6 10 64 https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/4c52c694246e41df0e9568782585f60c.png 48f404933fe6bcd1b11ce9cfc41ea6e7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 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 Roberta Meek OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_21.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 July 15th, 2020 Roberta Meek, July 15, 2020 PH40_21 01:24:08 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) Roberta Meek Liz Bradbury video/mpeg MeekRoberta_20200715_video.mp4 1.0:|37(10)|60(10)|95(2)|132(14)|167(14)|192(9)|223(9)|252(18)|285(12)|312(9)|345(4)|384(5)|413(18)|420(10)|481(9)|514(13)|551(5)|586(12)|623(12)|658(6)|697(6)|742(8)|773(10)|812(4)|843(13)|874(12)|907(5)|948(5)|981(2)|1018(7)|1063(12)|1094(6)|1121(10)|1150(8)|1181(12)|1208(10)|1239(13)|1276(10)|1305(5)|1332(4)|1363(16)|1392(21)|1425(10)|1458(3)|1489(10)|1524(13)|1565(10)|1602(9)|1633(4)|1666(2)|1703(3)|1734(8)|1779(9)|1816(11)|1859(10)|1896(9)|1929(16)|1966(5)|2007(2)|2050(12)|2079(13)|2118(4)|2139(16)|2168(3)|2193(15)|2224(16)|2255(12)|2298(10)|2347(12)|2386(5)|2421(9)|2446(9)|2483(3)|2504(14)|2539(9)|2564(7)|2591(14)|2650(4)|2701(7)|2738(2)|2769(8)|2810(9)|2839(7)|2872(9)|2881(5) 0 https://youtu.be/PVsIezhR4nc YouTube video 0 Introductions LB: Hi. Okay. And I’m going to start the audio recording. And the recording is working. So I’m going to read you this -- oh, I have to turn off my phone -- I think I did that already. Yes. And I’m going to pin you.&#13 ; &#13 ; RM: You’re going to what?&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Well that’s a Zoom thing that I didn’t learn until the fifth video, where it pins on you so that no matter what I say, it doesn’t flip back --&#13 ; Liz Bradbury ; Roberta Meek ; Zoom 0 295 Meek's Phased Retirement RM: Well I’m in a phased retirement, so I’m only working part-time. But no. I haven’t been terminated. I teach at Muhlenberg College, and actually I went online before they did, but we went online around the same time as everybody else -- mid-March -- and finished the semester that way. And I intend to teach online until, you know, until we have safety precautions for me and my family.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Sure. So you’re teaching part-time then?&#13 ; &#13 ; RM: I’m only teaching part-time. I only teach two courses a year, and the way I’ve spread it out, it’s one course per semester. And I’ve also done teaching online before, so it wasn’t like a shock to my system, like it was to a lot of people who had never taught online -- Liz Bradbury ; Muhlenberg ; Online ; Part-Time ; Phase Retirement ; Roberta Meek 0 487 Muhlenberg's COVID Plans RM: -- institution. And I also felt that, from an equity standpoint, that -- I don’t know if any of this is relevant -- but from an equity standpoint, I really felt that we had gotten some emails saying that as we return from spring break, that we, as professors, needed to be open to the idea of having some students learn through remote kinds of possibilities, because they might be, you know, immunocompromised, or those kinds of things. And when I read that, I was like, “I have no idea if anyone in my class is affected by this. But what is that going to feel like for the one student in a class that might have to do this? First of all, it outs them as having an illness, which is really their prerogative to not share.” Equity ; Roberta Meek ; Spring Break 0 739 Approach to Teaching Online RM: So remote learning, for me -- I can’t speak to everybody else who was teaching across the globe. But, for me, what it meant is -- I’m fortunate that I teach media and communication, Africana studies, and history courses. And so this course that I was teaching in the spring was “Media and Social Movements,” which was really apropos, as those students were leaving that class and Black Lives Matter exploded. They should have some tools, based on my class.&#13 ; Africana studies ; Black Lives Matter ; Remote Learning ; Roberta Meek 0 951 The State of Higher Education RM: There’s no way I will step foot in a classroom. I think, unfortunately, education in general -- certainly higher ed -- is really in dire straits, because, you know, Muhlenberg -- like most of the colleges in the country -- not all, but most of the colleges -- particularly small colleges -- are trying to bring students back, because their existence depends on that.&#13 ; Education ; Muhlenberg ; Roberta Meek 0 1060 "De-densify" Campus RM: And even if you supposedly -- what they’re calling this now -- “de-densify” the campus -- I’m sorry, but those students -- even the most paranoid of them, I just cannot imagine -- you know, that’s when you have sexual awakenings, you have social awakenings, you have racial identity awakenings. That’s what the on-campus, small liberal arts college experience -- and even the bigger universities -- that’s why you pay the big bucks to do --&#13 ; "De-densify" ; Liberal Arts ; Roberta Meek 0 1353 Privilege to Social Distance LB: Right. Yeah.&#13 ; RM: -- you know. And one of the things, again, that I kept saying to my students -- and to my family -- it’s like, “We are absolutely blessed and lucky that we can social distance -- that we can stay in our homes and be safe.” I mean, that is an absolute privilege (laughs) that we have that opportunity. And the most that we have is inconvenience. So like when people are whining and bitching about whatever, it’s like, “You are inconvenienced. That’s the extent” --&#13 ; Inconvenience ; Liz Bradbury ; Roberta Meek ; Social Distance 0 1563 Effects of the Spanish Flu with the Sedition Act LB: And so that’s why we don’t know very much about it. And it’s one of the reasons that I’m really glad we’re collecting these pieces of information now, because there isn’t a lot of -- there’s certainly not any public information -- there have been journals and stuff that people had written, saying, well, you know, Hilda Doolittle -- who was a famous Imagist poet, who worked with Ezra Pound, and did all sorts of significant things -- and she was from Bethlehem. She was very famous. And she was absolutely distraught by the fact that her brother and her husband had both died of the flu -- one of them it had been a thing from the war, and then her brother died. And, you know, and then she got it, and she nearly died, and it influenced her life. And yet, when you read that, you don’t really go, “Oh, yeah. Because everybody had it.” Everybody had it. One out of three people in the world had it. Bethlehem ; Ezra Pound ; Hilda Doolittle ; Liz Bradbury ; Spanish Flu 0 1849 Staying in Touch with Family RM: Absolutely. It’s actually been a godsend, because, first of all, I proposed -- and it’s happening now -- where my siblings and I talk every week on a Zoom call. And my sisters and I talk frequently -- certainly not once a week, but frequently. But my brothers, as much as I’m close to them, I typically might talk to them a couple times a year or whatever, you know -- not very frequently. And this, you know, we talk to each other religiously, except if there’s like Father’s Day or Mother’s Day or something like that -- we’ve skipped that week -- which is absolutely important to me. Because it’s not just a phone call, and it’s not where each of us is calling each other -- we all get to see each other -- Father's Day ; Mother's Day ; Roberta Meek ; Zoom 0 2081 The Reason for Retirement RM: And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to retire, because the world was literally falling apart, and it’s like the one thing that keeps me sane and happy are the younger grandkids, who don’t have any clue what’s going on, and, you know, that innocence -- and also it gives me the inspiration to like just keep fighting -- because, you know, you’ve got to for them. So yeah. So I’ve been actually watching them -- I didn’t watch them four full days a week until recently -- but, you know, that was the plan for me. And it’s been great, because, you know, their family -- which is two older boys -- one who just graduated from college, and one who’s going into 12th grade -- and two working parents -- there’s no way they could get any work done --&#13 ; Grandkids ; Roberta Meek 0 2332 The Pandemic's Effect on the U.S. RM: I mean, it’s ridiculous. So I’m really concerned about our ability to survive -- as a political entity for sure -- but what does that mean if we already see these disproportionate ways that it’s affecting certain communities? What’s it going to end up? So I have a lot of fear about this. The one hopeful thing, I will say, about the pandemic honestly is that the largest protest movement ever in the United State’s history is happening.&#13 ; Pandemic ; Protest ; Roberta Meek ; Survive 0 2563 Comparing the U.S. and the British Empire LB: It is a big deal. Yeah. It’s interesting. I have sort of been thinking a lot about the incredibly stupid things that Great Britain did when it was a world power, you know -- the sun never sets on the British Empire. They, in effect, owned everybody and colonized everybody, and were horrible about it. And there was this enormous one stupid mistake after another, where they just kept doing it, and kept doing it and doing it. And, you know, I’m sure that a lot of Americans today think the United States will never be not the power that it is. British Empire ; Great Britain ; Liz Bradbury ; United States 0 2853 The End of the Spanish Flu LB: It’s interesting -- the flu epidemic of 1918, there were two things -- one of the things was at the end of fifteen months, it disappeared -- it literally ended. And some people think that it’s because the flu mutated -- because mutation can be good, as well as bad. And so we don’t know what that’s going to be -- it could be mutating so it’s not bad for pe-- you know, it doesn’t make people sick anymore. And the other thing that happened was that one out of three people in the entire world had had the disease. So there was a, you know, herd immunity, because --&#13 ; Flu Epidemic ; Herd Immunity ; Liz Bradbury ; Mutation 0 3032 Situation of Social Distancing and Masks LB: Yeah.&#13 ; &#13 ; RM: -- and we were standing there one last moment with the kids. And I said to them, you know, “Can you just hold on?” Because if we can walk away, and whatever, and they were staying -- and she goes, “Oh” -- and she’s talking the whole time, right -- so it was like, “We’re just going to walk over here.” So she’s like walking and talking behind me, and I’m like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” But then I have to blame myself, because I didn’t have my mask on at that moment. Liz Bradbury ; Masks ; Roberta Meek ; Social Distancing 0 3302 Safety During the Pandemic RM: -- not only do I want to keep my family safe, but it keeps their family safe -- because it’s less people in that space.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Right. Right. Yeah. Well we feel the same way. We haven’t been out of the house, except for a couple of doctor’s appointments. And, you know, they’ll say to me, “Can you go over to the center and fix something?” I said, “Well, I’m going at Sunday morning at six o’clock, and I don’t want anybody to have been in there for two days.” And we never have more than one person at a time in the building, and they wipe down -- I mean they’re very, very careful. But I don’t want to be in the building, even if there’s somebody there the day before. And I’m not -- Families ; Indoors ; Liz Bradbury ; Roberta Meek ; Safety 0 3603 Lessons from the Pandemic RM: -- a treatment or a vaccine. I mean that’s what Americans need to understand -- or, you know, reading about returning to school, there was an article -- and I can’t remember if it was The New York Times or The Washington Post -- it was one of the two of those. And it was talking about what can we learn from other countries -- because of course it was riffing off of stupid comments about how everything has opened in other countries, and blah, blah, blah, and they haven’t had -- it’s been perfect, you know. But, when reading that, it was like, “All of this is great. But it’s meaningless in a country that hasn’t followed any of the things they should have followed.” Those other examples, you know, were on complete lockdown, or they were on -- like they had compliance across, you know -- obviously not one hundred percent -- but they had real compliance --&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Right.&#13 ; Liz Bradbury ; Roberta Meek ; The New York Times ; The Washington Post ; Treatment ; Vaccine 0 3854 Queer Dating Apps LB: No. (sighs) Actually, I was just talking to somebody -- a young man -- who was saying that he, you know, would look at the things, and if the person was saying that they would hook-up, he said, “Why would I do that? That’d be crazy.” (laughs) He called it the “Hi and bye” apps. (laughter) It was like that’s what Grindr is, is “Hi and bye.” (laughter) But he said, like, “I’m not going to say “hi” at all if the person is saying, you know, “I don’t care about the thing, you know, I don’t care about COVID.” Well, bye -- so he said, “It’s just ‘bye’ for me.” He was (laughs) great about that. I said, “Did you just make that up?” He said, “Yeah. There’s another name for it” -- which I don’t know, of course -- but I didn’t think it was appropriate for the video, so I made it up -- “Hi and bye” (laughter) apps. (coughs) So you’re talking about --&#13 ; &#13 ; RM: It feels like even if I were -- I mean I really haven’t bothered with dating sites for a long time -- but even if I were, this would not be the moment for me to be doing that. COVID ; Dating Apps ; Grindr ; Liz Bradbury ; Roberta Meek 0 4230 Privilege to Not Work RM: -- you know. Within my immediate circle -- in terms of my family here in Allentown -- none of us are, you know. But, again, my daughter-in-law -- some of her family has to continue to go into work. So, you know, and some of them have some health issues that worry me with that. And I just pray that, you know, that doesn’t happen. But no. I’ve been very, very fortunate --&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah.&#13 ; Allentown ; Liz Bradbury ; Roberta Meek ; Work 0 4467 Activism with Teaching RM: I’ve been on a town hall with Ce-Ce Gerlach. So I’m still doing things -- and my teaching I really do consider to be an extension of my activism -- but it is a weird moment in my life where, you know, it’s the first moment I can think of -- with any kind of protest that’s been important to me -- where I can’t take that risk. And I feel really guilty about being privileged enough to say, “I can’t take that risk to be out and about.” But I can’t take that risk. So it’s brought up a lot of weird emotions for me.&#13 ; Ce-Ce Gerlach ; Roberta Meek ; Town Hall 0 4756 Police Brutality Caught on Camera LB: They lied, and they got caught because of the video. And that’s what I was trying to say to this young woman -- the fact that there’s video all over the place is -- and I was just like -- this was a person in their 20s -- and I said, “Do you really think this hasn’t been happening forever?” (laughs) I mean it’s just that nobody was driving by with their phone (laughs), you know. And obviously the person who made the first video was very motivated to make the video too -- they were very, very concerned.&#13 ; Liz Bradbury ; Police 0 5035 Closing Remarks LB: Well thank you so much for doing this. This was just -- first of all, it’s --&#13 ; &#13 ; RM: You’re welcome.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: -- really fun to be able to see you nonstop for an hour and --&#13 ; &#13 ; RM: I know. (laughter)&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: So I’m going to stop recording. Thank you very much, Roberta Meek. I’m going to stop this n--&#13 ; Liz Bradbury ; Roberta Meek 0 MovingImage In this interview, Roberta Meek talks about her experiences with COVID-19 along with how she is going to handle teaching in a phased retirement. Furthermore, she goes on to talk about her role as an activist in Allentown. Overall, she talks about COVID-19 and how it has affected her teaching. Roberta Meek 2020-07-15 LIZ BRADBURY: There we go. There we go. ROBERTA MEEK: Okay. LB: Hi. Okay. And I'm going to start the audio recording. And the recording is working. So I'm going to read you this -- oh, I have to turn off my phone -- I think I did that already. Yes. And I'm going to pin you. RM: You're going to what? LB: Well that's a Zoom thing that I didn't learn until the fifth video, where it pins on you so that no matter what I say, it doesn't flip back -- RM: Oh. -- to me. RM: Right, right, right. LB: Because I tend to go, "Uh huh." And in the first videos, every time I went, "Uh huh," the picture came back to me. And I'm like, how do you make that stop? So now I know. Okay. And, let's see, I did that -- turn off phone, turned on recording. Okay. Good. With this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and 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'm here with Roberta Meek to talk about her 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 are meeting on Zoom on July 15th, 2020. 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? RM: Roberta Meek. Roberta is R-O-B-E-R-T-A, and Meek is 'M', like Mary, E-E-K, like Kenneth. LB: Thank you. Will you please share your birth date? RM: November 24th, 1956. LB: And what town are you in? You're in Allentown. Is that correct? RM: I live in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Yeah. LB: Okay. So this is the consent part -- do you consent to this interview today? RM: I do, Liz Bradbury. (laughter) LB: Thank you. Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? RM: Sure I do. LB: Okay. Do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, and possible other formats we don't even know about today? RM: I do. LB: 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 and/or withdraw -- or withdraw the entire interview -- from the project? RM: That's great. LB: I hope you don't do that, but, you know. Okay. This is the identity part. So what is your zip code? RM: 18104. LB: Now this says, "What is your age?" You just told what year you were born, but it says, "What is your age?" RM: I'm sixty-three. LB: Okay. RM: I'm going to be sixty-four this year. LB: Me too. (laughter) So this says, "How do you identify within the LGBT community?" So that can be any way that you identify, however you want to say. RM: I identify as a woman, I identify as a lesbian woman. LB: Okay. And one would say cisgender? RM: Cisgender. Yes. LB: Okay. So I sent you a list of things to think about. We certainly don't have to talk about all of those things. You could talk about -- RM: Oops, I didn't look that up. LB: Doesn't matter. I will just mention them as we go along. So one of the first questions we ask everybody is, who's in the house with you? Are you by yourself -- I know that's not true. So who are you seeing regularly, and who's in the house with you? RM: Who's in the house with me is my daughter -- a grown daughter who shares the house with me. And who I see regularly is my son, daughter-in-law, and their four children. LB: Okay. RM: We've basically made it so that we're one household, even though we are living in two spaces. LB: Yeah. RM: In terms of true interaction, it's only us interacting, even though they see some other people -- like her family. But they see them from a distance -- they socially distance with them. LB: Yeah. Okay. RM: So that's the only people I see up close and in person. LB: Yeah. So the reason we ask these questions is because people are really affected by how many people they're -- RM: Absolutely. LB: -- closely related to. And so we've been asking people if their employment has been terminated -- or what are you doing now, in terms of that kind of stuff? RM: Well I'm in a phased retirement, so I'm only working part-time. But no. I haven't been terminated. I teach at Muhlenberg College, and actually I went online before they did, but we went online around the same time as everybody else -- mid-March -- and finished the semester that way. And I intend to teach online until, you know, until we have safety precautions for me and my family. LB: Sure. So you're teaching part-time then? RM: I'm only teaching part-time. I only teach two courses a year, and the way I've spread it out, it's one course per semester. And I've also done teaching online before, so it wasn't like a shock to my system, like it was to a lot of people who had never taught online -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- or, I should say, we went remote, because we were not doing online teaching, because we hadn't constructed our classes that way. But I did not freak out over that opportunity. LB: So people may be looking at this someday way in the future, and they may not understand what you mean by "remote." RM: Yeah. LB: And I don't know. So (laughs) could you sort of describe what that's like, and what that looks like, and how many people, and that kind of stuff? RM: Well what happened with the pandemic is not -- let me backtrack a little bit. When I taught online, I taught online the previous two summers. And at Muhlenberg, which is a small liberal arts college, we went through a semester-long preparation for doing that so that we would really be teaching from the perspective of a liberal arts experience, not kind of a disconnected kind of learning on your own kind of thing that many online programs -- at least in the past -- had been. I would say that even schools that are not liberal arts schools are certainly doing that better than they used to. But Muhlenberg is actually being recognized nationally, now, because of how well we do this. So I had that experience -- one that I had been resistant to for a very long time. But the experience was really mind-blowing. I mean it was such a fabulous experience. I had students who were more engaged in the online class than they'd ever been -- LB: Huh. RM: -- in a face to face class. Because it equalizes the playing field, in terms of discussions, and those kinds of things -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- which happen in various formats. So when this started to play out, it was starting to be of concern right before spring break. And then after spring break, you know, people came back. And over spring break, I had decided I was taking my class online -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- because I was not going to step back on a campus when I'm in a phased retirement. I'm not going to go kill myself (laughs) for the one class that I need to give to this -- LB: Right. RM: -- institution. And I also felt that, from an equity standpoint, that -- I don't know if any of this is relevant -- but from an equity standpoint, I really felt that we had gotten some emails saying that as we return from spring break, that we, as professors, needed to be open to the idea of having some students learn through remote kinds of possibilities, because they might be, you know, immunocompromised, or those kinds of things. And when I read that, I was like, "I have no idea if anyone in my class is affected by this. But what is that going to feel like for the one student in a class that might have to do this? First of all, it outs them as having an illness, which is really their prerogative to not share." LB: Yeah. RM: And so I explained to my students that, you know, the school hadn't decided yet what it was going to do, but I had decided that, for fairness -- not just because I was afraid to return to campus -- but I was like, "We should all be in this." If one student has to be quote-unquote "Disadvantaged" by that -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- let's make it an advantage for all of us. So they accepted that. And I taught my first online session the day that Muhlenberg announced that within that week they would be sending students home. And they were one of the early schools to do it -- they were on the cusp of everybody else doing it. So I was really proud of them for actually making that decision. But what it means to teach remotely when you have not taught remotely is -- and I got most of this feedback from students, because I would do a check-in every -- we actually were going to do it asynchronously -- meaning that nobody had to be on talking to one another -- because, you know, I didn't know where students lived, I didn't know what their home situations were like. But I had students who said, "We really, really, really" -- especially first year students -- who wanted to meet synchronously -- meaning that we would have Zoom sessions. LB: Yeah. RM: And so I made it so that we met twice a week, normally, in the evening -- because I taught evening classes, rather than during the day -- but to traditional-age students. And because of what they wanted to do, I said, "Fine. We will meet twice a week, and whoever can show up can show up. But nobody will be penalized if they are unable to show up -- that the work that gets done can get done asynchronously. But our discussions, I will record" -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- "and so they're available to everybody to try to make, you know, again, equity, you know." LB: Yeah. RM: And so, you know, I did not record the first, let's say, ten minutes of each session, because I wanted to give students a chance to say -- kind of what you're doing with me -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- which is, "How is this impacting you?" LB: Yeah. RM: "What's happening? How are you feeling?" And a lot of them expressed concern and frustration, because having all of their classes online, with few teachers who had taught online -- which meant that most of their professors had, you know, two days of training or whatever. And so a lot of faculty didn't understand that you can't just translate from what you do in-person to online. LB: Right, right. RM: So this was not online teaching, in the sense of what I had been trained to do for the summer. LB: Right. RM: But there are some basic tenants -- like it does not mean that the workload can be the same -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- particularly under the circumstances. It doesn't mean that, you know, the expectations can be the same -- that there needs to be some flexibility. And a lot of professors did not get that -- which I don't blame them. They had no idea. It was like teachers across the globe were (laughs) forced into this -- LB: Right. Yeah. RM: -- remote form of teaching. And you really have to alter things, because the kinds of things that people get face-to-face -- you know, it depends on the students -- whether they're visual learners or oral learners or tactile learners, you know -- all of those things change in cyberspace. LB: Right. RM: So remote learning, for me -- I can't speak to everybody else who was teaching across the globe. But, for me, what it meant is -- I'm fortunate that I teach media and communication, Africana studies, and history courses. And so this course that I was teaching in the spring was "Media and Social Movements," which was really apropos, as those students were leaving that class and Black Lives Matter exploded. They should have some tools, based on my class. LB: Right. RM: But anyway, what that meant is -- I'm fortunate that -- unlike a math or a science or those kinds of classes where you have to get through a particular amount of material so that the person can go to the next class -- I don't have those restraints. So one of the things I was able to do is, you know, this was supposed to be "Media and Social Movements" that would take them from like post-World War II essentially to the present. I usually only get to about the eighties or nineties, (laughs) but I told them we're probably going to get to the seventies, if we're lucky -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- because I don't want to overload you with, you know, reading upon reading upon reading -- and reading in lieu of what we might do in class -- LB: Right. RM: -- those kinds of things. So I really altered everything. And they were really appreciative of that. And I would say I still had at least about fifty percent of my class showing up on a Tuesday and a Thursday -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- to talk. And in my mind, if you take something away from my class -- if you learn something -- that's really what I care about, right. LB: Yeah. RM: And so I do feel like they got a lot out of the class. But they also got a lot out of that because of the fact that they had the opportunity to just say what was going on in their lives, right. LB: Yeah. RM: Versus an online class, where I know, the student knows, everybody knows we're going to be doing this in an online format -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- and you design your class -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- in a way to have robust discussions, even though people may not be face to face. Because the classes that I taught were asynchronous, so nobody ever met, you know -- and yet, as I said, you can have a really, really wonderful experience in spite of that. But that's not what we were doing in -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- the pandemic. And when you think about education -- again, certainly across the United States -- but across the globe -- what an absolute shock and culture shock this was for people. It's amazing that we made it through -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- to be honest with you. Yeah. So that was remote versus online. And I will be teaching online for the fall -- meaning designing my course for that purpose. LB: Yeah. RM: And, in my mind, I intend to tell them I will do that until we have a vaccine, really. LB: Right, right. RM: I'm not going to take that risk. And I have next year, and then my final year of my phased retirement is '21, '22 -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- 2021, '22. And, you know, possibly online by then too -- but certainly through next year. LB: Yeah. RM: There's no way I will step foot in a classroom. I think, unfortunately, education in general -- certainly higher ed -- is really in dire straits, because, you know, Muhlenberg -- like most of the colleges in the country -- not all, but most of the colleges -- particularly small colleges -- are trying to bring students back, because their existence depends on that. LB: Right. RM: But, unfortunately, because we live in this capitalist society, it means -- that should not be the basis upon which people are returning -- LB: Right. RM: -- especially when you've trained faculty, now, to be able to teach online -- that's what you should be doing, because it is not safe. LB: Right. RM: It is not safe. LB: Right. RM: I mean at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I couldn't have given a shit about what anybody told me the rules were. LB: Right. RM: I would do what I wanted to do. And why would you be at a small liberal arts college and not really socialize with your friends? It's just not even remotely realistic. LB: Right. Well it's like (laughs) daycare, you know, in the same way -- you take your kids to daycare, they're going to get sick. RM: Right. LB: Kids at college are going to get sick. RM: Right. LB: I got sick every year I was in college. RM: Well, and they -- right. And, I mean, when you think about the health protocols under normal circumstances -- LB: Right. RM: -- with -- whether it's the flu, or norovirus, or why students have to get particular inoculations going to college that the average public doesn't get -- because of the environment of living in dorms. LB: Yeah. RM: And even if you supposedly -- what they're calling this now -- "de-densify" the campus -- I'm sorry, but those students -- even the most paranoid of them, I just cannot imagine -- you know, that's when you have sexual awakenings, you have social awakenings, you have racial identity awakenings. That's what the on-campus, small liberal arts college experience -- and even the bigger universities -- that's why you pay the big bucks to do -- LB: Right. RM: -- that. LB: It is. RM: And I cannot imagine that at that age, when you think you're invulnerable -- LB: Sure. RB: -- that -- you know, and I don't fault them for that. I mean that's what they're supposed to do, you know. So it really frightens me that they're -- I can't imagine that they're going to successfully stay open with the arbitrary deadlines that they have for, you know, "We're going to come back a week early, and we're going to end before Thanksgiving" -- what? Who told you that, you know, something isn't going to attack you in the meantime? Come on. Be realistic. LB: Yeah. RM: And that college students won't leave the campus between now and November. (laughs) I mean it's like come on. LB: No kidding. RM: Yeah. LB: That it could work out that way. And then there's still that sort of system circumstances -- like physical infrastructure systems that have to do with legionnaires, you know, or the cruise ships, or something. RM: Right. LB: There are older buildings there that have air circulation that have -- RM: Absolutely. LB: -- absolutely no idea how that circulates. And we know that people on cruise ships where every single person was infected, you know. How could that not happen in a dorm building, or a building that was converted from a house into a dorm, you know, that was one hundred -- RM: 1940. Right. (laughs) LB: -- if they could do that. They're not going to rush in and put a HEPA filter on every single system. RM: Right. And where's the money going to come from? LB: Yeah. They're not going to do that. It's a terribly complicated thing, and yet -- RM: It really is. And it's really particularly complicated in the United States, where we are -- I swear to God -- the most selfish humans on the planet -- LB: Yeah. RM: And, you know, it's exposed every problem. LB: Yeah. RM: Like every problem that many of us have known existed -- like it is out in the open -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- you know. This whole argument about essential workers, and -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- heroes. Essential? It's called underpaid -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- unable to live on their "living wage" -- LB: Right. RM: -- people who are literally sacrificing their lives. And that one percent -- those billionaires -- cannot exist, right. The whole system falls apart. LB: Right. RM: The whole -- excuse my language -- fucking system falls apart. LB: Yeah. RM: The moment that there's a threat to those quote unquote "illegal immigrants" -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- those underpaid human beings, right -- all of that is really just exposing how really sick we are. LB: Yeah. RM: And that's not going to turn around, and the capitalistic system isn't going to be able to turn around until they actually get treatment and a vaccine. And yet, you know, the push is on to be back to normal. There is no normal anymore. LB: No. RM: There's not even a new normal anymore. LB: Yeah. RM: Anyway. LB: Yeah. This interview, you know, you can talk about whatever you want -- and I don't think we can separate Black Lives Matter, or the political circumstances, or poverty, or anything from what's going on with COVID -- RM: You cannot. LB: -- and I hope that people in the future will look at COVID-19 and see the vast differences between statistic-- just if you look at the statistics between -- RM: Absolutely. LB: -- other countries and our country -- RM: That's right. LB: -- and why it's like that. RM: That's right. LB: And it's like that because of capitalism, and it's also like that because of leadership right now. RM: It's because of that, based on leadership, capitalism, racism -- LB: Right. RM: -- structural inequality -- I mean it has shown every fracture in our system that has been there all along, with, you know, people not wanting to recognize that. But, I mean, this didn't happen to us because we're some unlucky -- LB: Right. RM: -- group. This happened because of the way systems operate. LB: Yeah. RM: And they absolutely cannot be separated -- LB: Right. Yeah. RM: -- you know. And one of the things, again, that I kept saying to my students -- and to my family -- it's like, "We are absolutely blessed and lucky that we can social distance -- that we can stay in our homes and be safe." I mean, that is an absolute privilege (laughs) that we have that opportunity. And the most that we have is inconvenience. So like when people are whining and bitching about whatever, it's like, "You are inconvenienced. That's the extent" -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- "of what is happening to you" -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- "because it is an absolute privilege that you have the opportunity to make a choice" -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- "to not be out there risking," you know -- I am absolutely privileged that I don't have to step back on that campus. And, frankly, if they forced me too, I would say, "Fine, I'll go into full retirement right now." So I'm at a stage in my life -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- where, you know -- going back to COVID, you know -- and it hasn't felt as impactful to me as it might have 15, 20 years ago -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- in terms of where I am in my life, you know. The people that I care about, I get to see. Now I can say, if my daughter was still in D.C. and kind of trapped there and hadn't returned home, or if I was unable -- like in some countries where basically you literally could not see my son and his family because you weren't allowed out of your own home -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- I would probably not be doing very well at all. But because, you know, I am really, really fortunate to be able to continue, you know -- in our little circle it hasn't felt hugely different than (laughs) life before. LB: Yeah. RM: But for my grandson, who, you know, was supposed to graduate from Muhlenberg -- with no graduation, with no ability to have senior week, to probably have no ability to find a job anytime soon -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- you know -- that's a whole other space to be in. So this is really something. I mean every day I wake up and think, "I'm living in the upside down world. What in the hell is this?" LB: Yeah. RM: And, "It's a nightmare." And, "It must be changing by tomorrow," you know. And it's not. It's just getting worse, because of the fact that fools -- or a lack of leadership is there. And not only lack of leadership -- that evil leadership is -- LB: Yeah, right. Right. RM: -- in place in this country. LB: Yeah. I agree with that. And no president to be ready for any of the things that are happening -- I mean people have talked about this sort of as a hypothetical, "What if this terrible thing happened?" And I actually -- in all of the art history classes I've been talking about in the last few years, I've been talking about the flu epidemic of 1918. And we talk about that over and over and over again, way before we came into this. I talk about it all the time, because my grandmother died during it. RM: Oh. LB: And it affected every single family. I mean fifty million people died during that. And one of the things was was because it was World War I, there was the Sedition Act -- that no one could mention that people were dying, or you would go to prison. RM: Yeah. LB: And so that's why we don't know very much about it. And it's one of the reasons that I'm really glad we're collecting these pieces of information now, because there isn't a lot of -- there's certainly not any public information -- there have been journals and stuff that people had written, saying, well, you know, Hilda Doolittle -- who was a famous Imagist poet, who worked with Ezra Pound, and did all sorts of significant things -- and she was from Bethlehem. She was very famous. And she was absolutely distraught by the fact that her brother and her husband had both died of the flu -- one of them it had been a thing from the war, and then her brother died. And, you know, and then she got it, and she nearly died, and it influenced her life. And yet, when you read that, you don't really go, "Oh, yeah. Because everybody had it." Everybody had it. One out of three people in the world had it. RM: Yeah. LB: It changed the world. RM: Everything. LB: And, you know, one of the interesting things about the history of plagues is that the plague in the Dark Ages -- the Middle Ages -- actually -- (laughs) -- this is a terrible thing to say -- but it elevated the positions of poor people, because so many poor people died, that workers could charge more to the rich people who hadn't died. And it literally was like, you know -- it wiped out half the population -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- and most of the people who died who were poor, because the rich people could hide -- just the same -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- as it is now. RM: Yeah. LB: And so suddenly, like skilled workers -- and it also wiped out skilled workers. So if you had people who were like stone masons -- suddenly there weren't any stone masons. So they could say, "Well, you know, yeah, I'll do this for you, but I'm charging the big bucks." And, in some ways, people can say, "Yeah, we'll do this for you, but I'm not working for minimum wage anymore" -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- "this is ridiculous." RM: Yeah. LB: And I have to say that the interviews that I've been doing for the HIV/AIDS folks -- all of those people are our age, or older. RM: Yeah. LB: Well people who are our age often are more likely to have figured out their lives -- not everybody -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- but all of the people that I interviewed are either retired, and they have an income, or they're in a job that they've been in in a long time, or they own their companies -- some of them own their companies. So their financial circumstances were stable -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- compared to young people. And also, because of HIV/AIDS, these folks were extraordinarily careful -- so they haven't known very many people who had been sick and died of COVID-19. But now you're the sixth interview of COVID, and every one of the first five people that I've interviewed had essential workers in their family, who were in terribly stressful, nervous situations, very, very at-risk, and had multiple people that had died in their families. RM: Yeah. LB: Most of them were younger, and they were all people of color, and they all had a variety of -- larger families -- and they had more uncertainty in their lives. And it was so significantly different. It's been vastly different -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- compared to the other guys that I interview -- which is good for me, because most of the people I know as my friends are in that older age groups, so it's -- RM: Right. LB: -- like you, you know -- I'm thinking, well -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- [you live?] at home, and she's -- you know, that kind of stuff. RM: Yeah. LB: But when you start to talk about people who are in their -- RM: That's right. LB: -- forties or thirties or twenties -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- they're in tough, tough, tough situations. RM: Absolutely. LB: And some of them are very cavalier, and you want to go, "No. Don't take this level of risk." RM: Yeah. LB: And, just like you said, you can't say that to an eighteen-year-old -- RM: Right, right. LB: -- you know. That's why they send eighteen-year-olds to war. (laughter) RM: Yeah. LB: It's true. RM: It's true. I hadn't thought of that, but that's true. (laughs) LB: Because they think they're invincible, you know. RM: Yeah. LB: And in fact there's a whole proven strategy of that. RM: Yeah. LB: So I'm talking too much. So you've been talking about work, and that's been really fascinating. So are you talking to lots of other people -- we're talking a lot about whether people are using video -- Zoom -- and certainly you are for work -- talk about how you're using technology to be able to talk to people. RM: Absolutely. It's actually been a godsend, because, first of all, I proposed -- and it's happening now -- where my siblings and I talk every week on a Zoom call. And my sisters and I talk frequently -- certainly not once a week, but frequently. But my brothers, as much as I'm close to them, I typically might talk to them a couple times a year or whatever, you know -- not very frequently. And this, you know, we talk to each other religiously, except if there's like Father's Day or Mother's Day or something like that -- we've skipped that week -- which is absolutely important to me. Because it's not just a phone call, and it's not where each of us is calling each other -- we all get to see each other -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- through our Zoom call. LB: Yeah. RM: I've also been in touch -- like my best friend from childhood, who I always feel close to, no matter how many years we don't talk -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- we've talked. Other friends who I haven't talked to very often, just because life gets in the way, you know -- I've reached out, because it just feels really important to stay in touch with particularly people who are not close by, or who, you know, you don't get to be in communication with often. And, again, phone calls are great, but there's something really comforting about being able to see the other person, and see their face, and their expressions -- and, you know, even though you can't visit, you feel like you visited, to some degree. So I've been using Zoom a lot -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- and FaceTime. LB: Yeah. RM: Now, FaceTime isn't possible for everybody, because everybody doesn't have an iPhone. But Zoom is easy no matter what kind of technology they've got, you know. And for a while, for example, my oldest brother (laughs) could not get anything working -- but he was still able to call in -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- to the Zoom call. And now we can actually see him, because he figured some shit out. (laughs) But yeah, no, like I can't even imagine what that must have been like in 1918, when -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- you know, it might take two weeks to get a letter, let alone, you know... Can't even imagine, you know. Because it really has made things really comforting, to be able to speak to people -- or, like my daughter-in-law's family -- I haven't seen them, but, again, it doesn't happen every week, but I think we do FaceTime with them. LB: Yeah. RM: And, you know, the grandkids actually get to, you know -- before, they actually -- because in the beginning of this, like my son's family didn't go visit at all. But now the other grandparents -- they built a whole, beautiful playground for these kids -- the little kids -- in their backyard, which is huge. And so, you know, they get to go and socially distance. So they've been able to see them. But before then, they couldn't. And, you know, with -- my younger grandkids are four and two -- almost two -- tomorrow will be two -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- I mean how quickly they could forget who somebody is, right. So yeah. LB: And you really miss things with little kids. So are you taking care of the -- RM: I am. Four days a week I watch them. LB: Okay. RM: Wednesdays are the day I have off. (laughs) LB: Oh. (laughs) RM: And that's one of the reasons I wanted to retire, because the world was literally falling apart, and it's like the one thing that keeps me sane and happy are the younger grandkids, who don't have any clue what's going on, and, you know, that innocence -- and also it gives me the inspiration to like just keep fighting -- because, you know, you've got to for them. So yeah. So I've been actually watching them -- I didn't watch them four full days a week until recently -- but, you know, that was the plan for me. And it's been great, because, you know, their family -- which is two older boys -- one who just graduated from college, and one who's going into 12th grade -- and two working parents -- there's no way they could get any work done -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- if the little ones were at home. So they actually come to my house -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- four days a week, so that, you know, their household can actually function. (laughs) And I get real happy by them being here. So yeah. LB: Yeah. That's great. I definitely miss kids. (laughter) So we've talked a lot about some of your concerns, but what's your biggest concern -- pandemic-wise, what's your biggest concern? I mean I don't know if you can separate that from other things, but -- RM: I can't totally separate it. And my biggest concern is, first of all, are they going to figure this out, because of the leadership that we've got going on, and the fact that we are less and less and less connected with anybody else in the rest of the world -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- you know. The fact that we're not collaborating with -- as others are doing and working together to try to figure out a solution -- that, you know, those nightmare horror movies that you see where people are fighting over this, that, and the other -- whether it's water, or whatever the resources are -- I mean we literally could be in that position because of how we, as a nation -- not certainly we as certain individuals -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- but we, as a nation, have positioned ourselves, based on the absence of leadership or anything other than evil at the top. LB: Yeah. RB: It also really worries me about what will happen with the November election, because, you know, there's all kinds of ways that this could be rationalized to fuck that election up -- LB: Yeah. RB: -- if we're still in -- we're not going to get to a second wave, because we're not going to ever get out of the first wave -- LB: Right. RM: -- with the way we've been behaving, as a nation. But the point is, it's going to get worse as flu season approaches -- whatever you call it -- another wave, or a surge, or whatever. So I'm really, really worried about how this is going to land for -- I mean certainly the globe -- but certainly for the United States -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- because I think we are already essentially a failed state (laughs) -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- and I think that that exercise in destroying what, you know, the completely imperfect democracy that we were to begin with, I think -- LB: Right. RM: -- we are on the verge of complete destruction. I mean yesterday I was reading in the news how the federal government is insisting that, you know, the CDC not be the ones to collect data. LB: Yeah. Right. RM: And that's just happening. Like along with all the nonsense that we see, there's all of these insidious, nefarious things going on that are happening at the same time that people -- including the media -- does not pay attention to, because they're worried about whether or not, you know, Donald Trump is wearing a fucking mask. LB: Right. RM: I mean, it's ridiculous. So I'm really concerned about our ability to survive -- as a political entity for sure -- but what does that mean if we already see these disproportionate ways that it's affecting certain communities? What's it going to end up? So I have a lot of fear about this. The one hopeful thing, I will say, about the pandemic honestly is that the largest protest movement ever in the United State's history is happening. LB: Right. RM: Now, it's getting a lot less coverage, but it's still happening. LB: Yeah. RM: So how sustained that will be -- I don't know. But this is pretty amazing that it's been, you know, more than a month of every day -- in some localities, every day -- protests happening. And that could not have happened without the pandemic. So, you know, there's got to be something positive that comes out of everything, in my mind. So some silver lining. And that is the silver lining. Because people were home, people were, you know, not watching football or baseball or whatever the hell we would have been watching at this point in time -- basketball maybe. I don't even know what fucking season. (laughter) LB: Me neither. RM: But the point is that there was nothing to distract people from the news, so that George Floyd was not an anomaly, as many, many white Americans think it was. LB: Yeah. RM: But it was visceral -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- and it was seen by many people who wouldn't have paid any attention. LB: Right. RM: And people wouldn't have been able to be in the streets everyday if they had to be in their offices, or working wherever. So that's my glimmer of hope, is that the pandemic has actually allowed this protest movement to flourish in a way that it would never have been able to if we had been in a normal, you know, grind of work and all of those things. I don't know if that's enough to overcome, you know, the devastation that's being done to really all of our institutions and systems. LB: Right. RM: But, you know, I just saw RBG is in the hospital again, you know -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (laughs) I'm like, "Come on" -- LB: Yeah. Yeah. RM: -- "you've got to make it past November, and you've got to make it past us" -- I mean, unfortunately, Trump is not going to go away immediately -- it doesn't matter if he's defeated or not. But him being out of office will be at least a hopeful step towards something different and better. LB: Yeah. RM: But yeah. I mean it's like, you know, no one could have imagined that we could be in the spot that we are in. LB: Yeah. RM: I am not one who does not see all of the horror of who we are as a nation. I predicted this when Trump got elected in 2016 -- and people go, "Oh, we don't have to worry. He's not going to win." I'm like, "You all need to open your eyes, because this is really possible, and this is going to be a nightmare." But, I would say, as much as I thought of the horror story, I could not have envisioned this combination -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- of -- LB: Who could ever? RM: -- horrific opportunities of to be just in complete free fall. LB: Yeah. RM: But, as I said, that's the one glimmer of hope -- that's a big deal, you know. That's a big deal. LB: It is a big deal. Yeah. It's interesting. I have sort of been thinking a lot about the incredibly stupid things that Great Britain did when it was a world power, you know -- the sun never sets on the British Empire. They, in effect, owned everybody and colonized everybody, and were horrible about it. And there was this enormous one stupid mistake after another, where they just kept doing it, and kept doing it and doing it. And, you know, I'm sure that a lot of Americans today think the United States will never be not the power that it is. RM: That's right. LB: And that's what people thought about Great Britain in the 1920s. And now, you know, they've got that in the Falklands, (laughs) you know. And they have changed every single thing -- every single circumstance -- with the exception of the queen -- RM: Right. LB: -- every single circumstance in their -- and they did change, but it took, what, decades and decades and decades. And -- RM: But the reality is, we -- LB: (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible) perfect. RM: Yeah. We need to change. So that's not the problem. But the problem is that -- you've hit the nail on the head -- which is, again, as a historian, is just always so troubling -- that, you know, we live with blinders on, as a nation -- we live in our own mythologies. And, I mean, a few hundred years, in the scope of human history, is nothing. LB: Nothing, yes. RM: Empires -- and we are an empire -- LB: Right. RM: -- have fallen -- pretty much all of them fall -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- right. And I think that's one of the things that really worries me about, for example, November, you know -- that this "solution" is to elect somebody different. One of the things that has frightened me for years -- but certainly once Trump was elected -- is that, again, that's a mindset that's assuming that we have some stability, right. LB: Yeah. RM: And that's assuming that, you know, a change of leadership is going to be the solution. The problem is things have been so bastardized -- LB: Yes. RM: -- so bastardized for decades, but definitive-- like Trump didn't come out of nowhere, right. LB: Right. Right. RM: He's come out of -- at least since 1964 -- what the Republican Party has been moving towards. LB: Yeah. RM: So it's been decades of concerted effort to mess up the systems. And so, you know, to always think, "Well, all we need to do is get him out of there, 2020." "Or 2018, let's get, you know, things" -- who would have thought -- LB: Yeah. [It's ridiculous that they said that?]. Yeah. RM: -- that it does not matter what he has done, said -- it doesn't matter. Like his followers are not moving off of that path because it's not grounded -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- in rational anything. LB: Right. It's not rational. Yeah. RM: It's grounded in hatred, it's grounded in xenophobia, and homophobia, and racism -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- you know. Fear. LB: Yeah. RM: And -- I don't know. And so the pandemic could be the way we see a way out of that tunnel, or it could be the rocks falling on that tunnel -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- and, you know, unfortunately historians can't predict the future, so I can't say which that will be. I don't know where it will land. But -- LB: We're talking to the future right now, and, you know, I always think about -- I've mentioned this a couple of times in some of the other interviews -- when you watch movies about World War II -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- there's a few kinds of movies, and one of them was the movies they made during World War II, where they didn't know we were going to win or not, and how, in some ways, they were very different than the movies they made after World War II -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- which actually were more critical of the United States and stuff -- the during World War II was just about morale, and just saying, you know, "We have to keep fighting, and we have to keep fighting, but let's not say anything that's negative that's happening" -- and there were all sorts of horrible, horrible things that were happening -- the internment of Japanese, and, you know, all sorts of stuff like that -- the Holocaust was happening during -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- the time -- that people weren't acknowledging, even though some people were certainly aware of it. And yet, you know, we're in the middle of it -- and, in fact, we're at the beginning of it -- because it's only been a few months -- RM: Exactly. LB: -- you know. People need to understand that. I mean even the 1918 flu -- RM: It's not going to be over in a few months. LB: No. RM: This is a long haul. Yeah. LB: It's interesting -- the flu epidemic of 1918, there were two things -- one of the things was at the end of fifteen months, it disappeared -- it literally ended. And some people think that it's because the flu mutated -- because mutation can be good, as well as bad. And so we don't know what that's going to be -- it could be mutating so it's not bad for pe-- you know, it doesn't make people sick anymore. And the other thing that happened was that one out of three people in the entire world had had the disease. So there was a, you know, herd immunity, because -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- huge, huge numbers of people had had it, and they either died -- like the fifty to one hundred million people -- or they developed a resistance to it. And so, you know, we can look back at that now, and one of the biggest things we see about it is that almost nobody knows anything about it. RM: Yeah. LB: They don't even talk about it, you know. They sort of say little bits about it and stuff like that, but that was a million times worse than this pandemic. It hit young people, and all sorts of things. But we don't know what's going to happen with this. We're in the beginning of it. We have no idea what's going to happen. It could get one hundred times worse as we go along. RM: Yeah. LB: And it's shocking. I haven't spoken to anyone who wasn't furious at people who were not acting responsibly. RM: It makes no sense to me. LB: Yeah. RM: It makes no sense to me. But, again, unfortunately, a lot of that is rooted in it being politicized. But even so, you know, when we went out to the fish hatchery with the kids -- and there's huge signs everywhere that say, you know, "Because of COVID-19, make sure you're wearing your mask. Blah, blah, blah." We were in the minority -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- of people. And it's like, yeah, I might be able to be distant from you, but when you're walking along those things where the fish are, I can't guarantee you're not going to be close to me. Like it makes no sense. LB: Yeah. RM: No sense whatsoever. LB: Yeah. RM: Yesterday we were at the park with the kids, and, unfortunately, we were foolish, and we had our, you know, masks on our wrists -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- because we hadn't been near anybody for quite a while. And this young woman and her boyfriend -- we were at one of the little bridges at the rose garden -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- because we had been throwing rocks in the creek -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- and we were standing there one last moment with the kids. And I said to them, you know, "Can you just hold on?" Because if we can walk away, and whatever, and they were staying -- and she goes, "Oh" -- and she's talking the whole time, right -- so it was like, "We're just going to walk over here." So she's like walking and talking behind me, and I'm like, "Are you fucking kidding me?" But then I have to blame myself, because I didn't have my mask on at that moment. LB: Yeah. RM: But the reality is, my mask -- needs to have her mask too. LB: Yeah. RM: And everybody else had been as they should, you know -- they were polite, and everybody says, "Thank you," as people wait, you know -- LB: Sure. RM: -- and the kids are even -- I mean, my four-year-old grandson now knows, you know -- he waits until people walk by, and therefore he's not -- what was wrong with her? And I didn't want to have an argument with her, because it would have meant more back and forth with the spit, you know. It's like -- LB: Yeah. More air. RM: I mean the lack of compliance -- and I have not been in any place except my home, and my son's home. LB: Yeah. RM: I pick up things where it's curbside pickup -- and they throw things in my trunk -- so I literally (laughs) had no contact with other human beings. I haven't been in a store -- I've been fortunate that I haven't had to be in a store, you know. And it really doesn't take -- I mean if we're lucky enough to be able to do this, what is wrong with people? LB: Yeah. I don't understand. RM: I mean my daughter keeps telling me -- I'm not mentioning names, since this is going to be recorded forever -- you know who they are -- but, you know, she laughs at me, because I keep ordering new masks, you know -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- got some kind of cloth ones, some whatever -- because it's going to be around for a really long time. LB: Yeah. RM: So it's like a fashion accessory -- like Michael Jackson. You know what I'm saying? So I'm going to be wearing them for a long time. So (laughs) they've got to be cute, and they've got to be a lot of them. (laughs) LB: I know. I was talking to -- I said, you know, "Start getting your kids used to wearing masks. So buy them like superhero ones -- like lunch boxes, you know." Like, "Oh, I get the coolest mask, you know, and" -- RM: I just got two in the mail yesterday with Spiderman on them. LB: Yeah. RM: We both had them on, because they're going to have to wear them. LB: Yeah. RM: They're going to have to get used to it. And even they're not school age, they're going to have to get used to it. And then if they go to school, let's pray they keep them on. But oh, God, I don't know. LB: Well we have a friend, you know, who is a pediatrician. And she said that, you know, she's got all these moms saying, "Can I send my kid to daycare?" And she said, "Well let me ask you a question. When you send your kid to daycare, do they get a cold, you know? Don't they get everything from the other kids at daycare? So if you do it, they're going to get this. So you have to decide. If your kid gets this, what's it going to do to them, and what's it going to do to everybody else in your household? Because you're not going to be able to keep them away from you" -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- "you know." And she said, "You just have to stop and think. I'm not going to tell you. I'm going to tell you that. If you send them to daycare, they're going to get it." RM: Right. And if they don't get it, they'll be, you know, could be silent carriers. Who knows? LB: They're going to get it. RM: I mean that's why I just feel like this is so much more important than me staying, working full-time, is the fact -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- that, again, this is a privilege and a blessing that, you know, between my daughter and me, we have been able to have my son and daughter-in-law never have to send their kids -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- to daycare. Now, you know, the older one, who's four, was in preschool. And unfortunately he's not going to have that interaction. But thank goodness he has a younger brother, so he's not going to be totally bored. LB: Yeah. RM: But that just is not worth the risk. LB: Yeah. Yeah. RM: You know, he loved preschool, but he's not going to be going back in the fall. He can't. LB: It's [just?] -- RM: You know, she has a -- I don't know -- seventy-six-year-old grandmother. I mean he'll never be able to see her if that's the case. LB: Yeah. RM: So I realize that there are people who don't have those options -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- and that's how you de-densify, is (laughs) that you have people who absolutely have no choice. But if I have a choice -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- not only do I want to keep my family safe, but it keeps their family safe -- because it's less people in that space. LB: Right. Right. Yeah. Well we feel the same way. We haven't been out of the house, except for a couple of doctor's appointments. And, you know, they'll say to me, "Can you go over to the center and fix something?" I said, "Well, I'm going at Sunday morning at six o'clock, and I don't want anybody to have been in there for two days." And we never have more than one person at a time in the building, and they wipe down -- I mean they're very, very careful. But I don't want to be in the building, even if there's somebody there the day before. And I'm not -- RM: Right. LB: -- going to be in the building when anybody else is there -- in fact, I don't even like to go out of the house. I really don't. RM: Right. (laughs) I don't know if that's going to change. I said I'll probably need therapy to actually get back to being a human being who will interact with people. I get so paranoid. If we take a walk, you know, just to get out in the fresh air -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- like if I see people a block away, I start to get -- LB: I do too. RM: -- anxious, you know -- a little anxiety. LB: (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible) I haven't walked anywhere. I have a bicycle desk, which I get exercise on, and we work in the garden. And that's all we do. We haven't gone for a walk. I'm not going to -- you know, Trish, now, she's in great shape, but she has interstitial lung compromise -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- as part of her lupus. Now, it's not serious, but she has it. And she's -- RM: You're not taking that risk. LB: -- sixty-five years old. So, you know, she's great. She works hard -- she built a rock garden and everything. But if she gets this, you know -- I mean we're all over 60. For heaven's sake -- RM: We're in the age group that's a risk -- which is weird, but it's true. (laughter) LB: I know. Because I think I'm so -- like I was talking to somebody yesterday who was in her twenties, and she goes, "Well, you know, my grandmother's really at risk," and stuff. And I said, "How old is she?" And she said, "Sixty three." (laughter) She goes, "She's really spry." (laughs) I go, "Yeah. Oh, yeah." RM: And we think, "Damn, that's us." Yeah. (laughter) LB: I'm spry. I walk five miles a day, kid, (laughs) you know. For heaven's sake. Oh, God. We're really spry, Bert. (laughs) RM: Oh my God. LB: So one of the things we have that we're very lucky with, I think -- in the state of Pennsylvania -- is we have Dr. Rachel Levine. And, you know, I don't know if you've seen her speaking or anything, but it's a plus, I think. RM: I think we're one of the states that has leadership, period -- LB: We do. RM: -- you know. LB: A good governor. RM: New York, us, you know -- there's a few. LB: Yeah. RM: And yeah. I mean, first of all, it's just with such pride to think (laughs) that she is leading this -- and, first of all, that we have her in that position -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- is a big deal. LB: It is. RM: And, you know, just thinking how many years ago -- LB: Right. RM: -- anyway. It's just really -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- I love hearing what she has to say. I love reading that, you know, she's leading this, that, and the other. Yeah. I think we're really, really fortunate to have -- and especially someone who also -- I mean obviously is not part of the community, obviously -- but who can understand the scope of the kinds of issues -- LB: Right. RM: -- that could come up for the community. LB: Yeah. RM: Obviously, you know, she is not only representing the community -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- you know, which always becomes a thing when -- LB: Sure. RM: -- folks are Black or trans or whatever -- that somehow that's their only interest. But having that perspective I think really is helping with making certain decisions. Unfortunately, again, the economy has driven some of those decisions so that we didn't even follow our own guidelines for when we went from damn red to yellow to green. Because what has translated, for many people, is green means things are back to normal. LB: I know. Trish was saying, "What a stupid thing to call it, to call it 'green'" -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- "because it just sounds like that means 'go'. And it's not" -- RM: We should have just stayed in yellow. We should have never been able to go beyond yellow, if you're going to talk colors -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- so that people understand yellow at least means "caution," you know. LB: Yeah. Or they could have -- RM: And green means, "Hey, everything's back to normal." LB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should have started with a different color, then gone to red and yellow. (laughter) Because there's more levels than three, really. RM: Yeah. LB: And we really aren't out of the yellow phase. It's ridiculous. And people are like -- RM: We're not going to be out of the yellow phase until there's -- LB: That's right. RM: -- a treatment or a vaccine. I mean that's what Americans need to understand -- or, you know, reading about returning to school, there was an article -- and I can't remember if it was The New York Times or The Washington Post -- it was one of the two of those. And it was talking about what can we learn from other countries -- because of course it was riffing off of stupid comments about how everything has opened in other countries, and blah, blah, blah, and they haven't had -- it's been perfect, you know. But, when reading that, it was like, "All of this is great. But it's meaningless in a country that hasn't followed any of the things they should have followed." Those other examples, you know, were on complete lockdown, or they were on -- like they had compliance across, you know -- obviously not one hundred percent -- but they had real compliance -- LB: Right. RM: -- with whatever it was. They had governments that might be democracies, but they're social democracies -- so that social safety net was there for pe-- like there's no comparison. Like we can't learn from them, because we're not in that position. LB: Yeah. RM: We're not in a position where, as a nation, we don't have to worry about the fact that we're still in the first wave, and we're going to be in the first wave. Because, unlike other countries, you know, we haven't moved off of this. We haven't gone like this, and then a second wa-- we've gone like (noise) -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- you know. (laughs) And so I'm just like, "Stop acting like we can learn from anybody else until we learn that we're not -- we have to stop being stupid, as a nation." LB: Yeah. RM: And Americans have a really hard time not being really stupid. LB: I know. Why is it? Well, yeah. Oh. Ugh. Yeah. It's -- RM: COVID parties, so that you can -- and then dying. LB: And then dying. (laughter) Yeah. RM: I mean, come on. LB: Yeah. And then people saying, "Well, that wasn't me." I just talked to somebody who was saying, "Well, you know, now that you can go to restaurants" -- and she was making some good points about, as a young person, buying food weeks and weeks in advance -- so like buying food once every two weeks -- and how she really just wasn't equipped to deal with the concept of buying food -- because fresh food doesn't last, you know, over that time. And she wasn't really a cook. And she said by the end of the second week, "I don't want that food anymore." And so she said that they're going out to eat. And I'm in my mind thinking -- going out to eat, to me -- so somebody (coughs) that I know on Facebook that I know personally said that he'd gone out to lunch -- he'd taken his mother and his sister out to brunch. And the wait person came to their table and wasn't wearing a mask. And Trish and I said in unison, "I would have gotten up and walked out of the place, just right then." And he ended up staying. And she said, "Why did he do that? Why didn't they just leave?" Because -- RM: Right. LB: -- I mean that person was coming in contact with dozens of people who, because they were eating, weren't wearing masks. So how could that person possibly be not potentially infected? And, in fact, wait staff people are absolute-- they're essential workers, making no money at all, and they're at such risk, that it's a horrible, horrible situation for people who are working in restaurants. And we know lots of people who work for restaurants, and they do that, you know, and they make an okay salary, if they can work all of the time -- if it's a nice restaurant, they can do okay. But places are telling them, "You have to come in and work. If you don't come in and work, you can't work here anymore." It's -- RM: Exactly. Right. LB: And because they're essential workers, they can't get unemployment anymore, because we're open. It's an awful situation. So let's see. Oh (laughs), here's a good one -- are you spending any time on queer dating or hook-up apps? RM: (laughs) No. (laughter) No, I gave up on that a long time ago. (laughter) If you know -- LB: No -- RM: -- any good apps, you can tell me what they are. But -- LB: No. (sighs) Actually, I was just talking to somebody -- a young man -- who was saying that he, you know, would look at the things, and if the person was saying that they would hook-up, he said, "Why would I do that? That'd be crazy." (laughs) He called it the "Hi and bye" apps. (laughter) It was like that's what Grindr is, is "Hi and bye." (laughter) But he said, like, "I'm not going to say "hi" at all if the person is saying, you know, "I don't care about the thing, you know, I don't care about COVID." Well, bye -- so he said, "It's just 'bye' for me." He was (laughs) great about that. I said, "Did you just make that up?" He said, "Yeah. There's another name for it" -- which I don't know, of course -- but I didn't think it was appropriate for the video, so I made it up -- "Hi and bye" (laughter) apps. (coughs) So you're talking about -- RM: It feels like even if I were -- I mean I really haven't bothered with dating sites for a long time -- but even if I were, this would not be the moment for me to be doing that. LB: You know, I -- RM: I understand that for many, though -- like in some ways I can imagine if you're younger that those sites -- assuming that you're not doing the hook-up thing -- it can be a way to actually get to know somebody -- LB: Sure. RM: -- which a lot of times -- especially when you're younger -- you don't bother to do before you hook up. So that there could be some utility. I don't know if people are smart enough not to, you know -- if you want some grins, look at -- I think it's NYC dot gov -- the New York City -- LB: Oh, yeah. RM: -- Twitter account has a whole thing about hook up stuff. LB: (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible). RM: Hilarious. I mean, I'm like, "This is a government site saying all of these things." It's hilarious. LB: (inaudible) [Adrian?] worked with the city and the state to adopt a lot of the information that New York had. Parts of it was a little too edgy. But we put it on our website, because, you know, it's specific -- RM: I mean it's great information, but it's hilarious that the language that is on there is on a government site. (laughs) LB: But, in some ways, it's kind of brilliant, because it's more likely for people to read it. It's not stodgy. It draws people to it (laughter) to actually read it and go, "Oh yeah, I see it." (laughter) So Adrian said, "I can see why the glory hole thing is not making people comfortable" (laughter), you know. And he said, "They wouldn't use the word 'rimming' in the thing that I wanted to " (laughter) -- RM: Right. (laughs) LB: But (laughter) -- RM: They did actually, though. They did. LB: In New York, they have it -- but they won't use it in PA. So -- RM: Oh, okay. LB: -- he rewrote it to make it more, you know -- RM: PA-friendly. (laughter) LB: I guess. And part of that is because we're getting a lot of pushback from Rachel Levine. So they don't want to have it seem like, you know -- you know what I'm saying [and stuff?]. RM: Well there's the problem -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- which we have -- whether it's Barack Obama as the first Black -- LB: Exactly. RM: -- president, or the first trans person -- is you don't want to seem like blah, blah, blah. But it also means that that creates a problem for the community that you do come from -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- because, in some ways, you've got to distance yourself from that so that you don't -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- seem like that's your key constituency that you're worried about. LB: Yeah. RM: And, you know, it's one of the things that we joked and kind of didn't joke about with Barack Obama -- that, you know, Black people were better off under, you know -- whether it's Lyndon Johnson or whoever -- because -- LB: Right. Yeah. RM: -- you know, whether it's white people or white guilt -- same thing that I had at work when we had a particular person in a particular position -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- where it was like, we were better off with the white guilt that was at the top. Do you know what I'm saying? LB: Yeah. RM: Because we could get what we needed better -- LB: I see. RM: -- when -- LB: I can understand that. RM: -- but it really is -- it presents a real quandary at times -- LB: Yeah. Sure. RM: -- when what you're talking about affects the community that you come from -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- that, in a marginalized group -- that, in a political situation, you've got to act as if you are not worried about those folks in the way that you really are worried about those folks. LB: Yeah. I think you've talked about most of the other questions that we've had on here by our just chatting. There's one question on here -- do you know anybody that's had it -- had the disease -- or anybody who's died? RM: I do not know anyone who has died, personally. I don't even have anybody, thank God -- knock on wood some place -- within my personal circle -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- who have become ill. Like my sisters, former brother-in-law, you know, had it, and recovered. But, for example, one of the young men who was in [Hype?] many years ago -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- actually was written in the -- there was an article in the paper about his family -- the one who had multiple people die -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- in their -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- family. LB: Yeah. RM: So, you know, reading it was like, "Oh my God. I know who they're talking about." LB: Yeah. RM: But I have not had a lot of personal experience -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- with people -- but, again, that's because I'm in like this bubble -- LB: True. RM: -- and, you know, some of my siblings have children who have to continue to work -- and thank goodness they've stayed healthy. But it's not like everybody is fortunate to not have to work -- LB: Right. RM: -- you know. Within my immediate circle -- in terms of my family here in Allentown -- none of us are, you know. But, again, my daughter-in-law -- some of her family has to continue to go into work. So, you know, and some of them have some health issues that worry me with that. And I just pray that, you know, that doesn't happen. But no. I've been very, very fortunate -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- that it has not impacted me, personally, at this point. LB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the last thing -- and I think we've talked about this a little bit, but I want you to have an opportunity to talk about this a little bit more if you want -- because you can't divorce the circumstances of COVID from the circumstances of Black Lives Matter right now -- and even our local issues with that, which are very significant at the moment. So do you want to talk about that anymore? You have said some things. But go ahead and say whatever you want to about that. RM: As I said, I think it's a double-edged sword with COVID. Because it's both -- as I mentioned already -- really opened up the possibility for a movement. But I can remember thinking -- like right after George Floyd, you know -- the video surfaced -- which I haven't watched that or most others. I can no longer traumatize myself in that way. I realized that many Americans -- particularly white Americans -- need to see it to believe it. I don't. So just the image -- just the photo on my Facebook feed meant that I went off of Facebook for -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- weeks. Because I could not continue to see just even the still image. LB: Yeah. RM: But one of the things that I think was really troubling to me is I was so thrilled to see that, in spite of everything, immediately people took to the streets. LB: Right. RM: But it also made me, you know -- I wept about it, because it was like folks who are the most vulnerable -- LB: Yes. RM: -- are forced to put their lives on the line in multiple ways -- LB: Right. RM: -- by going out into the streets -- because literally people have been run down by cars, or, you know, maimed by police with rubber bullets, or whatever it is -- but that they are willing to do that, in spite of the fact that we have a pandemic -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- is amazing. And really, as I said, that's what gives me the hope. But it also makes me worry, because, you know, right now, there isn't like a lot of evidence that that has been a major contributor to any surges anywhere -- primarily because the stuff is all outside, and people are moving, and air flow, and, you know, probably at least 50 percent are wearing masks. But there's a lot of people -- when you look at those protests -- who are not wearing masks, or who pull them down when they are speaking, or singing, et cetera. But, fortunately, the dynamics of how the virus seems to spread -- they're still pretty much protected, because they are outside -- and they're able to be outside, you know, at this moment, because the weather is good or whatever. But I had real mixed feelings about it in the beginning. And, to be honest with you, I've had a lot of guilt that I haven't been able to be out there with them. LB: Me too. Me too. RM: And my sister has tried to calm that guilt, and said, you know -- I mean obviously I continue to donate to things, you know, I was just on a program on PBS -- I think it was yesterday -- I didn't see it, because I don't have cable, so I have to look at a streaming thing on it -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- on systemic -- LB: Yeah, yeah. RM: -- racism. LB: Yeah. RM: I've been on a town hall with Ce-Ce Gerlach. So I'm still doing things -- and my teaching I really do consider to be an extension of my activism -- but it is a weird moment in my life where, you know, it's the first moment I can think of -- with any kind of protest that's been important to me -- where I can't take that risk. And I feel really guilty about being privileged enough to say, "I can't take that risk to be out and about." But I can't take that risk. So it's brought up a lot of weird emotions for me. LB: I feel the same way. You know, our two local protests that we just had in the last week -- I looked at the videos of the first one -- and Adrian actually called me, and said, "Do you know what's happening?" And I looked at the videos, and I could see people shouting, and they weren't wearing masks. And I thought, "I can't do it. I can't do it." RM: Right. Right. LB: So this is exactly -- it's like the, you know, the choir singing. And I hate that. I mean I really wanted to be there, and I have also written -- I tried to do some lobbying for Ce-Ce. She asked me to do some lobbying, and I tried to do that for specific people. And I also wrote some talking points for her and stuff. But because this most recent video that came out -- [and I don't know what he did with that?] -- but I watched that second by second, and I wrote down -- this happens at this point, and this is exactly contrary to what the police said in their statement -- because I want people to talk about what happened, as opposed -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- to saying these sort of abstract things. I haven't posted that yet, because -- and now, of course, there's some stupid -- I have a very visceral response to police in Allentown because of my interaction with the police in Allentown. And I was talking to a young person of color in one of these interviews who was saying, you know, "These things have happened, and they've never happened before." And she said, "They're happening because of COVID." And I said, "No they're not. You're seeing them because of COVID, and you're also seeing them because every single person in the United States has a video camera that they're carrying with them" -- RM: That's right. LB: -- "thank God." RM: That's right. LB: So, you know, that's the thing. RM: Yeah. LB: And it's not just one person. So they can't say, "Oh, well that" -- it's fifteen people making a video of that -- you can see them holding their phones up. Well it's a great thing -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- because you can't argue with it -- RM: Right. LB: -- and people who used to -- RM: Well, but they can -- did you see the article about the expert? LB: Oh, yeah. That was ridiculous. RM: And I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" LB: Yeah. RM: "Are you kidding me?" Because he didn't keep his knee on there long enough to actually kill the man, that means that there's no problem? LB: Yeah. RM: And it doesn't matter what happened before. If it's not supposed to happen because of your -- LB: Right. RM: -- policies -- LB: Right. RM: -- how can you say that's not -- I mean on every level -- plus, I mean, the man got down in a supplicant motion. LB: So if you watch that nine minute video -- RM: Yeah, I did. LB: -- at 5:59 in that video, the police officer does it again -- he knees the guys head -- after he's been handcuffed -- you know, and that's just the use of force. RM: And why are you handcuffing somebody who does need to be in the emergency room? LB: Right. Right. RM: I mean why was there an arrest? Why was any of that -- I mean when you watch all -- LB: They didn't need to arrest him. RM: -- the video, it makes no sense. LB: Right. RM: I mean, that's why -- it makes no sense other than the fact of police acting like -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- police. LB: And -- RM: Because -- LB: Yeah. And no question about it -- it's racism. No question about it, it's bullying. There's even that part where every time the police officer goes to do something, he rolls up his sleeve, and he goes like this with his muscles -- he's a very muscular guy. And I think, you know, "Oh, for heaven's sake." (laughs) RM: Yeah. LB: It's just -- RM: I mean it's really a sad thing when Allentown made -- I mean, Democracy Now! covered it -- LB: I know. RM: Buzzfeed, you know. (laughs) It's everywhere. And -- LB: And the first thing they do is they release a statement saying that he fell to the ground, and the other people fell down with him. And then you see the video where they (laughter) sweep his feet out from under him. (laughter) RM: Exactly. Exactly. LB: So, you know, my response to that is, "So they lied?" RM: Right. LB: They lied, and they got caught because of the video. And that's what I was trying to say to this young woman -- the fact that there's video all over the place is -- and I was just like -- this was a person in their 20s -- and I said, "Do you really think this hasn't been happening forever?" (laughs) I mean it's just that nobody was driving by with their phone (laughs), you know. And obviously the person who made the first video was very motivated to make the video too -- they were very, very concerned. RM: Yeah. LB: So they were more tuned in to doing it too, but -- RM: Yeah. LB: -- you know. RM: Yeah. It's so not new. LB: But I do think that the resolution that Ce-Ce made and Josh Siegel made is a very good set of things. I had said to her over and over again, "Don't make a resolution unless you talk about body cams" -- because that's something that is a real practical thing. And apparently they're (laughs) supposed to be wearing them anyway, since 2017. RM: Yeah. LB: And I don't know. And I hate not going to march for that. RM: Yeah. It's been really tough from that standpoint. LB: And I know that people -- because if you look at the demographic, for the most part, most people are younger. And that's not always true in old-time -- RM: Right. LB: -- (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible). RM: And which also, again, is why I feel so -- like this is a moment of optimism. LB: It is. It is. RM: Because there's a lot of young people -- and, you know, I mean places like Bangor -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- have protests. I mean I used to do consulting work up there, and used to be afraid -- like I was always grateful I was light skinned (laughs) when I went up there that they could mistake me and not know who I was, because that was not -- I mean that and Pen Argyl -- those places were scary to me. LB: I know. RM: Or -- what's that place called in Texas? The one that was a sundown town. I mean that's what's like been amazing -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- or when you see like one lone person -- one lone white person -- LB: Yeah. RM: -- you know, on a corner with Black Lives Matter. And then things like TikTok, which -- LB: Yes. RM: -- first of all, I'm completely addicted to TikTok. So if they -- LB: Oh, that is -- RM: -- take that away I'm really in trouble -- LB: -- [my favorite?] (inaudible). RM: -- but it's been really interesting to watch the movement evolve on a platform like that. And then it's clear that TikTok is doing some things -- and they have a term for it -- you know, the young people have some term for what's happening to them -- but where you're not seeing that in your feed. Because the stuff is still happening, and people are still protesting, and yet, you know, for a while, I was seeing only that. And now I'm really not. But, again, the kinds of things that are available for folks when protesting -- like social media -- and social media's one of the main ways in which people in Allentown were out and about, you know -- LB: Right, right. Absolutely. RM: -- almost immediately after seeing the video -- because, again, in the past, that would have been very difficult to accomplish. LB: No kidding. We know that to be true. RM: Yeah. (coughs) LB: So I think we're about done here. RM: Okay. LB: And do you have any other things that you're thinking, "Oh I really should" -- like here's something I ask people -- if you're thinking that somebody thirty, forty, fifty years from now, when we're not around any-- well, I was actually talking to somebody that said, "Oh, you could be around twenty, thirty, forty years" -- but we probably won't be (laughter) (coughs) -- at least fifty years from now -- what do you want to tell somebody who is maybe looking at this and saying, "This is something you need to know about this time from me?" I mean you've said a lot of things that I think are very important, but is there anything that, you know, you just want to throw in? Or do you think you've covered everything? RM: I think I've pretty much covered everything, other than -- yeah, I can't think of anything that -- LB: Well thank you so much for doing this. This was just -- first of all, it's -- RM: You're welcome. LB: -- really fun to be able to see you nonstop for an hour and -- RM: I know. (laughter) LB: So I'm going to stop recording. Thank you very much, Roberta Meek. I'm going to stop this n-- END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:24:08 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Roberta Meek, July 15, 2020 Description An account of the resource In this interview, Roberta Meek talks about her experiences with COVID-19 along with how she is going to handle teaching in a phased retirement. Furthermore, she goes on to talk about her role as an activist in Allentown. Overall, she talks about COVID-19 and how it has affected her teaching. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PH40_21 Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-07-15 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/6958bb0dd45927f5143dfcdda4d4fc38.png d10603262582ba69d529ddce65c03713 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 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 Robin Casey OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_25.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 July 21, 2020 Robin Casey, July 21, 2020 PH40_25 01:11:49 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) Robin Casey Liz Bradbury video/mpeg CaseyRobin_20200721_video.mp4 1.0:|27(3)|58(9)|89(7)|114(12)|137(15)|160(6)|183(6)|208(15)|231(7)|258(5)|279(2)|302(3)|321(5)|340(12)|363(11)|384(12)|407(3)|430(2)|453(10)|482(3)|503(6)|528(2)|555(4)|578(13)|603(5)|620(19)|645(8)|670(9)|697(3)|716(8)|735(12)|760(2)|785(10)|810(5)|833(10)|852(9)|869(13)|890(2)|913(5)|932(14)|957(4)|980(5)|1005(6)|1024(9)|1043(10)|1066(7)|1087(17)|1112(14)|1137(12)|1164(14)|1183(11)|1204(12)|1227(6)|1252(18)|1275(7)|1302(2)|1325(3)|1352(7)|1371(9)|1398(10)|1425(7)|1452(7)|1479(5)|1502(6)|1525(14)|1550(5)|1575(6)|1604(15)|1627(7)|1652(8)|1677(9)|1706(5) 0 https://youtu.be/HkG5lECgvG0 YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction LIZ BRADBURY: So, yes, it’s working. Going to start the backup sound. That’s good. And I’m going to read you this thing. 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. 0 207 Working in higher education during the pandemic/Working in-person everyday during the fall semester LB: And so, talk about what you do and how you’ve been working and whether you’ve been working online or that kind of stuff.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: I work in higher ed, and I’ve primarily been working remotely up until three weeks ago. And I’ve been going into the office twice a week. &#13 ; 0 279 Concerns over how pandemic affects students socially and health-wise LB: What about in general, in terms of how that’s going to affect people on campus in terms of your [perception?]?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: It’s interesting because I have been focused on the, I’m always focused on the needs of the students. And so many students want to come back to campus, and yet I am aware that their safety -- they may not be thinking about their safety in the same way that perhaps they may need to think about it. 0 424 Preparing for both in-person and online classes/How the pandemic has affected Muhlenberg College staff and students RC: So I think we’re preparing -- the college is preparing for students to come back, and at the same time, my colleagues are preparing for what it would be like to teach classes online.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah, it’s interesting. So, let’s see. There, at Muhlenberg -- because you’re at Muhlenberg College -- have there been layoffs, or have there been sections of the campus that have been affected? 0 742 Engaging the Allentown community in Promise Neighborhoods/Students pushing for Muhlenberg College to be a more anti-racist space LB: So are you communicating with people that you are friends with or family or something, a lot online and talking to people in other areas? Do you find you’re doing that more now than what you would do -- &#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Yeah, I think I’m doing more of that with Allentown community. Well, No Promise Neighborhood. 0 829 Engaging the Allentown Police Department in sensitivity training, towards LGBT community members RC: You know, around our police security force, engage them and also engaging the Allentown police department. I did share with them there was some conversation about whether or not they had been, at the APD, trained in work with trans and LGBT community members. And I said, “I’m pretty sure the Sullivan-Brad-- that they’ve been doing some work there.” And they made it seem like -- they made it seem like they hadn’t been. I’m like, that’s not true. 0 1096 Culture of police violence/discomfort with Bradbury-Sullivan Center training police RC: Yeah. I’m -- they’re going to find that with our police officers too, given that even after the chief had put out that email recent, (inaudible) the chokehold, and then the next thing you know, it’s a culture. The APD has a culture they have to really grapple with. This is going to take a lot of ongoing engagement on working with marginalized communities, and so I’m not really sure they’re ready for that or even open to it. So, yeah, I don’t know. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: I don’t feel comfortable about, unless there’s drastic change in that police department, I don’t feel comfortable. 0 1259 Muhlenberg students against armed campus security/supporting students throughout the pandemic RC: But that’s what’s happening right now, because our students really would love for us not to have an armed security on campus. And yet they don’t want APD on our campus either, so all those things are happening simultaneously, and we will see how that shakes out. 0 1347 George Floyd's murder/Allentown police violence caught on video RC: And then from then on, then George Floyd was murdered and then it’s just been ongoing from then on. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah. And this thing that happened in Allentown, it’s just extraordinary. I mean, because it’s not -- I don’t know if you’ve seen the whole nine minute video. Did you see the whole nine minute video?&#13 ; 0 1627 Allentown Police Department statement concerning police violence incident LB: And yet, well you know, all of those things. And I remember saying this to Trish. I said, “Yeah, they’re making the statement and they’re not going to do this.” And then that happened. Like four days later.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: It wasn’t unbelievable, but it was just so clear --&#13 ; 0 1724 Pandemic combined with visible police violence influencing people's points-of-view and interactions RC: You know, I was out at the fish hatchery and I was walking with a friend of mine and we had our masks on, so it was -- I wouldn’t say at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, but it was when people were just feeling like they could start to walk outside in the park with a mask on. This white gentleman is coming the opposite direction and he’s walking toward us and we don’t think anything of it, and then he stops us and he just says to me, “I want you to know that I believe that Black Lives Matter.” And I’m like, “Okay.” Thank you? 0 2103 Concerns regarding the pandemic/Envisioning a support network for Allentown LB: So, what do you think, for you in general, what’s your biggest concern with regard to the pandemic? So, when you’re thinking about this?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: You know, I think a part of it has to do with that this is also the time when I’m hoping that in the next ten years or so I’ll be retiring And not knowing, I’ve never ever faced any worries about being laid off or furloughed or things like that. And so my retirement account, paying attention to the stock market because the college puts our money into the stock market. 0 2474 Thoughts on Dr. Rachel Levine LB: Do you actually know people -- because I have to say, this is a factor of who I know and all the folks that I’m interviewing are part of the queer community, of the most part, or tangential parts of the queer community -- and so there’s never people who like, think Rachel Levine is a bad person. Because she’s really our hero, you know, and recognize that by extension Governor Wolf has been very, very good to the LGBT community in the state of Pennsylvania. 0 2600 Thoughts on using queer dating or hookup apps during the pandemic LB: The next question is, are you spending time on any queer dating or hookup apps?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: I refuse! I just can’t! I can’t do it! I so miss the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. My heart! I just refused to do it, and I think I’ve come to accept that probably -- I have some really close friends here. 0 2765 Going out during the pandemic/Staying active during the pandemic LB: So, are you limiting going out? Are you going to the grocery store or stuff like that? How is that?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: I have a dog. I walk him three times a day, at least four or five miles. He kills me. And I do go to the grocery store. I just started going back to work to the office. 0 2935 Assisting LGBT Muhlenberg students LB: So, there’s a question on here. And has it been hard to be out? And that really is for young people how are in circumstances where they’re with families that are not supportive, and I would wonder that you might be coming in contact with students that might let you know that they might be out on campus but now they can’t be that way at home. Have you come in contact with anybody that’s in --&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: That’s my biggest concern when we went remote, is that -- so we have our GSAs. And most students, when they come to college is when they really feel they can express themselves fully, if they haven’t come out. 0 3360 Points of hope during the pandemic RC: So you know, I’m hopeful that these young congress people like Alexandria, Ayanna, and all those others, they are strong enough to hold fast, like Ruth and John Lewis. Because it’s not like ten, twenty -- it’s a lifetime. 0 3834 Epiphanies during the pandemic LB: So, anyway, I think that’s everything. I did want to, so here’s one little thing. There’s a question here that says, “What are your frustrations and challenges?” And you’ve already talked about some of that stuff, but have you had any like one little thing that’s an epiphany about your life that you figured out? 0 4046 Missing others/Not being able to help others during the pandemic RC: I have a lot of friends like that who are -- what’s nice about it is that more and more young women that I’ve met, or colleagues of mine, have grown up being butch dykes but they’re not. You know? They do all the things that I think they -- one of the scientists, and she just tore down her shed and built a new one. And it’s this beautiful thing ; she has all these tools, and all the tool belts and everything, and it’s just like amazing. So I love these young women of today because they are who we were, (inaudible). So I think that that’s cool. But no, that’s what I miss, is just not being with people that I really like to be close to. &#13 ; 0 4144 Inspired by Muhlenberg students LB: Well anyway, it’s wonderful to hear about really positive things. A number of the things that you said about the students are very heartening for me. I’m sucking out as much hope as I can out of this, because we all need to get that. So it’s wonderful to hear about (inaudible). Well, and I just think that they’re the ones that are going to save us in this world right now. And I think that this kind of circumstance is upsetting, but for young people they’re not disillusioned. They’re angry, and that’s the way I want them to be. &#13 ; 0 4244 Conclusion/Thoughts for the future LB: Thank you so much for talking to me. It’s been terrific, and I usually ask people if they want to say anything else to somebody in the, 30 years from now and going to look back and, no, you’re pretty much -- &#13 ; &#13 ; RC: No, all I have to say is that I was here and I hope that I made, this video is just to say that we all got work to do -- &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: It is, it is. And we’re working, and I hope the people watching it in the future will say, “Yeah, it worked.”&#13 ; 0 MovingImage Robin Casey talks about how the current COVID-19 pandemic is affecting her as a faculty member at a local college. She talks about her concerns regarding the opening of the college during the pandemic, the LGBT students who need support, and the relationship of the college and students to the Black Lives Matter movement in regards to recent police brutality issues in Allentown.  Robin Casey 2020-07-21 LIZ BRADBURY: So, yes, it's working. Going to start the backup sound. That's good. And I'm going to read you this thing. 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. Oh, I have to turn off my phone. Collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury, and I'm here with Robin Riley-Casey to talk to her about her experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community during this time of the COVID-19 epidemic as part of the Lehigh LGBT community archive. We are Zoom meeting, or meeting on Zoom, on Monday, July 21st, 2020. 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? ROBIN CASEY: Yes. Robin Riley-Casey. Liz, just so you know, I've been just going by Robin Casey lately for various reasons, if that's okay. LB: Okay, sure. RC: So, do you want me to go back and do that again? LB: Yes. RC: Okay. So, my name is Robin Casey. That's R-O-B-I-N, C-A-S-E-Y.  LB: Okay. So I will change that on the indicators. Will you please share your birthdate? RC: 9-21-63. LB: Okay. And are you in Allentown? RC: I am.  LB: Okay. So, this is the consent part. Do you consent to this interview today? RC: Yes. LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publically available online in searchable formats? RC: Yes. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, and anything else that might be available in the future that we have no idea about? RC: Yes.  LB: Which could happen! Do you understand that you will have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview, identify any parts that you'd like to delete, and/or withdraw from your interview, or withdraw the whole interview form the project? RC: Yes. LB: Okay. Now, this is the identity part. What is your zip code? RC: 18104. LB: Okay. And what is your age? RC: Oh, my birthday is coming up, so that would make me fifty-seven. LB: Okay. And how do you identify within the LGBT community? RC: Queer. LB: Okay. And that is good. So, these are some things that we're going to talk about. I mean, you can say whatever you want here, but we start out with some of these beginning questions and, you know, you can say whatever you want. So here's the deal. The first question is, during the COVID thing, are you living with somebody, or do you have somebody else in your household, or are you by yourself? RC: I do have someone with me right now.  LB: Okay, that's good. And so, talk about what you do and how you've been working and whether you've been working online or that kind of stuff. RC: I work in higher ed, and I've primarily been working remotely up until three weeks ago. And I've been going into the office twice a week.  LB: And what are you anticipating with regard to how that's going to go for the rest of the summer and into the fall? RC: They are anticipating that we will be coming back to campus, and that my office, I will be in the office primarily every day of the week, and my assistant will be there three times a week.  LB: How do you feel about going back to work like that? RC: I'm not nervous and I probably should be, but I'm not because my office is separate from the main campus. And anyone who wanted to meet with me would have to meet by Zoom or by appointment, and so I can control the number of people that come in and out of that space.  LB: That's good. What about in general, in terms of how that's going to affect people on campus in terms of your [perception?]? RC: It's interesting because I have been focused on the, I'm always focused on the needs of the students. And so many students want to come back to campus, and yet I am aware that their safety -- they may not be thinking about their safety in the same way that perhaps they may need to think about it. And so I think students want to come back because this is their life. And they want to enjoy all of it. And a part of that is experiencing a Western college experience and so being on campus, a college campus, is a part of that. So I've been focusing on their need to feel relationships and that requires a full college experience. So my peers, my colleagues have asked me to start thinking about things a little bit differently. And so I have been. LB: You mean thinking about it that way? RC: No, thinking about it not so much in terms of the student's need to be in community with one another physically. But more about how it may impact their health by being -- even though we're doing all kinds of measures, you know, in terms of trying to be thoughtful about how COVID could be spread -- it still may inadvertently cause harm to either those students, to other colleagues, community members in Lehigh Valley, all those kinds of things. So beyond the students, to outside of that. So I've been considering that. LB: That's tough. It's tough to sort of look at both sides of that. Because you can certainly see why kids want to come back, the young people want to come back to campus (inaudible) campus. But Trish was just at the doctor this morning for a checkup, and the doctor -- it was a specialist, actually -- said, "There's no way that schools are going to open." She said it flat out. "Stop worrying about it. It's not going to happen." RC: And more and more people are saying that, including my colleagues. So I think we're preparing -- the college is preparing for students to come back, and at the same time, my colleagues are preparing for what it would be like to teach classes online. LB: Yeah, it's interesting. So, let's see. There, at Muhlenberg -- because you're at Muhlenberg College -- have there been layoffs, or have there been sections of the campus that have been affected? I was just talking to another person at another college who talked all about all the staff of the college, but didn't talk about like the food service providers and stuff. So, want to say anything about that? RC: Well I mean, I think that our food service provider is considered a third party. And I know that those individuals worked all the way up until -- so, we went remote sometime in mid-March. And those food service providers worked all the way into April. And it was a way to keep them employed, but also because we still had a number of students on campus. For various reasons, who were unable to go home. Their home was not conducive to them returning. International students who really could not go back to their home countries, and so there were so many students at the time. I think when we went remote we had over one hundred students that were still on campus after. And then we actually allowed some students to come back because the conditions at home were not optimal. So there were a number of people that were in food service in particular that were still here, on campus. So I don't know specifically what happened in terms of the numbers of people, how they managed that. But for students, for people who are, my colleagues, who are part of the Muhlenberg campus, they began to do shared work hours, where some people who could Monday/Tuesday. Other people would come Wednesday/Thursday, those kinds of things. That started to happen. They asked how many of us could do our job remotely. How many of us who were willing to do other jobs that had nothing to do with our particular area, but were willing to do other jobs so that we could continue to receive a paycheck. And so those kinds of things were offered up. So many students went home without taking their belongings, because they weren't prepared to do that. So many people stayed on campus to help box up those belongings, store those belongings. So that happened all the way throughout April and into May. So other colleges have done all kinds of things to try to make it so that people didn't have to go, what they call furloughed. Not layoff, but furlough. So that was happening in many offices outside of academic life, and outside of (inaudible) and Student Affairs, the department I'm underneath. To plan out housekeeping, grounds people. I'm going to say assistants. So they had a different kind of schedule that they were working under than other people. So I think now they are bringing those individuals back to more of a full work kind of schedule, preparing for the beginning of the academic year. LB: You don't have students on campus now, though, do you? Or do you? RC: We do. We do. Not many. I think we have maybe, maybe thirty? Thirty or so students. LB: They were in that situation, they're international students or they're in that situation? RC: Not as many international students now. Now more domestic students. So those students who came back because they are working for the campus, they didn't have optimal living conditions and came back. Those kinds of students. But they are in a suite style living situation where they have a full kitchen, their own restroom, you know. That kind of thing. (inaudible) An apartment.  LB: Oh, that's good. Well, I certainly am fairly aware of all the different living situations there because of [Hannah Mesouani?], my dear friend who I just talked to recently. And he's in a very similar job as yours, actually, at Wesleyan University, or Illinois Wesleyan. And it's the same kind of thing, where the college really wants to open but the faculty is talking about the ethics of opening. And the concern for students and it's a very similar college to Muhlenberg in terms of size and the kind of students that are there, I think. Maybe not quite as culturally aware. Which is, you know. So are you communicating with people that you are friends with or family or something, a lot online and talking to people in other areas? Do you find you're doing that more now than what you would do --  RC: Yeah, I think I'm doing more of that with Allentown community. Well, No Promise Neighborhood. Some of the -- I almost wanted to say student action. Youth-led action groups around Black Lives Matter movement. And then our students, who have been so you know, they're back home in their own communities but they're still pushing Muhlenberg to be more engaged. And so it's as if they never left. I mean, it's never been this busy in the summer in my eleven years here at Muhlenberg College. And so we've had so many meetings between the president, the provost, and the deans around how are we going to make this more an anti-racist, ethical space. And that's from our indigenous community, our Asian community, our trans community. And certainly our Black and brown students who have really been really challenging our college leadership to be more proactive, and not waiting for the students to get back. You know, around our police security force, engage them and also engaging the Allentown police department. I did share with them there was some conversation about whether or not they had been, at the APD, trained in work with trans and LGBT community members. And I said, "I'm pretty sure the Sullivan-Brad-- that they've been doing some work there." And they made it seem like -- they made it seem like they hadn't been. I'm like, that's not true.  LB: I want to make this perfectly clear. To say this, and feel free to pass this information on. I trained them five years ago. And the training was -- I mean, I've trained hundreds of people. I've trained thousands of people. I've trained 9,000 people in the last four years, and I trained them just before we opened the center. And they were not very good at [leaving?] that training. I would not consider them well-trained. That was five years ago. I mean, trainings have changed since then. Certainly drastically changed since then. I didn't find that group of people perceptive, and I have to say that we have actually removed from our list of places that we've trained, police departments. Because we don't want people to think that these police -- I also trained Bethlehem police. And even by the very virtue of it just being five years ago, that was too long ago. I mean, you can't count that as a training. But I have to say that training police is very, very, very hard to do. And I can just say this. I trained every one of those police officers. I trained them in groups of forty or fifty over five different trainings. And several of the trainings, I had an intern with me from [Potsdam?], who was a social work intern. At one of the trainings, she actually came out of the training, got in the car, and cried. And she cried all the way home. She told me she cried all the way, her drive home. And she was not part of the queer community. And she said, "I will never feel comfortable engaging with police again." RC: Wow. Well, that's the work they're trying to do now. So we'll see. Maybe that's what the --  LB: I think that training the police -- and I've made a video, because we had a grant, and I made a series of videos which I have available, to train. And they would work for security, too. And they specifically were made to train police, because of this. Police said to me, flat-out, "We don't want to be trained by anyone but other police officers." So, the training that I made was that I created a script. I used another video that was made by the Prince Edward, what is it called. Prince George's County Police, outside of (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible). And they have a very good training about -- that was made a long time ago. It was made about six or seven years ago. It was made by the National Center for Transgender Equality in conjunction with that police force. It's about training lice to work with the trans community. But it didn't talk about, it only talked about transgender women and it didn't talk about LGB people. It didn't talk about gender nonconforming people, so you know, I filled that in and we had a police officer. We filmed the police officer doing the training. So we have four, twenty-minute trainings, about twenty minutes, where the police officer -- and one of them uses that video, and then the other two talk about the other issues. They talk about cultural circumstances that cause LGBT people to be war of the police. All sorts of things like that. It's a very good training.  RC: Yeah. I'm -- they're going to find that with our police officers too, given that even after the chief had put out that email recent, (inaudible) the chokehold, and then the next thing you know, it's a culture. The APD has a culture they have to really grapple with. This is going to take a lot of ongoing engagement on working with marginalized communities, and so I'm not really sure they're ready for that or even open to it. So, yeah, I don't know.  LB: I don't feel comfortable about, unless there's drastic change in that police department, I don't feel comfortable. They had to force the people to come. They had to have a person sit there who was management, an upper-level person, so they wouldn't call out rude things to me. I mean, it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. I've never had another training that was like that, and as I've said, I've trained over one hundred and seventy organizations. Never had anybody do this. I took into consideration, I had done the trainings a little bit more drastically before I did those trainings, and I changed some of the in reaction to that. But I ended up training Lehigh County Health and Human Services, which is every person who works -- and that includes juvenile detention, court people. Social workers, everything. And people were concerned about those, because those were mandatory trainings, too. And I actually got contact from people who said, "I don't think that these people are going to receive these trainings well. They haven't liked other mandatory trainings. They're going to be tough on you." And I was very careful about how I did that training, but it was pretty similar to what I had done to train the police. And as a result, I didn't have any problem training the Health and Human Services people. They actually gave me the highest ratings of anybody that ever had trainings there. And part of it was that other trainings were not as clear and useful. But in terms of training the police to be empathic, I don't think that'll ever happen. In terms of training them to stop using micro-aggressions and saying to them, "If you do use this language, you'll be fired." Maybe. Maybe. RC: Right. It'd be interesting. I don't know, because honestly they have so many protections, particularly when people think that we're in the height of the moment. They have to both be someone who can step up to engage in an uncertain situation, and they also have to maintain a level of professionalism, which is difficult in those -- I don't know. But that's what's happening right now, because our students really would love for us not to have an armed security on campus. And yet they don't want APD on our campus either, so all those things are happening simultaneously, and we will see how that shakes out. So I think that this summer has been nothing but, from the COVID-19, when that first hit, we were trying to figure out how to support students who were at home, who didn't have access to the internet. Families who were losing their jobs, and so food insecurity, housing insecurity, and all those kinds of things. And luckily enough we had just started our financial hardship support system, resource system, on campus. And so we were supporting many students and their families, to make sure they had access to the internet services, wherever they were located. California, Washington D.C., it didn't matter. Texas. So we were doing all that, and then also making sure that they had access to some funds to help them replenish their food stores. So all those things were going on on this end, to make sure they could make it through the semester. And then from then on, then George Floyd was murdered and then it's just been ongoing from then on.  LB: Yeah. And this thing that happened in Allentown, it's just extraordinary. I mean, because it's not -- I don't know if you've seen the whole nine minute video. Did you see the whole nine minute video? RC: I did. LB: It's not just one instance when he's trying to handcuff the guy. He does it again, later, when the guy's completely handcuffed, for no reason at all.  RC: I didn't understand (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible) either. I didn't understand what they were doing. I mean, it's hard to say if they were fearful or they just didn't want to intervene because the officers were present. I'm not really sure what was going on there either, so it was really awkward and kind of mind-boggling about what they were doing or what they perceived themselves -- being a help to the officers? Or to the gentleman? I couldn't quite figure that out. LB: If you look at the expressions on their faces -- it's hard to watch. And I've talked to people, and people of color, who've said, "I can't watch it. I don't want to watch it." And I understand that. But I have to say that based on my privilege, I've been in a position where I've watched every second of that so I can call it out. And then I do call out that kind of stuff, and one of the things is that the police said that in their statement, that he fell to the ground and the other people, the police officers, [fell?]. It's a complete lie. They kick his feet out from under him and threw him to the ground. RC: Yes, yes, yes. LB: And you know, you can't just have it both ways. You can't say, "Well, we have to trust the police and look they're trying," and then they just lie to you. And you and I have been in situations where we've been talking to police officers who just blatantly will tell you something that isn't true, and it's very hard to not be very sensitive to that And I can understand how -- I mean, I was talking to a young black activist who said, "When these things are defunded and stuff like that." I went, "Boy, I hope that's true." And I know it should be. I know it should be. And you can see why we cannot send police officers out in a situation where there's a person who is sick or mentally ill, something like that. You could see why that is ridiculous. If you look at that video and you look at the healthcare worker's faces, some of them literally go -- like, they're concerned for the guy. Who knows what they're thinking. I mean, that's an impossible situation. RC: Yeah. Yeah, it's hard in too many ways, because I struggle on campus with being raised not to, what I call, bend my knee. You know? To authority. And yet I know young people in this generation are taught to just make it home alive. Make it home alive, right. So put your hands on the steering wheel, "Yes sir, no sir." And so I want them to make it home alive as well, but I struggle a lot with not interceding.  LB: I know, I know. RC: So in that moment probably the thing in my mind would've been how could I have helped that gentleman? So, could I go over and put my arm around him and say, "Brother, let me take you into the hospital." Or, "What do you need?" And try to speak to him. But I think that so many people look at the officers as, now they are in charge. They come on scene, they're in charge, and so you give away all your power to them. Yeah. That's just not something that I'm comfortable with, so. LB: And I also think that you know, it [goes?] back to COVID-19. This was a person who was really potentially endangering other people because he was throwing up, he was spitting, things like that. So we are in that extra added level of fear, that is legitimate, you know. It really is. RC: It is legitimate.  LB: And in fact, he could've been sick like that for that very reason. And yet, well you know, all of those things. And I remember saying this to Trish. I said, "Yeah, they're making the statement and they're not going to do this." And then that happened. Like four days later. RC: It wasn't unbelievable, but it was just so clear -- LB: A classic -- RC: We don't need another statement. No more statements. We do not need another statement. LB: You can't say anything. And the thing and I was talking to Ce-Ce Gerlach and I said -- their resolution, I think their resolution that they made was very, very significant and very well done. I don't think, anybody with any sense couldn't argue with any statement they made. It's actually the least that you could expect. But the whole thing about body cams could've -- because we're still not hearing anything about that. And people are saying, "Well, you don't know what they're saying." Well, it doesn't matter what he's saying, but the bottom line is, yeah, I would like to hear what he's saying. Because some people are saying, "Well, this man was insane. He was a danger to himself." Other people, we have no idea. So why do we think that at all? That's not really the issue, but it certainly isn't the issue with regard to kneeing somebody's head into the sidewalk when he's handcuffed. I mean, that's it. That's it.  RC: Over the curb. That was just like, that was hard. You know, I was out at the fish hatchery and I was walking with a friend of mine and we had our masks on, so it was -- I wouldn't say at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, but it was when people were just feeling like they could start to walk outside in the park with a mask on. This white gentleman is coming the opposite direction and he's walking toward us and we don't think anything of it, and then he stops us and he just says to me, "I want you to know that I believe that Black Lives Matter." And I'm like, "Okay." Thank you? And then he tells me that, you know, he was a part of the Civil Rights movement back in the sixties, and all these things. But he didn't do enough. And I'm thinking, that's interesting. And I said, "Well, what do you mean?" He says, "You know, I kind of just got busy with my life." And I said, "We all do. We all get busy. Don't feel bad about living your life." He said, "But I realize now I should've helped push. And I want to push now." I said, "You know, I really appreciate you stopping and telling me that" -- LB: That's very gracious of you. RC: -- yeah. But (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible) yeah. It was really kind of, it was awkward. At the same time, because we're all dealing with the COVID-19, we all keeping our distance. He was very respectful and aware that we had to maintain this distance, right, because of COVID-19. And yet you could see his desire to make a connection. I think that's the interesting thing, is that in the midst of this distance, there's still the desire for some of us to make a connection. And so I hope that he knew from me, I had no ill will against him. I didn't know this man from anyone. And yet he took a moment to say, "I see you," and I said, "I see you. And I appreciate that you wanted me to know that we're in this together." And that's what I did. I said, "We're in this together. It's all of us. We've all got work to do." But my person that walks with me, the white woman who's just now starting to think about issues of racial inequalities, and so she's like, this is a white man, she's a white woman, and I think she was thinking like maybe protecting me to some extent. Like, who's this white man approaching us on a dog trail? But it was really interesting and I didn't share that story with anyone because I thought, "Nobody wants to hear a nice, warm, fuzzy story." It wasn't that it was a nice, warm, fuzzy story. It was just that in the midst of so much, this damn COVID-19 that connections still could be made. And I probably wouldn't recognize that guy from anyone. But it will stick with me, and I'm sure it will stick with him as well. Interesting.  LB: Good to hear that. But it still, I think, was very gracious of you to listen to his story about, "Oh, I really tried." RC: "I really tried, but then I stopped." LB: Well, I think it's gracious of you to do that. And I agree that, you know, yeah. I think people are trying. And I've talked to a lot of people I've talked to a lot of people of color in this, because I wanted to be -- I have to confess that I had to do ten interviews of people who were in the Lehigh Valley during the AIDS epidemic, and I talked to three women and seven men. And they were all white. They were all pretty privileged, to the point where they weren't really -- it was during now, it was during COVID -- and they weren't really negatively affected by COVID, other than just being concerned for people's health and stuff. They hadn't had it, they didn't know anyone who had died, that kind of stuff. And so I said to Trish, "Now I've got to do twenty COVID interviews," which is a lot, frankly. And I said, "I have to interview people of color or it's just going to look like the Aryan reaction to these things. It's ridiculous." So I tried to interview as many different kinds of people as I could. Also different age people, because everybody in the AIDS thing was all, you know, sixty or over. And so I talked to a lot of people, and one of the things that -- so this, I think, the eighth or the ninth interview. No, the eleventh interview I've done for the COVID things. And this universal thing -- because you cannot talk about this period of time without talking about Black Lives Matter, it's ridiculous to presume that you could separate that from this instance. And I said to the folks, I've said to everybody, "What's giving you hope about this?" And a lot of people have said that this response, particularly by young people, in terms of violence breeds activism, that kind of stuff, has been a positive thing for them. And I feel that way too. The thing that's killing me is, I can't join in. Because Trish is such at risk. I can't. And so a lot of older people that I've spoken to have said, "I can't do this, and I hate that I can't do it. But it's wonderful to see a lot of young people, who are being socially distancing and wearing the mask, but they are out there and they are doing what they should be doing. And that's the thing that's giving us the hope that we can grasp during this time." Because there's not a lot of things that we can be really, really hopeful about. I mean, you can always be hopeful, but it's tough. So, what do you think, for you in general, what's your biggest concern with regard to the pandemic? So, when you're thinking about this? RC: You know, I think a part of it has to do with that this is also the time when I'm hoping that in the next ten years or so I'll be retiring And not knowing, I've never ever faced any worries about being laid off or furloughed or things like that. And so my retirement account, paying attention to the stock market because the college puts our money into the stock market. So I'm thinking about that and how to safeguard that money, because if I were thinking outside (inaudible), it's just to supplement, not to (inaudible). So that's probably one of my concerns. I think the other one has to do with the way it personally, my personal concern. I don't have any concerns about my own health, which I think is really interesting. I've never really been unhealthy, so that's privilege and I'm aware of it. And I don't know anyone currently who's had COVID-19, and so that's also a part of it. But I have a dear friend who has leukemia. She's in remission currently, but has had a scare so we're waiting to hear back some information. But she's in Ohio. So I'm not in touch with her physically, but so I'm worried that there's a kind of, the other ancillary things around it. That if I needed to get home to be with my family, and some sort of network glitch would happen and I couldn't be in contact because technology would go down. Or all of a sudden, my money, I didn't have access to it and I couldn't get home, to campus or somewhere. Or if I got really ill myself and all my family was at my and they couldn't get to me. And so in conversations I've been having with people in Allentown, we've been talking about what would an underground railroad look like now? Where people in need needed support? Whether that was food, whether that was housing, whether that was finances, whether that was care. Those kinds of things. Who in our community could we say, "We got you?" You know? At one time, when there was a real scare here in Pennsylvania, you know that I was in the military at one time. And I can shoot a weapon. And I thought -- well, things got really, really crazy. It was when you couldn't go to the store and there was nothing at the grocery store. But in Allentown, people get crazy about like the snow is coming and you can't find any milk. I'm used to that. But it seemed a little bit different. And so you can't find toilet paper, you can't find (inaudible). You can't find like the food stuff, and so we were talking about this underground network of support for people who were going to need things and they're also going to need someone to protect them. And one of the things I was saying is, I do know how to shoot a weapon. I haven't done it in probably twenty years. My eyesight has changed. But I could do it if I had to. And if I had to train others, now's the time to start to prepare to do those kinds of things. So these are the kinds of interesting sort of ancillary things that's not COVID-19 specifically, how the virus may impact me physically. But what I would need to do if, in fact, it impacted the people that I love or cared about as a community, and we needed all the other things that could happen because of it. So, those are the kinds of things that I've been more acutely involved in. I've been worried about all the numbers and I've been in conversation with people who keep saying it's a hoax. (inaudible) Unbelievable things. And our governor is an idiot, you know. I've been trying my best to sort of help them understand, please pay attention. But for me, it's the ancillary things or the fall-out, how COVID-19 can impact us in ways, our community, Allentown proper. I'm not talking about the west end. I'm really talking about the city as I think of it. Where people don't have access to things because they don't have the resources. They don't have the insurance. They don't have finances to make sure they have food stores. Or lights, or those kinds of things. That's the kind of conversations I've been a part of, and that happened early on during the COVID-19 crisis. And that probably was an extension of so many students that I knew, were going back home to communities where their families and neighborhoods didn't have access to those (inaudible). So then that reconnected me to a community that I, really probably the closest I was connected to Allentown was when I was working the (inaudible) commission. That was the closest I was to really knowing the people in the city proper. And so through those students, it reconnected m to some of the work that was happening in the city.  LB: That's interesting. Do you actually know people -- because I have to say, this is a factor of who I know and all the folks that I'm interviewing are part of the queer community, of the most part, or tangential parts of the queer community -- and so there's never people who like, think Rachel Levine is a bad person. Because she's really our hero, you know, and recognize that by extension Governor Wolf has been very, very good to the LGBT community in the state of Pennsylvania. And you know, both of them have been a real guiding light, compared to a lot of other states where they're just, "Yeah, so what if everybody dies?" Kind of thing. We've been very lucky, I think, at least to have that level of leadership. And I also think it's been a positive thing for our queer youth to be able to see that even -- you know, it's tough though, because I talked to somebody who said, "It is hurting our transgender youth to see Dr. Rachel Levine be attacked that way." They don't just look at this and say, "Oh wow, look at this wonderful brilliant woman of science who is this very high level of the government and is saying all these intelligent things." The first thing that young people are seeing is all the attacks that they're going to, that she's enduring, and thinking to themselves, "Well you know, if I come out as trans or if I'm in public with regard to my gender identity, am I going to be attacked that way?" They're not going to think, "Am I going to be able to achieve what she has?" They're thinking, "Am I going to just be beaten up and made a mockery of constantly?" It's a tough thing for our kids. RC: I saw that whole thing with the dunking booth of someone dressed up as, supposed to be Levine. And he blatantly denied, it was not meant to be a mockery of her at all, meant to be just for fundraising. But yeah. LB: It's hard, It's ridiculous. So, that was my next question, about Rachel Levine. So there you go. The next question is, are you spending time on any queer dating or hookup apps? RC: I refuse! I just can't! I can't do it! I so miss the Michigan Women's Music Festival. My heart! I just refused to do it, and I think I've come to accept that probably -- I have some really close friends here. Women, all women, that when I head home, that's when I'm in my granny shawl and my rocking chair. Perhaps I'll do it. But I have no desire to go through that route, because I tried it early on when I got here to Allentown and I struggled with the politics of it a little bit. My politics around it. And I guess I have this sort of, it's probably the old-school way of just thinking about meeting people. I'm sure it's just an old-school way, and it just felt so manufactured in a way that I just can't quite get myself -- and I've met people who've met lifelong partners, they have great relationships. I've met younger lesbians who, great partners, starting families. All these things. I just don't seem to have the time or the energy to go through that kind of a thing. So yeah.  LB: I understand. Obviously this was not a question that was written by me. And interestingly, the demographic of people who have answered yes to that were not people who are in our age or (inaudible) demographic, quite frankly. Because of that, I think it's tough to -- yeah, and especially now during COVID-19, it's the last thing that you would do. In fact, nobody has said to me, even the younger gay men who would say, "Well, you know I'm not a stranger to these things, but not now. I want to be alive."  RC: That's the focus. LB: I mean, their response is, if there's somebody using this, what would that person be like? They would be exposing themselves in every situation. They'd be the most likely person to be carrying the disease. So I think that's a pretty interesting thing. So, are you limiting going out? Are you going to the grocery store or stuff like that? How is that? RC: I have a dog. I walk him three times a day, at least four or five miles. He kills me. And I do go to the grocery store. I just started going back to work to the office. I do try to limit my contact with people as much as I can. And so luckily we have these great parks and we can do that. I wear my mask. Yeah. LB: Yeah, we are lucky that we have great parks here, it's true. I feel, though, that in my -- I normally will walk for miles and miles and miles every day. I walk five miles every day. But I am paranoid of just walking out my door because every minute I see people walk right by on the sidewalk that are not wearing a mask, and I just, it's too much risk for me. And I don't feel like I want to drive to the park, because people (inaudible). While I was at the park, I walked around and then this person came up to me and tried to talk to me and they didn't wear a mask. And I thought, "I can't deal with it. Can't deal with it." RC: The park is right across the street from me, so I have both the rose garden and Cedar Beach just right there. LB: So great there, yeah. RC: Yeah. But I've been going to the fish hatchery early in the morning because he gets up like around six, six thirty, so hardly anybody's out at that point in time, and that's nice. But I do think I'm going to have to start curtailing my exposure a little bit more, simply because the surge is starting to, and so I have to be a little bit more cautious.  LB: Yeah, yeah, I think it's true. And yet, you've got to move around, you know? And so I have a bicycle desk where we have our garden. We have a bicycle desk, so I try to do ninety minutes of that a day or something like that. But boy, it's tough. I know a lot of people who've gained a lot of weight. I know a lot of other people who've been very concerned about it, and they've made a big effort to not become stagnant and stuff. Because that's hard to get out of, too. You do that for a year, it's awful hard to turn that around.  RC: I mean, it's so easy -- and I'm an introvert, so it didn't bother me to be at home. That didn't bother me. But what I did find is, it's easy just to close your eyes to nap. And I like naps, so naps are good. But the routine of it. So I have to get up and get moving, otherwise it's -- yeah. The sun comes in the window and all that kind of stuff. The dog's sleeping, you know.  LB: Yeah. So, there's a question on here. And has it been hard to be out? And that really is for young people how are in circumstances where they're with families that are not supportive, and I would wonder that you might be coming in contact with students that might let you know that they might be out on campus but now they can't be that way at home. Have you come in contact with anybody that's in -- RC: That's my biggest concern when we went remote, is that -- so we have our GSAs. And most students, when they come to college is when they really feel they can express themselves fully, if they haven't come out. Now they're at home, they're cloistered, they're in quarantine, and either they go back into this space where they're not fully able to express themselves, or they try to find a way to find community. And how do we do that virtually? That's a difficult one, because they're in a situation where they have to maintain their safety because of COVID, so they can't be thrown out on the street where they have no way to protect themselves physically, because of this virus. And yet they can't protect themselves emotionally and mentally, either, because they can't really express themselves fully as queer folk. So we've been struggling with trying to provide virtual spaces by GSA where they can at least find a way to be in that space of GSA queer students for support. And so I am worried about how many of our queer students have supportive family members, and are safe either to come out or will stay isolated for fear of being pushed out and nowhere else to go. Particularly now. They may not be able to come back to campus, or their immune system would even allow them to come back to campus. That's the other thing. Some of our students can't come back because of that, so I'm very conscious, specifically, about our LGBT community because of that concern. That's a scary one, that's a scary one. And we were just beginning to, there's kind of a tipping point at Muhlenberg where more and more of our trans students know that before they even walk on campus, they can contact our registrar and say, "This is the name that I want on every single piece of documentation. I do now want to walk onto this campus and somebody call me by that name." And so they were very comfortable with this information and sharing it, before even I would know. Which is great. I don't need to have that information. Now, what I'm finding is there's a few students who I know who are transgender students who have not found a connection on campus and they're almost, I think a little bit of fear to let people know so they can make sure all the stuff happens earlier rather than later. And I think partly it's because there's a delay in their resources back home. That something's happening back home where they can't get the resources they need to make that connection on the other side, going into college. So I had a couple students who -- you probably have met a few of my students a few years ago, who had those issues at Muhlenberg where they actually quit. They came back a year later because they didn't want to be known by their dead name. They wanted to be known by the name (inaudible). Well, I don't know. I think our LGBT students are going to be, I hope that they're not subjected to violence. Both physically or emotionally, because they need to be themselves and they come out to their family members.  LB: That certainly is a thing about going to college, where you can totally reinvent yourself. You can really explore (inaudible). You can totally be the gender you know yourself to be, and you don't have to answer to anybody. RC: No one. LB: And if there are people that have problems with it, particularly on the Muhlenberg campus, there are other people that are going to be your friends. And that can happen, but I think you get to a certain point once you've gone to college where when you go home you go, "Yeah, I can stand this at home for about two and a half days." And that's about it. Two and a half days, probably max a month for both me and my parents. I love them, they were great, but two and a half days max. And then I had to leave because -- and I'm always amazed at kids, students who will say, college-age students will say they talk to their mother every day. I'm like, really? (inaudible) No kidding. But I know that's much different now than it was then, when I was a kid and nobody talked to their parents about anything. Certainly not about sex. For heaven's sake, it's crazy. But good for them, if they can do that. I think it's wonderful, and it certainly makes families so that they don't have a maximum of two and a half days. Because (inaudible) be realistic, I think, but I think it's great. And I think it's great that there are colleges that are offering, and really supporting people. I mean, you're seeing it from the other perspective. From the way I see it, when people say things like, "Well, you know, is there a supportive college?" I can say, "Look, Muhlenberg College has gender neutral housing, for heaven's sake." Has had it for quite a while. So if you're saying, "Well, it's not up to date" or something, it's like, compared to what? You know, I guess, but I don't know. I think for colleges similar to Muhlenberg, they're pretty good. They're better than Illinois Wesleyan, I'll say that. RC: Poor Illinois. Yeah, we definitely done some work. We still got work to do, but yeah. And always, always. LB: And certainly, and now's the time to do it, I think. This is a good time to do it. I'm so glad to hear that students are demanding that kind of introspection now. It's a good thing.  RC: It is a good thing. It's tiring, but it's a good thing. LB: It is really tiring. And young people want it now, too. [Get you?] everything right now.  RC: And then they leave us. They're gone. Yup.  LB: So, so what's giving you hope, now? What's giving you hope? RC: You know, just the new day. I think that every day that I'm not online looking at all the news is a good day. I think the fact that my friends are still healthy, I'm healthy. That November, oh God, please November -- I just hope, it was hard for me to see when John Lewis passed. When I saw that Ruth Ginsberg was back in the hospital, my heart.  LB: I know. I started to cry. RC: I know, I love her. LB: Both of those.  RC: So you know, I'm hopeful that these young congress people like Alexandria, Ayanna, and all those others, they are strong enough to hold fast, like Ruth and John Lewis. Because it's not like ten, twenty -- it's a lifetime. So -- LB: John was a lifetime of that. But I've got to tell you that when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was put on the court, she was pretty moderate. I mean, she was not seen as the leftist. She progressed. So we have that going for us, too. She may even roll back and become -- RC: But look at how -- oh God.  LB: I know, I know. I know exactly what you mean. People who are looking at this in the future, we're talking about the Supreme Court. We're just groaning about the Supreme Court.  RC: So I'm hopeful that we see more and more people that will run for city council. I'm glad Ce-Ce kept moving toward that direction. I thought she always wanted to be on the city council. She's on the city council. She's working with some very interesting people but she's on the city council. I want to see more young people take up that kind of work. I've heard that human, what was our -- LB: Human Relations Commission. RC: I've heard they're starting to move in a better way. I hope so. But they finally got a person who's actually going to be paid to do the job, after how many freaking -- yeah. So I think they need pressure on that group, and I'm hoping that the connections that the college says they want to make to Allentown -- because what I said to Muhlenberg College is, I think the city needs to hold Muhlenberg accountable. I mean, they are in the city of Allentown. Honestly, the work they do is not enough. I feel like if you want to be seen as experts in different fields of study, that's all great and dandy. But if you want to be seen as people who can be servants to the community at large, then you're not doing the job you've been called to do. And I think I would love to see the city be able to hold Muhlenberg accountable to that kind of framework. And I think that's what students are calling Muhlenberg to be. LB: Well, that's great to hear.  RC: So that would be a fantastic shift, if we could make that. LB: I mean yeah, it's an integral part and it's not just like, "Don't go below Seventeenth street," kind of thing. You know, Adrian went there and he went below Seventeenth street and my first experience with him was him saying to me -- I don't know if you know this -- but the first thing he said to me was, Patty Middleman had him call me because he wanted to get the college to include gender identity in its nondiscrimination policy. And he said he wanted to get a petition and have them, and I said, "You don't have to do that because the city already has this law in place." The laws had been in place by the time he was a student -- I think it was in -- so we'd had it in place for two years. And I said, "The college has to follow it. You can't discriminate against -- so just tell them it's already in the law." So then he comes back with, "Well, the administration of the college said that because we're a not-for-profit, we don't have to follow the law." I said, "That's not true. That's ridiculous. What do you think, you think that the hospital doesn't have to follow the law, they can discriminate against black people? That's ridiculous." And he goes, "Oh, okay." And I said, "So, this is what you do. Don't worry about a petition. This is what you need to do." This is the last time he goes to me. Because he was, what, 18 then. So I said, "What you need to do is tell them that Lehigh already has the policy." (inaudible) on it like, you know, two seconds. RC: That [petition's?] going to be good. LB: And that, and also it's the law. It's the law and you can't -- and he was saying, "Well, it's a religious college." I said, "It's not a religious college." If it were a religious college -- I said, "Look, frankly, there are colleges in the Lehigh Valley -- DeSales, for example -- that is a religious college. Or even Cedar Crest, which it's all about the mission. And the mission of the college, if the mission of the college was to follow Lutheran principles -- which it is not, the mission of the college is to educate young people. That's what it is. Or just educate people in general. It's an education. That's the mission, that's it. They're not saying, "We're going to only do Lutherans." That's not what they say. Cedar Crest College's mission is to work for women in education. And so technically they can make decisions about gender with regard to how they educate people or whether they've inclusive or not, of men. They can say, "We don't want men in the dorms." Because it's their mission, if they want to do it. That's their mission. And DeSales has a right to say, "We follow Catholic principles," because they're a Catholic college. Everybody knows that. So Adrian then comes back, literally the next day and he has a meeting with the president. They had the policy changed in a couple of days. I said, "Just play the Lehigh card." And it totally did it. RC: I can see [Reggie Ham?] falling for that.  LB: Yeah, totally. Well, it was Taylor.  RC: Oh, it was Taylor! Oh, it was Taylor. I never got a chance to meet him. LB: He was, you know, the other thing is that he would meet with Adrian because Adrian was so pushy, and he was successful in doing it. And I have to also that back when Adrian was -- and I mention this all the time when I talk about GSAs -- when Adrian was the head of the GSA, there were seven hundred students in the GSA. There were forty-five. He was there, and then when he left there were forty-five again. But there were seven hundred, and the reason is he did really interesting fun, exciting events, and he just made that happen. He also made everybody go out and vote. It's a big deal. I think our college student vote is what will win this election for us, because that's the swing vote.  RC: I hope so, I hope so. LB: That's why I do want them to come back, because Pennsylvania's a swing state and if they're in California it doesn't matter. Or New York, or D.C.. So, yeah. RC: I'm trying to be positive. Just hold out hope. LB: Try to be, try to be positive. Trying to be positive in the last election and we got kicked in the head. I know, I know. I mean, yeah. Shit. So, anyway, I think that's everything. I did want to, so here's one little thing. There's a question here that says, "What are your frustrations and challenges?" And you've already talked about some of that stuff, but have you had any like one little thing that's an epiphany about your life that you figured out? Like, now I'm home all the time I realize this about myself that's kind of frustrating, and I'll give you an example. It's that Trish is extraordinarily frustrated by -- I mean, the world, we wake up every morning, we're concerned about the world. But she's frustrated that she cannot shop for herself because it is costing so much more money than when you can go to buy something on sale. She can't find any sales for food, so it's costing us almost twice as much money for food because we will order by the list. So she'll say, "Get this chicken," and stuff like that. She can't go to the farmer's market because it's so dangerous there. And they won't do curbside pickup and stuff. Or a lot of the booths. And so she can't go to Elias Market, she can't go to Produce Mart because it's not really set up for that. And she said, "That's what's killing me. I need to get the sale on this thing." And that was the frustrating -- so has anything like that, where you started to think like, "Oh, this thing is the thing that's turning out to be so irritating for me?" I mean, in the grand scheme of things we're very, very privileged and we're lucky that we have a place to live, and food, and a job, and stuff like that.  RC: I've been thinking ; I realized that three years ago, when my mother died, that I was not going to waste time enjoying me family and friends, and then COVID-19 happened and my best friend, who has leukemia, I can't be around her. And so she could die. And I would not be able to physically be with -- all this time, I cannot spend any time with her. And I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even want to be close to a human within six feet or ten feet. I just don't want the chance. So I think that that's the hard thing, is now when I finally realize don't waste time, time's all I got, that COVID-19 happened and I have no choice. LB: Yeah, we're just waiting for it to be over. I know exactly what you mean. I feel like we're older. For younger people it's sort of an inconvenience and, might not be so true for college students, but that sort of millennial who's thinking, "Well, I have to work differently and I can't go out to the bars and I can't see as many people," and stuff like that. But for me, I'm thinking like, "How many years do I have left? And am I wasting twenty percent of them hanging around the house?" RC: Yeah, I don't like that. LB: No, it's just (inaudible). We have to try to do projects that we wouldn't normally do, but we know they need to get done.  RC: Yeah. Like painting my house. I don't know, and those things seem frivolous, but I don't know. We'll see. LB: That's what I've been doing, is fixing my house.  RC: But you're a fixer. (inaudible) LB: I'm a butch dyke with two power tools, so -- RC: I have a lot of friends like that who are -- what's nice about it is that more and more young women that I've met, or colleagues of mine, have grown up being butch dykes but they're not. You know? They do all the things that I think they -- one of the scientists, and she just tore down her shed and built a new one. And it's this beautiful thing ; she has all these tools, and all the tool belts and everything, and it's just like amazing. So I love these young women of today because they are who we were, (inaudible). So I think that that's cool. But no, that's what I miss, is just not being with people that I really like to be close to.  LB: I think another thing that really sucks is that people who need help -- like I have a friend who, a good friend, whose aunt died and she's the executor and she needs to clean out her house and stuff like that. And she had to do it all by herself. I said, "We would've all helped you. We could've done this in one day. We could've done this in one day, instead of you having to slog away with this. This would've been something." We knew the aunt. We just would've come in and done the whole thing. It could be all over, and we would've felt good about it. And instead you can't help somebody who's in that kind of situation. Can't come and fix something for you, or make you feel better, just make you feel less lonely. People who have had those losses that we can't be with them, is really awful. Well anyway, it's wonderful to hear about really positive things. A number of the things that you said about the students are very heartening for me. I'm sucking out as much hope as I can out of this, because we all need to get that. So it's wonderful to hear about (inaudible). Well, and I just think that they're the ones that are going to save us in this world right now. And I think that this kind of circumstance is upsetting, but for young people they're not disillusioned. They're angry, and that's the way I want them to be.  RC: I agree. If they can use that anger for good, that's fabulous. Go for it. LB: Because often, I don't know about you, but often I just think, "Ugh, could this be any worse? What else?" You know? (inaudible) It can't be -- oh, there's another thing! RC: Oh my God, there's always something else, you're right. LB: It's just awful. And it's in the way. And so I think young people look at that and (inaudible) "I want to do something. Got to march about this." And that's what I want to see them do, because they're not just sitting back saying, "Oh, this is so awful. There's nothing we can do about it." I like hearing that, and I like hearing when young people say, "If this doesn't work, we'll take it. We need to take this." And I like to hear them say that. Scary, but I have to hear them say it. Because that's where they need to be, I think.  RC: We haven't seen that kind of apathy yet, which I am thankful for.  LB: Well, good for you, Robin. Thank you so much for talking to me. It's been terrific, and I usually ask people if they want to say anything else to somebody in the, 30 years from now and going to look back and, no, you're pretty much --  RC: No, all I have to say is that I was here and I hope that I made, this video is just to say that we all got work to do --  LB: It is, it is. And we're working, and I hope the people watching it in the future will say, "Yeah, it worked." RC: That would be nice --  LB: But they know the future.  RC: Yeah. Only they will know. LB: They needed to also know what you were doing in the present, and thank you so much for telling me about that and being, let's see if I can say the thing. And, to give me your time and thank you so much. It was great to talk to you. I miss talking to you, so -- RC: It's been a while. LB: It has been a long time. Ridiculously long time. (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible) Thank you, and going to turn off the recording now.  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). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:11:49 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Robin Casey, July 21, 2020 Description An account of the resource Robin Casey talks about how the current COVID-19 pandemic is affecting her as a faculty member at a local college. She talks about her concerns regarding the opening of the college during the pandemic, the LGBT students who need support, and the relationship of the college and students to the Black Lives Matter movement in regards to recent police brutality issues in Allentown. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PH40_25 Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-07-21 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/c9ad16be34cedf3e114a260e680a3c52.png 0a52ecce01ce3edd1edcc8b364c9a2cc Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 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 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 Rose Craig OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_05.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 June 30, 2020 Rose Craig, June 30, 2020 PH40_05 01:29:17 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) Rose Craig Liz Bradbury audio/m4a CraigRose_20200630_audio 1.0:|25(9)|50(5)|83(7)|106(15)|127(8)|142(11)|165(2)|184(12)|207(12)|232(2)|255(5)|274(7)|295(12)|320(3)|341(8)|364(10)|383(8)|408(8)|429(9)|452(6)|475(9)|504(3)|519(15)|540(14)|557(12)|580(6)|605(6)|634(8)|655(13)|678(6)|707(16)|728(12)|751(11)|772(9)|791(13)|814(6)|837(7)|858(7)|879(6)|896(14)|919(13)|940(9)|967(11)|988(13)|1013(8)|1040(2)|1071(3)|1098(2)|1121(5)|1146(6)|1173(12)|1206(9)|1225(13)|1252(17)|1271(11)|1292(16)|1317(9)|1346(16)|1367(17)|1390(11)|1411(15)|1444(7)|1463(10)|1488(7)|1509(11)|1534(13)|1559(12)|1580(5)|1597(9)|1620(10)|1641(15)|1660(8)|1683(8)|1716(8)|1743(5)|1762(13)|1785(5)|1810(17)|1829(8)|1858(2)|1877(16)|1900(9)|1923(9)|1946(14)|1973(16)|2008(3)|2031(3)|2054(5)|2055(5) 0 https://youtu.be/MAXUETF8CYM YouTube video English 32 Interview Introduction Okay, there we go, I’m starting again. So, 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’m here with Rose Craig to talk about her experiences in Lehigh Valley LGBT community during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive. 0 216 First Awareness of HIV/AIDS LB: But do you remember the first time you became aware of AIDS and HIV?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Yes, I actually do ; I remember that. And it was probably around nineteen eighty-five, I would say, and I think I was the last president of the Lehigh Valley Gay and Lesbian Community Center, located in Allentown, Eighth and Hamilton. And we began to hear things and stories from our friends, mostly the boys, as we called them, went to New York, there was a lot of that, to the big city, because we had easy access, and they came back with stories of people getting sick, and you know, really, we felt bad about it, but we really didn’t know it’d be anything in relationship to us ; we just thought it was a New York thing. 0 423 Involvement with the Lehigh Valley Gay and Lesbian Community Center and the AIDS Services Center LB: But you were involved with the AIDS Services Center too, is that true?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, that came about from the community center. We were beginning to have so many people that we socialized with all the time getting ill that suddenly there were not many more parties, frankly, but it was mostly, okay, how do we help our friends? You know, and it was a joint effort by the guys and the lesbians. Dixie White was a great trooper with myself and a couple of other women, that were pretty good organizers ; we both had had long histories organizing the community around different issues, and at that point, and again, I was the last president, so I proposed that we, instead of being a community center, we change ourselves to being a service center, and we also took our models from New York, Philadelphia, there weren’t many towns or areas our size that had this. 0 754 Formation of Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (FACT) At the same time, we went out there and we hustled money, and this was the time that actually FACT grew out of that ; Brian and several of the guys thought, okay, we really need to get an arm of raising money from our community. And they, I understand, continue to do that, and have done an extraordinary job. And that’s kind of where the guys went more into that area of fundraising, which was great. So we took on the politics ; we took on the day-to-day coordination, and they took a lot of the fundraising. 0 952 Activism evolved from friends dying RC: Oh yeah, it was like, hey Joe is in trouble ; he’s down the street. You know, it was a very great network of people who knew people. And you know, again, this all evolved out of our friends dying, and us trying to figure out what the hell can we do to do that, and that was the basic reason why it all went that way. 0 983 Grants and funding for care and support ...as I said earlier, the Ryan White money began to be available. And I was just talking to Kathleen Kelly who is a good friend who was head of human services and drug and alcohol and all those things for Northampton County, and her counterpoint in Lehigh County, were looking at this money and saying, okay, how can we help? Because by this time also, the health bureaus were involved from each city, magnificently involved and wonderful. So many people, I couldn’t even, you know, remember all the names of all the people who came forward from the beginning. And that was so important to the community.&#13 ; 0 1198 AIDS Services Center case management LB: I’ve interviewed a number of people already and they were talking about FACT, and what FACT did, and where they funneled their money. But for AIDS services center, when you’re talking about case management, was that specifically to try to get people into healthcare?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: I mean, every month, practically, we were learning more about what this disease, and believe me, we watched, and very closely, New York, Philadelphia, the big cities, San Francisco, you know, conversations with people there to find out, so how do you this? Or how do you do that? Because there were some, you know, unique things about this particular disease and situation. 0 1399 Handing out condoms / educating about AIDS And the education piece, though, was very, very important ; I don’t know if you talked to anybody about that. But, we were out everywhere talking about condoms, you know, we had condoms everywhere, including my two teenage kids who were like, mom, can’t you have cookies at the front door and not a bowl of condoms for us and our friends? You know, but that was, you know, we’re scared to death of how that could spread everywhere. So it was all tragic, tragic. 0 1843 Helpfulness of doctors and healthcare professionals RC: Can’t remember a single name. (laughter)&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Other people can.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: There were wonderful doctors, oh gosh, I’m sure if you talk to somebody who might have been there during the health bureau, I remember at St. Luke’s we had some wonderful -- I’ll tell you who would also know would be some of the chaplains from St. Luke’s who have been there a long while, Ann Huey would know some of this, as per, because they worked very closely with the doctors too, so that’s a good source. I was on the end of hustle, so I was not a direct care person ever. 0 1901 Obtaining corporate support for funding LB: So, you were talking about some of the corporations that were supportive, and how did you get into some of those places and get them to step up? Were there instances, and I know there were some corporations that had CEOs who had children, adult children, who were sick, or who had HIV, and talk about some of that kind of stuff.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Well, if you could find somebody, and there was always somebody who had a child that was gay. That was where they started. Or you know, it was not beneath us to reach out to anybody that we knew that maybe had a parent working somewhere, and also, you know, some of us were very connected and into the community by that time. When I first started this, I worked for the American Red Cross, and I ran several programs there, and when this became so, taking up some of my time, the Red Cross gave me permission to just focus on developing the ASC, now this had nothing to do, because we didn’t do blood services in the Lehigh Valley. 0 2116 Medications for HIV/AIDS LB: So, what was I going to say? Okay, so there was a time when people were getting AIDS, or they were becoming infected ; there was absolutely nothing they could do. It was a death sentence.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Oh yeah, there was no medication or anything. They were just trying to figure out what was it, and what were some of the symptoms, and you know, and again, all of that information rolled quickly through a whole United States, in terms of, okay, look for these kind of sores. Well, if they’re having diarrhea and this, you know. So it rolled quick.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: There was a time, I think, when some medications, AZT, and some other medications, I was talking to somebody yesterday about a couple of medications, that he was a nurse, and he said, this isn’t working ; this is killing people. And it was a medicine that was destroying people’s hearts. It was such an interesting thing because I’d never heard of it before. Once there was medications involved, do you think, when was that shift, and how did that influence everything?&#13 ; 0 2456 Providing AIDS education in schools LB: So, with regard to that, this is going back a little bit, when you were doing education, were you able to get into schools, or were they not comfortable with that? I mean, some schools are so reticent about AIDS education.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Yeah, and I would say the religious schools never let us take a step towards them. But, I’m trying to think of when that popped a little. I think it’s because, we saw the importance of using the health bureaus to do that, because the health bureaus had a foot in a lot of places that we couldn’t, as a community. 0 2581 Providing condoms in nursing homes RC: Well, going back to like nineteen ninety-three, I would say, I remember taking all my stuff, dragging it up to one of the, I can’t think of the nursing home, the county nursing home, in Northampton County, and so I, you know, set up my display next to, you know, the transportation, or Meals on Wheels, and everybody, you know. And I had to call my staff twice to bring me more condoms. And I talked to the nurses up there, and they said, oh yeah, there’s a lot going on there, believe me. And it was, again, like you said, one of the funniest experiences. I thought well, life is not, it goes on, you know? And they didn’t care much about AIDS, although we still gave them the information. They had to take a brochure to read along with the condom, but it was hilarious, hilarious.&#13 ; 0 2742 Specific fundraisers for the AIDS Services Center and FACT LB: So, did the AIDS services center have specific fundraisers? Did you do Rainbow Restaurants, was that Red Ribbon Restaurants, or was that --&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Oh no, what did we do? It was hilarious, number one. I was always thrown in jail.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Okay, one of those things.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Yeah, we had, I wish I could remember the name of it, but yes, we had wonderful, that you provided, you sold a table of people, and then you, servers, something, something with the word “servers” in it, somebody will remember it, but you know, you would fix a meal, and you would serve it to them, and it would cost them a certain amount, and if they wanted a fork, that would cost them another buck. You know, things like that, so we were very creative in doing that, and there were a whole lot of people, was it “Star Servers” or something like that, I don’t know, it was hilarious ; we did that. 0 2832 Mental health impact and support LB: Sure. But also, you were losing people, and I know that that was happening really quickly. I talked to one person who said that there were so many funerals that he had to stop going to them, because it was just too much for him. And Dave Moyer said to me, as I interviewed him last week, he said that, you know, it takes a while to get over the death of a friend, or a death of a close person. And if you’re having that every week, or three times a month, or twice a month, or once a month, that it takes two years to get over the death of a close friend, and if you have six close friends die, and I think that that might have been some of the issues that you were dealing with, were you providing mental health care too for, that kind of stuff?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: We were hooking people up. We had some wonderful therapists. See, you’re bringing up different things, and then I remember, oh yeah, that whole, the mental health piece. We had some wonderful therapists in the area that put their services right out, you know, free counseling and stuff like that. So we’d hook people up with that as well, so there were some, everything from psychiatrists to a therapist, so it was quite a network of people. 0 3081 Involvement with passing the anti-discrimination ordinance in Allentown LB: But, some of the papers that Dixie gave me were about the effort to pass the anti-discrimination ordinance inclusion in nineteen seventy-eight. And were you there for that?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: I was around for that, yes. And I knew Melissa Lee ; that was part of that. I don’t think I was involved with the center at that point in time. I don’t remember that.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Well I don’t think they had the center.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: But I remember going into the hearings and being very vocal about the right with all of that, and stuff, so it was a strange time. In fact, back when that first one, I’m actually bisexual, and I was married at that time. I think I got Divorced, but I had always been involved with justice issues and things like that, so that’s why I got involved with that. 0 3229 Meeting Dixie White / Individuals who were on the FACT board RC: Yeah, I really don’t. It was, when I ended up being with someone, I remember hearing about this. How would I have heard about, I heard about it somehow. But by that time, I was in social services working at the Red Cross at that time, and they would have like, get-togethers, and parties, and come meet. And so I started going to those, and I think that’s how I met Dixie, at that, and it was social ; it was fun. It was a great way to get into the community and know the community, and because I hadn’t been involved with the community, so I started to know people, and it just grew from there. 0 3708 Involvement of the Latino community RC: For those other communities, and it brought in a whole bunch of wonderful, I think of Anna Claudio and people like that who just became wonderful, wonderful partners in all of this, and the Latino community just rallied, they really did. It was their family, and again, because so many gay people still were getting very ill, you couldn’t not know someone, you know, even if you were in South Bethlehem Latino community and you never in your life for sure ever saw anybody gay except maybe your second cousin Ricky who was a little strange. But you know, they met through feeding people, and taking furniture. They met gay men, and gay women, and you know, it’s again, in my mind, what community is really, really about. And you know, that was transforming, you know.&#13 ; 0 3777 Working with Dixie White at the AIDS Services Center LB: ...when you were working on this, and you were talking about Dixie, were you and Dixie working, both working at the same time, or were you one and then the other?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: She was our first hire. We hired her as the executive director, and it was a small board ; it was myself, and Brian, and a couple of other people. I’m so bad with names, that I can’t remember. But there were several people, and we hired Dixie, and the Red Cross let me spend a lot of time helping her get that whole thing organized, and again, the piece that I did most of was out in the community, doing as much. She was the, do we have enough rubber bands? How are the paper clips? You know, here’s the file folder, you know, all that kind of stuff, and organizing, a wonderful organizing ability that she has. And I was more the ideas person, or the person who would go out there and talk about it. Because they already had some credibility in the community. And so I could do that very quickly. And then, the guys were raising money, and it was so crucial, and everybody was just doing as much as they could. But everybody had a niche of how they would be able to do it.&#13 ; 0 3965 Comparison of HIV/AIDS to COVID-19 LB: So do you want to talk a little bit about, you said a few things about COVID-19, but let’s talk a little bit about that in relation to the AIDS epidemic. I mean, you know, #ItsNotOurFirstVirus, which is what people are saying. But I think that, one of the things that’s pretty interesting about this is that, during the AIDS epidemic, during the height of the epidemic, those who were in the LGBT community were young ; I mean, we were in our twenties and thirties, maybe in our forties at the end of the epidemic when it was at its height, and we were helping our friends. You know, it’s pretty easy to do that when you’re in your twenties, to really do a lot of that work. Now that we’re aging, it’s a little harder, where also not only do we have this COVID epidemic, but for that baby boomer generation, we also have the aging epidemic which is a whole different ciRCumstance. But I mean, a lot of people have talked about the similars and the differences with regard to COVID and COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS, and you want to say some stuff about, how are you seeing that?&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: Well, I think the first thing that strikes me about it, going to the politics of it all, is that like HIV/AIDS, there was no recognition at the top. So we didn’t have like a national focus on, hey, let’s take care of this, together as a nation. Took a while, and I think the passage of Ryan White money was key, that there were some people in legislature who got it, and they got it usually because they had a child die, or they knew someone, and that’s how all of that, you know. So we had at least a framework within to work, and I think that’s been, certainly one of the issues with COVID. 0 4473 Advocating for your community LB: ...People are wanting COVID to be over now. And I think, for people who are minorities, because that’s what the LGBT community is, we are more used to dealing with things not necessarily going our way just because we want them to, and you know.&#13 ; &#13 ; RC: That’s a good point, yeah. And you know, we’re used to doing hard things. Because, everyday living is hard for members of our community. And it has been for a long time. And so, you kind of get used to that, and you also push back, which I think we do too ; we push back as much as we can without getting killed. And I think that’s why we probably have a lot of simpatico for all the racial justice things that are happening now. 0 Sound Rose Craig talks about her work as the last President of the Gay Community Center in Allentown in the 1980s and how the Center evolved into the AIDS Services Center in the late 1980s and early 1990s to address the crisis. She talks about what services the AIDS Services Center provided and her role in securing funding and support. ROSE CRAIG LIZ BRADURY: audio. Whoops. I'm going to start the recording thing, recording on this computer. There we go. And I'm going to say these things. Uh-oh. ROSE CRAIG: (inaudible) lost you. Hold on. LB: There we go. RC: You there? LB: Yeah. RC: All right, I was trying to turn up my volume. There we go. LB: Oh, that's good. I'm going to do that too. Okay, there we go, I'm starting again. So, 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'm here with Rose Craig to talk about her experiences in 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 June thirtieth, and Rose, what town are you in? RC: I'm actually in Columbus, Ohio right now. LB: Okay, all right. That's good. Now I have to go to page two. There we go. 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? RC: Yeah, it's actually Rosemary Craig, known as Rose, and Craig is C-R-A-I-G. LB: Okay. And, will you please share your birthdate? RC: The year too? LB: You don't have to. (laughter) You don't have to. It's okay if you can't -- RC: November twenty-seventh, a long time ago. LB: Okay. Do you consent to this interview today? RC: Yes, I do. LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in Searchable formats? RC: Yes, I do. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes on other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, and other format? RC: Yes. LB: Do you understand that you will have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview, identify any parts you'd like to delete, or withdraw, from your interview from the project? So we will send you a transcribed interview, and if there are parts that you want to tweak up, that's fine. If you say, I hate this whole thing, we can throw it out, we can do it again if you want. Although I'm sure it'll be fine. RC: I'm sure it will. LB: So, okay. So then I start by saying, in the midst of the current public health crisis that we are experiencing, 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-forties and through the nineties, and we're really specifically talking about nineteen eighty-five to nineteen ninety-three. So, the first question, and really you can say whatever you want on this Rose, and you can, whatever you want. But do you remember the first time you became aware of AIDS and HIV? RC: Yes, I actually do ; I remember that. And it was probably around nineteen eighty-five, I would say, and I think I was the last president of the Lehigh Valley Gay and Lesbian Community Center, located in Allentown, Eighth and Hamilton. And we began to hear things and stories from our friends, mostly the boys, as we called them, went to New York, there was a lot of that, to the big city, because we had easy access, and they came back with stories of people getting sick, and you know, really, we felt bad about it, but we really didn't know it'd be anything in relationship to us ; we just thought it was a New York thing. And at that time, nobody knew what it was, whether it was a flu, kind of like the COVID situation, or cancer, perhaps. But, in very short time, people began dying from it. So there was only a tiny, tiny space between learning about it and suddenly a lot of dead people. But still, that was in New York. It didn't take more than a month or two for some of our friends, and good friends at the Community Center began getting ill. And back then, as I recall, it was a quick dive. It was not a long, long, long time between contracting whatever this was and then really bedridden and then dead, frankly. The hospitals didn't know what to do with them. In the hospitals, they had quarantines of all sorts because nobody knew what it was, but everybody knew they were gay men, so that was one of our first battles was getting that to stop, so that they weren't singled out or anything. You know, back in the eighties, it was very progressivist for us to even have a community center in Allentown, and we not only were a social group, but we also helped change the law in Allentown with the human relations commission, Melissa Lee was the head back then, and we got gays and lesbians on as a protected class in Allentown, and we also had worked with a couple school districts to do the same. So, you know, we had a little bit of politics going, certainly an awareness of it, but it was nothing like the deep water we got into when AIDS really came to town. LB: Right, yeah. So you were involved with the community center, and then you had additional involvement. I'm just going to turn off my air conditioner, but go ahead and just take a second. But you were involved with the AIDS Services Center too, is that true? RC: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, that came about from the community center. We were beginning to have so many people that we socialized with all the time getting ill that suddenly there were not many more parties, frankly, but it was mostly, okay, how do we help our friends? You know, and it was a joint effort by the guys and the lesbians. Dixie White was a great trooper with myself and a couple of other women, that were pretty good organizers ; we both had had long histories organizing the community around different issues, and at that point, and again, I was the last president, so I proposed that we, instead of being a community center, we change ourselves to being a service center, and we also took our models from New York, Philadelphia, there weren't many towns or areas our size that had this. But because of our proximity, I think, to New York, we had a lot of people who were in and out of the big towns. So we got besieged pretty quickly, and it didn't take long at all for all of us to agree that that's what we need to do. So we dissolved the community center, and we began the AIDS Services Center. We moved out of our location in Allentown and moved into a smaller place in Bethlehem, and Dixie White was the first executive director, and again, because she'd had a lot of experience at organizing, we were able to get the organization up-and-running within a few months. So we had a board of directors ; we had everything we needed for the 501(c)3 application, got that approved. Part of my job was to get out there and sell this to the typical regular funders in the community to make them aware of what was going on. Because back then, nobody was really talking about it, especially in Allentown or Bethlehem, or at least in Pennsylvania. And the whole issue about being gay was again something that wasn't a real popular topic. LB: Where was the community center, do you remember? Was that on Hamilton Street? RC: It was on Eighth and Hamilton, up above, on the second floor. LB: I'm losing your picture ; your picture is disappearing. Can you tilt your phone a little bit? There, that's perfect. RC: I got excited thinking about the Chinese restaurant, Rubes, right below us. Yeah, it was around, I guess Eighth and Hamilton, Ninth and Hamilton, up on the second floor, on the south side, and it was a great big area because again we were a community center, so we were having parties and dances and all the other kind of stuff. So, we knew that that wasn't going to work for what we needed to do, and so that's why we got out of that place and went into a smaller place, and started the business of taking care of people. LB: Yeah. And so, when you moved to Bethlehem, do you remember where that was, the address of that, approximately? RC: Yeah, I've been trying to think of that today, and can't remember where it was. But it was probably, not quite in downtown, but right around that neighborhood of downtown in Bethlehem. So we just moved one city over, and then eventually, we moved to a suite of rooms in a space in downtown Bethlehem, so that was a real nice space. LB: I think I remember where that was, yeah. So, people were saying to you, like people are dying and stuff. What was some of the stuff that you were providing in terms of services for people? RC: That's a good question. Part of what we provided at that point in time, now, there were people in the community, and people associated with us that were really doing the handholding, feeding, taking care of, wiping the behinds of our friends who got ill quickly ; there were a lot of angels out there doing that kind of work. And we were certainly associated with that. One of the skills that we could actually bring was the fact that both Dixie and I knew how to navigate the system, the human relations system, and the nonprofit system within the Lehigh Valley. And it was important, because part of what we had to do was also educate, to inform the community about what this was, why this was important, and again, it just brought out a whole lot of different issues. But we know how to work that, and we did. We politically were very savvy and knew how to work that aspect of it. At the same time, we went out there and we hustled money, and this was the time that actually FACT grew out of that ; Brian and several of the guys thought, okay, we really need to get an arm of raising money from our community. And they, I understand, continue to do that, and have done an extraordinary job. And that's kind of where the guys went more into that area of fundraising, which was great. So we took on the politics ; we took on the day-to-day coordination, and they took a lot of the fundraising. Myself and a couple of others went after grants and things which were just beginning to show, money for AIDS, the Ryan White bill was huge, and bringing actual money from the government. So, we jumped on all of that, and wrote grants and did things like that, and also looked for corporate sponsors to see if we could find some. So that was a whole bit of what we were doing. So we knew that we wanted to add case management, was what we called it at the time, and basically, that was a matter of looking at the person, sort of holistically, and seeing, what did they need? Did they need a place to stay? Did they need some nursing care? Did they need food? You know, what was it that each particular person needed? So in order to coordinate that, we needed to hire some people who could actually do that social work aspect of making sure that the needs were met. And so that grew to be a very important part of what we did, and what we provided for the community, and also an important part of the grant-writing so that we had something to offer. Now at this same time, it's kind of like having plates spinning in the air, because there were several things going on at the time as well. Part of it was the religious community ; there were courageous people within the religious community who were also looking at this issue, and I'll very proudly talk about our association with the Episcopal diocese, was wonderful, from the beginning. There were Catholic priests from the beginning who were willing to -- it was in the basement of the church but were willing to give -- we had to think of the whole thing, including funerals and burying people. And don't forget at that time, and I suppose this still goes on, but at that time, there was a lot of separation of people from their families, and the community became people's family, so there weren't the usual supports in place that one might expect if you had cancer, or something like that. So we had to all be involved doing it all for that particular person. And we shot up very quickly until we were covering about three-hundred people a year at least in servicing all that stuff. LB: So people would come to you, or they would be referred or something, and then they would be -- RC: Oh yeah, it was like, hey Joe is in trouble ; he's down the street. You know, it was a very great network of people who knew people. And you know, again, this all evolved out of our friends dying, and us trying to figure out what the hell can we do to do that, and that was the basic reason why it all went that way. And you know, again, the religious community came in and supported, and then as I said earlier, the Ryan White money began to be available. And I was just talking to Kathleen Kelly who is a good friend who was head of human services and drug and alcohol and all those things for Northampton County, and her counterpoint in Lehigh County, were looking at this money and saying, okay, how can we help? Because by this time also, the health bureaus were involved from each city, magnificently involved and wonderful. So many people, I couldn't even, you know, remember all the names of all the people who came forward from the beginning. And that was so important to the community. So anyway, we, and Billy Leh, and people like that, we wrote the first big government grant that was like a million dollars to get some of that into the Lehigh Valley, and then out of that, we needed to have a coordinating base. It wasn't the AIDS service center, because we were too busy then providing services ; we were really busy. I think out of that, the AIDS Task FoRCe group, and that was made up of a whole lot of different people, not only from the service area, but from the religious area, from the business community and government, and so this was the first place that everybody was kind of coming around that table, and looking at each other and saying, okay, we've got a major health crisis here, you know, and it's with a group of people, a community that are not very popular ; again, people didn't want to talk about, certainly, AIDS, and they also, it was just a hard time to be gay. Anyway, but as we all well know, all of us older people know. But we all came around this table and sort of looked at each other like, okay, well what are we going to do here? And we did get the grant, and we did come up with ways to get the money, setting up a way to give the money out to certain organizations within the community to best spend it, including the health bureaus and everything, and because it was a, we're trying to think today, when I was talking to Kathleen, it must have been a federal grant that came down to the states. So there were a lot of crossing Ts and dotting Is, and a lot of follow-up with, okay you have to do this. You know, but we had people who knew how to do that, and they all volunteered to be part of this AIDS task force, and so that's when it kind of really got off the ground that we were a movement here in the Lehigh Valley. LB: When that happened and you go that money, do you know about when that was? RC: That must have been around, I would say, venture to say maybe eighty-eight, eighty-nine? LB: Okay, so that's really in the height of stuff. RC: So actually, you know, it was a little earlier than that because, no it was eighty-eight, eighty-nine, around that time. LB: When that happened, and you had that money, so if somebody came, AIDS, oh there's a huge rainbow out my window. It's an omen. So, the folks, I've interviewed a number of people already and they were talking about FACT, and what FACT did, and where they funneled their money. But for AIDS services center, when you're talking about case management, was that specifically to try to get people into healthcare? RC: I mean, every month, practically, we were learning more about what this disease, and believe me, we watched, and very closely, New York, Philadelphia, the big cities, San Francisco, you know, conversations with people there to find out, so how do you this? Or how do you do that? Because there were some, you know, unique things about this particular disease and situation. And so, we really were finding out more and more as we went along, and we matured as we were doing that. Believe me, not without a lot of pain and suffering by the people who were organizing. (laughs) As you know, Liz, being an organizer yourself, you know, trying to get everybody, I didn't care if they were happy ; I just wanted them at the table and contributing something, you know. As a lot of dear old friends would say, you know, I was a real -- they called me "the bitch," but you know, there it is, a real straight-shooter. That was okay ; we were fine with that. No problem. And Dixie was the other bitch, but we were good. But they also loved us, and knew that we were really making a difference, and that was important too, so. LB: "Bitch" is just another word for the person who gets things done. RC: Exactly, that's exactly right. (laughs) LB: But I guess what I'm trying to find out is that, when the money came in, what did it go for? Did it go to support people's medical bills? Did it support their rent? Did it support everything? What kind of -- RC: Yes, yes, and yes. And it also supported education, and it supported funerals, and we got to watch the metamorphosis of HIV/AIDS going from just gay men at that time on to other populations. And in the early nineties, for instance, I actually ended up being the executive director at the AIDS services center for a couple of years, and at that time, we were just discovering about the HIV, about the intravenous drug users, and so needle sharing, and all of that was just hitting the road. And Lehigh Valley has always had a wonderful Latino population, and we were finding more and more that it was hitting that population hard. And not only the person who was doing the shooting, but also family members, we had children. So all of this was, again, this maturing, this rolling on and seeing oh my god, okay, now what do we do with that, you know, we got to take care of a family. The family needs their rent, you know, so we just went on and on. And believe me, this money went quick. And the education piece, though, was very, very important ; I don't know if you talked to anybody about that. But, we were out everywhere talking about condoms, you know, we had condoms everywhere, including my two teenage kids who were like, mom, can't you have cookies at the front door and not a bowl of condoms for us and our friends? You know, but that was, you know, we're scared to death of how that could spread everywhere. So it was all tragic, tragic. But there were people, like I said in the community, gay and straight, who just held the torch for all of this, and I'll never forget losing a couple of very close friends, some guys, and also when it hit the kids, that was heartbreaking. I remember kids that we would drop things off for, and you know, four years old, five years old, babies, all of that. So it was a nasty thing. Meanwhile, the rest of the community had some, a semblance of looking at this and saying, oh, this is bad, you know. We had reduced the number of people who were saying things like, well, that's what they deserve, because I don't know how you say that to a child. So you know, that was something I could really promote to banks and places like that to give money. It's a terrible thing to say, but you know, we hustled everywhere, everywhere, and there are some banks, like, I'll say Chase Bank was one of the very first to come on board, and you know, there were just some businesses that got it, and stayed involved, and we were lucky to have some of those in the Lehigh Valley. LB: Did you have any politicians that were really in your corner that you should name, I'd love to hear about those, because some of them were terrific, I know. RC: We actually ended up having some people that were like state legislators, some mayors ; I remember Bethlehem, and Allentown, you know, the people within their own organizations. You know, this was starting to be, everybody started to know somebody who had it. And so it began that kind of groundswell so that it popped up to higher levels. And there were some people, even within the school districts, who came forward and did support. So I would say, you know, I wouldn't say any of that happened overnight, and I wouldn't say any of that happened without a lot of effort and a lot of tears. I remember myself and another good friend, a guy, we used to be the spokespeople ; we'd go out and talk about what it was like to be mainstream, because neither he, he worked, he had a very important job at Air Products and you know, I looked like everybody's chubby mother, you know? So we would go out and talk to people about, so this is what gay looks like too, you know, and -- LB: Who was that? RC: -- we went to the universities and things like that, and tried to enlighten people as much as we could. LB: Who was that from Air Products? Was it Charlie? RC: Charlie Versaggi. LB: Charlie Versaggi, I was just talking to him a few minutes ago. RC: Love him ; he's a darling. Yeah, oh he'll remember all that. LB: I'm going to interview him at the end of the week, so yeah. RC: Oh, good. Well that was a lot, the community center, we did that to upgrade, but all of that helped us then be able to communicate and talk about HIV/AIDS. And I knew many a straight wonderful woman who went out with their cucumber and condoms and you know. (laughs) We're giving that talk all over, bless their hearts, I really mean it. Bless their hearts ; they were unafraid, and that was really something. LB: There was a time I think when people were, when you were talking about nineteen eighty-five when people were noticing that people were dying, and a lot of people didn't know how this was happening. I remember, I was a college teacher then, and somebody, a student asking me, well how do you keep from getting it? Because like, we didn't know where it was coming from, how is it passed around? And was there a time that you can remember that you started to pinpoint that say, oh, this is how you keep from getting it, and this is what we need to tell people? RC: Yeah, absolutely. We were in the pipeline early on, with the health bureaus, especially were very, very connected. You know, and we learned from them. And again, the whole world was just learning this. It's so funny, when I see the doctor, can't think of him of course at this moment, who is the one to believe about COVID, was the same guy who worked a lot on AIDS, yeah. And so, we had our trusted sources that we paid attention to, and we learned and we learned, and we let anybody who knew something come in. It was a very open kind of, what do you got it? Oh, come on in, you know. What can you do? Can you go do that school tomorrow? (laughs) You know, so it was a community of people, and how we learned everything was by having some of those people be very smart and very connected to health systems and stuff. And like I said, we would call into New York, or we would call into Philadelphia to say, hey, are you seeing this? You know, have you seen this yet? And as we, at the AIDS Services Center grew, we hired more case managers and we had bilingual people, and you know, and they were right on the front line of, you know, figure out how to do the best thing, and everybody shared every and all their information. That was one of the things I think that always stayed with me, about how willing people were to contribute in any way that they could, and believe me, we were not without infighting and, you know, he said this, she said -- that kind of thing. But the better good really is what ruled the day, and when it got right down to brass tacks, people were there. LB: So, when you were doing this and you were doing case management stuff, did you have specific doctors and health care workings that you were referring to people who were really like heroes at the time? RC: Yes, absolutely. LB: Can you remember some of those people? RC: Can't remember a single name. (laughter) LB: Other people can. RC: There were wonderful doctors, oh gosh, I'm sure if you talk to somebody who might have been there during the health bureau, I remember at St. Luke's we had some wonderful -- I'll tell you who would also know would be some of the chaplains from St. Luke's who have been there a long while, Ann Huey would know some of this, as per, because they worked very closely with the doctors too, so that's a good source. I was on the end of hustle, so I was not a direct care person ever. But I could get you anything you needed to do it, and that was always my job, so I don't have the, I don't remember the names of folks, but they were there. They were there in every hospital system. Sometimes they couldn't talk about it. And sometimes it wasn't something that the hospital would even talk about, but they were there ; they were there. LB: So, you were talking about some of the corporations that were supportive, and how did you get into some of those places and get them to step up? Were there instances, and I know there were some corporations that had CEOs who had children, adult children, who were sick, or who had HIV, and talk about some of that kind of stuff. RC: Well, if you could find somebody, and there was always somebody who had a child that was gay. That was where they started. Or you know, it was not beneath us to reach out to anybody that we knew that maybe had a parent working somewhere, and also, you know, some of us were very connected and into the community by that time. When I first started this, I worked for the American Red Cross, and I ran several programs there, and when this became so, taking up some of my time, the Red Cross gave me permission to just focus on developing the ASC, now this had nothing to do, because we didn't do blood services in the Lehigh Valley. The Red Cross didn't do it, rather. But I was given time and we had members of the board from the Red Cross. We'd just find one person who knew another person. The Churches brought in people. Dear guy, who died recently I understand, Bill Coles, was from Dun &amp ; Bradstreet, and he was there. He committed all the Resources, you know, that he could. There were people from Beth Steel. You know, there was, Air Products became, and some of these people organizing this, some foundations locally, you know, we became really good friends with them, and just sort of said, hey, here we are. What can you help us with? What can you show us? We were a very humble beginning, because it was like, we don't know what we're doing, but we're doing it, and it's got to be addressed ; how can you help? And it was one person by one person. There was still big corporations that didn't want anything to do with it, you know, that's fine. But I have to say that everyone involved knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, and that, again, it was that groundswell that we started from the beginning, and reaching out, which I think is true community organizing, but it also got us up there with the big guys, and you know. We did a lot of that, as much as we could. And again, I count as friends some incredible people who were part of all that who gave a lot, at risk in some times, because it was new. Air Products is a good example of someone who said, okay Rose, you know, what's this about? You know, and they were there, and Ed Meehan from the foundation at Lehigh Valley Hospital. People like that, I mean, we were all together in this pretty quickly ; we just, you know, converged. LB: So, what was I going to say? Okay, so there was a time when people were getting AIDS, or they were becoming infected ; there was absolutely nothing they could do. It was a death sentence. RC: Oh yeah, there was no medication or anything. They were just trying to figure out what was it, and what were some of the symptoms, and you know, and again, all of that information rolled quickly through a whole United States, in terms of, okay, look for these kind of sores. Well, if they're having diarrhea and this, you know. So it rolled quick. LB: There was a time, I think, when some medications, AZT, and some other medications, I was talking to somebody yesterday about a couple of medications, that he was a nurse, and he said, this isn't working ; this is killing people. And it was a medicine that was destroying people's hearts. It was such an interesting thing because I'd never heard of it before. Once there was medications involved, do you think, when was that shift, and how did that influence everything? RC: That shift, as I recall, happened in the early nineties, maybe ninety-three. I'm thinking around that time, when we called it "the cocktail," of course, was starting to be given. And I'll tell you, everybody, doctors, everybody, were surprised as hell that this worked, because nothing had worked before, the different things they tried. And suddenly, I wish I were more knowledgeable on all the medical ends of it, and if I knew it once, I don't remember, but suddenly they got the right combination of things and it was having a real effect. So we moved from, as soon as you get it everybody, you're going to die, kind of thinking, to okay, well you know, there might be some people who aren't, and so that grew then, of course, and that's the story today, grown so much better. But through all that, we still had to do a lot of prevention, because there were still scores of young people, young men getting the disease, and nothing you could tell anybody would stop them. And is that any different from what's going on right now? You know, people not wearing masks out on the beaches, stuff like that, it's like, it's that invincible feeling that you have at certain span of years. Well that was the same thing with AIDS, you know, they were sure they weren't going to get it. You know, sometimes you were supposed to tell anybody if you had it. That became a legal issue later on. You know, so it brought out, as does any public health issue, I think, that gets to the pandemic stage, brought up every single corner of things that could go wrong, do go wrong, and trying to repair it and fix it, and you know, two steps forward, three steps back, that kind of thing. And that is to me reflected so much today in what we're currently battling. But that, on top of, we have to remember always, and this is why you're doing this wonderful work, that the basis was in the gay community, and that was always a struggle ; that was always because people, to change, it didn't happen overnight for a lot of people, but they were willing to try, and eventually they had a whole different view of the community. But that was a long time coming. It was a lot of education that had to be made again and again and again and again. I don't know how many city council meetings in different cities did I talk to, to tell them why this is an issue that we all share ; why this is important for Allentown, or Bethlehem, or Easton, to take this on as something that needed their support, needed their interest, and you know, just, it took a lot to do that. I think with the COVID, there's not quite that stigma, I would guess, I don't know, that the gay people -- "the gay people" -- what we endured during that time. But I can also see the things that are happening today with, you know, the populations, the minority populations and such, you know, getting infected, most. Well of course, those are the same people who couldn't get anything, or have anything. We were lucky, actually in some ways, and starting, that it was gay white men who had money, and had income, and were willing to share. So, that was one thing, and have insurance, so it did start. That went all to hell quickly, believe me, but it did start with some people being resourced, as is very different from what we're experiencing today. LB: So, with regard to that, this is going back a little bit, when you were doing education, were you able to get into schools, or were they not comfortable with that? I mean, some schools are so reticent about AIDS education. RC: Yeah, and I would say the religious schools never let us take a step towards them. But, I'm trying to think of when that popped a little. I think it's because, we saw the importance of using the health bureaus to do that, because the health bureaus had a foot in a lot of places that we couldn't, as a community. So, they became our friends, and very willingly, they were. And so they got in under that, you know, that credibility, and was a great help. We knew people, we had all kinds, everywhere we went, we took condoms ; I remember that. And believe me, that was not a popular thing, and some of the social services, what are those things, that you get a fair, some place with all the social services, well we would come with our little pot of condoms, you know, and do our thing, and sometimes, that was not viewed very well. But for the most time, we were all pretty ballsy, so we were right there, saying, uh-huh. Well let me tell you about this. LB: I got to tell you, Rose now, because of my age, I do senior fairs sometimes, and I have a big bowl of condoms. RC: Oh my gosh. LB: And it's so funny. Like I've actually said to the younger people at the center, if you want to have a hilarious, hysterical laugh, come and do this thing with the condoms with the seniors, because they're not, they're like, well, I just put my name on eHarmony, so maybe I should take two. I actually had a woman say that. So it's been pretty hilarious, you know? I honestly love that. RC: Well, going back to like nineteen ninety-three, I would say, I remember taking all my stuff, dragging it up to one of the, I can't think of the nursing home, the county nursing home, in Northampton County, and so I, you know, set up my display next to, you know, the transportation, or Meals on Wheels, and everybody, you know. And I had to call my staff twice to bring me more condoms. And I talked to the nurses up there, and they said, oh yeah, there's a lot going on there, believe me. And it was, again, like you said, one of the funniest experiences. I thought well, life is not, it goes on, you know? And they didn't care much about AIDS, although we still gave them the information. They had to take a brochure to read along with the condom, but it was hilarious, hilarious. LB: It's pretty funny, isn't it? So I know that the bars were doing the summer games. You were probably going up there to set up with the summer games. RC: Oh yeah. Yup, up the Poconos, yeah. LB: So, did you have a table there, or were you sort of working the room, or may speaking -- RC: Well, I was always working a room, as you can imagine. But we always had a table. Wherever we could take our information, we did. And we were blessed to have, like I said, a lot of people out there who were willing to go and, you know, have stuff out, answer questions, things like that. And we got to, testing was part of, I think, what we ended up doing too ; I'm trying to remember all that. So there was, you know, important stuff to be done, and we just tried to be able to provide what we could provide, you know, to the community. LB: Yeah, so yeah, now you know, it's interesting, because then tests took so long, and now we've got the twenty-minute testing stuff, and it's really significant at a pride festival where people can just go into a truck or something. RC: I know. That's wonderful ; it's incredible. LB: Because that was (inaudible). RC: But again, the maturity of everything connected to this whole industry, I remember calling it that, and scaring some people. But it really was by that time. You know, there was just so much to it, and so many different aspects of it that we had to figure out how to cover, so. LB: So, did the AIDS services center have specific fundraisers? Did you do Rainbow Restaurants, was that Red Ribbon Restaurants, or was that -- RC: Oh no, what did we do? It was hilarious, number one. I was always thrown in jail. LB: Okay, one of those things. RC: Yeah, we had, I wish I could remember the name of it, but yes, we had wonderful, that you provided, you sold a table of people, and then you, servers, something, something with the word "servers" in it, somebody will remember it, but you know, you would fix a meal, and you would serve it to them, and it would cost them a certain amount, and if they wanted a fork, that would cost them another buck. You know, things like that, so we were very creative in doing that, and there were a whole lot of people, was it "Star Servers" or something like that, I don't know, it was hilarious ; we did that. You know, there's nothing more fun than a group of gay people, actually. (laughter) When it gets down to it. And of course FACT, always had their balls, which, that will be taken many different ways, I'm sure. But my point is, they always had a big celebration -- LB: The snowball. RC: Yeah, snowball. LB: They celebrated. RC: (inaudible) a lot about that, yeah. So you know, every way we could figure out to do it, we were trying to do it. But there were some very fun times connected to all that. LB: Sure. But also, you were losing people, and I know that that was happening really quickly. I talked to one person who said that there were so many funerals that he Ahad to stop going to them, because it was just too much for him. And Dave Moyer said to me, as I interviewed him last week, he said that, you know, it takes a while to get over the death of a friend, or a death of a close person. And if you're having that every week, or three times a month, or twice a month, or once a month, that it takes two years to get over the death of a close friend, and if you have six close friends die, and I think that that might have been some of the issues that you were dealing with, were you providing mental health care too for, that kind of stuff? RC: We were hooking people up. We had some wonderful therapists. See, you're bringing up different things, and then I remember, oh yeah, that whole, the mental health piece. We had some wonderful therapists in the area that put their services right out, you know, free counseling and stuff like that. So we'd hook people up with that as well, so there were some, everything from psychiatrists to a therapist, so it was quite a network of people. And then, as I recall, when the counties were involved, we were able to get some of that stuff funded for people, so the services were free. We integrated it into, so you didn't know someone was going for a therapy for that as opposed to therapy for, you know, something else, bulimia or something. So we tried as much as we could to integrate people into the regular systems, because there was such a need out there, and you know, so that's how we worked that. But it was a time of great tragedy, and great -- courage. LB: Courage is the word. RC: Yeah. And people, at the beginning, it happened so quickly, and I think that's probably some of what David's talking about. It just was, it was just right and left, right and left. And it was a terrible time for all of that ; we just didn't know quite know what to do, except to honor that person as best as we could, and that's what we did. LB: And then organize. RC: And then try to prevent less, so it wouldn't spread to everybody. All, just like this big ball that rolled, yeah. LB: I have to say that, you know, I was in the Valley then ; I didn't know as many people, but I can really say that as a small community, which per se, compared to New York, Chicago, you know, San Francisco, there was an extraordinary response. And part of that was, because you had an organized community, because you had that community center already organized. So how did that start? Were you there -- let me just step back a little bit more -- because Dixie White gave me a lot of her papers, and just, Elizabeth Goff just moved another fourteen boxes of Dixie's papers into the community center. They're all going to go into the Muhlenberg ARChive, which is terrific. RC: As they should. LB: And thank goodness that she kept that stuff, even though some people may have said it was hoarding, but still, we had those papers too, and they started that aRChive with about ten boxes of our papers, because we kept every single thing, and so it was real good that we did that. RC: You know, I think the AIDS Service Center, I had like four boxes forever in my closet wherever I lived, like I got to get this back somewhere. I finally did get it back, and I can't remember -- LB: Well if Dixie has it, we have it now. RC: I was going to say, probably you have it now -- LB: That could be good. RC: -- forever kind of like, I got to get that to somebody, but yeah, it was precious. Precious stuff in there. LB: But, some of the papers that Dixie gave me were about the effort to pass the anti-discrimination ordinance inclusion in nineteen seventy-eight. And were you there for that? RC: I was around for that, yes. And I knew Melissa Lee ; that was part of that. I don't think I was involved with the center at that point in time. I don't remember that. LB: Well I don't think they had the center. RC: But I remember going into the hearings and being very vocal about the right with all of that, and stuff, so it was a strange time. In fact, back when that first one, I'm actually bisexual, and I was married at that time. I think I got Divorced, but I had always been involved with justice issues and things like that, so that's why I got involved with that. And my brother was in the Bethlehem school district who helped get some of that going in the eighties to make sure that people's sexual orientation was part of their -- so we grew up like that, our parents were social ministers, we had a soup kitchen in Philadelphia, so that's where our minds went and our thinking went. Yes, so I didn't get involved with, I'm trying to think where I met Dixie. I didn't know Dixie at that time ; I had seen her, but I didn't know her at that time. I met her a little bit later, and I think it was around the, I don't know, it could have been a party ; who knows? LB: That effort was in nineteen seventy-eight, and then people came together to start the community center. I think Bob Whitman was involved with that, Bob Whitman and Frank Whalen. RC: Oh Frank Whalen, yes. LB: Yeah, he's still around. Well, I think they've moved to Philadelphia now. But they've talked about that. And then their papers, I think, are all at the library, although we wish we had them because we're (inaudible) cataloging them. But still, the question is, my question is, do you remember, like, how the community center really started, or when you got involved with that community center on Hamilton Street? RC: Yeah, I really don't. It was, when I ended up being with someone, I remember hearing about this. How would I have heard about, I heard about it somehow. But by that time, I was in social services working at the Red Cross at that time, and they would have like, get-togethers, and parties, and come meet. And so I started going to those, and I think that's how I met Dixie, at that, and it was social ; it was fun. It was a great way to get into the community and know the community, and because I hadn't been involved with the community, so I started to know people, and it just grew from there. And I guess it was at least a few years of that. And then, I'm trying to think why that, it started to dwindle before, the popularity of that. I think there were several clubs you could go to. You know, I think just people ran out of steam for organizing. And then just when we're like comfortably thinking, oh well maybe we could close this down, AIDS hit. And so, we all, whether we were tired or not, we had to ramp it up, and the rest is history, so to speak. Parties were over for a while, for sure. LB: Yeah, that's for sure, yeah. And so, who, do you remember any of the people that were on the board then that were making those decisions, did you make those changes? RC: I think Brian -- LB: Brian [Marks? RC: Yes, Brian Mariks, Markie, who I can't remember her last name. I think she was part of it. David Houseknecht, he was very instrumental in putting together -- he was sick, but he lasted for a few years, but he was right there with all of it. Carl. LB: Yeah, Carl Mancino. RC: Carl Mancino. LB: He's still around, sure. RC: Who I love, love, love. David Moyer, I mean, just folks like that that were, there were a couple of women too, I'm trying to think of. I can see them in my mind, but I can't remember their names. But, they're still around ; I know that. Anyway, so it was not a large group of people towards the end, but it was at least a couple of dozen people who would show up for different things, until it changed. But people who are still around, because now we're all old, but you know. I remember a lot of community center funds, and then we'd all go to the bars. So that was all that anybody had at that point in time, you know, going to Stonewall, or Rosemary's, a couple of other places, Diamondz and things like that. That was our life, our community, until it got to be not so much fun and we had to work. (laughs) LB: Yeah, although there were still people ; I think the bars were really instrumental in making FACT happen, and -- RC: Oh, totally, absolutely. LB: And there was quite a, they really rose to that occasion I think in a lot of ways in a positive way. RC: Oh, they did indeed, and you know, I can't say enough. Brian and I didn't always get along, but -- LB: You're all working for the same thing, though. RC: Yeah I mean, but again, we both knew that we were fighting for the same cause. He'd give me the shirt off his back, and he knew I would do the same. So I think that was, you know, just sort of what the bottom line was for everybody. But we were very vested in it, and I mean that in the way that, this really was our community, and we knew it. And we knew that if no one else was going to do something, and we knew that that was going to be the case, we were going to do it. So you know, people, like I said, stepped away from lots of fun things, or were spending time doing things in their lives, and dedicated themselves to this, and that was no small feat for a lot of people. It think Scott Allen and so many wonderful -- Kit [Hower?], wonderful people who were involved. LB: Yeah, I'm interviewing Scott on Thursday. (laughs) RC: Oh, my love. LB: Say hi to him for me. Yeah, he was enthusiastic about it, so. I think that one of the things that happened was the changes with regards to medication and finally science was weighing in, and people were acknowledging that this was happening. But a lot of people have talked about the lack of response from society, and particularly elected officials. Were you aware and thinking about that then? I mean, what do you think about that? RC: Oh my goodness, oh yeah, yeah. I mean, that was, you know, the politics that, I mean through my time at the Red Cross, I was very involved in different initiatives that involved politicians, you know? But you know, this was the time you have to remember that nobody even wanted to say the word HIV/AIDS, or gay, or any of that. You know, a politician would no more have said, you know, my lesbian friend here, I mean, just, I remember when Clinton said "lesbian" the first time on national television, I about fell off my chair, you know, I was so proud of him doing that. But no, nobody was talking about that. LB: It's so amazing when you would take that tiny little thing, you know, that one little thing, can't you just do this, you know, that one thing. RC: Yes, exactly. Say the word! You know, and again, I have to say that when, some of it shifted into other populations and things, it made it more palatable, if I can say that, and you know, fine. Whatever gets you on the wagon, get on the wagon, and we'll teach you more as we go, and that's what happened to a lot of people, that they learned to love some of the men, just as friends. There was a lot of learning, and a lot of evolving that we got to see too. And that was, I don't know how we would have done it without the whole community of people, honestly. LB: Right. RC: They saved lives. LB: I remember one of the things that happened, you know, people would do fundraising. I remember somebody calling me up here at one time, it was coming from the hospital, and they said that they wanted me to donate money, because children had AIDS, and I said, okay, all right. Tell me more about this. And they said, well they're innocent victims. And I'm like, okay, what does that mean? So they're innocent, huh? RC: That wasn't one of our folks. LB: I know, (laughter) I thought, this is not -- RC: Well I'll tell you, I was able to really raise some money. LB: This does not come from an LGBT organization. RC: For those other communities, and it brought in a whole bunch of wonderful, I think of Anna Claudio and people like that who just became wonderful, wonderful partners in all of this, and the Latino community just rallied, they really did. It was their family, and again, because so many gay people still were getting very ill, you couldn't not know someone, you know, even if you were in South Bethlehem Latino community and you never in your life for sure ever saw anybody gay except maybe your second cousin Ricky who was a little strange. But you know, they met through feeding people, and taking furniture. They met gay men, and gay women, and you know, it's again, in my mind, what community is really, really about. And you know, that was transforming, you know. LB: Yeah, well that's pretty great. I think, when you were working on this, and you were talking about Dixie, were you and Dixie working, both working at the same time, or were you one and then the other? RC: She was our first hire. We hired her as the executive director, and it was a small board ; it was myself, and Brian, and a couple of other people. I'm so bad with names, that I can't remember. But there were several people, and we hired Dixie, and the Red Cross let me spend a lot of time helping her get that whole thing organized, and again, the piece that I did most of was out in the community, doing as much. She was the, do we have enough rubber bands? How are the paper clips? You know, here's the file folder, you know, all that kind of stuff, and organizing, a wonderful organizing ability that she has. And I was more the ideas person, or the person who would go out there and talk about it. Because they already had some credibility in the community. And so I could do that very quickly. And then, the guys were raising money, and it was so crucial, and everybody was just doing as much as they could. But everybody had a niche of how they would be able to do it. LB: Yeah, a lot of people had special skills that they were all bringing together. RC: Even when I went on to work at Just Born, I was their community affairs person, I was able to take that message about AIDS to people who hadn't heard a whole lot about it, to get their understanding and support. Then I had a lot of colleagues in different corporations, and that's one of the ways that we started really talking about it by then, and this was about ninety-five, ninety-si around that time, and being able to bring it to other places that hadn't previously really been involved. So it was just a spiderweb of all kinds of connections. LB: Yeah, everything coming together, yeah. RC: Yeah, and that's how, I can guarantee that every grassroots cause has started the same way. Somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody, you know, and thought they might have a truck, you know. LB: That's true. Well, of course, when you talk about grassroots organizations, lots of different reasons spark it into place. When all of your friends are dying, you're really motivated in those situations, as opposed to just, you know, we need a new baseball field, or something down by the school, so. RC: Absolutely. And we never knew who was next, that was the thing, because we had so little information about it. It was like, you know, you just never knew. We saw that women weren't particularly getting infected at that time, but yet, we always had dental dams that we would give away and everything, but you really didn't know who was going to be next. LB: So do you want to talk a little bit about, you said a few things about COVID-19, but let's talk a little bit about that in relation to the AIDS epidemic. I mean, you know, #ItsNotOurFirstVirus, which is what people are saying. But I think that, one of the things that's pretty interesting about this is that, during the AIDS epidemic, during the height of the epidemic, those who were in the LGBT community were young ; I mean, we were in our twenties and thirties, maybe in our forties at the end of the epidemic when it was at its height, and we were helping our friends. You know, it's pretty easy to do that when you're in your twenties, to really do a lot of that work. Now that we're aging, it's a little harder, where also not only do we have this COVID epidemic, but for that baby boomer generation, we also have the aging epidemic which is a whole different circumstance. But I mean, a lot of people have talked about the similars and the differences with regard to COVID and COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS, and you want to say some stuff about, how are you seeing that? RC: Well, I think the first thing that strikes me about it, going to the politics of it all, is that like HIV/AIDS, there was no recognition at the top. So we didn't have like a national focus on, hey, let's take care of this, together as a nation. Took a while, and I think the passage of Ryan White money was key, that there were some people in legislature who got it, and they got it usually because they had a child die, or they knew someone, and that's how all of that, you know. So we had at least a framework within to work, and I think that's been, certainly one of the issues with COVID. Now what I think is a little different, or maybe it's not different, I don't know, but we learned everything medically and otherwise from each other and from people who had just had it. And I think now with the COVID, and I look at New York, New York State, as a good example of a place that really approached this in a pretty organized way, and a lot of the experience they had, I mean if you had half a brain, you could see that that was going to go other places, you know. Everybody was susceptible, and I think again, everything they were learning, as they were doing, which was exactly what happened in the medical field and the service field with HIV/AIDS, you learned it as you got along, and then you know, researchers and folks like that were working on all of the stuff with HIV/AIDS pretty damn quick, but it took them a long time to get anywhere, and so I have faith in the researchers working on the COVID as well, because I've experienced, it can work. You know, there can be things that can change that whole paradigm. So I'm hopeful for that. But I think that not having the top political support has been a problem. But people, the thing that's very much the same is people are inventing themselves, and inventing how to approach this as they go along, and as they learned, and that helped, I hope everybody's sharing all that stuff. I know not all ears were open to sharing it, but certainly in the medical field, they were there. And they continued to be there, and this has, I guess the advantage with HIV/AIDS epidemic is that we were close to the ground, so it wasn't, the bungling didn't happen close to the ground, you know? What happens close to the ground is usually pretty god damn good, and that's what's happening with the COVID, and that's the doctors and nurses and medical people and all the support people, and people who are working hard at that are doing an incredible job, just like they did back in the HIV/AIDS ; there was no room for blunder, because people were dying right in front of you. So that's how I think every pandemic works in my mind. And I think, again, I think that New York State did a good job of wrapping its arms around, and being the most infectious place of course and trying to really pay attention ; a lot of that was about communication and keeping people apprised of what was going on, which is so key. So I think that's been important. But you know, it's a mess ; it's a mess, it never should have been like this. There were so many things. I have very little patience with people who don't wear a mask out in public ; I mean, what the hell? This is a piece of cloth that can not only help you, but it can also help anybody else that you come in contact with. And you know, I've been known to be in stores, and someone without a mask comes very close, by going, "Hey, back up!" You know, because it's just ridiculous. So, I can get pretty pissed off about that. (laughs) But you know, it just, I don't know what's the matter with people? What's the matter with you? I say it every time I see another Looney Toon kind of a thing, and lord knows there's plenty of opportunity for that. So, I think, you know, we're all learning, maybe on a different level. I was pretty impressed with a lot of people staying home. I think that was pretty incredible. And I think a lot of that is also about, people's workplaces that didn't want people there anymore. Yeah, and so that people could work from home ; I think that was a great advantage. And I also think, talking about baby boomers, I'm telling you, we changed the world, and we always have, and we always will. I don't care how old we are, frankly. But you know, the first people who said, yeah, we're going to cozy up at home. I'm going to do a Costco run, get everything I need, and I'm not coming out for a couple months. That was us baby boomers, thank you very much, you know. And we saved a lot of people from dying in that way. But then, the other craziness that was going on that we, you know, really didn't have a lot of affect with, like people opening up too soon, and stuff, you know, that stupid, stupid stuff that they're paying for now, you know. LB: But don't you think a lot of that really boils down to leadership? RC: Yeah. LB: So, and you can see that in everything you're talking about. You can see it in terms of, how you run the community center, it has to do with leadership, and people coming together, and a good board, and a good leader and stuff. RC: Exactly. LB: You have a state that has Andrew Cuomo as the leader, and it's totally different than a state that's saying, should we open, should we not? You know. RC: Florida. LB: Yeah, Florida's a good example, I mean, to just ignore reality -- RC: I know, the politics. LB: -- if you have Reagan, who's just, his response when somebody asked him about it for six or seven years, I mean, we're really six months into COVID-19. When we talk about that big, the serious Circumstance of HIV when it was really HIV/AIDS, which was really the killer time, it was eight years. So it took eight years -- RC: That's very true. LB: -- for people to figure out, how are we going to keep people from dying? How do we keep, where is this coming from, it took eight years to figure this out. People are wanting COVID to be over now. And I think, for people who are minorities, because that's what the LGBT community is, we are more used to dealing with things not necessarily going our way just because we want them to, and you know. RC: That's a good point, yeah. And you know, we're used to doing hard things. Because, everyday living is hard for members of our community. And it has been for a long time. And so, you kind of get used to that, and you also push back, which I think we do too ; we push back as much as we can without getting killed. And I think that's why we probably have a lot of simpatico for all the racial justice things that are happening now. I mean, really, we're right there, right there with that, because we get that ; we get that. And like I said, you know, I just remember all of those years, and still being an advocate to today. I used to write on my resume that, "I had a head for business, and a heart of an advocate." I combined those two things, because you know, see what's going on. Makes me a little mad that I can't get out and march anymore, you know. But, I would like to have been part of that. But physically, just decided that that was not -- I mean I could have marched, if my knees are good. But you know, it was just not good for the other thing ; didn't want to risk getting anything. I have a daughter who has some real immune system issues, so we have to be very careful with her. So anyway, but I get it ; I get it. Been there, done that. And yes, oh yes, let's do it again, if we need to do that. And I think it's amazing. I don't know about you, but I think what's happening right now is just amazing. LB: Yeah, I do too. RC: I think things are changing in a way that I really had hoped that I would live to see a woman as a president ; that was my big dream. Still a Hillary fan. (laughs) But to see some of these changes that are happening, I'm just so happy about it, like so, it's about fucking time. LB: I think, you know, it's an interesting thing. RC: I'm glad to be able to still be alive to see it. LB: Yeah, I was talking to Maria Rodale yesterday, and she said, you know, we were talking about her brother and everything (inaudible). RC: Oh, Ardath Rodale, oh my god, yes. LB: Yeah, Ardath Rodale, the wonderful Ardath Rodale who was her mom, who was such an advocate. But one of the things Maria said was, which was brilliant I thought, was, you know, it's really the height of privilege to think that this is the absolute worst time ever. Because, you know, there have been horrible times in the last hundred years, and to suggest that, because we all have to stay home, and you know some people have lives -- yes, it's very bad, but you know, for many of us, it's not devastating. We're healthy ; we're okay. We're not at war. They're not bombing our neighborhood. RC: You know, and the privilege of being white, and being able to afford to have enough food, and a nice house, to you know, have to bundle up, and just have fun with, you know, your partner, or your husband, or your wife, and you know, that's not so bad. But yeah, you know, Liz, a lot of people don't have a clue ; they just don't have a clue. I don't know how else to say it. And Maria was just absolutely correct, yeah. It's a first-world problem, I have to say. LB: Really, really tough stuff and all of the things that we should be desperately concerned about. But one of the first things she said was, we will get through this, because we've been through horrible other things, and you know, humanity will get through it, even if the worst stuff happens, we'll still get through it, because if you look back at the last hundred years, there have been incredible, horrible, horrible things. And people get through it, and they learn from it, and sometimes they don't pay attention. And then it goes (inaudible) -- RC: Well they know, and not that they forget, it's just that it hasn't been in front of their face for a while. So when something happens and it's right there again, it's like oh yeah, I kind of remember this feeling, you know. Oh, okay, good, we're glad you got it a second time. So yeah, you got to be open to learning, and I think there are a lot more people who are than aren't. At least I have to believe that, or frankly I couldn't get up in the morning. LB: I know what you mean, yeah. RC: So, I really do believe in the good, and I wonder a lot about the not-so-good out there, and I'm absolutely waiting to vote, and I agree with whoever it was who said listen, people are going to crawl across broken glass on their knees to vote this idiot out, and I believe that that's true. (laughs) LB: Well I hope so, and I've said that many times, so I really hope that that is the case, and that everybody feels that way. But I also, and I hope that thirty years from now when somebody sees this videos, and we're maybe not around anymore, that people will say, oh, everything turned out great. You know, and they'll know what's happened in the same way that we can look back at the HIV/AIDS crisis and say, it was a tragedy, but it was also a time of courage, and a time where people really stepped up, and that there is not a cure for that ; there's absolutely not a cure, but, and people still in some ways were kept from still being able to teach our children how to not get diseases like this. But there's PrEP, and PEP, and those are really significant things and I'm beginning to see the dawn at the end of this epidemic which has been going on for such a long time. It's not over. I mean that's something Brian Marks says every time he's (inaudible). RC: No, it's not over, and I'll tell you, I think many a days, none of us could have seen this future, because it just didn't seem conceivable that anything would come and be able to really help. I mean, it was, we just never could see this day. Not that we didn't have the vision, but we didn't have the hope. I think that was it ; we really ran out of hope early on. LB: At the beginning. RC: But I'm happy to see that today, and, you know, there'll always be something. And there'll always be a time, this is for thirty years from now, by the way, there'll always be a time when you were called upon to stand and to show courage, and you know, you have a choice, you can do it, or you could just not do it, it's up to you. But you know, you got to live the rest of your life looking at yourself in the mirror, and you know, there are so many days I think back on my whole career and I think, oh crap, I wish I could have done this, or I should have done that better, or you know, I was always out on a limb, you know, with my big mouth, and stuff like that. But you know, I had to live to my truth. I had a really good friend who said to me, "Rose, can't you just go keep your head down, do your job, shut up," and I looked at her and I remember thinking, and saying, "No. I cannot." And that is the story of me, and a bunch of other people out there who showed up. And everybody will have that, at some time in their life, they'll be given that choice, to act or respond to it, certainly you respond to it, and you know, just the incredible center that you have there. LB: Yeah, we're happy that that's working. RC: It's incredible, and wonderful. LB: And I'm so glad that you've been able, you've done, you can look back and say, a lot of things wouldn't have gotten done had I not done it. I think that there are people when they're in positions of leadership, you can look at a Circumstance and say, well this leadership, if there isn't that leadership, then sometimes things don't happen, and I think you were really instrumental in making a lot of these very significant things happen at the height of the epidemic, and thank you for doing that, because you saved people's lives, or made people's lives better, and education certainly did that at then end of the time. That really was a question of, you know, this is what you can do to keep yourself from dying, and how essential that was at that time. RC: That's very kind of you ; thank you. And cheers to all those white-haired white women who went out with a banana and a cucumber, because that's what changed this world, their willingness and their matter-of-fact way of just saying, listen, this is how you put it on, and you need to put it on. LB: Yeah. I remember when I got to the point, where, because I do trainings all the time now, that I used, I'm comfortable using the word "penis" in huge groups of, you know, and so, you know, I could just say that in any situation. Any my younger self, I don't think I would ever have thought, oh yeah, that's something you say in front of loads of people all the time. RC: They used to always carry their cucumbers with them. They were all ready, a small group, and just do it, god bless them all. LB: Oh, that's hilarious. That's great. Well good for them. I'm so glad you could come, and I'm so glad you could talk about Dixie, because I'm so sad that we've lost her ability to tell all of those stories, but thank goodness she -- RC: She was instrumental. She was instrumental. LB: Thank goodness she saved every single scrap of paper she ever touched. I don't think her (inaudible) -- RC: Yeah, that was Dixie. LB: Yeah, I don't think her heirs are saying that, now that they're clearing out her house. But they were able to rescue the papers. RC: Yes, I'm sure. I think of her house and all the things that she's always had growing, and collecting, and oh my gosh, yeah. I don't envy them at all. She lived a life, for sure. LB: Well they're coming to an end now, and I think that the great thing is that all that stuff that she saved is going to be archived, and this video is going to be Archived, and so thank you so much for being on it. You got about three minutes to say anything else you want to say. Anything else? RC: Well, like I said, just, you know, the Lehigh Valley is home to me, and I grew up there, and my dad was a radio personality and he was a minister, went from social ministry to radio, and he always was doing community things ; he got that, way back in nineteen-fifty, whatever. You know, he got that, and he would bring people along to form more community. And in the Lehigh Valley, when he died, quite young, the whole funeral was about community members coming out and saying, hey, Vern Craig helped me with this, and he started this, and he went to people in the community and talked about mental health issues, just was there, and so I've seen that area, the Lehigh Valley grow in so many ways, and I'm so lucky to have been able to, be able to show up for my own community there, a place I loved and, you know, will always love and care about, so thank you, Lehigh Valley, for letting me be invited to the dance. (laughter) LB: Well thank you, Rose, I really appreciate it very, very much. RC: Thank you, Liz. And keep doing the great work you're doing. LB: Thank you, have a great day, and keep you, keep up the good fight yourself. Okay, bye-bye. RC: Thank you. Bye-bye. 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.&#13 ; 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:29:17 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rose Craig, June 30, 2020 Description An account of the resource Rose Craig talks about her work as the last President of the Gay Community Center in Allentown in the 1980s and how the Center evolved into the AIDS Services Center in the late 1980s and early 1990s to address the crisis. She talks about what services the AIDS Services Center provided and her role in securing funding and support. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PH40_05 Subject The topic of the resource AIDS (Disease) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-06-30 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/9923401b4f924ff7404e943767336710.png eb11d47a8cc36c1b1949afa96679f4ac Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sandra Fluck OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-28.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 February 20, 2022 Sandy Fluck, February 20, 2022 LGBT-28 01:32:32 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 Sandra Fluck Mary Foltz video/mp4 FluckSandy_20220220_video_TRIMMED.mp4 1.0:|33(8)|68(14)|89(2)|108(14)|127(3)|146(11)|163(16)|178(5)|197(8)|220(7)|237(5)|256(15)|279(3)|300(9)|319(3)|338(8)|353(2)|372(6)|397(5)|418(9)|439(12)|458(6)|477(3)|500(13)|517(9)|542(4)|561(4)|580(5)|599(3)|618(13)|637(7)|658(13)|677(8)|700(14)|717(13)|732(15)|747(11)|768(11)|789(6)|812(3)|831(3)|852(11)|875(8)|896(14)|917(7)|950(6)|967(16)|990(8)|1011(14)|1032(9)|1051(3)|1074(12)|1093(12)|1116(13)|1135(12)|1152(16)|1173(5)|1192(13)|1217(10)|1236(11)|1255(5)|1274(7)|1293(14)|1312(3)|1329(5)|1346(11)|1365(13)|1382(16)|1401(2)|1422(6)|1441(4)|1460(6)|1481(14)|1504(8)|1529(3)|1548(11)|1571(6)|1588(9)|1609(10)|1628(15)|1649(6)|1672(19)|1695(13)|1714(8)|1737(4)|1758(7)|1783(5)|1806(13)|1827(14)|1848(4)|1871(15)|1892(9)|1913(5) 0 https://youtu.be/8a2WpKsPVOQ YouTube video English 1 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I’m here with Sandy Fluck to talk about her life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley. We are meeting at Sandy and Bev’s home, here in Delaware, just a little outside of Rehoboth Beach. And the date is February 20th, 2022. We have funding this year from ACLS, which I should have said earlier. And I’m going to start with just a few quick questions before we jump into the interview and the first one is, would you be willing to state your full name and spell it for me?&#13 ; &#13 ; SANDY FLUCK: Sure. My real name is Sandra, so Sandra Fluck, F-L-U-C-K. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: And would you share your birthday?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: My birthday is January 30th, 1947. 0 110 Early Childhood / Experiences in Primary &amp ; Secondary School MF: And since we’re doing this arc of your life history, I’ll start with this question. Will you tell me a little bit about your childhood?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Okay. All right. I grew up in the Lehigh Valley. I was born in Bethlehem, in St. Luke’s Hospital Fountain Hill. And I spent most of my life there, but as a child -- it was a nice life. My friends refer to my family as the Leave it to Beaver kind of family. My dad worked at Bethlehem Steel, and practically every man I knew worked at Bethlehem Steel. My mother was a mother. Both my parents had gone to college. My mother went to Moravian, my father went to Lehigh. My mother graduated from St. Luke’s Nursing School, but once she had kids she became a stay-at-home mom like most of my friends at that time. I had a nice childhood. I had an older brother and an older sister. We were pretty close. But what I remember mostly about my childhood, aside from a real sense of a loving family, was, as a girl, I didn’t have the privileges that boys had. And I think that’s kind of an important piece of who I became. 0 582 Finding Her Passion SF: But my junior year, in my methods class, I had a phenomenal professor and she just turned me on to teaching. And I can remember sitting in that class and looking at her sitting behind her desk and thinking, “I’m going to do what you’re doing one day.” And that was the first time, other than wanting to be an engineer, that I found something that, “Okay, this’ll work for me.” So, I finished school and I became an elementary teacher for, I guess, 17 years. I’d loved teaching, but it wasn’t challenging. And I like to be challenged. So, I taught for three years and then I quit. And a group of us formed of a little group in Long Island, New York, and we bought old houses and fixed them up and resold them, and I did that for a year, and made enough money that I took a year off. &#13 ; &#13 ; And during that year, I became very introspective, and I studied, and I thought. It was a really neat year for me. Then, I came back home to Pennsylvania and the Lehigh Valley and I went back to teaching. And then I taught for another 15 years. And then, I went to Moravian College. And that’s when I really found that I was doing what I wanted to do. Up until that point, I asked for a transfer in schools or grade levels or whatever every three years because I was bored. And I thought, “Well, I’ll go to Moravian and I’ll stay there maybe three or four years and then I’ll go to a big university so I can do some research,” those were things I was interested in. 0 787 Time in Higher Education MF: I’m curious. You talked about going to the undergraduate degree in education. Can you describe for me how you went from that undergraduate degree, where you got your doctorate degree, what that doctoral program was like?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Sure. I went to East Stroudsburg, I guess was it a university or just a college then? It was just a college when I went. Went to East Stroudsburg, and as I said, I started as a Phys. Ed. major and changed over to elementary. And then, I was teaching in a school in New Jersey, in a district. And as a teacher, you really have to get your master’s degree, so I just went back to ESU for my master’s degree and I just continued in elementary ed because, I hate to say this, but it was easy. So, I just did it. And a couple years into teaching, I went to summer school. &#13 ; &#13 ; One of the other pieces of my life is, there were times in my life where I was very church oriented. And I was a Christian Scientist for quite a few years and a couple of summers I went to summer school at the Christian Science school called Principia. And what I found when I went to Principia the first summer, I got reconnected with that desire to be a college professor that I had when I was a junior in college. And I came home that summer thinking, “All right, you’ve got to get into a doctoral program and get going.” So, I did. 0 1124 Teaching Philosophy MF: Did you have a teaching philosophy when you got to Moravian that you really wanted to impart to your students?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: I did. My belief is -- and I always told my students this -- I’m not here to make you one of me. One of me is enough. You need to be you. We need to find out what your talents are, what your gifts are, and how can we bring those to the classroom? That’s what I loved about being at Moravian, because I knew my kids. They knew me, they knew they could come into my office anytime they wanted to. They had me on speed dial. They could call me 24/7. They could come to the house. We could have dinner together. It was very important to me that, that we be a family. &#13 ; &#13 ; My students, I knew them as freshmen, but I had many of them as advisees beginning their sophomore year, for sure. And in the early days at Moravian, I taught sophomore classes, too. So, I had them as sophomores, as juniors, and seniors, so I really knew them. Later on, when I became chair of the department, I had to give up some teaching. I taught the children’s literature class ; I gave that up as sophomores. But I had them then, as juniors. And as juniors, I taught the math methods class, but we also had this, what we called junior block. And I just knew my kids inside and out. 0 1388 Moravian’s Education Program &amp ; its Evolution MF: I’ll ask one more question since we’re sort of in this work life arc, but I’m curious how Moravian’s education program evolved over the time that you were there. You first started out in your post-doctorate right away, but then, you were able to see the whole development of that program through the new building. So, how did it evolve?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Education has always, from day one, been important at Moravian. And when I went there, education, and I guess, business, were probably the biggest programs, and they may be now, I’m not sure. So, it was a big program when we started. There were three full-time faculty members in the education department when I started. And there was, of course, no graduate program then. But it was a wonderful program to begin with. So, I came into something that was already beautiful. And I felt very at home. &#13 ; &#13 ; There were two gentlemen teaching in the program at the time. And there was a woman, and she’s the one who left, and I took her place. And they just welcomed me with open arms. I couldn’t have been happier with the two guys. And we grew, we got larger. In the beginning there were maybe 20 elementary ed kids. And that grew overtime to 40, 50 elementary kids. So, I am sure I had some impact on that, but I think it was, we all had impact on that. I was out in the schools with student teaching supervision, and you get to know all the principals in Bethlehem, and you get to know the teachers, and you get to know, whether it’s at elementary, middle school, or high school. And so, a lot of kids are encouraged to come back to Moravian. 0 1697 Navigating Being LGBT in Higher Education &amp ; Personal Life MF: You mentioned diversity within the program and that leads me to think about something that’s adjacent to work. I’m wondering what it was like for LGBTQ people in the field of education at that time. Would you be willing to talk about that?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Sure. Okay, so for me, personally, I didn’t become an out lesbian until, I guess, really until I was with Bev. And teachers who were gay or lesbian, they couldn’t be out. They just couldn’t be. At least not in Pennsylvania, not in the Lehigh Valley. I don’t know if they would have been fired or not. But it just would have been too hard for them. So, any of the LGBTQ faculty that I knew, I don’t think I knew any in the public schools who were out about their orientation. There might have been some, but I didn’t know them. Now when I came to Moravian, Bev and I had just become partners the year before. And Bev is just always very vocal about who she is. [laughs] I tend to be a little more private. Not anymore, but I was a little more reserved in those days. 0 2215 Connecting/Relationship with Bev MF: You started to talk about Bev now a little bit. Should we talk about how you met? And then, we can work our way up to ACCO, a bit. How did the two of you meet?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Sure. Ok so, I come from a very musical family. My brother and sister both musicians and I grew up singing all the time. I was always in the church choirs, and glee club, and those things. But as I finished all my schoolwork, I finished my doctoral program, I finished my business degree, I finished all these things and I thought, “Well, now what am I going to do?” And I said, “Maybe it’s time to do something for yourself, something outside of education.” So, I said, “Well, I always wanted to take voice lessons.” Okay. So, I asked our soloist in church. I said, “I want to take voice lessons. Who should I take from?” And she said, “Well, Beverly Belnome is the best in the Valley.” That was Bev’s name at the time, Beverly Belnome. And I said, “Okay.” So, I called Beverly Belnome and I got an appointment with her. &#13 ; &#13 ; This is a long time ago and I can see it like it was yesterday. I went to her house because she taught out of her home. She opened the door and I immediately fell in love with her. I mean, she just took my breath away, you know? So, went in, we had our first lesson. And now, she’s kind of -- I don’t know if she told you any of this or not, but she’s a hands-on kind of person, touchy-feely. Even though she wasn’t raised Italian, she was very Italian. And she had to get to know me and whatnot. And we talked about how you breathe right. She took my hand and put it on her chest, like right here so I could feel her breathing. And of course, I’m like, I’m out in la-la land somewhere, I can’t even focus on breathing, I’ve got my hand on this woman’s chest and I’m absolutely madly in love with her already. So, that’s how we met. 0 2733 Establishing A Chorus Celebrating Women (ACCO) MF: Okay, we’re back. And we’re just going to begin to talk about ACCO. And so, I’ll just say, tell me a little bit about ACCO.&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Okay. ACCO came about -- I can’t remember dates, I’m not really good at that. Bev and I, it was in the early ’90s. Bev and I went to Michigan Womyn’s Festival with our friends, Ann and Sharon at that time, and I had a great time. Bev didn’t have a great time, but I had a great time. But on the way back, I don’t know if it was Ann or Sharon, Bev will remember. One of them said, “Bev, you really ought to start a women’s chorus.” So, she hadn’t really thought about it. And she decided she would. So, she did a lot of research. Bev did a lot of research and found -- with her classical background, she knows a lot about women composers who have not been acknowledged in the classical field. &#13 ; &#13 ; In fact, most people think, “Oh, it’s classical music, a man had to write it.” So, her passion was in the classical field and not knowing anything about Holly Near and that whole group of women writers. So, she forms ACCO, did a lot of fundraising things, like Ann and Sharon had a gathering at the house and we had a fundraiser there, and other people did that. And Bev auditioned. I don’t even know how we got the word out. We worked through the Y in Allentown, the YWCA in Allentown. And in the beginning, we rehearsed there. But the group just formed, and it was women. I don’t think any men ever asked if they could join the group because it definitely had women in the title. But we were both lesbian and straight women, so it didn’t matter your sexual orientation as long as you were a woman and you were interested in singing women’s music. 0 3095 Impacts of ACCO&#13 ; SF: So, with the grant money, we were able to do the workshops and bring in people and do good programming, because again, it was more about celebrating women in music. And one of the other things that, that Bev, and all of us really, had an interest in was also diversity. And so, she came up with the idea to work with Ysaye Barnwell, who they had become friends by now, Bev and Ysaye, and they had a program where they, we went to Northeast Middle School and the children there wrote poems or stories, and Ysaye chose a few and put them to music, and then ACCO went and we performed with the chorus and we did a spring programming with them. And the music teacher, we chose Northeast because Bev had a connection with the music teacher there and knew her, through Moravian, actually. Denise had gone to Moravian. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, we did special things like that. We did Martin Luther King Celebration Day at Muhlenberg College every year, we came and sang a program there. We did Take Back the Night kinds of things. So, we did a lot of important things. I think back in the ’90s, more of that was happening, sometimes, than now. I mean, now there are other movements. But there was a lot going on and a lot of music going on in those days. And people didn’t know anything about the music we were singing. So, it was exciting. 0 3453 Relationship Between ACCO and the Steel Chorus of Bethlehem / Connection to Steelworkers MF: What was the relationship between ACCO and the Steel chorus? You mentioned that earlier. &#13 ; &#13 ; SF: They didn’t have a relationship except for Bev. [laughs] I don’t know how much you talked about this with Bev, but when the Steel was closing, what’s the name of the theater? &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: I think Touchstone. &#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Touchstone, thank you. Touchstone Theatre was writing a play called “Steelbound.” And Bev got involved in the music of that. And that was all through grant work. So, Bev and Ysaye, again, Ysaye Barnwell, did the music for that. And then Bev got a chorus together and we sang. And that was phenomenal. And there were people who told their stories, and we performed. It was a mixture of storytelling and singing those stories. All the music for that was from personal stories of Steelworkers and Steel families. I don’t know if she gave you a CD of that, or not. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Did that have special significance for you, as a child of a Steel family? 0 3661 Family / Views on Relationship MF: I’m curious about, because we’ve come back around almost full circle to discussion of the Steel, which makes me think about your family. Earlier you talked about Bev’s mom moving in with the two of you. Could you talk a little bit about your family, their responses to your relationship with Bev? &#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Sure. So, by the time Bev and I came together, my father had already passed on, so he never knew Bev. And I’m sorry about that. My mother and I were very close. And when Bev and I came together, the hard part for Mom was, up until then, I was Mom’s partner. So, in some ways, Mom felt like Bev was taking her place and pushing her out a little bit. But I told Mom, we were in New York, we had taken Mom to see a show. And we were walking down, I don’t know, Fifth Avenue or somewhere in New York, and I told Mom, I said, “Bev and I are more than friends.” I forgot exactly what I said. And I said, “We’re going to be living together, and she’s my partner,” and Mom said, “Okay.” That was it. “Okay.” So, Mom became part of our life. 0 3902 Evolution of Faith MF: This sort of connects back to earlier we had talked about your faith, being a part of a Christian Science faith tradition. How did your faith evolve over your life story? &#13 ; &#13 ; SF: I was raised in the Lutheran Church, actually Bev and I both were. And I always, we always went to church and everything, but it was more about music, going to sing. And then, actually, I was in college, and it was my sophomore year in college when I met -- I’ve only really had one other relationship than Beverly, and that was with someone from college. And her family, actually, she was Christian Scientist. And so, I was introduced to Christian Science through her and her mother. And I remember going to the Christian Science Church and talking with people and I just, I liked it. I liked how I felt. I liked the philosophy of it. And I liked that it was about love. 0 4257 Ties to LGBT Organizations / Community in the Lehigh Valley MF: Well, we talked a little bit about ACCO, we’ve talked about faith tradition. Were there other, were there LGBTQ organizations? I know ACCO, it was straight women, it was more about women, as an organization.&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Yeah, just women.&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: But were there other LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley that mattered to you during the time period that you were active in ACCO?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Well, I’m sorry to say this, but no. [laughs] Honestly, I don’t even know what was available. We didn’t have–– for me, I guess for both of us, we were so busy working, that you’d come home, you don’t have time to do anything else. I think, honestly, Liz and Trish did more when they came to the Lehigh Valley to promote diversity of any kind. And we never even had any lesbian friends until we -- well, we had one couple that we were friends with. We met a lot of people through Liz and Trish and through that organization, through what they were building. But outside of them, no. No, really. And we certainly supported them. But no, I’m sorry. &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: I know that ACCO sang at Pride, I think. 0 4589 Validating Relationship with Bev / Marriage Equality MF: Tell me a little bit about, you got married later on, but you did a commitment ceremony. Tell me a little bit about that.&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Oh, we did. Actually, it was Liz and Trish who said, “Vermont just opened up civil union. We’re going to go out, we’re going to get a civil union.” I forget what year it was. We have the certificate hanging downstairs. And they said, “Why don’t you come with us? This other couple is going with us.” So, the six of us went up in their van, and we got married. Or, we got the civil union. We have pictures and I think we may even have a video of it, I’m not sure. It didn’t mean anything in Pennsylvania, but it meant we did something, so it was the beginning. So, we had that. It was nice. &#13 ; &#13 ; The officiant was a woman, and she was really sweet. And Bev and I, I wrote something to say to Beverly, and she sang something to me, and neither one of us knew what the other was going to do, and at the end, the gal is practically crying while Bev’s singing and whatnot. And we had already had wedding rings. We gave each other these on our seventh anniversary, so we didn’t do wedding rings, but we each, without knowing, bought each other a bracelet. She bought me a diamond bracelet, and I bought her an emerald bracelet, because we’re going to the green state of Vermont, so my whole thing was about green and emeralds and stuff. 0 4929 Life in Rehoboth Beach MF: We’re kind of getting into your retirement, so maybe I’ll ask one last question. Tell me about retirement down here in Rehoboth. What made you move down here? What is your life like?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: Well, let’s see. Bev and I, we both love the beach. And we both grew up going to the Jersey Shore, Long Beach Island. And so, in our first years together, we still were going to Long Beach Island because that’s what we always did. And that got more busy and more crowded and more, there was nobody there like us. So, we’re living in the Lehigh Valley, there’s nobody there but us except when we have a party, and 50 million women show up at our house. And then, we’d go on vacation and again, there’s nobody there like us. &#13 ; &#13 ; So, friends of ours -- actually, it was Ann again, I mentioned Ann and Sharon earlier. Ann had been coming down here. And she said, “Why don’t you check out Rehoboth sometime?” So, we came down and did Bev tell you this story? All right, I’ll tell it. I wasn’t going to tell it, but I will. We came down here, we were staying at a bed-and-breakfast, a gay-owned, a lesbian-owned bed and breakfast, Wendy’s. And Bev had gotten a really bad case of poison ivy and she was miserable. She was just miserable. She was scratching and itching and just moaning and groaning. 0 5497 Closing Remarks MF: Thank you so much. We’re right at the at the end of the interview but before we conclude, is there anything that you thought, “Oh, I kind of wanted to talk about that today,” and we missed it? Is there anything you want to add at the end?&#13 ; &#13 ; SF: You know, I don’t think so. I think, no, I’m okay. I don’t like talking about me so much. [laughs].&#13 ; &#13 ; MF: Well, I appreciate the fact that you did talk about you. Thank you so much. 0 MovingImage Sandy Fluck recalls her childhood in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, work in higher education, connection to A Chorus Celebrating Women (ACCO), and relationship with her partner of over 30 years. INTERVIEW WITH SANDY FLUCK FEBRUARY 20, 2022 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz and I'm here with Sandy Fluck to talk about her life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley. We are meeting at Sandy and Bev's home, here in Delaware, just a little outside of Rehoboth Beach. And the date is February 20th, 2022. We have funding this year from ACLS, which I should have said earlier. And I'm going to start with just a few quick questions before we jump into the interview and the first one is, would you be willing to state your full name and spell it for me? SANDY FLUCK: Sure. My real name is Sandra, so Sandra Fluck, F-L-U-C-K. MF: And would you share your birthday? SF: My birthday is January 30th, 1947. MF: Thank you very much. And then, before we started this interview, we reviewed a consent form and I just want to go back through three questions about consent. Do you consent to this interview today? SF: Absolutely. MF: And do you consent to this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made available publicly online? SF: Yes. MF: And do you consent to this interview being accessible to researchers and to archive staff for educational purposes? We might use it in articles or in short clips about the archive. Would you consent to that? SF: Yes. MF: Okay. And the final consent question is, you are aware after we sign this consent form that you'd have 30 days once I send you the transcription to decide if you want to pull the interview, or if you want to redact something from the interview, or if you're okay with it to move forward in the archives? SF: Yes. MF: Fabulous. So, I want to start just by saying thank you so much for being here with me today. SF: You're welcome. Thank you. MF: And since we're doing this arc of your life history, I'll start with this question. Will you tell me a little bit about your childhood? SF: Okay. All right. I grew up in the Lehigh Valley. I was born in Bethlehem, in St. Luke's Hospital Fountain Hill. And I spent most of my life there, but as a child -- it was a nice life. My friends refer to my family as the Leave it to Beaver kind of family. My dad worked at Bethlehem Steel, and practically every man I knew worked at Bethlehem Steel. My mother was a mother. Both my parents had gone to college. My mother went to Moravian, my father went to Lehigh. My mother graduated from St. Luke's Nursing School, but once she had kids she became a stay-at-home mom like most of my friends at that time. I had a nice childhood. I had an older brother and an older sister. We were pretty close. But what I remember mostly about my childhood, aside from a real sense of a loving family, was, as a girl, I didn't have the privileges that boys had. And I think that's kind of an important piece of who I became. I wanted to play the sports that the boys did and being a little girl in the early '50s, we didn't have softball, they still don't have football, we didn't have any of those things. What we had was swimming, which I excelled in those areas, but I wanted to play baseball and stuff. And I can remember my brother being on a Little League team and I was always there. I always wanted to play Little League, and of course, I couldn't because I was a girl. And finally, the coach said, "Well, you can be the bat girl," and I got to sit in the dugout which was phenomenal. And then the next year, his little boy wanted to be the bat boy, so I got kicked out. So, there was always that sense that girls didn't quite get what boys did. And I felt that in school a lot, too. I was more interested in subjects that were more geared to the boys. I was the math and science geeky girl and that was more boy related. I wasn't interested in reading and writing as much, as were more feminine dominant. And my dad was an engineer so I grew up with math. I grew up with Daddy giving me problems to solve at the kitchen table kind of stuff. And I went through Bethlehem Public Schools. My whole career, I always felt like I was never really encouraged. And this, this may not sound exactly right because it's my childhood memory. I think it was 1957, I want to say, Sputnik went off. And it was like, the next day, we were all given a math test. Now I know it didn't happen that quickly, but I think I was in seventh grade, I was at Nitschmann, it was Junior High, then, and we were all, across the city of Bethlehem, given a math test. And they took the top kids, whoever did it as well as we did, and we were accelerated. So, I became part of that accelerated math project in Bethlehem. And by the time I was a junior at Liberty, I had calculus, I had three years of algebra, I had plain geometry, analytic geometry, and something they called advanced placement mathematics. And they virtually ran out of math courses my senior year. The thing that I want to say there was that as a junior in those math classes, it was almost all senior boys in those math classes. I was one of, by then, maybe two, maybe three girls left in that accelerated group. I was a straight-A student in math. My teacher never once called on me to answer a question, never once called on me to go to the board and put a problem on the board, because I was a girl. Who cared? My counselors never encouraged me to pursue mathematics. I wanted desperately to be an engineer. I wasn't encouraged to pursue that. So, that was, I'd say, the downside of my childhood. My parents encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do. But as I got older, those memories stayed with me and they've always helped me look at my students differently, not as boys or girls, but as people with likes and desires and needs. So, I think that formulated me quite a bit. Other than that, I was a happy kid. I excelled and I did well and I played sports. And my sports more became personal sports. I was a diver. I was a gymnast, because I really wanted to play football but I could only do that out in the street with the guys. I'm rambling now, aren't I? When it came time to decide where to go to college, I really didn't even want to go to school because I never felt like I got enough out of school. I was in advanced classes in almost everything. I was in advanced German classes and we already talked about the math and science. My senior year I had an extra time slot and I wanted to take an extra language. I wanted to take Russian and they said, "No you can't. You can't do that. You can't take extra languages because you're in the math and science track." I thought, "Why can't I do that?" So, those things put me back. So, my senior year, I pretty much spent in the gym. They needed somebody to teach swimming, so I taught a swimming class. I pretty much wasted my senior year, I think, at Liberty. But anyway, I was very much, as I said, involved in sports. So, when it came time to decide where to go to college, I just went to school because my parents said I had to go, not because I wanted to. And so, I went to play sports, so I became a Phys. Ed. major. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I had several injuries, and I guess my sophomore year was pretty brutal, and I had to change my major, I just couldn't do it anymore. So, I had some good friends who were elementary ed majors, and I thought, "Oh, I'll just become one of those, I don't really care." But my junior year, in my methods class, I had a phenomenal professor and she just turned me on to teaching. And I can remember sitting in that class and looking at her sitting behind her desk and thinking, "I'm going to do what you're doing one day." And that was the first time, other than wanting to be an engineer, that I found something that, "Okay, this'll work for me." So, I finished school and I became an elementary teacher for, I guess, 17 years. I'd loved teaching, but it wasn't challenging. And I like to be challenged. So, I taught for three years and then I quit. And a group of us formed of a little group in Long Island, New York, and we bought old houses and fixed them up and resold them, and I did that for a year, and made enough money that I took a year off. And during that year, I became very introspective, and I studied, and I thought. It was a really neat year for me. Then, I came back home to Pennsylvania and the Lehigh Valley and I went back to teaching. And then I taught for another 15 years. And then, I went to Moravian College. And that's when I really found that I was doing what I wanted to do. Up until that point, I asked for a transfer in schools or grade levels or whatever every three years because I was bored. And I thought, "Well, I'll go to Moravian and I'll stay there maybe three or four years and then I'll go to a big university so I can do some research," those were things I was interested in. I never got bored. I loved my students. And it makes me cry. I found that part of my background coming in, I think, helped me be a better teacher. And I think my students loved me as much as I loved them. So, I spent 25 years at Moravian and my doctorate degree is in math education. So, that was my specialty and that's what I came there with. But I taught all kinds of things and about half of my time there I was also chair of the education department, so that's when I really also found that there was no way I could be bored because running a department, doing all of the state requirements for certification, and teaching, and we also had a graduate program. So, I got to work in the schools with teachers. All of that became very important to me so I didn't get bored. So, that's kind of my evolution of childhood into adulthood. What else do you want me to talk about? MF: I'm curious. You talked about going to the undergraduate degree in education. Can you describe for me how you went from that undergraduate degree, where you got your doctorate degree, what that doctoral program was like? SF: Sure. I went to East Stroudsburg, I guess was it a university or just a college then? It was just a college when I went. Went to East Stroudsburg, and as I said, I started as a Phys. Ed. major and changed over to elementary. And then, I was teaching in a school in New Jersey, in a district. And as a teacher, you really have to get your master's degree, so I just went back to ESU for my master's degree and I just continued in elementary ed because, I hate to say this, but it was easy. So, I just did it. And a couple years into teaching, I went to summer school. One of the other pieces of my life is, there were times in my life where I was very church oriented. And I was a Christian Scientist for quite a few years and a couple of summers I went to summer school at the Christian Science school called Principia. And what I found when I went to Principia the first summer, I got reconnected with that desire to be a college professor that I had when I was a junior in college. And I came home that summer thinking, "All right, you've got to get into a doctoral program and get going." So, I did. So, I thought, "What do I really want to do my doctorate in?" So, I started out at Lehigh because it was convenient and, I don't know if I should say this or not, but I didn't like their program [laughs]. I didn't even finish the semester. I went to, like, two classes and I thought, "This is not going to challenge me. I'm out of here." So, I left. And I really knew that math was my love, so I looked around for not math, but math education because I loved teaching math. And I found Temple was the place to go for me. At that time there were some of the best math educators at Temple University than in the whole country. I got to work with some really phenomenal people. So, I went to Temple, and I taught the entire time that I was also doing my doctorate. My major professor, her name was Ann Wilderman. She was well-known throughout the United States. We became friends, actually, and she had several bouts of cancer prior to meeting her, and then, my final year in the program she got very sick, and I actually taught her graduate courses for her. We had a nice relationship and she taught me a lot but that was the sad piece of it. But anyway, so I finished my degree at Temple and then I did some adjunct work at Moravian and then a job opened up at Moravian. They asked me to apply, and I applied, and got the job, and left public ed. So, it wasn't too long after I actually had my doctorate degree that I went to Moravian, again, not really knowing where that path would go because I just assumed -- when I was at Temple, that was in the very beginning stages of computers, believe it or not. My dissertation was actually done on a typewriter. But it was the beginning of the TRS-80s and stuff like that. So, I was involved in the beginning stages of technology, and I liked it. So, after I finished my doctorate degree, I felt like, "Well, now what can I learn?" So, then, I went to business school, and I got a degree in computer programming because I had to do something. And we learned RPG and all these crazy languages that nobody knows anything about anymore. But it was fun. But what I found there was, I was staying up all night long writing programs, and having to get up and go teach. I thought, "Well, this isn't going to work. It's not a balanced life. I have to give it up." So, I didn't go that route. I needed balance in my life. So, that's how I got to Moravian. And there was something I wanted to tell you there, I just forgot what it was. I can't remember. It'll come back. MF: Did you have a teaching philosophy when you got to Moravian that you really wanted to impart to your students? SF: I did. My belief is -- and I always told my students this -- I'm not here to make you one of me. One of me is enough. You need to be you. We need to find out what your talents are, what your gifts are, and how can we bring those to the classroom? That's what I loved about being at Moravian, because I knew my kids. They knew me, they knew they could come into my office anytime they wanted to. They had me on speed dial. They could call me 24/7. They could come to the house. We could have dinner together. It was very important to me that, that we be a family. My students, I knew them as freshmen, but I had many of them as advisees beginning their sophomore year, for sure. And in the early days at Moravian, I taught sophomore classes, too. So, I had them as sophomores, as juniors, and seniors, so I really knew them. Later on, when I became chair of the department, I had to give up some teaching. I taught the children's literature class ; I gave that up as sophomores. But I had them then, as juniors. And as juniors, I taught the math methods class, but we also had this, what we called junior block. And I just knew my kids inside and out. I knew all about their backgrounds, their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their whatever they were doing. After several years at Moravian, we built the new academic building--- which isn't new anymore--- but part of that was the education department got half of the third floor. And it was incredible. So, we had this beautiful space. We had a big room, opening, where our offices were around it, but the students had this big table. They could work. They were there, sometimes, all weekend long working on projects, or they'd be there all night long working on stuff during exams. And so, I was there with them. I always believed that teaching really is an art. And you can learn a lot about teaching, a lot about pedagogy. But if you don't have the fire within you to be a teacher, then go away. Because you can't just learn. You have to have the learning, but you have to have the artistic talent for it. And my kids worked hard, and they knew they were going to work hard. I would tell them the first day of class, "Teaching isn't a nine-to-five job. Especially elementary teaching, because elementary teaching is where you don't have a lot of free periods, and you take all your work home with you. So, you're not done." And so, they needed to know that if it's a lot of hard work. And I think I saw my kids build their strengths. We did a lot of work together to do that. I still hear from some of them. And I got to know them personally. I got to know some of their very tragic stories. And that's when you realize, as a teacher, you're a counselor, you're a mother or a father, you're everything they want you to be, and they need you to be. And whether it's at the college level, or second grade, it doesn't really matter. They're children. So, my college kids were my children. MF: I'll ask one more question since we're sort of in this work life arc, but I'm curious how Moravian's education program evolved over the time that you were there. You first started out in your post-doctorate right away, but then, you were able to see the whole development of that program through the new building. So, how did it evolve? SF: Education has always, from day one, been important at Moravian. And when I went there, education, and I guess, business, were probably the biggest programs, and they may be now, I'm not sure. So, it was a big program when we started. There were three full-time faculty members in the education department when I started. And there was, of course, no graduate program then. But it was a wonderful program to begin with. So, I came into something that was already beautiful. And I felt very at home. There were two gentlemen teaching in the program at the time. And there was a woman, and she's the one who left, and I took her place. And they just welcomed me with open arms. I couldn't have been happier with the two guys. And we grew, we got larger. In the beginning there were maybe 20 elementary ed kids. And that grew overtime to 40, 50 elementary kids. So, I am sure I had some impact on that, but I think it was, we all had impact on that. I was out in the schools with student teaching supervision, and you get to know all the principals in Bethlehem, and you get to know the teachers, and you get to know, whether it's at elementary, middle school, or high school. And so, a lot of kids are encouraged to come back to Moravian. We had a lot of local kids from the Lehigh Valley. The one thing that, and I think it's still an issue at Moravian, maybe not as much, but it's not a diverse population. I can count on less than one hand how many non-white students I had during my 25 years there in elementary ed. So, that was something that I always was wishing that we had more diversity and I tried to encourage -- I went to Easton because they had a bigger diverse population at that time than Allentown then, really Allentown and Bethlehem. They had a population I could reach better. And I tried to work with their administration, and they told me point-blank, "Not going to happen," because our, they told me that their kids of color, they would get scholarships to virtually anywhere they wanted to go. And that was the time then. And Moravian didn't have that kind of money. And being a division three school, you weren't going to get athletic scholarships. So, that was the only issue I had at Moravian. But you work with what you have. So, we grew. And as we grew, we became instead of three people we became four people. And then we decided to have a graduate program. And that was, that was great. One of the things I got to do in the graduate program was kind of teach outside of the program. And I was fortunate that I could go into a school district, Bethlehem, Parkland, Allentown, Easton, each of those districts, that I designed courses just for them, always around math education. I did a series of courses in Easton, for example, on just teaching better and going into the classrooms and videotaping and watching our videos, and, "How do you do this better?" kind of thing. It was all around math education. So, that was really nice in the graduate program. We eventually grew, and when we came into the new building, I think we were maybe seven faculty members, I'm not sure. So, we grew. And we were all part of that growth. And I think just being out in the schools, and all of us were out in the schools a lot, and just being out there with your name and your face and who you are. And our students were phenomenal. So, it worked. We grew. MF: You mentioned diversity within the program and that leads me to think about something that's adjacent to work. I'm wondering what it was like for LGBTQ people in the field of education at that time. Would you be willing to talk about that? SF: Sure. Okay, so for me, personally, I didn't become an out lesbian until, I guess, really until I was with Bev. And teachers who were gay or lesbian, they couldn't be out. They just couldn't be. At least not in Pennsylvania, not in the Lehigh Valley. I don't know if they would have been fired or not. But it just would have been too hard for them. So, any of the LGBTQ faculty that I knew, I don't think I knew any in the public schools who were out about their orientation. There might have been some, but I didn't know them. Now when I came to Moravian, Bev and I had just become partners the year before. And Bev is just always very vocal about who she is. [laughs] I tend to be a little more private. Not anymore, but I was a little more reserved in those days. So, I was an out lesbian at that point. So, that was 1989 or '90, I think, when I came to Moravian. And at that time, nobody had an issue with it at Moravian. There was never an issue that I knew of. The issues were more about me being a woman instead of a man. I can remember being hired and the same year that, that guys got hired that I got hired, they got more money than I did. I don't know what it's like now. But, that's a whole different aspect. Nobody ever questioned me about being a lesbian. My students knew right away. I never had any complaints from students or parents or anything, at least not that I knew of. We didn't have spousal benefits at that time but that came through work, through Liz, as the center now, through Liz and some work in the Consortium of Lehigh Valley Colleges. That came later on, so Bev had benefits then, through Moravian. But as far as the kids, times were very sheltered then. It's still very sheltered in the Lehigh Valley. And I know I used to tell my students, because Facebook was coming about in those days, I'd say, "You can't have a Facebook page. You can't do it because anything that's out there, a principal's going to look at when he's thinking about interviewing you, or she's thinking about interviewing you. So, anything you put on there is going to go against you." So, yeah. We had to be very careful about those things. MF: Did you also have to be careful in college? How did students navigate that? Or was that not as... SF: No, it was a problem. When I was at East Stroudsburg, and I graduated from there in 1968. So, I was there '64 to '68. I didn't know I was a lesbian then until my sophomore year in college. That's when I had my first encounter. But I can remember as a freshman, I think, as a freshman, there was obviously -- I mean, this is a school in those days where girls went to play sports and there were a lot of lesbians, but nobody talked about it. But I do recall kids getting in trouble for it and being hauled into the dean's office or whatever. And I do remember having, having the counselor, our hall counselor, our dorm counselor, I forget which, having a meeting with my whole floor because there had been complaints about two of the girls who were doing what they shouldn't be doing. Nobody ever even used the words. So, yeah, it was an issue. And yet, it certainly was prevalent. But it was an issue. You couldn't be out and about with it. So, anyway. MF: You talked about college life, and you just mentioned briefly that Bev was able to get benefits through Moravian. Could you just describe what that was like, pre-marriage equality, to be thinking about partner benefits? How did that work at Moravian before they allowed partner benefits and after? Can you just describe that? SF: Well, before they had it there was no benefit. Well, that's not true. There was no insurance benefits kind of thing. But she was allowed to take classes if she wanted to, to take classes for free, which she never took advantage of, by the way. And what else would there have been? I think that was it. And I don't remember when it actually -- see, Bev never had a "full-time" job where she had benefits. She was always adjunct faculty and teaching private voice lessons. And so, her insurance always had to be private. On the other hand, at Moravian as a full-time faculty member, I had all those benefits. When that finally came, it still wasn't as good as a "married couple." She could come into my policy, but I paid a lot for it, whereas had we been a husband and wife, that would have just been a benefit. So, it was a help because she got insurance. But we still paid for it. And I don't know when that changed, to be honest with you. It's kind of interesting, because we tend to not worry about those things. We just go along and we're a happily together couple. But even little things, like when we bought our house in Danielsville, and that was, I don't know, '92, maybe, our realtor told us, "Don't let them know you're lesbians." So, I had to, the house was bought in my name. She was just my friend. And the next day, after we bought it, the next day we had to redo it and put it in both our names, and we had to pay for that. Because the realtor told us, "They might not sell to you if they know you're lesbians. And there's nothing I can do about that." So, that was something I didn't expect because I just didn't ever think like that. Who cares? But people care. MF: You started to talk about Bev now a little bit. Should we talk about how you met? And then, we can work our way up to ACCO, a bit. How did the two of you meet? SF: Sure. Ok so, I come from a very musical family. My brother and sister both musicians and I grew up singing all the time. I was always in the church choirs, and glee club, and those things. But as I finished all my schoolwork, I finished my doctoral program, I finished my business degree, I finished all these things and I thought, "Well, now what am I going to do?" And I said, "Maybe it's time to do something for yourself, something outside of education." So, I said, "Well, I always wanted to take voice lessons." Okay. So, I asked our soloist in church. I said, "I want to take voice lessons. Who should I take from?" And she said, "Well, Beverly Belnome is the best in the Valley." That was Bev's name at the time, Beverly Belnome. And I said, "Okay." So, I called Beverly Belnome and I got an appointment with her. This is a long time ago and I can see it like it was yesterday. I went to her house because she taught out of her home. She opened the door and I immediately fell in love with her. I mean, she just took my breath away, you know? So, went in, we had our first lesson. And now, she's kind of -- I don't know if she told you any of this or not, but she's a hands-on kind of person, touchy-feely. Even though she wasn't raised Italian, she was very Italian. And she had to get to know me and whatnot. And we talked about how you breathe right. She took my hand and put it on her chest, like right here so I could feel her breathing. And of course, I'm like, I'm out in la-la land somewhere, I can't even focus on breathing, I've got my hand on this woman's chest and I'm absolutely madly in love with her already. So, that's how we met. Now, she was living with a man at the time. And so, I mean I knew there was no way that she and I were ever going to be a couple. And the other side to that is, I was very big in church at that time, and you really couldn't be a lesbian and be in a Christian Science Church at that time. So, I never really thought -- and I was like best friends with a gay man, and we did everything together. We went to concerts and theater and everything, so my life was okay. I wasn't expecting to have romance. So, Bev and I became friends. And we were friends for almost 10 years. And we did a lot together. We would always go to the beach for a day trip or so. We always ended my school year celebrating by going down to Illick's Mill and buying a pack of cigarettes and smoking down at the water, which then we gave up for the year. We always celebrated the first snowstorm by walking across the bridge to the South Side to go to Grotto for pizza, which I don't think is there anymore. So, we did little things like that. And over time, later on in her life, I don't know, maybe eight years or so into our friendship, over that time, I moved her many times. I think you know this story. She'd go, she'd leave John, and she'd get an apartment, and then, she'd go back to John, and then they got married, and then she moved out. So, she moved all these times. And every time she was moving, I moved her. She didn't have a lot, but she did have a piano. And that was a lot to move. So, the last time I moved her, I said to her, "The next time you move, you're going to move in with me." And that was true. So, she finally decided to leave John, her husband, and then she went to work at Valley Youth House, and she hooked up with a woman there for the first time in her life, and she found she really enjoyed being with women. And then, she told me about it, and I was mad because I wanted her to be with me. And so, then, for a while, we had this kind of awkward relationship because she was still seeing this other woman. And now she knows that in my past, that I've been with women and she, I think, is getting the sense that I really want to be with her because I keep telling her I want to be with her. So, one night we were, we were -- oh, what the heck was the name of that diner? I don't know if it's still there anymore, it's on Union Boulevard. There's a diner. We had gone to the movies. We saw Dead Poets Society, carpe diem being the message, right? So, we went out to get something to eat after the movie and we're sitting in the diner across from one another at a booth, and we both said, "We're really not hungry. What are we doing here?" So, we left. And I was driving. And as we went around the curve on Union Boulevard, she said to me, "Do you want to come home with me?" Or, "Do you want to spend the night with me?" I forget. She'll remember the words. And I said, "Do you mean it?" And she said, "Yes." And that was the end. That was the beginning of the end. So that was, what year was that? I don't remember, '89? Anyway, somewhere around there. And that was it. We never looked back. We had a couple of sticky moments in the beginning, but she said, we both agreed to, we'll give it a year and if we're together in a year, then we'll move in together. And about seven or eight months into that year -- and this is Bev, this is Bev to the max. She does this kind of stuff all the time -- she said to me, "Oh, I gave notice to Dan on the apartment, so I can move in tomorrow." And my back immediately went into spasm, and I couldn't move. Because I'm more of a planned person. "You said a year. I still have two months to get ready for you to move into my house." I just had a little half a double, me, and my cats. Anyway, she moved in. So, we went from this little house, two-bedroom house, myself and my two cats, she moves in with her dog, my cats hate the dog, so we get that. And shortly after that another dog moved in with us, now we're in this little house, two cats, two dogs. And pretty soon, her mother moved in with us. [laughs] So, it was quite a beginning. But it worked. That first year was a really rough year with lots going on with her mom. And then, we got the bigger house and stuff. But anyway, yeah. It's been a great 30, what are we at, 33 years? Yeah, 33 years. And it's just been a wonderful journey together. Really great. So, it was all about the music. And when we were friends during that time between my voice lesson and becoming partners, I went to every concert she ever did. And I have always, and still to this day, I mean, she starts to sing, and my heart just melts. She has the kind of voice that I love, and she's the person that I love. So, it's been a great trip. So, that takes us to ACCO, maybe. Should we do ACCO a little bit? [break in audio] SF: Anticipated, is this okay? MF: This is so wonderful, yeah. We'll go in different directions. We've done a wonderful career arc. We've done your relationship arc ; we can talk a little bit... [break in audio] MF: Okay, we're back. And we're just going to begin to talk about ACCO. And so, I'll just say, tell me a little bit about ACCO. SF: Okay. ACCO came about -- I can't remember dates, I'm not really good at that. Bev and I, it was in the early '90s. Bev and I went to Michigan Womyn's Festival with our friends, Ann and Sharon at that time, and I had a great time. Bev didn't have a great time, but I had a great time. But on the way back, I don't know if it was Ann or Sharon, Bev will remember. One of them said, "Bev, you really ought to start a women's chorus." So, she hadn't really thought about it. And she decided she would. So, she did a lot of research. Bev did a lot of research and found -- with her classical background, she knows a lot about women composers who have not been acknowledged in the classical field. In fact, most people think, "Oh, it's classical music, a man had to write it." So, her passion was in the classical field and not knowing anything about Holly Near and that whole group of women writers. So, she forms ACCO, did a lot of fundraising things, like Ann and Sharon had a gathering at the house and we had a fundraiser there, and other people did that. And Bev auditioned. I don't even know how we got the word out. We worked through the Y in Allentown, the YWCA in Allentown. And in the beginning, we rehearsed there. But the group just formed, and it was women. I don't think any men ever asked if they could join the group because it definitely had women in the title. But we were both lesbian and straight women, so it didn't matter your sexual orientation as long as you were a woman and you were interested in singing women's music. I want to say -- and I'm not sure if this is true or not -- 100 percent of what we did was written by women. And that was the focus, bringing women's music to the Valley, to people, anybody who would listen. Bev's focus was definitely in the classical arena. And in the beginning, we did a lot of really hard stuff, probably harder than we should have been doing. [laughs] But it was fun. And then as we grew, and there was more influence from the women in the group, and the group got larger, other composers would come in, more of the folky kind of stuff. But we sang in all kinds of languages, probably seven different languages. And we did all kinds of music. We rehearsed once a week. So, it was a lot of work. And as we grew, the library of music grew, and one of our members, Charlene, became the music librarian so I didn't have to schlep it all the time. We did workshops together. Bev brought in some famous people. We worked with Ysaye Barnwell from Sweet Honey in the Rock. We worked with -- I forgot who all we worked with. But we actually became very close, as a women's community, because we did sessions together, even counseling together if you will. We had weekend retreats maybe once a year, and you get close when you spend time together with the women. I can't say that, that we became friends outside of ACCO too much, but we were close, and we could count on one another, especially within your own group. I was a second alto and there aren't a lot of second altos in the world. So, sometimes there are only two of us. At the most, we had four. And we were always very close, and we were very sincere and very dedicated because altos are like that. Sopranos give you a lot of trouble, always. So, ACCO took a lot of work. And I've always been the kind, I've always been there to support Bev in her work. I came from the math-science background. If I wanted something at school and we couldn't afford it at Moravian, I wrote a grant and I got it. And you could do that in math. You could get a grant for almost everything. The Arts, it's a little different ballgame. You don't get paid a lot in the Arts. You don't get anything done unless you get a grant to do it. But you have to get help doing that. So, we had a board for ACCO because we had to eventually get our 501c3 or whatever it's called. And one of the gals was a good grant writer, Marilyn Roberts. Maybe someday you'll get to talk to Marilyn. She's in the Lehigh Valley and she was at Muhlenberg in the theater program. And Marilyn did a lot of grant writing for us, so that was great. We got funding from Lehigh Valley Council of the Arts, and Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. And people like, I'm trying to think, Linny Fowler gave us money but I'm not sure if that was just for the Steel Choir or if it was for ACCO, too. That might have just been the Steel Choir. So, with the grant money, we were able to do the workshops and bring in people and do good programming, because again, it was more about celebrating women in music. And one of the other things that, that Bev, and all of us really, had an interest in was also diversity. And so, she came up with the idea to work with Ysaye Barnwell, who they had become friends by now, Bev and Ysaye, and they had a program where they, we went to Northeast Middle School and the children there wrote poems or stories, and Ysaye chose a few and put them to music, and then ACCO went and we performed with the chorus and we did a spring programming with them. And the music teacher, we chose Northeast because Bev had a connection with the music teacher there and knew her, through Moravian, actually. Denise had gone to Moravian. So, we did special things like that. We did Martin Luther King Celebration Day at Muhlenberg College every year, we came and sang a program there. We did Take Back the Night kinds of things. So, we did a lot of important things. I think back in the '90s, more of that was happening, sometimes, than now. I mean, now there are other movements. But there was a lot going on and a lot of music going on in those days. And people didn't know anything about the music we were singing. So, it was exciting. As a musician it was great for me, as a choral singer, because the only opportunity you get to sing chorally is if you are in a church choir, or if you're in a community choir. I wasn't involved in church and a church choir, so I, this was great for me because I really missed singing. Singing had always been a big part of my life. My family sang at the drop of a hat. We didn't do anything without singing. So, it was important to me. And I loved it. I loved learning. We learned a lot. Bev introduced us to a lot of techniques. And the music was great. It was wonderful. MF: You described the personal impact of ACCO, the cohesion of the group. Could you talk a little bit about the community impact of ACCO? I mean, you're singing at MLK Day at Muhlenberg, you're singing at Take Back the Night marches. Did you get a sense of the import of ACCO in the larger Lehigh Valley? SF: Yeah, that's a hard question. You never know how much impact something has on a community. I think, we did a winter solstice concert every year and I think people looked forward to that. I really think they did because we had a good crowd for that, always. Did it accomplish what we hoped it would? I doubt it. Because our country, our culture, doesn't celebrate the Arts like other cultures do. And I think that is probably the biggest loss in our society, or one of the biggest losses. So, people would come and, yeah, they would enjoy it and what did they take away? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, there were women who joined the choir, of course, because they heard us at a concert and they'd go, "Oh, I want to do that." So, that had an impact. It became a place for some people to come and sing. Did it change lives? Did it change the community? Did it impact the community? I think maybe at the time it was a big piece of the community. It's gone now. So, what impact did it have? There is no chorus. There's no Lehigh Valley Women's Chorus anymore, that I know of. So, I don't know. MF: Just as you described, I think listening to Bev, listening to you, that personal impact, that ability to go to variety of different places, including places of education, to put students' music, their writing to music, it had an impact. SF: It had an impact, and I'm sure, especially the students that wrote something and it was put to music, that impacted their life forever. So, yes, I think in that. But if you walk down the streets of Allentown today and said, "Hey, did you ever hear of ACCO?" They're going to say, "No." So, not in the big picture, but individuals that it touched, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, yeah. And it still touches my heart. I can go to one of our first concerts, one of our winter solstice concerts that we did at the Community College, at NACC, and I can remember walking down the aisle and singing. I can remember pretty much everything that happened. And it takes me back there. So, for us who were part of it, absolutely, it had an impact. Absolutely. MF: What was the relationship between ACCO and the Steel chorus? You mentioned that earlier. SF: They didn't have a relationship except for Bev. [laughs] I don't know how much you talked about this with Bev, but when the Steel was closing, what's the name of the theater? MF: I think Touchstone. SF: Touchstone, thank you. Touchstone Theatre was writing a play called "Steelbound." And Bev got involved in the music of that. And that was all through grant work. So, Bev and Ysaye, again, Ysaye Barnwell, did the music for that. And then Bev got a chorus together and we sang. And that was phenomenal. And there were people who told their stories, and we performed. It was a mixture of storytelling and singing those stories. All the music for that was from personal stories of Steelworkers and Steel families. I don't know if she gave you a CD of that, or not. MF: Did that have special significance for you, as a child of a Steel family? SF: It did. I grew up, as I mentioned earlier, everybody I knew worked at the Steel. So, I still can't imagine the Steel not being there. But yeah, it had very significant impact for me. And what was really interesting for me is I grew up in a white-collar family. So, my family didn't come home dirty from working in the Steel. But the stories that were written were all by the blue-collar workers. And I had no idea what those guys went through. I had no idea because my daddy always had a suit and tie job at the Steel. And I mean, those stories were heartbreaking. Heartbreaking, what those guys went through. Now I know my dad saw those stories because he was in the mill, even though he was supervising. But my dad didn't talk about what happened, ever. So, hearing the stories was really heartbreaking in a lot of ways, for me. But so much happened. And as one of the songs goes, "Something happened in the mill," and Bev and I often will say, "Boy, something just happened in the mill." It's just amazing. But that was a whole other world down there. I mean, hospital, everything. My father didn't have to go to a doctor, or St. Luke's hospital for anything. Everything was done right there in the mill. I don't think people have any idea how big that was. It was huge. But yeah, I was really taken by the Steel Choir. I can still, you can probably hear it in my voice. It was very impactful. MF: I'm curious about, because we've come back around almost full circle to discussion of the Steel, which makes me think about your family. Earlier you talked about Bev's mom moving in with the two of you. Could you talk a little bit about your family, their responses to your relationship with Bev? SF: Sure. So, by the time Bev and I came together, my father had already passed on, so he never knew Bev. And I'm sorry about that. My mother and I were very close. And when Bev and I came together, the hard part for Mom was, up until then, I was Mom's partner. So, in some ways, Mom felt like Bev was taking her place and pushing her out a little bit. But I told Mom, we were in New York, we had taken Mom to see a show. And we were walking down, I don't know, Fifth Avenue or somewhere in New York, and I told Mom, I said, "Bev and I are more than friends." I forgot exactly what I said. And I said, "We're going to be living together, and she's my partner," and Mom said, "Okay." That was it. "Okay." So, Mom became part of our life. My brother was fine. My brother, he could care less. My sister is a born-again, right-wing Christian. I don't know how else to put it, except like that. So, she wasn't happy about it at all. So, how that worked out, my sister has two daughters. At that time, my brother had one son. And they're all similar in age, the three nieces and nephews. So, my first niece, my sister's daughter, got married and Bev was not invited to the wedding, okay. So, then my nephew got married, and of course Bev was invited to the wedding because that's my brother's child. And the family, we all sat together, my sister and her husband and everybody, and we had a wonderful time. And I thought, "Oh, this is great. We're okay." So, now the next niece gets married. Bev's not invited again. So, I went, and I said to my sister and her family, I said, "This is the last time I'm coming to an event without Beverly. So, if she's not included, I'm not either." So, the next big event that happened was they had a big celebration for my sister's fiftieth birthday. Bev was not invited. I didn't go. That was it. I was done. So, I'm not quite sure how it happened, but over time, my sister always had Christmas gathering for everybody and I didn't go for a couple of years, and then, one year, we both got invited and we went. And so, then it was okay. I mean, they never approved of us as a couple, but we were allowed to be there together. But there was about maybe a three or four-year period where there was nothing. But that was about it. And my, as I say, my brother's side of the family, they're fine. They could care less. My sister and my nieces, none of them approve but they're all okay. They just know who we are. MF: This sort of connects back to earlier we had talked about your faith, being a part of a Christian Science faith tradition. How did your faith evolve over your life story? SF: I was raised in the Lutheran Church, actually Bev and I both were. And I always, we always went to church and everything, but it was more about music, going to sing. And then, actually, I was in college, and it was my sophomore year in college when I met -- I've only really had one other relationship than Beverly, and that was with someone from college. And her family, actually, she was Christian Scientist. And so, I was introduced to Christian Science through her and her mother. And I remember going to the Christian Science Church and talking with people and I just, I liked it. I liked how I felt. I liked the philosophy of it. And I liked that it was about love. And I remember going to my minister in the Lutheran church, because I was a member, I had to leave the Lutheran church in order to become a member of the Christian Science church. And I had to talk with my minister about that. And I remember telling him, he asked me, "Why?" And I said, "Well, all the years in the Lutheran church, I never once felt like God loved me." I said, "But in the Christian Science church, I feel that." So, that's really what it was about for me. And I told you earlier that I spent a year off studying. That year was studying Christian Science, too, and the Bible, actually. I had read the Bible many times but not studied it. So, that year, I spent really going deeper into my own soul, I guess, and studying Christian Science, and studying the Bible. And then, I was pretty active in the Christian Science church in Bethlehem for years. I was a reader, and I was treasurer for many, many years. And when Bev and I became a couple, I realized I couldn't be totally true to my commitment to Christian Science. And so, I left the church. But I think, and I'm not positive about this because I think if I really wanted to go back I could, even as an open, gay person, I think I could go back now because I think they've changed. But the rules were so strict. When I became a member way back when, you had to vow that you don't smoke, you don't drink, you couldn't even do coffee, you couldn't have caffeine. It was very strict guidelines. And no out of marriage sexual encounters of any kind, so it was more, it was very confined. And when you study, and people that are in Christian Science, they say, "I'm a student of Christian Science," because you're always studying and it's this huge piece of who you are. People will say things like, "I say my prayers before I go to bed," and I would think, "But I'm praying all day long. How can you just take five minutes before you go to bed and say a prayer?" You have to be in a prayerful state all the time. And that's what Christian Science is about. It's always holding the positive thought. Something happens, you're always trying to negate that bad thing and know the truth about it. So, it's like a, it becomes 100 percent of who you are. And when I met Beverly and we became a couple, really, I knew that I couldn't give 100 percent of who I was to that church anymore. And I chose a different path. So, it didn't change me. I mean, I still have a deep spiritual sense and so does Bev. We might think a little bit differently about things, but it certainly, it gives me peace in my life. MF: Did you join a different church tradition after you--? SF: No. We both grew up in, as I said, the Lutheran church. And Bev sang in churches forever, and synagogues. And we've gone to churches. For me, I don't want to make a commitment to anything else. And I know if I join something, I am committed to it and I have to work for it. And I have enough to do. But we haven't found a church that we'd want to be part of, right now. We both miss the music of church, though. And we're trying to find that, but we haven't found it. MF: Well, we talked a little bit about ACCO, we've talked about faith tradition. Were there other, were there LGBTQ organizations? I know ACCO, it was straight women, it was more about women, as an organization. SF: Yeah, just women. MF: But were there other LGBTQ organizations in the Lehigh Valley that mattered to you during the time period that you were active in ACCO? SF: Well, I'm sorry to say this, but no. [laughs] Honestly, I don't even know what was available. We didn't have---- for me, I guess for both of us, we were so busy working, that you'd come home, you don't have time to do anything else. I think, honestly, Liz and Trish did more when they came to the Lehigh Valley to promote diversity of any kind. And we never even had any lesbian friends until we -- well, we had one couple that we were friends with. We met a lot of people through Liz and Trish and through that organization, through what they were building. But outside of them, no. No, really. And we certainly supported them. But no, I'm sorry. MF: I know that ACCO sang at Pride, I think. SF: Yeah, we did. We sang at Pride. But Mayfair wasn't then a music fest. But yeah, Pride was the only thing that really came about in the Lehigh Valley. MF: Because it was smaller. You'd have two bars, maybe two organizations. SF: Yeah. And Bev and I aren't big drinkers, or I don't drink at all, so we didn't go out a lot. We did like to dance, but there really wasn't -- that's why being here is so much different. Yeah. And most places, even bars, like the Stonewall was probably the biggest place. And that was so men-dominated that you didn't feel comfortable really doing that. So, we had a lot of parties at the house, though. This is kind of cute. When we lived in Danielsville, it was a party house. And um, there might have been parties where we had 50, 75 women. And we didn't even know where these women came from, but they were all lesbians. They were all within driving distance of Danielsville. We had a volleyball net out in front ; we had a swimming pool in the backyard. It was crazy. And we were away one time, and one of our girlfriends was staying at the house, and must have had a party or two because we've had other parties where people would come and we didn't know them and we'd say, "Well, how'd you get invited?" "Oh, we were here before." "What do you mean, you were here before?" "Oh, you know, when -- I don't want to mention any names, I don't want to get anybody in trouble." So, it was a party house. And we would have potlucks, women potlucks. And there were a lot of women in the Lehigh Valley that had no place to go. There was just no place to go. So, there was a period of a couple of years where we had a lot of gatherings, and a lot of just having fun together. Yeah, I had forgotten about that. Because there wasn't, there was no place to go. MF: Tell me more about the Danielsville years. Because you moved from your condo out to that area. SF: Yeah, we moved. I had a little half a double in Bethlehem that Bev and I lived in. And then, we moved out to Danielsville because we just needed more space. So, it was nice. It was an acre, and gardens and everything that we built, and we did a lot of work out there. But why did we move? We just didn't have enough room, I guess. Yeah. It was fun trying to find a place because I would say, "Well, I only want to be 20 minutes from work. I don't want to have to drive that far," and we would push that, and push that, and push that. It was about a half an hour, maybe 25 to 30 minutes. But it was a beautiful ride, and I could decompress on the way home. And it was a real redneck neighborhood. In fact, there was a house down the street from us that had a big, white cross in the yard. Everybody knew we were a couple, and everybody was okay with us, but nobody ever talked about it. But we were friends with the people next to us and across the street kind of thing. But yeah, it wasn't a gay-friendly neighborhood [laughs]. But we did okay. I don't know what else to say about that. MF: Tell me a little bit about, you got married later on, but you did a commitment ceremony. Tell me a little bit about that. SF: Oh, we did. Actually, it was Liz and Trish who said, "Vermont just opened up civil union. We're going to go out, we're going to get a civil union." I forget what year it was. We have the certificate hanging downstairs. And they said, "Why don't you come with us? This other couple is going with us." So, the six of us went up in their van, and we got married. Or, we got the civil union. We have pictures and I think we may even have a video of it, I'm not sure. It didn't mean anything in Pennsylvania, but it meant we did something, so it was the beginning. So, we had that. It was nice. The officiant was a woman, and she was really sweet. And Bev and I, I wrote something to say to Beverly, and she sang something to me, and neither one of us knew what the other was going to do, and at the end, the gal is practically crying while Bev's singing and whatnot. And we had already had wedding rings. We gave each other these on our seventh anniversary, so we didn't do wedding rings, but we each, without knowing, bought each other a bracelet. She bought me a diamond bracelet, and I bought her an emerald bracelet, because we're going to the green state of Vermont, so my whole thing was about green and emeralds and stuff. So, we exchanged bracelets. It was nice. We went up the night before, and our friend, I think Laura was with us. She did some other work for us. And we had a nice night together, and we got married, and came home. Well, civil unioned, I guess, and came home. But it was, I don't know how long after that that states started to open up more, but Vermont was the first, at least on the East that we could get to, we could drive there. I don't know if California was opened up by then or not. I don't know. But again, it was Liz and Trish who said, "Come on, we've got to do this." "Okay." They were a big influence that way. MF: And was it important to you when marriage equality was passed? SF: You know, it was important because, only because to me equality is important across the board. It didn't make me feel any different to have a paper that said, "I'm married." I mean nothing was going to change how I felt about Beverly. Financially, it was not helpful for us to be legally married. In some ways it was a financial detriment to us. But we did it because we think it's the right thing to do. I think I've always questioned, "Why can't you do something? If you want to do it, why can't you do it? I'm not hurting anybody. I'm not injuring anybody or killing anybody. Why can't I marry Beverly? What's the big deal?" So, in that respect it was important to us to be married. And again, we got married here in Delaware because we were told that anything we had somewhere else wouldn't matter in Delaware. You had to do it here. So, when that came, again, it was Liz and Trish, I have to blame my whole life on them. They told Beverly-- I was traveling a lot. After I retired from Moravian, I did a lot of consulting, and I was traveling a lot and Liz, I guess, told Bev a story about a couple who weren't married and one of them was in an accident or something and was in the hospital and the partner couldn't go see her because they weren't married, and the family stepped in. So, they said, "You two really need to get married," so I came home Thursday, and I was leaving on Monday, and Bev said to me, "We're getting married this weekend." "Oh, okay," I said. So, we go to the courthouse to get our papers on Friday, we go to the beach on Saturday, we get married, I leave again on Monday. So, it was no big deal. But we're married, we're legal, and we file our taxes together [laughs]. And she doesn't have to do anything, I do it all [laughs]. "Hey, I need that report, give it to me." "Okay." MF: It's great to live with someone who does math. SF: The accountant does it, I just sent it off. But anyway, those things are important only from a -- for me personally, it's again, about, "Why can't I do that if I want to do that?" It goes back to that little girl who wanted to play baseball, but I couldn't because I was a girl. "What do you mean I can't marry Beverly? I love her, she loves me. Why can't I marry her?" So, it's more about that. MF: We're kind of getting into your retirement, so maybe I'll ask one last question. Tell me about retirement down here in Rehoboth. What made you move down here? What is your life like? SF: Well, let's see. Bev and I, we both love the beach. And we both grew up going to the Jersey Shore, Long Beach Island. And so, in our first years together, we still were going to Long Beach Island because that's what we always did. And that got more busy and more crowded and more, there was nobody there like us. So, we're living in the Lehigh Valley, there's nobody there but us except when we have a party, and 50 million women show up at our house. And then, we'd go on vacation and again, there's nobody there like us. So, friends of ours -- actually, it was Ann again, I mentioned Ann and Sharon earlier. Ann had been coming down here. And she said, "Why don't you check out Rehoboth sometime?" So, we came down and did Bev tell you this story? All right, I'll tell it. I wasn't going to tell it, but I will. We came down here, we were staying at a bed-and-breakfast, a gay-owned, a lesbian-owned bed and breakfast, Wendy's. And Bev had gotten a really bad case of poison ivy and she was miserable. She was just miserable. She was scratching and itching and just moaning and groaning. So, she's in the room, drugged out and everything. Everybody else is out playing cards in the lobby area and having fun. I came back to the bedroom, and I said, "Don't you want to come out and have some fun? All you do is scratch and itch." Well, not smart. She got really mad at me. And so, she told me to get lost. So, that night, I guess about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning she got up and she said, "I'm going to the hospital. I can't stand it any longer." I said, "Well, I'll take you." No, no, no, no, no, no, she was still mad at me. She said, "I'm going by myself." So, she did. She took herself over to Beebe, came back. I'm sitting out on the porch on a rocking chair with everybody, feeling absolutely horrible. And so, she comes back and goes back to her room, and I go back and I go, "Honey I am really, really sorry. I was so insensitive." I said, "What can I do to make this up to you?" And she said, "Buy me a beach house." And I said, "Okay." So, [laughs] that's how we got to Rehoboth. I'm not sure if it was that time or the next time we came down, we went and we looked at -- oh, I know. So, we asked the owner of the place where we were saying, we asked Wendy, "Wendy, where should we look? What are some nice condo things that we should be looking at?" And she gave us the name of two different sections that we should look at, so we did. We looked at these two different sections. First of all, I'm not wealthy, Bev's not wealthy. We don't have a lot of money. I don't know how we ever thought in this lifetime we were going to buy a little beach house. So, we figured we can start with a condo, we'll figure it out somehow. Anyway, we drove around these two areas, and we drove around this one area, I forgot the name of it, behind Big Fish. It'll come to me. Anyway. We're driving around. And there were two women out, and we said, "Could we see your place?" "Come on in," they showed us their place. And it was really nice. So, we kind of got a sense of the end units, they were up and down, and they were roomy and nice, and we liked that. So, we got a realtor, and we said, "We're interested in getting one of those end units, sometime." "Oh, they never go on the market. There's only six of them in this whole place. They never go on the market." Okay. So, that was the summer. I think it was September, because school was just starting, and we get a call from the realtor, "One of these units is coming up." I took off from school, we went down, we bought it. And I don't know how we ever bought it. I don't know how we ever got a mortgage, but we did. And that was the beginning. And then, we had it for, I think, nine years, eight or nine years, and we would rent it because we really couldn't afford it. And so, most of the summer we rented it. And I rented it just through Moravian. I would put out an email and friends at Moravian would be renting it for a week here and a week there, and then we'd come down off season and stay weekends and stuff and get used to the area. And every time we would come down here for a weekend, Bev would be looking in the paper at the real estate. And I'd say, "Honey, stop looking in the paper. We can't afford anything else. We have a house, we have this. Come on." And she kept looking, she kept looking. And so, I don't know, a bunch of years into this now, and she's really looking seriously now. And I said, "You know, we can't buy something unless we sell this condo." And she said, "Okay." And now, she's getting really serious because this is like our ninth year, our eighth or ninth year. Now, we're looking at houses. And we had a realtor, she took us to a couple of places, we didn't like anything. Houses, not in development, just houses. We didn't like anything. And then, we saw one house that we kind of liked. And then, I picked up blueprints, and I saw a blueprint of a bathroom that I liked. I said, "I want to see a house that has this bathroom in it." She said, "I'll have to take you out to Independence," which is here, where we are. And we came out here, and we liked it. We liked it here. The clubhouse had an indoor swimming pool. We liked all that. "Okay, we like it here." Now, at this point, we had this realtor, who also had our condo, and that was up for sale now. And we said to her, "We can't do anything until that condo sells." We came out from looking at this place, the realtor got a message, "Your condo just sold." So, we made enough profit in nine years on that condo to begin this house. And that's how we did it. And we came here because of the women's community. Everywhere we went in Rehoboth, there were women like us. Everywhere. And we just don't have that and didn't have that in the Lehigh Valley. So, we knew we both loved the beach, but it was the women that brought us here. The women really did it. So, that the song that says, "There's something about the women," there's something about the women. Because yeah, that's what brings you here. The community of women is phenomenal. We have met, I can't tell you, how many wonderful women here. Everybody retires here, pretty much for the same thing. They want to be with the women. And if you have a problem there will be women lined up at the door to help you. Some of our friends are single and if they have like surgery or something, there's just, right away, a chart is formed and meals are coming every day, you've got a job to do, you're doing the laundry, you're taking the dog out, you're doing whatever. It's just, that's how it is. It's a huge women's support group here. And at our age, that was perfect. So, Bev was turning 70, I was still working at Moravian full-time, and she said to me, "I'm going to be 70. I'm leaving. I'm moving to the beach." Because our house was done by then and we weren't living in it, but it was here. And so, she said, "Are you going to retire and come with me?" I said, "Well, I guess I have to." So, I did. I didn't want to retire. I loved my job. But I did because I loved Beverly more. So, we came. But then I started to consult, and so, I was still busy. And I was out there all the time until COVID hit, and then I was home. So, COVID really made me retire. So, a year after COVID, my company asked me to come back and I said, "No," because I'd been home, now, for a year. I was used to it. So, that's kind of that. It's a great place to be. MF: Thank you so much. We're right at the at the end of the interview but before we conclude, is there anything that you thought, "Oh, I kind of wanted to talk about that today," and we missed it? Is there anything you want to add at the end? SF: You know, I don't think so. I think, no, I'm okay. I don't like talking about me so much. [laughs]. MF: Well, I appreciate the fact that you did talk about you. Thank you so much. SF: I'm sure Bev's going to say, "Well, did you tell them this? Did you tell them that? Did you tell them this?" MF: Well, you know, hey, we can always come back out again. We don't mind coming down to the beach. SF: You are always welcome at our beach. Always welcome. MF: Well, thank you so much. SF: You're welcome. Thanks for having us. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:32:32 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sandy Fluck, February 20, 2022 Description An account of the resource Sandy Fluck recalls her childhood in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, work in higher education, connection to A Chorus Celebrating Women (ACCO), and relationship with her partner of over 30 years. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-28 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-02-20 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/28fef07de6ffe29c32aebd5d73bb7ae5.png 8db7440e30cff0f21c39f4b86c3d0051 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Foltz, Mary Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mesics, Sandra (Sandy) OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-13.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 October 11th, 2021 Sandy Mesics, October 11, 2021 LGBT-13 01:46:09 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 Mesics, Sandra (Sandy) Foltz, Mary video/mov MesicsSandy_20211011_video.mp4 1.0:|29(2)|58(11)|83(2)|100(11)|123(15)|144(2)|165(6)|186(5)|209(12)|234(15)|259(3)|280(4)|301(7)|322(6)|349(3)|370(4)|391(8)|418(10)|443(17)|468(7)|491(2)|514(5)|535(10)|556(16)|581(8)|604(2)|625(5)|650(7)|673(6)|692(15)|715(15)|740(7)|763(6)|786(2)|805(10)|826(5)|849(11)|872(3)|893(6)|916(2)|937(16)|964(4)|987(6)|1008(5)|1031(13)|1048(12)|1073(7)|1096(5)|1113(11)|1134(8)|1155(8)|1176(15)|1201(15)|1226(18)|1247(10)|1264(11)|1285(9)|1306(14)|1331(2)|1354(9)|1377(5)|1400(12)|1425(9)|1448(15)|1471(12)|1494(2)|1517(3)|1536(15)|1559(12)|1582(11)|1607(7)|1632(2)|1649(16)|1672(15)|1693(11)|1718(2)|1737(8)|1754(12)|1777(2)|1800(4)|1825(2)|1844(15)|1867(9)|1888(12)|1915(3)|1938(8)|1961(8)|1984(5)|2007(5)|2030(8)|2051(13)|2074(5)|2095(15)|2116(15)|2135(6)|2154(12)|2177(6)|2198(10)|2219(4)|2240(4)|2259(14)|2282(11)|2303(14)|2328(5)|2349(8)|2380(2)|2383(6) 0 https://youtu.be/tngiiTGigK8 YouTube video 0 Interview Introductions My name is Mary Foltz, and I’m here with Sandy Mesics to talk about her life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley and beyond, as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and Sandy and I are meeting on October 11, 2021. 0 141 Early Family Life in Bethlehem, PA Well, I guess to sum things up, I’m a baby boomer. You know, as you know from my birthdate, I fall into that generation. I was born here in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at St. Luke’s Hospital in 1952. My family at that time consisted of my mother, my father, and I have an older brother eight years older than myself. 0 347 Bethlehem Steel and the Evolution of the City but the Bethlehem Steel obviously was the main employer, and in some ways, it seemed like we were all connected to Bethlehem Steel, you know, either directly or indirectly. 0 622 Death of Father and Impact on Life My parents were always, well, to go into a little bit of detail, I did not have my father very long in my life. When I was 12 years old, we had a snowstorm, and it was a really bad January snowstorm, but we loved it because I didn’t have to go to school. 0 798 Childhood Gender Questioning SM: (laughs) Yeah. It’s going to be a short answer, because you know, being a Roman Catholic child growing up in a not major city in the 1950s and 1960s, I had no clue as to difference, biological differences between boys and girls. I mean, I knew what I looked like, I kind of looked like my brother. 0 928 Finding Trans Representation in Youth I think one of the earliest memories was finding a book by Christine Jorgensen you know, that talked about her change. And ironically, Christine Jorgensen, that news hit in 1952, the year I was born. 0 1230 College Experience Honestly, I really didn’t get a comprehensive picture of being trans until I went to college. And I went to Penn State, majored in Psychology, as it turned out, and Pattee Library had a wealth of journal articles and some books that were not available commonly to the public, and that’s where I really did my homework, so to speak. 0 1507 Gender Dysphoria in College My gender dysphoria was getting like you couldn’t believe, because there was no opportunity to slip off and dress the way I wanted to dress, or express myself the way I wanted to dress, which I had been doing since I was a little, little, kid. 0 1586 The Erickson Foundation There was an organization called the Erickson Foundation. And this was started by Reed Erickson, who was a transman, and he had come into some money because of his parents’ family business, and so he set up a foundation that was supposed to disseminate information for transsexuals in those days, and one of the services they provided was referral lists. 0 1646 Starting Hormones So, I wrote to them for referrals. And so, they wrote back and sent me a nice letter, and there were three referrals! Three physicians in Pennsylvania that might help me. 0 1744 Graduating and Moving to Philadelphia So, then I really had no future after college. You know, really, I always joke that having a bachelor’s degree in psychology kind of prepares you to ask people the important questions in life, and the important question being, “Would you like fries with that order?” And that’s exactly what my life was. 0 1910 Creating Image Magazine And that opportunity came when I started a magazine. And you know, talk about hubris. You know, my friend and I in Philadelphia decided that we wanted to start a magazine for trans folx. And, you know we knew a half a dozen trans folx by that time, but you know, I worked on the school newspaper, I was good at writing could do a rudimentary lay out, and so we established Image Magazine, and it was a quarterly, and it was a grassroots, I typed it at home, you know we sent it over to the printing place a couple blocks away, got it back, fold it, collate it, stapled, mailed it, and it started taking off a little bit, and so that’s sort of my entrance into the trans community and being an activist. 0 2067 LGBTQ+ Community at Penn State and HOPS Good question, thank you. Yeah, it, Penn State did have a gay bar in those days. It was called the My Oh My, and it was I think on College Avenue. However, I was not able to take advantage of that because I actually graduated from Penn State the day after my 21st birthday. 0 2224 LGBTQ+ Community in Philadelphia and Eromin So, transitioning over to Philadelphia was like “Ooh!” You know, all of a sudden you know I was meeting trans people in the streets! You know, striking up conversation, like we would see each other at Rittenhouse Square. And so, all of a sudden in Pennsylvania at that time in Philly, the group that I was most associated with was called Radical Queens. 0 2577 The United Transvestite Transexual Society and Working in Publishing And so, we all got our heads together, and Jack O’Brien, a cisgender male who was a former cartoonist, ran all these publications. And there were a slew of them, and some of them were pretty gross. 0 2858 The Importance of Erotic Imagery in LGBTQ+ Publications Could you talk a little bit about why erotic fiction, why erotic images really mattered in that time period? Why that was a focus, along with the self-help, along with the conferences, along with political discussion, I imagine. Why did that matter?&#13 ; 0 3109 Female Impersonator News It was called, and again, Female Impersonator News. And it was a tabloid publication, and a lot of, I should mention, a lot of what we did were personal ads, and you know, in those days, people trying to connect with each other, and you know, you got maybe a post office box and you placed an ad in a magazine like ours, you know maybe send a picture you described yourself, what you were looking for, and we would facilitate like forwarding mail, and that was a big part of what we did. 0 3263 The Impact of Trans Publications I think it was, I don’t know, just, I wasn’t prepared for the outpouring of letters that I got. You know, and so like we had, we always had letters to the editor that you know we would publish if we thought there was something helpful in there. 0 3626 Career Post-Image Magazine Yeah, so I parlayed what I learned about publication layout writing and everything and applied for a job at W.B. Saunders company in Philadelphia. And, W.B. Saunders was at that time, I think it still is, a large medical publishing company, and W.B. Saunders had one best seller in their whole career, and I think that was the Kinsey Report. 0 4144 Exploring Sexual Orientation Segueing into the other question, I always knew that I was attracted to women, even as a kid, and boy that was confusing. You know, so like I want to, you know I am a woman, I want to be a woman, but I love women, and you know, so that was really hard. 0 4341 Meeting and Dating Future Spouse My spouse and I met in 1985, in Miami. At that time, she was just graduating from the University of Miami’s master’s degree in Nurse Midwifery, and she at that time was exploring her own lesbianism. 0 4553 Navigating Lesbian Relationships as a Transwoman I had my first, what I would call serious relationship with a woman probably [01:16:00] in Philadelphia in 1978 or so, and we were together for four or five years, and so in that aspect, you know, one of the big discussions among trans people is entering a relationship, do I disclose my trans status? 0 4907 Moving Back to the Lehigh Valley Okay. So, that pretty much brings us up to the year 2000. And what is happening at that time is Sara is working in a clinic in Broward County, and is not real happy with her job situation. 0 5169 Relationship with Mother As I said, way in the background, even though my mom was born in the United State, she basically grew up in Hungary, and then moved back to the States. And she had basically the equivalent of a grade school education, I don’t think, she didn’t have high school. 0 5696 Evolution of the Leigh Valley cont. As I said, think the industries are, not to say industries, but the professions in like the learning institutions, the medical care brings a more professional kind of class of people. I’m sorry, I’m sounding elitist there, and I don’t mean that by any means, but it’s a place that’s culturally rich now, where it hadn’t been before. You know, we have world-class music. 0 5925 Hope for the Future and Closing Thoughts I think if anything, I am so hopeful for the future. When I see young non-binary kids not afraid to express their gender identity, not having to buy, you know, one or the other, you know, gender is everything in between, and that’s okay, it’s like wow! 0 MovingImage Sandy Mesics describes her childhood, growing up in Bethlehem, PA ; her reflections on Bethlehem Steel, including her father’s employment with the company and working-class steel communities ; and her experiences as young transwoman trying to find information in tabloids and books about other transgender people. She discusses her enrollment at Penn State as a physics and later a psychology major ; her anti-Vietnam war activism ; her gender dysphoria during college ; and her journey toward gender affirmation with support from the Erickson Foundation and a doctor in Philadelphia. &#13 ; &#13 ; Moving to Philadelphia after college because of the large LGBTQ community, Sandy started Image Magazine, worked with Transsexual Action Committee, the Radical Queens, and Eromin Center ; in addition, she built a relationship with publishers of Female impersonator Magazine and ultimately worked with publishers to produce articles and publications for transgender readers, beginning 1974-1975. Sandy then describes using her work in publishing to gain employment with W.B. Saunders, a graphic arts company, and as an html coder. Toward the end of the interview, Sandy describes living in Miami, training to be a nurse, becoming a nurse midwife, and meeting her wife. The interview concludes with Sandy’s discussion of moving back to Bethlehem to care for her mother and finding a job at St. Luke’s, training others in maternal-newborn nursing. Sandy Mesics Interview October 11, 2021 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Sandy Mesics to talk about her life and experiences in the Lehigh Valley and beyond, as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, and Sandy and I are meeting on October 11, 2021. We're conducting this interview on Zoom, because there's still a pandemic going on, so we think this is the safest way to conduct interviews at this time. And I want to start by saying, Sandy! Thank you so much for being here with me today! SANDY MESICS:It's a pleasure, Mary. I'm glad to be participating in this project. I hope I have something worthwhile to share with you. MF: Well, I'm really looking forward to it. I want to start just by getting some basic information down. Would you be willing to state your full name, please, and spell it for us? SM: Sure. My full name is Sandra Mesics. M-E-S-I-C-S, although I prefer Sandy. MF: Thank you. And will you please share your birthdate? SM: Yes, March 23, 1952. MF: Thank you. And, I know I already shared with you a consent form, and you signed it, and then I signed it on my end, but I just want to review just a few items about consent. So, first, do you consent to this interview today? SM: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online? SM: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including articles or on websites, presentations, or other formats that might come along? SM: Yes. MF: And do you understand that you'll have 30 days after the electronic delivery of the transcript of this interview to identify parts you might want to delete, or you could withdraw the interview in its entirety if you wanted? SM: Yes, I do. MF: Great! Okay, thank you so much. So, we'll just go ahead and dive in. So, Sandy could you start by telling us a little bit about the early years of your life? SM: Well, I guess to sum things up, I'm a baby boomer. You know, as you know from my birthdate, I fall into that generation. I was born here in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at St. Luke's Hospital in 1952. My family at that time consisted of my mother, my father, and I have an older brother eight years older than myself. So, I came along, and you know I guess the doctor in those days took a look at what was between my legs and assigned me as a male at birth. And I think it took a little while for me to realize that there was a real disconnect there, but you know, we can cover that in some detail. So, 1957, at that time we lived in Fountain Hill, my dad and mom basically, my dad was a Bethlehem Steel worker. He was a first generation American. Both grandparents on both sides of my family immigrated from Europe in the early 1900s to seek a better life. And so, my dad was the first generation born here in America, as well as my mother. My mother was born in Northhampton, but then immigrated back to Europe, and basically my mom grew up in Hungary, and didn't get back to the United States until I think the 1930s at that time, and then settled here. My mom at that time when I was born was a domestic servant. She worked for one of the vice presidents of Bethlehem Steel, and her job was to cook meals, do the shopping, and in those days, the steel executives had quite a staff of domestic workers, and my mom was one of them. My older brother I mentioned is eight years older than myself, he's still alive and living in Florida, and we do keep in touch occasionally, although we never really had a close relationship. Both parents were, I was raised a Roman Catholic, and in those days Bethlehem, particularly on the South Side had a lot of ethnic churches, a lot of Roman Catholic churches. And a lot of them are still standing, although they're pretty much defunct right now. And we were members of St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church on Fifth Street, which was a Windish church, which Windish, it's hard to explain, but it's some kind of amalgam of Hungarian and Slovak backgrounds. All that European, Eastern European mix that used to get jumbled up every time they had a war over there. And so, that was the milieu in which I was born and raised. Subsequently, we moved to the North side of Bethlehem, where my mom and dad actually built the house I grew up in. So, as a little kid I remember carrying around hammers and drinking lemonade on the building site, and it was a family affair. So, I can tell you that Bethlehem in the early 1960s was a booming place, an industrial center. It's hard to conceive of it anymore, but the Bethlehem Steel obviously was the main employer, and in some ways, it seemed like we were all connected to Bethlehem Steel, you know, either directly or indirectly. The steel company pretty much ran 24/7, 365. It never shut down. And as I look back, I can still hear the sounds of the steel running at night. I can still see the glow on the horizon from the blast furnaces. It had this orange glow most of the time, smoke spewing into the air, and on a really humid day where the wind was out of the East, you got the wonderful aroma of the Coke Works outside of Hellertown, which was a sulfuric smell. So, you know, in many ways, Bethlehem and the Lehigh Valley has really improved as far as a quality-of-life thing, even though we kind of miss the industry. I really don't miss the noise, the smoke, and the pollution. And you know, the steel provided a great living for a lot of steel workers like my dad, who had a high school education, and could go right to work in the steel, he had a trade, and there were good benefits thanks to the union, and they were able to raise kids, and they were able to keep a roof over our heads, and keep us clothed and fed, and actually my brother was the first one in our family to go to college. And you know, I followed along eight years later, and they were very proud of that achievement. So, I'm digressing. Put me back on track, Mary. MF: I don't think you're digressing at all. That description of what it was like to live in Bethlehem with the steel works was amazing, and you're really capturing both how central the steel was to the economy, how it benefited laborers, but then the environmental costs of having the steel works at the center. SM: Yeah, the Bethlehem Steel that, a lot of the folks that worked there that are still walking around, you know, they're blaming everybody else on the demise of Bethlehem Steel, and truly it was multi-factored. You know, the company failed to invest in newer technology to compete with Europe and Japan, but by the same token, the union kind of drove some deals that made it very hard for the steel to make money. So, I honestly think it was everybody's fault, and it was almost inevitable that the steel would have a demise, and I think that was the amazing thing. Because when I left the Lehigh Valley in 1969 to go to college, the steel was running full blast. When I moved back to the Lehigh Valley as an older adult, back in the year 2000, it was gone. And but yet the Lehigh Valley survived, and I think is thriving, because of other smaller businesses that have moved into the area. We've become an educational mecca, with all the colleges, and universities. Certainly, a healthcare mecca, which we didn't have back then, so I am thrilled at the course that the Lehigh Valley has taken, and it thrives. And a lot of us could not have imagined that happening, you know, if the steel had gone away. MF: So, the steel was central to your family, in terms of you know, keeping a roof over your head, as you shared. What was it like to be in a steel family as a young child? SM: (laughs) The steel was a close-knit community in some ways, you know. You know, my dad worked there, my uncle worked there, and other relatives. And for instance, when my dad was building our house, it wasn't unusual for him to get his buddies from the crew that he worked with to help put the roof on the house. And there was always a buddy that could fix your car, or replace your brakes, or there was always somebody, you know, so it was kind of, those guys had this like kind of a knit community. And they helped each other a lot, and they were always working on projects for each other. So, that was really kind of interesting, and I think we miss that to a certain extent these days. I don't think we have that sense of tight community. My parents were always, well, to go into a little bit of detail, I did not have my father very long in my life. When I was 12 years old, we had a snowstorm, and it was a really bad January snowstorm, but we loved it because I didn't have to go to school. And for whatever reason, my dad was either not working that day, or couldn't get into work or whatever, and so we had a nice day together, but then we went out to shovel snow, and my dad came in with chest pains, and you know, he a neighbor-- a neighbor, not an ambulance, a neighbor took him to the hospital, and he never came home. So, that was kind of a sudden shock to all of us that we had lost this you know, my father. And it took kind of a long time to get over that. So, when, just before my dad died and my brother started going to college, my mom started working for Just Born as a candy packer. And so, Just Born is still around, and thriving in the Lehigh Valley, and so my mom became a line worker at Just Born, and so my brother was away at college at that time. He was in his late teens/early twenties, and so we had living in my house myself, my mother, and my paternal grandmother, which was like a really interesting dynamic, but a lot of the day-to-day running of the house, maintenance of the house, mowing the lawns and everything, kind of fell to me because there was nobody else to do it. So, for myself personally, it was like almost growing up overnight. You know, you kind of like left this sheltered childhood thing and all of a sudden you had responsibilities. And then, you know, life was still okay but a little precarious. There wasn't always money to do things, but we made do, and we did very well. You know, it kind of pulled the rest of us tighter together. So many years ago, and I still sort of get emotional about talking about that. Nobody expects, you know, your dad to go out the door and never come back the door again, so. MF: Wow. Thank you for sharing that, that story. It sounds to me like you know, following your father's death, you really became a figure in the family that was expected to do maintenance, kind of labor around the house, and this led me to think a little bit about, or wonder about how your family understood gender when you were a child. Would you be willing to explore that a bit? SM: Yeah. It's going to be a short answer, because you know, being a Roman Catholic child growing up in a not major city in the 1950s and 1960s, I had no clue as to difference, biological differences between boys and girls. I mean, I knew what I looked like, I kind of looked like my brother. I didn't know what girls looked like, I didn't, you know, but I just knew that there, you know-- One of my earliest memories is thinking to myself, and I must have been about four years old, and seeing little girls around me and going "when do I get to join that team?" You know? I always assumed that there would come a time in my life, early on, where I would be able to be like picked for that team, like you were picked for a basketball team. You know, you'd stand in a line, and I want to be on the girls' team because that's where I belong, and it just never happened. And so, I had no clue as to like gender differences. My mom, you know, with basically less than a high school education wasn't able to talk to me about that. She didn't understand. And so, I was kind of lost, and I had to sort of figure things out by myself, and I knew that there was this major disconnect, and when I was about five years old, it dawned on me that I was never going to get that chance to choose, and I was never going to get the chance to choose and I was never going to develop in that direction, and what do I do now? And so like, the rest of the time into my teens that's what I was trying to figure out. It's like, am I stuck this way? Do I have to lead my life in this gender and be totally unhappy? Is there any way that you know after the fact that I can switch genders? Which at that time might as well have been talking about, you know, walking on Mars, because you know, there wasn't. There was no information. And then gradually, gradually I started to connect with things, and I think one of the earliest memories was finding a book by Christine Jorgensen you know, that talked about her change. And ironically, Christine Jorgensen, that news hit in 1952, the year I was born. And so, I have a wonderful story, talk about full circle, is I got to meet Christine and have a discussion with her when she was older in life and just told her how her story gave me life and hope. But anyway, I started finding out about that probably in my early teens, and then the little lightbulb went on and said, there are other people like myself. I'm not alone. But even that, you thought to yourself, well maybe there's a half a dozen people like myself, maybe, in the world. And so, that was how it kind of evolved. And then gradually in my high school years, there were these things called tabloids, and there were dozens of them. And so, their idea was like splashy news stories. Titillating kind of things, and they were all The National Examiner, the National Enquirer, the Insider. It was trash journalism at its best. And they kind of like hooked on to trans people very early on, and would splash these pictures on the front page about "Can you believe this is a man?" With a picture of a lovely woman on the cover. And my eyes kind of bugged out when I started seeing this stuff, and so every Sunday morning after church we would make a trip to the store, and we'd buy the Philadelphia Enquirer, and the Allentown Chronicle, whatever, and I would find these tabloids and kind of stash them in between the papers and kind of steal them. So here's an admission, you know, I hope they don't come after me, but I would be able to do that and then get them home and kind of take them out right away before anybody else could see them, and like pore over these newspapers and this stuff. And it was like a desperate attempt to kind of glean some information about you know, there are other people like me, how are they managing their lives? How do they do this? And so, you know it took a while, but then gradually I started putting the pieces together. And then in the late 1960s I ran across Harry Benjamin's book, The Transexual Phenomenon. And obviously that was a real game changer, and it was a game changer for the whole trans community. I mean, how many of us were saved by that book? Bring me back on track, Mary. (laughs) MF: You're on track. We're just going to go wherever you want to go. Can I ask, did you hear about Christine Jorgensen from the tabloids, or you said, "I found something about her." Where were you finding information beyond the tabloids? Was there a place in the Lehigh Valley, or? SM:Yeah, so I think the Christine Jorgensen book when I found it was already out in paperback, and I think I found it at a department store in probably one of the defunct department-- like Almart or one of the stores that no longer exists, and they would have like little things you could buy record albums, and you could buy books, and you know, dinnerware and stuff like that. And I spotted this on the shelf, and somehow at the age of 11 or 12 I had the courage, screwed up the courage, to take this book, with my hand shaking, and go to the counter and pay for it, which was like "Ehh! They're going to think I'm weird." So, I found that out. And then there were, in those days, there were newsstands all throughout Bethlehem, and my favorite one was on, I think it was on New Street, and it was Sherry's News Stand. And again, you could go in the front, and they had all the newspapers lined up, but in the back corner, they had Playboy, Penthouse, they had you know the "adult magazines" and I ran across a copy of Female Impersonator Magazine. And irony of irony, I would actually become the editor of that magazine in a few years. So, yes. I found that also when I was a teenager, and I don't know if I figured out a way to steal that, because I'm pretty sure he probably wouldn't have sold it to me if you know I wasn't old enough to read that kind of stuff. But so, there were newsstands, occasionally you'd find things in stores, grocery stores would have the tabloids. There was nothing in the library, believe me, I looked, in those days, and that was of no help at all. So, you kind of, it was a pre-internet age and there wasn't that flood of information. There was no information superhighway in those days, but you kind of gleaned what you could. Honestly, I really didn't get a comprehensive picture of being trans until I went to college. And I went to Penn State, majored in Psychology, as it turned out, and Pattee Library had a wealth of journal articles and some books that were not available commonly to the public, and that's where I really did my homework, so to speak. MF: Tell me a little bit about moving to Penn State. So, what made you choose Penn State, and what was your experience like in college? SM: Okay. Good question, thank you. I was a science nerd in high school, and you know, going back a little bit, so I went to a parochial Roman Catholic grade school grades one to eight, and then my mother, to her credit, thought that the education that I was getting there wasn't on par with what I could get in the public education, and so in ninth grade I went to Northeast Middle School, which at that time was Northeast Junior High School, and then Liberty High School which, I mean you know, the big public high school in Bethlehem. All during that time I had developed a passion and an interest in astronomy, which you know, carries through to this day. I was a member of the Lehigh Valley Amateur Astronomical Society as a kid, and I am a member today again. So, at any rate, I went to Penn State because, number one, we could afford it. Number two, we could afford it. Number three, we could afford it. I benefited, you can say benefit is the right word, I benefited from social security survivor benefits because my father was, had died at such an early age. So, between scholarships, state aid, and my own working during the summer times, I was basically able to graduate from college without a dollar of debt, which, you know, who can do that these days? Nobody can do that. So anyway, I went to Penn State basically because I was admitted there, and it was close by, relatively, and we could afford it. We could swing it as a family. So anyways, I started out as a physics major and so Penn State in those days was culture shock for me, coming from the Lehigh Valley. I mean, I was thrown in with I think the student body then was maybe 26,000, something like that. I was living in a dorm. Living independently, which I loved. And tossed into this milieu of learning, which was like awesome, but it was also, 1969 was also the time when we had lots of things happen. You know, you had Woodstock that summer, we had man walking on the moon, but more important we had Vietnam. And I was eligible for the draft. And so, the only reason I was able to stay out of Vietnam was if I could stay in college. Because there were student deferments at that time. The selective service at that time was very racist, and very classist. If you were a poor black kid from an inner city, you went to Vietnam. You were drafted. If you were white and could get yourself into some kind of college, you were deferred until college was over. So, you know, there was inherent racism built into that whole system, and classism. It was horrible. So, you know, I spent more time my first two years in college being an activist in anti-Vietnam War protests, campus protests. I worked with the Peace Coalition. I met people like Abbie Hoffman, you know, not Abbie Hoffman, but some of the Chicago Seven: Dave Dellinger, William Kuntsler, Rennie Davis, so I was in this very much mode of let's end the war in Vietnam. My studies kind of suffered as a result, and I didn't last as a physics major very long. I think I made it maybe two or three semesters, and then I changed my major to psychology. And you know, a lot of us go into psychology because we have our own demons to work on, and certainly that was true in my case. So, at Penn State for the first two years, I lived on campus. My gender dysphoria was getting like you couldn't believe, because there was no opportunity to slip off and dress the way I wanted to dress, or express myself the way I wanted to dress, which I had been doing since I was a little, little, kid. And all of a sudden in this men's dorm, you know, I was kind of lost. It was a really bad time. So, my third and fourth year I moved off campus into an apartment, where I had a little bit more personal freedom. And so, it was the first time I actually was able to go out in public as Sandy and just kind of blend into things, because it was a big enough community that I could kind of get lost there. So, I did, eventually I graduated from Penn State. I wrote most of my psychology papers in the day what we call "transvestism" and "transsexualism." We didn't have the term transgender yet, that came along a little bit later. And so, that was my experience at Penn State. My senior year at Penn State, which was in 1972 I believe, 72, 73, the dysphoria, my gender dysphoria got so bad that I finally sought out professional help. There was an organization called the Erickson Foundation. And this was started by Reed Erickson, who was a transman, and he had come into some money because of his parents' family business, and so he set up a foundation that was supposed to disseminate information for transsexuals in those days, and one of the services they provided was referral lists. And so, again, pre-internet days, where do I go to get help? He would, his group would compile lists of doctors that were doing some form of trans care in the day. The only place we really knew about, everybody kind of knew about what Johns Hopkins was doing. You know, with the first Gender Identity Clinic, and I think Stanford on the West Coast started up at the same time. But other than that, there really was not much information out there, and Johns Hopkins actually treated very few patients, you know in the long run. They, it was a small program. But again, I digress. So, I wrote to them for referrals. And so, they wrote back and sent me a nice letter, and there were three referrals! Three physicians in Pennsylvania that might help me. Two were in Pittsburgh, and one was in Philadelphia, and I lived more close to the Philadelphia side, so I drove from Penn State to Philadelphia, met the physician who was a Doctor of Osteopathy Family Physician. Had a little street corner practice in South Philly, in the Italian area, and he got into this whole thing because one of the kids in the neighborhood was trans, came to him and "I need help with hormones," and he started treating trans people. And it grew and grew and grew, and I think by the time I got to him, he probably had about 300 trans patients in Philly. So, he was the trans doctor in Philly. And so, he could not believe that I had driven I guess, what is it? 180 or 200 miles to see him for treatment. I was 20 years old. And he did a quick interview, we talked for about 45 minutes, and he started me on hormone treatments. And so, by the time I graduated from Penn State in 1973, I'd been on hormones for about six months, changes were starting to happen, and the minute those changes started to happen, this sense of calm kind of came over me that I can't describe. And so, the last few months of my college experience were awesome. And so, that was the story. So, then I really had no future after college. You know, really, I always joke that having a bachelor's degree in psychology kind of prepares you to ask people the important questions in life, and the important question being, "Would you like fries with that order?" And that's exactly what my life was. So, you know, the one good thing was by the time I graduated from college, they had ended the draft and Vietnam was winding down, so I dodged, literally dodged a bullet there, and so tossing a coin in the air, I moved to Philadelphia. It was a place where my doctor was, it was a place that was big enough that I could disappear and you know get the help I need, hopefully find a job that I needed, and transition in anonymity. Because this would have not flown in the Lehigh Valley at the time. Getting back to the Lehigh Valley, it was still kind of a, I don't know, provincial place. You know, growing up I didn't even know if there was a gay bar in the Lehigh Valley in the time I was here. I didn't know other gay people ; I certainly didn't know another trans person in the Lehigh Valley. It wasn't here. But in Philadelphia, you know, Stonewall there was a burgeoning gay community, it was getting very political, which was kind of cool, and so you know, there were resources for me there. So, even though it was kind of difficult, I only knew like one or two people that lived in Philly, but kind of got myself established, worked all kinds of odd jobs at first. My favorite one being at the time was, I made sandwiches in a gourmet deli in Downtown Philly, and I take pride in the fact that the place that I worked for, voted Best Hoagie in Philadelphia in 1973, which is no small accomplishment. And I got to make those hoagies every day. I mean it was, they did an amazing lunch business, and they actually put quality stuff in their sandwiches, but that was, again I digress, but you know, this is what you have to do to kind of like put food on the table and do your best. And in those days in Philly, I was sort of spending half my time in my male role, and half the time in my female role, trying to sort things out, and of course you know, if you're going to transition, you have to completely transition, so I was looking for a way to ditch the old identity and just be Sandy full time. And that opportunity came when I started a magazine. And you know, talk about hubris. You know, my friend and I in Philadelphia decided that we wanted to start a magazine for trans folx. And, you know we knew a half a dozen trans folx by that time, but you know, I worked on the school newspaper, I was good at writing could do a rudimentary lay out, and so we established Image Magazine, and it was a quarterly, and it was a grassroots, I typed it at home, you know we sent it over to the printing place a couple blocks away, got it back, fold it, collate it, stapled, mailed it, and it started taking off a little bit, and so that's sort of my entrance into the trans community and being an activist. So, we had articles from people all over the world, we published stuff that correspondence in England, and I got involved with the Transsexual Action Organization, which was, they were trying to establish chapters in major cities, they had started in Miami. Angela Douglas, who's a very controversial and fascinating person, if you ever get a chance to research this person, wow. She was obviously schizophrenic but managed to be a pretty ground-breaking trans activist. SO, for all the good and the bad, she accomplished something, but she was mean as a whoo! I probably shouldn't say that because, well, you know, Angela is gone and she's not likely to, but had I said this and if Angela was still alive, you could be sure she would find a way to kick my ass, so. Yeah. She was that way. She threatened everybody, so. And so, Mary I'm digressing again. Bring me back to home. MF: You're not digressing because this is all just fabulous. I have so many different questions that are popping around in my mind, and I'm wondering about this relationship between the community at Penn State, and then what you found in Philly, because you did say at Penn State that you were able, once you moved off campus, to really embrace Sandy, and so, was there a community there? What was the relationship between trans people and the gay community? And then, how did that small kind of State College area differ from what you found in Philly? SM: Good question, thank you. Yeah, it, Penn State did have a gay bar in those days. It was called the My Oh My, and it was I think on College Avenue. However, I was not able to take advantage of that because I actually graduated from Penn State the day after my 21st birthday. So, you know, I knew it was there, but I couldn't get in. And in those days, you know, given that it's a college town, they carded pretty universally, because they had a lot to lose. So, if you were under 21, you didn't get into a bar. So, I did not have that perspective, although I knew there were gay people around. I knew maybe about three or four gay and trans people at Penn State, but we were not a close-knit group in any means, and as a side story, when I was at Penn State, I worked for the Daily Collegian. I was a reporter for the daily student newspaper, and at that time they assigned me to cover the first homophile at Penn State. In those days they used the homophile terminology, and it was, homophiles of Penn State were HOPS. They were trying to get a charter from the administration at Penn State to organize, have meeting space, and be a recognized organization, and Penn State was having none of it. I know. And this was 1972, 1973, and I actually kept some of the articles I wrote about it. So, finally I think HOPS appealed to the Graduate Student Association, that was much more progressive, and they were able to do an end-around, but I think you can google that early history of Homophiles at Penn State and get a really clear picture of how hard it was. And you know, we're talking about, '72 is like three years past Stonewall, gay liberation was just starting to kind of get is wings, but again, Penn State you know, all said and done at that time, it was still a pretty conservative place. You know, you had a lot of agriculture majors, a lot of engineering majors, a lot of folks from the central parts of Pennsylvania, and so it was like this melting pot, but it was by no means a bastion of liberal thought. Although you had it, it wasn't pervasive. So, transitioning over to Philadelphia was like "Ooh!" You know, all of a sudden you know I was meeting trans people in the streets! You know, striking up conversation, like we would see each other at Rittenhouse Square. And so, all of a sudden in Pennsylvania at that time in Philly, the group that I was most associated with was called Radical Queens. And Radical Queens was really, really progressive. In fact, they were like into destroying the patriarchy and starting to view gender as non-binary before it was like cool to look at it that way, and so they were really kind of ahead of the curve. They did some, and I think Tommi Avicolli Mecca is still around. I think he lives in the Bay Area, but he was a driving force in that, and you know, I learned a lot from Tommi in the Radical Queens in Philly. We tried starting the first, it was called the Eromin Center in Philly, which was supposed to be like the first sit-in space, providing some level of services to the LBGT community. Eromin standing for Erotic Minority, E-R-O-M-I-N, and so that was kind of like the predecessor of the William Way Center, and the predecessor of the Mazzoni Center in Philadelphia. It was the fledgling efforts that we had made in the 70s to do something for health and such. So, it wasn't until you know I was in a large urban environment that I was able to actually blossom a little bit, and you know, tap into resources, and create resources. So, that was the fun part. MF: When you get to Philly, are you part of Radical Queens first before you start the publication? Or is it, is this all kind of happening at the same time? SM: (laughs) Yeah, I honestly can't remember. To my 69-year-old mind, it all kind of happened at the same time, although you know, had you asked me 20 years ago, I might have said, "Well this happened first, and this happened second." But it basically was kind of all, the connections, the synapses were happening so quickly, and so it was a great time to be an activist. Now, again, you know, Philadelphia, we think of it in you know 21st Century terms as a very liberal city, but you have to remember, when I lived there, the Chief of Police was Frank Rizzo, who later became Mayor, and he was not LBGT friendly. I mean, in Philadelphia while they tolerated it, you had to be very careful, because every time for instance, every time he'd run for office or you know, something was coming down, they'd raid the gay bars. And you know, it was just, so it was dicey. And I tell people, when I tell this to younger people, they just can't, they can't put their minds around this, but when I lived in Philadelphia, every time I went out the front door as Sandy, I was breaking the law. There were impersonation laws still on the books, so that if some random cop pointed to me on the street and I couldn't produce ID that was in line with my presentation, I got taken in. And it did happen, it did happen. I came close a couple times, but fortunately I never ended up in jail, but you could be arrested for just expressing your true gender, and you know, I can't begin to like impress upon young people how dicey that was in the day, and what a head trip it, you know, it played with you, you know. You had to kind of like scope out every move you were going to make, where you were going to go, who you were going to be with, and just sort of you were always on guard. You were always, you know, it was not great. And again, groups were advocating to change that kind of law, and you know we were flaunting it in some cases, so you know, I think eventually you know, they saw that that was really stupid. We all carried, those of us that were on hormones, we all carried like these little carry letters from our doctors saying this is why we were dressing this way and everything, they had no legal bearing, but you know it was like a little, I don't know, gave you a little sense of false security I suppose. I kept mine for a long time, I think I might still have it somewhere. Yeah, yeah. So. Again, so in Philly all this was sort of happening at the same time, I was making connections, I was getting out, you know, you had things happening socially and, in the media, you know the Rocky Horror Picture Show, you had Pink Flamingos. The first trans person I ever met was Elizabeth Coffey from that movie. I don't know if any of you remember the famous scene-- yes, yes, I won't describe it here because this is probably a family audience but let us just say that Elizabeth was pre-operative at the time, and kind of showed it. And so, she was a delightful, delightful person, and we became pretty good friends in Philadelphia. She had moved there after the movie came out and wow, she was just absolutely gorgeous, and had her head screwed on straight, and just gave me sage advice, and you know, I can't thank her enough. So, my magazine sort of came to the attention of Female Impersonator Magazine, and they were like the big ones, and they were trying to organize something called The United Transvestite Transexual Society. UTTS. And so, we all got our heads together, and Jack O'Brien, a cisgender male who was a former cartoonist, ran all these publications. And there were a slew of them, and some of them were pretty gross. And so, he offered me at first the use of his facilities to type-set, do camera work, and actually make my publication look a little more professional, and I on the other hand would write for him and do some photography and go out into the field, and cover some events in the day, and so we sort of, that kind of melded into like, "Hey, why don't you come work for me full time, and we'll put out all these publications together?" And so, that happened in like the late 70s, 74, 75. It gave me the opportunity to be Sandy 24/7. Qualified for surgery, and all that, and so that was like really how I kind of came on to the national scene as an editor and publisher of trans material at the time. MF: Can you talk a little bit about, what were you covering in the early years of that publication? What were the big articles, you know, what were the topics that really mattered to you as an editor and writer, and other writers that you were publishing? SM: There was a lot of self-help stuff. And I have to say, our bias in those days was mostly trans-women. Was basically, the trans-men started to emerge, but frankly our focus in those early days was mostly trans-women. So, a lot of self-help. How to do make up. How to, you know, what are the best hair removal methods. We started publishing lists of providers that you know would help people. Erotic fiction. I always said that you know my real forte was writing erotic fiction that could be read with one hand. Yeah. And so, a lot of that. The events that we would cover were things like drag balls, you know, which precede our, what is it called now? Culture... Drag culture... Ballroom culture, that's it. We covered the early drag balls, and those were kind of interesting. We covered occasionally conferences. There were early conferences, you know like the one in Massachusetts with Ariadne Kane, and this emerging kind of you know, serious discussion about transitions. We covered that sort of thing. I was covering Mardi Gras. I covered the first Fantasia Fair in Cape Cod. So, there was a lot to cover, and what I couldn't cover, we got people to send us stuff from like what was going on in the West Coast, and so it was just like gathering steam, and we were getting everything out there, it was amazing. So, I was kept kind of busy and you know, some of the stuff that I shot was like R-rated, sex, I would call it that. You know, we had strict guidelines as to what we could photograph and what we couldn't. You know, nudity was absolutely okay, but you couldn't have anything going into anything else, so that was a red flag no no, so we kind of like worked within those confines. And looking back on it, honestly, I'm kind of like, I cringe a little bit, because the quality is pretty crude by today's standards, but it was eye-opening in the day, and it was kind of like earth-shattering. Oh! Things like movie reviews, you know, I mentioned a couple movies. We did that. There was Dog Day Afternoon came out, we reviewed that. We tried to get an interview with the woman Liz whose story it was based on. I think we did. Book reviews. You name it. We covered it if we could find out about it. MF: I think as you were talking about you know the import of erotic fiction, the import of images, and yeah, they're in the 70s, but who cares about the crudeness of the technology, it's like, these are really important things to be publishing, they're important images to capture. Could you talk a little bit about why erotic fiction, why erotic images really mattered in that time period? Why that was a focus, along with the self-help, along with the conferences, along with political discussion, I imagine. Why did that matter? SM: Yeah, it mattered because we produced, it was kind of like a two-pronged thing, okay? So, we produced the magazines and the books, but we didn't distribute most of them. For that we went to Star Distributors in New York. Star Distributors was run by Italian families. And so, they sort of controlled the high-end printing presses and then distribution to adult bookstores, and through their mail order sales. And so, while we would produce content, if they decided not to distribute it, you know, so in order for them to get it into the stores to sell, you had to have the erotic content. So, they didn't mind that we packed it with other information at the time, so that was okay, the editorial content. And we always kind of did a fine line there. We always included something, because, not to digress even further, but at that time the Supreme Court handed down a decision regarding what was pornography and what was not pornography, and for instance that's why we didn't show actual penetrative sex, or anything like that. But the caveat was that as long as it had quote-unquote "redeeming social value," it wasn't pornography. And so, my job in part, was to provide the content that was meaningful social content: self-help, articles you know, and so that's how we had this meld of material. Now that being said, we did put out some stuff that was like not erotic, and basically more self-help and stuff, but we distributed that ourselves through mail order, because we didn't have restrictions in those days, and so you know, that's kind of how we maneuvered that whole thing. It was all about, and again, in the days before the internet and the days before desktop publishing, whoever had the printing presses and the means to distribute, called the shots. MF: That makes sense. I was thinking about, so there were, sort of the printing presses dictated some of the content. I was thinking about when I first saw, as a young lesbian, the On Our Back publication, how important that was to me as a reader. I wasn't thinking about, you know, like how other LGBTQ publications might have used erotic content based on you know what the publisher was requiring. But from a reader's perspective, I feel like those publications were ground-breaking, in a way because you just didn't see it anywhere. Even for myself, in the 90s, that's when I came out, was in the 90s, you know I just had no representation of the kind of eroticism that I was envisioning in my own head, so there's something so powerful about those publications to me as a reader, and I cannot wait to look at them, Sandy. I can't wait to kind of go into the archives and see some of the publications you were involved with. SM: Yeah, our biggest breakthrough was we actually did a newspaper, and it came out on an infrequent basis, but actually more frequent than anything else we did. It was called, and again, Female Impersonator News. And it was a tabloid publication, and a lot of, I should mention, a lot of what we did were personal ads, and you know, in those days, people trying to connect with each other, and you know, you got maybe a post office box and you placed an ad in a magazine like ours, you know maybe send a picture you described yourself, what you were looking for, and we would facilitate like forwarding mail, and that was a big part of what we did. And you know, we made money from that because, you know, it wasn't a lot of money, but it was like this steady little trickle of income, and so almost every publication we ever did had a personal ad section in it. And again, you know, I think it was you know, of course people trying to find each other for sex, but it was also building of a community that you know, that's what we were doing. And by the way, On Our Backs is one of the finest lesbian publications. I used to hang out at the bookstore waiting for the next issue to come out. I read that, you know, that was like, "Whoo!" Yes. Enjoyed that tremendously. That was a ground-breaking lesbian publication. They were not afraid to show erotic content in (inaudible). MF: Mm-hmm, yeah. Definitely. Well, I wonder if-- I felt the same way about that publication. (inaudible) right now. I wonder if you could, just reflecting back now, on the import of your work in publishing, in various formats, and in various roles, what do you, when you look back, what do you think were the major contributions of those publications? SM: Hmm. MF: I mean, I have some idea, but I'm just interested in you thinking about how, why did they matter? And I want, if you feel too humble, because you are so humble, you know you could just think about that publishing era, because there were other publications, other editors and writers that you were connecting with too, and like you were a part of that. What was the import of that kind of publishing arm that was both catering to trans communities, but also engaging in sharing information, medical information, the kind of self-help that you already talked about, and there's a political undertone there too, you know.SM: I, huh. I think it was, I don't know, just, I wasn't prepared for the outpouring of letters that I got. You know, and so like we had, we always had letters to the editor that you know we would publish if we thought there was something helpful in there. Certainly, we'd publish them if they were complimentary because you know we all like to be patted on the back and so you know, we loved the letters that say, "I love your publication! Can you come out more often," blah blah blah. But what weren't published were the heart-breaking ones, and I made it sort of like my personal mission to respond to them. And I got a lot of support from the folks at Neptune Productions that gave me the time and the space to respond to a lot. And you know, it was heart-breaking to read some of them, and some of them were very gratifying, and a lot of them were looking for help. And so, after a while, the flip side of the coin is you can get burned out from doing this. And after almost about a decade I think, I got tired of, you know, I got tired of being a "professional transexual." And so, by the late 1980s I had gotten a legitimate job. You know, all this publishing that I did in the trans community was great. It paid minimally, I was able to meet my immediate expenses, but I saw that it was not a future. And so, I think probably by 1978 I was working a full-time job, and then doing this on the side. And so, I kind of, I'm digressing again. So, the impact is the early days of the, we were a part of the overall early days of the Gay Liberation Movement, and I call it that because that's initially what we called it. And trans folx have always had an uneasy kind of relationship with the LBGT thing, you know. And you know, Mary you're a scholar of this, there are other peoples that are scholars of this early thing, and so I'm only talking from my perspective, personally. You know, when we came out, it was supposed to be Gay Liberation, and it was an umbrella term that was supposed to include everybody. And as we started to do this work, it started to faction. And you know, the lesbians said, "Well, we're not gay, we're lesbians and our issues are unique, because they're wrapped around gender as well as being gay, and it's, you know--" Then it became gay and lesbian. And then you know, then the bisexuals kind of came in at some point and say you know, "How about us? You know, we have our own unique needs," and so you had LBG, L-G-B, and so the letters got a little bit longer. And then trans kind of got in there even though trans people were part of the early Gay Liberation Movement, and actually spear-headed a lot of it, but then we were added on as a T on the end, and I always thought that was kind of like not an easy fit, because L-G-B kind of like talked about sexual preference, at least in my gestalt. So, they had that in common. But trans said nothing about you know sexual preference. It talked more about gender identity than anything, I suppose. And so, I always thought that was kind of an interesting but not great fit. And you know, those, there were early fights where the trans folx were kicked out of gay organizations, and you know trans folx were kicked out of the lesbian community, a lot of in-fighting. A lot of scrambling for our own turf, and so that part to me was very disheartening. And I think was partially the impetus for me to kind of like, by the 90s I was done. Especially when Janice Raymond published that horrible book called, yeah, The Transsexual Empire? I mean, I wanted to crawl under a rock and just say, "I'm not coming out ever again to anybody," and that's basically how I led my life for the next 20 years. You know? And I, and you know, we had discussions off-line where in the 1990s, late 19080s/1990s it was okay for me to tell my coworkers that I was a lesbian, but I never discussed the T thing with them, because it just wasn't you know there yet. So, I, you know, I don't know what my accomplishments were. Some people have said that you know I'm responsible for the term "transgender." I don't take credit for that. I know we published it early on, but I think Ariadne Kane was the person who actually coined the term rather than Virginia Prince, but you know, I'm not going to get into that argument. Certainly, I was part of the people that made it widely used, let's put it that way, through the publications. And I thought it was a great term, because it took the word "sex" out of it, and you know, there's a lot to be said for that. So, in my early years, I was a transsexual, but now I'm a transgender person. MF: You had started to kind of go into you moved out of publishing, Raymond's book comes out, that's kind of the end for you, but there were tensions before-hand, and burn out, frankly, from all of the emotional labor that goes into that. What happens with your career once you kind of, you take some of these publishing experiences, and then you take flight into a different you know, stage of your work life? SM: Yeah, so I parlayed what I learned about publication layout writing and everything and applied for a job at W.B. Saunders company in Philadelphia. And, W.B. Saunders was at that time, I think it still is, a large medical publishing company, and W.B. Saunders had one best seller in their whole career, and I think that was the Kinsey Report. Other than that, it was you know, a multitude of medical journals and books. And so, I became a proofreader. At first, I was a layout person, and then shortly after that I became a proofreader. I did that for a few years. And so, you know, people tell me about, you know, was it harder or easier to transition in those days. I think the one good thing about those days was that without the internet, it was easier to hide yourself. And so, I put down Neptune Productions and Image Magazine on my resume, but I guarantee you nobody checked that, you know? And it was just, you know, there were no large databases where they could look up Sandy Mesics and see her social media profile and everything. So, in that respect it was easier to kind of like maneuver your way through life, and I took every advantage of that. So, I work for W.B. Saunders for a few years, and then had an opportunity to work for a graphic arts company that produced books for various publishers at that time, and so I became what was called a markup person. And basically, what that is in today's terms is like an html coder. So, you know, in the early days of type setting, it wasn't what you see is what you get, you had to code everything in order to get the right font, point size, and things like that. I loved that work, and I did that work for quite a few years, eventually moving from a company in New Jersey to a graphic arts company in Miami. And so, you know, I wanted an adventure in my life, I didn't have a significant other at the time, and so I took a job in Miami, and it was interesting. And so, that took me into the 80s and 90s, and then what happened at that time was the internet, personal computer, desktop publishing, and it wasn't soon before I could see the end of my profession. You could see it almost like a headlight coming straight at you, you know that within a few years, this is going to be gone. It's all going to be gone. And then, coincidentally at the same time, AIDS was starting to hit our community, especially in Miami, and so I felt kind of helpless when my friends were starting to get sick. I couldn't do anything for them, and the other thing that happened at the time was I met the acquaintance of my now spouse, and her colleagues who were all registered nurses, and certified nurse midwives and I said, "Do you think I could do this work? You think?" You know, and they said, "Yeah, you know, you'd probably be pretty good at it." And so, I went back to school. And I, in 1992 I graduated from Barry University which is a small Catholic school in Miami Shores, Florida with a bachelor's degree in nursing. A BSN. And, ironically, even though I did get my nursing degree, I never actually gave HIV care. It was peripheral to what I did. I occasionally did it, but it wasn't the focus of my career. And then I became a nurse, and even at that point occasionally I would write for publications, and at that time I was writing sometimes under a pseudonym, but sometimes under my real name, I was writing for like the Transsexual Voice, I was writing for Empathy Press in Seattle. If I had something to say. And I really enjoyed it that way, because I wasn't writing under deadlines, I wasn't trying to produce tons of content. If I had something to say that I thought was useful, I'd submit it, and more often than not it was published, and that's how, you know I think I finally stopped getting published around 92, 93. And then became pretty much a professional nurse, and then eventually a certified nurse midwife. MF: I love that description of like, "Oh, then I could do it when I really wanted to say something and take my time and really craft that piece." You, I want to hear more about what the move into nursing meant for you, as a worker, how did you experience that career in nursing? So, I want to go there first, but then you've also mentioned your spouse, and maybe we can do a little discussion of some personal life which we haven't talked about yet. But tell me a little bit about why nursing, and what the career really meant for you. SM: You know, nursing I truly believe, after all you know, it's a cliché, but you know but nursing is basically a calling. And I had considered it briefly sometime in the 1970s and went, "Oh no, there's no way I can do that. Just no way." But revisiting it as a more mature woman, I was 40 years old, I had some life skills, some organizational skills, and then the timing was right, because I had the tool kit to be able to do that. I couldn't have done that at age 21, and I certainly admire the students that I taught that had their crap together at age 21 to be able to do this, because I certainly didn't. So, it's honestly the best professional move I made in my career. Nursing has been fulfilling on so many levels. You know, I can't begin to describe you know the personal fulfillment I got from just doing my job. Helping babies come into the world, you know, helping tragedies sometimes as a result. Being able to educate young nurses, and being able to you know, administer a school that is the oldest nursing school in the United States, to be the director of that school for 15 years, and produce thousands of talented young people that are entering the workforce, that will have an impact on health care for the next generation, it's like wow! I mean, it's overwhelming. That really is the fulfillment, you know. I kind of lost the rest of the thought. Interestingly enough, for me, entering the nursing career was, nursing is still largely women. And I had never worked in an almost all-female environment before, and so at 40 years old, entering this environment, you know, I was very kind of like attuned to like, okay, let me get the lay of the land here and how this works. And unfortunately, what I really, I came away with, was that women can be really mean to each other sometimes, and I didn't expect that. You know, I expected like this sisterhood, and we all pull together, and it's like, holy crap! You guys are nasty! And so, I had to kind of like wrap my head around that for a while, and you know, the theory is that you know women are generally, at that time at least, I don't want to make any broad generalizations, but like, when people are put in powerless situations, and certainly nursing is not like at the top of the power chain, there's a lot of in-fighting. And so, you could actually see that, and you know honestly, to be honest with you, I think nursing as a profession would benefit from more gender diversity. More men, more gender-diverse people. And I think that's happening, I think that's happening and I think it's to the benefit of the profession, honestly. It's going to push us forward, I think, because you know, I wasn't too impressed with you know what I saw at first. It was kind of disheartening. I guess I expect too much from women. You know, my psychologist always said that I kind of idealized them in some ways. So, yeah. Segueing into the other question, I always knew that I was attracted to women, even as a kid, and boy that was confusing. You know, so like I want to, you know I am a woman, I want to be a woman, but I love women, and you know, so that was really hard. And you know, I will credit the fact that I had a psychiatrist in our gender identity program in Philadelphia that really tuned into my naivety about that. I was, I think I was 22 or 23 years old when I entered therapy, as part of the gender, you know you had to do, you know I had to do I think a minimum of six months to a year of psychoanalysis in those days, and I was blessed with really a great psychiatrist. He knew that I was kind of sexually naïve at the time. I had had minimal experiences with women and no experiences with guys at that time, and he says, "You just need to explore this." SO, you know, with his encouragement, you know, I started to explore my sexuality, and I started to explore experiences with both genders, and you know, those were the days where things were much simpler. It was pre-HIV days. You know, if you were not cautious, you know, you might have to go get a shot of penicillin to clear up something, you know. So, you know, it was a lot easier in those days, and as a result, a lot of us were more promiscuous you know probably than we should have been, in retrospect. But so, like he made me explore that aspect of my personality, I think he wanted to be sure that I wasn't gay and you know just couldn't accept the fact that I was gay, and was trying to (inaudible) being gay by becoming you know a different gender, and of course that didn't happen. I remember telling him, you know, at one of our first visits, you know, I'm attracted to women, and I don't see that changing after surgery. And to his credit, he didn't throw me out of the office, he just said, "Let's explore that," and we did, we worked on it. And so, he would send us to conscious raising groups, back when women had conscious raising groups, back then he'd send us to that. You know, he was really, really progressive, and I came out at the other end basically unchanged. I can say that probably my experiences made me a little bit more bisexual, but definitely a preference for women. In my serious relationships in life, almost exclusively been with women. I've been with my current spouse now for 30 years. Yeah. (laughs) We were one of the first same-gender couples in Pennsylvania to get a marriage license. I think-- not like the first dozen, I think we were within the first 100 or 150, so. You know, I'm kind of proud of that. And so, that covers most of what you asked me, I think. What did I leave out? MF: Would you be willing to tell me how you fell in love? How you met and what your story is there when you met your spouse? SM: Yeah, sure! My spouse and I met in 1985, in Miami. At that time, she was just graduating from the University of Miami's master's degree in Nurse Midwifery, and she at that time was exploring her own lesbianism. She had just, she was just emerging from a marriage, and was finally, finally I guess starting to learn her truth, and so we met, and we were friends. I had a different partner at the time, and she was just exploring being a lesbian, and coming out, with a couple kids, and trying to navigate a new job, and a new role as a nurse midwife, and so we stayed friends. So, we were friends from about 1985 to 1991, and by that time I had ended my relationship, and she had ended her first couple relationships with women. And we just sat down one night, and you know, we acknowledged the fact that we were attracted to each other. We had known each other for about six years at that point. We were both single at the same time, finally, and do we risk having a really good friendship for having a relationship? And that was the big discussion. You know, it's like, we're such good friends, are we going to screw this up? Because we don't want to screw that up. And so, we decided to embark on this, so I wish I could tell you that it was passionate, sudden, and the heavens opened, and the angels sang and the whole nine yards, but it was really a very rational (laughs) discussion that you know, you know, we acknowledged this, that we had this for each other, but you know, should we do this? And so, and I've never regretted it, and so. And then, ironically, a few years later when I entered the master's program at University of Miami, Sara, my spouse, was my instructor for one of my nurse midwifery courses. And we had already discussed this with the Dean, and the Dean was aware of our relationship, and we took very good steps to be sure that there were no improprieties. Sara could teach me, but she couldn't grade any of my work, and so that's how it worked out, so the rest is history. MF: So, can I ask a quest-- this is a fantastic story. Rational love story, but I can see all over your face that there was also a lot of passion and love there, as you transitioned from friends to, it's a fabulous story. Could you talk a little bit about, before-- I do want to move through your married life, and then how you come back to the Lehigh Valley, but I want to just-- with your spouse-- I want to put that on hold for a minute, and just ask you, what was it like to be a lesbian and a transwoman? Either, even while you were meeting your spouse, or while you were dating. What was that like to be part of a lesbian community at that time period in Miami, or even up in Philly? What was that like for you as a transwoman? SM: I had my first, what I would call serious relationship with a woman probably in Philadelphia in 1978 or so, and we were together for four or five years, and so in that aspect, you know, one of the big discussions among trans people is entering a relationship, do I disclose my trans status? And I think, I think it's a little bit easier maybe now than it was then, and that was really, where do you sort of disclose the fact that you're trans to a potential partner? And you know, I wrestled with that myself, because you know, as part of my work with my psychiatrist, I dated some men, and I did not disclose that until, you know, maybe there was intimacy on the scene. And then at that point, we had to have The Talk. Sometimes that went well, and sometimes it didn't go well, and you know as well as I do, that sometimes for people that talk ends in violence, and so the stakes are very high, and you're very careful about you know, who you disclose to, at least in those days. I can't speak to the situation nowadays. I suspect it's similar. I guess, I guess I was lucky in that the women that I was attracted to and had relationships with accepted that part of me. It was weird, I can remember (laughs) there's a joke in the lesbian community that you may have heard of. It's, "What do lesbians bring on the first date?" "A U-Haul." Yup. I met my partner, my first partner of 4 years, my first night in a women's bar in Philadelphia. Yeah. I was, you know, first of all I was dressed inappropriately. I'd come from work, it was a great bar, it was called The Upstairs, and it was like in Philly on the waterfront, by the Delaware River, and you know, it was a beautiful place. Great dance floor. Music. The whole nine yards. All women. Loved it, loved it. My first night there, she came over and asked me to dance, and asked, you know we had drinks, and you know so we started dating, and you know, I don't remember exactly when I disclosed, but it was pretty early on, and so again. That was a four-year relationship, it confirmed everything I always thought about my sexuality. We still stay in touch. So, then again, I went through a period where you know I was just like running amuck, sexually. And so, it was, you know, (laughs) I always say that, you know, trans people you're given, you're finally given the set of organs that you should have had, and you know, you've got these hormones coursing through your body, and so what do all transwomen do? Is like, once they start this journey, they start dressing totally inappropriately for their age. You know, the spike heels to go to the Wegman's store, and the whole nine yards, and I did all of that. You know, and so you're trying this out, you're basically an adolescent in an adult body for a while, and you know, all kinds of weird stuff happens. So, after that relationship ended, I dated around for a few years. Nothing was happening, that's when I moved to Miami. I had again took up with another partner who was lesbian, ten years younger than me. That was kind of culture shock. Again, not an issue for her. I will tell you an interesting story about that relationship, when I met her, she had long blond hair, really attractive, nice, you know. I introduced her at one point to a trans guy that was my friend from Philadelphia, he came down the visit, and Jason came to see us, and my partner at that time, Sally, was like, the eyes went, and so the next thing, he goes back home, she comes home with a short butch haircut, and she starts wearing polo shirts, and it's like "Wait a minute!" So, I can't tell you how unsettling that was for a trans person all of a sudden understand that the person that you're with is exploring a transition. That blindsided me, and so like, kind of like every bad deed that I ever did in my life sort of came home and hit me in the face at the same time, and I'm going, "How do I wrap myself around this? How many times has a person like myself put another person in that position?" It's kind of like, well, you know, eventually she kind of like kind of tabled that transition idea. We broke up. But all during that time I was friends with Sara, my current spouse, so Sara knew my past, my background, everything like that, so that was not something that we had to hack out upon starting the relationship. So, did I answer your question properly, or? I'm (inaudible) something. MF: Yeah, you did. You did. So, tell me a little bit about, you're in Miami, you're dating Sara, your career is moving along in nursing. Then what happens (laughs)? What's the next part of your life there? SM: Okay. So, that pretty much brings us up to the year 2000. And what is happening at that time is Sara is working in a clinic in Broward County, and is not real happy with her job situation. They're asking them to do a lot with a little, and you know, a lot of pressure. The practice, the OBGYN practice that I was working in, was breaking up. We had I think five OBGYNs at that time and myself, and they were all feuding with each other, and you know, they were splitting off and breaking up the practice, and all of a sudden, I was finding myself without a job. And so, coincidentally at that same time, my mom who had stayed in Bethlehem, was now in her 80s, and was starting to have some serious health issues. And so, even though I promised myself way back in 1969 that I would never come back to the Lehigh Valley, yeah. I relocated here first. So, I took a job for one year doing locum tenens work, which is like a traveling nurse, a traveling nurse midwife, and I was able to get assignments in Baltimore, Philly, and Northern Virginia. And so, I was traveling about, doing that, trying to figure out how to support my mom, and what the next steps were. Sara was remaining in Florida, so for about a year, we were kind of separated by this until we could sort it all out. So, my mom wasn't getting any better, so we made the decision to relocate to Bethlehem to support her. So, Sara quit her job, and moved up here, and I was already here. I had found a house, we bought a house, and then a job opened up at St. Luke's for an instructor in maternal-newborn nursing. And so, I took the job, and Sara eventually found a job at that time with the Visiting Nurses Association, and so we sort of settled down. And the timing was impeccable, because we settled around 2000, 2001, and my mom died in 2002, and we were able to give her a great, great quality of life for her last two years. I mean, she just blossomed. You know, we brought her to our house and had Thanksgiving, we spent, I would go to work every day and drop my Jack Russell terrier off, and she'd babysit the dog all day long, and it added to her life, it added to my life. I had a wonderful relationship with my mom for the last couple years of her life. Don't regret it for a second. And I was holding her hand when she passed away in her own bed, at home, with the care of home nurses. So, at that time, we sort of thought we would stay in the Lehigh Valley and see my mom through this final illness, and then we would go to California to take care of Sara's mom who was also ailing at that time, but what happened was Sara's mom decided to die before we could make that trip happen, that move happen, and so we stayed here. We stayed in the Lehigh Valley because we both had jobs we liked, and as we said early on in this long conversation, the Lehigh Valley had become a different place, a more accepting place, a kind of nice quality of life for us. Sara was really burned out from the Miami experience, and I was getting there pretty quickly. The crime was pretty bad, and congestion was terrible. And so, that's why we're back here, and that's why we stayed. And now we have grandkids that have moved to this area to be close to us, so you know, we've come full circle. MF: Tell me a little bit about, you said that your relationship with your mother at the end of her life was wonderful. And clearly, because you and Sara could be there, and provide excellent quality of life for her for the last two years, I mean what a beautiful gift for a daughter to give. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship and its evolution throughout your life with your mom? SM: As I said, way in the background, even though my mom was born in the United State, she basically grew up in Hungary, and then moved back to the States. And she had basically the equivalent of a grade school education, I don't think, she didn't have high school. And so, when she came back to the United States, it was like, learning English for her was like, she had to learn it all over, because she left at such an early age, that I don't think it was established. So, my mom could read and write at a basic level, she could manage herself through reading a newspaper or something like that, but you know, would never read a book. I don't think my mom ever read a book. So, she struggled to write checks and handle things and you know, that's where we provided that kind of support the best we could. When I was very young, I mean, I cross-dressed in front of my mom, and you know, she was concerned at the point I think in high school (laughs) when I was doing it, she was concerned for me. And you know, she was not condescending, she wasn't angry with me for doing it, but she thought I needed help. And she said, "You know, if you continue doing this, I think we need to take you to the family doctor." And like, I was a teenager, and I already knew what that meant in those days. What we were afraid of was you know, being transgender, transsexual, whatever have you, in those days was a pathology. And even the most enlightened doctors would probably send you to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist would probably order electroshock treatments. And that scared the bejeezus out of me. You know, it was like there was no way I was going to discuss this with a family doctor, so basically my cross-dressing went under cover, and mom didn't see it ever again, although it never stopped. And so, we sort of like pushed that under the table, and but, by the time I started hormones, she could see that something was changing, even though I hadn't discussed it with her. And so, my plan was to tell her right before my surgery, which probably in retrospect is a bad thing, you know? So, like, remember, I was 22, 23 years old, and you know didn't always make the best life decisions at those times. So, what happened was, I was, I had finished my time with the psychiatrist in Philadelphia, was coming back to see my mom, you know I'd come back weekends, I actually there was a train that would take you from Philly to Bethlehem in those days, I'd ride the train every once in a while. I'd come and see her, but we never talked about that until I got the clearance for surgery, and I actually had a surgery date scheduled that was about, I don't know, maybe a month out. And so, I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to have to have this discussion with my mom. Well, what ensued was, 14 days before my scheduled surgery, I came down with Hepatitis B. Yup. And I've written about this experience, so you're going from somebody who has been on hormones for a couple years, I had completed my psychiatric workup, everybody said yes, you're ready for the surgery, you know, go meet the surgeon, okay, did that, had the date set. I had some misgivings about it, believe it or not. I didn't hit it off with the surgeon. I thought he was cold, I thought he was, you know, I didn't know why he was doing this because it didn't seem he was doing it for any compassion for the patient, so despite that, it was, okay, you know, I'm going to go through with this, and you know, I'm not sure about this guy, but whatever. And then I got sick, and because of the sickness, I had to go off hormones for a year. No alcohol for a year. No surgery for a year. And the worst part of it was, I had to have help recovering, because I was pretty sick. They didn't hospitalize me, but you know, I was... And so, I went back home to mom. And I was, like I said, I was about 22, 23 years old, and she took care of me while I was sick, and I recovered, and that's when we started having discussions about what I was doing with my life. And her first comment was, "I knew it!" You know, yeah. "I knew this hadn't gone away." You know, and so, yeah, that's true, and so she was very concerned about, you know, I would have to have surgery, was I doing the right thing, had I really thought it through. You know, the usual things a mom would be concerned about. But she was never non supportive of me, and she told me that unconditionally this didn't matter, you know, she still loved me, that in her way of putting it, she said, "I wouldn't love you any less if you were diabetic, I wouldn't love you any less if, you know, you had asthma or anything. Why would this change anything?" And so, it didn't. And so, she was supportive, and eventually I was able to recover, and but it was one of the lowest points in my life, and you know, I had considered suicide many times in my life, that was certainly one of them. I can't imagine, I can't begin to tell you, you know, number one you're ill, number two you're coming off hormones. And you know, all that good work and changes started to reverse, and you know, it was horrible, and then finally, you know, I was able to get back on track. But the good part of this is things always happen for a reason, and in that year that I was kind of like recovering from this, I found a different surgeon, and I found a surgeon in New York City, his name was Dr. David Wesser, he's passed away since then, and the thing that I liked about Dr. Wesser was that he had a technique that created a clitoris. Which wasn't necessarily what you got in those days with anybody else. And so, you know, hoping to remain as a, be as authentic as possible and at least have some semblance of a sex life, I went with him, and I never regretted that decision, and he truly was a compassionate human being. So, a few months after the surgery, I took my mom by the hand and took her in the bathroom, we had the grand reveal, she was like amazed and you know, she took me out shopping for clothes! And, so, you know, I think my mom probably, while she was, she was very accepting of me, I think she still had confusion to the end of her days about why it was that I stayed with women, but she was not opposed to that, and in fact she loved Sara to death, and you know, she told me to take care of her, and she told Sara to take care of me, and so we've done that, and you know, she, I couldn't have asked for a better mom. MF: She sounds wonderful. A really special mom. SM: Hey, could she bake! Ah. She wasn't a great cook, but boy could she bake. MF: Well, and I bet, in terms of like all of the good kind of Hungarian, Windish, you know for that Windish church, I bet she baked a lot of wonderful pastries. SM: A lot of kiffles. Tons of kiffles. MF: Well, I'm wondering what it's like for you now to be in the Lehigh Valley, and you said it's changed a lot. What's changed here for you? What makes the Lehigh Valley a place where you and Sara can live happily at this point in your lives? SM: As I said, think the industries are, not to say industries, but the professions in like the learning institutions, the medical care brings a more professional kind of class of people. I'm sorry, I'm sounding elitist there, and I don't mean that by any means, but it's a place that's culturally rich now, where it hadn't been before. You know, we have world-class music. You know, if you're not getting culturally fulfilled in the Lehigh Valley, you're not trying, you're hiding. And that's part of what I enjoy about it. We enjoy movies, we enjoy theater. You know, we'll enjoy being able to do those things again. You know, we enjoy reading, and so we enjoy intellectual stimulation. We're both involved in the life of our faith community, and so, that's all there. You know, the crime isn't horrible in the Lehigh Valley. You know, we do have our issues, but it's not like an urban center like Miami. So, there's that. So, there are things to do, there's a quality of life. I do believe it's getting a little bit kind of congested, and honestly, I'm not crazy about all the trucking hubs going in all over the place. I think that's kind of impacting our quality of life a little bit, but certainly as you view life as a senior, you know you're looking at things like, what is my support as I get older? You know, and we do have good medical and social supports in this Lehigh Valley right now. As far as LGBT in the Lehigh Valley, it's come a long way. When I was growing up here, I didn't know any gay or trans people. You know, I knew a couple in high school, not trans people, but gay people in high school, but it was all very hush-hush. You didn't talk about it. You know, and that's changed. You have groups like Renaissance that have arisen, the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, and so you know, it's a good place to be gay, the Lehigh Valley. Or be gender-variant or something. I mean there are, I assume there are better places, but taken as a whole, it's not so bad. MF: Yeah, I totally, we moved here in 2009, and even since 2009 I've noticed changes in the Lehigh Valley in terms of community center and a variety of different groups. Yeah. Well, we're getting towards the end of our time, and so I want to give you an opportunity to, is there something we missed that you feel, Sandy, like, "Oh, I really wanted to share this," or "this is something that I want people to know about my life." Did we miss anything? SM: You know, I really don't think so. It's been a long, strange journey for me, and I get kind of embarrassed when people say, you know, "You're a pioneer!" And it's like you know, no, not really. I mean, there were people before me, and you know, they laid the groundwork, but I think we're all building for each other, eventually, and you know I was proud to play my little part in this, in advancing the community, so. I think if anything, I am so hopeful for the future. When I see young non-binary kids not afraid to express their gender identity, not having to buy, you know, one or the other, you know, gender is everything in between, and that's okay, it's like wow! When I see, when I see the advances that we've made in treating transgender issues, and gender issues, in adolescence, you know, it gives me hope that these kids won't have to go through the wrong adolescence, which is devastating. Devastating. That gives me hope. I know there's a lot of push-back now about, you know, the ethics of doing this, but I think once that cat is out of the bag, and I think it is, they'll work out the details about the ethics. This will be not an issue. I know, you know, if anything, the last few years have taught me is that our political system is a lot more fragile than I thought it was growing up, you know, and I thought, I thought the United States had weathered some pretty significant storms in its day, but I was not prepared for 2016, 2020. And so, I think, I think that's the issue of our day, even more than COVID. You know, where is the United States going as a nation? And I think why I think about that is how it goes will have an impact on trans people, and LBGT people as well. I'm watching what's going on in Texas as we speak, you know. Everybody getting on the bandwagon about these you know, anti-abortion, anti-choice things, and I'm very much for choice, and that distresses me a lot. You know, I remember vaguely what it was like before Roe vs. Wade, and even with Roe vs. Wade, as a nurse, I took care of patients that had botched self-induced abortions, just because they didn't have access to care, and that concerns me a lot. So, I think it's a mixed bag, but I'm an eternal optimist I think, you know, and I think we will prevail in the long run, and we'll work it out. And you know, I'm not done advocating just yet. So. I think that's all I had to add. MF: Well, I'm going to think about this interview probably for the next month and thereafter. This has been amazing. Sandy, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I wanted to end the interview, maybe this will be a strange way to end it, but just to ask you know, all of your work on the publications, have you found an archive home for that? Is there someplace where that material can be accessed? SM: I don't have a lot of it. You know, I had kept a collection of my work and eventually threw it out thinking there was no value to it. Yeah. I have a little bit of it, I'm trying to catalogue it now, and I'm hoping to donate it to an archive somewhere, so if you have good suggestions, I'm open to that. You can find a little tiny bit of it on the Digital Transgender Archives. Yeah, there's a little bit there. If you google my name, a few things show up in that context, but I do, you know, now that I'm finally pretty much retired, the next part of what I'm hoping to accomplish is to catalogue that stuff and get it to somebody who wants to do something with it. I did send a little bit of stuff to a trans archive in Houston, and honestly, you know, I don't even have any print copies of Image anymore. You know, I have digital copies, but that's about it. But you know I hope to actually preserve that. I have a lot of negatives from drag balls and things like that that I covered during the days that I hope will get a home somewhere. MF: Yeah, I mean, those are I think the Digital Archives that you mentioned are really important. There are ways that, since your materials I think are so important, that you can donate them to a specific home, a trans archive that you really care about, but you could also say, "I'd also like these materials, or copies of them, to be at William Way." Because they have incredible archives, and you are certainly so important to Philadelphia's history. You could certainly have copies put at our archives here in the Lehigh Valley, you're from here. I even think the Lesbian Herstory's Archive would love your material. SM: (laughs) MF: So, you could think about, "Where is the place that I want to have the physical materials?" And you could work out a contract that says, "Okay, you get the physical materials, but I want them to be digitally available at other places, maybe even Miami, in communities that I really contributed to," so that those communities also have access to a real for-mother in publishing and you know, and someone who is really important to multiple regions. I always think about, for me regional archives matter because it's important to know that someone like Sandy Mesics came from the Lehigh Valley, and contributed really in important ways to publishing, to trans communities in Philadelphia, and those publications kind of move out everywhere. You are so humble, but that really matters. That you were a nurse, that you were, you know all of these ways that your archives can be connected to those communities that you really impacted, I think would be very powerful, and of course I would love to see-- I have not seen the publications that you put out, I'd love to see them. SM: We will, we'll arrange that somehow. MF: Okay, that would be fabulous. Well, I will then-- that was a weird way to kind of move to the ending, I apologize, Sandy. I just think like, I want to see these negatives of your photographs and read your early articles. But I'll end by saying this. I just feel so honored to have had the opportunity to talk with you today. It is a true privilege. I'm just sitting in gratitude, so thank you so much. SM: Thank you, Mary. I am astounded that you have an interest in this and thank you for letting me ramble on for so long, and I hope somewhere down the line some researcher finds something of interest in here. MF: I know they will. I know they will. SM: (laughs) MF: All right, I'm just going to pause the record and then you and I can close out together. Thanks again, Sandy. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:46:10 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sandy Mesics, October 11, 2021 Description An account of the resource Sandy Mesics describes her childhood, growing up in Bethlehem, PA; her reflections on Bethlehem Steel, including her father’s employment with the company and working-class steel communities; and her experiences as young transwoman trying to find information in tabloids and books about other transgender people. She discusses her enrollment at Penn State as a physics and later a psychology major; her anti-Vietnam war activism; her gender dysphoria during college; and her journey toward gender affirmation with support from the Erickson Foundation and a doctor in Philadelphia. Moving to Philadelphia after college because of the large LGBTQ community, Sandy started Image Magazine, worked with Transsexual Action Committee, the Radical Queens, and Eromin Center; in addition, she built a relationship with publishers of Female impersonator Magazine and ultimately worked with publishers to produce articles and publications for transgender readers, beginning 1974-1975. Sandy then describes using her work in publishing to gain employment with W.B. Saunders, a graphic arts company, and as an html coder. Toward the end of the interview, Sandy describes living in Miami, training to be a nurse, becoming a nurse midwife, and meeting her wife. The interview concludes with Sandy’s discussion of moving back to Bethlehem to care for her mother and finding a job at St. Luke’s, training others in maternal-newborn nursing. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-13 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-10-11 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/5f85dcc744254cf4fe144d78965f26c5.png 2997915d1fdc6b32b0635e884138d92a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 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 Sarah Trimmer OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_30.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 July 27, 2020 Sarah Trimmer, July 27, 2020 PH40_30 01:15:27 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) Sarah Trimmer Liz Bradbury video/mpeg TrimmerSarah_20200727_video.mp4 1.0:|25(11)|48(2)|81(7)|112(16)|139(11)|166(12)|187(13)|212(9)|237(13)|262(3)|283(7)|310(9)|335(7)|356(12)|377(9)|402(8)|425(16)|452(5)|475(4)|500(9)|523(6)|546(3)|565(9)|586(3)|603(8)|624(14)|649(4)|672(15)|695(18)|722(3)|745(13)|772(9)|795(5)|822(5)|853(2)|882(6)|907(3)|924(13)|945(12)|966(4)|989(7)|1010(2)|1029(8)|1048(8)|1075(5)|1098(4)|1119(7)|1142(4)|1169(6)|1192(2)|1215(18)|1240(7)|1265(10)|1290(8)|1313(16)|1338(10)|1363(2)|1386(3)|1409(7)|1428(10)|1453(2)|1476(16)|1505(5)|1530(9)|1553(4)|1576(3)|1601(4)|1628(11)|1653(11)|1676(8)|1699(10)|1730(4)|1753(3)|1774(15)|1807(11)|1822(5) 0 https://youtu.be/Ti8AKoS5pYQ YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction LIZ BRADBURY: -- and because actually it’s not even six thirty but let’s go for it. I also have an audio recorder because I’m paranoid and anyway with this. So all right, actually with good reason because I did a whole interview and there were some problems with the person’s camera and stuff, and it turned out that it didn’t work at all. I mean the whole ninety minutes, but luckily, I did the audio tape of it and since their camera wasn’t working well anyway, their projector. So I still had because I couldn’t imagine asking this person to do the whole thing again. Okay, so I’m going to read you this information, I want to turn my phone off first I’m going to do that.&#13 ; &#13 ; SARAH TRIMMER: I think I already did.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yes, I did all that stuff so we’re recording. Okay, so with this project Bradbury Sullivan LGBT community center of 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 Sarah Trimmer to talk about her experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT community archive. So we’re meeting on Zoom on Monday July 27th and thank you so much for your willingness to speak with us today, so can you please first of all state your full name and spell it?&#13 ; 0 238 Being able to live with family during the pandemic LB: So where you have been in your house and I know that you’ve been working but who is in the home with you?&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: My wife, who is also named Sarah, we’ve been married for six years, together for about eight. And my cousin is also here with us, he’s about the same age as us. Then we’ve got three dogs and a cat.&#13 ; 0 269 Managing a bed and breakfast during the pandemic/Local colleges' Covid-19 protocols LB: So you’ve been working so tell us a little bit about what you do and what your employer is and stuff like that.&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: So I manage a bed and breakfast and I just landed this job at the end of last year with big huge plans to take it to the next level and then boom global pandemic. So when we were told that we had to shut down we were considered an essential business for lodging, but you know the majority of B&amp ; B guests are recreational, so they don’t -- a lot of cancellations came through. 0 644 Communicating with friends and work colleagues through Zoom LB: So it sounds like you’ve been communicating a lot with phones and people that way, have you done video chats with people or have you been doing that with your family or what do you think about that?&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: My friends I saw other people were getting together with their friends on Zoom calls and I was like I don’t know if I’m going to like that, it’s weird, like I’m so used to being around my friends face to face, so we tried it one night and we had a freaking blast. 0 751 The severity of the flu epidemic of 1918 and its effect on the Lehigh Valley ST: I think about the you know a hundred year ago flu they didn’t have all this what did they do.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: No, I’m glad you’ve got that out because I love to talk about the flu epidemic of 1918, because I think it’s really an interesting comparison. It was far more terribly dangerous. Young people died, fifty million people died, my grandmother died in that flu epidemic and she was thirty-two years old, my father was four and his sister was seven. 0 964 Thoughts on Dr. Rachel Levine LB: So we’re lucky in our LGBT community because we get to watch Dr. Rachel Levine who is part of our community. What do you think about seeing Dr. Levine on -- have you seen her talking about the--?&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: Yes a lot of times when I was, when I had to be at work a lot of down time when there’s only one or two guests so I watched the briefing, I watched Cuomo’s and I would watch Wolf’s almost every day, I was really hot and heavy on it in the beginning. And I guess I never paid attention to who our secretary of health was, I didn’t know, I’m just watching this amazing -- and I really like her. 0 1153 Biggest concern during pandemic and its effect on the LGBT community LB: What's your biggest concern during the pandemic and what’s your biggest concern for that matter for the LGBT community?&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: Personally, I am very concerned about getting it. I have survived breast cancer twice and as a result of the radiation treatment I endured the second time I’ve developed a bunch of nodules around my lungs, they’ve sort of diagnosed it as sarcoidosis, but they don’t really know. 0 1295 Not personally knowing anyone who has caught Covid-19/Reaching out to isolated friends and family LB: Do you know anybody that’s had it or that’s been affected by it?&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: Relatives of friends, so no-one that I’ve actually known personally, thank goodness. And someone that I know lost his mom to it so that was pretty devastated, but I’ve also known some younger people that bounce back and they have full recoveries, but no-one really close to my inner circle.&#13 ; 0 1456 Social distancing-Covid protocols at bed and breakfast LB: For you yourself I know you have to work, and you have to be around people, and you have to tell people that they have to be careful. Have you had any problems with people that have stayed there that didn’t want to wear a mask?&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: No, the guests have been great. I did have an issue with a staff member, so we just went separate ways, it is what it is. I have people in my family that are definitely in support of the current administration and think that masks are not useful, so that’s hard to move past. 0 1555 Socializing during the pandemic LB: For you I mean besides going to work and having to deal with folks that are potentially like that when you have downtime and I don’t know if you have any free time, but if you have free time are you going out? We know a lot of people who are going out and we think for me I’m thinking what the heck are you doing.&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: Yeah, so Sarah and I we love our community, downtown Easton, we were there a lot, she worked as a bartender and a server for many years down there, now she sells cars but so many of our friends are down there, that was like what we did, we really enjoyed being social. 0 1668 Watching movies about lesbians to pass the time ST: The other thing that we did to pass the time so Sarah found this list online I want to say maybe it was on like Autostraddle or something and it was a list of one hundred and twenty lesbian movies and so she’s like we’re going to power through this, we have all this downtown. 0 2243 Frustration with government messaging/frustration over President Donald Trump in general LB: So what’s the biggest frustration you’re having right now?&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: I think the lack of consistent messaging from the government being I don’t even like saying who is up there behind a podium touching the microphone and not wearing a mask and the next person, like you lead best by example. 0 2391 Feeling safe being openly bisexual in the Lehigh Valley, despite living under the Trump presidency ST: I try really hard just to focus on our own bubbles, you know the Lehigh Valley has a lot of great things, Bradbury Sullivan Center being one of them, we’re progressive, I feel safe walking on the street holding hands with my wife in our community and the other areas of the Lehigh Valley, I’m very grateful for that. 0 2426 Discussing Black Lives Matter/being anti-racist at a young age/thoughts on policing and police reform ST: [...] I mean the civil unrest that we have happening right now, the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s hard to just--&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: I’ve asked everybody to talk about Black Lives Matter if they want to, so do you want to talk about that for a little while go ahead and say some stuff.&#13 ; 0 2681 Finding positives during the pandemic/having more free time LB: So you’ve already talked about being worried about getting the virus and taking a lot of precautions to avoid that. What’s the best thing that you’ve really experienced so far, what’s giving you hope now, and I think you were talking a little bit about young people marching, that’s one of the things that gives me hope.&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: Yes, I think I’m realizing that there’s more channels to communicate with each other. Seeing the global pollution go down has been something I’ve been -- you know a positive aspect I’ve been trying to focus on. I do try to kind of be the glass half full, it’s hard for me. 0 2915 Exercise during the pandemic LB: Have you had an opportunity to sort of like work into a regime of some kind of exercise, I just talked to somebody who said I don’t go out of the house at all, and it was a young person and they said there’s a -- they ended up being stuck in a place where they couldn’t go home so they had to stay at somebody’s family’s house from college and then the family left so they’re by themselves and I said if you’ve been like -- and they’re in the woods and I said have you been going outside and he said, “No there’s a bear, I’m not going out, what are you crazy, I’m not going out.” So I thought that was really funny.&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: I am not built for this hot hot weather we’ve been having lately. I'm not a hot weather person, so I don’t I try not to go outside either. We bought this house last year and there’s an above ground pool, so we hang out in there a lot, that’s about the extent of the exercise I’m getting. But I’m not swimming, I'm floating. 0 3026 Mental health and self care during the pandemic LB: So it sounds like you’re doing pretty well with your mental health, this actually says how would you describe your mental health right now. What do you think about that?&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: I think I was way more sporadic than normal, I feel like I’m pretty even keel most of the time, like middle of the road, I don’t let bad things like really ruin my day unless it’s like a catastrophe 0 3108 Wearing masks during pandemic/grocery shopping during the pandemic ST: I was actually -- I had a big box of masks that I still had from when I was going through chemo because when your cell counts are low you know you have to mask up to go in public. So I wore masks before it was cool, no but I was probably one of the first people going to the grocery store with a mask on and got a lot of weird looks from people and it was funny like as the weeks ticked by then it was like you’d see more and more people and I’d shoot them like a -- no I didn’t, it was interesting to see the progression because of course at first they said well we think people should have them, but it’s because they learned more about the virus so they learned that yes this is a good thing so that was interesting. I was a little high strung at first, I was doing the whole sanitizing all of the groceries because they said it was like living on surfaces we didn’t know.&#13 ; 0 3491 Masks/Vaccines/England's and China's lockdown protocols in contrast to America's LB: We just went out ; we haven’t been out in probably two weeks and we’ve really only been out together to go to doctor’s appointments. So we went to a doctor’s appointment today, we’re coming back and every single person that we saw we made a comment on whether or not they were wearing a mask and it drives you nuts. 0 3683 School and college social distancing protocols ST: Are you in your Covid interviews? Do you have any educators or teachers that you’re interviewing?&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: No, I talked to somebody who was a retired teacher who has a lot of teacher friends and he was very strong about saying it’s just ridiculous and he gave me so many interesting little insights into it 0 4026 Unexpected effects of the pandemic on nature ST: But the unexpected ripple effects of this you know the more people that you talk to and it sounds like you -- you know you get to talk to all these people with these interviews and things are sprouting up that you wouldn’t even think. One of my friends works in the parks system so when this first happened the shutdown everybody’s like let’s get back to nature and it was March, April, it was great weather so like the first or second weekend there were like seven forest fires not like raging forest fires but there were seven fires in our parks system that had to go be extinguished because it’s like people that never go out into nature are suddenly out there [...] 0 4092 Wealth redistribution for children's education/Universal healthcare LB: It will be a thing to see if indeed people like for example well we can’t afford to pay kids you know we can’t afford to pay for kids to have education and suddenly we have a trillion dollars to line everybody’s pockets, a trillion dollars is so much money that that would mean every single person in the entire Lehigh Valley could have two million dollars for children, you know.&#13 ; 0 4148 Conclusion/HBO series "Gentleman Jack"/Anne Lister LB: So, yeah, well this has been a wonderful conversation, I’m so glad to get to talk to you, what a good time. We’d love to stop by on Zoom at your bar.&#13 ; &#13 ; ST: We’ve got to hash out the happy hour specials I’ll let you know.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Tell people what happy hour special it is so that they could bring it to their Zoom. Their own concoction as a mocktail or something. But it would be really interesting to hear what it ends up to be that is your perfect lesbian movie.&#13 ; 0 MovingImage Sarah Trimmer talks about how the current COVID-19 pandemic is affecting her, her essential worker job managing a bed and breakfast in South City Bethlehem, and her concern about the virus because she is at high risk as a breast cancer survivor. She also discusses how she and her wife have replaced new entertainment interests for things they regularly did before the virus. Sarah Trimmer 2020-07-27 LIZ BRADBURY: -- and because actually it's not even six thirty but let's go for it. I also have an audio recorder because I'm paranoid and anyway with this. So all right, actually with good reason because I did a whole interview and there were some problems with the person's camera and stuff, and it turned out that it didn't work at all. I mean the whole ninety minutes, but luckily, I did the audio tape of it and since their camera wasn't working well anyway, their projector. So I still had because I couldn't imagine asking this person to do the whole thing again. Okay, so I'm going to read you this information, I want to turn my phone off first I'm going to do that. SARAH TRIMMER:I think I already did. LB: Yes, I did all that stuff so we're recording. Okay, so with this project Bradbury Sullivan LGBT community center of 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 Sarah Trimmer to talk about her experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT community archive. So we're meeting on Zoom on Monday July 27th and thank you so much for your willingness to speak with us today, so can you please first of all state your full name and spell it? ST: Sarah Trimmer, S-A-R-A-H T-R-I-M-M-E-R LB: Great. Can you please share your birth date? ST: May 22nd, 1981. LB: Are you in Bethlehem, is that what town you're in? ST: Palmer Township. LB: Oh you're in Palmer Township okay, now is the consent portion. So the first part says do you consent to this interview today? ST: Yes. LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable format? ST: Yes. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats including films, articles, websites, presentations, and even other formats we may not even imagine? ST: Yes. LB: And that could be, 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 and/or withdraw, or withdraw or withdraw the entire interview from the project? ST: Yes, LB: Okey-doke, so this is the identity part of it. So what is your zip code for where you are? ST: 18045. LB: What is your age? ST: Thirty-nine. LB: How do you identify within the LGBT community trans, gay, lesbian, bi, pan, queer, QTPAC, nonbinary, etc? ST: Do I have to pick one? (Laughs) I would say bisexual. LB: Okay. Here are some things and cisgender would we say? ST: Yes. LB: Here are some things to think about, oh I already told you that. Okay so these are general things and you can answer anything you want with regard to how this goes. But we're just going to hit this right up front. So where you have been in your house and I know that you've been working but who is in the home with you? ST: My wife, who is also named Sarah, we've been married for six years, together for about eight. And my cousin is also here with us, he's about the same age as us. Then we've got three dogs and a cat. LB: So you've got a whole family there that's great, I've talked to a few people who have been totally by themselves and it's been very hard for them, I think. So you've been working so tell us a little bit about what you do and what your employer is and stuff like that. ST: So I manage a bed and breakfast and I just landed this job at the end of last year with big huge plans to take it to the next level and then boom global pandemic. So when we were told that we had to shut down we were considered an essential business for lodging, but you know the majority of B&amp ; B guests are recreational, so they don't -- a lot of cancellations came through. I had to lay off my entire staff and on the off chance that we did get one or two reservations I would, most of the time I just had the phone at home and I was taking all the calls at home, but if we had one or two reservations I was going in, getting the property ready for the arrival, cooking the breakfast in the morning, cleaning the rooms, doing the laundry, all of that. So I was like a one person show for many weeks and even when I was home the phones were just off the hook so many cancellations came through and inquiries of well are you open and what's going on. So it was a rough couple of weeks for sure, then my company was able to secure one of the loans, I called some staff back but then the loan money ran out and I did another round of layoffs because we still aren't seeing the business to support my entire staff. It's a little better, it's starting to pick up and we're obviously very very careful, so yeah definitely not what I was expecting for my first time managing a B&amp ; B. LB: What a surprise. I've been talking to a lot of people, this is actually my twenty-third interview and I have to do twenty COVID-19s and I have already done -- so this will be the thirteenth of those or the fourteenth one of those and then I also did ten HIV/AIDS ones for people who had lived through the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s which was very interesting and very different from the Covid although people talked about Covid because they were talking now about how it related to the actual epidemic. But a lot of people I've spoken to are involved with the colleges because we have a lot of colleges in Lehigh Valley so are you seeing this as -- you're pretty close to Lehigh Valley University and they're talking about opening, but do you think that's influencing your reservations and stuff? ST: Yes, so we have a very close relationship with Lehigh Valley all the alumni come to us, all the parents, the kids when they're visiting the college before they're enrolling. So they had tasked us with sourcing some rooms because they thought, you know, they were building new dorms and they had to stop construction. So they thought they weren't going to have enough housing for these incoming students so I had worked the area hotels trying to scramble to find housing for these students and it turns out they didn't need them, but should they need to quarantine international students they've approached us to ask if we would. Because if it's a student that's from like Chicago that is exposed or tests positive than can, you know, hopefully travel home, or stay but an international student doesn't have that luxury of just going home to quarantine. So they've approached us if we would accept some students that had to be quarantined. And other area hotels are already doing that, it seems really scary, we even at one point were talking to area hospitals that if the medical professionals didn't want to go home and expose their families would we house them. And that was a hard pill to swallow. I'm like well then, I'm kind of being exposed or my staff is being exposed to those front lines. But I, you know, we really looked at it through a lot of different lenses and talked to a lot of different agencies and we were ready to take that on if we had to. Ultimately, we didn't have to, we didn't have that -- we were preparing for that peak in the Lehigh Valley, but we didn't quite see where the hospitals were overrun, and the medical people didn't want to go home to their families. Yeah, I'm waiting for Lehigh Valley to make the announcement that they would, like Lafeyette did, if they're going to go virtual, but I don't know I think Lehigh's going to trudge ahead and see what they can do, hopefully safely. I know they've been meeting about it a lot ; I know they will be safe. LB: Just saying because even colleges that are not planning on opening are taking in groups of students that can't go home and I was just speaking with somebody who cannot go home and this is a Kutztown student so they've arranged for housing and they have international students too, so there is definitely -- and it's not even that the folks are needing to be quarantined they just can't go home, they don't have any place to go. So even if the colleges close like Kutztown apparently will be running all of its classes -- we have a family friend who goes to Colgate and they also it's totally they're going to be in their rooms but they're going to be there but they're going to be doing online classes. So it's an interesting thing and apparently the students really want to do that because they want to at least feel like they're on campus. I don't know about that I don't know, I don't because I guess they would have to pay then, so I think there must be some kind of privilege involved in that to be able to afford to do that at a lot of the schools. So it sounds like you've been communicating a lot with phones and people that way, have you done video chats with people or have you been doing that with your family or what do you think about that? ST: My friends I saw other people were getting together with their friends on Zoom calls and I was like I don't know if I'm going to like that, it's weird, like I'm so used to being around my friends face to face, so we tried it one night and we had a freaking blast. And so it's opened up this whole new way to communicate with each other which was cool and I did not expect it to give me that sense of like oh I got to see my friends today, I got to hang out with my friends today, but it left me with that and I was really surprised by that. On the contrary you know it's like work gets ahold of like, "We can Zoom call now." And it was like that could have been an email so like I was so excited to have that extra way to communicate with my friends but on the flip side like you know the very first Zoom call for work it's like you know full hair and makeup, make sure you've got pants. And then by like the middle I was like oh whatever, hair is in a bun I just rolled out of bed. And then like now I don't even put my video on for Zoom calls I'm like come on just like -- what I love about it is how many companies are going to continue to do this and not make people drive into the office. And we're seeing the pollution go down in so many areas and if there's any sort of bright spot or positives to all of this hell we're going through I really found some happiness in that. Like maybe people will scale back how much they're traveling into the offices or whatever. And it's another way to communicate so they've been just for it. I think about the you know a hundred year ago flu they didn't have all this what did they do. LB: No, I'm glad you've got that out because I love to talk about the flu epidemic of 1918, because I think it's really an interesting comparison. It was far more terribly dangerous. Young people died, fifty million people died, my grandmother died in that flu epidemic and she was thirty-two years old, my father was four and his sister was seven. And after she died his father left these two kids with his wife's parents and he just went to South America and never came back ; he was an engineer and he was building roads and stuff. So the effect that that had a hundred years ago on me is a residual effect because my father grew up without a mother, I didn't have a second grandfather because of that, and it's surely absolutely influenced his life very significantly. So when you have a circumstance like that and people say well you know it was a long time ago, really you know who knows even that was incredibly significant. And a lot of people had to deal with the government because it was during World War I they told people they couldn't talk about it, it was sedition to talk about it, because they didn't want America to seem like it was weak. So all of these because it was, we were at war. And so all these people were just, I mean Easton for example five hundred people died in Easton, thousands of people died in Allentown, Bethlehem was pretty good at quarantining and they had about a hundred deaths. If you compare that to even Easton which was a tiny city in comparison Easton was really small then, it was terribly serious -- one out of every three people in the whole world had that flu. And yeah, they couldn't talk to each other, they barely had phones and most people didn't have phones and they certainly didn't have the ability to see each other. And people would be desperate to see each other and they would wear masks and they would like go and there's a story about these four women that wanted to play Mahjong and they gasped but they wore all these masks and everything, and they played Mahjong and by the end of the day three of them were dead. It was that kind of flu ; people would die in one day from that flu. It was amazingly terrible and it was involved with the war too, it really -- so it's a lot of people, but it had to do with young people, it influenced young people. And some people that it came from a flu that had affected little children twenty years before and so that's why those, like if they had had it twenty years before then they would die quickly from it if they had it when they were twenty to forty years old. ST: I never read that, that's really interesting. LB: There is a theory and since we don't know anything about flus who knows, you know, if it stays there for twenty years. Yeah, I'm actually fascinated by that flu because it affected my family but also affected every single thing that happened in the United States for the entire century and people forgot about it pretty quickly but it was true. So we're lucky in our LGBT community because we get to watch Dr. Rachel Levine who is part of our community. What do you think about seeing Dr. Levine on -- have you seen her talking about the--? ST: Yes a lot of times when I was, when I had to be at work a lot of down time when there's only one or two guests so I watched the briefing, I watched Cuomo's and I would watch Wolf's almost every day, I was really hot and heavy on it in the beginning. And I guess I never paid attention to who our secretary of health was, I didn't know, I'm just watching this amazing -- and I really like her. I thought she was so direct in her delivery. What was interesting to me is like Cuomo ran his conferences but really when you look at Pennsylvania's conferences it wasn't Wolf running them it was her, and I was just like man she's awesome. And then all the ugliness came out and I was like oh I honestly didn't even realize though it's so -- then I was extra proud you know I'm like man like it was so great that she's running these conferences and she's brilliant and she's always like you could see how frustrated she'd get when day after day people would ask the same damn questions. And I always loved at the end when she'd flip and she's like now for our daily reminders. And I swear by the end I could almost like recite them with her wash your hands for twenty seconds in soap and water. And it's like she had to, she had to pound it into these people heads because they just weren't getting it. And it was just so obviously representation is important so to see that is great and it's just so absolutely disheartening that she's being attacked still today, today in what was it Morris County there was a menu did you see that story? Come on it's just disgusting that this woman's there, she's trying to navigate us through a serious health crisis and people choose to focus on something like I don't know, well we're all faced with that all the time. But I was so proud of her and then it was just like oh my gosh even better. LB: And you know I've had a number of people say that young transgender people have expressed so much shock that somebody would be attacked this way that they have said to some of the leaders and some of the people that work in our program at our center you know, "Is this going to happen to me?" And I was talking to her in place and one of the things the messages that we have to say is, "Look, heroes are attacked, if it was easy to do this you wouldn't be a hero." People admire, we admire them for standing up to adversity and that's what she does with the incredible grace and science and every kind of calmness that makes people listen to her and it's very positive. We're lucky that we get to have her. ST: Absolutely. LB: What's your biggest concern during the pandemic and what's your biggest concern for that matter for the LGBT community? ST: Personally, I am very concerned about getting it. I have survived breast cancer twice and as a result of the radiation treatment I endured the second time I've developed a bunch of nodules around my lungs, they've sort of diagnosed it as sarcoidosis, but they don't really know. So I've tried to research as much as I can about how would Covid interacts with sarcoidosis, or how would Covid interact with someone who has got lung nodules. Like it's very concerning for me, there's no information out there of course because we don't know enough about either affliction. So I don't know that I would survive it, I don't want to get a cold let alone get this, you know, virus that we don't know very much about. So that's been my personal biggest concern, and I will say having gone through two bouts of breast cancer in the Lehigh Valley with our hospital network we're very very lucky here. I remember at the beginning worrying that they wouldn't let my wife in appointments with me or something, we never encountered that, everyone was incredible that I had to deal with with my care team. So, I think for the community I would be concerned about we already have a lack of healthcare, we already have you know we're statistically not as equipped as other communities, so it is concerning. But I will say that in the Lehigh Valley it's not as concerning for me, and I'm incredibly grateful for that, I feel incredibly privileged that I can say that, that I don't' have a concern about what kind of healthcare would I receive. LB: I was reading about people talking about moving to other countries and then somebody started saying oh you know you could move to Bolivia or Belize and they said of course they don't have any hospitals there. So like well okay if that's what you want to do. Do you know anybody that's had it or that's been affected by it? ST: Relatives of friends, so no-one that I've actually known personally, thank goodness. And someone that I know lost his mom to it so that was pretty devastated, but I've also known some younger people that bounce back and they have full recoveries, but no-one really close to my inner circle. LB: So there's a question here that says are you spending any time on queer dating hookup sites I don't know if that really applies. But how about extended -- you know being able to talk to LGBT friends who might have similar kind of sensitivities that you do with that gives you an opportunity to talk to people like that, do you have friends that fit that bill? ST: Yes, I think, you know, both my gay and straight friends we, Sarah and I, my wife and I really focus on reaching out to our friends that already struggled with isolation. Those were probably those people we most concerned about. You know even my father in law he's super high risk, he had a double lung transplant about six years ago which was crazy, but he lives alone and every Sunday we'd go to breakfast with him and hang out with him and we can't he's high risk, you know, we were arranging his groceries to be delivered and the one time that we did have to go over there it was like dropping stuff off at the door and running away. I hate not seeing my grandmother who is 82 and we've since, you know, very safely have visited with those high-risk people but I guess we were at our peak really like the first part of April. I remember doing a lot more like it was almost like on my to do list every day, like make sure you reach out to these people, because I am very fortunate that I'm in a house surrounded by family and animals, but for my friends that weren't and have to further isolate I can't imagine, it has to be really hard. LB: For you yourself I know you have to work, and you have to be around people, and you have to tell people that they have to be careful. Have you had any problems with people that have stayed there that didn't want to wear a mask? ST: No, the guests have been great. I did have an issue with a staff member, so we just went separate ways, it is what it is. I have people in my family that are definitely in support of the current administration and think that masks are not useful, so that's hard to move past. That's really hard to forgive, like I don't want to sit at a dinner table with them anymore, so I'll maintain social distance from them forever, it's very difficult. We talked through it actually as a staff before we kind of brought everyone back to work, we had meetings and we talked through, all right what's it going to look like if we have someone here that shows up at the door, because we have the big signs on the front door, guests must wear masks inside, shows up not wearing one or refuses to wear one, what's that going to look like. So we talked through procedure for that and we're ready for that. I mean we're not happy about it, but you never know I think it's quite possible that we'll encounter something like that. LB: For you I mean besides going to work and having to deal with folks that are potentially like that when you have downtime and I don't know if you have any free time, but if you have free time are you going out? We know a lot of people who are going out and we think for me I'm thinking what the heck are you doing. ST: Yeah, so Sarah and I we love our community, downtown Easton, we were there a lot, she worked as a bartender and a server for many years down there, now she sells cars but so many of our friends are down there, that was like what we did, we really enjoyed being social. And we said the other night, we like we think this whole thing has finally broke our habit, because you would think that two people that love it so much as soon as it reopened like we'd be down there, we went once and we were like this is not for us, I don't want to be around people just aren't taking the masking seriously enough for me. And like I said I'm very concerned about getting it, I'm very concerned about even social distance visit with my father-in-law like giving him something, so it's just not worth it. We built a bar in our garage, we're calling it the gay-raj, and we've been hanging out in there like it's just as great as going downtown. Because now we don't have to Uber home, we're saving a lot of money, we're not eating out, like why didn't do this years ago. And the other thing that we did the past time -- LB: Do you have people over for that? ST: Sometimes, but again it's like we don't want a ton of people over, so our friends will come by and they sit at the other end of the bar and we're all consuming alcohol so that kills germs right. The other thing that we did to pass the time so Sarah found this list online I want to say maybe it was on like Autostraddle or something and it was a list of one hundred and twenty lesbian movies and so she's like we're going to power through this, we have all this downtown. So she prints this list out and she cuts them into strips, folds them up puts them in this like gift bag and every day she'd like shake it and I'd pull one out and all that would be on the strip was they ranked number 1-120, so it would be the ranking, the title and then like year that it came out. So what a bunch of terrible movies let me tell you. Oh my god I think we made it through twenty-three of them and we just, I mean-- LB: Any good ones? ST: A couple, there were a couple of good ones, one of our favorites is Carol so that was in there. I mean what was great it was from all, from like the sixties up and from all over the world, there were French movies in there, so we still have the bag. I'm sure that we'll watch it from time to time, but she just, it was great to see so much representation we don't always get that in every movie we watch, but man some of them were a struggle to get through. And there were some days where she'd like walk over shaking the bag and I'm like not today I just can't not today, like unless you pick one in the top ten, I'm not doing it.  LB: Did you see anything in the top ten that you thought -- like one of my favorites is Desert Hearts, I thought Desert Hearts was a great movie even though it was a long time ago, it was in the eighties. ST: Who was in that one? I think we did watch that one, that sounds very familiar. LB: It's about an older woman and it's about these two women, one of them is getting a divorce in Reno, it's the 1950s and Kay is this young woman who lives, and she makes ceramics and they-- ST: That sounds familiar, see they're all just starting to run together at this point because we've watched so many. Sarah had a rating system and everything so she was into it. LB: It is true that some of them like they're so bad and people will say, "Oh you know entre nous you know" and I remember one time somebody said all these people were sitting in the audience one of them just shouted out, "This is like a bad date." ST: That's great, but you can absolutely identify that someone who was never like in a same sex relationship wrote these movies, someone who was never even, they have no idea about like lesbian sex, nothing and you're watching this on the screen like what in the hell is this. So we also realized that we could probably write a better someday and we should, a screenplay I don't know. LB: When you get to a time where you want to watch something don't forget that you can watch some of my art history videos on our website. I think I have three on our website and one on the Parkland Community Library website and they're funny too. So it's worthwhile to see it and if you go to our Facebook page Bradbury-Sullivan Facebook page and look at all the different videos that are there they're longer one's forty-six minutes, one's twenty-two, you know that kind of stuff, it's good dinner fare and kind of interesting. And you go huh that's, you know, and it's interesting one of them was about Greek myths and what the LGBT Greek myths, and I just did that one for Parkland. So those are fun to watch, I want to encourage you to do that because I went to a lot of -- people like them who saw them, more than a thousand people saw them so it was pretty great to do it that way. So I was going to ask you what sort of queer activities have you been doing and you just describe it this perfect thing, it's actually a perfect thing, I think it's wonderful. How about Liana, did you see the movie Liana, it's black and white, John Sales did it, he also did other famous movies including that baseball movie about-- ST: I'm writing it down because-- LB: Liana, it's L-I-A-N-A and even though it was made by a man, John Sales is the guy who made Field of Dreams and sort of an independent movie maker, but I saw that movie a long time ago and I mean I was in college or maybe I was in graduate school and I thought this is pretty good, this person does seem to get the whole thing about the deal. Desert Hearts was made by a woman though and it's right, you look at that and you go yeah that would really happen. ST: Well speaking of Field of Dreams what was the movie that was just made about the two women that were on the team, a documentary about their lives that was a-- LB: It's called Secret Love. I actually hated that, I hated it. ST: You hated it? LB: Because the person that made that was actually Terry's nephew or great nephew and it's really not about them it's about the family being able to deal with them. This whole thing it's so fucking depressing, I mean for heaven sakes and they don't know anything about these women's lives, they've been together for a million years, obviously they were very uncomfortable to come out to the family and you could see why for heaven's sake. ST: Sarah didn't like it, I think I was comfortable watching something very depressing at that current time, I was like this is just what I needed. She felt the same way she's like yeah, they did a shitty job. LB: They did a shitty job because nobody said for example, they made it seem like when they were getting married that it was such a cute thing, they didn't point out that when they get married that the other woman whose name I can't remember, Terry and Pat, that Pat was protecting herself, because had Terri died before they were married the family could have come in and just made off with half of everything. ST: Just like the book club -- the Under This Beautiful Dome. LB: Yes, exactly. ST: That always stuck with me just how-- LB: Yeah and so they didn't say, you know, how important and even when they were having dinner with those older guys who were their gay male friends and they don't say you know if we don't do this we're going to end up having to pay 15% tax on everything the person who is -- you know they didn't talk about the practical stuff of it because the people who made the movie didn't understand what this really meant. And then they're looking at oh look they had a whole life with all these other gay friends, of course they did why do you think they lived in Chicago not near you. I actually incorporated that into a training that I did and I use it in my training for older adults where I say in the nursing home where the person says like are they going to be accepted, the niece says that and the nursing home administrator says well didn't they say hi to you when you came in as thought that would be it, that's the response instead of yes we have a non-discrimination policy which includes sexual orientation and gender identity, we'll show you the different kinds of resources we have. They don't say that they said didn't they say hi to you when you came in like that would be enough, you should be-- ST: Oh yeah, you're right, yeah. LB: Well tell Sarah that she's absolutely right. You can watch that it's got some wonderful stuff about their baseball teams and stuff and their incredible relationship that they had which was driven. That's not what the movie's about, you know, if the movie was about that we would all be cheering for them for heaven's sake. ST: What was the other one, was it Freeheld where the police chief got cancer, obviously that really resonated with us, we were solving that, I thought that was pretty well done. And then of course as soon as you're watching you go and you're on Google looking up the true story and you want to see the real people behind the characters on the movie and what a story. LB: Steven Goldstein was the main guy, he's the Jewish lawyer, he's one of our Facebook friends. I mean you probably are Facebook friends with him, because he's just local. He's in the southern part of New Jersey and he actually worked with what's the name of that movie star, the guy who played that who was in the office, I can't remember his name. But Steven Goldstein actually met with him and said you're doing the gay part ; you're doing the Jewish part okay but you're not doing the gay part okay. Let me explain how you do this, and it was you know so they really, when they made that movie, they really paid attention to what it needed to be. So that was pretty good, plus the actors were so good, you know. So good for you for doing that, I love that aspect, so you haven't had any problems being out to your family because you're with your family and they're cool. So what's the biggest frustration you're having right now? ST:I think the lack of consistent messaging from the government being I don't even like saying who is up there behind a podium touching the microphone and not wearing a mask and the next person, like you lead best by example. I mean that's like leadership 101, that's what you learn like if you're even on a team as a child you learn, like you lead by example and do as I, you know, anyway. I mean I find sometimes when I'm scrolling through Facebook like if my sound is on and someone shares a clip of him speaking that just his voice strikes a tinge, like this response in me and that's so not healthy. I'm 50% hopeful-- LB: I just want to stop and say that you know if people are watching this thirty years from now that we're talking about Trump. ST: Yes, I just don't like saying his name, it also strikes that tinge in me. I'm fifty percent hopeful and I'm fifty percent riddled with anxiety about this election which is in 99 days but who's counting because we never thought he was going to win the first time, and that night watching the polls we were crying and I don't care if that makes people call us snowflakes or whatever, I've been called worse. We knew, we knew this was not -- we have, we know people who have family that like golf with that man and it was literally like a dare it was a joke he wouldn't be the president, so you have this person who doesn't even care about this country. He doesn't and we knew it, we knew it was bad news for the LGBT community, we knew it was bad news for just us as a country and it's sad to see especially coming off the heels of Obama's administration. So I'm frustrated beyond belief with what I see at the top there. I try really hard just to focus on our own bubbles, you know the Lehigh Valley has a lot of great things, Bradbury Sullivan Center being one of them, we're progressive, I feel safe walking on the street holding hands with my wife in our community and the other areas of the Lehigh Valley, I'm very grateful for that. But, I'm incredibly heartbroken and frustrated for things that I see happening in the rest of the country and nothing like a pandemic to just amp it up even worse, I mean the civil unrest that we have happening right now, the Black Lives Matter movement, it's hard to just-- LB: I've asked everybody to talk about Black Lives Matter if they want to, so do you want to talk about that for a little while go ahead and say some stuff. ST: Yes, so I grew up in Warren County, New Jersey, which is just over the border from the valley. I moved to the valley about fourteen years ago, but that county houses an incredibly racist town that was just a couple of minutes north of where I grew up. So I was in high school with those kids and I graduated in '99, I was 1998 or 1999 there was an incident of a man being drug behind a pickup truck with a noose in Texas. And there was a group of kids in my class who called themselves proudly The Rednecks, and then walking through the hall one day I spotted a noose hanging out of the one kid's locker and I questioned them about it, I said what is this about. And inside of his locker he had the article of that lynching in Texas and said that the man that did was his hero. And I don't consider myself a violent person now but when I was seventeen, I was a little crazy and I kicked his locker shut on his hand and hurt his hand really bad. But when we went to go to the office to talk about what had happened I didn't get suspended or anything, I maybe got like a day of in school suspension but I've always been anti-racist, I don't want to say that I'm not racist, I am anti-racist and you know I've always had my eye on the police and what they're doing. I attended a free [Malia?] march when I was seventeen-years-old it's just something that's very important to me, I am disgusted by people that think any less of someone who has a different skin color. So in terms of what's going on right now I'm here for it, I love seeing young people on the street and fighting for this and I hope to see significant change in my lifetime. I hope to see radical overhauls of our police department so that we have more thoughtful response to things and we're allocating sources to better respond to -- you know we should be taking some of the burden on, I would never sign up to be a police officer. I have great respect for the people that do but they are overwhelmed and they need more training. So I think that we're in for the long haul here, it didn't change overnight in the 60s when everyone was protesting it's not going to change overnight this time. Enough is enough, it's again incredibly frustrating to see how Trump handles it and what the things that come out of his mouth are just unbelievable. But hopefully that will change in 99 days and some real positive and progressive changes will come about. I'm maintaining hope for that, I really am. And someone asked me the other day well what if he gets elected again and I don't even know, I can't even stomach a response to that yet, I just don't know. LB: Well I'm certain of that and I said you know we just have to go on that's the thing, we can't just give up and you know -- but we have to work, we have to make sure that that doesn't happen. ST: Agreed. LB: So you've already talked about being worried about getting the virus and taking a lot of precautions to avoid that. What's the best thing that you've really experienced so far, what's giving you hope now, and I think you were talking a little bit about young people marching, that's one of the things that gives me hope. ST: Yes, I think I'm realizing that there's more channels to communicate with each other. Seeing the global pollution go down has been something I've been -- you know a positive aspect I've been trying to focus on. I do try to kind of be the glass half full, it's hard for me. I think inherently I'm a pessimist and skeptic and maybe even a little negative, so I try to reprogram myself every day and really focus on the positive aspects of everything that's happening. So one of the best things that happened was in the beginning when I was home more, I've worked every day since I was like fourteen so even through cancer treatment I was working, I didn't take any time off for that, looking back what the hell I had the opportunity. But I just have always worked really hard and at the beginning of the lockdown when I was mostly just answering the phones at home I got to stay home more, and I wish I could say that like oh I drafted a book or I wrote a business plan and I got in shape but I've gained so much weight. We made, I lost count of how many like trays of rice crispy treats we made and just like we were doing so well like in February we bought an elliptical and we were on it every day and we were doing the app where you count your calories and all that and we were like losing weight and just like boom, like ripped out from under us. And it was just like I wish I could say I was that person that took this opportunity to like I don't know do something great but it's hard, there's so much uncertainty and it's so scary and I'm just glad that I'm alive I don't care if I weigh a little bit more than I did, whatever I'm alive and I think, uh, it was great at first to spend some more time at home. I got like some cleaning and organizing, and craft projects done that I never had the time for, but I certainly didn't like probably utilize it all to my best ability. But whatever. LB: [Linda Khan?], who they had a PFLAG for many years and she's a good friend of ours and she said you know I just wanted to have, I was always hoping that sometime I would just have time at home so I could give this series of projects done and I found out that if I had time at home I wouldn't do the projects anyway. I didn't do them, so I'm not that into it she said. It was not true, you know, so yeah, I don't know we've been doing a lot of gardening. I think that's been a positive thing. But you've been working the whole time, almost the whole time. ST: Yes, I was so I should be a little easy on myself. I did have like this massive checklist and I'm a checklist person I have checklists every day. There was one in the kitchen that was like quarantine projects. You know so that it can loom over me every time I go get more rice crispy treats and put added pressure to me that I don't freaking need. But it was there we got some things done and the other things you know whatever they'll get done sometime. LB: Well I think that's a really good and refreshing attitude to have, I think that it's brilliant so good for you for doing that. Have you had an opportunity to sort of like work into a regime of some kind of exercise, I just talked to somebody who said I don't go out of the house at all, and it was a young person and they said there's a -- they ended up being stuck in a place where they couldn't go home so they had to stay at somebody's family's house from college and then the family left so they're by themselves and I said if you've been like -- and they're in the woods and I said have you been going outside and he said, "No there's a bear, I'm not going out, what are you crazy, I'm not going out." So I thought that was really funny. ST: I am not built for this hot hot weather we've been having lately. I'm not a hot weather person, so I don't I try not to go outside either. We bought this house last year and there's an above ground pool, so we hang out in there a lot, that's about the extent of the exercise I'm getting. But I'm not swimming, I'm floating.  LB: Water just it absorbs stuff so that would work. Well it's tricky. I have a bicycle desk and I've been using my bicycle pretty much when I'm on Zoom meetings that are boring. But if I have to be, I'm not on it now because all the interviews have been fascinating for me. I've got to tell you they've been fascinating, but sometimes there will be a Zoom meeting, a lot of the work meetings that we had to do and I'd be like on my desk, talking to somebody who is on one of those big bouncy ball things. ST: Yeah, you can see them kind of bobbing the whole time. LB: I thought that was great actually I thought like you know what the heck, so they were getting out of it and I thought that was a terrific thing. So it sounds like you're doing pretty well with your mental health, this actually says how would you describe your mental health right now. What do you think about that? ST: I think I was way more sporadic than normal, I feel like I'm pretty even keel most of the time, like middle of the road, I don't let bad things like really ruin my day unless it's like a catastrophe. But I would find like I never knew how I was going to wake up. There were days I would jump out of bed and you know knock out four of those quarantine projects on the checklist before 9 a.m. and it was great and then like the very next day I'd be like today we'll just stay in bed and watch these damn lesbian movies all day because I don't want to get out of bed and that was weird for me, I was aware of it though, which I think is important. I was very aware of like okay I don't feel like conquering the world today and that's okay, I'm going to let myself have this day of rest. Because I'll usually beat myself up if I'm not like gung ho. But it was just god you couldn't escape it either, I mean I guess you could, but it was like Facebook and there's so much that they didn't know. I was actually -- I had a big box of masks that I still had from when I was going through chemo because when your cell counts are low you know you have to mask up to go in public. So I wore masks before it was cool, no but I was probably one of the first people going to the grocery store with a mask on and got a lot of weird looks from people and it was funny like as the weeks ticked by then it was like you'd see more and more people and I'd shoot them like a -- no I didn't, it was interesting to see the progression because of course at first they said well we think people should have them, but it's because they learned more about the virus so they learned that yes this is a good thing so that was interesting. I was a little high strung at first, I was doing the whole sanitizing all of the groceries because they said it was like living on surfaces we didn't know. LB: So we're pretty much not doing that as much anymore is that true because I think we're still doing a little bit. ST: I definitely do a little bit, we -- my wife used to absolutely love food shopping, and I never really liked it and now we just we've used Instacart a lot, we're lucky to be able to do that but it's just I don't it's going there gives us so much anxiety. At the peak in April I took like half of my paycheck, we planned out meals for 14 days and we're like we're going to make a big batch of like -- we're vegetarian, we're going to make a big batch of veggie lasagna then we'll use it and we figured out like all right we're going to spend this much money and we're going to do two weeks of food shopping. So I went and my cart was overflowing like I looked like that crazy person in the grocery store. But it wasn't overflowing with like toilet paper I wasn't like hoarding stuff, and the cashier gave me the dirtiest look she was like oh, and I'm like this is what people should be doing so that you only have to check us out one time in two weeks and I'm saving you like but anyway, got home with all that stuff and had to wipe it all down and it was like a three and a half hour ordeal I was exhausted. I was like I hate this and of course you know you say like I want things to go back to normal and this is unfair but it's okay to have temper tantrums some days I certainly have. LB: Trish is a wonderful cook and one of her -- you know we are so lucky anybody that has a job, anybody that has a house, anybody that doesn't have to work in a place where they're constantly being really really at risk for nothing like waitresses that I know people that are servers that have to be at risk to the point where they're and they're not paid enough to make this worthwhile. And then threatened you know well yeah ; we're not wearing these masks but if you have a problem with it you can just resign and then you won't get unemployment. But Trish, a frustration that she has realized and she always kind of knew this but she's very very frugal, we live very frugally and yet she makes wonderful food, and that was all predicated on her ability to buy bargains and go to the places where she just said if I could go to the farmer's market now I would be getting those big flats of strawberries and then I could can the strawberry jelly and I can't believe I can't do that, I could get a whole flat for ten dollars. I would be putting the blueberries away so we'd have blueberry crumble in the winter, and I can't get out. She's realizing that that is actually our biggest expense is that she cannot buy food that is economical, we can't go to the farmer's market when the sales are on because they're just not careful there at all and she's a very high risk too she has lupus actually. So has had it all the time that we've been together all the 30 years that we've been together and she has to be very very careful. We have not been out, we haven't taken any -- well we were driving back from an appointment, we were at the doctor's appointment and we were driving back and we went by Produce Mart and I said go in there because we have our masks and we could go in there. And she said I can't go in there ; I can't count on it to be the way we need it to be and it will just be frustrating. And we have a young person who has actually had the virus and then was tested by Lehigh Valley Health network and has very high antibodies. So she shops for us. We don't even have to feel negative about it, but she still can't do the bargains, can't look at the stuff and go well this would be good and then if I buy this and this, I can make this. It is killing Trish that this is happening. ST: I think that's with Sarah like too she would go and maybe be inspired by something that she would see and make this whole meal around it and now it's like and you know they never get the bananas right, it's like no matter what it's -- one time we had a mishap last week she ordered like five bananas but they registered it as five bunches and she's trying to like you can message the person while they're shopping she's like no, no, no please don't bring us 11 pounds of bananas and she was able to get it corrected. But I said to her yesterday or the day before we Instacarted again I said when are we going to go back to the grocery store. Like we'll run in for quick things, you know, one or two items, but partially it's kind of being spoiled now, you know, I like having them deliver to the front door if I could just get them to come in and put them away that'd be awesome. But it's just also it's I realized even driving to the grocery store you start to realize like your shoulders are up around your ears and you're like wow this is really causing me a lot of distress, why you know I'll pay the delivery fee to have this luxury.  LB: We just went out ; we haven't been out in probably two weeks and we've really only been out together to go to doctor's appointments. So we went to a doctor's appointment today, we're coming back and every single person that we saw we made a comment on whether or not they were wearing a mask and it drives you nuts. You know you're like oh those people are wearing a mask, that guys wearing a mask, the whole way and you know one of the things we did see was rush hour and it was -- when we were coming back and we were coming back from Whitehall so it was right on 145 and that's a major route and I said boy this is half the traffic you would normally see, people are at home, they are really, we were looking at shopping, all those shopping places there and grocery stores and they just didn't have the one car in the gas station, there was just clearly nothing happening, really this is affecting the economy and yes it's not going to stop. I mean I just asked somebody earlier today about what was giving that person, giving him help and he said that he is watching every single science based thing about the vaccines. And that's what's giving me the hope because they're on the third trial of a vaccine now that they still think is very promising. So because the way Americans are, we're really a bunch of assholes and so we can't be like England where they just, everybody locked down, nobody left the house for 90 days and it went away and now they have life. ST: I remember first hearing about China and seeing videos where the government or health officials were posting these giant speakers on street corners and it was saying like do not come out of your house and they were only letting people like on Thursdays go grocery shopping and I thought oh my god this is, they're insane over there. And now I'm like oh my god I wish our fucking government was as insane as well. I just didn't realize the magnitude of it at that point, we got no direction though we were like wear a mask if you want whatever. LB: We've seen reports from scientists that have said bone fide reports that if every person in the United States wore a mask for three months it would be over. ST: Yeah wear it properly.  LB: Right actually not just -- and if that happened it would be a done deal and yeah if we'd had the leadership to do that and said look I'm sorry I know this is tough for you but if we don't do this we'll hurt the economy kids won't be able to go back to school. Well, we really didn't have that leadership. ST: Are you in your Covid interviews? Do you have any educators or teachers that you're interviewing? LB: No, I talked to somebody who was a retired teacher who has a lot of teacher friends and he was very strong about saying it's just ridiculous and he gave me so many interesting little insights into it. One of the things he said was in the Allentown School District, he was a music teacher so he worked in every single school, and he said in the Allentown School District in September it is so hot many of the schools are not air conditioned, what they do is they take -- so he said they're talking to me about having smaller classes what they do when it's hot like that is they take all the kids and they put them in a big air conditioned auditorium. He said what are they going to do, we're going to leave the kids in the 99 degree temperature and who are they-- ST: No way. LB: New kids have to be in there, but these kids can be in the cool area. He said there's just no way they're going to do that and then he named three or four other things where he said it is just not going to work, you cannot keep these kids from getting kids, sick from everything else. I talked to a number of college educators and one of the people that I know very well who works at Muhlenberg was saying we cannot, you know kids who are young people who are students on college campuses get sick, it happens all the time. You know you can have mono everybody gets mono, everybody gets the flu, it happens all the time. And people get colds and part of the whole experience of going to college is that communal interaction, you're with people all the time, in fact I was just talking to somebody who just graduated today and he was saying you know I haven't seen my friends as much I can only see them on Zoom. And I said you know on the day I graduated from college I had a really good friend that I had seen every single day of college who was still one of my best friends, I just talked to her and stuff, but I didn't see her face to face for ten years after that day. And I said the fact that you have Zoom and you can see -- because she lived in -- she moved to New Orleans and I was living in New York State and it's just like I didn't see her. I talked to her but I didn't see her. And I said the fact that you can see your friends when you leave college, that's what happens if you're not in that communal situation. If you're missing out on that communal situation of all that sharing and being around people that are different that you've never been around a person that was like that before, you begin to have new attitudes and ideas, your family is conservative and you change, your family has only spoken one language and then you see oh there's people that speak all the different -- if you lose that in a college situation it is devastating and yet you cannot stop kids from getting sick in college if they're all in dorms. It's just not going to work, it's like a nursing home, it's not going to work, and everybody has said that. And one professor was saying to me, she was an administrator actually and she said they think they're going to open this college but the staff and the faculty are not going to allow it to open, because it's too dangerous for the faculty and what they've said is it's unethical to do. ST: It really is, you're already asking so much of teachers, now this, and what is your plan and again it's like every district is left to their own devices well you guys write the policy and you figure out what the plan when a teacher gets sick or a student gets sick, but there's also HIPAA laws and what. There's no direction from the top down and I just feel for them, I feel for every parent, you know, we don't have children but definitely our friends do and talking to them through this it's like they're so torn it's like oh my gosh my kid needs to go to school, I need to get back to my job, they need the socialization, but germs. What the hell do you do? It's awful. LB: And there's even that other level of the idea that we're seeing that poor school districts like the school district in the city of Allentown where people don't even really have access to the internet much less having a computer. They don't even have the internet in their home, we don't have a grid here, and what they're talking about is like in cities like this or cities like Easton and Bethlehem they need to make the entire city be a grid and then the payment to be able to get into -- and just have like you never get a password who is in school so that they can be on the internet and then you can get them inexpensive computers and you can do that. But right now kids who are in the Parkland School District are having no problem being able to do lessons and classes and Zoom classes and stuff. But kids who are in Allentown who in some ways need this education more they don't all speak English, they're American citizens, they don't all speak English, they need this, they don't have their family. Their families are essential workers so they're home alone. You know that has to really be-- ST: But the unexpected ripple effects of this you know the more people that you talk to and it sounds like you -- you know you get to talk to all these people with these interviews and things are sprouting up that you wouldn't even think. One of my friends works in the parks system so when this first happened the shutdown everybody's like let's get back to nature and it was March, April, it was great weather so like the first or second weekend there were like seven forest fires not like raging forest fires but there were seven fires in our parks system that had to go be extinguished because it's like people that never go out into nature are suddenly out there, you know, tossing their cigarette butts or whatever and I was like wow what an unintended ripple coming out of this and there's so many of them out there, and there's so many that will continue to happen, there's so many we haven't even identified yet. It's just -- it's a really interesting part of history, I'd rather not have lived for it, but you know let it happen in another hundred years but here we are getting through it. LB: It will be a thing to see if indeed people like for example well we can't afford to pay kids you know we can't afford to pay for kids to have education and suddenly we have a trillion dollars to line everybody's pockets, a trillion dollars is so much money that that would mean every single person in the entire Lehigh Valley could have two million dollars for children, you know. ST: For us to get like a half hour bump on the stock market that was fun right. Couldn't have spent that money better. LB: And yet you know they'll say like well there's not enough money to have universal health care, because if we'd had universal health care that would have been another thing that would have kept people from getting sick, because people went to work because they couldn't go to the doctor, they didn't have health care and stuff, they were afraid to lose-- ST: And they infected other people, yes. LB: So, yeah, well this has been a wonderful conversation, I'm so glad to get to talk to you, what a good time. We'd love to stop by on Zoom at your bar. ST: We've got to hash out the happy hour specials I'll let you know. LB: Tell people what happy hour special it is so that they could bring it to their Zoom. Their own concoction as a mocktail or something. But it would be really interesting to hear what it ends up to be that is your perfect lesbian movie. ST: Yes, well we haven't found it yet. So far, you know, we do like Carol, we got really [ into the Gentleman Jack series on HBO that wasn't a movie but we dressed up like Anne and Ann and we're Sarah and Sarah so we dressed up as them for Halloween and I contacted [Shibden?] Hall and had them put little signs around that was like Sarah's love for you is so strong it can be felt at Shibden Hall, so I did that for my wife. But we are absolutely obsessed with that series so if they could like -- and that's another thing they can't film the next season because of Covid of all the things that are going on that's the most devastating.  LB: Are we privileged or what but boy I feel that way too and I actually studied all about Anne Lister I was going to do a whole art history program about her for lesbian visibility day and how brilliant she was and all the problematic things about her and it's such a fascinating thing. That you know they actually had well I'm sure you would know this but they had intimacy coaches to be able to tell them how to make out with each other and how to touch each other and stuff so that it would make more sense and it wouldn't look fake. ST: The theories oh my gosh, no I didn't know that. LB: This is what you should you know because these women are not lesbians, they were saying like you know you have all sorts of coaches for different kinds of movements in movies and stuff. ST: That is so funny. LB: Fighting coaches and stuff like that so they actually said you know this is what you should do, and this is how you should move, and this is the look you have. It is a brilliant series, it's the second, we don't have Hulu, so we sort of latched onto our friend's but it's the second series now, is it the second season? ST: Yes, there were two seasons and now the third one is postponed. So I think or was it one season. LB: I thought it was kind of sad actually so you know. ST: Well we read her, Sarah read her actual diary too and then like you know I never have time, so she gave me the Cliff Notes, but her medical treatment from her diaries was horrible. So I don't know if they'll touch on any of that I doubt it. LB: Fascinating thing but you'll never have time to do but Shibden Hall has a thing that's called Lister Sisters and Michelle Meecham I don't know she lives in our community I don't know if you know her, she also has a whole outfit, a whole Anne Lister, she was at the pride festival dressed as Anne Lister. She wears that ring and everything and she looks -- she became a Lister Sister because you know despite thousands or no it's five million words, she wrote five million words, well they haven't all been decoded. They get people who are known as Lister Sisters and they teach them how to decode it and then they give them pages and they write, they decode it. ST: I have the legend of like her handwriting I think it's saved on my phone, so I was going to like write -- I'll start writing to Sarah in that code, she'll be like what the hell is this. Grocery list, surprise. LB: But you have to know all those math symbols and everything, and actually the actors in that are just, they're so incredibly great the women are so great. I love that you're into that especially since Harry Potter is dead to us, so you know. ST: I was never a fan anyway. LB: I liked it but I'm past it now, I knew a lot of trans people who loved it and it's over such a shame. So good for Anne Lister for keeping us amused. Thank you again so much for talking to me. ST: Absolutely, it was fun. LB: When the transcript is all done, they'll send you the thing and you can look it over and see if there's anything that you say oh, I didn't mean to say that. But I don't think you'll find that, I thought this was wonderful and it was very different than a lot of other people I've been talking about. Each person has such a different insight into that, and this is significantly different because of your working in the hospitality industry so to speak and it's very helpful. So thank you very much for doing that. ST: Absolutely, thank you for thinking of me for the project I'm excited. LB: We're very lucky that we have this archive because Trish and I saved tons and tons and tons of papers over the last twenty-five years that we've been doing this and we're like what are we going to do with this stuff. And now it's digitized, it's all-- ST: Yes, incredible. LB: We're very lucky and we own it, the center owns it, but Muhlenberg is maintaining it so we've very lucky. Anyway thank you very much, keep up the good work, stay safe. ST: I will you too. LB: All that kind of stuff and we'll keep our fingers crossed for November well ninety-nine days, ninety-nine days on the wall. ST: All right thank you, bye. 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). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:15:26 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sarah Trimmer, July 27, 2020 Description An account of the resource Sarah Trimmer talks about how the current COVID-19 pandemic is affecting her, her essential worker job managing a bed and breakfast in South City Bethlehem, and her concern about the virus because she is at high risk as a breast cancer survivor. She also discusses how she and her wife have replaced new entertainment interests for things they regularly did before the virus. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PH40_30 Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-07-27 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/2f27b8008d7adc6abc086a8e1ea3634a.png e7b9469eaf34a8187ad598897dcf63ea Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 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 Stephen Libby & Gary Gaugler. Jr. OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_20.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 July 29, 2020 Stephen Libby &amp ; Gary Gaugler, Jr., July 29, 2020 PH40_20 01:00:57 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) Stephen Libby &amp ; Gary Gaugler. Jr. Liz Bradbury video/mpeg LibbyStephenGauglerJrGary_20200729_video.mp4 1.0:|27(5)|54(6)|85(5)|132(2)|157(3)|178(12)|197(12)|214(15)|233(7)|258(14)|277(17)|306(13)|329(17)|348(11)|371(2)|396(5)|423(6)|448(12)|473(7)|494(5)|517(14)|542(19)|563(13)|588(6)|621(3)|646(4)|683(2)|708(8)|741(10)|766(4)|791(2)|820(9)|843(13)|886(3)|903(12)|924(2)|941(15)|968(4)|993(4)|1016(6)|1049(12)|1080(6)|1109(13)|1136(7)|1163(4)|1184(6)|1213(4)|1238(2)|1261(4)|1286(2)|1315(15)|1346(9)|1373(2)|1396(8)|1427(4)|1452(6)|1483(9)|1516(3)|1539(16)|1570(2)|1609(5) 0 https://youtu.be/3XKYK6N19xo YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction LB: With this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBTQ Community Center and the Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College, to collaborate on forty years of public health experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ community, electing and curating local LGBTQ health experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury, and I’m here with Stephen Libby and Gary Gaugler Jr., to talk about their experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ community during this time of COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ community archives. 0 270 Stephen working as a social worker/Gary working in trade compliance from home during the pandemic SL: Yeah. I’m looking for something new. I think of the questions later, but just for a natural flow, I am, you know, just very concerned about going in to visit COVID positive people in COVID positive facilities or homes. As a social worker, I don’t feel like I have the training, like a doctor or a nurse might, for this kind of epidemic. I’m just not really comfortable doing that. [...]&#13 ; &#13 ; GG: [...] And we were told, when we all were back on July 1st, that they would not be sending us home again, no matter how bad it got, because they were so disappointed that when they told us we could optionally come back, that nobody did. And since then, we’ve had a couple of people leave because they’ve gotten COVID. And the governor has released a statement that -- an order -- that if you are able to telework, you must do so. And the company has refused to acknowledge that, and many people have reported them to the Pennsylvania Department of Health. And I’ve not heard anything.&#13 ; 0 860 Gary's experience working for his company as a gay man/Comparing World War II business and citizen protocols with pandemic business and citizen protocols GG: It’s always, as a gay man, it’s always been very interesting to work. I’ve worked at this company for just under 14 years, and it’s always been very interesting, not just towards gay people, but towards black people, towards Hispanic people, towards women, even, I mean, it’s very cripplingly old fashioned. And so this is really the worst it’s ever been. &#13 ; 0 1066 Getting used to being together all the time/Social distancing/Communicating with others virtually GG: I was very excited to ditch my forty minute each way commute. But, yeah, as I drove home with all my work stuff, I thought to myself, “Oh, my God, I don’t know what working with him at home, living with him, like, all full time is going to be like.” And we kind of got around her question. But I’m going to finish. For us, I found, I think he’s (laughs) I don’t know. The whole time that we were home, at least before I went back to work, we got along maybe better than we ever did. And we got along very -- I mean, we get along very well. I think we’re a pretty solid, functional couple to begin with. But, yeah, we really -- I think we’ve taken this whole pandemic so seriously, -- and really don’t go out. We don’t socialize. We don’t have people here to socialize -- that we rely on each other. And I think that, kind of knowing that kept us from the usual stuck inside for a snow weekend or whatever, kept us from reverting to, “Oh my God, it’s you again.” 0 1381 Exercising/Working on "The Gay Journal"/Gardening/Home projects SL: --we for a three-and-a-half-mile walk. I still do that every day, even since Gary’s gone back to work. And we were doing that pretty religiously every day if it wasn’t raining or whatever. And a little bit of -- we don’t have a home gym, so a little bit of a workout that I learned some stuff from my sister, who teaches physical fitness training online, so (inaudible). And I’ve been working on the magazine for two issues. Yeah. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah. It’s pretty intense. &#13 ; &#13 ; SL: Oh, and we have a vegetable garden that’s much healthier and pretty soon, more than the one we had last year. We planted more flowers. 0 1501 Pandemic affecting animals' eating patterns/Adhering to pandemic safety protocols LB: [...] Because restaurants are selling food to people that they take it away, and throwing the food away in their garbage cans behind the restaurants, restaurants where cats hang out. And so it really changed the patterns of most kinds of animals. They’re seeking out houses and stuff to hang around (inaudible). It’s scary. &#13 ; &#13 ; SL: I think we also found out, you know, like, that we are taking -- we’re at one end of the spectrum. &#13 ; &#13 ; GG: We’re extreme. &#13 ; 0 1572 Cooking at home SL: We haven’t done any kind of carryout, which we feel bad about because we want to support places. But I don’t know that I’d be able to enjoy it. We found that we both like to cook more than we thought we did. We have build your own pizza night on Friday nights for the last eighteen weeks. 0 1613 More on gardening/More on social distancing SL: And then we had mint, and we inherited from the previous owners a huge raspberry bush, which just keeps tipping over a little bit more and little bit more each year. So that was great. We got about, I would say, eight or ten cups of those. And then, you know, the neighbors on either side, so the young couple on this side with a two-year-old. And then we have an older couple that’s mostly retired on this side. And, you know, we’ve noticed that they’re doing things totally differently, too. [...] 0 1696 Liz ordering takeout/Grocery shopping LB: We were. And then we have a young person in our life who came back from college and had COVID-19, and it was serious, but she has totally recovered. And so she has a lot of antibodies. They tested her through the Lehigh Valley Health Network. So she shops for us, and we don’t even have to feel guilty about the fact that she might get this, because she is less likely to get it. She’s got the highest level defense that one could have, as long as that lasts. She’s going back to college in a couple of weeks, and then we’ll have to go back to either ordering stuff or doing what we’re doing. And, you know, we wanted to get -- Trish loves to get chicken from Mr. Bill’s, but Mr. Bill’s will not order -- like, we can’t pay them in advance and go pick up stuff. 0 1805 Stephen's concerns during the pandemic SL: My biggest concern -- well, so I would say my biggest concern personally would be for our families, obviously. And then also for myself, because I have smoked for years. I’ve had different ailments. I usually get bronchitis once or twice a year. I mean, all these other things. And when I was doing hospice, you know, you would find that everybody that you go visit is also treating it differently. And that can depend on something as stupid as politics, you know. 0 1934 England's Covid-19 protocols/President Trump's ideas on Covid-19 testing GG: It’s frustrating because we did this thinking it would be gone, like the other countries, in a few months. And so, to see it continue on when we’ve been doing what we were told to do from the beginning is frustrating. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Right. I mean, in England, where they shut down every single household, you could not leave your house for three months. And it’s gone. They’re shooting television shows with audiences full of people, and they’re safe because they’ve all been tested and they all know that there’s no danger and stuff, because they -- you know, and they, for 90 days, they stayed inside. 0 2040 Gary's concerns and concerns for the LGBT community/marginalized people GG: And so I’m going to -- so, to your question, I would echo exactly what Steve said about concerns for obviously myself, my family. As a smoker as well, as a family of half and half smokers, and just some old people. But for the LGBT community, you know, I want to say I don’t know if it’s the administration, I don’t know if it was because, God forbid, we asked people to stay inside for two months. I don’t know if I’m just blind to what I thought we were as a country, but, you know, we’ve seen this whole outbreak of racist nonsense with black people and lynchings and nooses hanging from trees and, you know, white lives matter, all lives matter. 0 2219 Stephen's work on "The Gay Journal"/Gary possibly writing a book LB: [...] Talk about the magazine, Steve, because I think that’s an important thing. &#13 ; &#13 ; SL: So, yeah. The first issue that we worked on, so that would have been the summer issue, when the pandemic started, I couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone if they had money to advertise in that issue. So that was an online only issue. We still produced it. It was still thirty-ish pages. My designer still worked on it. We still paid him. We posted it on the website. It’s a beautiful looking issue. I really wish that we could have printed that. 0 2619 Gary knowing of people who have contracted Covid-19/Frustrations over others not taking pandemic seriousl LB: So have you known anybody that’s been sick? Or more than sick? &#13 ; &#13 ; SL: No. Right. &#13 ; &#13 ; GG: Well, a couple of people. For me, people on Facebook that, you know, you know how Facebook works. It’s not direct friends necessarily. It’s -- a couple of people on Facebook that we know have had it. But nobody close to me. &#13 ; 0 2871 Anxiety over working in-person during the pandemic SL: I think when we talk about it with someone like you, I think we’re in pretty good shape. I think, you know, there’s anxiety when Gary comes home from work because they’re still -- they’re actually being way more aggressive with getting people back to work, telling people if they leave, they’re going to consider that their resignation if they’re concerned about safety and all this other stuff. So I think in some ways, it’s gotten a little worse anxiety-wise for us. 0 2990 Wearing masks/Steve Ziminsky and his former roommate who contracted Covid SL: [...] And then, again, the same thing with Gary’s work. Some people are wearing masks, some people are not. They’re not enforcing it because they are looking at it the other way. You know, people are complaining, ”It’s against my freedom. I don’t have to wear a mask. I shouldn’t have to wear a mask. You can’t force me.” Versus looking at it from the other perspective that everyone should be wearing a mask so that we’re all safe. And, you know, they don’t look at it that way.&#13 ; 0 3163 Thoughts on Black Lives Matter GG: I just think it’s very disappointing that we’re even still having the conversation. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah. &#13 ; &#13 ; GG: Really, all I have to say about it, I guess I live in a delusional world where all of this does not matter anymore because people are smarter than this. But....&#13 ; &#13 ; SL: Well, and I also think it just complicated, you know, having COVID happening while Black Lives Matter protests were happening. You know, it really complicated things because, again, I didn’t feel comfortable going out and taking part in marches and stuff like that. I mean, we live vicariously through Facebook and what we were seeing on the news, and friends of our that actually did go out, that either had young African American -- you know, adolescent African American children that wanted to go out and be part of this, or witness this, or be part of history. 0 3283 Finding hope in America's future political prospects SL: Well, so yeah, I do think maybe Joe Biden gives us hope. I hope that the country -- I hope that there’s enough people that maybe couldn’t vote for Hillary because that didn’t excite them, that are disappointed enough to vote for Biden. I mean, I really think that realistically, that’s what we’re looking at. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: I saw a meme about Biden, and he had a picture of him, and he said, “Well, let me read you my platform.” And then the bottom of the meme said, “You had me at let me read.” 0 3528 Discussing "murder hornets" SL: And I’m just glad we haven’t seen the orange wasps or whatever the -- &#13 ; &#13 ; GG: (laughs) Killer hornets. &#13 ; &#13 ; SL: The murder hornets. I don’t know. And so, hopefully, we’re not going to see those. &#13 ; &#13 ; GG: No, but every time I see one of those cicada killer wasps in the yard, one of those. I’m like, is it? Is it? (laughs)&#13 ; 0 3601 Thoughts for the future/Conclusion LB: Is there anything else you’d like to tell the future? And say, you know, here’s what the story is about this now, and we hope you’re doing this -- &#13 ; &#13 ; SL: I don’t think so. Just, you know, say hello to your president, Rachel Levine, in the future. (laughs) Because she’s doing a great job right now. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: From us. Yeah. One of the things [Ollie Riley?] just said was, “Yeah, this is what I want to say to the future. If we can work this hard during a pandemic, you better have fixed it.”&#13 ; 0 MovingImage Steve and Gary talk about how the COVID-19 virus is affecting them. They talk about each working from home and how it affects themselves and each other. They talk about what it’s like at their jobs, and how possible exposure to infection has caused them to reconsider their employment and why. They describe the care they are taking to stay safe and consider why they are not speaking time with people who are not caring the kind of care they are. Stephen Libby &amp ; Gary Gaugler Jr. 2020-07-29 LIZ BRADBURY: Here we go. And now I'm going to turn to back-up recording, because I'm anal retentive, and it's a good thing I am, because I've got a couple of recording issues, including that in the middle of Ollie's thing, it went off. And I don't know whether it was his or mine, but I had a strong signal the whole time. I have no idea what -- never happened. That was my twenty-fourth interview, and you guys are -- actually, it's more than that. No, it's more than that, because the one after it is -- it was my twenty-eighth interview. So you guys are twenty-nine for me. And I had never had that happen, and I've been on lots of other Zoom calls, too, and it just disappeared completely off the screen like it was never there. It froze for a while, and then it just disappeared. So I hope that that doesn't happen again. But I don't know. Well, anyway. So, let me read you this stuff. So, can you hear me okay?  GARY GAUGLER, JR.: Yeah. LB: With this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBTQ Community Center and the Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College, to collaborate on forty years of public health experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ community, electing and curating local LGBTQ health experiences from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury, and I'm here with Stephen Libby and Gary Gaugler Jr., to talk about their experiences in the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ community during this time of COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ community archives. Today is July 29, 2020, and we're meeting on Zoom. So, and I have to check to be sure I'm recording for sure. Okay. And I've pinned you, so that's good. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with us today. To start, can you please state your full names and spell them for me? STEPHEN LIBBY: Sure. Stephen Libby. S-T-E-P-H-E-N. Libby, L-I-B-B-Y.  GG: Gary Gaugler, Jr. G-A-R-Y G-A-U-G-L-E-R, junior.  LB: All right. And, could you please share your birth dates.  SL: March 27, 1964.  GG: July 8, 1983.  LB: All righty. So, and I wanted -- we have to do this just for the location stuff -- what town are you in? and you're in Allentown. Is that correct? Good. So, this is the consent part. Do you consent to this interview today?  SL: Yes.  GG: Yes. LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in surgical formats?  SL: Yes. GG: 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 we may not even know about today?  SL: Yes.  GG: Yes.  LB: Do you understand that you'll have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview, identify any parts you'd like to delete, and withdraw your interview from the project if you so choose? SL: Yes.  GG: Yes.  LB: Okay. So, I need to ask you what your zip code is there? SL: 18103. LB: Okay. And what are your ages, it says on this sheet? Sort of redundant. GG: Yes. Thirty-seven. LB: I didn't get yours, Steve.  GG: I'm sorry. Fifty-six.  LB: Okay. How do you identify within the LGBTQ community? Transgender, gay, lesbian, bi, pansexual, blah blah blah. SL: Gay.  GG: Gay.  LB: Okay. And Cisgender? SL: Yes. No. Yes. Yes. LB: And I can say that because I know you, so it's not like I'm making a presumption.  SL: Right.  LB: So, you know, I sent you these questions already, and there are things to consider. If you don't want to talk about these things, I'm perfectly fine with that. You talk about whatever you want. But let me just ask you right up front, because we're asking everybody, who's in your house with you? I mean, so you look -- you guys both live there, but what else? Is there anybody else there?  SL: We have two cats. We have Tigger and we have Nugget. Yes.  LB: There you go. So that's good, because some people are all by themselves and it's very hard. So, have you both been working? And tell me about what you each do, and how you've been working during the pandemic and that (inaudible).  SL: Okay. So I'm a social worker for a hospice agency. And I typically go out and do emotional support for patients, their families. That could be visits, phone calls, and work with the rest of our team, which includes nurses, aides, chaplain, to provide the best care for people at end of life.  LB: Would you say that you are part of Lehigh Valley Health Network? What's your organization? SL: No. Bayada.  LB: Okay. Gary, you want to... GG: I work in trade compliance. And that's dealing with imports and exports of our company's material. I work in a manufacturing facility in the Lehigh Valley.  LB: So how's it been for work? Have you both been going regularly to work? Why don't you start out, since you started on the first part?  SL: Yeah, sure. So when this first hit, I wasn't happy with the response from some people in my company, which tended to make me panic a little bit. And so, I started to do as much as I could do from home, which led to me being moved to per diem, and then led to me being furloughed for two months. And then was hired back part-time a month ago. And now I am going to be leaving that position. Friday will be my last day.  LB: And are you done there and you're looking for something new? Or... SL: Yeah. I'm looking for something new. I think of the questions later, but just for a natural flow, I am, you know, just very concerned about going in to visit COVID positive people in COVID positive facilities or homes. As a social worker, I don't feel like I have the training, like a doctor or a nurse might, for this kind of epidemic. I'm just not really comfortable doing that.  LB: Yeah. I can see that. What about your work situation, Gary?  GG: We were all sent to work from home in late March. And my work has been very, very aggressive in their summoning us back. We were told in mid-to-late-May, and Pennsylvania was at its peak, that we should come back optionally. But June 1st, they wanted fifty percent back. July 1st was one hundred percent back. And we were told, when we all were back on July 1st, that they would not be sending us home again, no matter how bad it got, because they were so disappointed that when they told us we could optionally come back, that nobody did. And since then, we've had a couple of people leave because they've gotten COVID. And the governor has released a statement that -- an order -- that if you are able to telework, you must do so. And the company has refused to acknowledge that, and many people have reported them to the Pennsylvania Department of Health. And I've not heard anything. I'm sure they're quite swamped with what, you know, the reportings that they get on different businesses, because I doubt my company is the only one that feels they're above the law. So my workplace has become very hostile. Somebody brought in a doctor's note yesterday that said they should be able to work from home, they're high risk. It was immediately handed back to them, and they were told, "We can't allow you to, because anybody that's at high risk will want to work from home, then." And she said, "Well, we're all supposed to be working from home right now." And the response was, "Well, we're essential." But my understanding of the governor's and Dr. Levine's press conference, now two weeks ago, was it was not essential or non-essential. If you could telework, you were not to go to work. LB: I know hospital workers working from home that are absolutely essential, but they're working from home. I mean, I guess the definition of "essential" is that you have to be on-site, but if you can work from home, you're not essential for that.  GG: Yeah. Right.  SL: And Gary's business is kind of twisting the definition, or stretching the definition of "essential."  GG: Yeah. When this whole thing started, my company is the world's largest global manufacturer of pipe fittings. And one of things that they also produce is sprinkler heads for fire protection in hospitals and hotels, anywhere you see fire sprinklers. And so they wrote to the governor and said, "We are essential. We create life-saving devices," and that was all true. The [Bradford's?] facility -- oops! Our facility in the Lehigh Valley has never, ever manufactured a sprinkler head. They're all manufactured in Leland, North Carolina. Oops. So, yeah, they've kind of been twisting everything from the beginning to make this work out in their favor, and creating this series of --  LB: I mean, is there a circumstance where, if you're working -- I mean, I have to say that we've been working from home, and I've done more work than I've ever done. I don't waste my time walking to work, you know. And, like, when you're at work, you feel like, "Well, I'm at work," whether you get work done or not.  SL: Yeah. GG: Yeah. SL: Gary said that after he was working at home for a few weeks, his supervisor came back, or his director came back and said, "You know, we're tracking productivity, and productivity is higher than it's been for a long time with all of you guys working from home." But then, it seemed like -- I'll let you speak for yourself after I say this to lead into that -- is that you were saying that it seemed like they were just scared that once the pandemic was over, that people were going to want to continue to work from home. And so it seemed like that sent a panic through upper management, and then a rush to get people back into the office.  LB: It's such a weird thing, because what this -- what we're all seeming to learn throughout this, from this pandemic, is that the way we all work can really be different. It doesn't need to be this way at all.  GG: I agree. And the method to my madness when this whole thing first started, because my company is so old fashioned, and very truly old fashioned, not just with working from home options. But I knew that this was a rarity, and so my thought was, I'm going to, while I am home, I'm going to, you know, really overachieve so that I don't want them to think that we're slacking. And so I really wanted to do more than I usually do. Because, as you said, you go into work, and you're like, "Oh, what say (inaudible) say today? What time did (inaudible) say today?" You know, and you're in your own TMZ before you know it. It's just this spiraling, you know, whatever. So I really wanted to make a point that it was something that could be done, and I was not taking advantage of the situation. I can't speak for all 800 employees in office space that they did that, but I think it works for some people. Doesn't work for others. And I don't know why, after three months, they felt -- there should be a way to measure. If you're less productive, you have to come back and be watched. If not --  LB: I wonder if they get, like, a huge write-off or something for having a big building. You know, because it's hard to justify having a huge building if you don't want to have 35 --  GG: Well, also, not just that. Our CEO is friends with Pat Toomey, and they golf together regularly. And I've been informed that he is going to ask for the maximum amount of money back in whatever it is, emergency relief or whatever, because we are so essential that we're the only company in the Lehigh Valley that has 100 percent staff back daily.  LB: I see. So you won't be able to say that if everybody's home. Okay, that's an interesting point of view.  GG: It's always, as a gay man, it's always been very interesting to work. I've worked at this company for just under 14 years, and it's always been very interesting, not just towards gay people, but towards black people, towards Hispanic people, towards women, even, I mean, it's very cripplingly old fashioned. And so this is really the worst it's ever been.  LB: Really makes you aware of it, it shows. GG: You know, you go into work for a business or a company knowing that even if they say, you know, employees are number one, you know the company's number one. And you understand that. You're working for the company. You want the company to do well as much as you want yourself to do well. But somewhere along the line, I feel like, at least for me, I feel like -- I said from the beginning of the pandemic, and I know I'm just talking and talking, but --  LB: That's okay, except for Steve. GG: I feel like, not just with companies, but with people, you're really seeing people for what they really are. And it's brought out a lot of good in people and a lot of caring in people. But it's also brought out a terrible, really awful side of people in businesses, and presidents.  LB: (laughs) You know, you see this during war, too. Where people, in World War II, I think, in particular, where people were rationing because they needed rubber for the --  SL: Yeah. Sure.  LB: And then people were stockpiling and hoarding it, and they were black market, and they were, you know, jacking up prices, and companies were profiteering and stuff. And then there were -- most people, frankly, a huge number of American, or people in the country who were just doing everything they could. Raising victory gardens and collecting rubber, and not -- and rendering fat, and doing all sorts of things like that, that every minute of every day, because they were thinking about people who were fighting and what they were fighting for. And people who were victims of war and oppression in Europe at the time. And, you know, it is -- I think this does show, in this kind of thing, how much are you willing to sacrifice? Well, nothing at all. Won't sacrifice anything, you know. I want to be totally like nothing has happened, even though everything has happened. And then other people who will say -- so, as I said, this is my twenty-ninth, of twenty-nine people I've interviewed -- I did the first ten were HIV/AIDS folks that lived through the epidemic. Was that different group of people, but I also talked to them all about COVID, too. Everyone has said the same thing, all the people that I've interviewed have said the same thing, that what you're saying -- that people -- a frustration, and I probably would ask you about this, too. But the frustration of people just acting like -- not pulling together at a time when we all need each other, you know. So are you communicating with other pals on the phone? Or are they coming over to swim? Or are they, you know, what's the deal? GG: (laughs)  SL: When we -- I'm going to let Gary tell his story. He tells it very well. When he tells the story that you tell, when you first brought your mom into his home.  GG: About having people over to swim?  SL: No. Just that he brought his monitors home, and he said he was telling people to work, or maybe his mom on the way home on a phone call, "Oh, you know..." Because there's such an age difference, and we have a lot in common, but there's a lot of things we don't have in common, especially maybe hobbies and downtime and movies, you know, video games, stuff like that. So he goes, "Well, wait and see what the hell this is going --"  GG: I was very excited to ditch my forty minute each way commute. But, yeah, as I drove home with all my work stuff, I thought to myself, "Oh, my God, I don't know what working with him at home, living with him, like, all full time is going to be like." And we kind of got around her question. But I'm going to finish. For us, I found, I think he's (laughs) I don't know. The whole time that we were home, at least before I went back to work, we got along maybe better than we ever did. And we got along very -- I mean, we get along very well. I think we're a pretty solid, functional couple to begin with. But, yeah, we really -- I think we've taken this whole pandemic so seriously, -- and really don't go out. We don't socialize. We don't have people here to socialize -- that we rely on each other. And I think that, kind of knowing that kept us from the usual stuck inside for a snow weekend or whatever, kept us from reverting to, "Oh my God, it's you again."  SL: Yeah. So we talked with other medical professionals in the beginning of this, when I was per diem, and then when I was furloughed for two months, and Gary was already working from home. And so we had a good two months, a little bit more, together at home. The room that we're sitting in right now is kind of our big great room that they added on to the house between the main house and then going out to the back yard. So Gary had this room all to himself during the work hours during the day. I would work in the living room inside the main house. And I think we both, after talking with those medical professionals, came to the same conclusion, that we only wanted to go out if it was absolutely necessary. And then that was also what was being told to us by our governor and by Secretary of Health Levine. And so that's what we were trying to adhere to. And I would make a list and go to the grocery store and spend 500 dollars, and that would last us for a month. And I didn't want to go back there again until we absolutely needed to go back. We didn't visit any friends. We started a Zoom happy hour on Friday afternoons, late Friday afternoon. Then we started Zooming with, or Facetiming, whatever, with his family as well. And they all live local, but we didn't have any of them over. They didn't have us over. Then we started Zooming with my family in Maine. Then we started Zooming with friends in Florida, with friends in Tennessee. And we kept that up, especially the local guides that are mostly on our kickball team, you know, on the Friday nights. So we did that, and it seemed like some of them kind of got tired of it after a few weeks.  GG: When we went to yellow and green, everybody -- we were the only ones that were still serious about it. (laughs) SL: Yeah. And so, that was okay. I mean, you know, they can do what they want to do. And then we just started doing it more with my family on Friday nights. And then what we did do when we opened the pool, is that we had, we'd been having Gary's parents over. And they sit a good ten feet from us at another table. We have our own table. They'd bring their own food, they'd bring their own alcohol. So this back room has three doors. They have their own door to go immediately into the basement to change and/or use the bathroom. And when they leave, we just wipe everything down, we keep everything closed. And that's what we've been doing for the last few weeks, when it's been nice enough on a Saturday, and they'll come over for a few hours. And that's really our only live socialization.  LB: Yeah. Wow. Well, I can't --  SL: Again, we're going to the grocery store. I don't think we've done -- we for a three-and-a-half-mile walk. I still do that every day, even since Gary's gone back to work. And we were doing that pretty religiously every day if it wasn't raining or whatever. And a little bit of -- we don't have a home gym, so a little bit of a workout that I learned some stuff from my sister, who teaches physical fitness training online, so (inaudible). And I've been working on the magazine for two issues. Yeah.  LB: Yeah. It's pretty intense.  SL: Oh, and we have a vegetable garden that's much healthier and pretty soon, more than the one we had last year. We planted more flowers.  LB: Everybody's garden is way better than it's ever been.  SL: Yeah. And we've done some home projects. I painted the bedroom. And, you know, things that we didn't -- that we were putting off, procrastinating since we moved in.  LB: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that world that biggest divided that stays it divided between people who really did a lot of projects and found out that they just weren't going to do any projects, even though -- [Melinda Kahn?] said to me, "You know, I had always thought that -- I'd always planned that when I had time, I would work on these big projects because I was so into them. But apparently, I'm not." (laughter) Couldn't do it. And I talked to two other people who said stuff like, "I said I was going to do stuff and I didn't." I just say that I've been maniacal about doing stuff. So, like, I took all the nuts and bolts and stuff in the basement and divided them. And there's like hundreds of jars with little labels and stuff. That's really anal retentive. I was building things and -- crazy. SL: You may get a cat's ass in a minute. This happened the other night.  LB: Yeah, get this. Hi, buddy.  SL: Hello. That's Tigger.  LB: Tigger. Yeah, I could tell. We have a lot of stray cats in our yard. And apparently, there's a lot more stray cats in the world in the 'burbs and stuff, Tigger, because -- Tigger (inaudible) are cats. Because restaurants are selling food to people that they take it away, and throwing the food away in their garbage cans behind the restaurants, restaurants where cats hang out. And so it really changed the patterns of most kinds of animals. They're seeking out houses and stuff to hang around (inaudible). It's scary.  SL: I think we also found out, you know, like, that we are taking -- we're at one end of the spectrum.  GG: We're extreme.  SL: We're pretty extreme, we're finding out compared to other people, friends, relatives. Actually, our relatives are pretty good, but our friends, you know, are going on vacations, Outer Banks, stuff like that. Posting pictures, no masks, no social distancing. GG: No masks, cheek-to-cheek.  SL: And we're like, so we don't want to invite them over to the pool. We don't want to really -- we haven't even gone out. We haven't done any kind of carryout, which we feel bad about because we want to support places. But I don't know that I'd be able to enjoy it. We found that we both like to cook more than we thought we did. We have build your own pizza night on Friday nights for the last eighteen weeks.  GG: Nothing Trish level yet. (laughs) SL: No, but we have done crab meat pizza. We've done meatloaf pizza. We've done a bunch of things that are fun.  LB: That's wonderful.  SL: Made some fun desserts. Gary's been making vegetable scrambled eggs almost every Sunday. We didn't get tired of those for a long time. The last two weeks we didn't do them, but sixteen or seventeen weeks, so.... LB: What do you have in the garden?  SL: So, you want to answer that? I've been talking for a while.  GG: Tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, radish, beets. SL: Pumpkin. GG: Pumpkins. And flowers. That's it.  LB: Wow. Great.  SL: And then we had mint, and we inherited from the previous owners a huge raspberry bush, which just keeps tipping over a little bit more and little bit more each year. So that was great. We got about, I would say, eight or ten cups of those. And then, you know, the neighbors on either side, so the young couple on this side with a two-year-old. And then we have an older couple that's mostly retired on this side. And, you know, we've noticed that they're doing things totally differently, too. They'll have family over, not really social distancing and stuff like that. And again, people would probably look at Gary's parents coming over. We're not wearing masks, but --  GG: They're far away.  SL: They sit far away from us.  LB: I have to say that of all the people I've interviewed -- I've interviewed twenty-nine people -- they have been extraordinarily -- they'll all like you. And Trish and I are even -- we don't even go to the store. We don't go to the grocery store.  SL: Do you order? So you're ordering out? You're ordering delivery?  LB: We were. And then we have a young person in our life who came back from college and had COVID-19, and it was serious, but she has totally recovered. And so she has a lot of antibodies. They tested her through the Lehigh Valley Health Network. So she shops for us, and we don't even have to feel guilty about the fact that she might get this, because she is less likely to get it. She's got the highest level defense that one could have, as long as that lasts. She's going back to college in a couple of weeks, and then we'll have to go back to either ordering stuff or doing what we're doing. And, you know, we wanted to get -- Trish loves to get chicken from Mr. Bill's, but Mr. Bill's will not order -- like, we can't pay them in advance and go pick up stuff. They won't do drop off, and we've been their customer for thirty years, thirty-three years. And they won't even, like, bring the stuff -- they have a door right behind their booth. Just call them, say we want eight chicken breasts, here's the money over the phone, and we'll just come and get it. Why would they not do that? I mean, you know, it's very upsetting, because that, not being able to shop, is just driving Trish crazy, because she does everything based on, you know, bargains. And she said, like, "I could be getting a flat of strawberries at the farmers' market and canning one hundred jars of strawberry jelly. And you could get it for ten dollars. You can't get that anyplace else. I could be getting it, but I'd have to be there, and I'd have...." She did that every year for -- she just canned thirteen jars of grape jelly from the grapes in the backyard.  SL: Wow. Cool.  LB: But, so anyway, what's your biggest concern in the pandemic, you know, for your personal biggest concern? And then also, just sort of for the LGBTQ community, if you could (inaudible). So what do you think about that, guys?  SL: My biggest concern -- well, so I would say my biggest concern personally would be for our families, obviously. And then also for myself, because I have smoked for years. I've had different ailments. I usually get bronchitis once or twice a year. I mean, all these other things. And when I was doing hospice, you know, you would find that everybody that you go visit is also treating it differently. And that can depend on something as stupid as politics, you know. I got into a conversation with a woman who, said, "Oh, and so I'll be wearing a mask. Will you be able to wear a mask when I visit?" and she said, "Yeah, well, you know, wearing masks. And she --" LB: I've lost the sound for you.  SL: Oh, I'm sorry. What did I do?  LB: What happened?  SL: Hello. LB: There you go. That's good.  SL: So she just said that she felt that it was all overblown, and it really wasn't, you know, "Don't you think we're making too big of a thing out of this?" and I said, "Well, you know, I have to go and visit other patients after I visit you. I also have to come home. And so, I'm asking if you can wear a mask, it would be appreciated." And so she did. To her credit, she did. But, you know, a lot of what she was saying sounds like what we're hearing out of our leaders, some of our leaders. So it just is concerning. You now, when we are taking this very seriously, and then you go out to the grocery store or whatever, and you realize, well, jeez, not everyone's taking this seriously. And yet, could we sluff off a little bit? I guess. But I don't know why we would, really.  GG: It's frustrating because we did this thinking it would be gone, like the other countries, in a few months. And so, to see it continue on when we've been doing what we were told to do from the beginning is frustrating.  LB: Right. I mean, in England, where they shut down every single household, you could not leave your house for three months. And it's gone. They're shooting television shows with audiences full of people, and they're safe because they've all been tested and they all know that there's no danger and stuff, because they -- you know, and they, for 90 days, they stayed inside. Not one single person went outside in the entire country under penalty of law. And then it's okay. And then they're now -- we're (inaudible) still going to be a little careful and stuff like that. But for the most part, they've tested enough to really know, it's not there anymore.  SL: Right. Right.  LB: You know, that's the other thing, too, is that we haven't had that adequate testing, and that could have been something that could have really controlled this all along, too.  GG: But, Liz, hear me out on this. The more you test, the more cases you'll find.  LB: I know.  GG: (laughs) LB: But for people in the future that are watching this video years from now (laughter)... GG: Sorry. I should have --  LB: The leader of our country said that the problem -- that we all don't hold in high regard -- said that if you test people, they will find more cases and the numbers will go up of the people who have had it. So then he didn't want people to be tested. SL: Well, and if for people that are watching this in the future, if you don't get a pregnancy test, you're not pregnant.  LB: (laughs) Yeah, that's right.  SL: And the logic follows. GG: And so I'm going to -- so, to your question, I would echo exactly what Steve said about concerns for obviously myself, my family. As a smoker as well, as a family of half and half smokers, and just some old people. But for the LGBT community, you know, I want to say I don't know if it's the administration, I don't know if it was because, God forbid, we asked people to stay inside for two months. I don't know if I'm just blind to what I thought we were as a country, but, you know, we've seen this whole outbreak of racist nonsense with black people and lynchings and nooses hanging from trees and, you know, white lives matter, all lives matter. And I look at Steve, and I don't want to sound ignorant, I really don't, and if I am, then I'm sorry. I always think we're good. Like, we're good, all of us, because I guess I put myself in a bubble where I don't associate with, or people like that don't associate with me, these people that feel this way. And our administration has felt this need to tell these people that I didn't really think were around anymore, to speak their minds and speak out. And, you know, as somebody that's studied history in college to be -- at one point I wanted to be a history teacher. I know that the blacks are cursed, and it's just going to spiral on from there. It's going to be the Jews. It's going to be the gays. It's going to -- it's certainly, it's trans. Trans has never gone out of style for being prejudiced against. So I just worry that we're the next in these peoples' freedom of speech to bash and go after their rights.  SL: Liz, I think I lost your audio.  GG: It's hers, I think.  LB: I turned it off because I had a call.  SL: There you go.  LB: So you've talked about communicating with people around, and in some ways, I feel like I'm communicating a little more with people far away than I used to. So have you been doing any other sort of queer activities? You told me you were working on the magazine. Talk about the magazine, Steve, because I think that's an important thing.  SL: So, yeah. The first issue that we worked on, so that would have been the summer issue, when the pandemic started, I couldn't bring myself to ask anyone if they had money to advertise in that issue. So that was an online only issue. We still produced it. It was still thirty-ish pages. My designer still worked on it. We still paid him. We posted it on the website. It's a beautiful looking issue. I really wish that we could have printed that. It came out -- we had some great artists and photography work in it, and great interviews. And all the contributors, including you, always come up with interesting, informative, entertaining content. And so that issue is online only for now. And then I started working on the fall issue. And I thought, well, you know, people started doing curbside and carryout and all this other stuff. And I thought, all right, I'm still going to put it out there, in case people do want to advertise. And, surprisingly, we got quite a few advertisers that came back, admittedly, probably about a third of what we usually get, but I was surprised that anyone came back. And so we talked with the printer about what paper options we had. You know, we thought maybe we had to change out paper to save a little bit of money because paper costs have been going up over the five years that we've been doing the magazine. And I think I had one ad rate increase in those five years, and we had paper increases, gosh, probably every, I don't know, four or five months. So I only passed that on once. Then she sent me some samples. I looked at some of the samples after wiping them all off with Clorox wipes once they arrived in my mailbox, because that's what a freak I am. And so I looked at those. And, anyway, so there was one, a non-glossy option that I thought was actually pretty good. So we talked about that. We talked about the money that that was going to cost. And so we're going to print 2,000 copies of that. And, because of that, and because of a couple of late advertisers, who were actually going to ad some pages from the -- actually we were going to add some pages anyway, because we're doing coming out stories for the first time, and we have over twenty people that volunteered to tell their coming out stories. Then we had the Black Lives Matter movement, so we had a couple of interviews. And then we have a centerfold with photos from the Black Lives movement protest from Philly and Lehigh Valley. And then we had some transgender. Corinne Goodman's writing something about trans black lives mattering, and deaths, and it's so far this year. And so then I thought, well, you know, there's some stuff in the summer issues. Maybe we can include that. So we added a few more pages. And we're going to include some of the stuff from the summer issue that was, you know, some of those great photos and artwork and stuff like that.  LB: Yeah. Good. SL: So we're going to still have the glossy covers, and then the interior will be a non-gloss paper. And it's seventy-four pages plus covers instead of our regular forty-eight pages.  LB: Do I need to do an article, or did I do one already?  SL: You already did one. You did it about the Supreme Court --  LB: Yeah. The Bostock kids, yeah. Good, okay. That was smart of me. (laughs) SL: No, you have to do it, and our deadline is the 3rd of August. (laughter) LB: I would do it. You know, you and I -- SL: I know, but no, no, no. You're good.  LB: You know, they're interviewing me for the archive, for the oral history now. And Mary [Paltz?] is doing it, and I said, "Mary, you know, I can't tell this story in one gig." So it's actually been like, I think, five sessions. And one of them, I was talking about how when we did the {Galligan?] Press, how some of us can just, like Trish, would research her article for days and days and days. And they were so meticulous with research. And I said, "Yes, Steve and I would spend about one day." I'm like, "Steve, you forgot to do your article." He said, "I'll get it to you in a few minutes." (laughs)  SL: Every once in a while it would work.  LB: And I said, "Trish and I don't know anything about pop culture anymore because that's the only way we ever knew anything was, oh, this was that person Steve was talking about."  SL: Yep. I'm not going to belabor the point, but Gary's even thought about maybe writing a fourth book in his series, and so -- which I would love to see. And he actually had -- someone wrote to him the other day about, "Is there another book coming out?" So that was kind of cool. And, anyway, he doesn't like to talk about it, so we won't.  GG: You probably heard me go, oh my God, under my breath at him. So you can edit that out. (laughter)  LB: I think that it's really important for people to know about creative work that people are doing. I think that's a good thing to do. And I was just thinking, maybe I should write another book. I've got a few. I'm working like a maniac for the center, but I'm also doing a lot of stuff to the house, and I'm doing a lot of art that's going to be a highlight through the Fry Festival. We're going to have this really interesting thing at the Fry Festival where, because it's virtual, you know, it's going to be on television and everything like that. But there's also a way to have booths where we're using a platform where it looks like you're walking into a gallery, and then each (inaudible) in the gallery, you can maneuver through the gallery. Each painting is like the booth. And then you go to that booth, and all their information is there, and then you can click through to their website. So it's actually got a booth component to the festival. And so, I was the first one. I said, give me a booth and I'll do art, and then maybe we can, you know, I'll do that. So then I said, "Trish, now I've got to do a whole bunch of paintings so I could do this gig." You know, because we don't -- SL: Right.  LB: And it happens, because I have to make this worthwhile. I'm too old to just blow off two or three years, you know. I don't have that much extra time. It's true for older people. So have you known anybody that's been sick? Or more than sick?  SL: No. Right.  GG: Well, a couple of people. For me, people on Facebook that, you know, you know how Facebook works. It's not direct friends necessarily. It's -- a couple of people on Facebook that we know have had it. But nobody close to me.  SL: No.  LB: Did you say there were people at work that had it?  GG: Yeah. Again, nobody close to me.  LB: Uh-huh. Yeah. I guess that's one of the problems is that, right now, anyway, in the pandemic, there are lots of people who don't know anybody that's had it. We know some people, and I'll tell you about that later.  GG: I just want a quick add onto the that and just say, he's very nice. We had somebody over to work on the pool a couple of weeks ago, and he said to me -- I came to the door wearing a mask -- and he said, "Oh, are we doing that?" and he's about seventy years old. And I said, "Yep. We're doing that." And he goes, "Well, you know, Hillary just concocted this whole thing so the Democrats would win." And I said, you know, he's here to do a job. I'm like, "Oh, okay." I'm not about --  LB: How do you do that? I mean, she's not even running for office.  GG: I know. I'm just so -- I've come to the point in this term that I can't -- you can't convince anyone anymore. There's no logic for some people. And so I just said, "Okay." And I left it at that. And he went on this tirade about how, and he goes, "Do you know anyone personally that's gotten this?" And I said, "Not personally." I said, "But I know people that are close to me in their lives that have someone in their family or a close friend that have had it." And he's like, "Exactly. You don't know anyone, though. Nobody actually knows anyone that has it." I'm like, "Okay." I just -- I'm so young to be over it, but I'm not arguing with the nonsense anymore. I'm just not. You do your thing, I'll do mine. But if you're on my property, please wear a mask.  LB: (laughs) That's reasonable to say. Yeah. So that's probably a big frustration. And that's one of the things we have on here, frustrations, fears, and challenges. And I think we already talked about some of those things. Is there anything else?  SL: I think the frustration is, people, you know, that we're taking it at a different level than other people. Because -- GG: We know we're taking it more seriously than most.  SL: But it's still frustrating. Because, again, if it was like you said about England, and we all took it as seriously as each other, and we all shut down, we'd be over it in three months.  GG: We made it -- when they announced it, everybody else saw it as this prison sentence. And we immediately took the high road and said, "This'll be cute. This'll be fun. We'll buy ingredients and we'll do all this cooking. We'll have our own little, like --" and he's way more social than I am. And I was like, I wanted to make sure that he was engaged, so we were doing, like, game night things, and different movie theme nights, and we're Zooming with all these different people. And I never felt like it was that big of an ask to not go out and spread germs for a couple of months. Honestly.  LB: And had we all -- had every American, so to speak -- done that, done the right thing, we'd be done. We'd be done. We'd be back at work. We'd be back kicking the economy and stuff like that. But it's a shame. So, would you say that your mental health has been pretty good during all this fun? You guys seem like you're in pretty good shape. SL: I think when we talk about it with someone like you, I think we're in pretty good shape. I think, you know, there's anxiety when Gary comes home from work because they're still -- they're actually being way more aggressive with getting people back to work, telling people if they leave, they're going to consider that their resignation if they're concerned about safety and all this other stuff. So I think in some ways, it's gotten a little worse anxiety-wise for us. And to the point that I, you know, quit my job. It's not (overlapping dialogue ; inaudible). I'm not like really fighting with the people that are my supervisor or directors. We've known each other for years. But we've had conversations, and they're really just towing the line from above them. Just like Gary's supervisor that's towing the line. Because they're both global companies. I think Gary's is probably a much larger global company than mine. But Bayada has offices around the world, and you know, there's somebody else that's up here that's telling everyone else what to do. And I feel like if you -- you know, everyone has to make their own decisions that are what they feel are best for them. I think there was, when I was furloughed, I felt great. I didn't really feel much anxiety, except when I had to go grocery shopping. And when I went back to work for this past month, it was high anxiety a lot, because I didn't know if I was going to get called to go in to see a COVID patient in a COVID facility, when different people telling me what different PPE to wear. And then, again, the same thing with Gary's work. Some people are wearing masks, some people are not. They're not enforcing it because they are looking at it the other way. You know, people are complaining, "It's against my freedom. I don't have to wear a mask. I shouldn't have to wear a mask. You can't force me." Versus looking at it from the other perspective that everyone should be wearing a mask so that we're all safe. And, you know, they don't look at it that way.  LB: You know, as my friend, [Laura Baterra?] said, "You know, people are forced to wear things all the time." We wear clothes.  SL: Right. Exactly.  LB: We're forced to wear clothes. I was talking to Steve Ziminsky, he's one of the people I interviewed, and he said that they had some really interesting insights about the way Allentown schools are, and how they really can't open. And one of the things is they're not air conditioned. A lot of them are not air conditioned. And September, they could be so hot, what they do is, they take all the kids, and they bring them down into air conditioned, like, auditoriums, and just cram them all into the auditorium. So they won't be able to do that. So what are they going to do? Leave these kids up in that one hudnred-degree temperature? They're all going to pass out. So they can't do that. They haven't put enough money into this school system to be able to accommodate this kind of circumstance. But he was also talking about his roommate, Liam, and I don't know if you ever knew that guy that lived in Steve's house, and he had a pretty serious heart condition, and now he's in a nursing home. And it's not Country Meadows, it's one that's just over the one in Allentown. It's a pretty big nursing home. And I can't remember the name of it. But it's one of the big ones we have right here in the Lehigh Valley. And he as serious, serious heart condition. And he got COVID. A hundred patients in that place had it.  SL: Lehigh Center.  LB: Was it?  SL: Was it Lehigh Center? I mean, that's what it sounds like.  LB: It was a nursing home that had one of those names that we recognize that's like Country Meadows.  SL: Oh, like Cedarbrook?  LB: Yeah. It was Cedarbrook. And Cedarbrook, they had 100 cases. They had a whole floor where they moved everybody onto that floor. And, you know, they're not telling people who's dying, because they don't want to tell, "By the way, there's six people down the hall that just kicked off." But you know, Steve was in touch with him, and it's hard to be in touch with him, because they don't have enough platforms and stuff for people. He said, "I haven't seen him. I haven't seen any of these people, but it's -- all these people had it." So it was very, very serious. And it's not like it's not happening. They had hundreds and hundreds of cases in Allentown. It's very serious. But, so you're already talking a little bit about Black Lives Matter. Do you want to say anything else about that? Or anything else about -- well, you've already talked about that. I mean, we can't really talk about this pandemic without talking about Black Lives Matter, and without politics.  GG: I just think it's very disappointing that we're even still having the conversation.  LB: Yeah.  GG: Really, all I have to say about it, I guess I live in a delusional world where all of this does not matter anymore because people are smarter than this. But.... SL: Well, and I also think it just complicated, you know, having COVID happening while Black Lives Matter protests were happening. You know, it really complicated things because, again, I didn't feel comfortable going out and taking part in marches and stuff like that. I mean, we live vicariously through Facebook and what we were seeing on the news, and friends of our that actually did go out, that either had young African American -- you know, adolescent African American children that wanted to go out and be part of this, or witness this, or be part of history. And so yeah. I mean, there's -- it's all just really hateful from -- I don't know. I really feel like it's from -- it's always been around, but I also feel like those flames get fanned by our administration that's in charge of the country. And so, I feel like that's the same with trans lives. I know that trans people were being killed before this administration, but it seems like it's increased.  GG: It's emboldened people.  SL: Yeah. LB: It has.  SL: And not in a good way.  LB: No. That's very true. Well, what gives you hope now, besides your kitties? Each other?  GG: Kamala Harris as V.P. LB: Okay. That sounds like a good deal.  SL: Well, so yeah, I do think maybe Joe Biden gives us hope. I hope that the country -- I hope that there's enough people that maybe couldn't vote for Hillary because that didn't excite them, that are disappointed enough to vote for Biden. I mean, I really think that realistically, that's what we're looking at.  LB: I saw a meme about Biden, and he had a picture of him, and he said, "Well, let me read you my platform." And then the bottom of the meme said, "You had me at let me read."  GG: Right.  SL: (laughs) Well, Gary has said this since day one after Trump won.  GG: I mean, I'll vote for the garbage can if the garbage can gets the nomination. I'll vote for anything. I mean, I -- he was my last pick. But he still towers about what's there, so...  SL: Biden.  LB: And we really hope, too, that -- you, person who is in the future watching this -- we're really hoping that Biden is smart enough --  GG: He worked out. (laughs)  LB: Well, I mean, a whole cadre of people in his cabinet, and as his vice president and stuff, because we've seen really terrific people that we could build an enormous super administration out of. It doesn't just have to be one guy. And so, you know, there's the Secretary of Health, and the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Education, and we know the terrible people that are in there now. They could be great. What if they were great? You know. So, we've got all that opportunity. And if you start to think about it, it's a dream team. So that, I think, would bring a lot of people out to vote. A lot of young people out to vote.  SL: I hope so. LB: Very, very important. That's what everybody says. Have to say that none of us are very, very, very, very confident. None of us are.  SL: I was confident when I went to bed that Tuesday evening.... LB: I know. I know.  GG: The cat threw up at about two in the morning, and Steve got up to clean up the cat vomit. And I reached over, grabbed my iPad, and I went, "Oh, my God." And he goes, "I'm half asleep. Don't tell me. Don't tell me anything." SL: "I need to be able to go back to sleep."  GG: And there were still, at that point, there were still a couple of states -- I didn't do the math. I was half asleep myself. I don't know if we could have made it at that point or not. But it was not good. And... LB: I know. I know. I haven't slept since that night.  SL: All right. Exactly.  GG: You're right.  SL: We had a --  LB: Well, actually, it was about six months before that when I started to begin to worry about it. So anyway. GG: Well, and I hope somebody has written, like, not a big, long history book, but just like, almost like a good Chicken Soup for the Soul kind of thing, but not. Where it just -- what he did each day. Because we keep looking at each other and going, "It's something every day." And we keep forgetting because your brain needs to make room for the new things. And so, there's just so -- every day he says or does something that makes us go, oh, my God. (laughs) Very depressing.  SL: And that's what I think, you know, of the pandemic on top of three years of that. You asked me about mental health and all that stuff, I think that that was just another kick in your balls, you know. And then Black Lives Matter. And trans people being murdered. And Jesus, God, you know. And I'm just glad we haven't seen the orange wasps or whatever the --  GG: (laughs) Killer hornets.  SL: The murder hornets. I don't know. And so, hopefully, we're not going to see those.  GG: No, but every time I see one of those cicada killer wasps in the yard, one of those. I'm like, is it? Is it? (laughs) LB: Oh, I saw one of those. We had that in our yard, too.  GG: They're terrifying looking.  LB: They're not bad, though, are they?  SL: They're not bad, but they look bad.  LB: They are huge and they have -- they're wearing that, like, orange jacket.  GG: And they're not afraid to break social distancing rules. They will get close to you, and it's like -- SL: But they're so dressed up. Like, what's that? (laughs) LB: Fabulous. I took a picture of one because it was so fabulous. But they aren't bad, because they get the bugs that will eat all of our leaves. So I guess (inaudible). Well, I have had a wonderful time talking to you guys. I'm going to turn off the recorder, and then I want to say a couple of things to you offline. SL: Okay. LB: Is there anything else you'd like to tell the future? And say, you know, here's what the story is about this now, and we hope you're doing this --  SL: I don't think so. Just, you know, say hello to your president, Rachel Levine, in the future. (laughs) Because she's doing a great job right now.  LB: From us. Yeah. One of the things [Ollie Riley?] just said was, "Yeah, this is what I want to say to the future. If we can work this hard during a pandemic, you better have fixed it." SL: (laughs) Yeah. Right.  LB: I thought that was a really good thing to say.  SL: Yup.  LB: I think that's really true. We're trying to manage all these civil rights and social concerns in the midst of a pandemic.  SL: Oy.  LB: It's very hard. And so, you know, you don't have to be in pandemic, you should be doing really well. Well, so I'm going to turn off the record thing. Thank you very much, guys.  GG: Thank you. SL: Thanks for including us.  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). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:00:56 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stephen Libby & Gary Gaugler, Jr., July 29, 2020 Description An account of the resource Steve and Gary talk about how the COVID-19 virus is affecting them. They talk about each working from home and how it affects themselves and each other. They talk about what it’s like at their jobs, and how possible exposure to infection has caused them to reconsider their employment and why. They describe the care they are taking to stay safe and consider why they are not speaking time with people who are not caring the kind of care they are. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PH40_20 Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-07-29 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/cdc99d3b24ac646ed797b97a6ef82588.png 3d26eede949bfff0f4779133974844fa Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 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 Steve Ziminsky OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_28.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 July 20, 2020 Steve Ziminsky, July 20, 2020 PH40_28 01:03:13 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) Steve Ziminsky Liz Bradbury video/mpeg ZiminskySteve_20200720_video.mp4 1.0:|27(4)|58(8)|85(9)|122(3)|159(3)|202(10)|237(12)|270(9)|311(5)|344(11)|375(6)|420(4)|453(6)|486(6)|520(2)|551(3)|588(5)|623(3)|658(6)|687(12)|722(2)|751(9)|780(10)|813(8)|848(7)|879(13)|910(5)|939(15)|972(2)|1003(2)|1038(2)|1079(5)|1110(19)|1135(12)|1170(11)|1207(10)|1240(8)|1271(7)|1302(15)|1335(9)|1360(19)|1387(7)|1422(17)|1449(13)|1494(4)|1525(13)|1550(13)|1577(14)|1610(10)|1639(11)|1666(8)|1695(3)|1722(14)|1759(13)|1784(3)|1809(15)|1842(2)|1871(9)|1914(2)|1949(5)|1982(13)|2011(3)|2038(9)|2049(5) 0 https://youtu.be/a2d1k9Md7qI YouTube video 0 Interview Introduction LIZ BRADBURY: And I’m also going to turn on my audio recording backup, when...&#13 ; &#13 ; STEVE ZIMINSKY: (coughs) Getting louder on this end. Good.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, is it better? Can you hear me okay?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: I see it says, “Recording.”&#13 ; 0 286 Working part-time at Grace Lutheran Church in Macungie during the pandemic LB: So talk about... So you’re not working now. So that’s a good thing, compared to other teachers, like.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: I’m a retired music teacher, almost thirty-three years in music ed. But I’m also -- am working my part-time job. The church never closed. So we’re doing video services each week.&#13 ; 0 400 Grace Lutheran operations during the pandemic LB: So h--? So you’re working. And was that plan all -- that they would just continue, right away? Were they closed at all during that time, the church?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: They really weren’t closed. There was one week, March 15th, where it was kind of optional for staff, if we wanted to come. And I just didn’t feel right that day. So I thought, “I’ll stay away.” But ever since March 15th... And we even did some Wednesday services. They’re all on YouTube. 0 433 Changed vacation plans due to pandemic SZ: And then I even got my vacation Sundays. And even though I’m not going anywhere... Anywhere I was going to go is all canceled or postponed to next year. But I at least got a chance to get some time off. And we had (inaudible) figure in advance. I did get some time off.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Did you have a vacation plan?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: The one week, no, and one week, yes. This coming Sunday, I probably would have been going... I was really thinking of going to New Orleans.&#13 ; 0 454 Postponed Black and White Men Together conference in New Orleans, Louisiana SZ: The one week, no, and one week, yes. This coming Sunday, I probably would have been going... I was really thinking of going to New Orleans.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Ah!&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: There’s a convention that was going to be held there. And then we start seeing... New Orleans really had an outbreak there. And I didn’t even buy the airline ticket. That’s when, I think, you’re really committed, when you buy the airline ticket. I’m so... And so they’re talking next year. But they’re also talking a video element to the convention. So if you don’t want to risk things and do that -- you can watch the key parts right online, like this.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: And that’s a convention for people who are music...?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Well, actually it’s a gay-related convention --&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh!&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: -- Black and White Men Together.&#13 ; 0 502 Socializing through Zoom LB: So have you been communicating with a lot of people? Like have you done other Zoom things and...? Probably ha--&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Oh, plenty of Zoom things. In fact, the most unusual one is I belong to several eating groups. We would get together like once a month. And so now what we do is go out to a restaurant or a place, bring something back, put it on our desk here, and eat and watch each other.&#13 ; 0 570 Communication with family LB: So are you communicating with other people? Like...? Do you have family around and that stuff?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Not really in this area. I do have living family. But the parents are dead. The grandparents are dead. The cousins are spread all over the country. I think the closest one is up in the Poconos area. And I haven’t really communicated there too much. And there’s some in Florida. And on the other side of the family, one of the things that really kind of hit was that one of my former roommates, as well as my aunt, who is now ninety-one... Sh-- I happened to visit her in early March. And then, all of a sudden, you know, no more visits anywhere, for either of those two. And then she was transferred to a different nursing home. And I’m not the power of attorney. But another one of my cousins is. And all of sudden, you found out, “Oh, by the way, she’s been moved.” So... She’s kind of death -- profoundly deaf and really is very quiet. So she never got to see the new nursing home. They just put her in a room. They bring the food to you. And it’s been this way for several months. And then the same thing with the former roommate that was here for ten years. And he’s over at ManorCare, in Bethlehem.&#13 ; 0 594 Inability to visit former roommate and aunt in their respective nursing homes SZ: And on the other side of the family, one of the things that really kind of hit was that one of my former roommates, as well as my aunt, who is now ninety-one... Sh-- I happened to visit her in early March. And then, all of a sudden, you know, no more visits anywhere, for either of those two. And then she was transferred to a different nursing home. And I’m not the power of attorney. But another one of my cousins is. And all of sudden, you found out, “Oh, by the way, she’s been moved.” So... She’s kind of death -- profoundly deaf and really is very quiet. So she never got to see the new nursing home. They just put her in a room. They bring the food to you. And it’s been this way for several months. And then the same thing with the former roommate that was here for ten years. And he’s over at ManorCare, in Bethlehem.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Liam?&#13 ; 0 654 Video chatting with former roommate, Liam, living at ManorCare, Bethlehem SZ: At least ManorCare is having these weekly video chats -- (dog coughing) and they usually are pretty good about. [00:11:00] Thursday, the phone rings. And you get to see him, get to talk. And he did have COVID. I’m trying to think of some of those questions you had on your list there --&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah.&#13 ; 0 680 Liam testing positive for/Living with Covid-19 LB: Okay. So Liam was sick?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Yes. And they gave him like... I think it was the third test he tested positive on. The first two, no. But he had always that, kind of... He’s very weak. And so then they said he had COVID. And then they kind of moved him to a different room. And it turned out the whole place... They were sending out emails like a lot. And they were up to over one hundred people --&#13 ; 0 696 Moving Liam and many other Covid-positive patients to different rooms/ManorCare location and layout&#13 ; SZ: And then they kind of moved him to a different room. And it turned out the whole place... They were sending out emails like a lot. And they were up to over one hundred people --&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Wow.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: -- including patients and staff. And it’s only a four-story building. And... 0 724 Spread of Covid-19 to the ManorCare 2029 building SZ: But the 2029 for a while didn’t have it. And then, all of a sudden, it just hit. And it’s not from the visitors, because there are not visitors. And we went -- just couldn’t wait till each week. And they finally got a way to communicate. You could talk to them. And he’s hoping to get back to his room. But again, he’s moved to another room. The rooms are all the same -- the same floor. It’s just down the hallway a little bit more. So, fine, you know?&#13 ; 0 752 Why Liam and other patients were moved/ManorCare protocols LB: They moved him to a different room, because they thought the room was contaminated or something?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Well, he had it. And then his first roommate, who he’s had quite a while --&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, I see 0 811 Liam's other illnesses/Vulnerability of older people to Covid-19 LB: Ah. Well, Liam has other illnesses, doesn’t he?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Yeah. He has quite a few things. And so he’s kind of confined to his bed. But he is talking. I mean, his mind is fine.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah. Is he about your age?&#13 ; 0 887 Video chatting with Liam via Duo LB: So you’ve been talking to him via like a Zoom thing or just on the phone or...?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: It’s called Duo.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Yeah. That’s what they use. So I had to... 0 903 Possibly catching Covid-19/ Cancelling plans because of Covid-19 LB: What’s your biggest concern about this? Are you concerned about you getting it?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: I can’t prove that I had it but I think I did.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, yeah?&#13 ; 0 978 Possible Covid-19 symptoms/No such diagnosis as Covid-19 at the time LB: Did you have a sense of smell?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: I don’t remember that.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: They say...&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: But I do remember my appetite was down.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Well, that’s a big thing. Yeah.&#13 ; 0 1046 Virtual doctor's visits LB: I guess that you could, at the hospital, have them check to see if you have antibodies in your blood.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Yeah, but... I have to wait for my next doctor visit. And at least it’ll be in person. My last doctor visit was over like something like this. 0 1083 Possible inaccurate diagnosis of bronchitis SZ: I mentioned it to the doctor and she thought that, “No, you had something else, bronchitis of some kind.” Well, it could be that too. Because a lot of bronchitis symptoms are similar too. And I was really pushing it.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: I don’t know. The things that you’re describing, though, they’re some... I’ve had bronchitis and I didn’t have diarrhea from it. 0 1142 Recovery process/Covid-19 affecting people differently SZ: And as it was, I went home and I took it real easy. And I could eat again. And everything kind of went back to being fine. But I never had it where... All your insides were rumbling there, while we were waiting for the bus. It was...&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Well...&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: I don’t want to chance this, so...&#13 ; 0 1196 Biggest concerns regarding the pandemic and the LGBT community/Protesting with Black Lives Matter, anti-Trump protests LB: So what’s your biggest concern during the pandemic, in terms of the LGBT community? What do you think about that?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Well, we’re all trying to survive. Yesterday I got to see part of the Reading pride festival online.&#13 ; 0 1299 Thoughts on Dr. Rachel Levine/Governor Tom Wolf LB: So how about being able to see Rachel Levine, on the videos tha-- Dr. Rachel Levine, who’s our Secretary of Health? That’s been a pretty positive thing for me. I don’t know about you. How do you feel about that?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Very positive. I don’t watch every single day. But sometimes you’re at your phone and, all of a sudden, “Oh, [00:22:00] the governor’s coming on.” And usually, Rachel’s on. And she’s very good. And it’s a very public spot. And usually the advice is right. I’m very enthusiastic about the governor too. Because he’s under a lot of pressure.&#13 ; 0 1345 Thoughts on school openings LB: Well, as a teacher or as a retired teacher... Because you were a teacher for a long, long, long time, in the Allentown School District, and from school to school. So you really traveled around from school to school. What do you think about opening schools?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: They should stay online, no matter what it is. I know it’s not as good as in person. And I was sharing some things on Facebook about this. But if I think of my last schedule that I had, I had two schools. I was six days at one school and two days at another school. And in eight days, [00:23:00] eight school days, you saw every child once. Now imagine if, around day eight... You know, the first few days -- probably going to go really well. But then, all of a sudden, if one teacher even has it, you’ve now exposed the entire school --&#13 ; 0 1525 Teacher friend's thoughts on school openings/Teachers leaving school before the pandemic LB: What about...? Have you talked to...? Because you were talking about going with other retired teachers on a trip. So... Or... And this teacher that -- you were talking, before we got on Zoom today -- that you went for a walk with... Who’s a current teacher?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Yes.&#13 ; 0 1580 Lack of communication over school openings/ Health dangers with school openings SZ: But you hear about all the online meetings but nothing’s been said. And it would be nice for them to know. Are we going to stay online? It would save the school district a lot of money. They have to go out and buy this stuff and adapt the buildings. And then, “Oh, we’re not doing that this year.”&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: I can’t imagine that... I mean, if the guidelines for the state are that you’re not supposed to be in a circumstance where there’s more than 250 people... Well, really, a school, even though you have classrooms, the kids are circulating around, though. So I don’t know if we have --&#13 ; 0 1814 Historic lack of air conditioning in schools LB: They’ve closed schools just for flu, in the past, or for measles outbreak or for something.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Or today, for heat.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: For what?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Heat. Some of our buildings aren’t air con--&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, heat. I...&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: If you’re in Florida there, it gets brutal! 0 1953 Dealing with lack of air conditioning and social distancing LB: So what that would do is create situations, particularly in September, when it can still be very, very hot, where they would try to move kids -- or normally they would move kids to rooms that had air conditioning. So it’d be more kids in one space.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: But then there you are, as a... You’re a kid in the air conditioned room. And now other kids are coming to join you. And then, are they going to kick you out?&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah. Yeah.&#13 ; 0 1991 Students and teachers wanting to return to school/lack of student social development SZ: But I have one friend who is going to be seventy-four in December, and hasn’t had it or anything. But his wife is very -- she has lupus -- much younger than him. His son is nineteen, just finished L-Tri-C and going to Kutztown. And if one of those gets it and brings it home, that could really... But he’s had two heart attacks, got diabetes -- almost seventy-four. And, oh, yeah, he wants to go back. Like, well... So there are some teachers, they want to go back. But it’s like, why?&#13 ; 0 2074 Possibility of students infecting each other LB: --the problem is, though, that those kids will still infect each other. And --&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: They could. Yeah.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: -- it’s impossible to not h--&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: A huge room and a lot of computers.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: I don’t see how they could do that. I don’t see how you could have a group of twenty kids in one room and not have them carrying an illness, no matter what they did. I mean, you just can’t keep kids from... It’s like saying, “Well, you know, of course they’ll wash their hands every single time they go to the bathroom.”&#13 ; 0 2124 Use of queer dating or hookup apps LB: Oh, here’s a good question. Have you spent any time on queer dating or hookup apps?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Not really. Because it doesn’t matter if they’re in another country or in your state or just down the road. The chance of actually meeting somebody, it’s a bit of a risk.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.&#13 ; 0 2179 Pandemic affecting restaurant music jobs LB: So in general, has it affected your life pretty significantly? What’s the biggest effect that it’s had on your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Well, biggest thing is you do have to stay in a lot more. And I had a piano-playing job in a restaurant.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, yeah.&#13 ; 0 2292 Discussion of limited capacity at venues SZ: But it’s like -- it’s really unsafe now. Now, that same place has an outdoor pavilion. But you’re talking September, October? You know. That’s kind of rough. And then we have a big job up in the Poconos, almost near New York State. And that’s in October. And, yeah, we have a date. It’s a beautiful facility. It’s a beautiful area. But again you’re talking probably several hundred people. Then they’re going to bring in German dancers. I just don’t think that’s going to happen this year. 0 2382 Grace Lutheran Church at limited capacity/ Popularity of events through streaming, Zoom SZ: And that’s why I’m happy that the church is doing something. And then, with this cutback, we were, again, making plans to reopen in August. And now it looks like, well, maybe September or later. And as the church musician, I’m looking ahead and thinking, “What are we doing to do for Christmas?” And [00:40:00] all the things that happen around the Christmas season... It’s like, well, I think we’re just going to, you know... And then, when you find out and you have to go through the denomination, you have to go through the state guidelines too -- but when you find out what you can actually do in a church service, live, according to the official rule, there’s not much at all. And so they’re getting more to watch the video than they are if you actually showed up.&#13 ; 0 2502 Health risks of having in-person events LB: Now, we have some people who have said that they don’t want to do it on Zoom. And Adrian has said, “Well, you know, some people won’t do it on Zoom. They only will do it in public. So if we can open for the public for some of our support groups, that would be a good thing.” But I don’t know. Because, [00:42:00] you know, if we make somebody sick, it’s going to look awful bad.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: And if it stays in the air or got on something they touched and then somebody else touches it... Bathrooms... 0 2565 Walking at the Lehigh Parkway and Trexler Park/ Health concerns while walking LB: So you’ve been going to the park a lot, to go for walks?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Two to three times a week.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: That’s nice.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: And sometimes the walking partner’s there. Sometimes, if that’s not available, I do it by myself. And sometimes what I’ve done als-- I live so close [00:43:00] to Trexler park. And sometimes I’ll go there.&#13 ; 0 2704 Postponement of American Theatre Organ Society convention to 2021 LB: So you were looking at the possibility of going to a convention, that was a queer convention, in New Orleans then, huh?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Well, actually, there was three conventions I could have gone to.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, that’s the...&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: And they all were moved into next year.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Ah. What were they?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Well, the one is called the American Theatre Organ Society. And they were going to go back to Indianapolis. And I’d been there. Just about like five, six years ago, they had it there too. And not much has changed, really -- 0 2762 Not being able to give concerts during the pandemic--specifically discusses organ concerts SZ: It’s like now, well, you can’t give any concerts, you can’t do anything. And then another friend of mine, who plays theater organ as well as classical organ, he’s not doing anything. If your church isn’t doing... And we have churches in the area here that basically... They do it from home. It’s like video mashup of something. I have another friend who used to be a pastor, who is now a church musician himself. And he brought a keyboard from church to his home. So he doesn’t have an organ. He just plays this keyboard. And that gets put on their service somehow. And he hasn’t been at his church in six months. I had a substitute, recently, who confided in me that this person hasn’t played the pipe organ in six months -- but did very well. But it’s kind of like you get a rough time, when you can’t get on an instrument.&#13 ; 0 2820 Still being able to play organ at church because of special dispensation/service video streams SZ: I have an organ at home. But I haven’t really needed to use it. Because I get out to chur-- And that was a nice thing. Because when this started in March, there was a special thing that you were allowed to be on the road to get out to church to practice. If anybody would have stopped me, you know... Because you were supposed to now... But there was a dispensation that you could... Well, then, if you’re out at church, you could stop at a convenience store and get a little something to eat. And then that was... So you kind of could get out. But you had to -- yeah -- be careful of it that way. But then... So, luckily. But they’ve been clamping down, to say, “Look, the only people are there, the people that do these video. That’s... And the church secretary. That’s it.” It’s...&#13 ; 0 2873 Discussion of other people who have caught the virus LB: So you were talking about... Do you know anybody...? You did talk a little bit about people. And certainly you were talking about Liam, who’s had this. Have you [00:48:00] known anybody else who has had the virus? You talked pretty much about that already, I guess.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: One that I really knew was Liam. Other people --&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: No.&#13 ; 0 2916 Discussion of pandemic on mental health/ Life during the pandemic LB: So how do you think this is -- think it’s affecting your mental health? You feel different? I m-- do you feel despair or great hope or about the same? Or what do you think?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Overall, I keep so busy each day...&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: That’s good. 0 2992 Discussing the possibility of playing electric keyboard at Brick Tavern Inn in Quakertown LB: What was the restaurant that you were doing a gig at?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Brick Tavern Inn, in Quakertown. And they have an outdoor [00:50:00] patio. And it’s very nice. And they’d always talked about, you know, “You bring your own keyboard.” And I’d be willing to do that. But now you’re twenty-five percent capacity. And you’re stuck on the weather. I mean, weather today is really hot. Other weekends, in the past, it’s been really, you know... It’s over a mountain. So the weather we have here, they may have the same thing or not. And sometimes it comes really fast, because they’re kind of close to the mountain. And, all of a sudden, there you are with your keyboard-- your electric keyboard and it starts to rain. Now what?&#13 ; 0 3069 Feeling sorry for musician friends who need a band to perform SZ: I feel sorry for my other friends that are in -- or play instruments like, say, drums. Well, you need a band. A drum solo is nice for two or three minutes at the most. And then you need something else. Or bassoon. Well, you need an orchestra. You need a small group. By yourself, that’s... But piano’s nice, because... Piano and organ, you can be your one-person band that way, and it’s nice. At least I’m playing. That’s the important thing. And that’s what I’m happy about.&#13 ; 0 3121 Thoughts for future generations regarding the pandemic LB: Yeah, I think we’ve hit everything on here. Let me ask you this. If you imagine that this video, which is going into the archives at Muhlenberg...? And I’ve been doing a lot of these. I told you before that I did a bunch of AIDS -- ones about AIDS. And I did ten of those. And those were pretty interesting. Oh, and you were... You’ve already talked about some of your protesting stuff. I’ve asked everybody what they were concerned about with regard to Black Lives Matter and with regard to political 0 3294 The impact of boycotting certain brands, companies, and restaurants for political reasons SZ: And certain brands, you’ve learned now, it’s li-- We’re never going to that restaurant, never going to buy that brand of jeans -- and other things that way. And it’s like, you know, you cons--&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Talk about the... I think this is an important thing. Because Trish was just saying that somebody said that, when you go into a store right now, the only beans on the shelf are Goya. Because no one is buying them.&#13 ; 0 3411 Huge pandemic stimulus mistakenly going to large corporations instead of small businesses SZ: What I’ll mention online too is that Ruth’s -- Chris -- Steakhouse --&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah.&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: -- a very fine steakhouse... And they try... And then they got caught. So they gave the money back.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah.&#13 ; 0 3490 Conclusion LB: And so is there anything else you want to say or toss in or talk about here?&#13 ; &#13 ; SZ: Not really. It’s been very nice talking with you.&#13 ; &#13 ; LB: It’s been lovely talking with you! I don’t get to see you enough. And I’ve known you --&#13 ; 0 MovingImage Steven Ziminsky talks about how the current COVID-19 pandemic is affecting him as a retired teacher, a musician, and a church music director who is featured on Zoom church services. He also discusses exercise and civil rights and political activism. Steve Ziminsky2020-07-20 LIZ BRADBURY: And I'm also going to turn on my audio recording backup, when... STEVE ZIMINSKY: (coughs) Getting louder on this end. Good. LB: Oh, is it better? Can you hear me okay? SZ: I see it says, "Recording." LB: It does. And I actually have done a lot of these. This is my eighteenth interview. I've done eight for COVID-19 and ten for HIV/AIDS. And one of the AIDS I did, which was Rose Craig... I don't know if you know Rose Craig. She was involved in the AIDS Services Center. She was one of the people who directed it, in the eighties and nineties And I did her whole interview -- she's in Columbus, Ohio, actually, now -- and it turned out that there was a glitch at the beginning and it didn't record it. But luckily, I had an entire audio, separate recording of her. And the video wasn't very good, because her camera kept falling over. So (laughs) I figured, "Aeh," you know, "at least I have the audio." So that was good. So how are you doing, Steve? SZ: I can't complain. I'm one of the few successful ones, I think. LB: If... SZ: It's been three years since I retired. LB: Yeah. So it's a... SZ: So... LB: Let me set this up. And then you can tell me everything you've been doing. Because I'm dying to hear. So let me say this. With this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and 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 experiences, from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury. And I'm here with Steve Ziminsky, to talk about his experiences in the Lehigh Valley community during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive-- We're meeting on Zoom, on Monday, July 20th, in 2020. Oh, it's 20-2020. Thank you, so much, Steve, for being willing to speak with us today. For the first part, could you please state your name and spell it for me? SZ: Stephen, S-T-E-P-H-E-N -- and last name is Ziminsky, Z-I-M-I-N-S-K-Y. But people call me Steve. LB: (laughs) Will you please share your birthdate? SZ: August 29th, 1960. LB: Okay. And you're in Allentown? Is that correct? You're... SZ: West side of Allentown, technically not in the South Whitehall Township but I have an Allentown address. LB: Okay! Okay. So do you consent to this interview today? SZ: Yeah. LB: (laughs) Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? SZ: Yeah. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational purposes or in other formats, including films, articles, websites, presentations, or other future formats we can't even imagine? SZ: Yes. LB: (laughs) Do you understand that you'll have 30 days after the electronic delivery of this transcript to review your interview and identify any parts you'd like to delete...? And/or you can withdraw your entire interview from the project. SZ: Yes. LB: Okay. So I have to do a couple of identity things. So what's your ZIP Code where you are? SZ: 18104. LB: And what is your age? You were just telling me about that. SZ: Oh, I'm fifty-nine right now. LB: Okay. And how do you identify with the LGBT community, gay, trans, lesbian, bi, ace? SZ: Gay. LB: Okay. And cisgender? SZ: Yes. LB: Okay. And so this is some stuff that we're going to talk about. So, in general, let's start with this. You... Let me just ask this first question, that I ask everybody. So are you in your house by yourself or do you have other people there? SZ: Just my pet -- LB: Oh... SZ: -- which is Atlas the pug, and me. LB: (laughs) Atlas the pug. Great. And so talk about your work. You were saying, before we started this, that you were retired. So there's your pug. Oh, that's -- SZ: He's sitting with me, close. LB: -- cute. (laughs) Good thing he's not outside. It wouldn't be good weather for him. SZ: Oh, they don't do well outside. LB: No. It's really hot outside. So talk about... So you're not working now. So that's a good thing, compared to other teachers, like. SZ: I'm a retired music teacher, almost thirty-three years in music ed. But I'm also -- am working my part-time job. The church never closed. So we're doing video services each week. LB: Oh. SZ: So we usually do them on Saturdays. I go out. And I get to play the piano, the organ. There's no choir involved. But there usually is special music involved. And so that keeps my playing, at least. Because all those other side jobs aren't. LB: So you go to the church to do that, then. SZ: Yes. LB: And then they video you. SZ: Yeah. LB: What church is that? SZ: Grace Lutheran, in Macungie. LB: Okay. Okay. Yeah. SZ: And I'll be starting my tenth year there in September. LB: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so are there other people there, when you're doing that? Probably just the people with the... SZ: Pastor. And now we have a person who's running the video part, and if there's special music. LB: Uh-huh. Oh, you mean other people playing music?SZ:Other people. Yesterday we had a violinist. And we're going to be having a flutist, coming up, and all sorts of different other people, and a number of vocalists. Nobody wants to do it, then I do something. LB: Like a vocal? SZ: Like a piano solo. LB: Oh, a piano s-- Oh, I see. Nice. So that's nice. So... Well, if the church is big and you can social-distance there, if you need to, and stuff like that... So that's good. It's a big space, isn't it? SZ: Pretty big. It probably seats about one hundred and fifty. But it's excellent acoustics -- LB: Well, tha-- SZ: -- built about 1912, with a pipe organ and a nice piano. So. People enjoy hearing the organ. And we had just had it tuned and fixed up. So everything's working. And they're enjoying it. LB: Yeah. Well, that's great! So h--? So you're working. And was that plan all -- that they would just continue, right away? Were they closed at all during that time, the church? SZ: They really weren't closed. There was one week, March 15th, where it was kind of optional for staff, if we wanted to come. And I just didn't feel right that day. So I thought, "I'll stay away." But ever since March 15th... And we even did some Wednesday services. They're all on YouTube. LB: Ah! SZ: So every week, we've been doing something. And then I even got my vacation Sundays. And even though I'm not going anywhere... Anywhere I was going to go is all canceled or postponed to next year. But I at least got a chance to get some time off. And we had (inaudible) figure in advance. I did get some time off. LB: Did you have a vacation plan? SZ: The one week, no, and one week, yes. This coming Sunday, I probably would have been going... I was really thinking of going to New Orleans. LB: Ah! SZ: There's a convention that was going to be held there. And then we start seeing... New Orleans really had an outbreak there. And I didn't even buy the airline ticket. That's when, I think, you're really committed, when you buy the airline ticket. I'm so... And so they're talking next year. But they're also talking a video element to the convention. So if you don't want to risk things and do that -- you can watch the key parts right online, like this. LB: And that's a convention for people who are music...? SZ: Well, actually it's a gay-related convention -- LB: Oh! SZ: -- Black and White Men Together. LB: Oh, oh! Okay. I... Good. So that's the -- Okay. Good. So... Okay. So have you been communicating with a lot of people? Like have you done other Zoom things and...? Probably ha-- SZ: Oh, plenty of Zoom things. In fact, the most unusual one is I belong to several eating groups. We would get together like once a month. And so now what we do is go out to a restaurant or a place, bring something back, put it on our desk here, and eat and watch each other. LB: (laughs) SZ: There's one through the church -- has done that now too. And then there's different groups. Sometimes you sit there and talk. And sometimes you sit there and talk and eat. LB: Yeah. SZ: And they haven't done the drinking ones yet. LB: (laughs) SZ: But that would be interesting. LB: What restaurant? What restaurant? SZ: Well, you get to pick. The one time it was to get a burger. LB: Oh! SZ: And I m-- one this past Friday but that one was to go to an Indian restaurant and have Indian food -- but not together. We'll just come back and watch it. But -- LB: Did you do that? SZ: -- I didn't go to that one. But each month, there's usually something different. LB: That's so interesting. So where did you get your burger? SZ: Oh, Red Robin. I live right around the corner. LB: Oh. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty close to Red Robin. So are you communicating with other people? Like...? Do you have family around and that stuff? SZ: Not really in this area. I do have living family. But the parents are dead. The grandparents are dead. The cousins are spread all over the country. I think the closest one is up in the Poconos area. And I haven't really communicated there too much. And there's some in Florida. And on the other side of the family, one of the things that really kind of hit was that one of my former roommates, as well as my aunt, who is now ninety-one... Sh-- I happened to visit her in early March. And then, all of a sudden, you know, no more visits anywhere, for either of those two. And then she was transferred to a different nursing home. And I'm not the power of attorney. But another one of my cousins is. And all of sudden, you found out, "Oh, by the way, she's been moved." So... She's kind of death -- profoundly deaf and really is very quiet. So she never got to see the new nursing home. They just put her in a room. They bring the food to you. And it's been this way for several months. And then the same thing with the former roommate that was here for ten years. And he's over at ManorCare, in Bethlehem. LB: Liam? SZ: And -- Liam -- he's been there for over seven years now. LB: And... SZ: At least ManorCare is having these weekly video chats -- (dog coughing) and they usually are pretty good about. Thursday, the phone rings. And you get to see him, get to talk. And he did have COVID. I'm trying to think of some of those questions you had on your list there -- LB: Yeah. SZ: -- so I can answer -- LB: Well, I have some questions. SZ: -- half of them. LB: I'll get to this, in terms of... That was your dog's coughing I hear there. SZ: Yeah. LB: He's close to the microphone. SZ: He has the... But he's happy now. LB: Okay. So Liam was sick? SZ: Yes. And they gave him like... I think it was the third test he tested positive on. The first two, no. But he had always that, kind of... He's very weak. And so then they said he had COVID. And then they kind of moved him to a different room. And it turned out the whole place... They were sending out emails like a lot. And they were up to over one hundred people -- LB: Wow. SZ: -- including patients and staff. And it's only a four-story building. And... LB: Where is ManorCare? Is that in Allentown? SZ: Bethlehem. ManorCare in Bethlehem, the 2029 building. LB: Oh, golly. SZ: There's two buildings, right next to each other. We're not even talking about the other building, which is just as big. But the 2029 for a while didn't have it. And then, all of a sudden, it just hit. And it's not from the visitors, because there are not visitors. And we went -- just couldn't wait till each week. And they finally got a way to communicate. You could talk to them. And he's hoping to get back to his room. But again, he's moved to another room. The rooms are all the same -- the same floor. It's just down the hallway a little bit more. So, fine, you know? LB: They moved him to a different room, because they thought the room was contaminated or something? SZ: Well, he had it. And then his first roommate, who he's had quite a while -- LB: Oh, I see. SZ: -- had to go to the hospital for something. And then they moved him to a different room. And then... They even had some kind of barriers in the hallway. And I think that was... So you had to get through the barrier to get into the room, so it wouldn't spread so much. And you should see what the nurses look like. I mean, they're wearing their full PPE, whatever that is. And it was quite a scare there. But now they've said the entire floor where he i-- the fourth floor, is COVID-free. However, that means they still have some in the building. And even if they had none in the building, we're still not allowed to visit. So this has been over six months, and not visi-- And the aunt, I know which nursing home it is but, to get in there and do things, I don't know -- in the Reading area, that one. LB: Ah. Well, Liam has other illnesses, doesn't he? SZ: Yeah. He has quite a few things. And so he's kind of confined to his bed. But he is talking. I mean, his mind is fine. LB: Yeah. Is he about your age? SZ: Oh, no. He just had his birthday. He's sixty-seven now. LB: Sixty-seven. SZ: He just made his next birthday there. So... LB: Close to my age. (laughs) SZ: Oh! LB: I'm not... I'm sixty-three. But... But, yeah, people in their sixties, they're certainly at risk. But he had other health issues. That's why he was in there. Is that true? SZ: Oh, yeah. That's where he'll be. The main thing is congestive heart failure. LB: Oh, I see. Is that in...? SZ: And so his heart gets weaker and weaker. So he can do less and less. And things begin to atrophy. And every time I would go in to visit, you'd always have to grab an arm and move his arm, move his legs. And the nurses would do that too. But he needed a lot of that. And he couldn't move anything. The only thing he'd do is -- just enough of the fingers to move the remote on the TV -- but couldn't use his cell phone, couldn't type on a computer, nothing. LB: Wow. That's tough. So you've been talking to him via like a Zoom thing or just on the phone or...? SZ: It's called Duo. LB: Oh. SZ: Yeah. That's what they use. So I had to... LB: Oh, y-- SZ: It works, you know. LB: What's your biggest concern about this? Are you concerned about you getting it? SZ: I can't prove that I had it but I think I did. LB: Oh, yeah? SZ: And it hit as a big diarrhea episode, on the same day that I was just ready to leave on a bus trip to go to Philly -- LB: Oh, gosh. SZ: -- with the retired teachers. And I thought I could get a nice breakfast in and we were going to leave around 11:30. And after breakfast, I had to get home for something, was li-- "I think I have to go." And it was like little bit unusual. And then, as I... And you hate to cancel. Because it was an expensive trip. It was going to be a day trip, a special restaurant opening just for us, the day, and see this show at the -- I think it was at the Kimmel Center -- and back. And I felt so bad. And so I kind of cancel. And I'm so glad I did, if that wa-- LB: Yeah. SZ: My family doctor can't prove I did. And I guess I can't prove I did. But when I looked at other people's symptoms... Which lasted most of January. But when you live alone, you can stay at home and basically you're isolating anyway. LB: So were you sick for most of January, then? SZ: Yes. LB: Did you have a sense of smell? SZ: I don't remember that. LB: They say... SZ: But I do remember my appetite was down. LB: Well, that's a big thing. Yeah. SZ: You would barely eat like half a sandwich and it was like you could barely get through that. And then you'd have to wait a while and eat the other ha-- And normally, that's nothing. So that was one of the things. I did go to see the doctor twice. And my regular doctor was out for over a month. So I saw another doctor in the practice. And at first, she put me on strong antibiotics. And it seemed to help but, at the end of the antibiotics, it was kind of back to where it was. And I went back in the second. "Oh, we can't do that again. So we'll try prednisone." LB: Oh, yeah. SZ: And that seemed to help a little. But I think, by that time, I was getting out of it. And knew it was some kind of viral thing and it was going around. But they didn't have any name for it or anything. Just kind of stay, you know, quiet that way. And then that's what I did. LB: Wow! SZ: It got better by itself-- The biggest thing was the coughing. And there was one night of chills. I remember that. LB: Well, it sounds like those are the symptoms. I guess that you could, at the hospital, have them check to see if you have antibodies in your blood. SZ: Yeah, but... I have to wait for my next doctor visit. And at least it'll be in person. My last doctor visit was over like something like this. LB: Yeah. Yeah. SZ: And there are some nice things there too. You take a big blood test. So they know all the good stuff. But you don't have to get weighed. You don't have to, you know... LB: (laughs) SZ: They can't check your blood pressure or anything, which usually is good anyway. So it... I have to wait a little bit that way but... LB: Yeah. SZ: I mentioned it to the doctor and she thought that, "No, you had something else, bronchitis of some kind." Well, it could be that too. Because a lot of bronchitis symptoms are similar too. And I was really pushing it. LB: I don't know. The things that you're describing, though, they're some... I've had bronchitis and I didn't have diarrhea from it. SZ: But then there's some articles that have been published that say some people start there. Other people, no symptoms. Other people, it starts as a respiratory. LB: That's true. Yeah, all sorts of ramifications of it. Well... SZ: Well, luckily, I don't think I have any lasting ones. LB: Well, if you had had it, you'd gotten on the bus with all of those people -- SZ: Yeah! LB: -- you could have really spread that around. That would have been... Even with bronchitis... You can get that from other people too, of course-- SZ: Oh, I make a decision. I waited till the bus came. But then I told them, "I'm not going." They said, "Well, we have a seat right next to the bathroom, in the back of the bus."  I said, "No." LB: Really? (laughs) Oh, n-- SZ: And as it was, I went home and I took it real easy. And I could eat again. And everything kind of went back to being fine. But I never had it where... All your insides were rumbling there, while we were waiting for the bus. It was... LB: Well... SZ: I don't want to chance this, so... LB: Well, it sounds like, if you did have it, it wasn't too devastating. It went on for a long time but... I know a few people who've had it who've said it was absolutely soul-crushing for them. And they said to me, "Do not get this." It was... You know, people who said, "If I had been by myself, I would have died. Because I couldn't even get to the bathroom. I couldn't even crawl to the bathroom, I was so weak." So. But then I know other people who've had it who have had no symptoms at all. And they were positive. So, you know, it's the thing. So what's your biggest concern during the pandemic, in terms of the LGBT community? What do you think about that? SZ: Well, we're all trying to survive. Yesterday I got to see part of the Reading pride festival online. LB: Ah. Uh-huh. SZ: And I didn't get to see the whole thing, because it turned out... I just found out at the time that there was a Black Lives Matter meeting in Emmaus. LB: I... SZ: I've been helping with those. I've been doing a lot of protesting lately, the past few months. And that's keeping me busy. And we always wear masks and do things. It started with that Tuesdays for Toomey -- LB: Yeah. SZ: -- now kind of branched int-- Because officially, that group had stopped. But then there's a core bunch of the group that still meets at the same place and still... Now it's kind of turned into an anti-Trump group. And then... They meet at different places, not always at Toomey's office. There's some other places too. And then there was the Black Lives Matter. I was in that rally just last week, walking through the city. We started at Seventh and Hamilton, ended up down at the jail. LB: Saw part of that. Yeah. SZ: Yeah. And so that was interesting. And I shared some pictures of that with Steve Libby. LB: I saw that. Yeah, I saw some of those pictures. I really wanted to be at that march. But Trish is so at risk that I can't really take that risk. But I'm very proud of all of the people that spoke out about that. I've talked to a lot of them. And it was a well organized thing, I think, and effective. It was relatively effective, which I think is good. So how about being able to see Rachel Levine, on the videos tha-- Dr. Rachel Levine, who's our Secretary of Health? That's been a pretty positive thing for me. I don't know about you. How do you feel about that? SZ: Very positive. I don't watch every single day. But sometimes you're at your phone and, all of a sudden, "Oh, the governor's coming on." And usually, Rachel's on. And she's very good. And it's a very public spot. And usually the advice is right. I'm very enthusiastic about the governor too. Because he's under a lot of pressure. LB: What...? SZ: But everybody has kind of agreed, that I've talked to, that you got to get the virus under control first, before you can really start opening things back up. LB: Well, as a teacher or as a retired teacher... Because you were a teacher for a long, long, long time, in the Allentown School District, and from school to school. So you really traveled around from school to school. What do you think about opening schools? SZ: They should stay online, no matter what it is. I know it's not as good as in person. And I was sharing some things on Facebook about this. But if I think of my last schedule that I had, I had two schools. I was six days at one school and two days at another school. And in eight days, eight school days, you saw every child once. Now imagine if, around day eight... You know, the first few days -- probably going to go really well. But then, all of a sudden, if one teacher even has it, you've now exposed the entire school -- LB: Yeah. SZ: -- entire schools. LB: Yeah. SZ: And it's like, well, it wouldn't be everybody, because there's going to be some kids that are going to stay online, every day, anyway. But now, all of a sudden... And then all the other teachers were exposed. And the thing is a classroom teacher usually stays in the classroom. So they're being, you know, self-contained. But the way we work, where the art teacher, music teacher, phys ed, and library -- and they would go to the rooms. Well, a separate gym. They would go to -- the phys ed tea-- in the gym. But everybody else came to the room. And if somehow something got on your stuff... Then as a music teacher you're thinking, "Well, the most important thing is getting them to sing," in elementary school. Well, you're not going to be singing too much with a mask. You're not supposed to be. You can't really do choral speaking. And then like, "All my rhythm instruments!" Well, maybe, if you bring two to each class and this class only uses these two and this class uses these two and they disinfect them every day. LB: Oh, gosh. SZ: But instead of a whole bunch of instruments... I used to have a whole bag of stuff. Well, now it's like, and you could maybe do that. Now you're down to "Well, we could show videos" -- LB: (laughs) SZ: -- "We could clap, I guess -- that's still okay -- and do things that way." You could talk about music. But you want to actually have them have a chance to perform, have a chance to try to sing. Because after elementary school, some of them aren't going to try anymore. That's their big thing. And then you think about in art, you kn-- "Oh, you want scissors. Oh, you want this. You want stuff that they're all going to touch?" You know. And then you go right to next class. There's no time. That forty-five minutes goes by pretty fast. And you got to get your materials back. You pack up. You roll. And it might be on the other side of the school. It might be next door. And most times, it's in between. And it gets quite rough. So my hope is that they would stay at home. I know it's not as great and I know the parents have to worry about babysitting and everything. But it's still... Least we're going to get them to survive. We're in survival mode right now. LB: Yeah. What about...? Have you talked to...? Because you were talking about going with other retired teachers on a trip. So... Or... And this teacher that -- you were talking, before we got on Zoom today -- that you went for a walk with... Who's a current teacher? SZ: Yes. LB: Is that true? And does that person sort of feel the same way about this stuff? Is that somebody you worked with? SZ: Yes. We were on a team together. And they go through so many teachers fa-- it's amazing -- that... You know, I'm -- only been out for three years and yet we're down to like maybe thirty percent of the teachers at my main school are still there. LB: Yeah. SZ: And others have transferred to other schools. Some have retired. And some just left teaching, it got to be so bad, and so much pressure that way. But that is one of the few teachers that's still there. And we've known each other for many years. And so... But you hear about all the online meetings but nothing's been said. And it would be nice for them to know. Are we going to stay online? It would save the school district a lot of money. They have to go out and buy this stuff and adapt the buildings. And then, "Oh, we're not doing that this year." LB: I can't imagine that... I mean, if the guidelines for the state are that you're not supposed to be in a circumstance where there's more than 250 people... Well, really, a school, even though you have classrooms, the kids are circulating around, though. So I don't know if we have -- SZ: The... LB: -- any schools that, you know... I mean, plus it's kids! For heaven's sake! What teacher isn't, you know, exposed to illness all...? That's one of the reasons the teachers stopped teaching, because they're sick all the time. They have to develop that... You must have had a really major immune system, from being around kids singing in your face for the last thir-- the thirty-three years. SZ: That too. I wasn't always in the classroom. I also did strings for twenty-five of those years too. Sometimes it was strings and a classroom. And sometimes it was... The last six years or so, it was just classroom -- LB: Yeah. SZ: -- bringing along instruments. Imagine bringing bell sets now. That's not going to g-- Rhythm instruments. No. So you can't really do any instruments that you could pass to them. I guess you could bring instruments that, you say, "Well, this is a tambourine. And this..." Yeah, but we don't play it. And you really can't do that. LB: But [the?] thing is that, if there's a teacher that's seeing every student, that teacher is potentially infecting every student. SZ: Yes! LB: So, I mean -- SZ: I've been hearing articles ab-- LB: -- how do you keep that from happening, even if they're wearing a mask or something, even if everybody's wearing a mask? The virt-- You know, when you talk about kid-- You can't keep kids from yelling. Y-- SZ: Or playing with their ma-- Or they forgot one today. Or they lost it somewhere. Or somebody stole somebody else's there. It begins... It sounds funny at first but it's like, "Yeah, this is..." And it's not just at elementary, can be all levels. LB: Yeah. I don't see how they can do it. SZ: I don't either. LB: And with the numbers going up the way they are, it's impossible, I think, to... I mean, it's going to kill kids. And it's going to kill their families. And, you know, I know a young person who had it, who is a college student, actually, who didn't have any symptoms, came home from college. She was sent home from college. She was there with her family. And then she spiked a big fever and infected every one of her family members. Everybody in the house got it, including her grandmother, who is over 90. They all got through it. But it was incredibly hard. And someone said to me, "Is she all right now?" And I said, "She's all right now." I mean, she's physically all right. She feels weak -- the kid. But she's not going to be all right, if she just killed her grandmother -- SZ: No. And -- LB: -- never going to be alright. SZ: -- they were mentioning what could happen, you know. Within the first two weeks or so, all of a sudden, you know, grandparents died at home, teacher died at school, and a lot of kids got sick. LB: Yeah. SZ: And, you know, everybody wants to go back. And I've talked to some teachers that want to go back. Yeah, but right now I'd rather keep the kids safe than anything else. LB: Is there any teacher that would think that they wouldn't be exposed? I mean, I can't believe that there are teachers who wou-- I mean, they see how easily it is to get sick in school, you know. They've closed schools just for flu, in the past, or for measles outbreak or for something. SZ: Or today, for heat. LB: For what? SZ: Heat. Some of our buildings aren't air con-- LB: Oh, heat. I... SZ: If you're in Florida there, it gets brutal! LB: Yeah. Yeah. SZ: And then some schools used to have it that, if a room was air conditioned, you could bring the kids down from the highest-temperature areas. Well, you got nothing done. After a while, it was like... When you're talking heat index over one hundred today... It was like, "No, that's not so..." Because we have several buildings in the district there's no air conditioning. Or it breaks. And then it's like -- or, "Oh, downtown says it's seventy in there." It's like, no, it's eighty-five and there's nothing happening. LB: (laughs) Yeah. SZ: But the computer said... And appare-- Even the janitors can't move some of those things. Or you have to call downtown. And downtown will adjust the computer in your building. LB: Gosh. SZ: That's how it was when I was there. See -- right on danger... LB: When I was in junior high, at a very affluent community in Connecticut, there was no air conditioning in our junior high. And kids would pass out, just be sitting at the chair and, all of a sudden, they'd get really red and fall on the ground -- especially if they were sitting near the windows. Because it was those 1950s buildings, with the big windows, that the... I think Union Terrace sort of liked like that. They were probably built -- SZ: That's the fifties. Yeah. LB: -- yeah, built in the fifties. And just this glaring heat. It's like one hundred and two degrees. And somebody... SZ: If you're on that sun side, you're just going to die. LB: Yeah. Yeah. SZ: And then what are you going to do, as a teacher? You know, are you going to present new material? Are you going to review what you did? At the beginning of the year, you can't really review anything. Everything is new material. And you can't really do much. When afternoon comes, you're just stuck. Union Terrace was one of the schools that used to have it where -- there was a new addition put on -- some of the rooms had air conditioning but most didn't. And it never got rectified, that way. We had other buildings where they had a chance to put air conditioning. But there was always the excuse, that usually came out to money. So they would put in air handlers. But that's not an air conditioner. That's just a fan. LB: Yeah. So what that would do is create situations, particularly in September, when it can still be very, very hot, where they would try to move kids -- or normally they would move kids to rooms that had air conditioning. So it'd be more kids in one space. SZ: But then there you are, as a... You're a kid in the air conditioned room. And now other kids are coming to join you. And then, are they going to kick you out? LB: Yeah. Yeah. SZ: Or are they going to have two or three classes doing it? Or you could have a video. And you got three classes in the air conditioned room. Again, it's that social distancing stuff. LB: Impossible. SZ: It's not going to work. So... But I have one friend who is going to be seventy-four in December, and hasn't had it or anything. But his wife is very -- she has lupus -- much younger than him. His son is nineteen, just finished L-Tri-C and going to Kutztown. And if one of those gets it and brings it home, that could really... But he's had two heart attacks, got diabetes -- almost seventy-four. And, oh, yeah, he wants to go back. Like, well... So there are some teachers, they want to go back. But it's like, why? LB: Yeah. Really. It's unrealistic, I think. Anyway. I mean, I can understand why people want to resume school. Some kids are just devastated. They really want to be around their... They're missing parts of their life. Where's the...? SZ: The social development part. LB: Yeah! And there's no question. And their parents have to go to work. And they can't go to work, because their kids are at home -- and their little kids -- you know? -- their seven-year-old kid at home. So... SZ: And have like a daycare center, that would have a number of computers, that you could like have a big room and just like cubicles for the kids. And, "Okay... Oh, you're going to Harrison-Morton. Well, you watch this one. And you're going..." The kid could sign in, and be at whatever school. They could be... LB: Yeah, but the problem is that the -- SZ: And they're daycare-ready too. LB: -- yeah -- the problem is, though, that those kids will still infect each other. And -- SZ: They could. Yeah. LB: -- it's impossible to not h-- SZ: A huge room and a lot of computers. LB: I don't see how they could do that. I don't see how you could have a group of twenty kids in one room and not have them carrying an illness, no matter what they did. I mean, you just can't keep kids from... It's like saying, "Well, you know, of course they'll wash their hands every single time they go to the bathroom." SZ: And who knows what's going on at home? LB: Exactly. Yeah. SZ: Something could come in from home. Or something could go from school to home and now, all of a sudden, at home they're sick. And... LB: So the... So let's see. So we talked about where it's... Oh, here's a good question. Have you spent any time on queer dating or hookup apps? SZ: Not really. Because it doesn't matter if they're in another country or in your state or just down the road. The chance of actually meeting somebody, it's a bit of a risk. LB: Yeah, that's true. That's true. SZ: So... LB: Yeah. I think that's affecting people. SZ: Although I like what they did in England. They mentioned that, if you could get somebody that you knew and you could work out a roommate arrangement -- LB: Yeah. SZ: -- that way you had the companionship, and you never... And as long as you were there for two weeks or more and you both k-- Well, that was an idea -- from England! LB: Huh! What's...? SZ: But I didn't see anybody actually do that. LB: You seem that you are having enough contact with people. But, you know, you do usually hang out with people. So... SZ: And online I have a lot of people that I hang out with. LB: Oh, that's good. That's good. That's a good thing. So in general, has it affected your life pretty significantly? What's the biggest effect that it's had on your life? SZ: Well, biggest thing is you do have to stay in a lot more. And I had a piano-playing job in a restaurant. LB: Oh, yeah. SZ: That... The restaurant has kind of tried to open now. But the latest thing is they're down to twenty-five percent. And it really wouldn't pay them t-- In fact, it was on the latest thing, "No live music." And then several places in the area, about two weeks ago, they did have live music, when a number of bars opened and a number of restaurants opened. Now it's -- no. So, and then I was think-- Last year... I also play trombone. And I'm hoping to play with some of the local bands as a substitute. I did that last summer. Well, that's not happening either. And do have friends, retired teachers, who used to do a lot of playing. They're doing nothing. LB: So you mean that they were playing the trombone with like the Palmerton, you know, band or the...? SZ: Well, it could be. But we have four city bands in Allentown -- LB: Yeah. Right. SZ: -- plus the Macungie band. There's a Catasauqua band. There's a number of o-- I play with a polka band. They're supposed to do something up in Coplay in September and October. And it's li-- I don't think that's going to be happening. But until it's canceled... Because if you think about how it is, it's a very tight, enclosed room, you know. And the people are all the at-risk ones. You're talking seventy on up. And, oh, yeah, it's nice. They all dance. And that's great. They're wonderful people. And they know all their dances. It's kind of neat to play pieces and say, "These people actually know what the dances are." LB: (laughs) SZ: And they know this stuff. And that's very nice. And that's why we kind of keep the traditions alive. But it's like -- it's really unsafe now. Now, that same place has an outdoor pavilion. But you're talking September, October? You know. That's kind of rough. And then we have a big job up in the Poconos, almost near New York State. And that's in October. And, yeah, we have a date. It's a beautiful facility. It's a beautiful area. But again you're talking probably several hundred people. Then they're going to bring in German dancers. I just don't think that's going to happen this year. LB: Well, several hundred people. I mean, they've already said that, in Pennsylvania, it's going to be green for the rest of the year. And that's a maximum of two hundred and fifty people. So unless they think that it'd be less than two hundred and fifty, you really can't do it. SZ: Or you'd have to limit how many people come. And that's a private party, that one that's up there. LB: No, like if you're saying... Two hundred people -- or two hundred and fifty people is dangerous but two hundred and forty-nine is not? SZ: You have to cut it somewhere. LB: Pretty unrealistic, to say... You know, what's the danger? Well, people could give it to each other, if there's two hundred and fifty people. Well, they're going to give it to each other if there's two hundred and forty-nine people too. They're going to give it to each other. Frankly, in a dance like that, which sounds wonderful, actually... But people are breathing hard and singing and coming close to each other, moving in the same space over... It's just the worst possible thing you could do, I think. SZ: Mm-hmm. So that's why I'm hoping it's going to not happen. And that's why I'm happy that the church is doing something. And then, with this cutback, we were, again, making plans to reopen in August. And now it looks like, well, maybe September or later. And as the church musician, I'm looking ahead and thinking, "What are we doing to do for Christmas?" And all the things that happen around the Christmas season... It's like, well, I think we're just going to, you know... And then, when you find out and you have to go through the denomination, you have to go through the state guidelines too -- but when you find out what you can actually do in a church service, live, according to the official rule, there's not much at all. And so they're getting more to watch the video than they are if you actually showed up. LB: Yeah. That's true. I've talked to a couple of people who have said that they've really enjoyed the video. In fact, at our community center we have a book group. And I think the most people we ever had come to the book group was eleven, maybe twelve. But we just had one that had fifteen people there. And the... And I said to Trish that I saw somebody in the book group that I haven't seen for four years -- I said. And I think this person is just a little shy. But this was really comfortable for them to come. In some ways, it's not a bad idea to occasionally run these things that way too now. SZ: You mean like a Zoom meeting or...? LB: Yeah. It was a Zoom meeting. And everybody's on the screen. It's like The Brady Bunch, you know. And you would -- people our age understand tha-- You know, and everybody's talking. And people take turns talking about what they... But it also is, if you're a person who doesn't want to talk, you just say, "Well, (laughs) I didn't read the book. I'm just going to listen." And everybody just lets them. I mean, there's no pressure, because you're not there, you know. So people feel more comfortable, I think. Now, we have some people who have said that they don't want to do it on Zoom. And Adrian has said, "Well, you know, some people won't do it on Zoom. They only will do it in public. So if we can open for the public for some of our support groups, that would be a good thing." But I don't know. Because, you know, if we make somebody sick, it's going to look awful bad. SZ: And if it stays in the air or got on something they touched and then somebody else touches it... Bathrooms... LB: Yeah. The bathrooms are one of the most serious places, too. Because if you have somebody use a restroom and then... Especially, multiple-stall restrooms are really bad. We don't have those at the center. But that's a particularly bad thing. Because you're in that little cubicle. And then, you know, there's lots of people... Like a restroom on the highway is particularly bad. So... SZ: Also at the park, at Lehigh Parkway. There's at least two that are open. But there's a whole lot more that are either boarded up or somehow closed. LB: Huh. SZ: And... LB: Huh. So you've been going to the park a lot, to go for walks? SZ: Two to three times a week. LB: That's nice. SZ: And sometimes the walking partner's there. Sometimes, if that's not available, I do it by myself. And sometimes what I've done als-- I live so close to Trexler park. And sometimes I'll go there. LB: Yeah. Do you feel safe, when you're walking around? Do you see people without masks or...? SZ: Almost everybody now is not wearing a mask, at both parks. And what used to bother me was the joggers (breathes heavily) -- LB: Yeah. SZ: -- breathing at you, you know. But there haven't been too many joggers. And a day like this, it's like no. But today, there was a lot of bicycles going around. But again, a lot of them, they're not really huffing and puffing. They just put in tenth gear or something. And they go flying past you there. And that was it. And we do get off the road to let somebody go by. You feel like a leper, unclean or something. You see people get off the road there when you walk by, and all that. But it's worked out well. I've done this now for like almost six months. And I haven't gotten anything from that. And you make sure... If you don't feel good, well, we're not going wa-- You really wouldn't want to go walking. Even one of our regular walks, of two miles, it's... If you're not feeling well, you're not going to -- you have a hard time make that. LB: Right. Right. That's two laps around Trexler park. SZ: Yeah, it would be there. LB: Well... SZ: So I take it easy, when I'm by myself there. And I was going the wrong way for a while, there. You have to go clockwise. LB: Yeah. SZ: And I remember the old days, when I had my bike and you could go counterclockwise. And I kind of liked that way too. Because at the very end, you come to the bathroom. LB: (laughs) SZ: The other way, you start at the bathroom. It's like, "No, I don't need that." Then you have to go around more than once, to get back to the bathroom -- which is open, at Trexler park, which is nice. There is only one. And you get to see the general. And you get to see the nice view. LB: Uh-huh. And Jack O'Diamond. SZ: Oh, yeah! Yeah -- LB: That's Trexler's horse -- SZ: -- the horse. LB: -- he's sitting on. So what other qu--? So you were looking at the possibility of going to a convention, that was a queer convention, in New Orleans then, huh? SZ: Well, actually, there was three conventions I could have gone to. LB: Oh, that's the... SZ: And they all were moved into next year. LB: Ah. What were they? SZ: Well, the one is called the American Theatre Organ Society. And they were going to go back to Indianapolis. And I'd been there. Just about like five, six years ago, they had it there too. And not much has changed, really -- LB: (laughs) SZ: -- in Indianapolis in the past five or six years. But... And you have a small group. But there again, there was one up-and-coming person and he's from... Where...? It's not Ireland. Scotland. And I heard recently that, well, he's not doing concerts, he's no-- I hope he's keeping in shape. But he plays piano very well. Bu-- he took theater organ on the side, and was wonderful! That was one of the big promising things. It's like now, well, you can't give any concerts, you can't do anything. And then another friend of mine, who plays theater organ as well as classical organ, he's not doing anything. If your church isn't doing... And we have churches in the area here that basically... They do it from home. It's like video mashup of something. I have another friend who used to be a pastor, who is now a church musician himself. And he brought a keyboard from church to his home. So he doesn't have an organ. He just plays this keyboard. And that gets put on their service somehow. And he hasn't been at his church in six months. I had a substitute, recently, who confided in me that this person hasn't played the pipe organ in six months -- but did very well. But it's kind of like you get a rough time, when you can't get on an instrument. LB: There's really nothing else like the pipe organ or the organ. SZ: Yeah. It kind of hel-- I have an organ at home. But I haven't really needed to use it. Because I get out to chur-- And that was a nice thing. Because when this started in March, there was a special thing that you were allowed to be on the road to get out to church to practice. If anybody would have stopped me, you know... Because you were supposed to now... But there was a dispensation that you could... Well, then, if you're out at church, you could stop at a convenience store and get a little something to eat. And then that was... So you kind of could get out. But you had to -- yeah -- be careful of it that way. But then... So, luckily. But they've been clamping down, to say, "Look, the only people are there, the people that do these video. That's... And the church secretary. That's it." It's... LB: Well, don't put people at risk. That's definitely the thing. So you were talking about... Do you know anybody...? You did talk a little bit about people. And certainly you were talking about Liam, who's had this. Have you known anybody else who has had the virus? You talked pretty much about that already, I guess. SZ: One that I really knew was Liam. Other people -- LB: No. SZ: -- really didn't actually get it. That's good. I mean, you don't want to know anybody that did. But you just... I thought that I might have had it. And the symptoms, I thought, sounded that way. But there's always different things. And until we have testing, nobody even knows. You're right. An antibody test might say yes or no. LB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. SZ: But then, that was many months ago. LB: So how do you think this is -- think it's affecting your mental health? You feel different? I m-- do you feel despair or great hope or about the same? Or what do you think? SZ: Overall, I keep so busy each day... LB: That's good. SZ: I'm kind of thinking that I'm kind of actually settling into retirement, the way it really could have been, you know. The ideas... I'm still busy with teaching. I'm still a teacher advocate and trying to help the kids, at least from this angle, and doing more protesting than I ever did before. And you're still playing. That's the important thing. You're still playing. Yeah. And that's ni-- I miss some of the other stuff I did before, [that all goes?]... And I'm home a lot more. And that was something I worried about in the past too, that, with school and with all the playing stuff and the church stuff, you're never home. And how it's like, you know, I actually sit on my recliner and watch the TV -- LB: (laughs) SZ: -- something I rarely did. And that's why I got rid of Netflix. Because I'm never home and I'm spending this money for this thing and... And now you could. But it's li-- I have enough, you know, going on that way. So. I keep busy, that way. LB: What was the restaurant that you were doing a gig at? SZ: Brick Tavern Inn, in Quakertown. And they have an outdoor patio. And it's very nice. And they'd always talked about, you know, "You bring your own keyboard." And I'd be willing to do that. But now you're twenty-five percent capacity. And you're stuck on the weather. I mean, weather today is really hot. Other weekends, in the past, it's been really, you know... It's over a mountain. So the weather we have here, they may have the same thing or not. And sometimes it comes really fast, because they're kind of close to the mountain. And, all of a sudden, there you are with your keyboard-- your electric keyboard and it starts to rain. Now what? LB: Have they pretty much, then, not been open? Or are they...? SZ: They were open for takeout. And then lately they tried to do something indoors and on the patio. And now it's the twenty-five percent thing. So I don't know. But I keep in touch there. And they know what I'm... I sent pictures along. Or I say, "Hi. How ya doin'?" But... They had five musicians. So it's like I don't think that's coming back anytime soon. LB: Oh. SZ: And so... I feel sorry for my other friends that are in -- or play instruments like, say, drums. Well, you need a band. A drum solo is nice for two or three minutes at the most. And then you need something else. Or bassoon. Well, you need an orchestra. You need a small group. By yourself, that's... But piano's nice, because... Piano and organ, you can be your one-person band that way, and it's nice. At least I'm playing. That's the important thing. And that's what I'm happy about. LB: Yeah, there's not a lot of bassoon-solo music to play, to entertain people. SZ: A group, there is but not by yourself. But... LB: No. Don't think that would work. And drums too. Can't have dining entertainment with just drums. So that would be an issue. So let's see. What do you think...? Oh... Yeah, I think we've hit everything on here. Let me ask you this. If you imagine that this video, which is going into the archives at Muhlenberg...? And I've been doing a lot of these. I told you before that I did a bunch of AIDS -- ones about AIDS. And I did ten of those. And those were pretty interesting. Oh, and you were... You've already talked about some of your protesting stuff. I've asked everybody what they were concerned about with regard to Black Lives Matter and with regard to political -- SZ: The election. LB: -- and the election. And you've talked about that. So someday, in the future, thirty years from now, somebody's going to look at this, maybe, or forty or fifty years, to see what it was like for individuals during the COVID-19 epidemic. What do you want to say to that person, to tell them what it was like and what it's like for your experience, at this point? And, you know, we're in the middle of the ep-- not even in the middle. We're at the beginning of the epidemic. We don't even know what's going to happen. SZ: Well, in the first wave. LB: Yeah. SZ: The only thing I would have... And this might not be the closest answer to thi-- Bu-- when I heard that this happened back in 1918, it kind of gave me a little bit of hope that, "Oh, we have been through this before." And some sources I looked at kind of said that it's almost like every hundred years, that there was something big in the 1800s, 1700s, 1600s, that there was some kind of plague or some kind of viral or -- infection that went and killed a lot of people -- but if you can actually go back quite a ways. So people have gotten through this. LB: Yeah. Yeah. SZ: It makes you wonder. It's like I... What...? We never heard, much, of a pandemic, you know? You heard about the Titanic but you didn't hear much about the pandemic. And so it's l-- we will get through this. There's been a number of -- I guess they're called memes -- LB: Yeah. SZ: -- that have been on there. And one was saying that, "Well, gee. It's like there's three things at once." We got the pandemic, we've got a depression starting, and we've got racial unrest, at the same time. Whereas before was one at a ti-- now you got all three. And so it's made it a very trying time for everybody. Because it's not just... And this has been like a tornado, the way it hit. Some people hardly get hit at all -- and I would say I'm one of those -- and, I'm sure, some that got hit not at all and others that lost everything. And in the next little time, they're going to find out that there's no money for rent. And eventually they put this off. But it's going to be there. Is there another stimulus check coming or not? And what are the terms of that going to be? And you look at what other countries have done. You look what little has been done here. For the very rich, they've got billions of -- and that way. And certain brands, you've learned now, it's li-- We're never going to that restaurant, never going to buy that brand of jeans -- and other things that way. And it's like, you know, you cons-- LB: Talk about the... I think this is an important thing. Because Trish was just saying that somebody said that, when you go into a store right now, the only beans on the shelf are Goya. Because no one is buying them. SZ: Good. LB: And that's because, for people in the future watching this, the CEO of Goya made some very, very pro-Trump statements. And Goya is a brand... Twice, and unapologetically, and gave lots of money to his campaign. And then one of the things is that Goya products is mostly purchased by Latinos, in the United States. And Trump has been particularly negative toward Latinos -- who are the people who buy these beans, or, you know, the other Goya products. So there is an actual significant effect -- it's happening already -- that... Sometimes, you know, people will talk about a boycott and nothing really ha-- you know, it's not that much. Because there's so much going on. Boycott Amazon. But then everybody has to use Amazon, to be able to... SZ: Or Facebook was another one. LB: Boycott Facebook, yeah. But everybody's using Facebook. But the circumstance with Goya is that the actual demographic of people who use Goya... Also, there are absolutely substitutes for that that are not bad. So it'll be interesting to see, you person in the future, if the Goya company is affected by this or if they get rid of the CEO. I don't know what his position is. But... But it's an interesting thing that you brought up the beans. Don't buy those bean anymore! SZ: Yeah. What I'll mention online too is that Ruth's -- Chris -- Steakhouse -- LB: Yeah. SZ: -- a very fine steakhouse... And they try... And then they got caught. So they gave the money back. LB: Yeah. SZ: That the conditions weren't all the... Oh, they knew. And there are plenty of other ones. But that was one that was really publicized. It's l-- S-- I know there's one in Philadelphia and there's several others. It's like, there's other steakhouses. LB: Right. Right. And other people who've made that money. That's true. And it's bad. It's... What we're talking about is the huge stimulus to corporations that went to individual corporations. It was supposed to go to small businesses that were really struggling. And it was millions and millions and millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, that ended up going to some big, enormous corporations, that really didn't need the money. And then they acted as though -- "Oh, well, we didn't know that this..." And some -- and you have to hand it to them -- some of them gave the money back. Others have... SZ: Got shamed into it. Yeah. LB: And so at least they did those things. They were a little bit more hip. But... Yeah. It's the interesting thing, about the beans, or about the restaurants or whomever is doing stuff. But I think, you know, we have to... It's an economic circumstance. Yeah. So that's a great thing to talk about for the future. And so is there anything else you want to say or toss in or talk about here? SZ: Not really. It's been very nice talking with you. LB: It's been lovely talking with you! I don't get to see you enough. And I've known you -- SZ: They too-- LB: -- for the twenty-five years, more probably than that. So it's wonderful to talk to you. And you look chipper and... SZ: You like the color? Huh, huh, huh? LB: Yeah! Yeah, I got the same shirt on, I think, as you, but just a different color. So there you go. And it's great to see your little doggie, who's happy. And I'm glad you have your dog, to be able to pet and hug while you're... SZ: Oh, that helps. This is my sixth consecutive pug -- LB: (laughs) SZ: -- since 1975. LB: It's a pug-a-thon! SZ: And this was a stray also too. And he was thin. And I want through the Pug Group. And ten people wanted this one. LB: Huh. SZ: And I just keep after the person, and, it turned out, the person who was in charge of doing this. And somehow... He was in the police department for a while. Nobody came to pick him up. And, all of a sudden, one day -- it was a Sunday afternoon -- I get this call -- was, "Well, I've decided to pick you." "Okay. And I'll come over to Easton." "Oh, no. We're coming over to you." LB: Oh... SZ:They wanted to check out the backyard, make sure you are who you say. And they had one of the K-9 police cars. And her husband came. Big car, big Ford LTD, and all the special stuff you'd have for the police car and this little pug in the back. LB:(laughs) SZ: And she brought him over. And so I had to give him a name. I had to think ab-- I didn't want to do Pugsley again. Every now and then, you'd think of the dog. You think Pugsley. And I've had two Pugsleys in a row. I didn't want to go for three Pugsleys in a row. So I had to pick a new name. I picked Atlas. Because he seemed much stronger. He seemed a little bigger than the other pugs. And... He was well-adjusted. So there wasn't much to train or anything. LB: Oh, that's good. SZ: And he... They're very stubborn. They're set in their ways. And so you learn to adapt to him. It's usually easier to do it that way. LB: Well, he's lucky to be in a... I would presume you have air conditioning, complete... SZ: Oh, yeah. Got a new system, two years ago. And I'm so happy. LB: Yeah. That was smart. I wish we had it. We have units. They're not -- or not in the house. I'm in the third floor and I don't think I can really cool it up here. I can make it not devastating. But I can't make it actually cool enough to just go, "That's cool." The second floor, we can do that. But we can't do it on the third floor. It's too hot. But anyway. So it's great... SZ: When the electric bill comes... LB: Pardon me? SZ: When the electric bill comes. LB: Yeah. This is the first day that we've used our air condition-- except in my office, in here, because it's so hot here. But, yeah. We can usually stand it pretty hot. But it was too much, last night, was over one hundred. And it was just too much. We did run the air conditioner, to sleep by. It was so hot, though. Trish got up at five o'clock to water the garden -- SZ: Ah! LB: -- because it was so hot outside. It was in the nineties in the night. So. It got down into the eighties. But... But it's supposed to cool off a little. SZ: I'm hoping. LB: Anyway, it's been lovely talking to you. I've really enjoyed it. It's been great to see you. You look great. And keep up the good work, Steve. You know, you've been such a loyal activist, for many, many years. I always think of you as kind of a Mr. Rogers voice, with the intensity of Mr. Rogers, as well, in terms of always being there to really make change. And I was just talking -- I just want to tell you that I've been interviewed for the archives, the oral history archives. I'm talking about all the stuff that we did for the ordinance and passing the ordinance and everything. And I was talking about how we would go to the on-site things, where Frank McVeigh was, and that time that I called you and you and Tom [Enby?] came over really fast. We were at the Ag Hall. You were there like in minutes. And it was so terrific. And that we also went to the churches, to try to... Because they were getting... SZ: Just thinking of tha-- LB: And how that guy was there with a video camera, because he thought, if he videoed us and we were representing the gay side, that we would be embarrassed. And you and I both turned to the camera and waved. (laughs) And you've always been -- as a public school teacher, I've always pointed to you as someone who is so willing to be out and an inspiration to students. And terrific that you've done that. I mean, you know, you had letters to the editor, identifying yourself as a public school teacher, when we didn't even have the rights. So you were really out there. Good for you. I really appreciate all that work that you did. Well, thanks! SZ: Thank you. LB: Well, you're welcome. So we'll see you around campus. And I'm going to turn the record off now. And thank you, again.  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). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:03:12 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Steve Ziminsky, July 20, 2020 Description An account of the resource Steven Ziminsky talks about how the current COVID-19 pandemic is affecting him as a retired teacher, a musician, and a church music director who is featured on Zoom church services. He also discusses exercise and civil rights and political activism. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PH40_28 Subject The topic of the resource COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-07-20 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/c9c01188f6dcdb5756a2effd8f86b307.png 8befef02e19e36e67708b11f0ec9bd9e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 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 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 T. Scott Allen OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PH40_11.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 July 2, 2020 T. Scott Allen, July 2, 2020 PH40_11 01:34:23 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) T. Scott Allen Liz Bradbury video/mpeg AllenTScott_20200702_video.mp4 1.0:|1995(5) 0 https://youtu.be/DnT8oLHQ5Oc YouTube video 225 Interview Introduction LB: Oh, you’re young. We’re not there yet because we have to do this whole thing. So wait a minute. I have to say this. With this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and Trexler Library at the Muhlenberg College will collaborate on forty years of public health experience in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community, collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from COVID AIDS to from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury, and I’m here with T. Scott Allen to talk 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, and today is July second, twenty-twenty. And you are in Allentown, is that correct? 0 383 Reflecting on early memories of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s LB: Good. Let’s just start right into this. We sit in the middle of the current public health crisis, where experience that we had -- 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 epidemic in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. And we start right out with that question. Do you remember the first time you became aware of the disease? And then just start talking from there. You can say whatever you want. &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: Well, I came to the Diocese of Social Missioner in January of nineteen eighty-nine from Wheeling, West Virginia. 0 562 Engagement with HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley / Involvement of religious communities TSA: When I got to the Lehigh Valley, it was much more -- engaged me much more because there were actually people here that had HIV/AIDS and people that needed help. I mean, and it was lots of things that they needed. It was like some of them just needed food, and some of them needed healthcare. Some of them needed housing. Because there was no safety net from Washington at the time or Harrisburg, really. It was a very hopeful time. While it was sad and this was a tragic thing going on, a lot of innovative things were being done, especially -- the church had a chance to really be a partner with groups that they wouldn’t have had partnerships with otherwise, and make friends, and show them the church wasn’t -- I mean, it was -- religious communities weren’t all great at the time, as you know. 0 662 Working as a grant writer for AIDS outreach / Collaborators in providing services for affected people TSA: And so, I think that was one of the things that was so amazing to me, is how much we cooperated with one another. I wrote grants. I was a grant writer for the Diocese. I wrote grants for the AIDS Services Center. I wrote grants for FACT. I wrote grants for AIDS outreach. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: What were the grants for? What did they -- &#13 ; 0 839 Providing housing and health care for underserved people in the community / The Transitional Living Center in Fountain Hill TSA: And then we tried to start, as you may remember, the Gilead House, which was supposed to be the Lehigh Valley version of Rainbow House in Berks County. And Kit Hower headed that project up. And that didn’t have a long life, mainly because some of the times, I hate -- and I’ll say this, and you can edit this out -- but sometimes, once the hospitals saw they could make money on something, they withdrew support of the community project and started offering it themselves. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: I know that’s true. 0 940 Early discussions and misconceptions on how HIV was transmitted / Church and HIV transmission TSA: And so, it was a sad time on that level. But we tried to make up for it in the Lehigh Valley. There was a great deal of compassion here at the time, and a great deal of understanding about how people became homeless because they had an HIV diagnosis. We had to fight a lot of fear in the culture because like this pandemic, we didn’t know everything about it. We didn’t know everything, how it was transmitted. I mean, there was a time we had no idea how it was transmitted. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Yeah, it took years. 0 1472 Reflections on friends who were HIV positive LB: Did you have any friends that were -- that you knew well that were HIV positive that went through this time, or are still around, or whatever? &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: Yeah. Well, everyone that I met who was HIV positive I met through my work, or being social in the gay community, or hanging out, and volunteering, and doing volunteer work at the AIDS Services Center. I didn’t have a lot of close social friends, if that’s what you’re asking. But I’ve had close social friends die since then, who were HIV positive, and had it for a long time, and long-term survivors, and had other underlying conditions that wasn’t good to have with HIV. I remember David Houseknecht. And what a character he was. And I remember our bishop. 0 1600 Role of the Episcopal Church during the HIV/Aids epidemic LB: The Episcopal Church really rose to this occasion, and I think there were a lot of people that sort of shifted their allegiances from other denominations to get into -- become Episcopalians because of this. It was remarkable because several people that I’ve interviewed have said, “Well, the Episcopal Church was really different compared to the other churches, other church involvement. ” &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: And I wonder about that, of why that was, and I’m not quite sure why that was. But I think part of it was we were such an urban church. Our strength is really in cities. 0 1834 Gilead House / Asbestos problem LB: When you were talking about Gilead House and that was a -- where -- was that a place? Where was it? &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: It was a place. We got a place over at the old Allentown State Hospital. They gave us one of the buildings. Of course, we thought, oh, this is great. Well, then we went in there and found out that we had to remediate half the building because the floor and the ceiling were asbestos. 0 2022 Reflections on the atmosphere of caretaking facilities run by minority groups LB: I had an interview with Bill Aull, who was really involved with Rainbow House. And there was such a significant community building feeling with regard to Rainbow House that -- I mean, I want to steer you into saying something about the fact that when a hospital takes over something that’s run by a minority group, things are different. &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: They are different. You don’t have to steer me that way. I think when you have people whose primary concern is running a place to make money off of it, as opposed to people that are running the place to care for people, the quality is different. 0 2254 Common enemies of discrimination and prejudice / Politicization of social issues TSA: And I remember that there was energy, enthusiasm, support, particularly in the gay community at the time. It was a galvanizing force in the gay community. It was like you had a common enemy. Nothing galvanizes people more than having a common enemy. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: That’s so true. &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: And the enemy was multi-fraught. It was prejudice, and discrimination in the culture. It was the medical community and providing services. It was we can’t let our brothers and sisters languish. 0 2412 ACT UP / Demonstrations and Parades TSA: Well, I think what the result of that was ACT UP. I mean, people just had to go to the streets because of the ignorance, because of the lack of response from the national government, and the lack of compassion coming out of the White House seemingly. ACT UP had to be in your face, and they were until people -- until political leaders were afraid of ACT UP. They didn’t want ACT UP to show up at their office doing some kind of demonstration because it would not be -- it would be pretty explicit if they did. The phenomenon that I saw was that the Reagans were singularly unhelpful for a period. They came around, but begrudgingly. 0 2779 Involvement with the Integrity organization / Dixie White LB: What other organizations were you involved with? Were you part of the Gay Men’s Chorus? I don’t remember whether you were part of that now. &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: No, I wasn’t. We started Integrity at the time. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, right. Of course. Yeah. &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: Which was the Episcopalian LGBT organization, which is now -- well, I’m declaring it defunct. I’ve got to go close our bank account. We don’t need it anymore. We don’t need it. And that’s a good thing. We won. We won. 0 3049 Experience as a priest in North Carolina / Racism and Anti-racism TSA: It was just before I left. That was starting to happen just before I left. I went to North Carolina from here. I was kind of burnt out after six years of just being on a treadmill, and I wanted to go to a little Southern sleepy town and be the rector for them, just be a priest for a while. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Where did you go? &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: I went to Pittsboro, North Carolina, which is twenty miles south of Chapel Hill. But that’s a whole other story. That was not a good idea on my part. But anyway. . . 0 3374 Coming out experience in a religious setting TSA: No, I was unemployed. I left that church under, let’s just say, stressful circumstances. As you know, I was married and have two children. And actually, my involvement in HIV/AIDS movement and interaction with the gay community started making me ask questions and be honest to me about myself, and stuff that I was terrified to face, and did everything I could, including getting married, not to face. But I came out in the wrong place, which was down there. You can bleep this, but it was an S show, as you can imagine. 0 3615 Being sent for psychiatric evaluation TSA: Well, I was sent off for psychiatric evaluation, which was like what? They sent me to Minnesota. In all of this retrospective, it turned out for good. There was grace in all of this because the guy in Minnesota, who was my -- the psychiatrist who was overseeing my -- I had to do the Wassermann test, and the MMPI again, and all that stuff. But he turned out to be a guy -- a gay man, who said, “The bishop wants to defrock you. ”I said, “Why? I’ve done nothing wrong except announce the divorce from my wife, and trying to be honest about myself at the same time, and trying to be discreet about it as much as possible. 0 3995 Feeling joy and sadness in reflecting on the early days of the AIDS/HIV epidemic / Experiencing social breakthroughs TSA: That’s funny. Well, I think back on those times as -- they weren’t dark days for me. They were good days, as far as working with the HIV/AIDS stuff. They were full of hope, and there was joy in it. There was sadness. People died and we were sad about that. No question about that. But there was also equal and opposite joy and feeling of community and support that I haven’t felt like that since really. Maybe a little bit I’m feeling with the Black Lives Matter movement now, but it’s starting to feeling a little more like that. 0 4178 Caring for a young family during the AID epidemic / David Houseknecht and Dixie White LB: That’s true. Let’s see. I know that you’re busy and you’ve got some stuff that’s coming up really soon. I always ask people if they had been in a situation where they were caring for anybody with HIV, where you had to go and bring them food or care people like that.&#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: Not on a consistent basis, no. Because you have to remember I had a young family then. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: Oh, that’s true. &#13 ; 0 4684 The return of virus related terminology / ELISA test TSA: I know. Well and truth is, we never came up with an HIV vaccine. I mean, that’s the thing. It’s funny how the language has come back to me because we were always talking about viral load, T cells. All of that language is back. All of that language is back. And the ELISA test. &#13 ; &#13 ; LB: I don’t know about that. What was that?&#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: The ELISA test was the second -- if you -- the first one was a simple test that would say if you’re HIV positive or HIV negative. But it had a lot of false negatives and false positives.&#13 ; 0 4869 Advice and reflections for consideration for future generations / Focusing on humanity LB: We’re at the last ten minutes of this. If we’re thinking about how people are going to be watching this someday in the future thirty years from now, some kind of -- or more, and they’re going to look back at this, and here’s your chance to talk to the future. Tell them a little bit about just sort of the summation about that time in the Lehigh Valley with regard to HIV/AIDS during the height of the epidemic, and maybe some other words that you might want to toss in there. What do you think? &#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: That seems like a very heavy task, to talk to the future. But I think more what it taught me was communities can rise up together and address problems that seem insurmountable and seem bigger than us, and they can do it in a way that is phenomenal and not only helps the people with the disease, but it helps you. It helps you focus your own humanity. 0 5187 Attending events and interviews in a minister collar / Attending Allentown City Council meetings LB: I want to thank you personally for a couple of times when I desperately needed somebody who was wearing a minister collar to show up fast at an event. I remember when we were fighting the ordinance that time in City Hall --&#13 ; &#13 ; TSA: I dragged Malloy. I said, “Come on, boy. We got to get up to City Hall and show -- put our mugs on the TV camera. ” &#13 ; 0 5326 Passing the Allentown ordinance / Opposition of Allentown diocese LB: The big difference between Allentown and Bethlehem was that when we passed Allentown’s ordinance, the ordinance was already in existence, and it was passed in nineteen sixty-five to protect people based on race, religion, national religion, sex, and, I don’t know, one or two other things. And so, we had to add sexual orientation, gender identity. And that’s a tricky thing. And that was two-thousand and two. It actually started in 1998, and we worked all the way through two-thousand and two to actually pass it, and then we had to fight that referendum. It took seven years to put that in place, and it was really hard. 0 MovingImage T. Scott Allen talks about the AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. He talks about his years as an Episcopal minister and his work with AIDS Services Center, about people who had HIV/AIDS, and how churches supported people who were sick. T. SCOTT ALLEN LIZ BRADBURY: -- on this computer. Now to see other things, that there's a little dot up there that tells you it's recording. And now I know. I must look at that all the time. T. SCOTT ALLEN: Yes. I see it on mine too. It tells me you better watch what you say, bud. It's being recorded. LB: And I think you're pinned in there. I just want to be sure that you're pinned. TSA: Oh, I see. LB: And you are. TSA: You are using the enhanced encryption recording. LB: Pardon me? TSA: It just says I'm using enhanced encryption. So, I guess the Russians can't tap into (inaudible). LB: Thank goodness because they could use this. I know you have another thing right after this, so I'm going to -- and you've already done some big deal this morning. Man, you're a busy guy. TSA: And they're doing construction next door, so if you hear the sound of drills and circular saws in the background, that's what's going on. Of course they would pick today to do that. Of course, my neighbor decides always in the middle -- when I'm in the middle of noonday prayers daily to leaf blow their front porch at about midway through them. So much for urban living. We live in the city. We live close to each other. LB: And there's fireworks. TSA: Oh my God. Yes, there are. LB: On Monday night, I was working until about 1:30 in the morning to finish a project. And up until then and after I went to bed, I could hear the fireworks. And at 5:00 a.m., somebody set off two other huge, bomb like fireworks. Woke me right up. I had gotten three and a half hours. TSA: I thought there were gunshots for a while, and I thought oh, Lord, have mercy. But it wasn't. It was just these stupid one-boom fireworks that were just -- LB: It's fireworks. And the problem is because of this new law, which is I'm sure going to be repealed because it was such a mistake, but you can buy fireworks everywhere. TSA: Well, I don't know where they're getting these because most of the fireworks I see are just kind of small things. LB: You can buy those big, scary ones everywhere now. You can get them at the dollar store. TSA: Wow, really? Because I think they're making them -- LB: They're at every convenience store because they repealed the law because they wanted to tax revenue to fulfill some kind of deficit. So, they said, "Well, we'll just let them buy fireworks everywhere, and we'll tax them really high." And so, they are double tax than the regular sales tax. It was the biggest mistake ever because it's every person in this city who has to -- who doesn't like to be woken up twenty-four hours a day or hear gunshots is furious. And throughout the state. It's not just in the cities. TSA: It's bad for dogs and dog owners too. I remember I would take Martini, my dog -- who -- she's dead now -- but I would take her up to my bedroom -- which I had a window air conditioner in my bedroom -- turn on the air conditioner, turn on the TV, and that -- between the air conditioner and the TV, that blocked out a lot of that. She couldn't hear it. It was good. LB: We're on record, so I got to read you this stuff now. I got carried away. Let's see. I've got that. Oh, I need to turn my phone off. TSA: My only concern was having to give you my birthday. LB: Rose didn't want to give me her year, and I said, "Of course you don't have to do that." You don't have to do that if you don't want to. TSA: I was born just before Kennedy was shot. LB: Oh, you're young. We're not there yet because we have to do this whole thing. So wait a minute. I have to say this. With this project, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and Trexler Library at the Muhlenberg College will collaborate on forty years of public health experience in the Lehigh Valley LGBT community, collecting and curating local LGBT health experiences from COVID AIDS to -- from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. My name is Liz Bradbury, and I'm here with T. Scott Allen to talk 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, and today is July second, twenty-twenty. And you are in Allentown, is that correct? TSA: I'm in Bethlehem right now. But my church is in Allentown. LB: I have to put down where you are when you're doing this. You're in Bethlehem? TSA: I'm sitting in South Bethlehem right now. LB: We did all of those things. I pinned you. 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? TSA: Well, I'm just going to use my initial, T, period, Scott, S-C-O-T-T, Allen, A-L-L-E-N. LB: And would you please share your birth date or day? TSA: December twenty-second. A couple years before Kennedy was shot. LB: You're way younger than I am, Scott. Because I remember when Kennedy was shot. TSA: Well, no, I was in first grade actually. LB: I was in kindergarten, so you win. But anyway, do you consent to this interview today? This is the consent portion. TSA: Yes. LB: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and made publicly available online in searchable formats? TSA: I do. LB: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes in other formats, including films, archives, websites, presentations, and even other formats? TSA: Absolutely. I'll be a movie star. LB: Yes. Do you understand that you will have thirty days after the electronic delivery of the transcript to review your interview, identify any parts that you would like to delete, and, or withdraw the interview from the project? If you say I don't want to do this at all, forget -- we'll do the whole thing again, if you wanted. Although, let's not do that. TSA: No. LB: But I will if you want me to. TSA: It's not like an answering machine message. Re-record. LB: So, you understand that? Okay? TSA: I understand that, yeah. LB: Good. Let's just start right into this. We sit in the middle of the current public health crisis, where experience that we had -- 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 epidemic in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. And we start right out with that question. Do you remember the first time you became aware of the disease? And then just start talking from there. You can say whatever you want. TSA: Well, I came to the Diocese of Social Missioner in January of nineteen eighty-nine from Wheeling, West Virginia. I was aware of HIV/AIDS before I got here. But it was just starting to become in the national conversation, I should say. It was a few people sick in New York City and in urban areas, and hadn't really filtered out yet to towns and smaller rural areas. It was just starting to be of great concern in the national conversation when I arrived in eighty-nine. And it was a time of obviously great fear because the AIDS Quilt was just such a reminder of how many people were dying of this disease. And I remember seeing the AIDS Quilt in about eighty-eight in Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan. And the whole basement of Cobo Hall, which is a huge -- if you've ever been there, it's a huge convention center -- was just covered with the quilt. It was a very moving moment for me when I realized each one of these squares represents someone who's died. And usually, a gay person who died, at that point. That was also the sadness, that a minority community was being hit so hard by this virus. Anyway, so I came here in eighty-nine. It was also a time of great community energy. There was a lot of energy going on here in the Lehigh Valley that you just -- lots of coalition building. Lots of making connections, doing stuff together, writing grants together. Unusual bed partners: the Red Cross, the Episcopal Church, and -- Fighting AIDS Continually Together would do stuff. As I remember, it was an exciting time in a way because I saw so many people coming forward, and so much effort and energy that was having some effect happening. When I got to the Lehigh Valley, it was much more -- engaged me much more because there were actually people here that had HIV/AIDS and people that needed help. I mean, and it was lots of things that they needed. It was like some of them just needed food, and some of them needed healthcare. Some of them needed housing. Because there was no safety net from Washington at the time or Harrisburg, really. It was a very hopeful time. While it was sad and this was a tragic thing going on, a lot of innovative things were being done, especially -- the church had a chance to really be a partner with groups that they wouldn't have had partnerships with otherwise, and make friends, and show them the church wasn't -- I mean, it was -- religious communities weren't all great at the time, as you know. There was a lot of fear in churches. There was a lot of blaming. Seeing it as a class issue as opposed to a virus. And by class, I mean a category of people. And so, I think that was one of the things that was so amazing to me, is how much we cooperated with one another. I wrote grants. I was a grant writer for the Diocese. I wrote grants for the AIDS Services Center. I wrote grants for FACT. I wrote grants for AIDS outreach. LB: What were the grants for? What did they -- TSA: General programming. I mean, they were for what they needed. Basically, for services to people with HIV and AIDS. And it was at that time that I met Rose Craig and became actually good friends with her. And she was a great ally, being at the Red Cross I think at the time. And David -- I forget his last name -- at Lehigh Valley Hospital. LB: David Moyer? TSA: He was a vice president up there. Jo Clare Hartsig with (inaudible) of the homeless. LB: You just stopped for a minute. You said Jo Clare Hart-- TSA: Joe Clare Hartsig was at Center City Ministries, which was the standing homeless shelter here, which no longer exists. But she got involved because many of the people who came to her shelter were also HIV positive or having just full-blown symptoms of AIDS. And so, she got involved in stuff. Billy Leh. Real involved with him as his -- working on projects together, Rob-Win Press, with that. And then Linda Lobach at the time. She's got another last name now. But anyway, Linda at AIDS Outreach, which was started actually at Grace Episcopal Church. She was an Episcopalian. And of course, another Episcopalian became the director of the AIDS Services Center, was Dixie White. There was this explosion of cooperation, advocacy, concern. We spoke with a pretty loud voice when we all spoke together. We spoke in a louder voice than we would've spoken had we spoken individually. For me, it was a great honor and privilege to be connected in a network with these people, who were all bright and articulate people that had a lot on the ball. And thank God. And then we tried to start, as you may remember, the Gilead House, which was supposed to be the Lehigh Valley version of Rainbow House in Berks County. And Kit Hower headed that project up. And that didn't have a long life, mainly because some of the times, I hate -- and I'll say this, and you can edit this out -- but sometimes, once the hospitals saw they could make money on something, they withdrew support of the community project and started offering it themselves. LB: I know that's true. TSA: Right after we started the Transitional Living Center down here in Fountain Hill, which was for -- wasn't exactly for people with HIV, but it was for people that -- and it wasn't -- what we discovered is we found out about a lot of underserved people in general, who were being released from hospitals that had no place to live. People that lived alone, who had to give themselves eye drops. They couldn't manage that. Or give themselves some kind of complicated medication that involved maybe injection or IV. And so, we started the Transitional Living Center down here in Fountain Hill, and wrote grants, and got it going for people that were released from hospitals. And it also would include people with HIV and AIDS, who were treated and then released. And many of them, because they had become unemployed, lost their employment, had become homeless. And so, it was a sad time on that level. But we tried to make up for it in the Lehigh Valley. There was a great deal of compassion here at the time, and a great deal of understanding about how people became homeless because they had an HIV diagnosis. We had to fight a lot of fear in the culture because like this pandemic, we didn't know everything about it. We didn't know everything, how it was transmitted. I mean, there was a time we had no idea how it was transmitted. LB: Yeah, it took years. TSA: We suspected, but we didn't have solid proof that kissing someone would not give you HIV. So, anyway... LB: People still say that now. TSA: Really? LB: People still will describe certain circumstances, and they'll talk about it, and (inaudible) at the same risk as needle sharing or at the same risk as anal sex. You could say, well, you could get it from this, this, this, and this, or anal sex, or needle sharing. I'm thinking yeah, well the first two, I mean, there is no statistical circumstance where anyone has ever gotten it that way. TSA: And in our church tradition, communion is so important that we had to do a lot of stuff with the church about communion, about how you couldn't -- finally, we got doctors to come out and say, "You cannot get this from the common cough. Period." You can't. Unless you're doing something else at the altar rail besides taking communion, you can't get HIV. (laughs) LB: You still can't, even if you are. You still can't because once you have -- TSA: Unless you're engaging in unseemly behavior in church, you can't get it at church. And that was one of the things that we were fighting, is that prejudice and that fear in the culture. Because one of the blocks, as you know, to getting people to buy onto, and volunteer, and giving money to HIV as service groups was to relieve them of fear of a lot of the fear they had. So one of the big things that we did in the Episcopal diocese that we did ecumenically, actually -- it wasn't just us, but it was kind of spearheaded by us -- but it was the healing -- we had that first healing service at the cathedral. I don't know if you remember it. But it was at the cathedral and we did it for a couple of years or three years. Then it kind of died out because it wasn't needed. As with a lot of things that you do, things take on a life of their own, and they outlive their time, and it just kind of dies this really sad death at the end. Because for what it was started for, there's no longer a need. I remember that first thing. The bishop, Mark Dyer, was the celebrant. And we got the guy in New York that Cousin Bobby was about. I don't know if you remember Cousin Bobby. It was about Jonathan Demme's cousin, who was an Episcopal priest in Manhattanville that was doing a really active ministries with people with HIV. In fact, helped start that hotel there down in Christopher Street that was pretty much a residence for people with HIV, which started to expand rather quickly to not just gay people, but straight people too, particularly in areas like New York. Cousin Bobby was the preacher. I can't remember his name. We wanted to let people with HIV and AIDS know that we would touch them, that we would actually touch them, that they can take communion with us, and we're not going to be afraid of you, and we want you not to be afraid of us. And so, that was the big message that we were trying to put forth in that service. And I remember that it was packed. I mean, there was not a seat left in the room, mainly because allies -- a lot of allies came. Once again, all these organizations that were in relationship from one another would support each other in that kind of thing. I would encourage people to go to FACT events from the Episcopal Church. I'd advertise the summer games, and the Snowball, and things like that. It was a ton of great cooperation that I haven't seen a lot since, although I'm seeing it again with the Black Lives Matter movement now. But there was great cooperation in the Lehigh Valley. LB: When we compare this to COVID, we have to remember we've only been dealing with COVID-19 for about four or five months, or six months. We're not talking about by nineteen eighty-nine, people in the Lehigh Valley had been working to codify our community for four years. But when you had that big healing service, where was it? TSA: It was at the Cathedral Church of the Nativity down here. I'll never forget this. This was great. At the time, they were just drag queens. Now we probably call them transgender people: men who dress like women, but not all the time. Anyway, but they came dolled up, their wigs, everything. Looking very conservative, but they weren't like they were going to go on stage at The Stonewall or anything. And I remember one going up at the time of laying on the hands of healing, one going up. And I think Dixie and I were sitting together maybe at that. I don't remember. But I remember her leaning over to me, and say, "I wonder if the bishop realizes that the woman that he's laying hands on is not a woman." (laughs) I said, "You know, it doesn't matter." She's still getting healing. LB: Because those people were cross-dressers. They really were not trans people. They weren't transgender people who were living their lives as women. They were people who were -- TSA: These were cross-dressers, yeah. LB: -- who would dress as women. That was a really big contingency of people at Renaissance early on. And I remember that some of the first work that we did was in that community as well. Yeah, that was pretty interesting. TSA: I mean, Billy Leh was about the most secular person I've ever met in my life. And he came up to me and said how meaningful that that service was at the end of it for him, that we were touching, embracing everyone, not caring what your HIV status was. And offer you communion. We will drink after you. It was very powerful at the time in nineteen ninety-one, ninety, ninety-one maybe. But it was also trying to be a message to the churches that you don't have to be afraid either. There's not this huge outbreak of HIV afterwards. LB: Of course, with COVID-19, it's a different story. TSA: That's a different story. Absolutely. But we're kind of in that same place where we're not sure. We don't know. We don't have a really good personality profile on this virus yet. LB: That's true. TSA: And there was a point we didn't really have that for HIV either. We didn't know exactly what was going to happen, how it -- if it would mutate, how it would mutate. Would it get better? Would it get worse? Will the antivirals that we come up with still be effective in two or three years? There were all those questions back then, I remember. But still, we persevered. We persisted. LB: Did you have any friends that were -- that you knew well that were HIV positive that went through this time, or are still around, or whatever? TSA: Yeah. Well, everyone that I met who was HIV positive I met through my work, or being social in the gay community, or hanging out, and volunteering, and doing volunteer work at the AIDS Services Center. I didn't have a lot of close social friends, if that's what you're asking. But I've had close social friends die since then, who were HIV positive, and had it for a long time, and long-term survivors, and had other underlying conditions that wasn't good to have with HIV. I remember David Houseknecht. And what a character he was. And I remember our bishop. The house of bishops in the Episcopal Church, the presiding bishop told each one of the bishops in the house of bishops that he wanted them to go back to their diocese, and befriend and make a -- work on a friendship with someone with HIV/AIDS. And so, our bishop did that. And the person he chose was David Houseknecht. And Bishop Mark would visit him, and call him, and stay in touch with him. That's kind of one of the remarkable things that happened at the time, Liz, that just -- unexpected relationships grew up that, except for this disease, otherwise wouldn't have happened. LB: The Episcopal Church really rose to this occasion, and I think there were a lot of people that sort of shifted their allegiances from other denominations to get into -- become Episcopalians because of this. It was remarkable because several people that I've interviewed have said, "Well, the Episcopal Church was really different compared to the other churches, other church involvement." TSA: And I wonder about that, of why that was, and I'm not quite sure why that was. But I think part of it was we were such an urban church. Our strength is really in cities. And I think probably the first wave of people with HIV were members of those congregations who had to get over it real quick to minister to them, and had to learn real quick how to minister to them and how to -- and that this was something that they weren't getting support for in the general culture. Maybe that's why it was. I don't know. I don't know. But it was definitely a time that our church really became anti -- I don't know how to say it -- anti-homophobic. I don't know. Well, it wasn't just homophobia. Treating them like lepers. We decided that Jesus didn't treat lepers like they couldn't be touchable, so why should we? I think that was it. But then also, the time I'll never forget, Peter Helt was the pastor up at the MCC church. LB: Yeah, before Beth Goudy. TSA: Yeah. And I remember going to a dinner at Linda Lobach's house, and having -- because of that dinner, becoming friends with him, and was glad to know that he was ministering to gay people that wouldn't step foot into a traditional church. Those are the kind of connections that were invaluable. And I could refer people to him too that I knew weren't going to come to the Episcopal Church and sit through an hour and a half service, not knowing that they were really welcome. I'm enough of an evangelist as a Christian. I want them to become Christians. So I sent them up to Peter. But it was really a time too that I think we had to really get over fear, prejudice. And folded into that, which was a blessing, was homophobia. I think if it weren't for the AIDS/HIV crisis, we wouldn't have heard the stories of gay people that moved us so much. Even though we were clear that gay people weren't the only ones getting it, they were really the first wave to get it. Gay men particularly. And people got to hear their stories, see them as human beings, have compassion for them. And then following up from there, why aren't we ordaining them? Why can't they be ordained? And that came out of that, really. LB: Oh, that's interesting. TSA: It did unlock the stories of gay people in a way that nothing else had before that. LB: When you were talking about Gilead House and that was a -- where -- was that a place? Where was it? TSA: It was a place. We got a place over at the old Allentown State Hospital. They gave us one of the buildings. Of course, we thought, oh, this is great. Well, then we went in there and found out that we had to remediate half the building because the floor and the ceiling were asbestos. LB: Made of asbestos, yes. TSA: Anyway, we were like -- LB: Having been there empty, they can't even tear them down. They'd kill everybody by just tearing them down. TSA: Well, they had to remediate Martin Tower for that reason before they blew it up. They had to spend all that money getting the asbestos out of Martin Tower because all of that stuff would be aerosolized when they blew it up. LB: That's why it stood there vacant for so long. That building that we were going to have for the community center that's on Turner Street turned out to be totally made of asbestos. And we would say what needs to be done to that building is to tear it down, but they can't tear it down because the cost of tearing it down is worse than just leaving it there. TSA: Well, and the health danger. All that dust flying over the city and into windows. LB: You can't just go and tear this thing down. You've got to put it in a giant plastic bag and then carefully take it apart. TSA: Well, we thought that was a great thing at first. And then we found out about the asbestos problem. And of course, we were trying to get personal care home licensure. We did do some remediation. We wrote some grants. Rose was on the board, actually, of that. Because we really wanted to have a home where people with HIV could go, whose families didn't feel like they could manage them. Because as you know, at the time, there weren't the pharmaceuticals and the antivirals that we have now. And it was a debilitating and withering disease. And eventually, you would -- you couldn't even go to the bathroom by yourself. People had to make everything you ate and bring it to you. You weren't able to do any of that. So that was the need at the time, which thankfully was not as much of a need shortly after its demise. We only had one person in Gilead House. Only had one person. Well, and this is, once again, the hospitals realizing, oh my God, we can get money for having a HIV floor and putting on the floor. Okay. And so, then when they realized they can make money off of it and get third-party payments, which is how we were going to support the Gilead House. We were completely undercut by the hospitals on that. LB: I had an interview with Bill Aull, who was really involved with Rainbow House. And there was such a significant community building feeling with regard to Rainbow House that -- I mean, I want to steer you into saying something about the fact that when a hospital takes over something that's run by a minority group, things are different. TSA: They are different. You don't have to steer me that way. I think when you have people whose primary concern is running a place to make money off of it, as opposed to people that are running the place to care for people, the quality is different. And it begs the question, had we not done the Transitional Living Center, had we not done Gilead House, would the hospitals have done what they did? We were kind of the canary in the mineshaft, and they said, "Oh, wait a minute. If Medicaid or Blue Cross Blue Shield is going to pay for them to be in these places, or the state's going to give us money for that, why can't we do that?" I think it really spurred them on to do what they did. But as you say, the quality is very different. And I know people were well taken care of at the Transitional Living Center, which was pretty full from the minute it opened. LB: Where was that? TSA: That was here in Fountain Hill. I forget what street it's on. It's not far from where I'm sitting. There's Old Silk Mill that we got a piece of. And it had rooms. It had probably about eight or ten rooms and a kind of a nursing station, so there was medical access to people. You could see all the doors and all the rooms. What's that street north of me? I'll think of it in a minute. I think that one of the things that we did in that period was we made the culture start responding, albeit not with the same caring touch that we had. No question about that. Another remarkable thing of the time is that nonprofits, churches, were stepping up immediately to deal with the people and the needs of these people who were diagnosed with a disease. It wasn't a plague. It was a disease like cancer or anything else. We did, I think, remarkable work on very little. It was kind of like some projects were like stone soup. Okay, I have this idea. Okay, well, we can do this piece of it, but we probably need someone to do this piece. Well, you know what? We've got the infrastructure to do that piece of it. That's kind of how a lot of the things have happened. And I remember that there was energy, enthusiasm, support, particularly in the gay community at the time. It was a galvanizing force in the gay community. It was like you had a common enemy. Nothing galvanizes people more than having a common enemy. LB: That's so true. TSA: And the enemy was multi-fraught. It was prejudice, and discrimination in the culture. It was the medical community and providing services. It was we can't let our brothers and sisters languish. We've got to do something. We can't just sit by and watch this happen. There was a lot of energy around that. LB: That's a good point. That's a good way of framing it, I think, the common enemy thing. I think that's the way maybe we need to frame COVID-19 because I don't think people understand that as much. We need to say that's the enemy. The illness is the enemy. The pandemic is about that. It's not about the (inaudible). The enemy isn't the mask. TSA: The problem we have in this culture, and it happened with HIV and AIDS too, is things get politicized right away. It's like you're a red state ; you don't wear a mask. If you're a blue state, you wear masks. Well, that's ridiculous. And Ronald Reagan -- you know how he was. Ronald and Nancy? They didn't want anything to do with AIDS/HIV. LB: These archives will really put -- will give people an opportunity because these will be archived at Muhlenberg College, and people will be able to access these online and stuff. Thirty years from now, the way history will be written is Ronald Reagan was a beloved, moderate Republican president and was still, for the LGBT community -- we're like wait a minute. That was not what was happening. TSA: I thought George W. Bush was the worst president in history until -- I'd love to have George W. Bush back now. (laughter) I'll take him back in a minute. LB: But I don't think people always understand that when you're talking about Ron and Nancy Reagan and what they did or what they wouldn't do -- and so, talk about that a little bit. I think everybody was aware of -- TSA: Well, I think what the result of that was ACT UP. I mean, people just had to go to the streets because of the ignorance, because of the lack of response from the national government, and the lack of compassion coming out of the White House seemingly. ACT UP had to be in your face, and they were until people -- until political leaders were afraid of ACT UP. They didn't want ACT UP to show up at their office doing some kind of demonstration because it would not be -- it would be pretty explicit if they did. The phenomenon that I saw was that the Reagans were singularly unhelpful for a period. They came around, but begrudgingly. Here's the other thing. It also tied to homophobia. It was interlinked with homophobia with just -- initially, anyway. And thank God straight people started getting HIV because then it's like, oh, they're not gay and they got HIV. Oh, this must be a disease. This was not a gay thing. And of course, gay people always get politicized still. People vote for Donald Trump because he's going to put Supreme Court justices that are going to limit transgender rights or repeal same sex marriage. I just have one, two words for them: stare decisis. We've already done that, man. We can't keep spinning that wheel. That was -- been decided. But I do think that it was a lot of things going on like that at the time. I mean, I remember ACT UP, I think, was compliments of Ronald Reagan. If we hadn't had Ronald Reagan's response, people wouldn't have felt the frustration that they had to go out and set their hair on fire in public to get attention and say this is worthy of public funding, and public research, and public attention. LB: Did you go to any of those ACT UP things? TSA: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There weren't many in the Lehigh Valley, as I recall. I don't think. But I went to one in Philadelphia, and it was in front of City Hall, actually. But being in the church, I had to -- well, I wanted to engage my own folks in a way. I spent my energy trying to engage people who claimed the Christian faith to actually claim the Christian faith, and to be what they said they were, and to give them opportunities to show that towards people with HIV and AIDS, and inviting them into that. Because Martin Luther King, he -- I think one of the things I've noticed that -- a lot of people have read King, but not thoroughly. And one of the things that I'll never forget -- and this was when I was involved in the anti-nuclear movement in Connecticut when was in seminary -- but we did demonstrations up there where we actually were arrested. But Martin Luther King always said that whatever public demonstration you do, you always have to have an element of it be an invitation for those who witness it to join you. You cannot create a demonstration to be intentionally off-putting, which I've always thought was really good advice. It's got to be non-violent, and it's got to be an invitation to people to join you, not to reject you. LB: Trish and I were just in a pride parade in Amelia Island, Florida last year at this time actually. It was their first pride festival, their first parade. They have a little park there. It was about eight-hundred people there all together. It was small. It's a small place though. The first thing we did was we paraded down the street a few blocks, maybe five or six blocks. And we came back up, passed by the Episcopal Church. All these people, they were the mom and dad's brigades, and they were coming out and hugging everybody. It was really wonderful. It was some church. But the church didn't participate, but the congregation did. It was sort of interesting. There's someone in the congregation that organized people to do this thing. But one of the things that Trish and I were doing -- we were near the front of the parade -- is that every time we walked by and we would see people that were clearly LGBT standing on the side of the road, and we would -- or even just people who had -- and they were cheering and they had -- and we would say, "Come on. Come on. Come and do this." Because sometimes, they feel like, well, I'm not part of that particular group. And we would say to them, "Come out to be with us and walk with us. We want you in our group." And I think that that was a great thing. People are still doing that today. That was a significant thing. What other organizations were you involved with? Were you part of the Gay Men's Chorus? I don't remember whether you were part of that now. TSA: No, I wasn't. We started Integrity at the time. LB: Oh, right. Of course. Yeah. TSA: Which was the Episcopalian LGBT organization, which is now -- well, I'm declaring it defunct. I've got to go close our bank account. We don't need it anymore. We don't need it. And that's a good thing. We won. We won. LB: If you have any leftover money, I know someplace that you could donate the money to. TSA: Oh, no, no. We're donating it to the Bradbury-Sullivan Center for the Dixie White room. LB: Yes, okay. Definitely do that. TSA: It's not a lot of money. I warn you. It's like two or three-hundred bucks. LB: That's terrific. We're about a little bit less than six-hundred dollars -- three-thousand six-hundred dollars from the goal. We're doing really well with that. It's very significant. TSA: And what room is it? LB: We haven't decided. That will be something that Dixie's folks and other contributors and stuff can decide. There's a lot of different options, as far as that goes. TSA: While Dixie was still alive, Dixie and I, and David Moyer were about the last three standing people that could still -- were still vertical that -- LB: Well, now there's two of you. TSA: Yes, and now there's only two of us left. But anyway, we did say we're going to close this account because Dixie was very concerned that we not just let this money languish and just put it in a checking account. It's a little of it. We need to put it towards something. And I suggested that we send it to the Bradbury-Sullivan Center in thanksgiving for the ministry that Integrity had. And we had a good ministry for a few years. It was really good. LB: I used to advertise it in the paper. TSA: Yeah. And we provided affirmation and a safe place for gay Episcopalians to be and know they weren't alone. That was really great. But we started that. That came out of that. I think there was a clergy group that Ann Hughie may have convened that I was part of. Donna [Seepley?], Nancy Adams, Jo Clare, me, Peter Helt. God, these are old history names, aren't they? LB: There's a guy at Saint John's Lutheran who was (inaudible). TSA: Yeah, Tim. No, no, no. He was at the UCC church. But that was the other thing, is getting -- doing education for clergy about -- so they could assure their congregations that they could have communion. Because it would scare people if you say, "We don't know if anyone in this room is HIV positive or not." They don't care. And they'd say, "Oh, yeah. It bothers me. I'm not going to take communion." And people thought by dipping their wafer they were going to be avoiding that bad germ floating around in the wine or something. I don't know. Rather than sipping from the cup. Whatever you need to do. And some people stopped taking the cup for a while. They just took the bread. So we had to do a lot of education with clergy, not just Episcopal clergy, but ecumenically. Presbyterians, Methodists, UCCs, Mennonites. Of course, Roberta Kreider was doing a lot of work with the Mennonites. And she was kind of doing this underground Mennonite gay ministry. LB: Was that then? TSA: She was starting it then, I think. LB: Cool. TSA: It was just before I left. That was starting to happen just before I left. I went to North Carolina from here. I was kind of burnt out after six years of just being on a treadmill, and I wanted to go to a little Southern sleepy town and be the rector for them, just be a priest for a while. LB: Where did you go? TSA: I went to Pittsboro, North Carolina, which is twenty miles south of Chapel Hill. But that's a whole other story. That was not a good idea on my part. But anyway... LB: It's interesting that you have this idea that it's going to be like Mayberry, and then you look underneath, and you say, "Oh, wait." Look in the closet of those guys in Mayberry and there's a bunch of white robes hanging up in there." TSA: Well, I told somebody, "I'm on the diocese in anti-racial and social -- and racial justice committee here in the diocese now." And I was telling them about my past and that when I was rector of that church, the Daughters of the Confederacy invited me to give an opening prayer for their centennial meeting, which was a big deal. Culturally, that was a big deal. I struggled with doing it. They were asking me because Saint Bartholomew's is one of the oldest churches in town, and a lot of the glorious dead were buried in our church yard. So anyway, I went down, and it was real creepy. The place was decorated in red, white, and blue, but there were the -- there was the Confederate flag everywhere. But the Daughters of the Confederacy are singularly responsible for most of those monuments in the South. These women baked pies and raised money for that statue of General Jubilation T. Cornpone in the (laughs) -- LB: Well, and I raised the money, and I think people don't quite understand that those statues were just being bulk produced. They were spitting out one after the other. They all looked exactly the same: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, a couple of other generals, Jefferson Davis. They didn't have any artistic value. They weren't put up as a monument for a specific battle that happened. It was just absolutely created as a white supremacy -- TSA: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. LB: -- thing. TSA: I was not a racist, but I didn't know enough not to be anti-racist. And there's a difference. I mean, I grew up in the South. I had a Confederate flag in my bedroom as a teenager. My parents didn't see anything wrong with that. I didn't either. We're related to the Lee family, the Robert E. Lee family. We're related to his brother, actually. But when the Sons of the Confederacy found that out, boy, howdy, they came and got me and wanted me to be a member of the Sons of the Confederacy. I'm like, "I'm really busy here at Saint Bartholomew's. I can't join one more organization." But both of the Sons and the Daughters of the Confederacy had chapters in Pittsboro. It was crazy time. It was crazy time. And here's this guy that came from the activist northeast. I'd just done all this stuff, as you heard, with AIDS and gay people, and stuff. There was some backwardness in the town, no doubt. But fortunately, a lot of my -- it was an Episcopal church. And so, there was a huge retirement community nearby called Farrington, and a lot of my parishioners came from there, and they had moved down from New Jersey. There was a level of sophistication in my congregation that was saving for me. I wasn't stuck with just southern ethos. There was a little more progressiveness going on. LB: Twenty miles from Chapel Hill means you're twenty miles from the university too. TSA: Right, right. And we had people that worked at the university in the congregation. And it was a place for cheap land if you wanted to build a house, and people did. It's in Chatham County, which is south of Orange County, which is the county that Chapel Hill is in. But it was -- LB: How long were you there? TSA: I was there for four years. LB: And then you came back here? Directly to here? TSA: Yes, came back directly to here. Came back here again. LB: Did they provide you with a church? I don't know how this works, so I'm not really -- TSA: No. Oh, coming back here? LB: Yeah. TSA: No, I was unemployed. I left that church under, let's just say, stressful circumstances. As you know, I was married and have two children. And actually, my involvement in HIV/AIDS movement and interaction with the gay community started making me ask questions and be honest to me about myself, and stuff that I was terrified to face, and did everything I could, including getting married, not to face. But I came out in the wrong place, which was down there. You can bleep this, but it was an S show, as you can imagine. LB: Bleep it. I love this kind of stuff. If you want to take these things out, you certainly can. But don't think that you need to do that, Scott, because, believe me, this is [nothing?]. TSA: I don't want to scandalize people. But it was a shit show. Let me just tell you that. It was awful. And the bishop didn't know what to do. And he was coming down to retirement. He was in his last lap, not wanting to deal with this. And there was a lot of scandal and rumor that wasn't true that was going around about my behavior, and that I was an alcoholic sitting in the house with my -- the gun in one hand and a bottle of vodka in another. It was crazy stuff. And I'm like, "What?" It just opened a floodgate of homophobia that I didn't think existed. LB: I think that often happens with people who are tangential to the community. I have two friends who were going to adopt. They were a lesbian couple, and they were going to adopt a baby. The adoption agency said, "It would be a good idea for you to be a member of a progressive -- a church that was a progressive church." So they went to the church in their neighborhood that was the denomination they were very comfortable with. I think it was the Church of Christ. And they went in, and this was in New Jersey. And they explained their situation. But they said, "Look, we don't really want to come out to everybody right away. We're not out like that in the neighborhood. We're going to have a child. We'll ease into it. We need to know people, et cetera, et cetera. But please be discreet about this and don't tell everybody." TSA: Oh, God. LB: They've already filled out the forms to go into the position of becoming a member of the church. And the next day, they go in there, and some really well-meaning clerk in the office there said, "Everybody's so excited that we're going to have a lesbian couple." And they're like, "Whoa. You told everybody at the church before we even got there?" What happens sometimes is a very, very caring, well-meaning straight person, who has no idea what kind of world of discrimination happened to LGBT people -- that was before could get married -- they were relatively new to the community -- thinking we're just -- I'm one-hundred percent supportive of you. You seem like a nice group of people. Why would people be negative toward you? And they (inaudible) into two-hundred people in one day. TSA: Well, I was sent off for psychiatric evaluation, which was like what? They sent me to Minnesota. In all of this retrospective, it turned out for good. There was grace in all of this because the guy in Minnesota, who was my -- the psychiatrist who was overseeing my -- I had to do the Wassermann test, and the MMPI again, and all that stuff. But he turned out to be a guy -- a gay man, who said, "The bishop wants to defrock you." I said, "Why? I've done nothing wrong except announce the divorce from my wife, and trying to be honest about myself at the same time, and trying to be discreet about it as much as possible. But that's obviously not going to happen." And so, he said, "I think I can get your bishop to back down with this. Are you willing not to work in the church for a few months?" I said, "Absolutely." I said, "It's like an attorney. You can lose your practice. You don't want to lose your license. And being what we call deposed is losing your license, and I'm fine not to have my practice for a while." He says, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I'm going to move back to Bethlehem. I own a house in Bethlehem and the tenants are really bad, so I feel no compunction giving them eviction notices. And they're four months behind in rent anyway. And I'm going to move back there. And he says, "Well, you know, one of my best friends is a therapist in Bethlehem." It was John Falbo. I don't know if you remember John Falbo. LB: Oh, of course I know John Falbo. TSA: But this guy in Minnesota -- LB: (inaudible) around, isn't he? TSA: -- hit me up to be probably condemned by him and said that he's a raving lunatic. Don't let him be a priest anymore. Sent me to John Falbo, who was the best thing for me. LB: Oh, yeah. No, I recommended a hundred people to John. And it was such a shock when he died. TSA: He died too soon. What happened? That was awful. LB: I'll tell you. He died after a huge snowstorm. I think he was out there shoveling snow. TSA: Oh, God. LB: He had a massive heart attack, and frankly, what would cause that? It was a blizzard day, and that night, he died. And I think that's what it was. I think he was outside. I really think that's what it was. I'm just guessing about that. I mean, he wasn't in the hospital or anything. He just had a heart attack and died. And I had literally dozens of people calling me up saying, "You need to refer me to another openly gay therapist in Bethlehem." I said, "Well, I'm sorry. But I don't have anybody." And it's been what, three years? And I still don't have anybody. And I just got another call from somebody who said, "I really need somebody that's more -- that's a man." Really what they were saying is, "I need a man." This is a woman. And she was lesbian, and she said, "I need a man to be in this position for me." And I just don't have anybody. I don't know. TSA: He was a lifesaver for me, and I was with him for three or four years, decreasingly seeing him. But when I first got here, I saw him about every couple weeks. I mean, no one was more helpful to me in coming out than John. He was great. But that's another story. And when you do the people's coming out story video, I'll be in that if you'd like. Because I have a hellacious story. Everything awful that could happen to you as an Episcopal priest happened to me. The only fault of mine is coming out as a gay man. LB: Mary Foltz at Lehigh University is doing a series of archive videos of people in the community. She's done Harold and Roberta Kreider, and they had ten people. And I contributed. They could only do ten people. That was the first grant. And they're still working on this, and there's going to be more money to do this. But the first grant was to do ten people, and I said, "Well, you got to do Harold and Roberta. They're in their mid-nineties. Hurry." And I said to do Dixie, and they were set to do her, and then she died. And it was so -- such a shame. TSA: That's such a loss. LB: I'll do Charlie Versaggi later today, and then I will have ten of these HIV/AIDS interviews. And every single person has mentioned Dixie White. I mean, she was so essential in that early (inaudible). TSA: Well, she had the AIDS Services Center at a critical time. That makes perfect sense to me that they would mention her, and as well as Linda Lobach and Rose Craig. Those were some always people that had -- were big noises in the AIDS community at the time. Absolutely. LB: So there will be more, and I will suggest that they interview you because I work with Mary. She's going to interview me tomorrow. I think that's one of the last ones. And I said, "Honey, you got to give me more than one day." They're like, "You can do this in ninety minutes." I'm like, "No way in hell. I can't even do five years in ninety minutes." TSA: That's funny. Well, I think back on those times as -- they weren't dark days for me. They were good days, as far as working with the HIV/AIDS stuff. They were full of hope, and there was joy in it. There was sadness. People died and we were sad about that. No question about that. But there was also equal and opposite joy and feeling of community and support that I haven't felt like that since really. Maybe a little bit I'm feeling with the Black Lives Matter movement now, but it's starting to feeling a little more like that. But it was just all of the breakthroughs that we made at those times in the -- and really had to break through a lot of prejudice and misinformation, just like now. I mean bleach and lights in your body, and things like that. I was like, "No, no, no. That's not going to take care of this." LB: We had really good local leadership. We had a common enemy. And here's another thing, Scott: we were a lot younger. TSA: Oh, hell yes. I can't imagine myself doing now what I did then. I just can't imagine it. The Summer Games, the FACT games, were always on Sunday, which was hard for me because I had to do church somewhere. But I remember Saturday, there was something, and then Sunday, I had to do church. And then I got right in the car, pretty much changed while driving up thirty-three in my car, and attended the FACT games and was at an information table there. That was it. The reason I was going is I was going to stand at a -- I think it was the AIDS Services Center information table or something. I didn't think of it at the time. Now, I'm like, oh my God. I'd no more do that now than fly to the moon. LB: Yeah, we did a lot of hard work in those days. We're still doing it. TSA: We're still doing it. Well, we can be the elders that give wise advice now. LB: And have people not listen to us. TSA: Well, we've got some wisdom. We've got some scars here and there, and some places that still hurt that we can talk about. LB: That's true. Let's see. I know that you're busy and you've got some stuff that's coming up really soon. I always ask people if they had been in a situation where they were caring for anybody with HIV, where you had to go and bring them food or care people like that. TSA: Not on a consistent basis, no. Because you have to remember I had a young family then. LB: Oh, that's true. TSA: I had little kids. In addition to doing my day job, I had a night job of being a father, and doing laundry, and do things like giving baths, and things like that. And that was important to me, to be present to my kids, even though I would leave early in the morning sometimes. And sometimes, I had night meetings. They didn't see me until the next morning because they'd gone to bed by the time I got home. Or I saw them briefly at dinner and had to run out to a meeting at seven o'clock or something. So, no. My only really tangential work in that direction was taking meals with Dixie to David Houseknecht and visiting him with her when she took -- LB: I didn't know him. I mean he was obviously a (inaudible). TSA: He was one of the first people diagnosed. He was a character. He was flamboyantly gay. Flamboyantly gay. He wore clothes like I have on, and then he'd have a yellow feather boa that he'd wear. He always had some accessory on that was outlandish, or long earrings that dangled and stuff. And it was clearly women's earrings. These weren't like Mr. Clean little gold things. These were dangly, sparkly things. So, yeah. He was one of the people that was first. I don't remember a lot about his story, where he came from. He was from this area. Of course, Houseknecht is not an unusual name in this area. But he had been involved in something. Dixie adored him, and it took a lot for Dixie to adore you. Dixie didn't have a long adore list. LB: I knew Dixie pretty well. I know what you mean. TSA: And usually, it was mutual, so it worked out fine. Well, as you know, I was a primary source for a David Houseknecht article on Dixie in The Bethlehem Press. There's a big article on Dixie in The Bethlehem Press, and I was a primary source. I didn't realize it, that I was going to be a primary source. But David Houseknecht was someone that she originally -- was a client of theirs at the AIDS Services Center. Since they're both dead, I don't think I am violating any HIPAA laws by saying that. I don't know. And he was the one that Mark Dyer decided to have a relationship with, and I think it's because of Linda Lobach that had -- because he was also -- Linda Lobach was very enamored of him. Her name's Eisenreich right now. She's still around. She might be a person on your list to talk because -- LB: Well I had grant funding for ten people. And you're the ninth. And I have one more. I have Charlie Versaggi later today, and then I'm going to be done. TSA: Cunningham. What was her name? LB: Vicky. TSA: No, she had a man's name I think. She had short black hair. I think she was Jewish, actually. LB: Marty? TSA: What? LB: Was it Marty or something like that? TSA: No. I'll think of it in a minute. She had a whole other ministry. I mean AIDS Outreach did material aid to people with HIV: food, medicines, connecting them to social services, things like that. Randall. No. He's a baseball -- I mean, a football player. No. But she did a spiritual -- just did spiritual stuff. Just did prayer services, coached clergy on dealing pastorally with people in their congregations that had people with HIV and the kind of concerns that they might want to be looking out for and being sensitive to. And also, having them know the referral points, where if they hear this need, you send them to this person. So it was making them a better helper to people in their congregations. What was her name? Bernie maybe. Bernie Cunningham. I think that was her name. LB: That makes sense. I didn't know her. TSA: She wrote several editorials in The Morning Call, as I recall. Bernadette Cunningham. That was her name. And they called her Bernie. Bernadette Cunningham. She was a very striking looking woman: tall, thin, kind of Sinead O'Connor hair. LB: Was she a minister? TSA: I don't know. Like I said, she's Jewish, and Jews are less I guess clergy focused than a lot of places -- I mean, a lot of religions. I mean, they have rabbis of course. But you don't have to be seminary educated to be a rabbi. So she could've been. But I never heard anyone refer to her as rabbi. But she did a lot of work at Temple of Peace in Easton. I think that's the name of the Temple there. So she was another character that was in the mix. But David Houseknecht was a favorite of Dixie's and a favorite of Linda Lobach's, which meant he got a lot of attention from both AIDS service organizations. So whenever he lifted his little finger to want, one of them provided it for him. He was a spoiled brat of the people with HIV (inaudible). And he was also witty and smart. Also, the Rodale's involvement too. I don't know if anybody's talked about that. LB: I interviewed Maria Rodale on Monday. TSA: Okay, good. Good. LB: And I talked to her about her brother and then about her mother, and it was interesting. I mean Ardath Rodale's extraordinary. I'm very happy about her because she had a different take on it. TSA: And she was great. I had several interactions with her, as you can imagine. I was always wanted to just touch the hem of her garment because she was such a wonderful person. It just brought out the best in the community. It brought out goodness in people that didn't have an opportunity to be brought out until that crisis in a way that I don't COVID-19 doing yet. LB: It's only been four months. Five months. TSA: I know. Well and truth is, we never came up with an HIV vaccine. I mean, that's the thing. It's funny how the language has come back to me because we were always talking about viral load, T cells. All of that language is back. All of that language is back. And the ELISA test. LB: I don't know about that. What was that? TSA: The ELISA test was the second -- if you -- the first one was a simple test that would say if you're HIV positive or HIV negative. But it had a lot of false negatives and false positives. Particularly if you were positive, they'd send your blood to a second test, which is a little more specific because the first one -- if you had a virus like HIV but wasn't really HIV in you, it would trip the alarm on this one test. But the ELISA test was what you did for a deep analysis of your blood and the viral content of your blood. LB: I see. TSA: Many times, the ELISA test would come back as negative for people that had taken that first test and gotten a positive. I don't know why it's called ELISA, but it's called ELISA. LB: If it came back negative, that was because they didn't have it? TSA: Right. I mean, the ELISA test was authoritative, which I don't know why they didn't give that right away. But there was some reason. It may have been cost. It was a costly test. And there was a simpler test that could -- you could show symptoms of HIV and AIDS, and that first test was enough. It's clear you've got this. We don't have to go any further. But then sometimes, you would get a positive test, and you're asymptomatic, and they'd send it to the ELISA test to make sure that you had -- often, it would come back negative, saying, no, you don't have human immunodeficiency virus. But anyway, I notice a lot of the same language is happening. A lot of the same uncertainty about the personality in the virus. Are there long-term effects, even if you were asymptomatic? Do you have some kind of organ involvement and compromise because you had it? They don't know any of that yet. LB: Yeah, they don't. TSA: As we said, it's only been four months. There haven't been any longitudal studies that can be done yet. LB: We're at the last ten minutes of this. If we're thinking about how people are going to be watching this someday in the future thirty years from now, some kind of -- or more, and they're going to look back at this, and here's your chance to talk to the future. Tell them a little bit about just sort of the summation about that time in the Lehigh Valley with regard to HIV/AIDS during the height of the epidemic, and maybe some other words that you might want to toss in there. What do you think? TSA: That seems like a very heavy task, to talk to the future. But I think more what it taught me was communities can rise up together and address problems that seem insurmountable and seem bigger than us, and they can do it in a way that is phenomenal and not only helps the people with the disease, but it helps you. It helps you focus your own humanity. It helped us focus our own relational needs, our own relational -- what am I thinking of? I can't think of it. And our common humanity to be able to address something that seemed so -- and it was very frightening. A lot of misinformation. And just to keep serene during all of that and focus on the sick people. What do they need? Not answering questions about the future. Not blaming things for the past. But being present to those who had HIV and AIDS, and to advocate in governments and health systems for care, and increased services, and more useful services to these people. That really was part of it for me, just focusing on your mission. Not making your mission complicated, like I'm going to cure AIDS in the world. I am going to make life for someone with HIV living in the Lehigh Valley more tolerable, more humane, more compassionate, by golly. And whatever else is happening in the world, I can't control that. But I can control my environment, my community, and the people that affect me the most. And I can have something to say about that, and I can do something about that that's good, and positive, and makes a difference. And I think that's what the AIDS crisis taught us in the Lehigh Valley, is that we are better together than apart. We are stronger together than apart. We're actually smarter together than apart. And we can address things together that we couldn't address by ourselves. And the encouragement we gave each other too, the encouragement. That was also it too. Sure, there were moments you just wanted to just sit down, and throw up your hands, and cry or whatever. Are they ever going to get it? Are we ever going to get this resource for this person? All of that. And there was always someone there to buck you up and say, "Yeah, we're going to get it. We care a lot about that person. We care about that person, and they're going to be okay because of us. So fear not." LB: I lost you. There you are. TSA: I'm sorry. I missed that. LB: We both froze up a little bit. I said I thought that was great. We just have a couple minutes left. So I just want to thank you so much, Scott, for this (inaudible). TSA: Oh, it was my pleasure. LB: Really great. TSA: I was just remembering all the stuff and the energy then, and just -- and all the good people that -- some of them aren't with us anymore, and that makes me sad. But also, that's life, isn't it? LB: It is. And there's (inaudible) wonderful thing you've done. TSA: People that come after us are going to do phenomenal things together like we did. LB: I want to thank you personally for a couple of times when I desperately needed somebody who was wearing a minister collar to show up fast at an event. I remember when we were fighting the ordinance that time in City Hall -- TSA: I dragged Malloy. I said, "Come on, boy. We got to get up to City Hall and show -- put our mugs on the TV camera." LB: That's so great. And the look on your face. You had that great, serene look. And we were plotting out that we were going to fight this effort to repeal the ordinance, and we already had hundreds of people who were going to take their names off of the petition. The anti-guys were just petrified. We're riding up in an elevator, and I think we were with you in the elevator, and the bad guy. And he's thinking, oh, there's a guy who's a minister (inaudible). I love that. Thank you for that. That was a long time ago. Way more than twenty years ago. TSA: I'm crying thinking of that moment because it was just so moving for me to be able to be there on a moment's notice. LB: That was really something. TSA: Have collar, will show. LB: And there was television. It was television and reports, and we were saying to people things like, "These people are lying to people to get them to take their names off." And plus, I have to say, you're really eloquent. You did a terrific job on this interview. And I'm thinking, oh, yeah. Scott's really good at this. Thank you very much for doing it. TSA: Well, thank you. I've verklempt. No. But also, I remember doing that in Bethlehem too, and going to those interminable city council meetings. And it seemed like we had to go every week for four weeks. LB: Truthfully, we had to do that in Allentown too. But it's just harder to remember because it was so long ago. TSA: Oh my God. And Dixie always went. And Esther Lee was there, and I think she was begrudgingly okay with it. She's a very conservative African American woman. LB: The big difference between Allentown and Bethlehem was that when we passed Allentown's ordinance, the ordinance was already in existence, and it was passed in nineteen sixty-five to protect people based on race, religion, national religion, sex, and, I don't know, one or two other things. And so, we had to add sexual orientation, gender identity. And that's a tricky thing. And that was two-thousand and two. It actually started in 1998, and we worked all the way through two-thousand and two to actually pass it, and then we had to fight that referendum. It took seven years to put that in place, and it was really hard. But when we did the Bethlehem one and Adrian led that effort -- and Easton was a breeze -- but in Bethlehem, because of really some odd city council problems and some other issues -- but the thing about Bethlehem was that ordinance was created to -- from scratch, and it included everybody. In Allentown, it was a lot easier to say don't keep those gay people in. It's okay to protect these people but not those people. We don't need those people. We never had. Blah, blah, blah. But to say we don't want to protect anybody, and that's what they were doing in Bethlehem. And so, Esther Lee, who's the leader of the Black community -- that ordinance has protected people based on race. It was awful hard to say, well, you can protect me, but not them. TSA: And you know who the main opponent was in Bethlehem? LB: Yes, but go ahead and say. TSA: It was the Allentown diocese. LB: Yeah. So what happened was that they were really trying to manipulate people who were Catholics on council. TSA: They did. And they sent their attorney. I remember that. But I was astounded. And so, I was just like by golly, I'm wearing my collar every time, and I would stand up and I'd say, "I'm here on behalf of the Episcopal Church to support this ordinance to be added to the City of Bethlehem's ordinance and civil rights ordinance." That was the most discouraging thing about that whole situation for me, was that they were pushing one of the members had -- was thick of thieves with that. He was actually somehow on their legal team of attorneys. LB: Their legal counsel was trying to rewrite the law to have such a religious exemption that anyone could just simply say it's against my religion to do this. But they tried to write the law that way, and then I rewrote it. And I said, "Okay, this is the language we would have because churches are always exempt for any kind of thing because, after all, a church doesn't -- a Catholic church doesn't have to hire a rabbi to be the leader of the church. They get their mission church, and then that's their mission. That's perfectly fine." So I changed them to say religious entity. They said, "Any business that had a religion -- that was tied to religion." And I changed it to any church or other religious congregation or something like that. And that's the way the law was, and that's protected by the Constitution anyway. TSA: And with this COVID thing, the governors didn't close the churches. The churches closed themselves, following guidelines of the health department. We could've been keeping church open. Of course, we'd have everybody on a ventilator by now if we'd done that. But it wasn't the government that was closing the churches. Nobody got that. Churches were never closed by the government in Pennsylvania, and I don't think anywhere else. There's too many Constitutional issues with that. But they closed themselves out of protection for their people. LB: They should. TSA: And they should have. Right, exactly. LB: I know you have another gig in a couple of minutes. TSA: I know. And I have to run upstairs and see a man about a horse. But one more time, was in front of the federal courthouse. One of my favorite pictures I have of Dixie -- and you may have it -- is Dixie and I standing there with a no DOMA. LB: I told (inaudible). TSA: Yeah, you did probably. But that's one of my favorite pictures of us. It kind of encapsulates how our relationship was throughout the whole thing: no DOMA. LB: That was the picture I used for all of the mentions of her. I said, "Here's a picture of Scott." Because Dixie looked so great in that picture. TSA: She did. She looked happy. She was in her element. She was in her element, man. LB: It was a (inaudible) thing. TSA: Thank you, Liz. Namaste. LB: Thank you. I really appreciate it, Scott. You're the greatest. See you around. TSA: Yes, ma'am. Let me know how this all pans out. LB: We'll send you the transcript of this too pretty soon. TSA: Okay, great. LB: Bye-bye. TSA: Thank you. LB: Bye. END OF AUDIO FILE Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:34:23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource T. Scott Allen, July 2, 2020 Description An account of the resource T. Scott Allen talks about the AIDS epidemic in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. He talks about his years as an Episcopal minister and his work with AIDS Services Center, about people who had HIV/AIDS, and how churches supported people who were sick. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context PH40_11 Subject The topic of the resource AIDS (Disease) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-07-02 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs. https://lgbt.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/files/original/c2a0cb49c8e1529cfd726b62d890ec78.png fc3454762486db53faa1723afdebd34a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Mary Foltz Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Thomas Duane OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://trexlerworks.muhlenberg.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=LGBT-37.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 April 1, 2022 Thomas Duane, April 1, 2022 (Part 2) LGBT-37 02:11:22 LVLGBT-2022 Stories of Lehigh Valley LGBTQ+ Community Members (2022 - ) Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository Support for the collection of this interview was provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Thomas Duane Mary Foltz video/mp4 20220401_DuaneThomas_video_edited.mp4 1.0:|26(13)|49(11)|67(20)|79(4)|89(9)|100(14)|112(10)|123(13)|134(7)|146(6)|159(14)|172(15)|182(12)|194(6)|208(8)|220(15)|230(16)|241(4)|256(5)|269(7)|283(8)|296(3)|307(16)|320(11)|331(7)|342(13)|357(5)|368(5)|382(17)|392(14)|406(15)|417(16)|428(6)|438(14)|453(10)|467(8)|481(3)|491(10)|503(3)|515(5)|528(6)|541(12)|551(12)|562(9)|577(6)|589(4)|601(13)|613(8)|624(9)|638(13)|651(15)|664(19)|678(4)|694(15)|705(12)|719(7)|732(10)|743(6)|758(5)|773(4)|785(7)|800(17)|816(7)|828(15)|840(9)|850(11)|862(15)|876(12)|889(17)|899(16)|911(15)|928(7)|941(13)|958(4)|975(8)|988(15)|1001(13)|1017(7)|1028(2)|1040(7)|1053(22)|1065(5)|1079(3)|1088(12)|1101(5)|1110(16)|1122(7)|1136(11)|1147(8)|1160(15)|1175(3)|1188(8)|1201(13)|1216(4)|1229(9)|1238(18)|1250(9)|1267(11)|1281(7)|1292(4)|1305(18)|1318(8)|1329(9)|1341(19)|1355(6)|1368(8)|1383(15)|1398(13)|1412(8)|1425(3)|1437(12)|1450(3)|1460(17)|1471(3)|1482(8)|1495(10)|1509(9)|1525(14)|1536(17)|1551(11)|1562(17)|1578(10)|1590(9)|1603(12)|1618(8)|1632(10)|1649(15)|1662(13)|1677(12)|1694(18)|1718(11)|1724(15) 0 https://youtu.be/hYIjUzZjMtA YouTube video English 0 Interview Introductions MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Senator Thomas Duane to talk about his life and experiences as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS, and we are meeting at the offices of Senator Duane in New York City in Manhattan, and it is April 1st, 2022. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me today. &#13 ; &#13 ; THOMAS DUANE: I'm happy to. I mean, I like that Lehigh likes me now. You know what I mean. Because they didn’t like me so much before. So now it’s like, they like me, they really like me. 0 141 Life after Lehigh University MF: Oh, me too. So last time we talked, we really spent a lot of time talking about your youth and then your college career at Lehigh, so I thought we could start today. Maybe you just tell me a little bit about post-graduation. What was your life like once you graduated from Lehigh University? Tell me about that time period in your life. 0 452 Joining the Chelsea Gay Association And I continued to work at that ad agency. But in 1977, so I had lived there for maybe a year or so. And I saw fliers go up on telephone poles, not trees. I knew not to do that. But you know, any place where you could tape a flier and it said lesbians and gay men and meet your neighbors, and it was this small group of people who were starting something called the Chelsea Gay Association, which is the first neighborhood based lesbian and gay organization in the city, in the world. 0 795 Community Organizing in the Chelsea Gay Association So, anyway, you know, our existence was, I think, important. And one of the things that had gone on was there were gay bars along the waterfront on the west side in Chelsea. So in the high teens and the low twenties, and gay men would walk through Chelsea and also up through the Village and then west to these bars. And there was a New York City public housing project, Fulton Houses and the people who live there, many of them had originally lived in Chelsea and through urban renewal, they ended up living there. 0 1004 Serving on the Local Community Board/Importance of LGBTQ+ Representation in Community Organizing So that was pretty, you know, amazing. And I just love that story because she was also a member of the local community board, which was with like these planning boards. Then they were advisory and in the [inaudible] 50 in each of them. And so the one that covered Chelsea in Hell's Kitchen, Clinton was board for, and Helen Gilson was on that board and another woman whose husband was the president of the Longshore or had been president of the longshoremen workers, longshore workers. And she lived in a, you know, a low rise building on 10th Avenue in Chelsea. You can see the building she lived in. 0 1200 Working with the Chelsea Coalition on Housing/Jane Wood/Tenant's Rights And anyway, I also got active in other things in the neighborhood. There was a very powerful tenants rights group called the Chelsea Coalition on Housing and, different than Michael McKee's group, and they didn't always get along that great. But Chelsea Coalition on Housing was associated with the Metropolitan Council on Housing, which still exists. 0 1425 Bella Abzug/Organizing with the Local Democratic Club And in 1982 my Democratic club would have been a very strong Bella Abzug supporter, was a very strong Abzug supporter. And for instance, I didn't work on her ‘76 campaign for the Senate. I'm sure I voted for her, but I knew people – I actually knew one of the people who ran her campaign, an openly gay man who became a journalist Doug Ireland. 0 1690 Running for District Leader So anyway, so the West Side is reform. And I worked on Bella’s campaign and then she lost, and the club went for Cuomo, but Koch won that race. And then in 1982 there was a gubernatorial race. I may be getting my years a little confused. Maybe, I'm not sure anyway. Because I feel like Ed Koch was in office for maybe two terms already. 0 1906 Struggles with Addiction [...] The only thing that was going on that really nobody or very few people knew about was that I drank every night and I smoked a lot of pot also. And I had used a lot of drugs and I had – I drank a lot in college and I continued to do that ‘till 1983 ; I got sober. So, because I just couldn't do it. I couldn't hold down a job, be the, you know, district leader and do community activism, you know, gay and not gay, and then go out at night and, you know, drink and smoke pot or whatever. Something had to go. 0 2191 Forming the Gay Democratic District Leaders/Importance of Terms as District Leader It was actually pretty convenient to be working for my father and to be a Democratic district leader. And I think there were three other openly gay district leaders in Manhattan and all guys because it's a male and a female. So. Well, there were women who were lesbians. They were now. &#13 ; &#13 ; But anyway, the four of us put a group together called the Gay Democratic District Leaders. 0 2773 Selling Ads for Gay Publications And there was another line of story that I was going to tell you, but I'll tell you about [Brashear?] and maybe the other one will come back to me. Well, when the AIDS crisis began — actually, when it first began, I was working for a gay publication, two publications actually, the New York Native, which was a fledgling gay newspaper, and Christopher Street, which was kind of a premium, was a literary magazine. It was great. It was one of those publications like Gay Community News out of Boston that I just loved and I couldn't wait for it to arrive in my mailbox. I read every word. 0 2993 Assisting with Stage Productions So I learned a lot about print production and then I worked for a TV production company. I had a lot of jobs, a lot of jobs. I had a lot of jobs, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. I was going to say that and there was nothing to be ashamed of, but I paused for a second. And it was because one of the jobs I had, which actually was really a great experience and this was through, his name is [Lyle Salgas], and he was the person that I was with. 0 3218 Proudest Moments/AIDS Crisis//Chelsea AIDS Committee MF: Well, you were going to talk about one of your most proudest moments. &#13 ; &#13 ; TD: Oh, yes, am I leading up to the Braschi decision? &#13 ; &#13 ; MF: You are.&#13 ; &#13 ; TD: So anyway, [inaudible] suggested I go work for my father, which I did. 0 3555 Braschi v. Stahl Associates Co. I have a [inaudible] story to tell. It's also kind of – I'll tell you the story. So I was very good at – No, I was very good at helping judges get elected. And once they got onto the civil court, to then get elected to the Supreme Court. So every once in a while I would go to court to sit next to my friend Jim West when one of his clients was at risk of losing their apartment. 0 4179 Marriage Equality/Life After Office And so. One of the judges, actually, his son is an openly gay assembly member, from Staten Island, and now I believe he's a surrogate court judge out of Staten Island, Matthew Titone is his name. And his father, was on a court of appeals. So it was amazing that we won that case, you know, But we did. And it's been very useful. And I don't want it to go away because of marriage, because I think we should be able to, queer or non queer it doesn’t matter, say, choose our own families. And, you know, put it together, you know, build it however you want to, using whatever institutions there are or not, you know. And I don't want that to go away. 0 4425 LGBTQ+ Openness in Media/Scouting Potential Donors &amp ; Campaigning Anyway, although I just have to say, I was recently looking at The Times, Sunday, and like there was gay stuff all over, of course, there was the Academy Awards and it was gay gay gay. You know, I don’t know whether it was the gayest. Certainly wasn’t the least gay there if there was. But and like many stories of, you know, the the real estate section, they always had a gay couple fixing up the country house or, you know, or a designer who acknowledges that they're gay. 0 4744 City Council Run So I'm a community activist and Braschi, that case – we won that case when I was running for the city council the first time. The race that…this is a race that my friend David Rothenberg had run against an incumbent council member – four years… in 1985, and at the time there were 35 councilmembers in New York City, and the council districts were like huge. They were like between the size of, say, a state Senate district or a congressional district, they were like big. 0 4956 Discovering HIV Status But I found out my HIV status. Which didn't surprise me at all, but it was not something I, you know, I didn't tell people, Oh, I'm sure I have HIV or anything, but I was sure I did. And then when I actually got confirmation that I did have it, I really only told a couple of very close friends. 0 5881 Disclosing HIV Status So in '91, anyway, I decided that I was going to disclose my HIV status when I ran in 1991, and I started to put things in motion. It was sort of like, you know, a snowball effect. I told more people, I like joined the HIV positive caucus of Act Up. I know it's anonymous, but I went to HIV recovery meetings, you know, people of substance abuse and that but specifically for people living with HIV. 0 6857 Effect of &amp ; Reactions from Disclosing HIV Status And there was a tremendous media… it got a lot of press, you know, nationally even. So, you know, I got from like this little, you know, neighborhood kind of, you know, city council race to like, all right, now you have to learn to talk to the national media, you know what I mean? So it was – so I'm not – I became very unafraid to talk to the press after this, you know, because nothing could have beaten this. So – well marriage maybe, not beat it, but equal it. 0 7684 Closing Remarks MF: Well, I felt like this was a good place to end. We sort of have talked about your movement post-graduation, work in tenant associations, advertising and magazines a little bit, and then really your political career through a city council run and loss to a city council win. Tomorrow could we start with what happens with the win? What are you doing on city council? Would that be a good place to start? f 0 MovingImage Thomas Duane talks about his life after Lehigh University organizing in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, time in office as a district leader and city councilmember, and his experiences as the first and only openly gay, HIV-positive member of the New York State legislature. INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS DUANE APRIL 1, 2022 MARY FOLTZ: My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Senator Thomas Duane to talk about his life and experiences as a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. This year, our project has funding from ACLS, and we are meeting at the offices of Senator Duane in New York City in Manhattan, and it is April 1st, 2022. Thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me today. THOMAS DUANE: I'm happy to. I mean, I like that Lehigh likes me now. You know what I mean. Because they didn’t like me so much before. So now it’s like, they like me, they really like me. MF: It's true. We do really like you. And really we're very grateful to speak with you. And I want to just start today by -- you signed a consent form before we're starting the interview, and I just want to ask a few questions verbally about consent. Do you consent to this interview today? TD: I do. MF: Do you consent to having this interview transcribed, digitized and made publicly available online? TD: Yes. MF: Do you consent to the LGBT Archive using your interview for educational purposes and other formats that might be articles, websites, presentations? TD: My reality show? MF: If you make one. TD: Yes, I consent to all of it. MF: And then I just want to remind you that you'll have 30 days after I send you -- I'll send it electronically, the transcript of this interview for you to review, and you can decide then, Oh, Mary, I don't want this in the collection and we'll just delete it. You could say I want most of it. Just delete this part and then we'll do that. Or you can contribute the whole interview. TD: Thank you. I can’t think who I'm angry with right now, you know, because I might say something that I would want to take out later on, but no one's coming to mind right now. But you never know. You know, it's like pushing the send button when you're angry, you know, with an email without showing it to someone first, you know. MF: So you have time. You'll have time to review the whole thing. TD: And I'll try not to be catty, you know, grudgey -- MF: Well, you’ll have time to review it TD: -- because I'm Irish, so that's a thing. MF: Oh, me too. So last time we talked, we really spent a lot of time talking about your youth and then your college career at Lehigh, so I thought we could start today. Maybe you just tell me a little bit about post-graduation. What was your life like once you graduated from Lehigh University? Tell me about that time period in your life. TD: Well, the truth is I left Lehigh in 1975, so I'm class of 1976, but I didn't get my degree until of 1977 because I left in ‘75 and I had two more courses to do. And it just it took me a little while to get those done. But, I consider myself class of ‘76 and there's a big reunion this year. And my oldest brother -- also went Lehigh -- is, when I was a freshman, he was a senior, but he's going to be there because they're doing a whole bunch of classes, I guess because of COVID. So he told me that ‘75,’76 and ‘77 will be there. So I'll see maybe some of the freshmen that I was a Gryphon too. I'll see some of the people I was in class with, you know, the graduates of ‘75. And then I'll see so many 1976 people, possibly. It would be my first Lehigh reunion. Yes, it would be. See how far we've both come me and Lehigh. So what happened? You know, I wanted to leave Lehigh. You know, I like a good fight. So in retrospect, you know, I may have been, oh, woe is me. You know, they treat us poorly, or whatever. But, you know, that's not how I am. So I don't believe that's actually what it is. I think what it is is I want it to go to work. And I wanted to live in Manhattan and I wanted to be gay. Really, you know, like big gay, like a lot of gay and… I’m just I'm headstrong that way. And, you know, in my early life I have a brother between my oldest that went to Lehigh and then I have a brother who's sort of my Irish twin who's a year and a half older than I am. And I probably was continuing this thing of wanting to not fall too far behind his progress in life. And I did have a younger brother who passed away, which I'll talk about at some point, because that was part of my later life anyway. I think I just wanted to work and I went home that summer and I got a job at an ad agency and for $175 a week -- no excuse me, $135 a week. That matters just because of something else that happened. And I save money because I really just wanted to get out of my house. So first I shared an apartment with someone that had gone to Colgate with my older brother John. And it was like a six story walkup, but it was like seven flights up. I don't know how they worked that out. The building is still there, actually, it’s on East 49th Street. And I paid $100 a month for that. And it was, you know, the sink was the shower, it was one of those old buildings. But it was fine. It's great. I wasn't great. But I mean, I was like 20, I guess. And then I saved up some more money and I got an apartment in Chelsea. And the reason I took this apartment in Chelsea, because I looked in the East Village and I looked in the West Village and I looked in Chelsea. And in the East Village, the only apartments I saw either had the bathroom in the hallway. I guess I was just a little too suburban, you know, to do that. So. And then there's another one was just when I saw that you couldn't pick up your mail and mailboxes would get stolen, I thought, I think maybe, you know, in retrospect, they probably might have done it. But, you know, things work out the way they’re supposed to, and I couldn't really afford anything decent in the West Village. And then I found this studio apartment in Chelsea for $175 a month and, I was home. And I continued to work at that ad agency. But in 1977, so I had lived there for maybe a year or so. And I saw fliers go up on telephone poles, not trees. I knew not to do that. But you know, any place where you could tape a flier and it said lesbians and gay men and meet your neighbors ; and it was this small group of people who were starting something called the Chelsea Gay Association, which is the first neighborhood based lesbian and gay organization in the city, in the world. I don't know whether in the world, but there's nothing else like it. And I was not a founding member, but I was a founder because the fliers were actually for the first meeting. And I went to it and I immediately became active in it. And we were not political, not political, but of course our existence was political. It's just that we existed, but we did a lot of amazing work. And just to please my friend Lillian, actually, who I convinced to move to Chelsea, my friend Phil, who I went to Lehigh with, he was one of the students who'd been thrown out of Theta Chi and. [Bert Lazar?] and Arthur Goodman and Michael McKee. And they were all organizers in various ways, but Michael McKee was a tenant organizer. So I learned a tremendous amount from them on how to organize just by organizing with them. And the truth is, we would have our steering committee meeting because we were nonhierarchical and we would do everything by consensus. And then we would smoke pot and we would go around and put out fliers for the next meeting. And we did some incredible things. We had raps at the police station so people would go every Saturday morning. I know Saturday morning, early and there'd be maybe four of us and four or five of them or three. Anyway, and we would just talk. It was the 10th Precinct, which was the Chelsea precinct, which was almost lost at the time. We fought to keep this police precinct is very, you know, as Chelsea's own police precinct. But when I think about that, you know, years later, when my friend Christine Quinn was the executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Violence Project, now the Anti-Violence Project. They had had a good relationship with the police and actually that the Anti-Violence Project was an outgrowth of something that happened with the Chelsea Gay Association, which I'll tell you about. But anyway, there had already been a little bit of a relationship being built between the police -- the New York Police Department and the gay community. I will probably would use whatever the words that we were using at the time. Although, you know CGA just sounded better. That's why we kept it as the Chelsea Gay Association. We really didn't want, you know. Anyway, they started to have a pretty, you know, an okay relationship with the Bias Crimes Unit and with the Sex Crimes Unit. And then when Christine Quinn came in, they had a really good relationship with the NYPD. But when I think about it, we were already developing like this little relationship with them way back then. And we did something like game night where we would play board games just kind of just to bring people together. And we all marched on Washington. There was, you know, I should remember this. It was either for the ERA or was pro-choice Washington march. I believe it was the ERA, actually. Anyway, but we marched as a group. So even if this nonpolitical group would march with our banner. And we had a street fair every year and we put out a newsletter and I may think of other things that we did. And then there were a couple of -- an Upper West Side Group was formed and then an East Village group was formed. It was really just -- this is in the 1977-’70. They weren't that many LGBTQIA organizations at all. You know, there'd been a lot of splits… the GAA and, you know, LFL. I should say, the Gay Activists Alliance, Lesbian Feminist Liberation was an outgrowth of that in New York City. But they were not really functioning the same way anymore, for whatever reason. You know, the activism seems to go on its own cycle. So, anyway, you know, our existence was, I think, important. And one of the things that had gone on was there were gay bars along the waterfront on the west side in Chelsea. So in the high teens and the low twenties, and gay men would walk through Chelsea and also up through the Village and then west to these bars. And there was a New York City public housing project, Fulton Houses and the people who live there, many of them had originally lived in Chelsea and through urban renewal, they ended up living there. There's also a big Latinx population in Chelsea, Latinx people. Which people don't think of [inaudible] development as having white people, but they actually they did. In Brooklyn there are a lot of Italian people that, you know. Well, they were very -- they weren't as segregated as they seem to be now. Anyway, the head of the Tenant’s Association was a woman named Helen Gilson, whose husband was a longshoreman, or what I would say these days, a longshore worker. But she was the president of Tenant’s Association and she was, you know, a big, you know, tough woman who, like many other Irish people, vacation in the Rockaways in the summer in those -- in these shacks, which there aren’t that many left. But anyway, I just remember that I read the Irish teenagers and I mean, I don't know up until what age they were, but they were beating up the gay men who were walking to the bars and, you know, pretty seriously. So under the auspices of the Chelsea Gay Association, I organized, and everybody helped, a forum on like crime in Chelsea. And we invited Helen Gilson to come to this event, this forum. And people talked about how, you know, the police, of course, we talk about how, you know, this history of gay people being beaten up who were, you know, walking at night, late at night to these bars. And I guess and what probably coming out of the bars to or walking in the other direction. And Helen Gilson, who we invited, was there. And I cannot say that she was like a big gay liberation situation at all, you know, And towards the end of the forum, when after she heard all these stories, she stood up and she said…something. She said, Well, you're not my cup of tea, but I don't think you should be beaten up either. And that was huge, huge. And I love that because it's an old fashioned you know, my grandparents used to say not my cup of tea. But when she said that it was a very powerful moment and she was the head of the Tenant’s Association. So she put the word out, no more beating these guys up, and it stopped. So that was pretty, you know, amazing. And I just love that story because she was also a member of the local community board, which was with like these planning boards. Then they were advisory and in the [inaudible] 50 in each of them. And so the one that covered Chelsea in Hell's Kitchen, Clinton was board for, and Helen Gilson was on that board and another woman whose husband was the president of the Longshore or had been president of the longshoremen workers, longshore workers. And she lived in a, you know, a low rise building on 10th Avenue in Chelsea. You can see the building she lived in. And the first openly gay person actually served on that board, Jean O'Leary was her name, who was of kind of legendary in the New York lesbian and gay history. She was a first in a lot of ways and a complicated person as well. But when she stood up at the community board and said, I'm, you know, a lesbian, right. Yeah. Rosemary and Helen, really, you know, but it was huge progress that she was on that board. And then, you know, other – I eventually started serving on that board in 1982, I think. And you know, it made a difference that there was a gay person even on this neighborhood sort of advisory thing on land use and zoning and who should get permits for like liquor licenses or outdoor cafes or just a whole host of different things, they make advisory opinions on. Elected officials listen to them. You know, they don’t always do what they say, but they listen to them. And other gay people were on it, this time with it. There are also some closeted gay people on it, and I may have bragged about my lesbidar and my gaydar in an earlier interview, but it's pretty good. So I was – I think I would say 100% accurate. As time went on, people did come out, some of them took a very long time. And you know, similar to what happened at Lehigh. I think maybe there are also, in retrospect, maybe some of them or a couple of them didn't want to get that close to me. I think they were friendly like any board member would be, but they weren't. They didn't want to seem to be too much of my friend, or something, I guess you could say. And I’m trying to remember when someone else gay joined. I can't remember right now. And I may have mentioned it, I [inaudible] around. And I think I'm still having that – I know I'm still having a memory thing. And I'm sure that I saved papers and, probably, I don't know how much of it was saved. But the minutes of every board meeting and the attendance and, you know, all those things. And anyway, I also got active in other things in the neighborhood. There was a very powerful tenants rights group called the Chelsea Coalition on Housing and, different than Michael McKee's group, and they didn't always get along that great. But Chelsea Coalition on Housing was associated with the Metropolitan Council on Housing, which still exists. It's called Met Council and it's a tenants rights organization, and it was led by a woman named Jane Benedict. So the Coalition on Housing was led by a woman named Jane Wood, though they would both say we do not lead this group. You know, there's a big membership here, and yes, you know, you maybe you know our names, but that we have no leaders. And that is true except for they had a wonderful way of organizing. When I ran for office, they both supported me. The groups couldn't make it, you know, a political endorsement. But personally they did. And other people from that council and also the Chelsea Coalition on Housing. And they're gone now. And the friends that I know who were giving that I knew from then who were active in the tenants rights community, you're talking about how when the Janes were gone, like they were the greats. And actually on 19th Street, there's a street renamed Jane Woods Way. And I can’t remember whether I did it, or whether Christine Quinn did it when she was in office. It was probably Christine Quinn, I think Jane was alive for a lot of the time that I was in the city council. But anyway, she's memorialized there. And I still walk – If I’m with someone that maybe I haven't walked by or anything before. I always point it out. And when I was in office, when I would – I would often think, like, ‘What would Jane do, you know?’ And I was also a very good friend of a woman named Susan Cohen, who is active and who eventually went to law school and then worked for a judge who was, of course, fair, but if you were a tenant, you wouldn’t want to appear before him. And she went on to become a legal services attorney helping poor people with their housing. And she also was a tremendous influence on me. And, you know, Michael McKean, we didn't really get along with Met Counsel. His group was. Neighbors and Friends, I have to check the name of it. But later on they joined together and it was their Tenant Unit Coalition. And at the same time, Mario Cuomo, the governor at that time, put together a group called the Tenant Advisory Council. So TUC stayed together in order to get people out TAC. And we used to laugh about that. But actually I got appointed to that to the governor's – then Governor Cuomo's Tenant Advisory Committee. And that is important for, something I’ll talk about in a little while called the Braschi decision, which is actually the thing that I worked on that I'm most proud of. And it was before I was even elected to public office, I was in a party office at that time, and then I got active in my local Democratic club. And in 1982 my Democratic club would have been a very strong Bella Abzug supporter, was a very strong Abzug supporter. And for instance, I didn't work on her ‘76 campaign for the Senate. I'm sure I voted for her, but I knew people – I actually knew one of the people who ran her campaign, an openly gay man who became a journalist Doug Ireland. Previous to this, she had been elected to Congress. And there's an old story about Bella and through redistricting, she was thrown into a district with another progressive Democrat. She'd beaten a sort of hacky kind of conservative Democrat, Farbstein was his name, and she beat him. And then. Ryan was the name of the progressive one who was the Congressmember for most of the West Side. And in the redistricting, I guess it must've been in 1972 to probably take effect in ‘74 or something like that. They were thrown into the same district and she had to run against Ryan and she lost. And it turned out that Congressmember Ryan was dying of throat cancer. So when he passed away, then there was a race between his wife, Priscilla Ryan, and Bella Abzug, and Bella won that race. So then she had a congressional seat, although it divided people on the West Side. It divided the progressives and the reformed clubs, Democratic clubs, which were very important in those days on the West Side. For years to come, people wouldn’t know what side each club was on and in some cases clubs, you know, broke into two were called reform clubs, which. [Inaudible]. Reform clubs – we believe that, reformers, that people shouldn't wear two hats. So if you are a council member, you should not also be a Democratic district leader, Democratic state Committee member. And the same holds true for the Assembly and for Congress. And so to be endorsed by the reformers, you were not allowed to wear two hats. Regular clubs, someone could have brought in as many hats as they wanted, and they would pitch battles between the regular and the reform clubs on the West Side. Most of the West Side, with the exception of Hell's Kitchen, Clinton, was reform – became reform. The reforms being the regular Democratic clubs, and Hell's Kitchen being the only one that wasn't. And that was the advice of Jimmy McManus, whose family beat Tammany Hall and that's a real big... I worked on Bella's ‘77 campaign for mayor and the runoff in that mayoral contest because Bella ran and Herman Badillo and – there was actually – it was a very multicultural race in many ways. But the two winners were Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch. So, you know, until very recently that there would be a runoff and so was Cuomo against Koch in the runoff. And Bella and her supporters were with Mario Cuomo because Bella didn't like Ed Koch very much, even though was from the Village, and from a reform club that had beaten a regular club down there, in fact it had beaten like one of the most famous regulars of all time, Carmine DeSapio was his name, and Ed Koch, and it could have been the woman that I had been running against for the city council the first time Carol Greitzer, would be defeated the regular. So anyway, so the West Side is reform. And I worked on Bella’s campaign and then she lost, and the club went for Cuomo, but Koch won that race. And then in 1982 there was a gubernatorial race. I may be getting my years a little confused. Maybe, I'm not sure anyway. Because I feel like Ed Koch was in office for maybe two terms already. Anyway, he announced he was running for governor and Mario Cuomo, who had been lieutenant governor to Governor Hugh Carey at the time, who wasn't running for reelection, also was running. They ran against each other in the Democratic primary. And my club had elected and gotten elected because the former leader of the club ran for a civil court judgeship in one. So they elected someone in the club who is gay but not really out. He was gay, but not really out. And he became a Koch supporter and tried to pack the club for Koch supporters. So the leadership of the club were desperately looking for someone to run, and they asked me to run. But it's interesting. I'm not going to say that the membership of my club were – let's say it was made up of people who would have been members of the American Labor Party and people who were reformers. And they made up the membership of this club, which had defeated a regular club years before, and they lived in a three way race one time with the regular club, which was run by Social Democrats. And for anyone who is a student of this kind of history, the Social Democrats are not Democratic socialists. The Social Democrats were in favor of the United States being in the Vietnam War. They are, still are virulently anti-communist. And they ran this other club, Chelsea [inaudible] Democrats. And there was even a third group that was the old regulars, and they were supported by, of all people Roy Cohn. And so there's a three way race, but our district leaders won. One of whom is the person who went on to become the judge. And anyway, they were just looking for someone to run for district leader. And the other person's name was, [Ardale Brown?]. And he ran, and I ran, and I beat him. So then I became district leader in 1982 and I served as a Democratic district leader until 1988, I guess, or ‘89 when I ran for the city council the first time. And I have to say I turned it into something like I would go to a meeting and I'd say, I'm the Democratic district leader, and nobody really knew what that was, but it was something. And, you know, use what you got. That's my – that's the philosophy I live with. And I advise other people if they ask me if I used to do the same thing, if you got it, use it. I was just, you know, I had a day job. The only thing that was going on that really nobody or very few people knew about. Was that I drank every night and I smoked a lot of pot also. And I had used a lot of drugs and I had – I drank a lot in college and I continued to do that ‘till 1983 ; I got sober. So, because I just couldn't do it. I couldn't hold down a job, be the, you know, district leader and do community activism, you know, gay and not gay, and then go out at night and, you know, drink and smoke pot or whatever. Something had to go. So, I actually was just telling someone about this who thought she might have an issue with drinking this thing that she said, you know, If I have one, I can't stop. And I very much know about that. When I first started working, if I had a drink at lunch, which sometimes people did even, you know, what I was at that time, which is called a group assistant, was like an administrative assistant. Like if I had a drink, like I could focus on nothing. But when was I going to have another drink after that? So I knew not to start drinking ‘till I finished all of my chores and tasks for the day. So that's when my drinking would start later on. And I drank maybe slightly earlier before I was the more active I became, the later my drinking would start, anyway. And I was in a relationship with someone. And I -- Who, to this day I love and you know, I think many politicians, many people, but I think many politicians have some intimacy issues. You know, I’ve had some rough things happen in my childhood, and so in a way, I don't think I was able to fully commit to him in the way that I wish that I, I just wasn't able to. And we're friends to this day, but he left right around the time, about a year into my sobriety. And it's funny because I go to a support group about it, and remember hearing this Irish guy from New Jersey speaking of a time and he's like, and I was a year sober and I thought, I had nothing in common with this guy, you know. He lived in New Jersey, he was, you know, was working on Wall Street. But I haven't worked on Wall Street but he was married and had kids and he said, yes, I you know, I feel great. You know, it's been a year. I haven’t been drinking and I feel great. And she said, yeah, that’s because you're the same goddamn son of a bitch now than you were when you were drinking. And I thought to myself, Oh my God, I am the same the same goddamn son of a bitch that I was when I was drinking. And so he – eventually he left, which was the smartest thing he ever did. And he also told me that I should go work on Wall Street because my father had a very small brokerage firm. It was like three people, four people, and I did. So I started to work in Wall Street for my father, which, you know how much I wanted to please my father. I went to Lehigh, I, you know, I went to work for him and I thought I was nothing like him, but I'm very much like him. But there was some stuff between this and childhood in which I have long ago forgiven him for. And I know he loves me. And sometimes I'm still very angry with him because he made it difficult for me to be really present and, you know, all-in on a relationship. And so, you know, I feel like for the most part, I probably hurt most of the people that I was in relationships with. And I wasn’t always such a great person when I was using and even after I stopped for a while because I actually picked up other addictions, which I may or may not talk about in this interview, but I probably will because I just can't help myself. It was actually pretty convenient to be working for my father and to be a Democratic district leader. And I think there were three other openly gay district leaders in Manhattan and all guys because it's a male and a female. So. Well, there were women who were lesbians. They were now. But anyway, the four of us put a group together called the Gay Democratic District Leaders. Like we created an organization which is really just a letterhead. And we had a meeting with the governor and we got him to appoint some people to positions in his administration. As I say, like, you know, I was very good at making something out of nothing. And I, like the others of us, are as well. Sadly, you know, two of them have passed away. One is still alive, he's a professor at Hunter, actually. So, I have to tell you why being on the governor’s task force is important. And I'll say now why the district leader thing was important. So the leader of the Democratic Party in Manhattan was an assembly member named Denny Farrell. Obviously not a reformer because you couldn't be a district leader or assembly member if you were a reformer. But he ran against Jimmy McManus, who I mentioned before, who is the regular from Hell's Kitchen. And this is right before I got elected in a very hotly contested race, Denny became the leader. He was an African-American man from I believe Inwood. But anyway, from the way Upper West District there. So but the deal he made with the reformers who supported him was that he was going to put together an independent judicial screening committee. And so this screening committee was made up of people from bar associations. Two thirds of them were from bar associations, and one third were from community organizations. But the way it worked was, say, if it was someone from the, you know, African-American – I’m sure it’s called the Black Bar Association, the whoever was president of that would appoint someone. So they sort of arm's length to try to take some of the politics out of it. Which later on it didn't matter, politics would creep in. That’s the women's bar, Italian bar, Irish bar, the every bar, you know, had members. But there was a fledgling lesbian and gay bar. So I fought to get them on. And then I also fought to get a gay community group on as well. And because I asked to serve on the Judiciary Committee of the New York County Democratic Committee. So I sat on this Judiciary Committee with other district leaders, and there was a woman from the Lower East Side, Ruth Bekritsky. I mean, I don't know whether I should…There’s actually a story that goes with that too. Anyway, she was a conservative Democrat, but still a conservative. And she said something about abomination when we were discussing the bar association. And I was like, well, that would mean I'm an abomination. But she didn't she didn't say No you’re not, you know, but she didn't say you are. She is – she became a little bit neutral at that point. Years later, her granddaughter worked for Andrew Cuomo when he was attorney general. And I did some forms with the attorney general at that time. And she was coming out of his office, and I told her the story about her grandmother. You know, My how things have changed because, you know, she's a young woman, not at all like that. But, hey, maybe I didn't change this woman's view, but maybe I gave her a little something to think about. And I worked with her. You know, I worked with her. I spent my whole life working with people that necessarily weren’t the most queer-friendly people in the world. And the club she came from was actually the club from which Shelly Silver, who was the speaker of the Assembly for many, many years until he was convicted in a corruption thing and went to jail, and he recently died. Anyway, he was actually a pretty liberal speaker of the Assembly, but that was his club and it was based down in Grant Street in Manhattan, where the apartments, the very same kind of apartments as the apartments I live in now. Anyway, it made a difference, and I helped manage the campaigns, especially with my friend Susan Cohen, of many kind of – I just can't have a political point of view. So instead of saying very, very liberal or very, very progressive, I would just say very, very, very fair. That was my code for... So we started to be able to elect some openly gay judges, which made a tremendous amount of difference and really a tremendous difference in Manhattan. And Manhattan was kind of led in that way. And also, we elected some very, very good judges, some smart, progressive judges, including this woman, Carmen Ciparick, who was until recently on the Court of Appeals and who was the first Puerto Rican American woman to serve on the Court of Appeals. And Governor Cuomo, former governor should have made her the chief judge, because the chief judge, you know, she retired ; she actually passed away. He should have put Carmen in that spot, but he didn't. He put a man in that spot and she was only – she was going to have to retire in probably less than a year. So why didn't he just let her have another.. you know. Will not even le – I don’t even want to say let her, let us have someone else, you know, to look up to. Anyway, interestingly, I had not worked on her civil court case, but the next civil court, I mean. The next level up is Supreme Court in New York State. Those sort of housing court and then there's civil court, Supreme court, which handles larger cases, Appellate division court of Appeals. And the court of appeals is the highest court. And then there's another track of criminal court judges and family court judges as well. And we have a hybrid system of elected and appointed judges as well. Anyway, when she ran to be Supreme Court judge, it's a complicated process, but the judicial delegates are elected in Democratic primaries and they all meet and they decide who to put on the Democratic line to run for Supreme Court in Manhattan ; basically combined with the Bronx, but there are too many people throwing chairs at each other, so they wised – they decided to break it into two different court districts. Anyway, whoever is on the Democratic line wins. But the attorney for the Democrats forgot to put these three people, their names on the Democratic line in time. So we really had to hustle. We got them elected on the Liberal Party line, which doesn't even exist anymore. So she was one of those judges. And interestingly, before that, when I had been called to jury duty, I served on a case where she was the judge and actually it was after that, because they ask, Do you know anyone here, the A.D.A. or the judge. I did. She said, Oh yes, I know – yes I know Mr. Duane. They ask if anyone was ever been a victim of a crime. And because I had been the victim and survivor of a violent anti-gay attack, so. But anyway, I stayed on that case. So I was active in politics getting Democratic judges elected. Good Democratic judges elected, I think. Or at least I was one of the people that worked to make that happen. And that was to become very important later on. And there was another line of story that I was going to tell you, but I'll tell you about Braschi and maybe the other one will come back to me. Well, when the AIDS crisis began — actually, when it first began, I was working for a gay publication, two publications actually, the New York Native, which was a fledgling gay newspaper, and Christopher Street, which was kind of a premium, was a literary magazine. It was great. It was one of those publications like Gay Community News out of Boston that I just loved and I couldn't wait for it to arrive in my mailbox. I read every word. Anyway, I was working there as I was selling advertisements and selling advertising sales. I had had – the first ad agency I worked for was a huge ad agency called [inaudible] International. And, you know, they had all these clients that, you know, were horrible, like the Army and Nestlé and De Beers Diamonds. And anyway, I worked for a group of six creative people, three copywriters and three art directors, and they were all women. And I was their administrative assistant and they loved it and I loved it. It was great. I mean, it's just the whole concept of it, I thought was just, you know, I just – I loved it. And eventually, you know, a couple people left and men came on, but that's how it was when I started. Now, I worked for another ad agency in print production, which is totally different then it is now. In those days, people put actual typed print down as the ad copy. There were no computer-generated suitable for publishing print. It was done by hand with X-Acto knives and had to fill in the page. And the photos because this place I worked, they had many different things, but including Eastman Kodak, although we had their fabric division. Smile, it's easier with Kodel. And at one point we showed the models and I had a one day modeling career, which I'll try to track it down and hold it up in front of the camera. I look pretty good too. I was in my early twenties, so yeah I was a model, and Cody Cosmetics. Anyway, you actually had to send plates, you know, to print off of, around the country to all the magazines. And you had to send these other things called proofs, which were the primary colors, but they would use those to match the color that – as it was supposed to appear on the air. And we had to, you know, figure out how to get it to everybody in time for their deadlines. Because the deadline for a magazine is not, you know, it's like six weeks before, you know. So anyway, I got a lot of experience doing that. It's nothing like that, of course, anymore. People won't even know what I'm talking about. But it was pretty challenging. So I learned a lot about print production and then I worked for a TV production company. I had a lot of jobs, a lot of jobs. I had a lot of jobs, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. I was going to say that and there was nothing to be ashamed of, but I paused for a second. And it was because one of the jobs I had, which actually was really a great experience and this was through, his name is [Lyle Salgas], and he was the person that I was with. We lived together for six years and I – He knows that I'm sorry that I wasn't present for him because he really did a lot to help me in my life in many ways. And he really loved me and I really did love him. I just couldn't, I just couldn't maintain it. Like I still loved him, but I guess with the intimacy I just couldn't maintain. Anyway, his best friend was a lyricist for Broadway shows, and at one point, whose name is Robert Lorick, who's passed away, sadly, Robert Lorick and a musical – a composer Henry Krieger, who wrote the music for Dreamgirls. But they were working on a show called Tap Dance Kid and, I worked for them as a, not as an assistant producer, though I did get a couple people to invest in the show, but is it really a production [inaudible] gopher? But I got to watch the whole process and one of the things I had to do is to help them find a space to practice in, and I found a studio on 48th Street called Act 48 and they had studio spaces, you know, at the piano so people could rehearse. But the other part of it was a dance school for tap, jazz, and ballet. And so Tap Dance Kid was rehearsing there and Dreamgirls was being created at the same time also. So, I got to know two of the women who were to go on to be in the Dreamgirls Broadway show because they helped with the demo and Tap Dance Kid. So this place I got the Act 48 Studios. At one point, they were looking for a night manager. So I signed up for that job. I loved that job, of course. And because I could still work on the show during the day and do this job at night, and I got free jazz and tap, and I would have gotten ballet lessons, but I did not take those. But I did take the jazz lessons for a while. I long ago hung up my shoes, given them away. No it was not the career for me, but it was fun, you know, and night manager and it was above a topless bar on 48th Street, which is so New York, you know. So I really had a lot of great experiences in New York. I think at that time I think I was actually still drinking, etc., during that time, but functioning. I was going to tell a story about – this alcoholism in my family, we’re Irish. Other groups, too, I’m just saying. As my friend Chris [inaudible]’s father used to say, You know, they're Irish, they drink, they're gay, they have HIV. He was funny, not – it's funny in the moment. It's funny, I promise. So, where was I going with that? I’m having an [omicron?] moment. MF: Well, you were going to talk about one of your most proudest moments. TD: Oh, yes, am I leading up to the Braschi decision? MF: You are. TD: So anyway, [inaudible] suggested I go work for my father, which I did. So, I was working the Native and Christopher Street, and that's when the news started to break about this cancer that gay men were getting and the papers started covering it. The Times didn't cover it until much later. It was history about that. The writer who wrote the first article was Lawrence Altman, the writer about it for the Native was Larry Mass ; he's a friend of mine. And whose partner Arnie Kantrowitz, I just found out passed away from COVID. So I need to send a note to say I really loved him and he was ahead of his time writing about AIDS. And you know, it was when they didn't know how it was transmitted and, you know, people with AIDS, they were - many of them would like die immediately and then maybe it would be a couple of days. But there were very few treatments for them, and it was a terrible time. And many hospitals didn't want people with AIDS. So emergency rooms would get backed up with gay men on, you know, gurneys and health care professionals wouldn't go into their rooms. And if they did, they like, wore hazmat suits. And anyway, I mean, things got marginally better over time when people found out how it was transmitted, and you couldn't get it casually. People still think you can get it that way but, medical professionals pretty much knew that's not how you get it. Although if you brought food to someone who was in the hospital because they had AIDS, like, you know, lots of times it’s like a big like fruit basket or something, and the patient obviously can't eat all of it. So, you know, they put out the nurse's station, but nobody would eat it, you know, if it had been in the room. Even later on, there's such fear around it. But many times in rent-protected apartments, rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments, if the person whose name is on the lease died, the surviving life partner was not entitled to stay in the apartment. So a couple of things would happen. The family of the deceased would come in and take everything because everything would belong to them. And the landlord would be nailing an eviction notice to the door. And, you know, it was terrible. And I remember a lot of families that they found out they're gay, he died of AIDS because they hated – they would think that this was the person who gave it to them. It's just terrible. And so there was an attorney at the local legal aid office, Russell Pearce, and he called me up one day and he said, I hear like you're a good person to go to organize stuff in Chelsea. And he said, we're going to mount legal challenges to this and try to protect the rights of surviving, who he then called life partners, to remain in their apartments when the person whose name on the lease dies. So, you know, I was all in and I created a very small group called the Chelsea AIDS Committee, and we put together a demonstration on this issue. There was someone in Chelsea who is being evicted from his tenement, his walk up. Michael Brown was his name. And one of our members Franklin, which he is no longer with us unfortunately, on sheets in big blood red letters, we put ‘Chelsea AIDS Committee’ on it and we organized and we got a lot of people and groups in the neighborhood to support it. And I went to the police station and Oh it's just a little neighborhood, you know, demonstration, but, you know, we're going to need a permit to use. He needed a permit for any amplified sound. But, you know, you just need an amplification permit just for the Saturday afternoon, whatever it was. Anyway, so we have this demonstration, we closed down the street. It was the front page of Newsday, which used to publish in New York City at the time, and it was in all the other papers. It was the lead story in all the local network news, you know, all the networks had local news stations. So at the time there wasn't cable or anything, so it was the lead story on all the news, it was huge. And that although Michael lost his – he lost his case, but there was another case. There are many cases and another there was an attorney who specialized in these cases ; his name was Jim West. And he would take on these cases even though a lot of the people were, you know, had too much money to be eligible for legal aid, but didn't have a lot of money. And he took on these cases and… I have a [inaudible] story to tell. It's also kind of – I'll tell you the story. So I was very good at – No, I was very good at helping judges get elected. And once they got onto the civil court, to then get elected to the Supreme Court. So every once in a while I would go to court to sit next to my friend Jim West when one of his clients was at risk of losing their apartment. And what happened actually, in one case, a woman who I had helped to elect to the civil court when this case – one of these cases went before, she recused herself. She said to me, you know me, my brother died of AIDS. But why should you recuse yourself for that? If later on there would be a lesbian – there was one lesbian judge in particular who recused herself because it was a gay case, which...what, so, you know, heterosexual white men should recuse themselves, I mean that's ridiculous. But anyway, but it was a you know, queer was still kind of marginal, maybe a little less so on the West Side of Manhattan, but still. And anyway. So all of a sudden judges start ruling on these cases because they were all getting – when there was a ruling, they would get appealed to the next level. So some of these judges just start making rulings on these cases, waiting for the case to go all the way to the top court. Which it did in 1989 in a case at Braschi versus Stahl Associates and the court, the state Court of Appeals ruled that nontraditional family members should be treated as family members and should be allowed to succeed to rent-regulated apartments. It only works because of, you know, New York’s… if you're like a landlord or a tenant attorney in New York City and you want to practice someplace else, you're useless because there's still a million rent regulated apartments, there are even more than in New York City. And it only worked for well, actually, it's worked in other ways since then, but it worked for rent-regulated apartments and what it said, because it wasn't just gay people. I mean, the AIDS crisis is what really brought it to a head. But there are many reasons why people may not get married. Two people living on disability may not want to commingle their finances because it might lessen their benefits or all kinds of reasons. You know, maybe that, you know, they're divorced. Who knows? But there's many different things sometimes I – the Golden Girls ; now I mean, I'm fine with polyamory, you know. But I think all of us – who could deny that they were family, not that that's what – but there were, you know, lots of kids. Two women who lived together, they weren't necessarily lesbians, but they just, you know, from college on, they lived in a two bedroom apartment and neither had, you know, moved away. And, you know, one had signed the lease over, at least, you know, 20 years ago, and if they should move or pass away, the other one now could succeed to the lease. And it really it said, if you say you’re family, you’re family, that's really how it worked. And there's some things that you can use to prove that you are family, like get magazine subscriptions together, the joint checking account, you have a pet together, the super know, your neighbors know. You know, you hold yourself out to be family. And so this is a whole laundry list of things that you could use in this including but not only I think. Sex, cannot ask about sex. That's the one thing that can’t come up in a landlord-tenant case that had to do with Braschi. But Miguel Braschi ended up succeeding to the rent-controlled apartment of his partner. And I never met him, but marriage passed. He sent me a congratulatory email. I don't know why I never met him. I actually kind of do know why I never met him ; maybe the same reason why I am always late for you, because it's hard for me to… I don't know. I guess maybe I both crave, like, someone thinking I'm a good person, but I also like, want to push it away? And even after years and years and years of therapy, when someone says something nice, you know, just say thank you and shut up. But I never met him ,and I actually was supposed to meet his sister and I ended up, you know, canceling. And I shouldn't really.. I don't know. You know, that's why I've been in therapy my whole life. Not even with the gay stuff, it's with this. All this other stuff that I have. But that case became the basis for the first case in New York State, where a surrogate judge ruled that the non-biological parent of a same sex couple could adopt the child. And Braschi was the part of the basis of her decision ; it was a surrogate court judge named Eve Preminger, who I supported just saying, in a Democratic primary. But it affected a lot of laws for nontraditional families going forward. And it's my proudest thing because everyone said, You have no chance. So this is what happened. At the time, the largest AIDS services organization was called the Gay Men's Health Crisis. And… I'm just thinking of something which I don't know whether I talked about here, but which I very much want to talk to you about. But if I haven’t, then I'll talk about that down the line having to do with – one of the founders of GMAC was Larry Kramer. So, there's a story that I want to tell, or it's more than a story. But anyway, AIDS helped a lot of people come out or helped force a lot of people to come out. And there were a lot of... maybe formerly closeted or in some cases still in a closet at their law firm, but who volunteered at GMHC with, you know, legal issues, because wills and…but one of the things, of course, for these landlord-tenant cases. And there's a thing that you can do in New York housing court where the landlord will give you… they’ll hand something called the stipulation to you. And I'll say something like, You can stay in your apartment for six months and we'll give you $10,000, and then you go, then you're out. Just sort of to end the case. And so there were these corporate attorneys that were representing tenants and landlords who knew nothing about that and who were allowing people to sign those. And anyway, you know, some of them called me over here, you know, don't sign anything, like do not sign a stipulation. Do not let the tenant sign the stipulation. The thing is, you know, the court is really smart, you know. Many of them, of course, went to great, you know, law schools and everything, but they knew nothing about landlord-tenant court or anything like that, that, you know, they were just like… What is you know? And I don’t wanna say [inaudible], like the fox things with the hens, you know, the landlord attorneys. Most, many landlords have an attorney full time in housing court. They, you know, the landlord has a lot of buildings and depending on what the landlord’s like. So they're like, you know, sharks. And they were just picking these, you know, lawyers off with their poor clients and getting thrown out of their apartments. Anyway, so but Braschi was going on and the largest legal, gay legal organization and probably still is the Lambda Legal Defense and Education. And the head of it then, who actually I became friends with, other people said, Don't fight this. Don't do this because it'll create bad law. You're never going to win. You're never going to win. And he’s like, But they're getting thrown out anyway. Like, what do we have to lose? It's already bad case law. You know what I mean? It's already stacked against us, so why not fight? But they were very afraid about it. And I understand, you know, there's strategies about many things, you know, you want to get the right case to be the one that goes up to, you know, for the highest – for the biggest decisions in New York State, the Court of Appeals and this the Supreme Court. And it can be distracting if other people bring cases that might, you know, jump ahead of yours. But anyway, Tom started, He said, don't do it. And other people said, You ever going to win. Anyway, I didn't listen. And in 1980, the state court of appeals ruled that nontraditional family members should be allowed to succeed to appointments. And much later on, it was really a beautiful thing because Tom said that I – you know, I was one of the many people who just, you know, revered – he was brilliant, brilliant. And he said to me, you know, I just want to make sure that I said you were right. And I could have been very wrong, but I was right. And so. One of the judges, actually, his son is an openly gay assembly member, from Staten Island, and now I believe he's a surrogate court judge out of Staten Island, Matthew Titone is his name. And his father, was on a court of appeals. So it was amazing that we won that case, you know, But we did. And it's been very useful. And I don't want it to go away because of marriage, because I think we should be able to, queer or non queer it doesn’t matter, say, choose our own families. And, you know, put it together, you know, build it however you want to, using whatever institutions there are or not, you know. And I don't want that to go away. I understand why marriages, you know, legally, makes things very easy in some ways. And I kind of feel now almost like, maybe everybody should be getting married because I'm very afraid the Supreme Court is going to – and I always tell people, you know, they can take it away. They can take it away. They can take it away. In New York State, after the marriage equality law passed, the political organization went out of business. And I’m like what? What? Like our job is not done. And the job wasn't done. I mean, I left. I didn't leave because of that. I did leave after marriage passed, but that wasn't why I left, but – which I want to say, which is very important for me to say. Of course, I'm proud of the work I did on marriage and it almost killed me. But of course I'm proud of that. But I'm proud of a lot of other things, as proud that, you know, people don't know about, which I probably won’t be able to help myself, but to talk about here. But that happened in 2011, and I didn't run for reelection in 2012, but not because, you know, [dusting hand motions] my work is done here. Like I had wanted to leave there – I was there 14 years. I never thought I was going to be there 14 years. Like everybody thought I was going to be there ten years. But I was there for 14 years, and it was just time to go for a whole host of reasons. For a whole host of reasons. Anyway. So, you know, the AIDS epidemic blessing and a curse. You know, a lot of people came out. It did exponentially move the, you know, the gay rights movement forward. But it also has, you know… in fact, you know what, because I'm teaching [inaudible], I get a free subscription to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. So I used to get The New York Times delivered, even though when you get the actual paper, you also have access to the digital. But when I got the [inaudible] subscription – except on Sundays, I still get The Times – I missed turning the pages and there was a time when I stopped reading the obituaries because I had read them too early in age. And I never get up to the now because by the time I finish with Ukraine and COVID and well during the Trump years, whatever nightmare he did, but you know, really like, how is Biden doing? I have no time for it. I don't get beyond that because, you know, the bottom of every story says you should look in this story, you should look at this story. I missed going like this [page turning motion] with the newspaper. And I keep saying that I have to get my apartment in better shape, you know, and stop saying that and just get the goddamn newspaper Tom. And I get it on Sunday because there's certain sections in the Sunday paper that they don't keep online for long. But there's reasons why I keep some of them, which is a Tom Duane strategy and a secret, which I am not going to say here. But I may tell you offline, something that – there's a reason that I get it. That I continue to get it on Sunday. Anyway, although I just have to say, I was recently looking at The Times, Sunday, and like there was gay stuff all over, of course, there was the Academy Awards and it was gay gay gay. You know, I don’t know whether it was the gayest. Certainly wasn’t the least gay there if there was. But and like many stories of, you know, the real estate section, they always had a gay couple fixing up the country house or, you know, or a designer who acknowledges that they're gay. Or like in the sports section, you know, a woman who, like casually mentions, you know, her life, like it's nothing. Like it’s nothing. Of course I think it's like nothing now too. What?! It was – are you kidding? I’ve lived during the most amazing times. It was never nothing for a very long time. It was like a big deal. And you had to read between the lines. And honestly, when I first ran for office, like, that's how I found out. That's how I figured out who might be gettable as a donor. Was reading about them somewhere and being like, I think that person's gay. Like not because they said they were gay, but just because of – I don't know. Not just because they were like single or something like that ; you know, at a certain age a man or woman was single. But, you know, sometimes you just – anyway. Like you just figure it out. And of course, some of the lesbian and gay people and actually trans and bi people who contributed to my campaign, and they tell me other people that I should ask, you know. So I didn't there – wasn't much fundraising that kind of fund raising a community political fundraising at all. In New York, running a campaign is very expensive. So I think I raised a lot of money. And the guy who'd run before for me, David Rothenberg, who I will call back to, who founded the Fortune Society and ran for the city council, he raised money. But he actually had, I think, an easier time raising money cause he's kind of more – way more famous and he'd worked in the theater. And so anyway, but, you know, raising money was not something that the gay people did. You know, people started to give because of GMAC or because of other things. And that also made, you know – more people gave to Lambda. And then the ACLU started their – they used to have an AIDS project ; I don’t know if they still do but they have a, you know, the lesbian and gay wing of the ACLU. So people have started and we have national organizations that are national political organizations that people give money to. But it wasn't something that people did. It was a very… so, you know, an organization like GMAC that people started to give money to and. It was a relatively new thing in the 80s and... You know, when I ran in 1989, the city council and I lost. Your donors are listed at the Board of Elections, and now it's online. I think at the time you probably had to go to the board of elections in the – I think that's the only way you could find them. But you could look at people's donors list and steal them for your campaign so… or for other reasons. And after I lost the ‘89 campaign, think a few months later, my mother called me up and she begged me, begged me – just because all of her friends, because some of their friends, my parents friends gave in and they were getting like advertisements, you know, for hotter, you know, sexier sex with this condom or this lube or something. And my parents’ friends, my mother was like, We’ll fund the campaign but just stop them. But I had no control over it. You know, I actually – people you know, I would say steal my list, but it's public, so they didn't steal it. But they you know, they took my donors and they used them for their own purposes, for, you know. And, not, you know, maybe some of my parent’s friends, they’re having hotter healthier sex now. Anyway, of course there did come a time when I would always – I think it was – I'm sure I said it when I was – my father's life, but I would also say to my mother, Oh, every family's got one. They would mention some, you know, a friend of theirs for years that they knew, however ; my mother worked at American Airlines with them, and my father knew some of them. And I would say, Yeah, their daughter is a lesbian. Every family's got what I would you know, because every family practically does. There should be a support group for families that don't. Anyway. But, I mean, that's a – it could all be taken away, so maybe everybody should be getting married. I don't know. I don't know because I don't want that. We could go back. I mean, if abortion goes, like we're next on the list, you know? And having two sexual assaulters on the Supreme Court, anyway. So I'm a community activist and Braschi, that case – we won that case when I was running for the city council the first time. The race that…this is a race that my friend David Rothenberg had run against an incumbent council member – four years… in 1985, and at the time there were 35 councilmembers in New York City, and the council districts were like huge. They were like between the size of, say, a state Senate district or a congressional district, they were like big. And anyway, he ran, he did very well, maybe a 46% or something like that, 45, 46%. And he lost, but it was a great race. And I love David, but I did go to him, and I – He didn't like politics. A lot of people say they don't like politics, and sometimes people that don't like politics are the best of politics. I used to be like when I was a babe in the woods and I was just nice to everybody, like I did really well. But it is important sometimes to know the history. Like once you start learning about people, you know, sometimes it's important to know the history. So anyway, I went to him and I asked him if he was going to run and he said No, that he wasn't. I considered running for the actual the Senate seat I eventually ran for and won in 1988, but I decided not to. I wasn't really ready to. And the senator who had the seat was kind of wounded with a legal issue, which he was deemed innocent of. And I kind of didn't want to – just didn't feel right to run against him. And it did it to be the right decision. But they did put together a campaign in 1989 and ran for the city council and… It must be … – And I lost. But I did very well. I won a lot of areas, but I lost some areas also. It was a, you know, elections are a funny thing. I – and there's a joke, you know, you run against someone if it's raining, my supporters are staying home, if it's sunny theirs are all coming out to vote. But there had been something that happened in – there was race-based issues that occurred in New York City. And the mayoral race was between the two major candidates, who was running for reelection and David Dinkins, who actually eventually won the primary. But it was a much larger turnout than usual. And so I actually hadn't.. my mail plan would have been different because it was different and more people who came out to vote. And, you know, you never see what's coming. You know, the primaries in September and it was the summer is when, you know, things happened in the – maybe very late in the summer. So it's kind of too late to – everything's already in motion – anyway, lost. I did get interested in The New York Times, and I lost by the same amount that David did. I got like 45, 46 or something like that percent and did very well in some areas. I know I’ve jumped way ahead here, but I just found out at the end of 1988 and I will have to go back and talk about this. But I found out my HIV status. Which didn't surprise me at all, but it was not something I, you know, I didn't tell people, Oh, I'm sure I have HIV or anything, but I was sure I did. And then when I actually got confirmation that I did have it, I really only told a couple of very close friends. And so, I really wasn't ready to be public about it during that – I actually kind of put it out of my mind when I ran into, you know, just because, I think for me it was kind of a natural thing to do. I had to do that in order to focus on race. And I was to disclose it. And it is a very important story that I want to tell you about where they disclosed HIV status. But… I was going to jump back or something for a reason, but oh, how did I find out about my HIV status. In 1984 maybe… there was a study being conducted out of Columbia, the [Irving] Medical Center, regarding gay men and AIDS and depression. And so I had a bunch of friends who all volunteered to take part in this study. And we said, you know, we were all interviewed in depth by people. And then they did eventually, when they had a lot of the data, they – anyone who was part of it was invited, you know, to go to a presentation about it. And then we were invited to another one because they probably – I think they kept in touch with us and kept asking us questions. And it was around 1985, they said, we would like to take – if people who are willing to take an HIV test and give, you know, blood for a test, you know, you don't have to, but this could be a part of our study and we know we're not going to get as many people for this. But we still… it's very worthwhile for us. And I of course… there's never, you know, a test, case, a trial that I don’t signed up for. So of course, I signed up for it. And it was in 19’, probably 1988 when it was when people were starting to live a little bit longer. I'm not sure exactly the year that AZT came out. I'd have to check that. But there was some treatments that people could have for, you know, the pneumonia and for the Kaposi sarcoma and all of the things that… I forget what it’s called but it causes blindness. Anyway, there were things that could be done to treat those things, to treat the symptoms anyway, so people would live longer and. And in 1988, the word was that, Well, okay, get your results now. Because before that they said, Don’t bother because there's nothing that can be done about it anyway you know till you have something so you know, don't. But then there were… so I went and I got my test results and the woman that I… who told me, who was, you know, also the counselor. You know, kind of trying to… you know, How do you feel? You know, to try to [inaudible]. But I... I just so I knew, you know. So I said, no, I… you know, I know my history. I am not surprised. And I was already… I was a member of ACT UP, I wasn't a leader of ACT UP, but I was a body to get, you know, arrested. The only thing I did ask their help on was Braschi to write a campaign, a postcard campaign to the governor, to, you know, work on the legislature to pass something that would be like Braschi, which didn't happen ; it happened through the courts. But the state actually, they didn't have to promulgate regulations. And there has been legislation regarding who's entitled to succeed to apartments because it included all surviving family members like children and grandchildren ; if they lived there for two years or if they lived there for at least a year, if you were sick and they were living in it. But you still have to hold yourself out to – people had to know you were there, you know, it was less difficult to prove your family, but it also included nieces and nephews and, you know, extended family, which some of which was shrunk later on. But it's still, you know, grandchildren, etc. But anyway, I don't know, I you know, I guess in some ways I think I felt a little bit defensive about not having had disclosed it in ‘89, but I just wasn't ready. I just, you know. And the thing about it, I mean I was going to be running for office and it just wasn't time to go around to people that I would need to go around to tell, you know, so that they wouldn’t find out. But more so, I just wasn't ready to put that on the table as part of the campaign or anything. Anyway, I lost. And that year New York City passed a new charter and the size of the council changed from 35 to 51 members. So the districts became smaller and... There – because the Supreme Court ruled that the way government was done in New York City was unconstitutional. So we had to change the way our government was. I teach this to my students, even though it's irrelevant because, you know, the old system doesn't – There used to be five borough presidents. They each had a vote on the board of estimate. There was a mayor, there was the president of the city council and a comptroller, and they each had two votes. And almost everything went through the board of estimate. The mayor created the budget that the board of estimate… really they would move things around. If it was land uses, zoning, they did it. So it was, you know, six votes for the citywides and five for the four presidents. And, you know, there'd be different alliances. And it wasn't a terrible way. It was, you know, no matter what kind of government, there's always going to be backroom stuff. So it probably was more backroom stuff. Some ways, I think it was fairer in some ways, but it was unconstitutional because, you know, having one person in Staten Island and having all that power and, you know, Brooklyn having whatever, six times that population having one person, on the board of estimates, so. And also something else. The reformers had done a lot of reform through the years for things that the sort of permanent government that, you know, what I – a term I learned during the marriage, grass tops people, you know, influential people. Anyway, where am I going with this? They’re always trying to reform the city council because the city council was always democratic and they didn't like that. So they you know, they tried proportional representation to try to get more Republicans and more conservative. Well, they got a couple, but they also got like communists and socialists, so. And so everything that they did, it didn't turn out the way they wanted to. They made it so that every borough could elect two borough wide city council members and they couldn't be from the same party. So every, you know, borough had one Democrat and then some had a liberal and some had a conservative, like Staten Island always had a conservative, but Brooklyn and Queens, they would go back and forth. Manhattan and the Bronx, always elected a liberal, but they really a Democrat. So anyway, it didn't work really in their favor either. But that was ruled unconstitutional too. That they got extra council members and with unequal populations. So we had to create a new – I say we. There was a charter commission and they made this new power of 51 new council members and they divided all that power up between the mayor, who was already very, very powerful, even with the board vested and the city council. And so… and this is what, when I teach this to my students now, I really realized for the past couple of semesters how ludicrous this sounds, but districts redrawn to enable certain underrepresented groups to win. So for instance, the district that I ran in was considered to be the gay winnable district, not that it was majority gay. Of course, it wasn't that there was a sizable lesbian and gay community, so it was thought, well, people might vote for a gay person there. Downtown there was an Asian winnable district. Was it majority Asian? No, it was... but there is a sizable Asian community. And there was a district drawn for a Dominican-American person to win. There was a district run for a Caribbean American to win. So the reason I, you know, I say it's like… At a time, I thought it was very important, I thought it was a very good idea and actually the gay community kind of worked closely with the Asian community in drawing districts so that we could each have a district. Anyway, now the Asian winnable district had not been represented by an Asian person till very recently, and then she served either eight or maybe 12 years because term limits were extended. But she had to run like five times before she won – four times before she won. And it's now represented by a non Asian person. But Flushing is represented by an Asian-American and the district where the St. Pat's for All Parade is, which includes Sunnyside, where Jimmy van Bramer, who’s actually more Irish than Van Bramer, was the councilmember, openly gay councilmember. Someone who is a friend and who worked on my campaigns and who also is able to start a gay organization at St John's University, which did not last after he was gone. But I don't know how he did it, but he snuck it in and it wasn't very big. He asked me to come and speak to them, and one of the women on it was from Ireland, and she actually turned out to be like an Olympic track star in Ireland when she went back from St John’s. Anyway, they don't allow that in Catholic Universities to this day, but he got it done at St. John's. So you know, no wonder he won the council seat. Anyway I thought it was, you know, a good idea, but this district in Sunnyside is represented by an Asian-American woman. But it's a very small Asian community there, you know. And, you know, other places are represented by gay people, even though they're not, you know, considered to be gay. There's a 22 year old now who represents a district in Brooklyn that includes like Crown Heights, which is predominantly Caribbean American and African-American and Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish people. And he's the councilmember there. So in a way, there's not really the same need for it, but at the time there was a need. And so I ran in the gay district and… in 1991. And this is a sort of an important story that I want to talk about because it's important for me to tell my own story. Yes. So let me beautify before I do that. So the new districts were created after the citizens of New York voted in this new form of government. And they voted in 1989. And there was to be an election in 1991 with new council districts that some of which were identity oriented. Make them winnable for various communities to win again, not because they were majority, but just because there was a substantial number of people who lived in the district who were of that group, the Dominican, gay, etc. So by this point I had decided to run again, I have to -- I need help finding a better analogy than this. But like it is a very special club. People who've lost an election and run again, because it had been like childbirth, like you only remember the good parts because some people are like, I'm never doing this again. But then there are some people like me that were like… not that it was -- actually, it's a sickness. In a way it's great, it has problems with it because you have to put your whole life on hold. And then after whether you win or you lose and I tell candidates all the time, I hope you win, but whether you win or lose, you're going to be depressed right afterwards. And I'll be there for you because all of a sudden everything comes on top -- everything that you have put off during the campaign because you're so focused, like all the bills you didn't pay, all the, you know, family stuff that you didn't take care of, like every other part of your life. You know, like, I don't know if you're watching The Real Housewives, you got to let that go like… you can't do anything because you're raising money, you're meeting people. So -- and I am a [inaudible]. So you could tell towards the end, I didn't have very many competitive races. So in 91, anyway, I decided that I was going to disclose my HIV status when I ran in 1991, and I started to put things in motion. It was sort of like, you know, a snowball effect. I told more people, I like joined the HIV positive caucus of Act Up. I know it's anonymous, but I went to HIV recovery meetings, you know, people of substance abuse and that but specifically for people living with HIV. I told more people, and it's actually something I always wanted to -- I thought this would be a good StoryCorps thing. My friend Laura Morrison, who worked on my -- as a paid staffer on my first campaign, who I met when I went up to Columbia Teachers College to speak before again when I was just a district leader and activist. And I remember she was very active in ACT UP, more active than I was. She got arrested at NBC and actually CBS, ABC and Public Television ; ACT UP people were able to get out in front of the cameras and say that ACT UP, Fight Back, Fight AIDS. But her group got caught. Apparently someone had to use the bathroom. And, you know, people on set heard that noise. She got arrested, well they all got arrested. She just didn't get a chance to go out and in front of the camera. Anyway, she was more active than I was in ACT UP, but a very good friend of mine. And she worked on my second campaign. And where, Christine Quinn I asked to be my campaign manager and, [sighs] I think some people will understand this, but not everyone will understand this. But we were -- I wanted to tell her, it was early on when I started telling people and I said, you know... In a way I -- You know, I'm.. I would prefer to have it. Like not that I wouldn't be, I was already an AIDS activist, I was already doing the work. But I felt a little bit like if there were people who had HIV and who were, you know, I wanted to be, you know, of them, and I didn't wish that I already had AIDS, really, I wouldn't have gone out and tried to get it or anything. But I guess I wanted... I don't know. I wanted to -- I can't quite explain it, but like, if people are going to be suffering less, and of course, a lot of people in recovery because they were injection drug users and non-gay people, I knew also who had it. So, you know, a lot of these people who I knew, many of whom I have loved, many of whom I like, some I was just acquainted with, if they were going to live with this, that I wanted to be part of that. And I would have been, you know, any way, even though I never, you know, it didn't matter whether you had it and you got arrested, whether you had HIV or not. But I don’t know. as I say, it's the way I feel, sort of the way I feel. And I think -- I’m not so sure everybody would think it's so great. But as I say, I wouldn't be going out to get it. But I wasn't surprised I had it. And I -- and by that time I was used to having the absolute knowledge that I had HIV. So I started to tell more people. And what happened was that because of the way they drew the districts, there was a woman, who was…her name was Liz Abzug. And I don't know all the facts on this, but there was a chance that she was going to run in this district. And she was not, not out as a lesbian. She wasn't really a political lesbian, if you know what I mean. She was a social lesbian, sort of. Anyway, she decided to run in the gay, winnable district. So now -- and it was also a time when… it was really an important time to empower women because of things that were happening in the country at that time. And so that I was a guy was, you know, kind of a disadvantage. Anyway, Liz Abzug is the daughter of Bella Abzug, the very progressive woman who I had worked to get elected to office, you know, And so the daughter of this, you know, feminist icon I’m running against, she's like, We're running against each other. And there was nothing else happening in New York City, so I’ll talk more about that a little bit later. Anyway, I asked Chris Quinn to be my campaign manager, and after she said yes, I sprung on her that I was going to announce my, not announce but disclose my HIV status. She was a tenant organizer and really, she was a great campaign manager, very smart, very good friend for a very long time. And my campaign consultant, when I told him I thought he was going to have a heart attack. And first, I'll have to talk about this thing that comes around, I was like I had a very active, too active sex life. And which I told him about. You know, I gave him all my negative research and he said, Oh, I think they're all going to vote for you, they're on a midnight registrations in my apartment. Anyway, then I think he was excited. And he was like, Oh, I might be able to work on the campaign if it's successful, you know, person. And there was only one other elected official in the country ; there was only one who was open about his HIV status. His name is Brian Coyle, and he's passed away. He actually passed away during that campaign and I knew him from meetings hat I went to for gay elected officials. He was a wonderful community organizer and just a really good guy. And anyway, because he had disclosed his HIV status. I called him and I said, Brian, how did you do it? And he said, Well, he said, I had a camera crew like from a local news station follow me around. And what would be like your New York magazine in Minneapolis followed me around. And it was just to see, like we said, it was just a story day in the life of a councilmember, but it was really leading up to disclosing his HIV status. So the story was embargoed and right before the story was going to come out on TV and in this newspaper, he thought to himself you know, the people in my district need to hear it from me especially, not the way everybody else like -- I have to you know, they’re my constituents, they like they deserve to know personally from me. So, he said, I wrote a letter and I sent it to everybody in the district. And I thought to myself, Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Because thank you… he was so -- He doesn't know -- maybe he does know how much he helped me, my mentor he was. But so I was like, that's it, I'm going to write a letter, you know, to the voters. To tell them so they would know that as they made up their minds who to vote for. And so that -- the campaign was like there was nothing else, literally. There was no mayor, no governor, no nothing. There wasn't even much happening nationally ; it was an odd year, an odd numbered year, ‘91. And so Liz comes out as a lesbian, like in a political way. Now I'm already like, like I'm a gay billboard. You know what I mean? But then I announce my HIV status, and there were people who thought that was like, you know, you can only imagine what Fox News would have done with that. I mean, it wasn't that bad. And a lot of people -- it was a very serious thing so. But there was some of the other stuff, which is, of course, the stuff I remember, not the good stuff. You know, the difficult stuff. Anyway, I know it was very, very difficult for her and she was not a good friend of hers, but we were friendly with each other. We liked each other. And I also knew her sister, who worked for an elected official. And I do have to do just a shoutout. The year between running for the city council and losing and then running and winning. That year I worked for another elected official. I worked for Elizabeth Holtzman, Liz Holtzman, who is another one -- an icon to me. She had been -- she was a member of Congress. She was fortunate enough to be on the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon Watergate time, and she was really a star that because she's so smart. And then she ran for the Senate and should have won, but because of the way New York is, you know, we have, you know, all these parties in addition to Democrat and Republican. And she won the Democratic primary, which was a tough race, but she won it. And Al D'Amato, a Republican, conservative Republican, beat a long time liberal Republican, as New York had Rockefeller, Javits left, which is… there were candidates that people in office had both the Republican and the liberal line. They were a certain brand of Republicans. Anyway, Alfonse D'Amato beat Jacob Javits, who remained on the liberal line, and Elizabeth Holtzman, similar to like a bad break that Bella Abzug had when she ran for the Senate. But some of that because Jacob Javits was still on the liberal line, she just fell short and she should have been a senator. She just should have been the senator. But New York is horrible for women, and maybe it's getting better now. But it was -- it's been a boys town. And, you know, people didn't like her. You know, she's does that whenever -- she's the smartest, the nicest, and has a great sense of humor. She's kind of shy, and actually a lot of times -- I was a shy kid. But we compensate. Oh, I overcompensate, maybe she doesn’t overcompensate as much as I do, but you could just -- But people really, you know, liked her, respected her. Anyway, I loved working for her for that year. All right, so back to the race. There's that sniff again. So I had enough people volunteering on my campaign, this is before the HIV disclosure, that we did our own poll. We didn't have to use an outside firm. We, you know, were able to make all the calls ourselves to get at random sampling. And one of the questions was, do you know someone who has AIDS? Maybe another question was or someone who is HIV positive? So based on that, that people -- this is something that people don't know a lot about because we live I don't know it. I think if I told this at the time, when you see what -- I would have seemed like craven or something, the way I did this, but I wanted to win, you know, there's no point in disclosing my status and losing. Anyway, actually. And then again, there's nothing wrong with this. We did focus groups. I didn't see any of them. The campaign did focus groups with some of these people and they showed them two letters. One was a professor who was up for tenure and telling the department head about their HIV status. And then the other was someone running for office. Just talking about if they were HIV positive and they would ask the people what they thought of that, Should the professor do that? Should this guy do this, who’s running for office? And apparently in the focus groups, older people who vote a lot. The older someone is, the more likely they are to vote. They were like a politician would never do that. But of course I'd vote for them. And the gay men are all saying, Oh, don't tell anybody. But I’d already decided to do it, you know, so it could have cut either way. It didn't seem like it was a big negative, you know. And it could have been a little bit positive, too. But who knows? But I wasn't, you know, I didn't know when I was going to send out the letter, but my campaign manager and, you know, people that I trusted, and my consultant is John [Houston] is his name. You know, they said, this has to be the first thing you send out to everybody. So I, along with John Astin, wrote a letter to the voters in the district disclosing my HIV status and telling him that I wanted them to know that before they made up their mind about who they were going to vote for. So, you know, I had a plan on how to disclose my HIV status because I wanted to win, and I wanted to disclose my HIV status. And I, you know, I talked about this and, you know, who knows what the futur – I think older people especially, but also gay men, like who knows what the future holds? Who knows when someone's – you know, I can't promise I'm not going to get sick. You know, I might. But right now, I'm very healthy and vigorous. And I think there's some other things that, you know, came from my heart, I think that also would indicate that like who I am and just, you know. Maybe you could read between the lines that I was an empathetic person. I'm not I'm not quite sure. But anyway, we put these plans in place, you know, and… So the time comes for the letter to go out, and we knew that there would be some press attention to it. And so we wanted a newspaper to do the story ; we wanted the New York Times to do it. And I had heard about, oh, I have to go see him. Phil Gutis, who I – lives in near New Hope now, had worked at The Times, and then he was working for the ACLU. And I asked him if he would help us and in particular, help us to plant a story in The New York Times the day that the letter was going to come out. Similar to what Brian Coyle did with the magazine and, you know. So he helped with that. He went to one of the editors who assigned a reporter who I spoke with before. And so the night that the letter went out, some people receiving it was also in the newspaper in The Times. And there was a tremendous media… it got a lot of press, you know, nationally even. So, you know, I got from like this little, you know, neighborhood kind of, you know, city council race to like, all right, now you have to learn to talk to the national media, you know what I mean? So it was – so I'm not – I became very unafraid to talk to the press after this, you know, because nothing could have beaten this. So – well marriage maybe, not beat it, but equal it. What happened was, then right after that, Larry Kramer and this guy named Roger McFarland, who worked for, uh, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, which is a theater group. They don't – they’re just called... I think they dropped the – I think they’re just called Broadway Cares now. I'm not sure they have Equity Fights AIDS as part of their name anymore. But anyway, he was the co-chair of it with this other guy, Tom Viola. But, Larry and Roger were in some sort of relationship and they planted in the paper that I was forced to disclose my status, which is exactly not what I did. And that story appeared in the Post. And then, so that narrative exists out there that, you know, I was forced to do it and I was not forced to do it. Like I made it so that I had to ; I had no choice but to do it. But that was of my own doing to, you know, you know, force myse – And I remember, you know, when I went for an interview at The New York Times, like I couldn't – I didn't feel like I could tell them that I had, like, been so intentional about how I was going to do it because – and I think probably they had it, you know, in their minds, because the endorsement meetings were after all this happened, that, you know, I was forced to do it. And they did it really, really, really, really, really upset me. And you can see now I – and it's sort of like leached into stories about me. And I – it's so terrible that it sort of tainted something that was only meant to do good. Like I didn't want people to think they should be forced to disclose their HIV status. Like that was not the message at all. But I think most people did get the – not everybody reads the Post, you know, of course. But I was angry about it, and Larry Kramer kept calling me up. He wanted to apologize, and I would not take his call. When I get angry my way, I close down and I’m like, Leave me alone. Don't try to make it better. I'll come back to you when I'm ready. And he kept calling and calling, and I wouldn't take his calls. Like if he had stopped calling me it might have been different. And then I got a letter ; I got lots of letters and phone calls and, you know, letters of support and everything, both, you know, in the district. But people I knew and just random people with HIV or people with whatever, people who had – people with chronic illnesses. So anyway, there was a letter that came in from a therapist, a woman, lesbian, who was a therapist. She was a friend of mine, had her return address, was addressed to me, and I opened it up and it was an apology letter from Larry Kramer. And I was so angry about that, too, because he forced, you know what I mean? Like it was a smart thing to do, I guess. But I was so upset about that, too, you know.. And I actually didn't forgive him for a very long time. And then years later, I called. I said, You know what – because he was sorry. I said, You know what Larry? I’m sorr – I said, We’re good. You know, not like I forgive you., but yeah, I forgive you. You know, I'm not mad. I don't want you to feel terrible about this anymore, you know? I want us to – it's okay. I never confronted Larry Kramer about it because it's just… I don't know why I didn't. I just feel like it would have been.. It might’ve just made it worse, you know? But they were supporting. Larry lived in the same building as Bella Abzug. They were supporting of Miss. Abzug, and that's why they did that. And the other thing that's happened, is so upsetting also. Many, many years later… Oh you know, so there was – anyway. So, many years later, Liz called me and she said, You know, I'm not the one that put that in the paper. I didn’t – And I said, Oh, my God Liz. Like I knew – I never thought she did. And I thought, Oh, my God, all these years she thought that I thought that she was behind that. And I never thought that. And I really felt terrible for her that she thought that, you know, I thought that she was to blame for that. And I knew she had nothing to do with it, you know. She was asked to comment in The Times and she made a very good comment. She said it shouldn't really make a difference in a campaign. People should vote for who they think is the best candidate. But, I think she got bad advice from someone. I actually know who probably gave her this advice when she was asked by the press the next day like that, the electronic media, as we called it then, and she said that she thought that it was opportunistic. And so a reporter at this big press conference said, Your opponent says that your disclosing your status is opportunistic. I couldn't have got a better question and she couldn't have said it you know, more... I don't know, slow pitched or whatever. And I was like, Well, it's an opportunity that I'd rather not have. She shouldn't have said that. She should have left the other thing. But it gave me a chance to say… even though I kind of told you that it's not something I’d rathe – but I did. But a normal thing would not want to have it – to not, you know, have that opportunity to, you know, have HIV and be able to disclose it. And by the way, I think that the… I don't know. Anyway, she got addressed by the Times that time, two years before I got addressed three times. And I just think that the [inaudible] meeting that happened after that. So I'm just telling this story because I – and I don't always tell it because I'm still upset about it, but it's out there and that's why I say I need to tell my own story. So that's why I'm telling you this story. But I don't know. You know, I hope you know, a hundred million people see this, but even if it's ten, it doesn't matter. I just, you know, on the record. And I think Larry died recently and I, you know, I forgave him. We never had – he doesn't even know I was mad. Well, he must have known I was angry with him, but he doesn't know that I forgave him or whatever. But anyway, I went on to win and I won, you know, pretty decisively. And, you know, I have deeper roots in the community. And, you know, there wasn't – it actually didn't have a lot to do with it. I mean, it got a lot of attention like that day maybe, and the national press covered it more. But the local press, you know, they move on to something else. And then from then on, it really was, you know. What… you know, our race between the two of us, and people have decided and I had deeper roots in the community than she did, you know, both in the queer community and, you know, just in neighborhood things. I had more things that I could point to, you know, a land use and zoning plan that I helped to write for Chelsea. And I was on, you know, the group that helped to decide what tenant should live in this development. But anyway, I was, you know, I couldn't help myself. It, you know, so they have talked about. I feel like – I just all that stuff just calls to me. So I have deeper roots in the community than she did, and I won decisively. I mean, I'm really sad about that, she thought she had – I knew she had to do with it. I'm not even sure she really wanted to run that much. But I think her mother wanted to, you know, serve, you know, a legacy. So anyway, what I can say this, you know, I won that race. It was actually much more arduous than the race in 1989. It was not fun, really. It was, you know, tough. And it was you know, I think global warming showed itself very much. So, it was really hot all summer long. And I – by rights, I should have lost weight because I'm a weight loser. But then they said, no, no, you can't lose weight, people will think you're getting sick. So every day I had to eat a pint of ice cream. It was so unfair, I didn’t get to lose weight. Anyway, you know. So then I was, you know, the first openly gay person to run with having had disclosed their HIV status in the United States. And Brian was the first to disclose – well, he was in office. And so certainly in the council and then again in the Senate, you know, the like the gay caucus was always meeting in my head. You know, the HIV caucus was always meeting in my head. But there were a lot of things that were to come where I really had to fight hard on behalf of people living with HIV. And it was actually… I think it gave it more strength because I was a person living with HIV. At one point, someone sent out postcards to Republicans in the Senate and that said, Does Tom Duane we really have HIV ; he's never been sick and he's gained like 500 pounds. They didn’t say 500 pounds, but they said like 100 pounds or something. And I had gained weight. I was more happy about that, but I know the HIV probably was... And I found out who did it ; I never did anything about it, but that was, you know. I had other things like, people signed me up for blood drives, someone took down my sign. So I did have some stuff like that, unpleasant things, but well, all of HIV is pretty – you know, the medication is, you know, pretty unpleasant. I don’t – you see these commercials everyone’s really happy. You know, they have great jobs and all these friends. I’m like, who wouldn’t want to – No, no, no. I'm telling you. The stuff I take is powerful and poisonous. And, you know. No, you don't want it. But I don't – there isn't anyone with HIV in the legislature, in either house, in Albany still. And I don't think there's anyone on the city council. I mean, there may be. Actually, I know someone who does have it in the assembly, but he has never – he doesn't disclose it. So, which I actually encouraged him to do it, but he didn't. Anyway, you know, the AIDS crisis is still not over now, it's just it's a disease of poverty now, you know. And I'm still on a state advisory committee and I want to get off and I've been on it for so many years, but I'm like the only one that, like, refuses to say that it's okay to test people without their knowledge, without doing like just at least a little bit of counseling, at least to ask them if they want the test, you know, I mean? And there really is a stigma. Like you have to tell people like they're laws against discriminating against you and you're entitled to health care like all these things. But most of the people on this advisory committee work in AIDS organizations. So, of course they don’t feel stigma. But if they ask any of their clients, Is there stigma in their community, they'll say, yes, there is stigma. Like who would hire me? I'm expensive, you know, I mean, now Medicare, they have to take you. But I mean, corporations…are they gonna hire someone who's HIV – no! The medications are very expensive. Maybe they will if it's a huge corporation, but it's not an advantageous thing, you know. It is something I'd rather not have, except that's not completely true. But, you know, if I was an average person and I used to say that and they said it like, who would hire me? You know, this is like and I said – I would say to tell the people, yeah, you don't have stigma because you work in the field. Although maybe you do have a little stigma but you wouldn’t admit to it. Like don’t we all? Don’t I even – everybody has a little homophobia, everyone has a little sexism, racism. Everyone is you know AIDS-phobic a little bit even if you work in the field. There's still stigma. Maybe you're not a perpetrator of that, but there's stigma and there's discrimination. And it's something that you really have to talk to people about. And most people will decide to take the test. You know, most people will because then they can stay alive, anyway. So. Yes, I disclosed my HIV status and then everything from that happened. MF: Well, I felt like this was a good place to end. We sort of have talked about your movement post-graduation, work in tenant associations, advertising and magazines a little bit, and then really your political career through a city council run and loss to a city council win. Tomorrow could we start with what happens with the win? What are you doing on city council? Would that be a good place to start? TD: Yes. Yes. MF: I loved this interview today. I felt like I learned a lot. Thank you so much for speaking with us today. TD: Well, I think there's... The truth is, I think there's a part of me that's like, a little reticent about like, I do want to tell my story, but it's also – it's. I don't know, it's. There's a lot to pull out. And there are other things that were happening which I… which we'll talk about that were happening at the same time in my life. In my personal life, too. Everyone should know that I do. I do have a time management issue. It's a part of my ADHD, and I know it sounds like an excuse. It is an excuse, but I usually have coping mechanisms to making that so. But, for purposes of this interview. I was very late today and I – it was terrible that I was so late to this interview. And I don't – I mean, maybe it was a little bit like I'm a little [cough heard in background], but I signed up for it and I'm glad that I did it, have done it. And I will be on time tomorrow, I promise. I'm on time to my therapy appointments, to my recovery. Like I'm usually – I don't know what happened today. Is there MF: It’s totally fine TD: – And we must be moving up towards a full moon because that's a bad time. And then when the moon is full, things are kind of good on the slide down. I have to check and see where exactly where we're at on the whole... anyway. MF: We were just happy to drive into New York and we're happy to sit with you here today and we look forward to tomorrow. I'm excited about it. TD: Your president was here for a couple of days. MF: Oh, really? TD: And he invited – in fact, he invited…even I was invited to go meet him up atTavern On the Green, but I couldn't do it. So it’ll be the another opportunity, maybe when I go back. MF: Are you coming for the graduatio – Are you coming for this reunion? TD: I think so. My 50th high school reunion is tomorrow night. MF: Oh, my gosh. Fun. TD: So I won't be full hair and makeup here. But yes, the last one I went to, you know what I found out? Even the popular kids, it was very stressful for them because apparently it's very hard to keep that status. Who knew? Everybody was a mess. And it was funny because a lot of the, Who did you have a crush on? You know, and I did have a couple of crushes and I probably mentioned a couple names, but I always would put their name, And of course you, which wasn’t always true. Boys like to be, you know, they want admirers too, even from gay guys. So, anyway. MF: Well, I look forward to tomorrow morning and thank you so much again. Copyright for this oral history recording is held by the interview subject. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile= Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:11:23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Thomas Duane, April 1, 2022 (Part 2) Description An account of the resource Thomas Duane talks about his life after Lehigh University organizing in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, time in office as a district leader and city councilmember, and his experiences as the first and only openly gay, HIV-positive member of the New York State legislature. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LGBT-37 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-04-01 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muhlenberg College Special Collections and Archives Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Muhlenberg College Special Collections and Archives Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.