrating to me, but they were good friends and you know, and I put up with it. And we would go into New York and we would go to the bars and we would have parties, and you know our whole staff in our department was very very social, and did a lot of social things together. But we used to go into New York City and at the time there weren't many bars, there was this horrible horrible bar, I'm making everything sound so horrible, but it was a horrible place called The Duchess. And it was at the basement of this building and it did have a sign out front, but you know you went in and you thought do I really want to go in here and people would say, "Only drink the beer they don't wash the glasses." You know and it wasn't much bigger than these two rooms, and the whole bar down one side it was dark and it was filled with every imaginable person you could imagine who could be a dyke you know was in there. And some of them were scary, particularly to people who were just coming out, but it was the only place to go, and you would go in there. And it was still in the days where you know they would do raids and you know they would tell you don't dance if you see the lights flash or if you see this thing happen don't -- separate yourself so that they won't bother you if the police come in and things like that. And they would tell you don't use your credit cards in these places because the FBI will track you and I mean they did, you know, they did that kind of thing. But you still went because it was the only place to go. I used to love to go to drag shows and things like that, and there were other places. There was a place in Rockland County where you could go to drag shows, but it was one of these bars that it was like one night they would have it and a lot of us would go there for that and just sit and drink and you know have something to eat and party. But there weren't bars like there are today in the city. It's a long time ago, it's before Stonewall. MF:Did you have your first sort of longer term relationship when you lived in Rockland County? PS:Yes, I did, and I learned a lot from those relationships. I learned that I always seemed to be interested in the wrong type of person for me. And it took me three of those relationships to realize that it wasn't the other person it was that I was choosing the wrong person. And so at the end of the third one I was doing graduate school, this was my doctorate work at Columbia. And so I didn't want to be in a relationship, I wanted to get my work done and I knew I couldn't do both. So I said I'm not going to worry about it, I'm not going to worry about dating or anything like that I'm just going to wait. And then Liz came along and so I couldn't let that go by, and that was the perfect one. MF:How did you meet Liz? PS:I met her through mutual friends, one of my former partners and her former partner were doing a workshop together on a special technique that used to treat children with cerebral palsy. And they were in this month long workshop and they got to know each other, and we all went out to dinner at a café and they introduced me to some other friends that knew Liz and then those friends decided we'd make a good couple and set us up to go into New York City to see a play and meet. And that's a really long story. MF:I'd love to hear it. PS:Liz tells it much better than I, but we went into New York City for this play and the play was interesting, but Liz had seen it before, and she wasn't that interested in it and I hadn't seen it and I was enjoying it. And then at the intermission this woman comes up to her and it was one of her former students, and she takes off with her former student to talk, I tell the story this way, she says that's not the way it happened. She takes off with the student and I think this is great, you know, here we're going to do this then she takes off with somebody, but it was someone that she had known for years in her program she had taught them. And so got to talk to them and then we left, and then we went to -- we were in the train station and we spent a lot time quizzing each other about relationships and what was good in a relationship and what wasn't and what our likes and dislikes were. And this went on for about two hours, and everything we were like really in agreement on because we had both been in situations where we'd been with people who were partially closeted, and we didn't like that. And, oh, there were all kinds of other things we talked about, I can't remember them all, it just went on, and on, and on. And so we find out we were very compatible and that was good, but you'll have to let Liz tell that story, she tells it so much better. MF:I love your version too. Okay, so then what happened, you meet Liz and your-- PS:Well, I was trying to leave my job and I had -- I couldn't really retire because -- I could vest my retirement, but I couldn't actually retire for about five more years. So, we spent a lot of time deciding how we would live, whether we would live in my house in New York, or in her house in Allentown. And we talked about which would be the best to rent as a rental property, we finally figured out the best thing would be to sell my house and buy rental properties here and so that's what we did, we sold my house and bought a couple of rental properties, in fact right across the street from your house (indicates the camera person). And we had those for about five years and while we were renting the properties we also started in the antiques business and sold antiques. And antiques is a really fun job because you learn about all kinds of things, but it's nothing anybody needs. So you know the -- but the great thing about the antiques business is the more you know the more money you make, because you have to be able to find things. You have to be able to find things cheap and sell them high. So we actually loved it because it meant spending a lot of time researching things and collecting things. So I left my job, I came here, we rented the buildings, we did the antiques, and then it wasn't enough for us because there was nothing about the community. We had trouble meeting people and finding people in the gay community, and they hadn't had a pride fest then. And so finally they did, there was a pride fest and so just said well we'll go to it. We went to the pride fest and we're thinking look there are all these groups we can volunteer with one, what'll we do, we need to do something. So, we found this political group which was a voters information group, and we really liked it because we really believed in getting people to vote and vote for the right reasons and so on and getting them information. So we volunteered to be a part of that organization and that we would do mailings for them. We would stuff envelopes and seal them and address them and do all that because we didn't have computers. And it grew until we were running the organization, and the first organization we were involved with we didn't -- we had some philosophical differences with the person who was running it. And our friend Steve Black, who was a part of the group, was just a political mastermind, just an incredible person said let's start our own organization and we'll call it PA-GALA and we'll provide the voter information, and we'll do it right, because this other organization was giving good information but they just weren't doing it in the right way, according to us. So we did this, and Steve ran it with Liz, and we continued to do the mailings and interviewed candidates for office, everything from school board right through to senator. And we made up a scale and we created a booklet which are in the archives, that would tell you how facts to place your vote on, how they voted on pieces of legislation. We interviewed then and we'd ask them questions and I remember interviewing Frank Concannon who was a city council candidate here and he said, I was asking him about gay issues, and he says, "No-one's ever told me they were a lesbian before." And he was so supportive, and you know, and he worked with us, he helped us do a lot of legislative work and he was -- but he said, "No-one's ever talked to us about this before." Because people were so afraid to and we didn't have that risk, we didn't have jobs to worry about, we didn't have family who weren't supportive so we could be out there. And so we took the risk because we could do it and Steve was just an amazing person, I'm so sorry he's not around to be doing this stuff now, because he knew every legislative district. He knew the addresses, he knew the people who were in them, he could negotiate with those people, he was just an absolute mastermind, and we learned so much from him. And we ran that organization and it created tremendous change because it made people vote, it let us get in legislators and city council people and mayors that supported our rights and would deal with our legislation and that had never happened before and it's a real loss to our community that we don't have an organization like that now that does that. Because people don't know who to vote for and they don't realize the value of voting in the primary election and voting for school board and those positions, and how it influences our community. So we did that and then at a later point we would produce the newspaper and I would do the mailings for that, a lot of us wrote articles for the newspaper but mainly I took care of all the paperwork surrounding it and Liz published the newspaper. And then we moved from that into the center, you know we met Adrian -- he was actually on our board, we met him first as a student, he came to Liz to ask Liz to help him deal with an issue at the college, and she was so impressed with him and so she asked him to be on the board. And then he said you know what I really want is to have a community center and we were at the stage where, you know, we couldn't do this forever and we needed someone with that kind of energy and expertise to come in, and it was time to pass it off to a younger person so to speak and he was just the perfect person and we said, "This is great." And so then we started on that journey to change one organization into another and he did a great job with that. MF:I want to go back to PA-GALA for a minute and just talk a little bit more about what that organization accomplished or what your sort of mission for that organization was. You focused on the voter guides as sort of a central mission for that organization. PS:Yes, it was a political organization and you know we provided information and we tried to change laws and educate people with respect to things like that. Like one of the things we did was the anti-discrimination laws we worked on all of those, we did the one in Allentown, and we had that terrible court fight over that. Because Liz had to sue to get the -- she would have to explain this, but we were trying to get the anti-discrimination laws and there was a referendum against us and we had to sue to fight the referendum. And we have the suit, it's in the archives. I wanted to go back a minute and just say something else about Steve Black. Steve, he was a lawyer, but he didn't really practice law, he ran his family's diner in Pen Argyl. And so we would go up to the diner and after the diner would close we'd sit in the booths and we'd process all these forms and do mailings sitting in the booths in the diner, all the computers were set up there, it was a very interesting system. And Steve didn't have a good mailing list we didn't think, and we found out he had this bag of papers that were like people's addresses and everything. So we met this woman here who was a lesbian and she worked, I don't know if she worked with a finance company or a cellular phone company or something, but she was really great with computers and she took that bag and she made a computerized mailing list for him and that was one of the things that really changed things early on because we had a computerized list. Then her name was Joan Todaro, she just did it like overnight she said, "Just give it to me." And then when we wanted to do the voter's guide, the voter's guide was very complicated and it used a very special program called Quark, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's a publishing program and I don't think people use it anymore. But, we sent out the word that we needed some help and Steve sometimes didn't look at these things when they came through and I was going through the mail and I found this letter from someone who said she could help us with that. And she just lives, she's our neighbor, she just lives down the street here over on Eighth Street. And she works for a publishing company and that's all she does every day is publish books, and she created the book that allowed us to send out the book for the voters' guide. And that's what I mean about people who do one thing, but it has such impact, but no-one even knows they've done it and they're sort of in the background. And Gail did that for us, and she would come over here every voter's guide and we would sit and we'd plug in all this information and it came out in a really nice booklet and very hard to do, very hard to do. But when we wanted to pass the ordinance there was a referendum against it and they collected signatures. And there was a fanatic in town who worked at Muhlenberg College, and he actually -- his name was Frank McVeigh and he's no longer with us, but when he was at the college he said such outrageous things in his classes, he was a, not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, he taught psychology. And he said such outrageous things in his classes and students complained about him so much that they took him out of the classroom, and they couldn't fire him because he was tenured, so they just sat him in an office. And they hired Patty Kline to go in and replace him, and she taught gender studies, you know, she taught really good stuff, and he was just awful. Well he disliked gay people so much that he went around, and he collected thousands of signatures, but he lied to people. He would go in their yard and he would look at their cars and he would see they had a sticker for the environment or conservation or something and he would go in and he'd say, "This is a petition--" and he would say it was about that and he would get them to sign it. And they did, and we had a city councilperson, Hershman, who would go around and take these petitions to churches and at the churches they had nights where they did bingo sign-up sheets. And he'd walk around, and he'd say, "This is a bingo sign-up sheet, do you want to sign up?" And they would sign up, or it was a food giveaway thing and they would sign up. He was so bad, and he was so stupid about this that he actually on a bunch of the petitions accidentally signed his own name with his signature pen, which was a blue fountain pen, very easily to pick up. And we searched, we went through all of those, well now this was before we had cell phones. And so we turned the downstairs over there and the upstairs over there into a center to deal with this. And every day from early morning until after midnight those rooms were filled with people with computers and phone books taking the names of everybody who had signed one of these. And then we sent out a letter to them, because it was public record we could get their signature, we sent out a letter to them with a postpaid envelope in it saying, "Did you know that this is what is about, and did you really mean to sign it? And if you did would you be willing to take your name off?" And we got -- there was an attorney in Philadelphia named Dan Anders who had been a clerk for one of the judges here. And he worked for the major, major firm there and they paid him to be our lawyer, the firm gave him his salary so he could come here and work with us and fight that referendum. And he figured out that we could put a piece of paper in that envelope that was a legal declaration that you could take your name off. So we, you know, all of our friends came over and we had some friends that were really computer literate and their families came over and they would look up things and they would sit here with phones and call the people and say can we come over and get you to take your signature off of this, sign one of these and then we would send people out. And we did that, and we waited for these cards to come back and Liz and Steve went to the post office and the first day Steve comes out of the post office carrying a box like this and there were hundreds of retractions, and that was the first day. So then we started going to people's homes and getting them to sign off and we'd call them up and the stories we heard were unbelievable like I went to a person who lives behind the Jewish community center or he did then and he was a World War II veteran and he said the person who shared the foxhole with him was gay and he would never discriminate against gay people because that person saved his life. And there was this family Liz went to see this really, really Catholic family with like ten kids and this woman was just so upset that she had been hoodwinked into signing this. And you know she was going on and on about it and took her name off, people were just appalled that they had been lied to. And then we had to go to the city and present this data and so we called a press conference and we'd go to the city and the city thought we were going to bring in a little stack of things and we brought in this huge stack of papers. Well they couldn't not listen to us, but here's the funny thing, they didn't have a way of dealing with it, and so what they had to do was cross file those people with the petition and they didn't know how to do it. But we'd already done it and so they had to use our records because they had no system to determine who those people were and we were able to pull the things where Hershman signed more than one thing and we, in our archives, we have a list of everybody who collected those petitions, and you know. So every time there would be an election and we wanted to -- somebody was going to run we would cross file the list to see if they were one of the people who filed petitions against us so we could tell people not to vote for them. Information is good, really good, but we sued, and so Dan wrote the case and it was in Liz's name because they had to have somebody against these far right people who were doing this. And he threatened them with subpoenas, and they withdrew, so we won. But that was really exciting, the other exciting was that the anti-discrimination law that contained the information about the transgender community, the gender identity part of it and the definition of gender identity was written in our solarium by -- okay now why can't I think of her name, she's the head of the transgender equality group. MF:Corrine? PS:No, in Washington. Starts with an M, I'm going to say Myra, anyway really she's been there a long time and she came here, and she wrote the definition and now the laws that Liz and Steve wrote and that you know Adrian has been involved, and now they all have all the proper terminology. And ours was the first one and it's used all over the country now when people want to look at the terminology for what should be included they use that as the model. MF:For a city. PS:Mara Keisling, Mara Keisling. MF:So that's a model for a city or a county or a statewide-- PS:Right, the thing is that each one of them have different stipulations to how they're done, because like we're a third class city and it's a different sized city the terminology has to be a little bit different, but the definitions stay the same. And so all those were, you know, great models for people around the country, it's pretty cool. MF:So it sounds like this organization, I mean you're putting together the voting guide, you're working on anti-discrimination legislation at the city and at the county level? PS:Yes. MF:You're interviewing local politicians that will go in the voting guide, but also just keeping track of even how they're voting. PS:Right. MF:There's also a piece here that I think I want to ask a question about which is you're building political community through the organization, could you talk a little bit about that? PS:Well, that was what was so great about PA-GALA and that's why I say it's so sad we don't have it anymore, because we would send out those voter guides and we encouraged people to become super voters which means they voted in the general and the primary election every year, because those are the people that elected officials listened to, they know they vote. So, when you write a letter to your senator or your representative they give it to their staff, and they look in their file and see if you vote. If you don't vote they don't necessarily pay attention to it. But if you're a super voter not only will they write you a letter sometimes they call you because they know you're going to pay attention. So we wanted all our people to be super voters and we started this push to make them that way. And so what we would do is just before the election we would call them up, "Did you get your voter's guide? Are you going to vote tomorrow?" And they started expecting us to do that, and then they would go vote, and then they would call us. And today we still get people calling us and saying, "Who do we vote for? There's no voter's guide, tell us who should we vote for?" And it's very hard because of course we only know the people in our area, we aren't necessarily able to help people in some of the smaller elections because we don't know anymore. But it really built a big political community, and then when we were working with somebody at some point and they took out the -- it was a candidate for mayor or for some big office, and there's a list you can buy on a disk and you can plug it in the computer and it shows you the voting record of everybody that's registered to vote, not how they voted but did they vote in these elections, and politicians take those and they use them to build their voters. And we were sitting down with this person and we looked at it and for our area every time we went down the list there was somebody we knew that was a super voter that was gay, and we could find them. And Steve always used to say he had a system, he called it, find a gay or something like that. And he would take the phone book, or the voters records and he could go through it and he could say these people live at the same address, they voted in every single election for how many years they are the same sex, they're about the same age, gay and track them down. You know and he was able to do that, we built more lists figuring those things out, because you had to find people and then you'd give them information and then they would get involved. And people really valued that information, they wanted to -- it's not that people don't want to vote, they're afraid they're going to vote for the wrong thing, and you have to educate them. MF:Before PA-GALA there were a few other organization like Le-Hi-Ho-- PS:Right. MF:--but how do you think PA-GALA really changed what LGBT organizations were doing in the valley? PS:Well Le-Hi-Ho, those were organizations were a lot further back in time. I think when we were doing PA-GALA it was a Gay Men's Chorus and F.A.C.T. and Pride and there was ACCO which was a women's group, but it had a large lesbian group that participated in it, but it was a women's choral group, and there were a few other groups. But the thing we changed was getting people politically active and getting the laws changed, that was what our goal was to make fair laws. We did the photo project too which was to help people understand about marriage and the laws related to marriage and everything, and that was an interesting project because those people were so brave. Because when we did that we thought okay so we -- let's see if we can get fifty people, we can name at least twenty-five couples that would probably do it because they're our friends. But let's see if we can get fifty people and this was when there were no laws protecting anybody and you had parents, you had people who wrote right in that photograph I'm a parent, I work at this kind of job. I mean they put all this personal information out there on that and people just started coming to the door to do it. And it just grew and grew and every one of those people put themselves at risk to do it and they were so willing to do it because they were -- part of it was educating them about why it was important to do it. And we displayed that in the state capital, it was pretty cool to have it in the state capital. MF:Just to give some context to people that photo project that you started was prior to -- it was about sort of moving up to marriage equality. PS:Right. MF:I was actually in that -- you took our photo and that was an incredibly powerful experience to have those photos put in the state legislature, so you had to look at all of these couples that were denied the right to marry. PS:You know, and people would be critical and say well why do you have someone up there that says they've only been together two months? Well so what people have short relationships, we had people in there who divorced or remarried, and the saddest part were the people who died without getting their rights, you know, that was the really hard part and we had to use that to educate people too. Because that's part of life, but it was a very important project, this just popped into our head we have to do this, let's do this, let's put a face on it. And then other people around the country started doing it, but they did it differently, like she had this thing about -- make people stand and put their heads together and it makes them smile, and it did. And you look in those pictures and more people particularly non-LGBTQ people would say, "Everybody looks so happy." And it's because of the way she took the picture and she did it intentionally, and we would go around and give lectures about marriage equality and show those. And people in the audience would say, "What are you doing that we're not doing because our relationships aren't that good?" Because we would give the statistics of how long people stayed together and people assumed that gay men didn't stay together very long, they just made the assumption and the statistics didn't show that at all, it showed there were some very very long relationships among men in the community, they're different, it was a wonderful project. MF:And that was a PA-GALA project or that was the organization that put together the photo project? PS:It was PA-GALA. [correction: PA Diversity Network] MF:I want to ask a little bit about the publication you put together, but I'm curious about how PA-GALA came to an end, because you describe sort of sadness that it isn't here anymore. PS:Well, it's kind of sad -- it was that we had been doing this for a long time, we'd been doing it with Steve and Steve was very hard to work with, I mean he was a genius and I loved the work that Steve did, but I did not have a good relationship with him, I could not work well with him at all. Liz could work with him very well, but he just was difficult to work with and I finally reached the point I just couldn't do things the way he wanted them done and he wasn't -- I didn't feel he recognized the efforts that were going into all of this. And he was sort of tired of doing it and so we decided, we gave them about a year's notice, and we said you know we're not going to be able to continue to do this because it was just getting too hard to coordinate things. And we didn't want to stop but we just couldn't do it anymore. And we thought he would do something else with it, but he didn't, and then we sort of went off on our own with PA Diversity which was not a political organization, it was an educational organization and that's really where our background is in education. And he just -- other things were happening in his life and it just ended, you know, he wasn't able to do it alone, but he wasn't able to work with the people who had worked with him to do it. And it was very sad because I have such admiration for what he did and what a great politician he was in terms of managing this stuff, and he -- so much of this progress in our community is growth from what he did. You know he just can't be left out of that equation, it was just too important and it was tough. You know here he was this guy who went to law school, he was bright, he was successful, but he was one of those people who had a family that didn't accept him, and it played really hard on his life. And it was very sad to stop doing it and it was very sad to lose him from the community because he would still be doing great things if he were here. MF:So while you're getting involved in PA-GALA you also are at some point starting one of, to my mind, one of the most important publications in the Lehigh Valley that focused on-- PS:Oh the Valley Gay Press? MF:Yes, so could you talk a little bit about the origin of that and what your mission was? PS:Well Liz wanted to do a newspaper, Liz always wanted to do a newspaper and with her art background she could create it on -- and we started it at the time of the anti-discrimination law work. And we started it because there was going to be this referendum and we had to get information out. So our first paper was one page and it was all about that, and then it just grew. And then she started getting other people to write for it, to write little columns just that were part of the community, and we found that there were a lot of organizations in the community and they weren't talking to each other. And so for example F.A.C.T. would hold their major event on the same night that the Gay Men's Chorus was holding their major event, and there was no reason for that to happen. And we thought there should be a calendar, so we created a calendar and we did this out of our pocket, I mean PA-GALA didn't pay for it, we did it out of our pocket, and we sent it out to everybody. And we would tell every group you can give us information and we'll put it in, because we wanted people to get the information. And it worked, there were still a few conflicts but pretty much people could look at the calendar and say if they really were serious about it and say okay we're not going to plan and they got to know when people's regular times were for galas and things like that, not conflict with them. And those were the two big reasons for doing it was to get information out. And it also advertised and we did it, we got a grant and we also provided in Berks County, so we did a lot of work in Berks County to get them started and now they have a center and they have a pride fest and they didn't have that before. MF:So you're doing PA-GALA and the newsletter, newspaper everything at the same time, but they seemed to be a part of a larger political vision that you, Liz, and then others in that network had which was at least what I'm hearing from you getting information out on politicians, the kinds of legislation you were interested in passing and supporting. But also highlighting other organizations in your area that were doing the good work. PS:Right. MF:How did you do all of that and your antique business? PS:Oh well we worked all the time doing that. The paper took Liz about two weeks to produce, two solid weeks and then there was the mailing of it. I did the mailing and you know we at the time -- one of the nice things in our lives is we had opportunity to be nanas to four wonderful children of gay couples and two of them stayed here a lot, and so we would get the kids to sit with us and we'd say, "Let's see how fast we can do this. See who can do this fastest." And so the kids would stuff envelopes with us, and we would take them to rallies and Liz would carry them on her shoulders, she said, "You might have to tell these kids that they did this for their resumes, that they went to all these rights rallies." And then we'd come home and watch it on the news, but we got volunteers to come in and help us. And it was really important to do that. MF:How long did the newspaper last and was it the internet that sort of changed your desire to publish it or how did it close? PS:Well we created the center we changed from PA Diversity to the Center and we transferred our 501C3 to the Center and Adrian chose not to continue that as part of the Center that they would provide information other ways. And Liz couldn't -- it was a full time job I think she was ready to stop with it, and it was sort of like the voter's guide we really hoped someone would do it but many people tried to start gay periodicals during that time and nobody was successful, because they always tried to do something really glossy and expensive and they couldn't maintain it. And we just did it, we did it low cost, and it wasn't as fancy looking, but it got the information out and that to us was the important thing not that it had a glossy cover. But she couldn't do that and do her other work too. MF:You've mentioned the PA Diversity -- is it network on the end? How did that come to be, your participation in PA Diversity? PS:Well when we left the voters organization we created that, we had to write a 501C and create a new organization for us to run, because we didn't want a political organization, the rules are different for them. We wanted an educational organization and so Robert Roush who was in the community and had been one of the people who developed the Gay Men's Chorus wrote the 501C3 for us and we just created a new organization. And we did the Valley Gay Press under that, that was the main thing that was under it and then we did other, we still did education about -- we still did things that had to do with laws and ordinances, but we did it from an educational point of view rather than a political point of view. MF:Well we're right at about an hour and twenty minutes so I think this might be a good place to stop for the day. But as a way to close I want to ask you is there anyone off the top of your head that you think we really need to interview for this oral history project? PS:I mean the main people I know are the people that are your list. Do you have Dixie White? MF:Yes. PS:I know she would really love to be interviewed and she is one of the really old timers in terms of being around way before we were. And she was also the head of AIDS Services at one point I think, I don't know exactly what her title was, but she was involved with the AIDS Services Center. And I don't know, I'd talk to Liz about that and I think she gave you names, I can't think of anybody right off the top of my head. MF:If you think of anyone you can email me. Well I think I just want to sort of end by saying thank you so much, you know, for being with Carol [Moeller?] who did our camera work today, and with me, again my name is Mary Foltz, both Carol and I are on the LGBT Oral History Project for the Lehigh Valley and are really excited you volunteered to be our first interview. Thank you so much Trish. PS:Thank you for letting me do this. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile=
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Patricia Sullivan, July 19, 2019
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Patricia Sullivan talks about her life growing up in Florida, her journey to creating crucial LGBT organizations, and it's impact on the LGBT community.
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LGBT-03
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - )
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Mary Foltz
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Ricardo Almodovar
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5.4 January 10, 2022 Ricardo Almodovar, January 10, 2022 LGBT-25 1:22:12 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Ricardo Almodovar Mary Foltz video/mp4 Almodovar, Ricardo_2-10-22_1080HD.mp4 1.0:|19(9)|54(5)|71(7)|90(2)|115(4)|136(3)|155(17)|182(2)|203(5)|224(16)|249(4)|274(3)|297(6)|314(11)|333(8)|350(10)|369(9)|390(2)|407(5)|420(14)|443(5)|466(3)|487(12)|508(7)|529(2)|548(8)|569(8)|588(3)|611(5)|628(3)|645(10)|666(10)|687(14)|708(9)|731(10)|748(4)|765(12)|784(4)|803(11)|828(7)|851(11)|874(6)|897(2)|918(11)|941(4)|960(3)|985(11)|1008(14)|1031(4)|1052(10)|1073(12)|1098(11)|1123(6)|1142(3)|1159(13)|1180(15)|1201(7)|1222(12)|1243(11)|1264(15)|1283(11)|1306(6)|1327(4)|1350(2)|1367(6)|1386(5)|1405(11)|1426(8)|1445(6)|1468(9)|1487(11)|1510(15)|1531(3)|1554(4)|1575(9)|1600(6)|1623(3)|1642(9)|1667(5)|1690(9)|1697(10) 0 https://youtu.be/KgBfv3rMj90 YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions 
 ; MARY FOLTZ: I am going to hit record. My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Ricardo Almodovar about his life and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. This interview is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding currently from ACLS, and we are meeting today at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College on February 10, 2022. So Ricardo, thank you so much for being here with me today.
 ; 
 ; RICARDO ALMODOVAR: Thanks for having me. 0 120 Early Childhood / Family Life MF: Great. Okay, we’ve got the business out of the way, so I’m going to start our interview with this question. Will you tell me a little bit about your childhood?
 ; 
 ; RA: Yeah, sure. So I come from a relatively big family, with a Puerto Rican background. My parents moved to Lancaster in the mid-80s. I was born and raised in Lancaster, and I have four brothers. So my mom was in charge of taking care of the household and, at the time, four rambunctious boys. And so I grew up in the city, and it was more of an urban POC working-class community. 0 408 Time at Millersville / Impact of Music
 ; RA: So after I graduated high school, I actually took two years off and started to work. Built some work experience, made some connections, but then after two years and the lack of upward social mobility and living paycheck to paycheck, I was like, “I need to go back to school. I need to do something with my life.” And so I started off at Harrisburg Area Community College, where I earned my associate degree in social science. I continued and transferred to Millersville University and earned my bachelor’s degree as a dual major in international studies and Spanish language. 0 657 Working with Make the Road PA RA: So after college, after graduating from Millersville University in 2016, I moved to the Lehigh Valley. I obtained my first job fresh out of college, and I worked for Make the Road Pennsylvania. I was able to start their base with our director and several other folks, and we finally opened an office in the Lehigh Valley, in August of 2017, I believe. But we were sharing offices with SCIU prior to that, which is one of our strongest partners. SCIU is Service Employees International Union. Healthcare PA. 0 938 Other Activism RA: And I’ve learned throughout the years that systemic oppression requires systemic change, and we want to organize and mobilize community members to talk to their legislators to push for policies that will benefit us all, particularly around immigration. Particularly around, you know, environmental justice. And, you know, events, for instance -- and that’s evidence that some of the events that we’ve organized -- I remember, and I’ve been arrested a few times, I remember the first time I got arrested was right after the 2020 elections, right before Trump was inaugurated, we wanted to push Tom Wolf to close down Berks Detention Center, which incarcerates families, including children -- immigrant families, including children, and in Leesport, our neighboring county, in Berks, right, and so we took over the intersection, literally in front of the Capitol Building in Harrisburg. 0 1511 Creation of Amor y Rabìa RA: And so almost everyone we talked to were on board, and so within an hour, hour and a half, we were able to collect contact information for about 80 people with a team of about nine or ten of us, simply just having conversations with folks at a gay bar. (laughs) And so then as the organizer, I followed up with every single one of them using our Google forms, which is an important tool that we use, and we collected their phone number, and I was able to -- and their email, and I was able to make phone calls and texts and sent out emails and inviting them to our very first committee in 2018 I believe it was. And so at our first committee, we didn’t even have the name of it, for Make the Road, or the name of the -- we didn’t have an official title for the committee itself under Make the Road. 0 1917 Working with CASA Pennsylvania RA: So in 2019 I came across an opportunity to work for CASA Pennsylvania, and both CASA Pennsylvania and Make the Road Pennsylvania are partner organizations, and they do a lot of social justice work and Latinx immigrant and Spanish-speaking communities in Allentown, Reading, Philadelphia -- or, rather, make the Road is in Allentown, Reading, and Philadelphia, whereas CASA Pennsylvania is based in Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Lebanon, and Chester Counties. Another thing that CASA does in addition to community organizing and social justice work, because they provide services like green card renewals, DACA renewals, civic engagement work, and even tax prep. 0 2161 Democratic National Committee Fellowship / Organizing for the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center RA: And so after community organizing for years and years, through Make the Road Pennsylvania and CASA Pennsylvania, I felt I needed a break. And so I took a few months to just breathe, to recoup, and I decided -- or, rather, an opportunity came up to continue my organizing work digitally, and so the Democratic National Committee was recruiting digital organizing fellows for about a five- or six-month fellowship program. I was like, you know what, that seems interesting. I don’t have to be there permanently, and who knows who I might be able to meet, and so I was able to spread the word regarding government and politics through the Democratic Party and working with the state Democratic Party and the county and the city of Lancaster, and meeting some of the political operatives in Lancaster and throughout the state. 0 2731 Campus Vote Project RA: And I started up, or I completed my contract with PBPC in July of 2021, and so at this point, what, six, seven months ago, and I started my new role as the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the Campus Vote Project in August. And if you’re unfamiliar with the Campus Vote Project, it was created in 2012, actually we’re celebrating our ten-year anniversary literally last week. And it’s under the Fair Elections Center. And the Fair Elections Center is a national network of legal experts focused on litigation, voting reform, and advocacy. 0 3148 Nonprofit Work RA: So my background is community organizing, civic engagement, and public policy work. So by day, as I mentioned, I am the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the Campus Vote Project, and we work to remove barriers to voting on campuses in Pennsylvania and across the country. And at night, I serve on a number of nonprofit boards. 
 ; 0 3520 LGBTQIA Activism MF: You talked a lot about all of the organizing work you’ve done. Organizing around immigration policy. Organizing in Allentown and Lancaster for LGBTQ+ communities. All the boards that you’re on. I’m wondering about a kind of personal history question, which is, when did you want to become active on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community? Did that start in college, did it start in high school? When did you decide that was something that you wanted to do, was organizing? 0 3758 Political Motivations MF: Do you have a sense of why you’ve been so interested in political organizing, both for LGBTQ communities, but also organizing for greater access to voting, to strengthen our democracy, to get people to participate in democracy, to be aware of immigration policy that’s impacting our communities? Do you know where that drive comes from? Were politics a big thing in your family? Were politics just something that you thought, this is where I want to put my energy for social change? 0 4048 Cultural Motivations/Passions MF: You’ve talked a lot about politics and your organizing work in both Lancaster and Allentown. I think people that listen to our oral history project in the future might be interested also about the culture. 
 ; 0 4366 Connection to Religion MF: You just mentioned two topics I wanted to follow up on. You know, healing and faith communities, and conversations with our families about who we are and our authentic selves. Have you personally had challenges within a faith community, or personally you had stories about coming out to family members that you wanted to share today? 0 4718 Closing Remarks MF: We’re about towards the end of our time, but before we conclude, I just want to give you some space. Is there anything you wanted to share today that you didn’t get a chance to share? Anything that you think, oh, I wish I would have talked about this? 0 MovingImage Ricardo Almodovar describes his early life, activist work, the creation of Amor y Rabia, and his multitude of passions. MARY FOLTZ: I am going to hit record. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Ricardo Almodovar about his life and experience in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley and beyond. This interview is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding currently from ACLS, and we are meeting today at Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College on February 10, 2022. So Ricardo, thank you so much for being here with me today. RICARDO ALMODOVAR: Thanks for having me. MF: And I want to start by asking you, could you please state your full name and spell it for me? RA: Yeah. My name is Ricardo Almodovar, R-I-C-A-R-D-O A-L-M-O-D-O-V-A-R. MF: Thank you. And will you please share your birthdate? RA: Yeah. My birthday is November 15, 1989. MF: And before we started this interview, you signed a consent form, but I just want to review the consent questions. Do you consent to this interview today? RA: Yes. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable format? RA: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats? That could be websites, articles, films, presentations? RA: 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 that you want to delete, or you could withdraw the full interview from the project. RA: Yes. MF: Great. Okay, we've got the business out of the way, so I'm going to start our interview with this question. Will you tell me a little bit about your childhood? RA: Yeah, sure. So I come from a relatively big family, with a Puerto Rican background. My parents moved to Lancaster in the mid-80s. I was born and raised in Lancaster, and I have four brothers. So my mom was in charge of taking care of the household and, at the time, four rambunctious boys. And so I grew up in the city, and it was more of an urban POC working-class community. I was always, you know, curious -- a curious child. And I first came into contact with, I guess, the outside world, or with people that think differently than me when I joined our concert band. And so I built a strong relationship with our director and learned to play not just one but several instruments, but I initially started out with the trombone. And so that's what kind of started my, I guess, engagement in community beyond just my academic life, and beyond what I had to deal with at home. So yeah, I joined the concert band in elementary school in fourth grade. I picked up the trombone and my director, or the band director, was confident that I would, you know, be a great performer, so she signed me up to play my first solo ever, and I did. And that really impacted my life in a way that I never thought would. And so it made me want to dig deeper into the music field and, granted, I'm no musician. I still perform to this day, interestingly enough, and I'll talk about that a little later. But it's what opened me up to meet more people, gain different perspectives in life, and open my eyes to a whole different world. Music, if you think about it, is almost like a whole other language, and being able to exercise that part of my brain and that part of my mind and making these connections helped me further on in my life. So I come from very humble beginnings. My parents moved, like I said, to Puerto Rico in the mid-80s, and we bounced around from apartment to house and back again. My very first year of life, actually lived in a shelter, and I'm a product of the social services and public school system in Lancaster. Who knows where I would be or where my family would be were those services not provided or that support system not present. And so I always keep that in the back of my mind when I'm doing this work or when I'm doing any work, really, in general. And I share that because you never know what's going to happen in your life, and despite some hardship, that there are ways to move forward in your life. And so I went to multiple middle schools, multiple elementary schools, in my early life, and that's how I was able to make connections and meet people, and I still have some of those connections to this day. And I come from a very close-knit family as well. We still have strong relationships, not just with my siblings, not just with my brothers, but also with our greater extended family -- aunts, uncles, my dad has 14 siblings, my mom has four. So my family, most of them live in Lancaster. Some of them live on the island, but we have family members from all over the U.S. But after graduation, or rather, continuing my studies in the school district of Lancaster, I felt like I needed to do something with my life. I knew college was calling me, but I didn't know how that would look like. So after I graduated high school, I actually took two years off and started to work. Built some work experience, made some connections, but then after two years and the lack of upward social mobility and living paycheck to paycheck, I was like, "I need to go back to school. I need to do something with my life." And so I started off at Harrisburg Area Community College, where I earned my associate degree in social science. I continued and transferred to Millersville University and earned my bachelor's degree as a dual major in international studies and Spanish language. But throughout my college career, I joined so many organizations, from the environmental science club, the student government organization, CALOR which is our Latinx student group on campus. But all of that, I guess, originated from my involvement even in, you know, elementary school, middle school, and high school, being part of so many music groups. Anything band-related, you name it, I did it, I'm a band geek. A proud band geek. I played in the concert band, jazz band, wind ensemble, pit orchestra, county band. But I think what impacted me the most, or what I enjoyed the most, is our marching band. And so I enjoy marching down parades. I enjoy halftime shows during football games. And sadly, you know, marching band in college was too much of a commitment for me at the time, working two, sometimes three jobs just to support myself. I decided I wanted to continue my music ambition, and so instead of joining Millersville's marching band, I joined the New York City's Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps Marching Band. And we performed for gay pride parades all over the east coast, and I made so many connections with folks, not just in New York City, but the general area. We performed for Capital Pride in D.C., Providence Pride in Rhode Island, which is the only one at night. We have neon lights and glow lights and all of the things. It's so much fun. But I think, you know, music has played a huge part in my life, and in my career, and I'm glad that I'm still able to continue that, even, you know, despite my busy schedule. Pride month, as you all know, is June, right? [laughs] So June is a very busy month for me. So I could dedicate maybe half of May and all of June to perform for all of these different gay events through the gay band, and then every now and then maybe go to a football game at Millersville University. But I'm a huge music supporter. The arts are so important to student life and professional and personal development, and it's played a huge part in my life. So music has helped open so many doors for me, and helped me develop the many skills and abilities I have to connect with people. And so that's how I got involved with so many student groups, and why I wanted to meet so many people and build relationships, not just with all of the different student groups on the different campuses that I'm involved with, but with also, you know, professors and administrators. I always tell folks, "You never know who you're going to rub elbows with, right, you never know who's going to be your next coworker, your next supervisor, your next boss, even," so I always try to be nice, I always try to be kind, and I always try to at least build some type of relationship and keep in touch with folks, even though we may not be in, you know, a direct -- even though I might not be in their direct vicinity. So after college, after graduating from Millersville University in 2016, I moved to the Lehigh Valley. I obtained my first job fresh out of college, and I worked for Make the Road Pennsylvania. I was able to start their base with our director and several other folks, and we finally opened an office in the Lehigh Valley, in August of 2017, I believe. But we were sharing offices with SCIU prior to that, which is one of our strongest partners. SCIU is Service Employees International Union. Healthcare PA. I've learned fairly quickly that we can't do this work in isolation, and that we rely on partnerships and on relationships. And as I emphasized earlier, we need to make sure we build those relationships because you never know what help or support you may need down the road. And so some of these folks at SCIU have actually met throughout my college career. With the different events that we've helped organize and the different conferences and summits that I was able to participate, and so at Make the Road, that first year we were doing a ton of civic engagement work. We led weekly action committee meetings where we not just provided civic education opportunities, we would share an article or a video on what's going on in this country, particularly in Latinx and immigrant communities, but we were able to open up a discussion to talk about how people feel about what's going on in this country, and then close off by how we can take action. And during that meeting, we'd also share a meal. We'd also sing songs, and it's very community-focused. And we wanted to build community through food, through music, and through community organizing. And we were successful in doing so in the Lehigh Valley and in Allentown, being the third-largest city in the state. There's so much potential in this area, and we saw it, and we saw potential in our people. And we were confident that we would be able to do big things in Allentown and beyond. And so like I said, in 2017, we opened up our office in what people would call, "The Hood," where a large number of folks are POC, or people of color. We were very intentional about where we wanted to base our headquarters here in Allentown, and so we were on Eighth Street, right outside of the downtown area, and that's where we not just met for these meetings but we also were able to onboard several canvassers during different campaigns. And so I'm proud to say that, in 2018, during the midterm elections, we had a Make the Road action, the largest canvassing operation of the year, and we knocked on over 200,000 doors and we were able to sway the votes significantly. Granted, our candidate didn't win, but we were able to build relationships with folks, not just in Allentown, but in the general Lehigh Valley and make those connections beyond that campaign. And let folks know that we have the power to change the political landscape in Pennsylvania, and it just takes time. It takes effort. And we may not always win everything, but if we don't try, then we've already lost. And our work basically is us extending that invitation to folks to join in their own movement, to join in their own liberation. And how we did that is through community organizing, through door knocking, through canvassing, through text banking, and generally building relationships with folks. If people don't trust you, it's so hard to bring them on board, it's so hard to get them involved. And it makes it that much harder to implement campaigns or to push for certain policies that benefit all of us. And I've learned throughout the years that systemic oppression requires systemic change, and we want to organize and mobilize community members to talk to their legislators to push for policies that will benefit us all, particularly around immigration. Particularly around, you know, environmental justice. And, you know, events, for instance -- and that's evidence that some of the events that we've organized -- I remember, and I've been arrested a few times, I remember the first time I got arrested was right after the 2020 elections, right before Trump was inaugurated, we wanted to push Tom Wolf to close down Berks Detention Center, which incarcerates families, including children -- immigrant families, including children, and in Leesport, our neighboring county, in Berks, right, and so we took over the intersection, literally in front of the Capitol Building in Harrisburg. And so we had a number of us that represented the different families incarcerated in Berks Detention Center. And we locked arms and they chained us, and we had a sit down, and we demanded that Wolf close down the detention center. And we were successful in that we pushed the administration to revoke their license, the Berks Detention Center license, but during the appeal process, they were still able to function, sadly. And so I remember it was a cold winter, because it was in December, literally right after the November elections, and despite the cold, we had folks that were passionate about creating change and supporting immigrants, undocumented or not, to the point where, you know, we decided to put our lives and our safety on the line, and so that was the first time I -- what is the term? That was the first time I engaged in an act of civil disobedience. And then the second time was for DACA. So the day after the Trump Administration rescinded DACA, a number of us decided that, you know, we need to disrupt business as usual, because 200,000 lives were disrupted because of -- because we don't have those protections for DACA. The folks that are unfamiliar with DACA, it's the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals that protects undocumented youth from deportation, and it allows young folks to work, to drive, and go to school in this country without that fear, and gives folks that piece of mind. And so after it was rescinded, those 200,000 folks were now at risk. And so we went to several Congressional offices and we occupied them. We said, "Y'all are representing us and we want immigrants to be protected." And so after hours of, you know, pleading to the administrators, to their staff, and requesting a meeting with, at the time, a Congressperson -- his name escapes me. We decided to just occupy, and so there were four of us in the Lehigh Valley, and there were actions throughout the state, and we just sang songs. And songs were like, you know -- oh. "We shall not/We shall not be moved," and then we just kept singing that over and over again. And then, "El pueblo/unido/jamás será vencido," or in English, "The people/United/Will never be divided," or some people would say, "Defeated," but that's another conversation. And so after occupying the Congressional office, you know, the police came in and took us away in handcuffs. But despite that, I feel making the -- or spreading the word in regards to DACA, after it being rescinded and getting folks involved and it being livestreamed and, you know, I would continue putting my life on the line if it meant that folks would be protected, if it meant that we could make this world a better place. And so those are just a few examples of some of the actions that we organized through Make the Road and through some of the work that we've been doing over the last few years, but it seems like there are constant attacks, not just against the LGBT community or the immigrant community, but just, you know, the working class communities. Folks in general, you know, they were stripping away healthcare from millions of people, and one of my first actions even before my first arrest in Harrisburg was a 24-hour occupation of Pat Toomey's office, because 24 million people were at risk of losing their healthcare back then, and that's why we were there for 24 hours, to represent each of those folks. And so spreading the word on these issues, you know, we had to come up with different tactics, whether it's an occupation, right, a Congressional occupation or a sit-in or a march or a rally or a protest. You know, these aren't just things we think of out of the blue, it's caused by, you know -- or, rather, it's a strategic escalation on how we can create that change, you know. Sometimes we'll start off with a petition or we'll start off with, you know a meeting with a legislator. But then it goes up and up until, at some point, they need to hear what we have to say, not just in terms of, like, immigration, but in terms of like policy and legislation. And so after a year of organizing with Make the Road Pennsylvania, I was able to we realized that, you know, there are other communities that are being attacked. And that first year, during Trump's administration, it seemed like they were targeting LGBTQ+ folks across the country. They took down the LGBT content from the White House website. They tried to ban trans folks from serving in the military. They tried to take away protections from LGBTQ+ folks in the workplace. Almost every month there was something, and so after having the conversation with our director at the time and several other folks who were like, "Maybe we should open up and start a LGBT committee," and so we went to work. And so some of our colleagues and allies and accomplices, we met and we were like, "How can we get the queer community together?" And so we had to meet people where they were, right? And so we were like, "Well, where are they?" Allentown is a huge city, right? Where can we meet the most amount of queer folks, who are LGBTQ+ people. I mean, we have the Pride event that happens once a year, but then we also have the gay bar. We have Stonewall right up the street from where the office was. And so we organized a group of about ten of us to go to Stonewall, and we created a Google form to keep track of folks, and so we simply went around, at the gay bar, before it was like drunk o'clock, before folks started to get really inebriated, and went out of our way to talk to people, and we simply asked, "Hey, how do you feel about the trans ban in the military?" And then we would have a conversation, and then we would follow up with, "How would you feel about having a LGBT committee or an LGBT group to fight against hate in Allentown and the Lehigh Valley?" And so almost everyone we talked to were on board, and so within an hour, hour and a half, we were able to collect contact information for about 80 people with a team of about nine or ten of us, simply just having conversations with folks at a gay bar. [laughs] And so then as the organizer, I followed up with every single one of them using our Google forms, which is an important tool that we use, and we collected their phone number, and I was able to -- and their email, and I was able to make phone calls and texts and sent out emails and inviting them to our very first committee in 2018 I believe it was. And so at our first committee, we didn't even have the name of it, for Make the Road, or the name of the -- we didn't have an official title for the committee itself under Make the Road. So at that first committee is when we decided, let's think of a few terms. Let's think of a few titles, and so Amor y Rabia came up and people liked it. We voted on it and we were like, sure, that works. Amor Y Rabia in Spanish means, "Love and hate," and that's exactly what we felt like expressed the meaning of the committee, because in the LGBTQ+ committee, we have a ton of love for each other and ourselves and our communities, but there's also -- I'm sorry. Not love and hate. Rabia means, "Anger." So a lot of us are angry because the system is against us, and a lot of us suffer so much because of homophobia, transphobia, and overall hate in this country. And so Amor Y Rabia came about, and we met regularly, Saturday afternoons at our organizing center here in Allentown, and that's where we were able to bring some of those components from our action committee, like civic education and even food and music and we were able to organize different events. And we wanted it to be also community-focused and to also share and express our cultures, and the diversity of our membership. And so we organized different events from open mic nights. We hosted drag shows. We've hosted even a rainbow Zumba night where we just danced the night away and worked out some of the stress that we had to deal with on a regular basis. And then, you know, those were ways to, you know, alleviate stress, just to come together and organize those events, and also develop community leadership. You know, as the community organizer, I didn't feel that I should be the main face or the spotlight for these events, so we were very intentional on building other folks up and giving them an opportunity to, you know, be the MC for the event, or to perform at this event. Or to create a flier or to spread the word, and to really pass on the lessons that we learned as an organization to regular community members, and, you know, I've always learned, we want to organize ourselves out of a job, right? We want other folks to become organizers and provide those tools and resources so they can rise up as well. And so some of those folks are still active to this day and are still working with Make the Road Pennsylvania. Some of them have moved on. Some of them are continuing their education, and some of those folks I still stay in touch with. But at the core of it is to, you know, organize and mobilize LGBTQ+ folks of color in Allentown and the Lehigh Valley, and to combat homophobia, bigotry, and overall hate. And we did that by, you know, simply existing and organizing and mobilizing, and when there was an attack against our community, whether it's the trans ban in the military or other issues, we were able to stand up and organize events. For instance, we had one of the largest LGBTQ+ rallies or marches in Allentown's history right after the Trump trans ban, and we met up at our organizing center here in Allentown, and we were able to recruit speakers to talk about the importance of the LGBTQ+ folks or the LGBTQ+ community. And, you know, raise awareness on queer justice and queer history and we can't sit idly by when they're trying to -- when certain folks are trying to erase us out of existence. When they don't want us to, you know, serve in the military, and if they don't want us to, you know, survive, you know, I learned throughout my organizing career, it seems like there are certain folks that don't want certain communities, particularly marginalized communities, to exist or, you know, they want to enslave us, or they want us gone. You know, so Make the Road gave us that space, that safe and brave space, to have those conversations, to learn and to grow, but to also bring in other folks to participate in their own liberation and their own movement. And so after being at Make the Road for a number of years, and passing the torch onto the next community organizer, and he's still there to this day, Armando Jimenez, and I decided, or rather, an opportunity came up to do this work in my hometown. There's no place like home, like Dorothy says, right? So in 2019 I came across an opportunity to work for CASA Pennsylvania, and both CASA Pennsylvania and Make the Road Pennsylvania are partner organizations, and they do a lot of social justice work and Latinx immigrant and Spanish-speaking communities in Allentown, Reading, Philadelphia -- or, rather, make the Road is in Allentown, Reading, and Philadelphia, whereas CASA Pennsylvania is based in Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Lebanon, and Chester Counties. Another thing that CASA does in addition to community organizing and social justice work, because they provide services like green card renewals, DACA renewals, civic engagement work, and even tax prep. So working with CASA and some of the AmeriCorps VISTAs that provided those services helped with organizing community members in Lancaster. And with having strong roots in the Red Rose City, I was able to start the base, and not only was I able to open up the office in Allentown for Make the Road years prior, but I was also able to help open up the office for CASA Pennsylvania in Lancaster in 2019 my first year working for them. And so very similar to Make the Road, we organized regular meetings. We had, you know, popular education opportunities, where we would share resources or articles or videos on what's going on in government or in politics. And we were also able to coordinate efforts with some of our other partner organizations, including Make the Road, and we were able to mobilize for different events and for different reasons. And so what's great about community organizing or what's great about partnerships is you can make things much larger, right? And so in some of those events, like, you know, Shut Down Berks or fighting against the trans ban in the military, you know, we were able to communicate with each other. And so oftentimes, if there was an event that impacted folks in the Lehigh Valley or folks that were affected -- particularly around what Make the Road was doing or like what CASA was doing, and if we needed to go to Harrisburg, for instance, to lobby, or if there was a statewide action, we would coordinate efforts. But then if there were any national or federal-level public policy work that we wanted to engage in, then we would also coordinate efforts and we would take buses to go to Washington, D.C., for instance. And as I mentioned, you know, in order to do this work, we have to have strong people-focused relationships, and so with CASA and Make the Road being part of the Center of Popular Democracy, which is a national network that focuses on social justice work and providing those resources and those connections, you know, has helped with pushing for immigration reform, has helped with mobilizing folks and registering voters and getting them out to the polls and providing translation for voter guides or for ballots or many other items that were necessary for non-English speakers. And so after community organizing for years and years, through Make the Road Pennsylvania and CASA Pennsylvania, I felt I needed a break. And so I took a few months to just breathe, to recoup, and I decided -- or, rather, an opportunity came up to continue my organizing work digitally, and so the Democratic National Committee was recruiting digital organizing fellows for about a five- or six-month fellowship program. I was like, you know what, that seems interesting. I don't have to be there permanently, and who knows who I might be able to meet, and so I was able to spread the word regarding government and politics through the Democratic Party and working with the state Democratic Party and the county and the city of Lancaster, and meeting some of the political operatives in Lancaster and throughout the state. And mind you, most of the work that I've been doing is nonpartisan, but if you really dig deep into this country and in our lives, everything about us is political. From the schools we go to the roads we drive on, to the homes we live in, to the type of education we receive, everything about our lives is political. And as a, I would say, political operative myself working with the DNC, I'm also a strong critic of the Democratic Party. It just so happens that one party decides to, you know -- or, rather, let me rephrase that. It just so happens that certain political parties support certain things over others. It's only -- how would I word it? Not to sound political or anything. [laughs] There's a fine line, right? At the end of the day, you know, we want to fight for full justice, you know? I always look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? And, you know, how can we -- or, rather, people shouldn't just survive, you know, the lowest rung, right? Food, clothing, housing, you know, if all of those things were guaranteed to us, how much folks could do in their lives? We want folks to not just survive but we want folks to thrive. And I always think about that when I'm doing this work, and so after my short fellowship with the Democratic National Committee, I came across an opportunity to work for the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center as an organizing associate. And so they offered me a six-month contract, and after working for them for six months, they extended it to a full year. And during my year at PBPC, I worked specifically under the We the People Pennsylvania campaign, which was created in 2018 to make state government work for all of us. And through We the People Pennsylvania, it's essentially -- or, rather, We the People Pennsylvania is essentially three initiatives. Number one, it's a coalition of state legislators. Number two, it's a coalition of nonprofit, nonpartisan partners. And number three, it's an actual campaign. So it's a roadmap for Pennsylvania to move forward for fair housing, fair funding for education, clean air, clean water, and all of those folks, the legislators and the community organizations and community members alike, helped draft that roadmap or helped draft that campaign. And through our statewide coalition, and some of those partners were my former employees, including Make the Road and CASA Pennsylvania, I'm still able to continue our working relationship with them. But, you know, also work through other initiatives, which include language access in Pennsylvania. And so I was able to meet with several issue-based advocacy groups, like the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition, and some of their partners, and we worked to develop a language access plan at the state level. And I continue some of that language access work to this day. And so our hope, through the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, is to organize a campaign launch or a budget summit in multiple languages. And we were successful in bringing all of our partners together, and one of our largest events, where we had 500 folks in a Zoom room, I believe, right before Tom Wolf's budget proposal, to talk about, what is it that we want the administration to invest in? We want Tom Wolf's -- or we want our state government to invest in our roads, in our schools, in clean air and clean water. And through the We the People Pennsylvania campaign, working with legislators in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, in the House and in the Senate, and through the roadmap we were able to coordinate all those efforts and get hundreds of people rallied together to talk about public policy, to talk about the state budget, and how we can all take action to make this world a better place. And I'm proud to say that we were able to successfully meet regularly with all of these folks and create change. One of the things that stands out in my work through the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and working with my direct supervisor at the time, was Kadida Kenner, and she's the director of campaigns for the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, and she is the chair for Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, and talking about the judiciary and the state courts, right? If we learned anything over the last couple years, it's that courts matter. And, for instance, when the last administration tried to contest the election results, where did they go? With Commonwealth Courts of Pennsylvania. We focus so much energy and time on the legislative and executive branches of our government. What about our three co-equal arm, right? What about the judiciary? There are many more MDJs -- magisterial district judges -- in Pennsylvania than there are state legislators. There are 253 Members in the House and the State Senate, whereas in the lowest court, the magisterial district judge, courts -- the lower courts, there are well over 450 judges, not to mention we have the Court of Common Pleas, we have the appellate courts, and so working with Kadida Kenner, my former supervisor, working with Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, which is a campaign of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy center, in addition to We the People Pennsylvania, and then separately. But indirectly, working with the 99 Percent, which is also part of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy -- which is more a federal issue-based advocacy. And Jeff Garris, who runs that campaign and focuses on the American Rescue Plan funding and how we want to use those billions of dollars for things that we need the most. Sadly, you know, there are certain legislators that want to use that funding for a rainy day, and they want to pay back debt that our state government has incurred. But I don't know what other time it's raining more than a global pandemic. And so through the 99 Percent and through the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, we're able to work at the federal level and at the state level to make sure that those billions of dollars, through the American Rescue plan, is able to be used adequately for our communities. And so after completing my year contract with the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and working with We the People Pennsylvania and all of our partners, I applied for a position to be the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the campus vote project. And I got it. And I started up, or I completed my contract with PBPC in July of 2021, and so at this point, what, six, seven months ago, and I started my new role as the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the Campus Vote Project in August. And if you're unfamiliar with the Campus Vote Project, it was created in 2012, actually we're celebrating our ten-year anniversary literally last week. And it's under the Fair Elections Center. And the Fair Elections Center is a national network of legal experts focused on litigation, voting reform, and advocacy. And so I always jokingly tell folks, a lot of my colleagues, a lot of the lawyers that we work with at the Fair Election Center are sitting behind their desks just itching to sue somebody, because democracy is always under attack, and sadly, voter suppression is a real thing in this country. And so we're working diligently to remove barriers to voting, and through the Campus Vote Project we're able to do that work on campuses in Pennsylvania and across the country. So we work in 41 states, 280 campuses, with 3.4 million students enrolled in those institutions. That's a huge electorate that we're trying to take advantage of -- or that we're trying to get involved and creating change takes a village. And so we want students, we want administrators, we want faculty, to talk about democracy work, to talk about the elections, to talk about what's on the ballot, and that's exactly what we do at the Campus Vote Project. And I basically run three initiatives through CVP. Number one is our democracy fellowship, which is similar to an internship. I supervise 30 college students in Pennsylvania doing just that. And they work about ten hours a week learning about the system, learning and informing and teaching their peers, their faculty and staff, what's on the ballot and general democracy work. And so we have 30 in Pennsylvania and hundreds of democracy fellows and graduates throughout the country. And there are ten -- there are currently ten of me, well, ten state coordinators across the country, so here in Pennsylvania it's myself, and then Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and in the south we have Florida, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona. And so we meet with all of our state coordinators on a weekly basis to discuss best practices. To just, you know, vent sometimes, and some of my colleagues are experts in their field. Some of them have master's or even doctoral degrees, and I hope some of that rubs off on me. [laughs] And the second initiative that I'm particularly involved with at the Campus Vote Project as the Pennsylvania state coordinator is our voter-friendly campus program. And this is a national designation that campuses declare to remove barriers to voting. And so campuses have to submit a statement of interest. They have to develop an action plan or a campus plan. And it also allows us to work directly with those campuses. And this is also in partnership with NASPA, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. And we're able to work more closely with these campuses through the VFC process. And campuses have to provide elections materials regardless, through the Higher Education Act. At the Campus Vote Project, we're able to provide resources, training, and best practices from across the country. And that's why we're on campuses. And the third initiative that I'm involved with is our Pennsylvania Youth Voting Summit, which is the largest in the Commonwealth, where we not only bring college students together but also high school students involved in our democracy. We bring in prominent speakers from the Commonwealth. Last semester, we had it in October, and we had our Secretary of State, [Veronica] Degraffenreid share on what our state government is doing. She talked about her story, and the importance of the youth vote. And so we have a very strong relationship with the Department of State, and in fact, we organized that Pennsylvania Youth Voting Summit with them in conjunction with Pennsylvania Youth Vote. We also work with the Andrew Goodman Foundation. We also work with All In Campus Democracy Challenge. And several other nonpartisan groups that focus in organizing youth. And so that's a basic snapshot on some of the work that I've been doing at the Campus Vote Project and the Fair Elections Center. And through my life and through my career, I want to bring some of those connections and hopefully inspire some of my students to do some of this work and continue not just their education but also to, you know, I always tell folks, Why are you in school? You're there to learn, to grow, but also to build relationships, to network. And I always emphasize -- and I can't say it enough to my students. You never know who's going to be your next coworker or your next supervisor, so use these opportunities to meet people that are doing this work. And so not only do we have our statewide cohort of 30 democracy fellows, and we meet regularly, but we also have a number of professional development opportunities at the national level. We have a national research and curriculum manager that works diligently to bring the most up-to-date materials on redistricting, on community organizing, on voter registration, and so we have discussion blocks where folks can meet democracy fellows from across the country. So we have so many opportunities for folks to meet here in Pennsylvania, but then we also want to open up the doors for folks to meet folks from all over the country. So that's really what stands us out at the Campus Vote Project, and I'm so excited to continue this work and use my background and my experience to essentially inspire young folks to do the same. So my background is community organizing, civic engagement, and public policy work. So by day, as I mentioned, I am the Pennsylvania state coordinator for the Campus Vote Project, and we work to remove barriers to voting on campuses in Pennsylvania and across the country. And at night, I serve on a number of nonprofit boards. I've been part of the Lancaster LGBTQ+ Coalition for about two years now, and so we work with DEI initiatives -- diversity, equity, and inclusion -- trainings and workshops, and so we've facilitated a number of discussions for different businesses and organizations in Lancaster County. One particular is with Two Dudes Painting Company. So imagine a room full of about 50 or 70 middle-aged, mostly straight white men talking about rainbows, butterflies, and glitter. So we broke down what LGBTQ+ means. And the importance of being respectful and mindful for LGBTQ+ folks, especially as clients, or especially since they're going to be potentially working with us. And the other board that I'm involved with is Lancaster Pride. So Lancaster Pride is a little different from the coalition, although we do regularly partner. Lancaster Pride's focus is more of an event planning organization. So we organize our annual Lancaster Pride festival, and our most recent one, for the first time ever, was our Lancaster Pride Fall Fest in October. And we had strict COVID restrictions. Sadly, we had to turn a few folks away. But despite all of that, we had well over 3,000 people join us in a one-day long gay festival. We took over the Clipper Magazine Stadium. We had about 140 vendors join in, business, nonprofit partners, to share the work that they're doing. Through tabling, and we had drag shows on site. And it was just a great day to just be authentic, to be open, and to just be in the community. And so in Lancaster, we have two LGBTQ+ nonprofits at Lancaster Pride, and then the Lancaster LGBTQ+ Coalition. And I just so happened to be on both of their boards, and my goal is to bring them a little closer together, to build relationships, and to make sure that, you know, we know what each other is doing. So we're not stepping on each other's toes. Another board that I'm involved with is the Keystone Business Alliance, which is central Pennsylvania's LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce. And so they support businesses, not just in Lancaster but also in Harrisburg and Lebanon and York. Even as far as Gettysburg. And it's membership-based, and we organize monthly mixers, where we get a bunch of the queer businesses together, and we provide support. It seems like I'm on a lot of boards, but we only meet once a month on different days, so that's why I say during the day I do my office hours, 9 to 5, right, and then in the evening I'm able to jump in on these board meetings. And then the other gay thing I do, and I do a lot of gay things, but I'm proud to say that I was an appointed commissioner for the Governor's Advisory Commission on LGBTQ+ affairs. This commission we don't meet monthly. We rather meet four times a year. And we are the direct line to the governor's office on anything LGBTQ+ related. So we work with the administration at the state level on public policy, on event planning, and general LGBTQ+ issues. So our commission is made up of about 45-ish people, lawyers, executive directors, nonprofit professionals, therapists, educators, and we meet to discuss, to talk, to vent, and to move the needle for LGBTQ+ liberation in Pennsylvania. We're the first and only of its kind in the country to do this work directly with the administration. So if you're unfamiliar, you know, or, rather, as you may know, the governor's administration has several commissions. We have a women's commission. An Africa-American commission. A Latino commission. And then as I mentioned, this is the first and only of its kind in the country we have an LGBTQ+ commission under the Governor's office. And so working with all of these LGBTQ+ organizations and learning what is going on, I'm able to, you know, build all these different relationships and also gain perspectives in life that I otherwise wouldn't have seen or noticed, and, you know, attending these events like Lancaster Pride, going to some of these mixers, meeting with the commission, really inspired me to do more. And I would say has helped me become who I am today, you know. I've always wanted to do something in the queer community. I don't know if I necessarily want to run my own nonprofit or business, but I can at least learn what is going on in Lancaster and throughout the state. MF: You talked a lot about all of the organizing work you've done. Organizing around immigration policy. Organizing in Allentown and Lancaster for LGBTQ+ communities. All the boards that you're on. I'm wondering about a kind of personal history question, which is, when did you want to become active on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community? Did that start in college, did it start in high school? When did you decide that was something that you wanted to do, was organizing? RA: And that's a good question. So I actually came out at the tender age of 16, but only to two of my very close friends. And then it wasn't until 18 that I really started to really come out to my family and more friends. And when I started to embrace my homosexuality. And I didn't know exactly back then how it would manifest itself in terms of like, you know, my career, community organizing, or trying to make this world a better place. But it wasn't until college that I -- or, rather, my first year in college, I realized we didn't have a queer space. But I found out that we used to, and that's when I decided to take action for the first time in my life and in my career to bring the queer community together. And so I got all of the basic requirements to re-found the allies group at Harrisburg Area Community College back in -- when was it? 2010 at this point. And I facilitated our meetings and I eventually became their president. And so we were able to host, you know, fundraisers and drag shows and coordinate efforts with the main campus in Harrisburg, and so that's when I began my, I suppose, organizing experience. And then that's where I met my -- in college I met my mentor, Adanjesús Marín, who eventually became my supervisor, who was the former state director for Make the Road Pennsylvania. So he really took me under his wing and he was part of the Human Relations Commission in Lancaster, and so I met him my first year in college, and he taught me more about queer history than anyone has in my life. And so I continued my educational career, and then we grew apart and then after college he was looking for an organizer, and he hired me on the spot, basically. Not that we grew apart, but life happens, right? And so, in college, I was involved with our allies group, and as I mentioned, our environmental science club. Some government association. And then continued that when I transferred to Millersville University, and I helped out with their GSA. And then I continued, you know, being involved with the gay band, the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps Marching Band in New York City, and I started performing with them since 2014, and I've performed with them every single year since, other than these last two years with COVID. And so -- gosh. Wow. Looking back, I've been doing a lot of LGBTQ+ work way back since 2010, and it's 2022. MF: Do you have a sense of why you've been so interested in political organizing, both for LGBTQ communities, but also organizing for greater access to voting, to strengthen our democracy, to get people to participate in democracy, to be aware of immigration policy that's impacting our communities? Do you know where that drive comes from? Were politics a big thing in your family? Were politics just something that you thought, this is where I want to put my energy for social change? RA: That's a good question. My family has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do even with music. I just, you know, things kind of, you know, I guess the puzzle kind of came together for me in my life, and as a curious young child, I, you know, took initiative. And in addition to that, you know, with my parents struggling to make ends meet, I didn't want to be a further burden in their lives, having to take care of our large family. So any excuse I had to, you know, be out of the house, I took, which is why I was so involved with band, and we had frequent concerts or after-school practice, and at some point I did do some sports, simply because my older brothers did. But it was never my passion. I always enjoyed music much more than football or wrestling or track or anything. Although I did enjoy it, but it was too much of a commitment for me to join in all of the things, so I had to choose one or the other, and I chose music. I chose concert band and marching band and all of the other music groups, and so that spark, I guess, was created over the years of being -- of having to hide myself for so long, and learning the harsh reality that a lot of folks go through this in Lancaster and Allentown and Pennsylvania in situations much worse than mine, and, you know, I always wanted folks to be their authentic selves, right, to live fully and, you know, I am lucky enough to -- rather, because of the support system I have beyond my family with some of my colleagues and my friends, I was fortunate enough to continue my studies, fortunate enough to be heavily involved in student groups, and meeting all of these folks, and it inspired me to learn more about government and politics and voting rights issues. And it allowed me to not just learn about it but also to share it out with folks, and I'm able to facilitate discussions around our political structure in Pennsylvania, and talk about the judiciary, and talk about all the different facets of our government, and organize lobbying efforts, even. Introduce folks to their legislators. Create opportunities to build bridges. And as I mentioned earlier, systemic oppression requires systemic change, and we need policies. We need laws. We need ordinances that protect all of us, and that we shouldn't just need to survive. We shouldn't hide. But we also want community members to thrive and move beyond their current circumstances. And so through politics, through government, and civic engagement, I'm able to express myself in a way that I feel will help others take action, since there's so much at stake, especially right now in Pennsylvania. 2022 is going to be a wild year with the U.S. Senate race and the gubernatorial race. We want to make sure that whoever takes those seats, for instance, in addition to the other elected positions, that they keep LGBTQ+ folks in mind, and they bring us to the forefront, because when we all rise, or when LGBTQ+ people rise, we all rise. MF: You've talked a lot about politics and your organizing work in both Lancaster and Allentown. I think people that listen to our oral history project in the future might be interested also about the culture. For Latinx community and LGBTQ communities and their overlapping communities, could you talk a little bit about the larger kind of cultural spaces of Allentown or Lancaster where you are refueled in community spaces when you're done working? Maybe you never are done working, because you are amazing. But where you do find joy and community and fun in either Allentown or Lancaster where you're living now? RA: I'm an extrovert, so I am recharged when I'm around people. I'm at my best when I'm with, you know, particularly in queer spaces, you know? I enjoy going to drag shows. I enjoy going to queer events. And I want to just be myself -- I don't want to feel like I'm hiding myself, so as an extrovert, COVID really hit me. Not too hard, thankfully, you know. Because I was still continuing my community organizing work, just in a different way. Just through Zoom and behind the camera, right? And so my passion comes from, you know, sharing the beauty of humanity with others and letting them know that, you know, you might have gone through hardship, but it's not always going to be that way. And you can still, you know, make great connections with people, and you can still experience life to the fullest, but, you know, it's okay to not be okay right now, but just don't let it consume you, and we'll be here when you're ready. MF: Do you have favorite bars in Allentown and Lancaster? Favorite community spaces that are like, okay, I have a night off, this is where I'm going? I think people ten years from now will wonder, "Where did people go in 2022? Where were the hot spots?" RA: I don't know if I could say like I have a favorite, because anywhere you go, as long as you surround yourself in good company, would be a great space. [laughs] Interestingly enough, I was a much bigger drinker in my earlier 20s, more so than now in my early 30s, so although I do enjoy going to bars, a lot of the bars are no longer open. I used to frequent Stonewall. I lived walking distance from there when I lived in the Lehigh Valley. Tally-Ho in Lancaster closed down, which is the only gay bar out there. And so we're losing our queer spaces. But, you know, with being part of the Lancaster LGBTQ+ coalition, Lancaster Pride, the Keystone Business Alliance, I have all these different opportunities, all these different events to be in those queer spaces, so I don't necessarily need to go to a gay bar or a club to meet my, you know, needs or whatever, that I'm able to also be part of those events, and yeah, I don't have a favorite -- all that to say I don't have a favorite. And it's not just, like, the nightlife either, you know? I, you know, with some of the organizations I'm involved with, we want to make some of these events kid-friendly or make them sober, and for some of our more seasoned folks, you want to organize -- or some or our elders, we want to organize jazz events or jazz nights. And even with the faith community, organize an interfaith service or something like that. There's a lot of healing that needs to be done between the faith and the LGBTQ+ community, and we need to have those conversations. You know, we should have had these not just with the faith and LGBTQ+ community, but when it comes to being out, being authentic, and when it comes to social problems, we should have had a lot of these conversations like yesterday. The good thing is the next best time to do it is now. And so I hope that I inspire others to do that, to speak with their relatives, you know? During Thanksgiving dinner, have that conversation, or, you know, bring your partner to meet your family. And just, you know, participate in the fullness that is humanity. MF: You just mentioned two topics I wanted to follow up on. You know, healing and faith communities, and conversations with our families about who we are and our authentic selves. Have you personally had challenges within a faith community, or personally you had stories about coming out to family members that you wanted to share today? RA: I'm very lucky that I didn't have to go through much hardship coming out. I had some resistance from family members. My mom thought it was a phase that I would get over. But here I am, well over a decade later, I'm still hella gay. Some of my other relatives thought it was a phase, but I'm still hella gay. And so I didn't have too much trouble. I think the biggest issue I had is, you know, with the Church itself. I was raised Catholic, and so I've gone to -- or, rather, I've seen several people, and I've tried to ignore folks that have organized anti-gay rallies or marches, and the church I used to go to as a kid, or that I was raised in, ended up having an anti-gay protest in front of their church. Literally right before COVID, interestingly enough, and it just was disgusting for me to find out that the church that I was raised in, that I was baptized in, I had my first communion in is -- and I've known they were strongly anti-gay, but for them to be so clearly anti-gay and outspoken is just, you know, ridiculous to me. And so I actually, you know, called them out and, you know, they took down all the posts on social media, for instance, and they haven't done anything like that since. I think it was mostly new leadership. Their previous priest moved away, or something happened. But that doesn't justify what they did. [laughs] And that's not just in the Catholic Church, sadly. It's common in several churches across the country. And I've been working diligently to build relationships with pastors. In fact, a lot of my close friends are gay Black pastors that went to seminary. In Lancaster, we had the Lancaster Theological Seminary. And a lot of them, a lot of my friends are recent grads or have preached in local churches, and I've been learning a lot in regards to the faith community and some of the work that they're doing to combat homophobia, transphobia, and bigotry in the church. And I realize it, and they also realize, there's so much healing to do, but that takes time. And in fact, one of the things that I'm working to build in Lancaster is an advisory board for Lancaster Pride, and so we realized that not everyone can be a board member and meet every single month, but what this advisory board, they would meet four times a year to help Lancaster Pride in its mission, vision, and values, and one of those seats is one of faith. In addition to business economics, in addition to government relations, and so my official title for Lancaster Pride is their community liaison. To build relationships with other organizations and to bring people in to Lancaster Pride. And so with all of the connections that I've developed over the years, you know, and working with this advisory board, so this will be the first time we've ever had an advisory board for Lancaster Pride. We're working to continue our relationship, but also to more institutionalize some of these changes using some of our partners or with some of our partners and to spread the word that, you know, queer people exist in Lancaster and we're not going anywhere. And that there are different ways that people can do that, and working with the faith community and working with the LGBTQ+ community is one way that we can make this world a better place. MF: Have you found an inclusive religious community for yourself, or have you found a way to -- I guess just found inclusive community that can support your spiritual self, your full self? RA: So I would consider myself more spiritual than religious. [laughs] Sadly, religion really hasn't been my friend, or in some ways maybe, in other ways not so much. But, you know, I've attended several services for MCC denominations and for UCC, and they tend to be, you know, more inclusive and affirming. But those are really, you know, unless I'm going to like a baptism or a wedding where otherwise I wouldn't have a choice, I would much rather prefer an MCC or a UCC church. And we have so many, and I've been to the one in Lehigh Valley. Is Pastor Beth still here? MF: Yes, yes. RA: And there are a number in Lancaster as well. MF: We're about towards the end of our time, but before we conclude, I just want to give you some space. Is there anything you wanted to share today that you didn't get a chance to share? Anything that you think, oh, I wish I would have talked about this? RA: So if you're here listening to my story, yes, I'm hella involved. I strongly encourage you to be involved as well. But please don't compare yourself to others. Don't feel like you haven't done enough. I've had so many people say, "Wow, you're doing all of this, what am I doing with my life?" But it's okay. It's okay to take your time. It's okay to learn, to grow, and to be in your own space. I am just fortunate to have done this for well over a decade, and that I'm able to build strong relationships that I still keep to this day. And I really hope that some of my work inspires you to do the same. You know, whether you're ready or not, you know, we'll be here when you are. So, you know, thank you for listening and for, you know, being part of this story, and this process, and I hope that we can continue telling our stories and educating future generations on what we have been doing, not just here in the Lehigh Valley but beyond. MF: Thank you so much, Ricardo. I am inspired just sitting here with you. You are amazing. I'm a fan of yours and I'm grateful for all that you do. Thanks for being here today. RA: Oh, thank you. You're too kind. 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=
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01:20:13
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Ricardo Almodovar, January 10, 2022
Description
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Ricardo Almodovar describes his early life, activist work, the creation of Amor y Rabia, and his multitude of passions.
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LGBT-25
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2022-01-10
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community: COVID-19
Description
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In the spring of 2020, the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive received a grant to collect oral histories and written stories for 40 Years of Public Health in the Lehigh Valley’s LGBT Community: Collecting and Curating Local LGBT Health Experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19.
The collection consists of oral histories from individuals who experienced the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as oral histories from members of the local community as they lived through 2020's summer of Covid-19. Running through both are the themes of dealing with the fear of an emerging health crisis, loneliness and isolation, and coming together as a community in support and activism.
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.
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Liz Bradbury
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Ricardo Almodovar
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_27.xml
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COVID-19
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5.4 July 20th, 2020 Ricardo Almodovar, July 20, 2020 PH40_27 01:08:39 LVLGBT40 40 Years of Public Health Experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community 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 COVID-19 COVID-19 Lancaster LGBTQ+ Pandemic Family Allentown Ricardo Almodovar Liz Bradbury video/mpeg AlmodovarRicardo_20200720_video.mp4 1.0:|28(5)|48(8)|87(2)|116(12)|142(13)|159(3)|181(7)|204(12)|261(9)|282(11)|303(2)|325(4)|344(14)|369(10)|397(14)|409(3)|435(14)|457(16)|484(14)|500(2)|515(16)|544(8)|562(16)|587(7)|613(11)|636(8)|659(17)|677(5)|693(13)|710(5)|731(5)|756(3)|776(9)|797(3)|820(14)|841(12)|866(4)|890(2)|911(4)|934(2)|969(16)|1000(2)|1010(3)|1024(5)|1046(5)|1071(12)|1088(14)|1111(13)|1132(8)|1157(4)|1186(3)|1208(6)|1220(4)|1239(10)|1262(2)|1277(14)|1290(9)|1316(5)|1335(12)|1355(3)|1372(7)|1386(11)|1396(7)|1410(3)|1429(4)|1447(2)|1468(15)|1491(5) 0 https://youtu.be/4fUbg17RmDk YouTube video 0 Interview Introductions RA: I hope I’m camera-ready.
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 ; LB: You look terrific ; you look good. And it’s really good ; the lighting is really good, you’re in a good place, that’s great. So I’m going to read you this stuff. I have to be sure that my [drink?] (inaudible). With this project, Bradbury Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College will collaborate on forty years of public health experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury and I am here with Ricardo Almodovar -- I spelled your name wrong -- Almodovar. Is that right?
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 ; RA: Almodovar. Almodovar.
 ; COVID-19 ; Introductions ; LGBT ; Liz Bradbury ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 209 Almodovar's Living Situation LB: Okay, and here, so I already sent you some of the questions and stuff. We can really talk about whether you want. But one of the things we start out with is, in the place where you live, who is there with you, sort of quarantined or locked down or in that space?
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 ; RA: My partner and I.
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 ; LB: Okay, the two of you. All right, that’s great. So are you working now?
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 ; RA: Oh, and in addition to that, actually, my brother had COVID, and he’s currently working on renovations with his house so my mother has been staying as well, so we have an additional room so there’s three of us. 
 ; COVID-19 ; Liz Bradbury ; Quarantine ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 380 Almodovar's Job at the Local Shelter RA: So, folks aren’t allowed visitors, so folks are to mostly stay in their rooms. The only areas that are shared are the common areas. We have two lounges, an adult lounge, a family lounge, and then a veterans lounge. And so they have to schedule that in advance with their case manager. We have case managers onsite that are licensed social workers that helps with budgeting, money management, house search, job search, and other issues, basically bridging that gap from homelessness to permanent sustainable housing ; that’s ultimate goal.
 ; Job ; Lancaster ; Liz Bradbury ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 569 Transgender Women in the Military LB: It’s a one-in-two chance. So if you do come in contact with somebody and since you’re giving services for people who are trans, or who are veterans, and you know, if they say to you that they’re transgender, or you recognize it, maybe, you recognize that they’re trans, and they’re over sixty-five, chances are really good that they’re a veteran. Liz Bradbury ; Transgender ; Veterans ; Women 0 723 Family Struggles with COVID RA: Both, both reasons. He is also in the military, and actually, since they’re renovating the family house, I actually lived there when I was in college before I moved to Allentown. In fact, I left that household to move to the Lehigh Valley, and then my partner and I moved back for work. And then in that, I guess, somewhere in that timeframe, my brother decided to renovate the house. He realized one problem led to the other, and was like, let’s just tear down the whole thing, except for the bare bones, which is pretty much what the house was. And then he was staying with my father, and he ended up contracting COVID through his work, sadly. And his experience was terrible ; he was under a ventilator for two weeks. The whole family was terrified of what would happen. And mind you, there was no way to visit, so I’m basing this on virtually. Thankfully that happened, you know, in about two months ago, and now he’s been almost a month out of the hospital. And, but you know, with my mom being here, I feel like she’s in a safer place, and she undergoes dialysis ; she’s diabetic, so she’s already immunocompromised ; she can’t risk it enough as it is.
 ; Allentown ; Brother ; COVID-19 ; Family ; Military ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 948 Almodovar's Experience with his Father's COVID-19 Situation RA: Yeah, so it just happened, you know he came from home one day scared and saying really bad chest pain and lack of breath, really. And so he called up his doctor, and they advised him to just stay home. So he stayed home for a while, he couldn’t work, he couldn’t go anywhere. Then it just got worse and worse. I would say after a week, they finally had to rush him to a hospital. And they had to put him under a ventilator, tubes going up both nostrils. Very painful procedure. (laughter) At least from what I heard. In our family, we’ve been communicating via, or through video, both from WhatsApp and Facebook Chat. And so, you know, it’s sad to, you know, see someone, you know, especially a parent, under such pain and having to deal with, you know, something like this, and being under a ventilator for not just one but two weeks, over two weeks, actually, two weeks and about two days or something like that. A very long time.
 ; COVID-19 ; Father ; Hospital ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 1144 Biggest Fears About Getting COVID-19 LB: Yeah, so everybody that I’ve spoken to, I’ve spoken to a lot of people, their biggest fear, and I’m going to ask you what your biggest concern is but it sounds like this is what your biggest concerns it too, is that for people that are your age, that they’re going to get it and then give it to somebody. There’s a lot of young people, I mean, a lot of young people are at risk. I just was talking to somebody who knew of a young person who had really serious contemplations, and they were younger ; they were twenty. But their biggest concern is, you know, getting it and giving it to someone in their family, so that the loved ones ,and I would guess it sounds like one your concern is too.
 ; 
 ; 
 ; RA: Yeah, right, because so many people are asymptomatic, and I don’t know if I may be or who knows if I have it now? But my mom wears her mask every day. Like I’ve mentioned, she undergoes dialysis three times a week. They won’t let her on the bus unless she wears a mask, potentially through a program she gets from transportation to and from the dialysis clinic. And she comes back just fine, and I’m sure at the clinic, she gets her treatment done, they go above and beyond with making sure that everything is sanitary.
 ; Asymptomatic ; Concerns ; COVID-19 ; Liz Bradbury ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 1374 Comparing Gardens LB: We have a big vegetable garden, so you didn’t get any carrots, they just didn’t make it, is that the thing?
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 ; RA: No, well I tried to germinate them or put them in the little cup and let it grow slowly. But we had one really bad rainstorm, and I should have just brought it in, and they just drowned. So I had cucumbers, carrots, green peppers, and so on. Now I just have basil, tomatoes, and I actually, interestingly enough, have done orange plants or mandarin plants. (laughs) I found I have somewhat of a green thumb, I guess half a green thumb, because I have much more experience with indoor plants. I have about seven, eight indoor plants right now, and somehow, I found a sprout growing out of one of them. Mother-in-law’s tongue I guess is what it’s called. (laughs) And it had --
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 ; LB: Which is kind of a politically incorrect thing to say. There are other names for that which I think we should think of, and I can’t remember what it is. But it’s more Latin, like a Latin designation, like the Latin, because really it’s kind of rude. But (laughs).
 ; Basil ; Carrots ; Cucumbers ; Gardens ; Green peppers ; Liz Bradbury ; Ricardo Almodovar ; Tomatoes 0 1550 COVID-19 Rules with Family RA: And my mom wants to spend time with other relatives, so sometimes, she’ll go to my cousin’s house, for instance, to help babysit. And so, you know, when it comes to family, like we like to remain close. But other guests, not so much, like acquaintances, we like to keep a distance.
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 ; 
 ; LB: Yes. It’s tough, but I think that there, you have to do a certain amount for your family to make everybody feel like there’s cohesiveness I think, there’s no question. So you have a partner so I’m not going to ask you about -- I have a question on here that talks about dating apps. So I don’t know whether you’re using that or not, but I’m not going to ask you anyway, since you have a partner, and I’m, you know, making my moral presumption on that. Let’s see, so in terms of you being worried about the virus, do you have illness, you know, like preexisting conditions that worry you, or are you more concerned about other people around you or what do you think?
 ; COVID-19 ; Family ; Guests ; Liz Bradbury ; Mother ; Preexisting Conditions ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 1714 The Most Frustrating Part of the Pandemic RA: I think it’s, I would say the most frustrating is just the uncertainty of the situation right now not knowing, or the unknown. And that creates a lot of anxiety for other people. I’m not an anxious person. (laughs) I would say for the most part I’m stress-free. I believe there are so many alternatives to dealing with stress and anxiety. You know, I practice my own person of, I guess, a makeshift-type yoga and meditation almost every single day, and I’m very blessed to have, you know, the love and support of, you know, friends and family members, and even, I feel like now I’ve been trying to take action more than ever, you know in addition to helping out at TLC, I’ve also applied for grants for a community action project. And they’re helping to fund initiatives to not just help TLC, but work on highlighting the needs of low-income communities, and in additional to TLC, Crispus Attucks, and it’s a black-owned organization focused on equity and inclusion and they have a food bank every week and they provide these folks in the southeast of the city, which is the most condensed and racially-diverse part of the city. And so through this grant, I was able to purchase carts, pushcarts for folks to use for necessary items, and work with a graphic designer to produce a video to let folks know that there are people who are going through a difficult situation, whether it’s having to go to a foodbank, or being homeless. And what you can do to take part, whether that means donating food, or Crispus Attucks does need, you know, people with muscle, folks that can help back these boxes, and I myself have packed, I would say at this point, hundreds of boxes. in the last few months. You know, they give out every, like I said every week, every Wednesday at that, at least 300 boxes. It used to be where folks would have to come in and show their ID, but now it’s just, that food is provided to the Central PA food bank at no cost, without any, you know, folks just, take your food, take what you need. If you can’t use it, then pass it along to your neighbor. And so my goal was to not just provide those pushcarts to help out folks, but to also highlight those needs and what folks can do to take action. Family ; Meditation ; Ricardo Almodovar ; TLC ; Yoga 0 2025 Leadership Cohort for Lancaster Clean Water Partners RA: For sure. And then what also motivates me to do that is that, I recently signed up for a leadership cohort through the Lancaster Clean Water Partners. It’s like a year program regarding leadership development and how to take collective action for clean water, sustainability and conversation in Lancaster. It’s a grant they were provided through Penn State and the Lancaster Conservancy. Like I said, it’s the Clean Water Partners. It’s a partnership, and so we meet monthly. We used to meet in person, but obviously we had to transition to Zoom. And so, I’ve always wanted to do sustainable work and conservation, and I love the environment, and you know, learning about what’s being done in Lancaster, and what I can do to, you know, help to take collective action for clean water, is one thing that I’m passionate about. And going out to the park and also participating in this leadership cohort, you know, makes me more appreciative, not just, you know, mentally, but also emotionally, and even physically, for that matter.
 ; Clean Water ; Lancaster ; Lancaster Clean Water Partners ; Penn State ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 2120 The Difference Between the Counties Clean Water RA: Kind of both. So each session is different. We had a county tour, for instance, where we visited local water treatment facilities. And then another one, we also visited a water sewage treatment facility, and what is being done for water quality. You know, we all drink water, we all take showers, or at least we would hope, so. But where does that water go? How is it treated? And even what businesses are doing with that water. For instance, what are beer distributors or brewers doing, because they heavily depend on water quality. Water in Lancaster is going to be different from water in the Lehigh Valley or even across the country in California, and so depending on your recipe and what the water is made up of, that’ll change the flavor of not just beer, but products if you’re a business owner.
 ; California ; Clean Water ; Lancaster ; Lehigh Valley ; Ricardo Almodovar ; Water 0 2383 Friend From Morocco LB: Oh, who’s from Morocco, and another friend of ours went to visit her in Morocco, visit her family, and they went to the part of the sea there, part of the Mediterranean that’s there, that comes up to the coast, and the entire beach area and everything was completely unusable, just completely, just devastated, like you couldn’t even, like the worst, horrible pollution that you could even imagine. You couldn’t even put your foot in it, you know? And it’s a beach ; the beautiful beach area. But it’s just totally fouled, and what we’re doing in the United States is exactly the same. It’s just, well, you know, it doesn’t matter, we’ll just do it a little bit more, and we’ll just me, and we have that, we have no leadership that is stopping that from happening. Let’s talk a little bit about Black Lives Matter, because I don’t think we can talk about COVID-19 without talking about -- 
 ; COVID-19 ; Liz Bradbury ; Morocco ; United States 0 2494 Housing Situation LB: Your house looks like, just from those bricks, it looks like it’s from the 1800s.
 ; RA: I wouldn’t, I couldn’t tell you. We would love to buy a house. Sadly as LGBT people of color it’s a little more difficult. And plus we want to do more traveling. Maybe in my mid-thirties, I just turned thirty. Or rather, I’d be thirty-one in February, so I’m in no rush to buy a house. House ; LGBT ; Liz Bradbury ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 2724 Police Brutality LB: Yeah, there’s no question, that was just a few blocks from my house where that happened with the police officer. I’ve worked with the police before and I’m not surprised by that happening, and I’m not surprised by them already dragging their feet with regard to what (inaudible), and then they did it. And then they said, well not this time. And I’m not surprised that they released a nine-minute video that happened to be from a CCTV across the street, and that nine-minute video, I don’t know if you’ve seen that, the longer video, is actually goes, the police officer when he’s first handcuffing your guy with the other people after they’ve thrown him to the ground, after they’ve kicked him to the ground, which is what he did, he said, the police said that he fell down, but then you can see that that’s not true at all, they kicked his feet out from under him and pushed him to the ground. They’re trying to handcuff him and the guy kneels on his neck. But then, but people say well, you know, but then, about two minutes later after he’s been handcuffed completely there the police are no longer touching him, and the police officer says something to him and he raises his head up about an inch, and the police officer knees his head right back down into the ground again. And he’s handcuffed, there’s absolutely, you know, so even the ridiculous sort of excuses of the first action, there was no excuse for the second action. Absolutely assault ; it’s against this person who was completely unable to move at all, and then to have a police officer do that. And it’s a terrible situation because I think that, you know, it’s based on white supremacy but it’s also based in police power. Those two things are so closely related. But there are also a lot to do with the training of the police which causes anybody who’s a police officer to feel like (inaudible) it’s even if they’re not white, frankly. And working with guys who are unbelievably scary.
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 ; RA: Yeah, and the police enforcement has a long history of discrimination and brutality and if you look at its inception, you know it was born too, out of a need within the white community to capture escaped slaves. And you can see some of those roots, or remnants are still, you know, still exist, whether people realize it or not. George Floyd ; Liz Bradbury ; Police Brutality ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 2890 A Stance on Gun Control LB: And then, people will say that the militarization of the police started during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. You know, these people have rights ; now we’re going to have to have the police officers to have machine guns and AK-47s, and dogs, and stuff like this, which actually, it was a different kind of attitude in the earlier parts of, where every police officer didn’t carry a gun, for example. Most police officers didn’t carry a gun, and in other countries where police officers don’t carry guns. So.
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 ; RA: Yeah, I don’t carry a gun, and I don’t feel safe around someone that carries a gun. There should be no reason why you need a gun around at all whatsoever. AK-47's ; Guns ; Liz Bradbury ; Police Officers ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 3083 Risks of Opening Up Schools LB: And you know, it’s only one kid. And he was also talking about, this is pretty interesting, he was talking about how most inner-city schools, and I’m sure this is true in Lancaster public schools too, they all don’t have air conditioning. A lot of inner-city schools in Allentown are not air conditioned, or only parts of them are air conditioned. And even some of the more recently built buildings are not air conditioned. So as a result, they will take kids who are in rooms where it’s very, very hot, and they’ll take all the hot rooms and bring them down to the air-conditioned rooms. So now you don’t just have one class of kid, you have fifty kids. And how do you keep those kids from not infecting each other? Or you leave them in the room where it’s one hundred and one degrees, or you bring them to a room where there’s fifty kids, and a bunch of them have their masks down like this because they don’t know how to wear them. So, it was really interesting what he said ; I hadn’t even thought about that. And he said, oh yeah, I think about that every day.
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 ; RA: Yeah, and then the whole, going back and forth right now, school districts don’t know whether to open or close, and there’s just so much controversy.
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 ; LB: Yeah, and it’s really based in greed. I mean, the only reason to open schools is so that you can let parents go back to work so that they can do minimum wage jobs to support rich people. Because truthfully, you know, we need to be able to -- parents need to be able to stay home with their kids right now. And yeah, they need money. But who really needs, you know? I was talking to one of the people I interviewed that has a daughter who has a congenital heart defect, and she was called back to work because she’s an essential worker because she’s a waitress ; she’s a food service person, where she makes below minimum wage and the restaurant wasn’t using precautions. There were people that were sick there, and her mother said to me, if she gets sick, she’s going to die. But if she doesn’t go to work, she’s going to lose her job. Because they told her, if you don’t come to work, it’s your resignation. She said, but you’re not -- nobody’s got a mask on here. I’m coming in contact with all these people, you know, particularly wait staff because people who are eating are not wearing masks. So, and you know, this is not somebody who’s making $300,000 a year as an essential worker. The most essential workers are the ones who don’t make any money.
 ; Allentown Schools ; Lancaster Public Schools ; Liz Bradbury ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 3379 Pennsylvania State Politics RA: So the statehouse is majority Democratic ; however the state senate, not so much. So we’re having some trouble, and I recently met an open queer person of color, Malcolm Kenyatta from the Philadelphia area, and he’s been championing COVID relief and raising the wage, and talking about, you know, the hypocrisy within the Republican Party, and highlighting that it’s not a political issue ; it’s a human issue. It just so happens that Republicans time and time again are trying to take away our healthcare, and they don’t want to pay it. And sadly, they have the wealth, they have the representation, and the power, and so we want a more evenly distribution of that wealth, and we’ll do that at any cost necessary, or rather, any means necessary.
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 ; LB: I think it’s true, you know, people have often, and I’ve been fighting for equal rights for the LGBT community and other communities for my whole career, and for years and years and years, and a long time ago, when we were fighting to pass the anti-discrimination ordinance in the city of Allentown, which was the first passage that included gender identity in the state ; nobody else had gender identity anything, not Philadelphia, anything, it was just Allentown. The effort to pass it started in 1998, and we were successful, and finally successful in 2002.
 ; COVID-19 ; Democratic ; LGBT ; Liz Bradbury ; Republican ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 3687 American Jobs in Today's Day and Age LB: They’re incredibly short-sighted. It’s short-sighted (inaudible) because if you have a living wage, a living minimum wage, it improves and makes a robust economy ; it just does. So if you’re looking at it purely from the viewpoint of greed, which is often the other side’s viewpoint, pretty much it’s the entire viewpoint, it’s incredibly short-sighted to say, well we’re not going to spend the money to give this population, this worker population a living wage because it will come out of our pockets. But it really doesn’t, because if you pay people living wage, frankly, that's the whole basis of capitalism. Now you have people, even one of the most dastardly capitalists in the world, Henry Ford, who started Ford cars and changed the whole circumstance, he said, I want to produce a car that my own employees could buy. And so, you know, it has to be a good, cheap thing, and I have to pay them enough so that we can continue this American project which is based in capitalism. Capitalism has become this enormous seesaw of the incredibly rich and the incredibly poor, and the poor are the workers. And one thing we’ve totally seen about COVID-19 is without people who are making minimum wage, everything grinds to a halt. We can’t do anything you know? Now you have to spend millions of tax, billions of tax dollars to just make it so that this population is still going to be able to come back to work when things open. I mean, that’s speaking from a totally greed basis, which is a terrible basis to look at anything. But it’s ridiculously short-sighted to say, well we’re not going to pay you, but we want you to buy our computers. Or we want you to buy food in the grocery store. But we’re not going to give you any money to do it. Well, that’s not going to work. You know, and we also know that corporations, or companies that are justice-based will actually do that and it doesn’t hurt their profit margin at all. Like Costco, or Ben & ; Jerry’s or something like that who just pay a living wage. They pay a living wage, and they pay their workers, and they pay for their worker’s healthcare, so what comes out is a real sense of support. You know the workers themselves have a sense of loyalty to their employer, and they work hard, instead of thinking, well, they don’t care anything about me. You know, it’s just a bad circumstance ; it always comes from greed.
 ; Capitalism ; COVID-19 ; Economy ; Liz Bradbury 0 3975 Inspiration for the People Going Through Struggles
 ; RA: Yeah, sure. So things might look a little stark ; we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. We have constant rioting, we have violence. But in the midst of all that, there is good, there is love, there is support, support for black folks, for LGBTQ-plus folks, for folks in the Latinx community, for refugees, for folks that are disabled. We’re all in this together, and it’s July 20th, 2020, but I hope that when you see this video, things are much better, and I know that, you know, with the work that we’re doing now, we can together collectively develop policy solutions for some of the major problems we’re facing, not just today, but hopefully, by the time you see this, these problems will be long resolved.
 ; Latinx ; LGBTQ+ ; Pandemic ; Ricardo Almodovar 0 4073 Closing Remarks LB: Yeah. Well thank you very, very much for talking to me and taking an hour and a little bit more out of your day to do this. I really appreciate it very, very much and everybody who will see this will appreciate it as well. And I love everything you said, and you give me a great deal of hope, so thank you for doing that. And I appreciate it, so what you’ll get a transcript of this, and as soon as they’re finished transcribing it, we send them to another college and they fix that, and then they give it back to us, so thank you again, and have a great day, and have a great weekend. Keep up the good work.
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 ; RA: Yes, great. Thank you so much for inviting me, and I hope we stay in touch, and I’m sure we’ll cross paths again soon.
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 ; LB: I hope so. Okay, bye-bye.
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 ; RA: All right.
 ; 0 MovingImage In this interview, Almodovar and Bradbury talk about how people's lives have been impacted under the pandemic, and how LGBTQ+ people fit in a pandemic. They talk about the problems in Allentown and Lancaster while even mentioning their own families. Ultimately, this interview generally talks about the effects of the pandemic in both the Allentown and Lancaster community. Ricardo Almodovar 2020-07-20 RICARDO ALMODOVAR: Okay. LIZ BRADBURY: Now I'm going to turn my audio backup record on too. And -- RA: I hope I'm camera-ready. LB: You look terrific ; you look good. And it's really good ; the lighting is really good, you're in a good place, that's great. So I'm going to read you this stuff. I have to be sure that my [drink?] (inaudible). With this project, Bradbury Sullivan LGBT Community Center and the Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College will collaborate on forty years of public health experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury and I am here with Ricardo Almodovar -- I spelled your name wrong -- Almodovar. Is that right? RA: Almodovar. Almodovar. LB: Yup, there we go. To talk about his experiences in the Lehigh Valley, in the Greater Lehigh Valley, Scranton-Stroudsburg area, LGBT community during this time of COVID-19 pandemic as a part of the Lehigh Valley's LGBT community archive. We're meeting on Zoom on Monday, July 20th, 2020. So, thank you so much for your willingness to be speaking with us today. To start, can you please state your full name and spell it for me? RA: Yeah, sure. My name is Ricardo Almodovar, R-I-C-A-R-D-O, Almodovar, A-L-M-O-D-O-V-A-R. LB: Okay, and can you please share your birth date? RA: My birthdate is November 15th, 1989. LB: Could you say the last word again, because it disappeared? RA: Oh, November 15, 1989. LB: Okay. Let's see. Okay, and what town are you in? RA: I currently live in Lancaster City. LB: But, when I'm taking this picture of you, you are in Lancaster? RA: Correct. LB: Okay, so that's fine. So, because there's a part that says where are you, and where is the interviewee, so I wanted to know where that is. So this part is the consent part, so I'm going to read you this stuff. Do you consent to this interview today? RA: Yes. LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, made publicly available online in searchable formats? RA: Yes. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes and other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, and other formats we may not even know about today? RA: Yes. LB: Okay. Do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview, identify any parts you'd like to delete and/or withdrawn from your interview, or you could withdraw the whole interview from the project? RA: Yes. LB: Okay. So this is just some identity things. What is your zip code where you are? RA: 17602. LB: Okay, and what is your age? I think you indicated that. RA: I am thirty. LB: Okay, and how do you identify with the LGBT community? RA: I identify as a gay cisgender man. LB: Okay, and here, so I already sent you some of the questions and stuff. We can really talk about whether you want. But one of the things we start out with is, in the place where you live, who is there with you, sort of quarantined or locked down or in that space? RA: My partner and I. LB: Okay, the two of you. All right, that's great. So are you working now? RA: Oh, and in addition to that, actually, my brother had COVID, and he's currently working on renovations with his house so my mother has been staying as well, so we have an additional room so there's three of us. LB: Oh, I see. Okay, so are you working currently? RA: Yes. LB: Are you working at home, or at work? RA: Yes. A little bit of both. So yeah, well my background is community organizing and Spanish language, and so I lived in Allentown for three years working for Make the Road, and then I moved out here. I just finished a fellowship with the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and now I actually recently, as of tomorrow, I accepted a new role as an organizing associate with We the People, the project of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. LB: Oh that's great, cool. And so, and will you be working on that from Lancaster, is that the thing, or do you have to go to Harrisburg to do that? RA: Well, it is virtual ; it is based in Harrisburg and so, I don't foresee traveling anywhere quite yet because of COVID. Everything is via Zoom, or Google Hangouts, or many of the multiple video platforms. But then, in addition to my organizing work, I do work part-time at, I help out at a local shelter here in Lancaster called in the Transitional Living Center. And so, as an essential worker, we are there on-site providing front-line support for folks that are experiencing homelessness and trauma, including veterans, families, children, folks going through recovery. A two-unit building, and so 24-hour facility, and we basically just man the front desk providing support and whatever they may need in that facility. LB: Are you doing that now? RA: Yup, just on the weekends though. LB: Okay, is it hard to be social distanced and stuff in that kind of arrangement? RA: So, folks aren't allowed visitors, so folks are to mostly stay in their rooms. The only areas that are shared are the common areas. We have two lounges, an adult lounge, a family lounge, and then a veterans lounge. And so they have to schedule that in advance with their case manager. We have case managers onsite that are licensed social workers that helps with budgeting, money management, house search, job search, and other issues, basically bridging that gap from homelessness to permanent sustainable housing ; that's the ultimate goal. LB: Yeah. So, would you say that, have you come in contact with a lot of LGBT people there, or any? RA: Actually, surprisingly yes. And they have program under Tabor Community Services and they have a very strong religious background. LB: Oh, what's the program again, because I didn't hear that. Say it again? Community -- RA: Tabor Community Services. T-A-B-O-R. And so, they got a lot of heat, not necessarily recently, but over the years. And so, my partners, interestingly enough, he is there full-time while I'm only there part-time. And so he's openly gay, they know we're together and engaged. They're very open and supportive. And then we have another openly lesbian black woman who's also on staff. And so the front desk staff which is who we are as program reporting assistants -- LB: You're pretty queer. (laughs) RA: Excuse me? LB: You're pretty queer, the front desk staff. RA: Yes, yes, which is great. LB: Yeah, it is. RA: And so, they've been working on getting the participants' demographic much more diverse as well. We've had a few lesbian couples -- actually, not very many gay couples, interestingly enough. But mostly, you know, women with their children. And they prioritize children, obviously. LB: And with the veterans, are you seeing transgender veterans? RA: That is a good question. Not that, and not any of that have been open. LB: Okay. Because you know, transgender of transgender women who are over sixty-five, one out of two of them, or fifty percent of them, are veterans. You know that? RA: Yeah, I didn't know that. LB: Amazing, isn't it? But it's really true, particularly from the Vietnam era. So if you come in contact with a transgender woman who is over sixty-five, chances are very high that she's a veteran. RA: Oh, wow. LB: It's a one-in-two chance. So if you do come in contact with somebody and since you're giving services for people who are trans, or who are veterans, and you know, if they say to you that they're transgender, or you recognize it, maybe, you recognize that they're trans, and they're over sixty-five, chances are really good that they're a veteran. RA: That's interesting, I never really thought -- LB: Yeah, it's remarkably true, actually. And that's, as a result of that, it means that a lot of transgender people over 65 are getting healthcare from the VA. And it sounds -- RA: Yeah, that makes sense. LB: -- pretty good. It's not the worst possible circumstance for them, so that's true. Not as good now as it used to be, but you know, it's not terrible ; it's not a terrible situation. RA: Yeah. It's just tough because Lancaster, when it comes to the nonprofit world is heavily controlled by religious organizations and institutions. I mean it's really common across the board when it comes to nonprofits. And that's not like a judgment or a critical call or anything ; it's just, you know, as long as their beliefs don't infringe on our rights. LB: Right, right, right. It's not necessarily a bad thing ; it's just that when they use their religious exemption to not be supportive, that's the dangerous thing. So we have religious organizations here in the Lehigh Valley too, as I'm sure you know, that are fine. They're fine. And other ones who will say, well because we're a religious organization, we're not going to support gay people, and it's interesting, or trans people. It's interesting that in Allentown's law, it specifically says that if an organization gets money from the city, it doesn't matter what their religious circumstance is ; they can't just go against the Allentown nondiscrimination law. It's actually written into the law, so yeah. So you were saying that, did you say your mother is in your house? RA: Yes. LB: Yeah, and is she there because it's safer for her, or just because your brother is working on the house? RA: Both, both reasons. He is also in the military, and actually, since they're renovating the family house, I actually lived there when I was in college before I moved to Allentown. In fact, I left that household to move to the Lehigh Valley, and then my partner and I moved back for work. And then in that, I guess, somewhere in that timeframe, my brother decided to renovate the house. He realized one problem led to the other, and was like, let's just tear down the whole thing, except for the bare bones, which is pretty much what the house was. And then he was staying with my father, and he ended up contracting COVID through his work, sadly. And his experience was terrible ; he was under a ventilator for two weeks. The whole family was terrified of what would happen. And mind you, there was no way to visit, so I'm basing this on virtually. Thankfully that happened, you know, in about two months ago, and now he's been almost a month out of the hospital. And, but you know, with my mom being here, I feel like she's in a safer place, and she undergoes dialysis ; she's diabetic, so she's already immunocompromised ; she can't risk it enough as it is. LB: Wow, so that's amazing stuff. Does your brother know how he got it? Were there other people in his workspace that were sick? Was that the circumstance? RA: It wasn't my brother ; it was my father that got it. LB: Oh your father, yeah. RA: From his job. And he's on the verge of retirement ; he's a long-time labor worker. He's worked in factories all over Lancaster County mostly, and so I guess the company wasn't moving fast enough regarding some of the safety protocols regarding COVID, and he ended up getting it. Thankfully, they were able to pay him throughout this whole process, and now they're taking precautions but it's like from the very beginning, a lot of companies and businesses and even organizations were very skeptical about the gravity of the situation and how serious it was. LB: Wow. Had he had other kinds of conditions that made him susceptible to it, or -- RA: He's diabetic. LB: Perhaps how old he is? RA: He was born in 1960, what would that be? (laughs) LB: He's sixty. I already know that because of when I was born, so. RA: Okay. (laughter) LB: This is a birthday year for him. RA: Yes, he just turned sixty actually, the 13th a few days ago. LB: Oh, there you go. Okay. So did he have some kind of existing condition that caused him -- I mean, just people over sixty are at risk ; I know -- RA: Yeah, that, and he was diabetic, and he suffers from high blood pressure, but that's about it. LB: I don't know that those things necessarily make you that much more susceptible to COVID, but wow, that's a terrible thing. And did it happen fast? Or you know, did it just, oh, I have a cold or something like that? I haven't talked with any of the people who were so close to somebody who was sick, so I'm sort of probing. RA: Yeah, so it just happened, you know he came from home one day scared and saying really bad chest pain and lack of breath, really. And so he called up his doctor, and they advised him to just stay home. So he stayed home for a while, he couldn't work, he couldn't go anywhere. Then it just got worse and worse. I would say after a week, they finally had to rush him to a hospital. And they had to put him under a ventilator, tubes going up both nostrils. Very painful procedure. (laughter) At least from what I heard. In our family, we've been communicating via, or through video, both from WhatsApp and Facebook Chat. And so, you know, it's sad to, you know, see someone, you know, especially a parent, under such pain and having to deal with, you know, something like this, and being under a ventilator for not just one but two weeks, over two weeks, actually, two weeks and about two days or something like that. A very long time. LB: Yeah, but he's okay? Relatively okay now, I'm guessing? RA: Yes, he's a firecracker. He's been wanting to like get back to normal lives right away. But you know, his health has to come first, and he has to, you know, take things easy ; he can't breathe as well as he used to, and plus he was a smoker. He quit about ten weeks ago. LB: Wow, yeah. RA: So he's much better. I wouldn't say he's fully recovered ; I'd say -- LB: It took a long time to get better. RA: Yeah, and they say that COVID-19 could have caused permanent lung damage. LB: Oh yeah. RA: But we haven't noticed, or rather, it's too early to tell whether it is going to cause -- LB: Yeah. Does he seem -- is he scared about going out and stuff? Does he think that he's safe now because he's had it, or does he fear that he's, it's interesting because sometimes people can say you could get it again and.. RA: Yup. So he's been pretty much enclosed in his house. He lives with his wife, and my brother now with the renovations and so, it's just one big happy family right now. So at least he's not by himself ; at least he has people he can talk to. I don't know, who stares, video chat, and (inaudible), you can make a quick phone call. So it's not completely isolated, but sadly I haven't been able to see him in person quite yet, but I know hopefully soon, you know, I've been trying to take the lip precautions. I can't imagine if I were to, you know, go visit, and you somehow I'll bring it over and my mom gets it. LB: Awful, wouldn't it be terrible. RA: Yeah. LB: Yeah, so everybody that I've spoken to, I've spoken to a lot of people, their biggest fear, and I'm going to ask you what your biggest concern is but it sounds like this is what your biggest concerns it too, is that for people that are your age, that they're going to get it and then give it to somebody. There's a lot of young people, I mean, a lot of young people are at risk. I just was talking to somebody who knew of a young person who had really serious contemplations, and they were younger ; they were twenty. But their biggest concern is, you know, getting it and giving it to someone in their family, so that the loved ones, and I would guess it sounds like one your concern is too. RA: Yeah, right, because so many people are asymptomatic, and I don't know if I may be or who knows if I have it now? But my mom wears her mask every day. Like I've mentioned, she undergoes dialysis three times a week. They won't let her on the bus unless she wears a mask, potentially through a program she gets from transportation to and from the dialysis clinic. And she comes back just fine, and I'm sure at the clinic, she gets her treatment done, they go above and beyond with making sure that everything is sanitary. LB: Yeah, it seems like they're working very hard to do, in places like hospitals and stuff are really safe, and in comparison to other places that you might have to go to, like have you been to other places where you didn't feel so safe? RA: Yeah. LB: I don't know. What do you -- RA: Well, Lancaster is -- and I'm sure it happens, you know, in Allentown. So we have our city council members and our mayor who wants to keep businesses closed for health reasons, and they're majority Democratic and progressive, whereas our county commissioners are Republican and want to open businesses back up. The state government, Rachel Levine and Tom Wolf want to close businesses, or leave them closed, whereas the federal administration want to open up businesses, and so all these levels, and there's so much confusion, and thankfully with the work that I do, I'm been trying to clear up some of those misconceptions and let folks know that, you know, we have to take the steps in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones whether we have it or not. And that is beyond politics. LB: Yeah, well it's wonderful to hear you say that ; it makes me feel hopeful. (laughs) So, do you have other friends that you're talking to? You know, are you talking to other people online, or have a circumstance where you can see people social distanced? Or what do you think about that? RA: Yeah, and so I, like I said, we live here ; this is our little house, this is our backyard. We have a nice little setup here. We have our little fireplace there, I have my little plant there, there's my car. I've been growing some tomatoes and some basil. I try to grow carrots, tomatoes. Or not tomatoes, I do have tomatoes, other vegetables, and they didn't turn out well, they ended up -- LB: Didn't get any carrots? RA: But what happened? LB: We have a big vegetable garden, so you didn't get any carrots, they just didn't make it, is that the thing? RA: No, well I tried to germinate them or put them in the little cup and let it grow slowly. But we had one really bad rainstorm, and I should have just brought it in, and they just drowned. So I had cucumbers, carrots, green peppers, and so on. Now I just have basil, tomatoes, and I actually, interestingly enough, have done orange plants or mandarin plants. (laughs) I found I have somewhat of a green thumb, I guess half a green thumb, because I have much more experience with indoor plants. I have about seven, eight indoor plants right now, and somehow, I found a sprout growing out of one of them. Mother-in-law's tongue I guess is what it's called. (laughs) And it had -- LB: Which is kind of a politically incorrect thing to say. There are other names for that which I think we should think of, and I can't remember what it is. But it's more Latin, like a Latin designation, like the Latin, because really it's kind of rude. But (laughs). RA: Yes. Anyway, I found this sprout growing out of that plant, and I planted it in my -- I don't know if you can recognize it, it's right here. It just grew out of it, and my friend told me to just pick out a leaf and smell it to see what it smells like. And it smells like citrus. LB: Well there you go. Well that's great. RA: So it might be, I'm assuming it's an orange, but who knows? LB: Yeah, well once they grow, that's beautiful. So by the time that grows at the end of the season, you can dig it out and bring it inside, and it'll be lovely. Great. RA: Yeah. So I've been using this time to do some more planting. This is the first time I ever started to garden, and it's not huge ; it's not impressive quite yet, but that's just, you know, one little pot that I've been trying to work. LB: Sure, yeah. It's a good time to do that ; I think that growing things like that makes you feel really much more in control of the world. You know, there's something about that, that if you can eat something from your garden, you feel really like, okay I got this. (laughs) RA: And I'm looking forward to it. LB: Well that's great ; that's so great that you're doing that. So, you're saying that you're inviting people over and they can stay farther away, or your family can (inaudible) or something like that? RA: Yeah. LB: That's great. RA: And my mom wants to spend time with other relatives, so sometimes, she'll go to my cousin's house, for instance, to help babysit. And so, you know, when it comes to family, like we like to remain close. But other guests, not so much, like acquaintances, we like to keep a distance. LB: Yes. It's tough, but I think that there, you have to do a certain amount for your family to make everybody feel like there's cohesiveness I think, there's no question. So you have a partner so I'm not going to ask you about -- I have a question on here that talks about dating apps. So I don't know whether you're using that or not, but I'm not going to ask you anyway, since you have a partner, and I'm, you know, making my moral presumption on that. Let's see, so in terms of you being worried about the virus, do you have illness, you know, like preexisting conditions that worry you, or are you more concerned about other people around you or what do you think? RA: I don't have any preexisting conditions. I'm more so worried about other relatives, and other people, particularly folks that are more susceptible like older folks or immunocompromised folks. So for the most part I am fine, but it's selfish of me to not take the necessary precautions (inaudible). LB: Right, right. What, when you're working with the people who are at the place where you're volunteering for and where your partner is working full-time, are you seeing people that are sick there, or are they indicating that they're knowing about people who are sick? RA: Well, we have not heard any reports of anyone getting coronavirus or any of them saying that they knew someone, which is great ; it's good news. No news is good news. But we have, you know like I said, we have, we were trying to mitigate further infection by having these policies like no visitors. We have an electronic thermometer to test every person every single day. We also have hand sanitizer, and a lot of these items are either donated or provided by the org. LB: Yeah. What's the most frustrating thing, do you think, that's happening for you? How are you the most frustrated? RA: I think it's, I would say the most frustrating is just the uncertainty of the situation right now not knowing, or the unknown. And that creates a lot of anxiety for other people. I'm not an anxious person. (laughs) I would say for the most part I'm stress-free. I believe there are so many alternatives to dealing with stress and anxiety. You know, I practice my own person of, I guess, a makeshift-type yoga and meditation almost every single day, and I'm very blessed to have, you know, the love and support of, you know, friends and family members, and even, I feel like now I've been trying to take action more than ever, you know in addition to helping out at TLC, I've also applied for grants for a community action project. And they're helping to fund initiatives to not just help TLC, but work on highlighting the needs of low-income communities, and in additional to TLC, Crispus Attucks, and it's a black-owned organization focused on equity and inclusion and they have a food bank every week and they provide these folks in the southeast of the city, which is the most condensed and racially-diverse part of the city. And so through this grant, I was able to purchase carts, pushcarts for folks to use for necessary items, and work with a graphic designer to produce a video to let folks know that there are people who are going through a difficult situation, whether it's having to go to a foodbank, or being homeless. And what you can do to take part, whether that means donating food, or Crispus Attucks does need, you know, people with muscle, folks that can help back these boxes, and I myself have packed, I would say at this point, hundreds of boxes. in the last few months. You know, they give out every, like I said every week, every Wednesday at that, at least 300 boxes. It used to be where folks would have to come in and show their ID, but now it's just, that food is provided to the Central PA food bank at no cost, without any, you know, folks just, take your food, take what you need. If you can't use it, then pass it along to your neighbor. And so my goal was to not just provide those pushcarts to help out folks, but to also highlight those needs and what folks can do to take action. LB: So, is there a TLC in Easton? RA: I couldn't tell you. I think I've heard of something (inaudible) -- LB: Is that a whole thick -- RA: -- but they're not affiliated. LB: Is it, oh it's not affiliated, okay, because it sounds like they have a similar program with the food distribution and stuff. RA: Well that's through Crispus Attucks ; TLC is the shelter. LB: Oh, I see. So is TLC a network across the state? Or one that's called TLC in Lancaster? RA: Correct, correct. And it's through Tabor Community Services, and they've been in existence for over thirty years. It used to be an old hotel ; it was called the King Douglas Hotel in Lancaster City, and so a couple purchased the building and just converted it into a shelter for those experiencing homelessness in the mid-eighties. LB: Oh, there you go. Looks pretty interesting. What -- RA: It's a little unique. LB: It is, although I think that that happens to hotels, or you know, places that have multiple rooms like that that are harder to figure out what to do with when they're older. So you've just described your mental health as pretty good ; you sound like you're in pretty good shape as far as that goes. RA: Yeah. LB: Are you getting exercise, or do you just normally have exercise from your job? RA: (laughs) Well I am lucky because I live walking distance to Lancaster County Central Park. And they have amazing hiking trails. The Conestoga River crosses right through the park. And so I hike at least four times a week, I would say, at least. And especially in the summer where it's nice. Even if it's hot out, just put on a pair of shorts and t-shirt, sneakers, good to go. LB: Good for you ; that's great that you're getting the exercise. RA: For sure. And then what also motivates me to do that is that, I recently signed up for a leadership cohort through the Lancaster Clean Water Partners. It's like a year program regarding leadership development and how to take collective action for clean water, sustainability and conversation in Lancaster. It's a grant they were provided through Penn State and the Lancaster Conservancy. Like I said, it's the Clean Water Partners. It's a partnership, and so we meet monthly. We used to meet in person, but obviously we had to transition to Zoom. And so, I've always wanted to do sustainable work and conservation, and I love the environment, and you know, learning about what's being done in Lancaster, and what I can do to, you know, help to take collective action for clean water, is one thing that I'm passionate about. And going out to the park and also participating in this leadership cohort, you know, makes me more appreciative, not just, you know, mentally, but also emotionally, and even physically, for that matter. LB: So what's involved with the Leadership? It's a program that is helping you to do, attain leadership skills? Or it's providing you as a leader? How does that -- RA: Kind of both. So each session is different. We had a county tour, for instance, where we visited local water treatment facilities. And then another one, we also visited a water sewage treatment facility, and what is being done for water quality. You know, we all drink water, we all take showers, or at least we would hope, so. But where does that water go? How is it treated? And even what businesses are doing with that water. For instance, what are beer distributors or brewers doing, because they heavily depend on water quality. Water in Lancaster is going to be different from water in the Lehigh Valley or even across the country in California, and so depending on your recipe and what the water is made up of, that'll change the flavor of not just beer, but products if you're a business owner. LB: How clean is the Conestoga River? RA: Not very clean. (laughs) From what I learned, less than twenty percent of the rivers and streams across Pennsylvania are up to par when it comes to the statewide standards regarding pollution and contamination. LB: And is that also because of upriver dumping, or is it coming from -- I'm just fascinated by this ; it doesn't have anything to do with COVID. RA: That's fine. LB: I wanted to know if that, you know, in places where I've lived, a great deal of the pollution comes from storm water overflow, or it comes from runoff from fertilizer. RA: Farms, yeah. LB: Or farms, or it comes from grass fertilizer, where particularly in suburban areas that clog -- that cause the algae to bloom and grow because they're fertilizing this algae that shouldn't have all this artificial fertilizer, and it clogs, it looks awful actually. RA: Yeah, and not just that, but you know, we have fracking going on in Pennsylvania, and that's a huge issue. And most recently, Maryland is suing Pennsylvania for not taking steps to mitigation pollution and contamination, and it's affecting Maryland's livelihood, particularly around the water, or rather the fishing industry and crabbing industry. LB: Yeah, so it's running through the River Susquehanna and the -- RA: Oh my goodness, over forty streams and rivers empty out into the estuary in the Chesapeake out into the Atlantic Ocean. LB: It's got to go someplace ; that's where it goes. RA: Yeah. (laughs) LB: Ugh, it's terrible. So, I'm glad that there are people that are looking after that ; that's very, very [important?]. It's, yeah. And you know, it's interesting that where I grew up, which was a quite affluent area of Connecticut, the whole east coast along the Long Island Sound was totally fouled by the fact that people put so much fertilizer in their grass, and then weed killer too, that it's just like, you know, and people think oh, it's so beautiful here, and everything, it's like yeah, you just killed everything. RA: Right, exactly, and I always say, and I keep repeating myself, you know, the work that we do, or our future depends on the work that we do now, and there is no plan B. If we don't save our environment, then you know, and I would say that it's one of our most, not just important, but pressing issues around the globe. LB: Yeah, that's definitely true. I have a very good, very, very close friend who's from Morocco. What happened? Oh, there you are. (laughs) RA: I just saw a notification ; I had to close it off, yeah. LB: Oh, who's from Morocco, and another friend of ours went to visit her in Morocco, visit her family, and they went to the part of the sea there, part of the Mediterranean that's there, that comes up to the coast, and the entire beach area and everything was completely unusable, just completely, just devastated, like you couldn't even, like the worst, horrible pollution that you could even imagine. You couldn't even put your foot in it, you know? And it's a beach ; the beautiful beach area. But it's just totally fouled, and what we're doing in the United States is exactly the same. It's just, well, you know, it doesn't matter, we'll just do it a little bit more, and we'll just me, and we have that, we have no leadership that is stopping that from happening. Let's talk a little bit about Black Lives Matter, because I don't think we can talk about COVID-19 without talking about -- RA: Sorry, I just had to say bye to my partner. Say hi. LB: Bye! IAN: Bye! LB: Have a good day. IAN: Nice to meet you, I'm Ian. LB: Nice to meet you. RA: He has to get going to work. LB: What a nice beard. RA: Yeah, he starts at four. LB: Oh. What did he say? I didn't hear him. RA: Oh, what am I going to do to get the car. I'll get the car later on. Sometimes I drop him off, but it's fine. LB: Oh. Do you own your house? RA: We don't, it's a rental. LB: Because it's old. RA: What? LB: Your house looks like, just from those bricks, it looks like it's from the 1800s. RA: I wouldn't, I couldn't tell you. We would love to buy a house. Sadly as LGBT people of color it's a little more difficult. And plus we want to do more traveling. Maybe in my mid-thirties, I just turned thirty. Or rather, I'd be thirty-one in February, so I'm in no rush to buy a house. LB: Yeah, it's just as well. Things are a little uncertain right now ; it's probably not a good idea to make that kind of choice. RA: Yeah, that's -- LB: Other people are saying it's a great time to buy and sell a house. I don't know why that is, but they're saying that. I think it's because people are paying so much attention to their houses right now because they're stuck in them. So, I'm really seeing that. But I was going to say that I don't think that we can talk about COVID-19 without talking about the current political situation and Black Lives Matter, so let's talk about Black Lives Matter a little bit, you want to say some things about that. RA: Yeah, so my partner is black and Puerto Rican. Very strong African roots in his family. Very strong Caribbean, indigenous, and even Spanish roots. His whole family speaks Spanish, and he's been highlighting that intersection of Latinx and black communities and LGBTQ+ folks, and he falls in all of that. (laughs) And so we've been fighting for black lives for years. I remember when Joey Santos was shot and killed in front of Dorney Park years ago, and here we are fighting the same fight. But we believe that black lives do matter, and that we need to push for comprehensive, not just reform, but you know, the whole system needs to change, it needs to be dismantled. You know, but that's going to take a lot of work. We need to be bold ; we need to be brave. But at the end of the day, know that we're in this together, and if your liberation is bound with ours, or rather, what is that quote? They always say, if you're here to help me, you're wasting your time, but if your liberation is bound with mine, then let's do something together. And I wholeheartedly believe that. And here in Lancaster, and even in the Lehigh Valley most recently with the officer that put his knee on a black man's neck -- yeah, you would think that the cops would learn, but you know, there's no negotiating with white supremacists and racists, especially when they are used to the power, and they oftentimes abuse it. And we even see it within the LGBTQ+ community, the reason why we have pride is because the police raided Stonewall fifty-one years ago, and trans, brown, and black folks decided to fight back against that abuse of power and police brutality. And here we are, we're still fighting police brutality and abuse of power. LB: Yeah, there's no question, that was just a few blocks from my house where that happened with the police officer. I've worked with the police before and I'm not surprised by that happening, and I'm not surprised by them already dragging their feet with regard to what (inaudible), and then they did it. And then they said, well not this time. And I'm not surprised that they released a nine-minute video that happened to be from a CCTV across the street, and that nine-minute video, I don't know if you've seen that, the longer video, is actually goes, the police officer when he's first handcuffing your guy with the other people after they've thrown him to the ground, after they've kicked him to the ground, which is what he did, he said, the police said that he fell down, but then you can see that that's not true at all, they kicked his feet out from under him and pushed him to the ground. They're trying to handcuff him and the guy kneels on his neck. But then, but people say well, you know, but then, about two minutes later after he's been handcuffed completely there the police are no longer touching him, and the police officer says something to him and he raises his head up about an inch, and the police officer knees his head right back down into the ground again. And he's handcuffed, there's absolutely, you know, so even the ridiculous sort of excuses of the first action, there was no excuse for the second action. Absolutely assault ; it's against this person who was completely unable to move at all, and then to have a police officer do that. And it's a terrible situation because I think that, you know, it's based on white supremacy but it's also based in police power. Those two things are so closely related. But there are also a lot to do with the training of the police which causes anybody who's a police officer to feel like (inaudible) it's even if they're not white, frankly. And working with guys who are unbelievably scary. RA: Yeah, and the police enforcement has a long history of discrimination and brutality and if you look at its inception, you know it was born to, out of a need within the white community to capture escaped slaves. And you can see some of those roots, or remnants are still, you know, still exist, whether people realize it or not. LB: And then, people will say that the militarization of the police started during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. You know, these people have rights ; now we're going to have to have the police officers to have machine guns and AK-47s, and dogs, and stuff like this, which actually, it was a different kind of attitude in the earlier parts of, where every police officer didn't carry a gun, for example. Most police officers didn't carry a gun, and in other countries where police officers don't carry guns. So. RA: Yeah, I don't carry a gun, and I don't feel safe around someone that carries a gun. There should be no reason why you need a gun around at all whatsoever. LB: Yeah, I think that's true, and I think that people really put themselves at risk if they advocate to proliferate arms. It just makes it scarier and scarier. I don't think that helps anything. I do think that the rapid action to marching and protesting and speaking out and photographing and talking about it is a very positive thing that I've been seeing ; I'm very excited about that. RA: Yeah, it seems like folks aren't just waking up, but you know, they're having these very difficult conversations, including you know, religion, anything LGBTQ+, and you know, these are, and politics, and these are things that you don't talk about at the dinner table. LB: Yeah, I don't think many people -- I mean, I've talked to a lot of people ; I have to say that, I haven't interviewed anybody who said, yeah, I'm not wearing a mask, and I think that, you know, I don't interview people like that because I'm not interested in reaching out to that population, but also, I'm only interviewing people who are part of the queer population, and frankly, I'm not coming across a lot of people in the queer community saying, yeah, go ahead and kill everybody, I don't care, as long as I'm alive ; I'm just not finding within our own community. There are people but not people who are going to talk to me, because they know I'll [yell at them?]. So, you know, I know that there are people who want to get back to work. And I was just talking, the last person I spoke to just before you was a person who's retired now, but he was a schoolteacher and he was talking about all the ramifications of sending kids back to school. And pointing out all sorts of reasons why that's just not going to work. He was talking about, he was a music teacher, and he came in contact with, of three schools, with every single kid in a week, he would come in contact with every single one of those kids, and so his potential for spreading it himself to all of those people, or having all of those kids in contact with him, he said, you know, if I were there, I'd get sick ; how can I not? I'm coming in contact with, you know, 800 kids. RA: Oh my goodness. LB: And you know, it's only one kid. And he was also talking about, this is pretty interesting, he was talking about how most inner-city schools, and I'm sure this is true in Lancaster public schools too, they all don't have air conditioning. A lot of inner-city schools in Allentown are not air conditioned, or only parts of them are air conditioned. And even some of the more recently built buildings are not air conditioned. So as a result, they will take kids who are in rooms where it's very, very hot, and they'll take all the hot rooms and bring them down to the air-conditioned rooms. So now you don't just have one class of kid, you have fifty kids. And how do you keep those kids from not infecting each other? Or you leave them in the room where it's one hundred and one degrees, or you bring them to a room where there's fifty kids, and a bunch of them have their masks down like this because they don't know how to wear them. So, it was really interesting what he said ; I hadn't even thought about that. And he said, oh yeah, I think about that every day. RA: Yeah, and then the whole, going back and forth right now, school districts don't know whether to open or close, and there's just so much controversy. LB: Yeah, and it's really based in greed. I mean, the only reason to open schools is so that you can let parents go back to work so that they can do minimum wage jobs to support rich people. Because truthfully, you know, we need to be able to -- parents need to be able to stay home with their kids right now. And yeah, they need money. But who really needs, you know? I was talking to one of the people I interviewed that has a daughter who has a congenital heart defect, and she was called back to work because she's an essential worker because she's a waitress ; she's a food service person, where she makes below minimum wage and the restaurant wasn't using precautions. There were people that were sick there, and her mother said to me, if she gets sick, she's going to die. But if she doesn't go to work, she's going to lose her job. Because they told her, if you don't come to work, it's your resignation. She said, but you're not -- nobody's got a mask on here. I'm coming in contact with all these people, you know, particularly wait staff because people who are eating are not wearing masks. So, and you know, this is not somebody who's making $300,000 a year as an essential worker. The most essential workers are the ones who don't make any money. RA: Yeah, minimum wage jobs. LB: Yeah, yeah. Warehouse workers, talk to people who are warehouse workers, and the dangers in their circumstances are very, very high. So okay, I think you were covering most of the stuff. So you seem to be in pretty good shape, I have to say, Ricardo, that you're the most stable person I've talked to, the last eighteen people. RA: Appreciate it. LB: And you're giving me a great deal of hope. What other things give you hope about right now? RA: What gives me hope is, oh my goodness, that's a big question. (laughs) What gives me hope is the prospective of a better future, that we'll get over this pandemic, that we'll be able to live full, authentic lives, and that finally we're highlighting black lives, but also trans lives and LGBTQ+ lives, and that we're highlighting that intersection and the need to lift those voices. And just because a group is gaining more rights doesn't take away someone else's. (laughs) That's not how -- LB: We're not rationing rights. RA: Yes, yes. I never understood that rationale. But what gives me hope is that we're putting in the work, that we're taking collective action, that I'm meeting with so many organizations, so many leaders on the ground, or rather on the computer (laughs) doing amazing things from virtual workshops, training sessions, webinars, community forums, and building relationships with legislators, people that are decision-makers, and building those relationships with their constituents, and that's part of the work that I'll be doing too. LB: Are you finding some positive things from people who are in the statehouse and stuff? I mean -- RA: So the statehouse is majority Democratic ; however the state senate, not so much. So we're having some trouble, and I recently met an open queer person of color, Malcolm Kenyatta from the Philadelphia area, and he's been championing COVID relief and raising the wage, and talking about, you know, the hypocrisy within the Republican Party, and highlighting that it's not a political issue ; it's a human issue. It just so happens that Republicans time and time again are trying to take away our healthcare, and they don't want to pay it. And sadly, they have the wealth, they have the representation, and the power, and so we want a more evenly distribution of that wealth, and we'll do that at any cost necessary, or rather, any means necessary. LB: I think it's true, you know, people have often, and I've been fighting for equal rights for the LGBT community and other communities for my whole career, and for years and years and years, and a long time ago, when we were fighting to pass the anti-discrimination ordinance in the city of Allentown, which was the first passage that included gender identity in the state ; nobody else had gender identity anything, not Philadelphia, anything, it was just Allentown. The effort to pass it started in 1998, and we were successful, and finally successful in 2002. RA: Congratulations. LB: Thank you. And then after that, I mean there were only six communities that had nondiscrimination laws ; Lancaster was one of them, and Lancaster interpretively, the city of Lancaster interprets as inclusive of gender identity as well. But it didn't say gender identity in the law. So once we passed it in Allentown, now we have fifty-six, fifty-eight communities that have nondiscrimination laws that includes sexual orientation and gender identity. But it's still only a third, really a third of the state. But the thing that somebody told me way back then, and I think this has always been true, and I've read this in a variety of circumstances, no matter what disenfranchised group you're talking about, you cannot compromise for basic civil rights. You shouldn't do that, because the bottom line is, so people were saying to me when I was leading that effort to pass that law in Allentown, we had to add sexual orientation and gender identity into an existing law, and what they said, people were saying, just do sexual orientation, because gender identity's too edgy. And my response to that is, look, you know, our enemies would deny us oxygen if they could. And there are people in the statehouse of the state of Pennsylvania that would do that. They would just deny us oxygen ; they'd deny us the right to live in the state. And so, if they would deny you oxygen, they're not going to be satisfied with a compromise. And you shouldn't be either. Don't compromise, because you know, this is just a question of basic civil rights, the right to housing, the right to employment, the right to healthcare, the right to economic distribution, the right to education, all of those things are just regular things. It's what every American, every person in America should be able to presume is their right to have, and it is ; it is. RA: Yeah, in college, sorry to cut you off, you just reminded me of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? And if you take care of our basic needs first, we can continue up the ladder to potentially self-actualize, or self-realize. The main issues are, imagine how much our communities could thrive if we had guaranteed housing, quality education, clean air, clean water, clothing. All of these issues that are basic human necessities, if they were guaranteed to all of us, how much further along when it comes to progress and development could we be in ten, fifteen, twenty, one hundred years down the road? But because folks, you know are apprehensive to change or they just don't care enough to create that change -- LB: They're incredibly short-sighted. It's short-sighted (inaudible) because if you have a living wage, a living minimum wage, it improves and makes a robust economy ; it just does. So if you're looking at it purely from the viewpoint of greed, which is often the other side's viewpoint, pretty much it's the entire viewpoint, it's incredibly short-sighted to say, well we're not going to spend the money to give this population, this worker population a living wage because it will come out of our pockets. But it really doesn't, because if you pay people living wage, frankly, that's the whole basis of capitalism. Now you have people, even one of the most dastardly capitalists in the world, Henry Ford, who started Ford cars and changed the whole circumstance, he said, I want to produce a car that my own employees could buy. And so, you know, it has to be a good, cheap thing, and I have to pay them enough so that we can continue this American project which is based in capitalism. Capitalism has become this enormous seesaw of the incredibly rich and the incredibly poor, and the poor are the workers. And one thing we've totally seen about COVID-19 is without people who are making minimum wage, everything grinds to a halt. We can't do anything you know? Now you have to spend millions of tax, billions of tax dollars to just make it so that this population is still going to be able to come back to work when things open. I mean, that's speaking from a totally greed basis, which is a terrible basis to look at anything. But it's ridiculously short-sighted to say, well we're not going to pay you, but we want you to buy our computers. Or we want you to buy food in the grocery store. But we're not going to give you any money to do it. Well, that's not going to work. You know, and we also know that corporations, or companies that are justice-based will actually do that and it doesn't hurt their profit margin at all. Like Costco, or Ben & ; Jerry's or something like that who just pay a living wage. They pay a living wage, and they pay their workers, and they pay for their worker's healthcare, so what comes out is a real sense of support. You know the workers themselves have a sense of loyalty to their employer, and they work hard, instead of thinking, well, they don't care anything about me. You know, it's just a bad circumstance ; it always comes from greed. RA: Exactly, and they're the same ones that want to bust unions, and intimidate workers from former unions. And unions have a long history of creating change. That's the reason why we have a 40-hour workweek, or why we don't have children working in factories anymore, and why we have benefits, or why we have vacation time and all of these other benefits. And then you have folks who don't realize how important unions are, and because it's so anti-capitalist and more people-oriented, bosses and the rich are intimidated by the people, by unions, because ultimately, or rather at the end of the day, you can have a million executives, but if you have not one worker, what's the point? LB: Right, it's really true. Well you're certainly right about that ; it's been a joy talking to you, as I'm so pleased to be able to do that. So the last part of this, you know, that we're hoping somebody people will be looking at these videos, 30 or 40 years, you'll still be around. RA: (laughs) I hope so. LB: Of these, well I'm sure you are. Look at how healthy you are. And I want to give you an opportunity, and I want to encourage you to give a message to those people that are looking at this video sometimes in the future and say, you know, something about now, and you know, something that's sort of positive for them to think of. What can you think of that you would say to something -- RA: Yeah, sure. So things might look a little stark ; we're in the middle of a global pandemic. We have constant rioting, we have violence. But in the midst of all that, there is good, there is love, there is support, support for black folks, for LGBTQ-plus folks, for folks in the Latinx community, for refugees, for folks that are disabled. We're all in this together, and it's July 20th, 2020, but I hope that when you see this video, things are much better, and I know that, you know, with the work that we're doing now, we can together collectively develop policy solutions for some of the major problems we're facing, not just today, but hopefully, by the time you see this, these problems will be long resolved. LB: I hope so. RA: But again, we're in this together, and we just have to stay persistent. We have to keep pushing, and we have to lean in. We have no other option. We can't sit idly by, and the time was yesterday, but at least there are people doing it, and we're doing it boldly, courageously, but we're not alone. Like I said, we're in this together. LB: Yeah. Well thank you very, very much for talking to me and taking an hour and a little bit more out of your day to do this. I really appreciate it very, very much and everybody who will see this will appreciate it as well. And I love everything you said, and you give me a great deal of hope, so thank you for doing that. And I appreciate it, so what you'll get a transcript of this, and as soon as they're finished transcribing it, we send them to another college and they fix that, and then they give it back to us, so thank you again, and have a great day, and have a great weekend. Keep up the good work. RA: Yes, great. Thank you so much for inviting me, and I hope we stay in touch, and I'm sure we'll cross paths again soon. LB: I hope so. Okay, bye-bye. RA: All right. 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=
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01:08:39
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Ricardo Almodovar, July 20, 2020
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In this interview, Almodovar and Bradbury talk about how people's lives have been impacted under the pandemic, and how LGBTQ+ people fit in a pandemic. They talk about the problems in Allentown and Lancaster while even mentioning their own families. Ultimately, this interview generally talks about the effects of the pandemic in both the Allentown and Lancaster community.
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PH40_27
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COVID-19
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2020-07-20
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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6488a0d174408162ba0f6765d92efbb1
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Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - )
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Mary Foltz
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Rick Balmer
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-21.xml
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5.4 December 6, 2021 Rick Balmer, December 6, 2021 LGBT-21 1:27:42 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 Rick Balmer Mary Foltz video/mp4 BalmerRick_20211206_video.mp4 1.0:|25(10)|60(8)|77(14)|98(5)|121(2)|142(10)|165(8)|188(6)|207(11)|230(6)|247(15)|272(5)|289(11)|308(12)|331(5)|350(14)|375(6)|396(2)|417(3)|434(12)|455(5)|478(4)|497(9)|516(18)|539(7)|562(4)|581(10)|600(14)|619(10)|644(9)|669(15)|690(5)|711(14)|734(15)|757(10)|782(6)|803(8)|824(9)|841(9)|860(10)|879(6)|900(9)|921(6)|944(17)|969(10)|992(4)|1009(13)|1032(11)|1049(6)|1066(14)|1087(15)|1104(15)|1119(15)|1136(15)|1155(15)|1176(2)|1199(10)|1222(4)|1241(8)|1268(2)|1289(8)|1310(9)|1333(5)|1354(15)|1375(10)|1394(16)|1417(4)|1440(4)|1457(15)|1478(3)|1499(8)|1518(9)|1541(8)|1562(2)|1581(11)|1602(6)|1623(10)|1644(7)|1663(10)|1682(16)|1703(7)|1720(8)|1741(3)|1760(6)|1781(5)|1800(8)|1819(10)|1842(14) 0 https://youtu.be/vMMrat3tMoU YouTube video 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Rick Balmer to talk about his life and experiences in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding this year from ACLS, and Rick and I are meeting on Zoom because there’s a pandemic going on, and Rick is up in Connecticut, so we’re meeting on Zoom on December 6, 2021, for this interview. So, Rick thank you so much for being here today with me.
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 ; RICK BALMER: Thanks, glad to be here.
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 ; MF: And to start, will you please state your full name and spell it for me.
 ; 
 ; RB: Yeah, it’s Rick, R-I-C-K, middle initial D as in David, and last name B as in boy, A-L-M-E-R, and I was born November first, 1951. 0 116 Early Years of Life / Growing Up Gay MF: Great! All right, well let’s get started, and I’ll just begin with this question: Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life?
 ; 
 ; RB: Yeah, I was born in Rochester, New York. My parents were there briefly. I grew up in Elmira/Horseheads, New York, which was where both their families had been rooted for a long-- like 150 years. It was a very ordinary and probably very typical life of the ’50s and ’60s as I grew up there, in a tract home. All those homes that were built after World War II. My dad had stayed there because they built the Westinghouse plant and he’d gotten a degree in engineering with the GI Bill after World War II. He was in the Air Force at that time. I was one of four siblings, the eldest, and very academic mostly. I was a book worm. Definitely wasn’t a sports enthusiast. 0 471 Finding Identity in the Lehigh Valley / Time at Lehigh University RB: Like I said, there was a little bit of literature. I started to find, again through libraries, you know the old, some of the novels of Mary Renault. Little things like that that came along. Once I got to my freshman year in college-- I left Horseheads for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to go to Lehigh University, and that would be starting in the fall of 1969, and one of my first memories, very early memory there was, within a couple months of being there, finding the Bethlehem Public Library and it’s the same one that’s there today. It was brand new at that point. 
 ; 
 ; Going there by myself and found a book that I knew about, and I was thrilled to find it. It was Gore Vidal’s The City in the Pillar. A very early landmark gay novel. It actually dated back to 1948 if I recollect correctly, so it had been around a while. I was so thrilled to find it that I-- I didn’t have a library card so I couldn’t take it out, so I just sat in the library and read it in a couple hours that afternoon. 0 769 Study Abroad in Germany / Burgeoning Gay Art Forms RB: My first semester of my junior year, I went to Germany on a program abroad and spent one semester at the University of Bonn. I decided to pursue German as my major by that time, and the time I spent in that semester away from Lehigh actually was good for my growing up as a gay person. Not that I don’t think Germany was definitely more advanced at that point, but I just I think found other out people a little bit and found a couple of people to talk to for the first time and interacted just a little bit with other gay people. It was just sort of very enlightening. Had my first sort of brief romance. It was very platonic, but it was a brief romance, so. Cut off obviously by my having to leave. 
 ; 
 ; So, I came back with just a little more I think self-confidence and reassurance and I was really much more assured as a gay person at that point. Also, around that point, there started to be gay films, and I think that was part of the whole thing. You know, there’s gay literature was important to me, but films also started to become important, and I know I saw specifically while I was in Germany, the Luchino Visconti film of Death in Venice, of Thomas Mann’s novel, very famous novelette, and you know that was quite eye-opening. It was subtle for the times, but it had a great impact for me. 0 1023 Creating Community at Lehigh University / Connecting with Le-Hi-Ho RB: So, just backing up a tiny bit, when I came back from the semester abroad in Germany, so it was in fall of 1971 just as I was turning 20, I was really ready to you know somehow come out and meet the gay community, and I found at some point that fall, there was an ad in Lehigh’s student newspaper, the Brown and White, for draft counseling for gay students, and the Vietnam War and the draft being a big issue at that point, and whether or not you wanted to say anything about being gay to get out of being in the military, that was a big issue then. 
 ; 
 ; In any case, Le-Hi-Ho, the Lehigh Valley Homophile organization, which had as I found out had started in the Lehigh Valley in 1969, so it had been there a couple years, had put the ad in. So, I called. Not that I really wanted the draft counseling, but I called because I just wanted to get in touch with the group, you know, and I didn’t know that much about it. So, I did. Got in touch with the group and very quickly I found myself, I don’t know, within a couple of weeks, invited to a party which was held at Kutztown. 0 1394 Le-Hi-Ho Outreach / Creating A Safe Space to Socialize RB: I believe I went to their first monthly meeting in December of that year, shortly after the party at Kutztown, and I think I jumped right in and within the next couple of months, maybe January or February, I decided to do their speaking-- they were doing speaking engagements around the community, which ultimately, I thought was just one of the most important things they were doing. And in retrospect, 50 years later, I truly, truly believe that being public and being out in some way to any number of people, as many as you could be, just made a momentous social change which accomplished way more than I thought it would within my lifetime. 
 ; 
 ; I never at that point dreamed that society would change as much as it has in these 50 years, and that we would be where we are now with all the things that have changed, and how for granted gay people are taken at this point in time. I know it’s not universal, I know it’s not [laughs] thoroughly spread across and through the United States, even, and probably here in the Northeast we’re in a much better place for the most part than maybe other parts of the country still, but still: society has changed so radically, and I just, it’s one of the things I’m proud of, is that I started doing the speaking engagements and kept them up. 0 1770 Le-Hi-Ho Library / Anonymity & ; Being "Out"
 ; RB: There was also Le-Hi-Ho was well-known for its library, which was dear to my heart, being the bookworm that I am, so I got very active in that and I was the librarian for a number of years, and I wrote book reviews for their newsletter for a number of years, and years later after that sometimes I wrote the whole newsletter, but in the earliest years I just wrote book reviews, and movie reviews sometimes. 
 ; 
 ; I was a great proselytizer for gay literature-- literature and non-fiction because I think those were just two so important things for coming to terms with yourself and educating yourself, and like I said, it was up to you to do it yourself. You couldn’t just go out and soak up the media, you know, of everything sitting around the way it is today. Just much easier to find everything. You really had to search things out. It was much harder to get the information. 0 2131 Political Work w/ Le-Hi-Ho RB: So, those little things were pretty rare at that time, so that was a really nice memory. It was also around that time that, I mean Le-Hi-Ho had been doing political things since the beginning, some of the members had gone to New York City and Philadelphia with all kinds of initiatives relating to civil rights, which were in a very primitive state at that point, but there were on-going state efforts, and a number of us in the group went to Harrisburg to talk to, lobby so to speak, talk to legislators in Harrisburg, and that also I’m quite sure was in 1975. 
 ; 
 ; It was an interesting experience, I mean we all dressed up to the nines to go there, and the reception was very, very touchy. I think the legislat-- I’m not positive it was THE first time, but you know, the legislators were very, very antsy and touchy about all these gay men and women in the state legislature, and you know we had some cordial interviews with legislators, and some that were rather frosty and very stiff [laughs] and uncomfortable. That was just all part of the start of things getting better, ultimately. 0 2425 Activism in the Workplace RB: Just going back again, another memory: although I was never really a parade person, a number of us from Le-Hi-Ho went I think to the 1975 Christopher Street March in New York City and had a Le-Hi-Ho banner in the parade that year. So, that was important that we did it, and it was a good memory. It was a good memory. Those are I think maybe most of the things I wanted to touch on there. I’ll just add an addendum, a little later in life I became active again in the LGBT movement, but this time it was at work. In short, after I left the Lehigh University libraries in the late ’70s, I went to work for Aetna. 
 ; 
 ; It was Aetna Life and Casualty at the time. They were in Allentown, and worked for them all through the ’80s, and then in 1990 moved to Connecticut to take a job transfer with them, and my partner, Ron, had worked for Bethlehem Steel for years, as did so many people in the Lehigh Valley, but they were a fading company at that time. They were in deep trouble, and Ron was ready to exit. He thought the timing was good, so we left the Lehigh Valley and moved to Connecticut, and I worked for the rest of my working career to retirement at Aetna. Their home office was there, although the home office was in Hartford, which is well known, but the home office for the division I was in was in Middletown, Connecticut so that’s where I was located. 0 2573 Official Coming Out / The Process of Coming Out RB: So, I mean in a way that was like another coming out. It’s funny, coming out is you know everybody talks about it and there are so many layers coming out. You know, you come out to yourself, and then you come out to family. And I never touched on that, so I’ll just make a quick retro, and say [laughs] I came out officially, even though I’d been with Ron for a couple years, I didn’t officially talk to my family about it until around 1975 when we were getting into politics and everything, and I just said, “Okay, so we just have to sit down and talk about it.” 
 ; 
 ; So, we did. Everything went pretty well with my family. They weren’t a talkative, warm, talk, talk, talk family so we didn’t talk about it much or a lot. Until years had gone by, I would say. Which was okay. That’s just the way things were then. But you know, it was all accepting. So, it was never traumatic for me in the way it is for a lot of LGBT people, which is very, very fortunate you know for me. I never had really horrendous coming out experiences. 0 2912 Experiences During the AIDS Crisis / Relationship between Gay Men and Lesbians
 ; RB: [...] I will go back and intervene perhaps, and touch on what the AIDS crisis did to all of that. 
 ; 
 ; In the latter part of, well, in the say about ’83, ’84, ’85 when things started to become up for public discussion, you know without going into the AIDS crisis itself and just talking about the social impact, it was both good and bad. I think there was just hysteria around it. And with that I can go back to one memory, which is unfortunate but amusing in a way. I remember at that time in the department I was working in in Aetna-- this was probably ’85. Yeah, you know, I think it was after the public had become much more aware of AIDS because a couple of celebrities had died, and I’m thinking I think it was maybe after Rock Hudson had died, and the whole issue of AIDS had just come into the public consciousness at that time. But of course, it was-- there was hostility. There was a lot of discomfort. People didn’t want to talk about it. 0 3203 Reflection on Identity Development RB: [...] In retrospect, I think I’ve been lucky as a happy gay person. I think I’m very lucky I didn’t undergo the trauma of coming out or being guilty or terribly unhappy as I was growing up. I really knew I was gay, I just had to figure out what it was all about. I was ready to be gay and call myself gay as soon as I could. 
 ; 
 ; You know, it’s so hard to say this, but I’m really sure that in today’s climate I would probably have been one of those 12 to 13 years old, you know 13 year old person who is coming out as they do today. Maybe not until 14 or 15, who knows. What can I say? It’s hard to project. But those were different times, so it took you a lot longer [laughs] to figure everything out. 
 ; 
 ; So, my not coming out say officially until I was 19 to 20 was very typical. In fact, you know, many, many people came out much later than that. In their thirties, in their thirties. It’s sort of a little mind boggling now, and even later. We would sometimes have people getting involved in Le-Hi-Ho, I remember one man who was in his sixties and started getting involved after his wife died, because then he felt he was free. And so that was always a touching memory too. The fact that you hope that isn’t happening today. 0 3330 Vietnam War Draft & ; Gay Men MF: Well, I have some-- thank you so much for all that you’ve shared. I have some questions that just as I was listening to your story, you know some of which are about Le-Hi-Ho. You had said that you had reached out to Le-Hi-Ho because they published something in the Brown and White about the draft. We’ll have some younger listeners who will tune in here, and they won’t understand what was going on with the draft, so could you talk a little bit about Le-Hi-Ho’s sort of outreach around the draft and what that meant for gay men at the time? 
 ; 
 ; RB: Yeah. I can a little. I mean, I never got involved in it myself so I was never-- I can’t say that I was expert on what gay men were being told, but it had to do with the fact that of course the draft was in place, I can’t remember since when, in the ’60s, and you know basically because of the Vietnam War, and it still went on through most of my Lehigh career. In fact, [laughs] one of my, I don’t know what the logistics were, one of my indelible memories of being at Lehigh was sitting in the TV room in my dorm, ooh, what year was it? I was probably a sophomore or junior. Around the TV with all the guys in the dorm, I can’t remember what exactly. Finding out something relating about what our lotto draft numbers were, because you were assigned lottery draft numbers in those days. And you know, if you got the lowest draft numbers, it meant they were going to call you up first for the Vietnam War. 0 3556 Le-Hi-Ho Newsletters MF: -- go join!” That’s wonderful. Well, I had another question about the Le-Hi-Ho newsletters, because as you know I’ve been reading them studiously, and I think they’re just phenomenal productions, and my question is what was your intention as one of the writers, the book reviewer, film reviewer, and also someone who put together entire newsletters? What was your hope for those newsletters? What did you want them to accomplish? What did you want to include? How did they circulate? I’m just really curious about your desire for those publications, and then where they went. 
 ; 
 ; RB: Yeah, that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll just touch on first, I mean Le-Hi-Ho had a post office box, which turned out to be the best solution for an address. You didn’t have a physical office space, which we didn’t ever really have. The community, LGBT community centers came later in the ’80s with other entities, like the Lambda Center, and much later entities in Allentown. 0 3987 Social Atmosphere of Le-Hi-Ho / An Alternative to Bars MF: [...] I’m interested in Le-Hi-Ho as an alternative to the bars, and could you say a little bit more about what it was like to be a member of the group? What the meetings were like, why they were a good alternative to the bars, what they offered that bars weren’t?
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 ; RB: Yeah, yeah, because I think I was such a big advocate of that, to make those meetings, to make them welcoming for one thing. And so, I think what we always tried to do is the people who went -- there was always a board of directors, you know a running board, which I can’t remember consisted of five or eight people, and there was annual elections, so there was turnover all the time, but there was always a core group, and it was always one of their jobs to be welcoming and network with especially the newest people who would show up at any given monthly meeting because you always had to realize that any meeting could be the first public entrance on the stage for some of the people who were showing up into the gay community, as an alternative to a bar which yeah, people do that too. They make their entrance into the gay community at a bar, and it is what it is. I mean, there’s no official structure [laughs] to welcome you, or make you feel comfortable or happy, and probably some of those experiences are good, and some of them are not. 0 4460 Connections with LGBT Organizations Outside the Lehigh Valley MF: Did Le-Hi-Ho have relationships with homophile organizations in New York and Philly? You talked about in 1975 going to the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in New York City, and you’ve talked about what a life-affirming kind of organization it was in the Lehigh Valley. What was sort of the connection beyond the Lehigh Valley? Was there a connection beyond the Lehigh Valley? 
 ; 
 ; RB: Yeah, I would say there was. A lot of it happened actually in the earliest years, you know, from ’69, even before I got active in early ’72. A lot of it really, I think was from that era. My partner Ron, was involved in that. But some of it continued after and you know I knew some of that, but yeah, I would say it was especially New York City, Philadelphia oriented, with extensions out to like I know there was a group I think at State College in Pennsylvania, and outfits like Delaware Valley College Students in whatever city that’s nearest, in Bucks County, [laughs] Pennsylvania. I forget exactly where the college is. Everybody was on everybody’s distribution list. You know, they got our newsletter, and we’d get all their newsletters, so there was networking in that way, and some of it was actual travel. 0 4766 Relationship with Ron MF: [...] I’m wondering if maybe we could talk a little bit about your relationship with Ron. You talked about meeting Ron in the 1970s at that Kutztown party, or meeting him through Le-Hi-Ho. Do you want to share a little bit about your life with Ron, and that your relationship with your beloved?
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 ; RB: Yeah, I will a little bit as an overview. I guess I’m a little probably, I’m going to try, to get very personal. I’m not really good at that, but yeah. I’m definitely willing to give it an overview. Yeah, I’d said it was 50-- it’s almost 50 years to the day right now when Ron and I met, but I mean we started seeing each other immediately after that. Could really consider our anniversary-- when I graduated from Lehigh, it was Memorial Day weekend, that’s when I moved in with him. 
 ; 
 ; He had already, he had bought a house in Bethlehem, an old house, which was, he was restoring, and needed a lot of restoration. And so that was the start. That was a year and a half later after we met, so that could really be called our official anniversary. We lived in that house during the time that I worked at Lehigh. During the ’70s. We moved in 1980 to a separate, yeah, to a different house that we bought in Bethlehem and that lasted until the 1990 move to Connecticut. 0 5136 Theater Trips / Closing Remarks RB: Yeah. Trivial memory. Ha. Le-Hi-Ho also sponsored occasional theater trips to New York City to see gay plays. In the ’70s. And there weren’t too many of them around, but that was fun. We did that. I just thought of that, that was a great experience. We always wondered what the bus drivers thought when we hired buses to cart 50 people, so to speak, to New York City, but it all went well. It all went well. So, I guess I’ll end with that rather trivial memory [laughs].
 ; 
 ; MF: It’s one of my true joys reading the newsletter when I see that you all have, you’re talking about going to a show, and then like not enough people signed up, but reading it now, you get to see like, “Oh, that was playing in New York in the ’70s!” And it’s almost like a chart of gay cultural, you know just a little bit of the gay theatrical happening in New York, and especially with the book reviews, you really get the sense of what books mattered to our community in the Lehigh Valley, and you know, to the [reviewers like you. I just love those parts of the newsletter. It gives just a snapshot of some of the culture. 0 MovingImage Rick Balmer recalls his life as a gay man in the Lehigh Valley, and the process of “coming out”, as well as his work with Lehigh Homophile Organization (Le-Hi-Ho) and its legacy on the LGBTQ+ community. INTERVIEW WITH RICK BALMER DECEMBER 6, 2021 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Rick Balmer to talk about his life and experiences in LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding this year from ACLS, and Rick and I are meeting on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on, and Rick is up in Connecticut, so we're meeting on Zoom on December 6, 2021, for this interview. So, Rick thank you so much for being here today with me. RICK BALMER: Thanks, glad to be here. MF: And to start, will you please state your full name and spell it for me. RB: Yeah, it's Rick, R-I-C-K, middle initial D as in David, and last name B as in boy, A-L-M-E-R, and I was born November first, 1951. MF: Thank you. And I want to just go over, just brief questions about consent. I know you previously signed a consent form, but I just want to check back in. Do you consent to this interview today? RB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to have this interview transcribed, digitized, and made available online in searchable formats? RB: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats including articles, films, websites, presentations, or any other formats that the future might bring us? RB: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you will have 30 days after the electronic delivery of a transcript of this interview to review it, identify any parts that you'd like to delete, or you could withdraw the whole interview from the project if you so wished? RB: Yes, I understand. MF: Great! All right, well let's get started, and I'll just begin with this question: Would you tell me a little bit about the early years of your life? RB: Yeah, I was born in Rochester, New York. My parents were there briefly. I grew up in Elmira/Horseheads, New York, which was where both their families had been rooted for a long-- like 150 years. It was a very ordinary and probably very typical life of the '50s and '60s as I grew up there, in a tract home. All those homes that were built after World War II. My dad had stayed there because they built the Westinghouse plant and he'd gotten a degree in engineering with the GI Bill after World War II. He was in the Air Force at that time. I was one of four siblings, the eldest, and very academic mostly. I was a book worm. Definitely wasn't a sports enthusiast. I think overall I had a very happy childhood, very typical of the '50s and '60s. I think they were very innocent times in a lot of ways. I don't have an awful lot probably to say about it, except if I come back in retrospect. I don't think there was terribly much that was really, really interesting in my earliest years. You know, as far as growing up gay? Again, it was the Age of Innocence. It's such a contrast to today, where I think young people know so much and learn so much about the context of being LGBT today, but at that point there really was absolutely nothing, and you were on your own. I think I started exploring that aspect of myself as soon as I was cognizant of it, which was fairly early. Probably maybe 12 and 13. Libraries were your greatest friend at that point-- even though you wouldn't think so, but amazingly there were some LGB-- not called that, of course, but you know LGBT resources in libraries at that time. Very primitive and very unfortunate, some of them you know, but I found some things that were there, I remember going not to the little public library that was in our branch in Horseheads where I great up, the village outside Elmira, but to the main county library in Elmira, New York: The Steele Memorial Library, and finding some early resources there like I just remember a title or two. I remember Judd Marmor's Sexual Inversion. You know, unfortunate title, but for the times it was probably [laughs] pretty progressive. Trying to hunt through the card catalogue and not finding much, but just scrutinizing every little scrap of detail I could find. Although I didn't know it at the time, just what my intuition and gaydar tells me now was, you know I had a very helpful lesbian librarian, although she never-- we never discussed the things I was looking for at that time. I all did that independently, but she was very nice to me, and I just always remember her. So, that's an early remembrance of my exploring what I could find out about myself. Because as I said, you know there really was so little in the media or anything, and what came along tended to be of course just incredibly negative. I mean, much later on there were things like I remember the great Time Magazine article in 1968, forget the title of it, Gays in America or something like that. I think it was on the cover, and of course it was sort of momentous, but you know very, very negative in terms of how we view things today. You know, I think I only heard the word "homosexual" said out loud by somebody maybe once in high school. I mean, that's how innocent things were. I think everybody was innocent, not just LGBT people growing up, but the general population. All the other kids you know. I mean, it just wasn't talked about. Which, you know in retrospect, probably was a good thing for the most part? I mean, not being talked about, of course, is one of the reasons were in the terrible situation we were in, but on the other hand I think it sort of sheltered you to a certain extent from abuse. And of course, that would depend on your environment, obviously. I know the experience varies for different people, but I guess my growing up was innocent and sheltered, and you know my parents never talked about it. No one I knew talked about it. It probably was a good thing ; it gave me this bubble to find myself without horrendous abuse or oppression. Yeah, I'm certainly aware of that a little later on in life, after I left home and went to college, that started becoming perhaps a little more apparent, but maybe that innocence I think was really sort of a good thing, just considering the times. There was no context. You had to figure it all out yourself. Like I said, there was a little bit of literature. I started to find, again through libraries, you know the old, some of the novels of Mary Renault. Little things like that that came along. Once I got to my freshman year in college-- I left Horseheads for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to go to Lehigh University, and that would be starting in the fall of 1969, and one of my first memories, very early memory there was, within a couple months of being there, finding the Bethlehem Public Library and it's the same one that's there today. It was brand new at that point. Going there by myself and found a book that I knew about, and I was thrilled to find it. It was Gore Vidal's The City in the Pillar. A very early landmark gay novel. It actually dated back to 1948 if I recollect correctly, so it had been around a while. I was so thrilled to find it that I-- I didn't have a library card so I couldn't take it out, so I just sat in the library and read it in a couple hours that afternoon. That was the first gay novel I ever read, and that was just sort of a thrill. Being a book worm and having written things being such important to me, that was just a big, big memory. In retrospect you know, I guess I can't say too much more about growing up. I really, in retrospect, do not remember knowing anybody who was gay in growing up, although I did find out as you often do later, that one of my be-- I had very few friends. I was an introvert and didn't have many close friends. Found out later one of my closest friends was gay. Years later I found that out. I think I was aware when I went to some conference that they did, it was run by the American Legion for high school juniors, I think, during some summer. That probably would have been '67, perhaps. And you know, running across maybe the first other boy I thought was gay, but was very tentative and there was nothing [laughs], nothing, there really wasn't any communication, but that's an early memory. But other than that, pretty innocent. Pretty sheltered. Not a lot of progress in finding myself. I think things really changed when I went to school when I went to college. In retrospect I'll also say this: at that time Lehigh was all male. Had nothing to do with my choosing the school, and in retrospect I could almost say, eh, you know, maybe I wouldn't recommend that [laughs] for somebody. I really think that atmosphere, I think that breeds homophobia and homoeroticism amongst young men of that age. I really do. And it was very complex and tricky to negotiate, and confusing, especially if you had no context and you didn't know, you know you were still finding yourself and you didn't know where all these other guys were coming from. I mean, it was just a very, very odd dichotomy the way young men act. You know, young men in groups. That's where, I've always said that: a lot of homophobia is rooted in young men in groups. It just aggravates [laughs] the whole thing. But it was interesting, because I was there for the last two years when Lehigh was all male, and my third and fourth year, the first women came in. Of course, they were in such small quantity that I can't remember how many. It was probably less than 100 for the first class, I think. It wasn't enough to see major changes. I think I saw the inkling of changes in the whole atmosphere. I'm sure it took years at Lehigh to completely, not completely, but to you know, improve the environment in that sense. But I think I saw just the beginning of it. I got involved with other gay students at Lehigh, not until about my junior year, what was sort of a dividing point. My first semester of my junior year, I went to Germany on a program abroad and spent one semester at the University of Bonn. I decided to pursue German as my major by that time, and the time I spent in that semester away from Lehigh actually was good for my growing up as a gay person. Not that I don't think Germany was definitely more advanced at that point, but I just I think found other out people a little bit and found a couple of people to talk to for the first time and interacted just a little bit with other gay people. It was just sort of very enlightening. Had my first sort of brief romance. It was very platonic, but it was a brief romance, so. Cut off obviously by my having to leave. So, I came back with just a little more I think self-confidence and reassurance and I was really much more assured as a gay person at that point. Also, around that point, there started to be gay films, and I think that was part of the whole thing. You know, there's gay literature was important to me, but films also started to become important, and I know I saw specifically while I was in Germany, the Luchino Visconti film of Death in Venice, of Thomas Mann's novel, very famous novelette, and you know that was quite eye-opening. It was subtle for the times, but it had a great impact for me. And in that period, right around '71 and '72, a couple of other films started to come out that I think really made impact. There was, specifically I can remember John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday, the English film. Although I believe that was probably maybe spring of '72 that I ended up seeing that in the old College Theater, which was just a block from Lehigh. It's no longer there ; torn down. It was very impactful but also you know-- and it had full audience, but it was very shocking to the audience, because there was a kiss between two men, and that was just such an impact then. Collective gasps from the audience. Absolutely shocked. And so, that's you know [laughs] something I remember from that. Also, right around that same period they made the film of Mart Crowley's the Boys in the Band which had been a well-known Broadway play. I wasn't really thrilled with that. It wasn't a wholly positive thing. In fact, a memory, a little bit later after-- I'm cutting ahead of my story, but I remember being in a speaking engagement later with the staff of a psychiatric clinic in Allentown, I believe. I don't remember the name of it. And they wanted to know, and I was with others from Le-Hi-Ho, the Lehigh Valley Homophile Organization, which I'll talk more about, but they wanted to know our opinion of The Boys in the Band film. They thought, "Whoa, wasn't this spectacular? Oh, this was great!" And they were really surprised because both I and practically everyone else said "Well, no. We didn't think it was that-- yeah, it was a good film, but its portrayal of gay people we thought was really innate unhappiness seemed to be the mode, and we weren't that thrilled with it," and they were really surprised by that, I think. So. And I still have always had mixed-- I saw the film a couple times later since then and I you know, I can view it more objectively now, but still, you know have mixed feelings about it. So, just backing up a tiny bit, when I came back from the semester abroad in Germany, so it was in fall of 1971 just as I was turning 20, I was really ready to you know somehow come out and meet the gay community, and I found at some point that fall, there was an ad in Lehigh's student newspaper, the Brown and White, for draft counseling for gay students, and the Vietnam War and the draft being a big issue at that point, and whether or not you wanted to say anything about being gay to get out of being in the military, that was a big issue then. In any case, Le-Hi-Ho, the Lehigh Valley Homophile organization, which had as I found out had started in the Lehigh Valley in 1969, so it had been there a couple years, had put the ad in. So, I called. Not that I really wanted the draft counseling, but I called because I just wanted to get in touch with the group, you know, and I didn't know that much about it. So, I did. Got in touch with the group and very quickly I found myself, I don't know, within a couple of weeks, invited to a party which was held at Kutztown. Then Kutztown College, now it's University, there was sort of a very informal student gay group there, and they had invited via Le-Hi-Ho, which had sort of informally coordinated some area college students, so they'd invited some Lehigh students, and you know people from other places to this party in Kutztown so, got myself invited [laughs] to that, and it was a great occasion because I met one of the gay students from Lehigh who I grew to know for the rest of my time at Lehigh, and I also met [laughs] at that party my future-to-be partner, Ron Seeds. Coincidentally two days ago on December the fourth happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of that party. The party at which I met my long-time partner, Ron, and sort of consider it my coming out. Now I'm 70. At that time, I was 20, so great, great memory. You know, so I was in touch with those students obviously after going back to campus, and there sort of developed a very informal student group, a gay student group at Lehigh. I don't think it ever really got off the ground in a really strict organizational way. It was more an informal collection of people and we tried to meet. We tried to organize a little bit. Our biggest ally at that point was Hugh Flesher who was the chaplain of Lehigh at the time. He was a great ally and tried to help us. I wouldn't say there was any other support from the administration at that point beyond the first-- I think her title was Dean of Women Students. That's an approximate title, but it was Ruth Hurley, and she had been hired really essentially to go along with the admittance of women to Lehigh, and she was an ally as well. My one specific memory, other than just meeting and socializing with other Lehigh students, which was you know, very, very important for all of us, was we got permission probably through the chaplain's office to make up a flyer and distribute it to all students at Lehigh. So, this was probably in early '72, and so we did up this flyer, and I don't remember the whole context of it other than saying you know, just trying to start a student group. Something like that, but we had to stuff the mailboxes at Lehigh so in the University Center we got permission to go [laughs] into the old post office and go behind the post office and stuff all the mailboxes. You know we had to do it ourselves, which was probably a good thing, but at the same time we were stuffing the mailboxes, various students were opening their mailboxes on the other side, and we can hear them. And some of them would open the flyer and look at it, and would just, you know small uproars of, people were aghast, and almost, not screaming and yelling I don't think, but just you know we heard raised voices, definitely. It was a great shock to [laughs] a lot of the students. So, that was a little momentous, I would say. But you know, we got a trickle of students, and we were able to network with some gay faculty and staff members. It was very, very unofficial, I mean none of them ever really officially got involved with the group, and the group really didn't get that far or do too many official things. There really wasn't support from the administration for anything like that at that point in time. As long as it was sort of low key and behind the scenes, I'd say it was tolerated. My outlet also really sort of transferred not just from Lehigh to Le-Hi-Ho, the Lehigh Valley organization which I started immediately to get very active in, because I thought it was great. I believe I went to their first monthly meeting in December of that year, shortly after the party at Kutztown, and I think I jumped right in and within the next couple of months, maybe January or February, I decided to do their speaking-- they were doing speaking engagements around the community, which ultimately, I thought was just one of the most important things they were doing. And in retrospect, 50 years later, I truly, truly believe that being public and being out in some way to any number of people, as many as you could be, just made a momentous social change which accomplished way more than I thought it would within my lifetime. I never at that point dreamed that society would change as much as it has in these 50 years, and that we would be where we are now with all the things that have changed, and how for granted gay people are taken at this point in time. I know it's not universal, I know it's not [laughs] thoroughly spread across and through the United States, even, and probably here in the Northeast we're in a much better place for the most part than maybe other parts of the country still, but still: society has changed so radically, and I just, it's one of the things I'm proud of, is that I started doing the speaking engagements and kept them up. In any case, the very first one was to I believe some sort of youth group at the Unitarian Church in Bethlehem on Lechauweki Avenue, and it was very casual and low key, and I think these were mostly high school students, and they were very cool, which I was quite floored with, but being a Unitarian church, I think probably made all the difference in that time, even [laughs]. And the speaking engagements I started getting involved with tended to be-- and I probably did that for the best part of the next decade, and we went many places. Probably most typically college classes. Repeatedly we went back to a sociology class at Lehigh. Robert Williamson, the head of the sociology department, thought that was really important and so he made sure that we were always invited to a certain-- it was a human sexuality class that ran for years. So, we always went to that. And it was whoever could make the speaking engagement. Sometimes there were two or three or four of us, generally. We would sometimes do unusual situations, like I think we went to speak to student nurses at Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown once. I don't know how we got invited to that. And there was something at Muhlenberg College. A couple times we went to conferences, and I'm not really sure how we got invited to those either, except it was by networking. You know, it's amazing. Audiences were basically polite, civilized, and I don't think we underwent any horrendous experiences with those speaking engagements. Oh, certainly there were individuals who just were a bit hostile and would sometimes ask not civilized questions. Sometimes slightly hostile questions. I can remember at one conference a couple of clergymen being quite rude and hostile [laughs], but we did end up going to a number of churches over the years. We networked a bit with some Lafayette students. So, overall, I think it was one of the best things the group did were the speaking engagements. Other than that, it wasn't aimed at just outreach. One of its primary goals was socializing and providing a welcoming space for the LGBT community. Not called those initials-- I use those initials just because it's the easiest streamlined thing to say, and of course they weren't really used at that point. But the monthly meetings were the only thing that a lot of gay people could go to. There were bars of course ; bars weren't for everybody. Once I was old enough, I popped into a couple, but they just really weren't for me. I wasn't a bar person. So, it was a great alternative. They were nice-- you know, we had potluck dinners, we had refreshments, we had speakers. And we tried to get a variety of speakers. As many as possible relating to the LGBT community, addressing topics of interest. There might be something on alcoholism in the community. We did transgender programs quite a few times in the '70s. It was much more, obviously, I'll just say primitive [laughs] compared to where things are today, but it was there. It was interesting. And we did have an ally. There was a doctor in Allentown. It was Dr. Charles Reninger, and he I believe he himself was involved in treating, had many, many transgender patients and got involved in the surgical component of it, and he was a great ally for our group too, and came and spoke. He invited us to a couple of speaking engagements, so that was a really good thing back then. There was also Le-Hi-Ho was well-known for its library, which was dear to my heart, being the bookworm that I am, so I got very active in that and I was the librarian for a number of years, and I wrote book reviews for their newsletter for a number of years, and years later after that sometimes I wrote the whole newsletter, but in the earliest years I just wrote book reviews, and movie reviews sometimes. I was a great proselytizer for gay literature-- literature and non-fiction because I think those were just two so important things for coming to terms with yourself and educating yourself, and like I said, it was up to you to do it yourself. You couldn't just go out and soak up the media, you know, of everything sitting around the way it is today. Just much easier to find everything. You really had to search things out. It was much harder to get the information. But we slowly and carefully collected books. Some were donations, and some we purchased, and you know we'd go to some of the famous bookstores in New York City or Philadelphia or had to order them. It was a lot of work to get them, but it was treasured, and they lived in cardboard boxes and got dragged to the meetings at the Unitarian Church because they didn't really have a physical home. A lot of the things were kept, well I'll just say this: my partner Ron, Ron Seeds, was one of the earliest people, one of the founders along with Joe Burns, of Le-Hi-Ho in '69, and so a lot of the... What should I say? Accessories? of the group resided in our house, which be the books in cardboard boxes, and some of the mimeograph machines where the newsletter was actually run off sometimes, and where the newsletter was actually folded and stamped and all that, and various members would come to our house and put it together. So, those are some good memories too. It's funny because obviously you can imagine in those days there were a lot of people who were reluctant to you know be on our mailing list, and it was a really, really tricky thing, the anonymity that a lot of people still required, and you know very understandably, you know. Some people went by pseudonyms for mailing lists, and even when they came to a meeting. It wasn't really common, but it was something you had to be really, really careful about is other people's privacy. And even as far as using your own name in the public media, it was an issue for a lot of people. I would say it wasn't until maybe later in the '70s that a lot of the members started being much more open about having their names in the media. I remember I could say another of my, other than-- you could almost say my first official public coming out was going to the speaking engagements because you would never know who would be at the speaking engagement, so it was public. Whether it was a group of students or people at a conference or whatever. But I first wrote a letter to the editor to the Allentown Morning Call with my name to it. There was one other fellow and I wrote a letter together and signed our names, relating to something-- it was 1975, and it was relating I think to on-going efforts for-- I really am not sure what the topic-- it probably was, we were talking about, there were all kinds of political things going [laughs] on in the '70s, but in any case, that was my public, public coming out you would say, having your name in the newspaper, and so I was waiting for the impact. At the time I was working-- I worked for a few years after I graduated trying to figure out what I was going to do, and doing a little bit of graduate work, I worked at the libraries at Lehigh, and so I was wondering what the impact would be, and it was basically dead silence. No one I worked with or that I knew ever said anything to me, except one fellow at the library. A much older gentleman from the maintenance department and you know, he was married, grandfather, he's the last person I thought would say anything, he was the only person who came up to me and said, "I saw your letter and I just want to commend you. That was a very brave thing to do." And I'm so appreciative of that, you know? It was the only thing. Absolutely dead silence from everybody else. Which, you know, that was the way it was then. People still just [laughs] didn't talk about it. MF: Rick, you broke up just a little bit there. Can you just tell that story in the lib-- the person who responded to your letter one more time? Our cameras fine now, but just at the beginning it kind of bleeped out a bit. RB: Yeah, after the letter came out in the Allentown Morning Call I was waiting to see if anybody I worked with in the Lehigh University libraries, or anybody I knew, would say anything and it was basically dead silence. No one said anything except one gentleman, older gentleman. You know, married, grandfather, he was in the maintenance department: the last person I would have expected. And he came up to me, and he said he saw my letter, and he commended me. He thought I was brave to do it. He said that was a good thing. So, you know, that made me feel really good. So, those little things were pretty rare at that time, so that was a really nice memory. It was also around that time that, I mean Le-Hi-Ho had been doing political things since the beginning, some of the members had gone to New York City and Philadelphia with all kinds of initiatives relating to civil rights, which were in a very primitive state at that point, but there were on-going state efforts, and a number of us in the group went to Harrisburg to talk to, lobby so to speak, talk to legislators in Harrisburg, and that also I'm quite sure was in 1975. It was an interesting experience, I mean we all dressed up to the nines to go there, and the reception was very, very touchy. I think the legislat-- I'm not positive it was THE first time, but you know, the legislators were very, very antsy and touchy about all these gay men and women in the state legislature, and you know we had some cordial interviews with legislators, and some that were rather frosty and very stiff [laughs] and uncomfortable. That was just all part of the start of things getting better, ultimately. There were also I think lots of sessions of people going to Allentown City Council when they were trying to enact anti-discrimination laws. I mean, that was one of the biggest initiatives of the '70s, was working on anti-discrimination. So, there were a lot of things on-going there as well. So, those are some of my really good, good and interesting and impactful memories from that period. I would say both I and my partner Ron sort of burned out around the end of the '70s. I mean, it had been pretty intense, and we sort of went into a much lower key from then on [laughs] through the '80s. And we were still active. Le-Hi-Ho started to fade around that time too, and transition into other organiz-- the Lambda Center and other organizations in the Lehigh Valley, and I won't go into them much, not being as much of an expert on all the affairs of the '80s, although I will hit upon one that I remember, and I believe it was about as late as maybe, oh, 1985? 1986, '87? There was a Massachusetts state legislator, Gerry Studds, who had been out for a number of years. He was the only congress representative U.S. who had been out for a long time. I think he was it. And some of the organizations in the Lehigh Valley had arranged, I don't know what you would call it, a reception for him at the Hotel Bethlehem in Bethlehem. It was a really great affair. I remember some very supportive Lehigh faculty came to it and [inaudible] but also notable for a protest. There were various churches in the Lehigh Valley. I can't remember their names. Probably mostly would be termed fundamentalist churches, had very raucous protestors all around the hotels, so as we went in, we had to walk through those protestors, so that was sort of a unique-- you know, the only time I ever experienced something exactly like that. It wasn't really horrendous, but it obviously it was a little disconcerting, so, what can I say? Just going back again, another memory: although I was never really a parade person, a number of us from Le-Hi-Ho went I think to the 1975 Christopher Street March in New York City and had a Le-Hi-Ho banner in the parade that year. So, that was important that we did it, and it was a good memory. It was a good memory. Those are I think maybe most of the things I wanted to touch on there. I'll just add an addendum, a little later in life I became active again in the LGBT movement, but this time it was at work. In short, after I left the Lehigh University libraries in the late '70s, I went to work for Aetna. It was Aetna Life and Casualty at the time. They were in Allentown, and worked for them all through the '80s, and then in 1990 moved to Connecticut to take a job transfer with them, and my partner, Ron, had worked for Bethlehem Steel for years, as did so many people in the Lehigh Valley, but they were a fading company at that time. They were in deep trouble, and Ron was ready to exit. He thought the timing was good, so we left the Lehigh Valley and moved to Connecticut, and I worked for the rest of my working career to retirement at Aetna. Their home office was there, although the home office was in Hartford, which is well known, but the home office for the division I was in was in Middletown, Connecticut so that's where I was located. But in any case, about 1992, a number of LGBT employees started assembling and congregating and deciding what maybe we could do in the corporation, and one was just to build a professional support network, which happened. That was a great goal. It ended up being called ANGLE-- the Aetna Network of Gay and Lesbian Employees. We networked with some organizations that were started at other corporations in the greater Hartford area, but our primary initiative to pursue for the '90s was to work on getting the company to offer domestic partner benefits, which obviously prior to gay marriage was a big, big issue, and it ended up being successful. It took us five years, we worked on it from 1993 until 1998, and we got it implemented. And you know, I have nice photos of those of us in the group who worked with us standing with the CEO of Aetna having our picture taken, and so we were out in company media. So, I mean in a way that was like another coming out. It's funny, coming out is you know everybody talks about it and there are so many layers coming out. You know, you come out to yourself, and then you come out to family. And I never touched on that, so I'll just make a quick retro, and say [laughs] I came out officially, even though I'd been with Ron for a couple years, I didn't officially talk to my family about it until around 1975 when we were getting into politics and everything, and I just said, "Okay, so we just have to sit down and talk about it." So, we did. Everything went pretty well with my family. They weren't a talkative, warm, talk, talk, talk family so we didn't talk about it much or a lot. Until years had gone by, I would say. Which was okay. That's just the way things were then. But you know, it was all accepting. So, it was never traumatic for me in the way it is for a lot of LGBT people, which is very, very fortunate you know for me. I never had really horrendous coming out experiences. Anyway, just going back to those levels, so you come out to yourself, and then maybe I come out in the newspaper in Allentown in 1975, but you know not everybody reads the newspaper. Not everybody reads the letters to the editor, so you still aren't out completely, because not everybody knows that, so you never know how fully you're out, so you really have to keep doing it over and over and over again, and then if you move, you move to Connecticut you know you're starting all over again because of course there was no great network of social media or anything like that then, so you really, really were starting over again. So, coming out officially at Aetna was something over again. So, I remember again not being a parade person, but I said "Okay, I'll do it once." So, I marched with, there were Pride parades basically coinciding with Christopher Street at that time, in Hartford and so when the Aetna group decided to participate, I went. You can vaguely recognize me in the pictures in the newspaper one year, but some of my fellow employees then said, "Oh, great! Saw you in the newspaper!" So, times had changed. [laughs] But again, that was coming out in a way because you know, well obviously I worked in a huge corporation, and you don't know everybody that well, so there's no way to be personally out to everybody. But as the years go by, you learn how to just be more casually out in casual conversations with people. One of the big ways of being out of course is being in a relationship with somebody. You know, if you're totally single, it's easier to be more invisible as an LGBT person, but as soon as you enter a relationship you sort of have to renegotiate all your communications with other people, and you know it went from being very, very awkward in the earliest times. You didn't know what to call your significant other. The word partner wasn't even used then. It sometimes was your significant other, or my other half, or the friend I live with. Things just were so different. So, the terminology became very important later on as many of us know, at least eventually evolving into the word partner, and eventually being able to use the word spouses etcetera. That's all part of coming out too. I think that's where things have just gradually gotten easier. You can sense it in conversations. When I was in a corporate meeting waiting for a meeting to start in a large room with maybe 20 other people, and so they're waiting for the meeting to start, and they start going around and talking about something relating to their spouses or something like that, you know. So, whether or not you choose to chime in and say something about your other half, or spouse, is part of this whole part of still coming out and just helping to make the world a better place, and I always tried to do that as much as I could, and I think again with the perspective of 50 years, I think it's just one of the most successful things I'm proud of. It's not just helping myself as a gay person within the gay community, but just being a small piece of what it took to change society. It's an ongoing process, we're still doing it, but it was a nucleus of, it was a start, all those little things we did years ago, and it made people very uncomfortable in the beginning for a long time. It was very tentative, and like I said you never knew what receptions you were going to get, but it just gradually changed over the years. I will go back and intervene perhaps, and touch on what the AIDS crisis did to all of that. In the latter part of, well, in the say about '83, '84, '85 when things started to become up for public discussion, you know without going into the AIDS crisis itself and just talking about the social impact, it was both good and bad. I think there was just hysteria around it. And with that I can go back to one memory, which is unfortunate but amusing in a way. I remember at that time in the department I was working in in Aetna-- this was probably '85. Yeah, you know, I think it was after the public had become much more aware of AIDS because a couple of celebrities had died, and I'm thinking I think it was maybe after Rock Hudson had died, and the whole issue of AIDS had just come into the public consciousness at that time. But of course, it was-- there was hostility. There was a lot of discomfort. People didn't want to talk about it. But I remember in the department I worked in at that time, I was in customer service at Aetna, as we sometimes did, brought in refreshments. I baked-- I was pretty good at baking muffins in those years, and I baked some special muffin, specialty of mine, and brought them in for everybody. I was known, you know, I was sort of out gay then, but everybody knew that I lived with Ron, and I wasn't officially talking about being gay to everybody, but I knew that everybody knew that I was gay at that point. But you know what? No one would eat my muffins that day. And they had previously. And I knew it was AIDS. And there was this paranoia at this time about, "Oh my God. Don't touch gay people. Don't touch food that they had touched." It's sort of a very sad thing. It was transitory. It was, but it represented some of the things that were happening at that time. But again, I'm just touching on social impact. The good things that it did were forcing some people to come out, and be out, and many, many more gay men and lesbians were out, and it was well-known as the era when I think lesbians became great allies to gay men in the movement, and just gay men in general. And certainly prior to that, I haven't really touched on it, there definitely was always well, sometimes strained relationships and friction between lesbians and gay men in the movement, definitely. There was a lot of separatism. We always tried to do a lot of integrated things as much as we could in Le-Hi-Ho, but the number of women active in the group was definitely smaller. I think lesbians were very much involved in overall women's movement issues in those years too. But what did change I think is that they became great allies in the later '80s. And you know, as that transitioned into the '90s, I think it just you know, again because AIDS forced so many more people to come out to their families and to talk, and to go to charitable benefits and things like that, it had to do with changing society as well. Amidst the tragedy of it came some social good, I would say. So, I'm thinking maybe I'm running out of coherent pieces of what I was going to try to put together of my life. In retrospect, I think I've been lucky as a happy gay person. I think I'm very lucky I didn't undergo the trauma of coming out or being guilty or terribly unhappy as I was growing up. I really knew I was gay, I just had to figure out what it was all about. I was ready to be gay and call myself gay as soon as I could. You know, it's so hard to say this, but I'm really sure that in today's climate I would probably have been one of those 12 to 13 years old, you know 13 year old person who is coming out as they do today. Maybe not until 14 or 15, who knows. What can I say? It's hard to project. But those were different times, so it took you a lot longer [laughs] to figure everything out. So, my not coming out say officially until I was 19 to 20 was very typical. In fact, you know, many, many people came out much later than that. In their thirties, in their thirties. It's sort of a little mind boggling now, and even later. We would sometimes have people getting involved in Le-Hi-Ho, I remember one man who was in his sixties and started getting involved after his wife died, because then he felt he was free. And so that was always a touching memory too. The fact that you hope that isn't happening today. MF: Well, I have some-- thank you so much for all that you've shared. I have some questions that just as I was listening to your story, you know some of which are about Le-Hi-Ho. You had said that you had reached out to Le-Hi-Ho because they published something in the Brown and White about the draft. We'll have some younger listeners who will tune in here, and they won't understand what was going on with the draft, so could you talk a little bit about Le-Hi-Ho's sort of outreach around the draft and what that meant for gay men at the time? RB: Yeah. I can a little. I mean, I never got involved in it myself so I was never-- I can't say that I was expert on what gay men were being told, but it had to do with the fact that of course the draft was in place, I can't remember since when, in the '60s, and you know basically because of the Vietnam War, and it still went on through most of my Lehigh career. In fact, [laughs] one of my, I don't know what the logistics were, one of my indelible memories of being at Lehigh was sitting in the TV room in my dorm, ooh, what year was it? I was probably a sophomore or junior. Around the TV with all the guys in the dorm, I can't remember what exactly. Finding out something relating about what our lotto draft numbers were, because you were assigned lottery draft numbers in those days. And you know, if you got the lowest draft numbers, it meant they were going to call you up first for the Vietnam War. Of course, what happened was by the time I graduated in '73, things had sort of gone away as far as that goes, so my timing was good in the sense of not having to even have it be an issue for me, although I ended up with a fairly high draft number as I remember. But the point was that technically homosexuals weren't supposed to be in the military, okay? And you were supposed to reveal it if you were, whatever they called it, you know, in your induction interviews. In-take interviews. And if it came up later, if you were already in, you were supposed to be thrown out of the military. So, gay men who were drafted or gay men who wanted to join the military had this tricky thing to negotiate about basically to lie. Shall I lie about being homosexual? I forget the exact questions. "Have you ever had sexual relations with a man?" I do forget the exact verbiage that was used in those days. But it was something that you had to negotiate and decide what to do. So, that's basically what the counseling was about to try to help you know what your options were and what the implications were, and would there be any negative feedback if you were honest. You know, would that be a bad thing? So, it was sort of a big deal. Especially for college-age men at that point. So, again, I'm not the best person to speak to more detail than that. MF: But it's interesting how Le-Hi-Ho, that kind of advertisement in the Brown and White, that they were really keyed into the issues that younger gay men might be facing at that time. And interesting that that advertisement could be used not just for that counseling, but like "Oh, hey! There's a group [laughs] that I could-- RB: Yeah. MF: -- go join!" That's wonderful. Well, I had another question about the Le-Hi-Ho newsletters, because as you know I've been reading them studiously, and I think they're just phenomenal productions, and my question is what was your intention as one of the writers, the book reviewer, film reviewer, and also someone who put together entire newsletters? What was your hope for those newsletters? What did you want them to accomplish? What did you want to include? How did they circulate? I'm just really curious about your desire for those publications, and then where they went. RB: Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe I'll just touch on first, I mean Le-Hi-Ho had a post office box, which turned out to be the best solution for an address. You didn't have a physical office space, which we didn't ever really have. The community, LGBT community centers came later in the '80s with other entities, like the Lambda Center, and much later entities in Allentown. So, Le-Hi-Ho had a PO Box at what was called Moravian Station on New Street. Where the old post office was in Bethlehem. So, and that's an old memory of mine. Just you know, all the mail we would get. Not just relating to the newsletter, but just from anybody contacting the group. Ranging from harassment to just people who wanted to find out, and other newsletters on distribution of publications from other groups. So, either Ron or I or other people had to go frequently, a couple times a week, to collect that stuff from the post office box in Bethlehem. And it also, you know, it was an anonymity thing too. I mean, using someone's home address wouldn't have been a really, really good idea in those days. People didn't want their mail carrier deliverers to know anything like that. So, the mailings of Le-Hi-Ho were pretty anonymous, and I touched on using pseudonyms and things like that, but also, I'm quite sure that just the return address was the PO Box, you know, and it didn't say Lehigh Valley Homophile Organization, because there were people who just would not have been comfortable with getting anything in their mailbox with something like that on it. So, we sort of had to do that. So, our goal with the newsletter was to circumvent that and get it out to as many people as we could, and so we really just sort of proselytized to try to get people on the mailing list. So, that was a very, a tricky thing too because you had to promise security, and that it wasn't going to be used for any other kind of distribution purposes. It had to be a very secure mailing list, and it was. It had to be guarded. And as I said, you knew that some of the names on the mailing list were pseudonyms, actually. Well, and even some of the people on the mailing list had PO boxes themselves. I think that was a big deal in those days. People, a lot of LGBT people, would take out PO boxes to get their gay mail, anything they subscribed to, rather than have them come to home addresses. But the newsletter itself, yeah, it changed and evolved depending on who was willing to be involved in it. So, there were always some people who were heavily into politics, and some people who liked films or books like me, and sort of whatever you chose to write about, we just welcomed everything, and we just wanted to get the maximum amount of information into these we could to try to make them interesting to a variety of people and get them out to as many people as we could, and as part of their education too, really. I mean, I always saw it in those days as an educational thing because so many LGBT people didn't have access to a lot of this information. It took effort again to find out all this stuff. There was no easy way to get all the information. I think it accomplished its goal very well. It had its ups and downs. If you look at the old issues, sometimes they were very short. I think in later years when the group was sort of fading a bit and there weren't as many active members, it got shorter, which is just sort of a natural [laughs], natural occurrence with a lot of organizations, I think. But I think that's... It was really important, you know. One of the major things the group should be remembered for is the outreach, the political outreach, the social outreach with monthly meetings, and the speaking engagement educational and social outreach, and just the newsletter to generally all around educate anybody it possibly could. MF: Thank you so much for sharing that about the newsletters. I love that you talked about trying to interest different people so the arts and culture, the politics, and one of the just truly important things about them is that it was, that you were charting legislation that was occurring just in Texas or in other states, so it was almost like you were capturing national political legislative battles and informing a public in a way that bars can't do. Not that you couldn't have a political conversation at the bar, but that's just not their purpose. But you also had like that busybody column, which may have been written by a drag queen, or maybe someone just putting on the persona of a [laughs] drag queen. You had jokes in the newsletters, which I've been telling at staff meetings. [Nerk?] from 1969 that I found in your newsletter, which I loved. So, they were fun and political, and about representation both in academic books, non-fiction books, and then of course vibrant artists. Just, they're incredible pieces of work. I'm interested in Le-Hi-Ho as an alternative to the bars, and could you say a little bit more about what it was like to be a member of the group? What the meetings were like, why they were a good alternative to the bars, what they offered that bars weren't? RB: Yeah, yeah, because I think I was such a big advocate of that, to make those meetings, to make them welcoming for one thing. And so, I think what we always tried to do is the people who went -- there was always a board of directors, you know a running board, which I can't remember consisted of five or eight people, and there was annual elections, so there was turnover all the time, but there was always a core group, and it was always one of their jobs to be welcoming and network with especially the newest people who would show up at any given monthly meeting because you always had to realize that any meeting could be the first public entrance on the stage for some of the people who were showing up into the gay community, as an alternative to a bar which yeah, people do that too. They make their entrance into the gay community at a bar, and it is what it is. I mean, there's no official structure [laughs] to welcome you, or make you feel comfortable or happy, and probably some of those experiences are good, and some of them are not. It wasn't my experience, so I can't comment personally on that, but I mean generally-- and I'm not trying to be negative about bars because they of course fill the vacuum and served a great function, you know, served a great purpose, but they often just weren't the best environment for being friendly social and networking with people. Having honest, serious discussions. I mean, you just wouldn't expect that to happen in a noisy, smokey bar late at night. So, not the right environment. But, on a Sunday afternoon in a very casual Unitarian Church setting, it was very comfortable and so we always made that point of greeting anybody. We knew who the regulars were, and who the brand-new people were, and you just had to try to make them welcome and feel comfortable. Really comfortable. Knowing that some of them were probably very, very uncomfortable showing up at the meeting. I'm sorry, just sometimes snippets of memories come to you. This was just such a touching one: we had phone calls in advance. Le-Hi-Ho did at the time have-- I didn't even touch on that-- we had a phone line that really, but just took voice, it was answering machine messages in later years. It never really was staffed, but and sometimes, well our, Ron and my phone number just got out there and so sometimes we just got a lot of [laughs] a lot of the calls, as did other board members. But in any case, we had a fifteen-year-old boy come once. And normally that was something-- in those days, interaction with young gay people, it was a real big issue, and it was just something you didn't get involved with because you'd get in trouble. But in this case, his mother permitted it, and she called us in advance, and it turned out he was terminally ill with cancer, and he knew he was gay, and he wanted to meet other gay people. So, she called us up and asked if he could come to a meeting. And so, she drove him. She didn't come in, but she drove him and picked him up. I'm sorry, I can get a little teary at this. So, I think his name was Scott, and he came to the meeting, and I think he came to a few meetings. And I think it was Leukemia he had, and he did die within a year or two after that, so, that was just so touching but it also reveals the vacuum of how it just almost wasn't possible to do much for young gay people then. I mean, we really had to use, you know, the eighteen-year-old cut off thing. It was a tough thing. It's more than I can discuss here, but not to say that we didn't get contacted now and then by younger people, we did, but it was something you just had to really, really be very, very careful with. But in any case, I loved the meetings because I loved to get to know people, and you know socialize with them repeatedly, and see a lot of times these were people who would never have been comfortable inviting you to their home, or coming to other gay people's homes, because that in and of itself was a revealing, out thing. Just having the Le-Hi-Ho board meeting at your house, which we did. We rotated. We didn't have those at the church, we had them in our houses. But you had to be willing to have, you know it wasn't like throwing a party, but you had to be willing to have maybe six or eight or ten gay people showing up at your house, and you know what neighbors might see and say and deduce, and that was just one of those things you navigated in those years, and so many people weren't comfortable in having [laughs] other LBGT people in their homes except under certain circumstances. So, again, these meetings were just such a neutral setting, you know. You're going to a church on a Sunday afternoon. It's a really easy thing to slip away to, and we knew that. We knew some people were slipping away from really restricted lives of, yeah, some of them were married, or some of them lived with families even though they were old. [laughs] They weren't really young. But they could slip away for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon, and so it was an outlet for them, and it worked. So, it was really important to a lot of people. In that sense too, I could almost get a little teary about it, and we grew close to a lot of people that way. Of course, some of them, some of it was probably some people came in frozen with fear, might have lasted one meeting and left and were never seen again, because they, you know, didn't cope well with it. Not to say that didn't happen, because it did. But a lot of people did come back. That was the good thing. MF: Did Le-Hi-Ho have relationships with homophile organizations in New York and Philly? You talked about in 1975 going to the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in New York City, and you've talked about what a life-affirming kind of organization it was in the Lehigh Valley. What was sort of the connection beyond the Lehigh Valley? Was there a connection beyond the Lehigh Valley? RB: Yeah, I would say there was. A lot of it happened actually in the earliest years, you know, from '69, even before I got active in early '72. A lot of it really, I think was from that era. My partner Ron, was involved in that. But some of it continued after and you know I knew some of that, but yeah, I would say it was especially New York City, Philadelphia oriented, with extensions out to like I know there was a group I think at State College in Pennsylvania, and outfits like Delaware Valley College Students in whatever city that's nearest, in Bucks County, [laughs] Pennsylvania. I forget exactly where the college is. Everybody was on everybody's distribution list. You know, they got our newsletter, and we'd get all their newsletters, so there was networking in that way, and some of it was actual travel. I know Ron and some other members went into New York City to the Mattachine Society, you know the oldest society in New York City at that time and were even there at the beginning of the Gay Activist Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front, and a lot of the very, very early stuff that started up in New York City. I forget. I'm just having a mental lapse on what the one in Philadelphia was called, but I know I went down there to visit them at their, they had a center I think on South Street in Philadelphia and talked to them. And a lot of it was used to networking to get some of the speakers we got, and we got like Frank Kameny from Washington, DC and Barbara Gittings from Philadelphia, and I always remember those two because, I'm pretty sure my memories good on this, they were sort of early icons of the LGBT movement. Famous I think if you go back to the photograph of the LBGT protestors marching in front of the White House in roughly 1965? Very, very early, about job discrimination. Frank Kameny was of course notoriously fired by the US government from his high, you know, very high-level job. But I believe Frank and Barbara were in that photo. They were of course all dressed up impeccably in suits and ties, and you know very, very conservative clothing carrying their placards very formally. But that's a very good memory. Dick Leitsch came from New York City, and oh gosh, some of the names... Mark [Segal] from Philadelphia, and I'm sorry, his surname is escaping me. You can probably research it. And those were important because I think you know, we fed off each other's energy to a certain extent. So, there was a good amount of networking that went on, and some of it I probably wasn't even involved in, so. It was hard to get involved in everything because there were [laughs] really quite a few things going on, so sometimes you just chose your little threads that you got involved in. I know once, I think the first time Barbara Gittings actually came to the Lehigh Valley though, was not to Le-Hi-Ho, but she spoke at Muhlenberg College, so I remember Ron and I going there to, he knew her already previously and I remember we went to hear her speak and talk to her afterwards, so yeah. So, those are some good early memories. MF: We've spent a lot of time talking about Le-Hi-Ho. We talked a little bit about your work at Aetna. We've talked about the social aspects of Le-Hi-Ho and how life-affirming it was. Social organizations tend to get sort of disparaged, but the way that you describe the monthly meetings with Le-Hi-Ho is how important that kind of social space was for members. I'm wondering if maybe we could talk a little bit about your relationship with Ron. You talked about meeting Ron in the 1970s at that Kutztown party, or meeting him through Le-Hi-Ho. Do you want to share a little bit about your life with Ron, and that your relationship with your beloved? RB: Yeah, I will a little bit as an overview. I guess I'm a little probably, I'm going to try, to get very personal. I'm not really good at that, but yeah. I'm definitely willing to give it an overview. Yeah, I'd said it was 50-- it's almost 50 years to the day right now when Ron and I met, but I mean we started seeing each other immediately after that. Could really consider our anniversary-- when I graduated from Lehigh, it was Memorial Day weekend, that's when I moved in with him. He had already, he had bought a house in Bethlehem, an old house, which was, he was restoring, and needed a lot of restoration. And so that was the start. That was a year and a half later after we met, so that could really be called our official anniversary. We lived in that house during the time that I worked at Lehigh. During the '70s. We moved in 1980 to a separate, yeah, to a different house that we bought in Bethlehem and that lasted until the 1990 move to Connecticut. What can I say? He was rooted in Bethlehem. His whole family was there. Very, very rooted you know for a long time in that surrounding area. I had no immediate connections to the area, but I grew very, very fond of it after being there for so long, of course. And you know it's funny, I mean again, the degree to people were out in those days, but in the '70s you know his parents were quite friendly to me, and just accepted me. His father told me I could be his, another son to him, which I thought was very nice. But again, no one talked about it, you know. But we, it's funny. I think we weren't as fully integrated as a couple into society as we would be today, or are still today, just because of the way things were. Just because people were so, so uncomfortable. And so, I think you often did a lot of things separately, you know, and led slight-- not different lives, but there were more threads of your life where you might just do them separately. Interact with certain relatives separately. What can I say? I met a great deal of his relatives, and some we were very close to, and we would go to visit his grandmother every Friday night and watch [laughs] television with her in the '70s. Eventually, you know maybe not immediately, but we started going to some of the holidays with my parents. Thanksgiving, Christmas kind of holidays with my parents and family, who would congregate back with my family in Elmira/Horseheads, New York, you know and those went fine. Things evolved, and certainly there were like I said, things you had to negotiate as a gay couple in those days about interacting with society at large. Like I said, it just wasn't the same thing, and it's gradually, gradually gotten so that now everything is just so casual, you know. What can I say? You know, Ron and I have been together 50 years, less a year and a half, call it, formally [laughs]. We haven't married for complex reasons. I won't discuss that here. We're still together, although I'll just say unfortunately Ron's health isn't good, and he's currently in an assisted living facility, so I've actually been physically apart from him for a year and a half, which is first time, you know, I've lived on my own since then, and it's difficult but I spend oh, about three hours with him every day, seven days a week, and frequent phone calls and grossly, and completely engrossed with his life in so many ways. It's not like we're separated at all, but it's not quite the same thing. You know, and we've had you know, a lot of good times, and a lot of friends, and I guess that's the overview I'm going to give. MF: Thank you so much for sharing. We are at the end of our 90 minutes, but before we close, I just want to give you the opportunity, is there anything that we didn't talk about that you really wanted to share? Did we miss something? Anything that you want to share at the end here? RB: Yeah. Trivial memory. Ha. Le-Hi-Ho also sponsored occasional theater trips to New York City to see gay plays. In the '70s. And there weren't too many of them around, but that was fun. We did that. I just thought of that, that was a great experience. We always wondered what the bus drivers thought when we hired buses to cart 50 people, so to speak, to New York City, but it all went well. It all went well. So, I guess I'll end with that rather trivial memory [laughs]. MF: It's one of my true joys reading the newsletter when I see that you all have, you're talking about going to a show, and then like not enough people signed up, but reading it now, you get to see like, "Oh, that was playing in New York in the '70s!" And it's almost like a chart of gay cultural, you know just a little bit of the gay theatrical happening in New York, and especially with the book reviews, you really get the sense of what books mattered to our community in the Lehigh Valley, and you know, to the [reviewers like you. I just love those parts of the newsletter. It gives just a snapshot of some of the culture. RB: Yeah. MF: And I wish I could have been on that bus to New York City. I don't know why we don't do that now. I mean, I would pay to go to New York City on a bus, so I don't have to drive-- RB: Yeah. MF: --and go see theater. What a wonderful program. Well, I'll just end our interview by saying thank you so much, Rick, for taking the time to talk with me today. It has really been a pleasure, a real honor to speak with you about your life story. RB: Thanks so much for doing this. It's been great for me too. 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=
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Rick Balmer, December 6, 2021
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Rick Balmer recalls his life as a gay man in the Lehigh Valley, and the process of “coming out”, as well as his work with Lehigh Homophile Organization (Le-Hi-Ho) and its legacy on the LGBTQ+ community.
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LGBT-21
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2021-12-06
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley
Description
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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>
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John Marquette
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Robert Kreider
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https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-06.xml
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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.
 ; 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.
 ; 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. 
 ; 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?
 ; 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?
 ; 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.
 ; 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. 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.
 ; 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?
 ; 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. 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.
 ; 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?
 ; 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?
 ; 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?
 ; 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. 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.
 ; 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.
 ; 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=
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01:33:43
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Roberta and Harold Kreider, January 11, 2020
Description
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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.
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LGBT-06
Date
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2020-01-11
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video
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
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Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.